Moving house in migrant narratives: the morphology of housing pathways from an anthropological perspective

Abstract

Focusing on migrants’ experiences of moving house in the country of settlement, the study explores the housing pathways of Russian-speaking migrants in Japan over their life courses. This paper emphasizes the need for the anthropology of migration to consider not only the housing events but also the housing pathways experienced by cross-border migrants in receiving countries. It is argued that the act of moving from one accommodation to another plays a crucial role in how migrants develop their biographies and perceptions of self. In addition to investigating house relocation, the study borrows from the Russian formalist school of narratology to examine how migrants narrativize their experiences in stories that intertwine housing pathways and movers’ identities. The study reveals how the instances of moving—and not necessarily the physical qualities of housing—emerge as dynamic forces that initiate migrants into their desired statuses.

Keywords:

• Housing pathways
• moving house
• Russian-speaking migrants
• Japan
• narrative
• Propp

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The data draws from a pool of 30 semi-structured interviews under the project ‘Modes of Diversity in Japan: Russian-speaking Migrants and their Material Culture’ (2018–2022). The questions focused on the housing, moving, homemaking, and placemaking practices of Russian-speaking migrants in the context of transnational migration. Informed written consent was obtained from the informants. All the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded. The housing trajectories of each of the informants were typified using data visualization methods; the five cases presented in this paper represent five typical scenarios. The analysis of how the migrant narratives relate to Propp’s methodology was conducted through their manual coding with the relevant Proppian functions.

2 Hereinafter, all the names of the functions of a wondertale are cited from Propp (1968). See the appendix for the list of functions.

3 The interview with Denis was conducted by the author of this paper as part of an earlier project co-authored with Varvara Mukhina; the housing-related data is utilized here with permission.

4 For a discussion of Japan’s housing names as markers of value in terms of socio-economic capital, see Wilkerson & Wilkerson, 2013.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [grant number 18K12591].

Notes on contributors

Ksenia Golovina

Ksenia Golovina is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Sociology at Toyo University, Japan. Initially trained in Japanese Studies, Ksenia Golovina received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Tokyo in 2012. She is the author of Russian Women in Japan: Migration, Marriage, and Life Crafting (Akashi Shoten, 2017, in Japanese) and has published in a number of journals including Russian Sociological Review and Asian Anthropology. Her recent research focuses on the Russian-speaking migrants in Japan with reference to housing, homemaking, creativity, and life cycle.