Center for Global Communication Strategies

Migrants’ Material Culture and Bricolage: Russian-speaking Community Members in Japan Making and Procuring Objects

Ksenia Golovina

The University of Tokyo

Abstract

Studies that address the experiences of modern-day migrants through the lens of materiality often succeed in unveiling the subtlest intricacies of the migrants’ conception of life, identity construction, and aspirations; thus, they highlight the importance of observing material culture. This paper draws on data from fieldwork on the first generation of Russian female migrants, as well as on an online surveyof male and female Russian-speaking migrants, residing in Japan. Here, I focus on one feature of the material culture of the Russian-speaking community members: the objects resulting from their “do-it-yourself” practices. I do not limit these objects to items entirely crafted by them; I argue that features of co-making are also retained by objects that are modified to meet their owners’ needs, as well as by those obtained in ways that require actions transcending traditional consumer experience. Displaced from a native socio-cultural context that is associated with certain forms of materiality, the migrants use “do-it-yourself” as a tool to restore this materiality in their new location while having to rely on limited materials and specific consumption channels. The restoration process is influenced by the ideas from the host culture. I suggest that these migrant practices could be approached through the concept of bricolage, which originates from Levi-Strauss’s discourse. Thus, not only are these objects the result of a compilation of resources at hand but also function often as the symbolic means of reproducing pre-migratory experiences in an attempt to construct an “as if” feeling of being at home.

Keywords: Material culture, Russian-speaking migrants, Bricolage, DIY

1. Introduction

When I first conducted fieldwork in Japan targeting Russians in 2008, their material culture was not my primary concern. Yet, every time I visited my informants’ homes andobserved the objects contained there, I was coming closer to the realization that this is a subject matter that should not be treated exclusively as the outer context providing insights about the Russian migrants; it has to be explored in its own right, with the curiosity of early anthropologists encountering unknown objects in the field and striving to make sense of them. To achieve this aim, in addition to paying particular attention to the objects in the homes and on the bodies of every new informant I have encountered ever since[1], in 2015-2016 I undertook an online survey (funded by “Japan’s Lifology Society”) on the migrants’ dwellings, objects within them, and the channels the migrants employed to procure the latter. The survey, to which 186 people responded, consisted of two parts, divided into a series of subthemes;the first part aimed to establish the types of dwellings the Russian-speaking migrants inhabit in Japan, the second – to determine the range of objects (from furniture to photographs) that can be found in those homes. In this paper I focus on the second part of the survey,particularly on the procurement channels the migrants utilize to obtain various objects, in addition to the data obtained as a result of extensive participant observation, interviews, and cyberethnography. Specifically, in this paper I pay attention to the objects resulting from the DIY practices by my informants.

2. Working Concepts and Literature Review

2-1 Working Concepts

As mentioned above, the first concept that I employ in this paper is “do-it-yourself” (hereinafter, DIY). When I talk about the objects resulting from my subjects’ DIY practices, I do not limit these objects to items entirely made by them; I argue that features of co-making are also retained by objects that are modified to meet their owners’ needs, as well as by those obtained in ways that require actions transcending traditional consumer experience in a contemporary society (whereby one buys a ready-made item over the counter or online). For instance, items that are bought through various channels such as online “buy-sell” groups targeting Russian-speaking migrants in Japan, where extensive communication on a private level is required until the transaction is realized, and that are sometimes in need of further adjustments (often by means of consumption of extra materials) in order to fit into the domestic space of a purchaser, would be an example of the usage of the term “DIY” adoptedin this paper. As such, their holders do not only contribute to these objects’ co-making, but also to their “cultural biography” [Kopytoff 1986] by means of obtaining, modifying, displaying and sometimes giving them away, when looked upon retrospectively. I would also like to make a distinction between the items DIYed out of aesthetic purposes, such as household items – cushions and cloth centerpieces – or clothes[2]made by my informants using Japanese kimono parts, and the ones made or modified out of necessity. An example of the latter would be purchasing at a second-hand shop and further modifying window tulle (that often bears resemblance to the commonplace design in the buyer’s home country)[3]. This necessity can be interpreted in conjunction with a combination of factors, some of them constraining in nature, – lack of knowledge about where and how certain things can be procured in the host country, an economic factor whereby buying used things could be beneficial budget-wise, and a desire to obtain something that has already passed a test of “usefulness” by one’s fellow countrymen (in case of the purchases within the ethnic or foreigners’community). Then, there is an element of nostalgia, and the popularity of second-hand shops among the migrants suggests that they may provide a wider range of items that can satisfy this sentiment rather than the ready-made items at various conventional stores.

