When People Stay and Things Make Their Way: Airports, Mobilities and Materialities of a Transnational Landscape

Abstract

This article explores different meanings of mobility and place by examining the interweaving of people, things and airports in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two airports – of departure and arrival of this migratory route – I look at the practices of sending and receiving objects by migrants in Lisbon and their kin in Bissau. The transnational yet grounded setting helps to provide a better understanding of the complexity associated with different forms of mobility – including corporeal, imagined and desired – and their key role in socially and relationally constructing a lived airport space, as well as wider social landscapes. Bringing in evidence from a less-explored setting – a small airport in a West African country – will particularly challenge some of the assumptions that tend to associate mobility with ‘modernity’ and fixity with ‘tradition’. It will show how people in Guinea-Bissau are, as much as migrants abroad, dynamically involved in global practices of movement – materialised in trading and reciprocating objects between two continents – through local performances of mobility that do not necessarily involve corporeal travel across borders.

Key Words:

• Airports
• Migration
• Body
• Imaginaries
• Mobile objects
• Global and local practices of movement

Acknowledgements

My research is funded by the Fundação para Ciência e a Tecnologia of the Portuguese Ministry for Education and Science (SFRH/BD/47395/2008). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Migration Research Seminar series in the University of Sussex in October 2011. I am grateful to the participants at the seminar for their questions and helpful remarks. I would also like to thank Russell King, Katie Walsh, and John Spall for their insightful comments, as well as the four anonymous referees for their critical insights. To Albano Costa, Hugo Costa, Délio Jasse and Inês Oliveira I am thankful for letting me use their photos and sharing their projects and experiences of Guinea-Bissau and with the Guinean community in Lisbon. Most of all I am indebted to the people of Guinea-Bissau, and Guineans living in Portugal, who happened to cross my path, especially to the men and women who not only bore my constant presence at the airport while struggling to successfully accomplish their hazardous tasks, but were also willing to share so much of their lives with me.