Bodily attachment to place: The case of elderly migrants in Norway

Abstract

Scholarship on transnational migration illuminates social relations and movement across two or more nation-state borders. However, recent scholarship has criticized this earlier work for neglecting barriers to these cross-border movements and ties. Calls have been made to include the physical body and its impacts on migrants’ ability to lead transnational lives. Based on biographical interviews with elderly migrants from Poland and Pakistan living in Norway, this article argues that the physical aging process may constrain older migrants’ mobility and deepen their attachment to their place of residence. The concept of bodily place attachment has been coined to highlight this increased sedentariness. In the article, bodily place attachment occurs in three forms: first, through the increased bodily vulnerability that aging brings; second, through familiarity with the physical make-up of their environment, which is important in situations of sensory decline; and third, through dependence on personal care by the welfare state. By adding the concept of bodily place attachment, the article provides nuance to former theories on transnationalism by identifying the physical body as a potential barrier to transnational practices and by describing how certain bodily practices arise that tie people to their place of residence.

Keywords:

• Elderly migrants
• bodily place attachment
• transnational practices
• transnational care

Notes

1. See Gardner (2002) for an analysis of the attachment of meaning to different places among older Bengali migrants in London.

2. The concept of independence remains a contested term within the literature on aging and elderly care (Christensen, 2009), and in particular with regard to elderly migrants, where it has been viewed as Eurocentric (Torres, 1999; Wray, 2003). However, the purpose of this article is not a discussion of the conceptualization of independence. The concept is used because of the emphasis put on the importance of feelings of independence by the migrants interviewed in this study.