DIY is both a description of the state of things in the pre-consumerist society, as well as a reactionto the universalization of objects in the context of consumerism; however, for migrants the term carries extra meaning. Displaced from a native socio-cultural context that is associated with certain forms of materiality, they use DIY as a tool to restore this materiality in their new location while having to rely on limited materials and specific consumption channels. The restoration process is not one-sided but is influenced by the objects and ideas from the host culture.I suggest that these migrant practices could be approached through the concept of bricolage(as an extension of DIY), which originates from Levi-Strauss’s discourse (where bricolage isdescribed as spontaneous, rather than with a definiteproject in mind, process of creation with reliance on available means, a metaphor used by Levi-Strauss to characterize the process of myth-making). The reason I adopt this term is due to its three crucial components (which will be detailed throughout the paper) – constraints (of the available materials), resistance[4] (through the actions of the migrants), and organizing logic [Altglas 2014] (that prompts the migrants to engage in the described practices). Not only are the objects made and procured by migrants the result of a compilation of resources and channels at hand but also function often as the symbolic means of reproducing pre-migratory experiences in an attempt to construct an “as if” feeling of being at home.The memory of these experiences, like Levi-Straussian mythemes, is the arsenal of means that migrants have at their disposal to express through objects-making process. The bricolage is thus twofold, both at the level of the memories of the past as well as of the physical resourcesthey can obtain and channels they can get access to in a host countryto materialize these experiences. The lack of a project or rather, lack of specificity of the vision of the final product, can be attributed to the unavailability or invisibility, due to constraints mentioned above, in one’s immediate realm of the sought-after objects and ideas[5].For migrants, despite hybridity of the globalizing world, where cultures intermingle (albeit unequally)through various media sources [Kraidy 2005], the host country can emerge as a largely uncharted territory, difficult to navigate. The reason for this is an enormous gap between consuming a culture through media, an experience that can leave one with an illusion of knowing that culture, and operating from within that cultureafter relocating there. The lack of knowledge of the host country’s language – especially with a script largely different from that of a migrant’s language (as in the case of Russian-speaking migrants in Japan) – adds to the problem, and the question of gaining access to necessary resources, i.e. what, where, and how to buy to make one’s living comfortable, while maintaining symbolic connections to the memories of the past, emerges as a complicated one. Thus, DIY, reframed here as bricolage (which is “DIY” in French but is invested with the meanings of the anthropological discourse) may be the migrants’ response to the unknown in front of them, their strategyin gradually fitting in the host societyby means offinding the objectsthat they can – through practices of searching, combining, modifying, adjusting, and ultimately investingwith new meanings – employ as new symbols of their belonging to both pre- and post-migratory worlds. These initiatives are therefore not aimed at creating one’s own isolated material world, but, contrarily, are defined by interaction – with things, people both within and outside one’s ethnic community, and the locals – where the migrant material world gradually expands to include the aspects of materiality of all these actors. Often, these practices take place in what can be interpreted asa liminal space, defined by the socio-economic constraints the migrants experience, – purchases are made at second-hand shops in the host country and online migrant communities rather than in actual conventional stores; items procured at home during visits are carried by plane and ferry, acquiring the marks of the journey, some breaking apart and some disappearing, leaving only a memory of them; objects that found their place on the shelves in the migrants’ homes collapse in pieces amidst the earthquakes so frequent in Japan, reminding the migrants that these things – large porcelain teapots or fragile tea plates –may in fact notbelong here.To avoid romanticization of these situations of making and procuring the objects, however, I would like to mention that for somethepractices described above tend to prevail during certain stages of theirlife in Japan, associated with distinct status, and may decrease or even disappear completely under certain circumstances (such as engaging in demandingfulltime paid work in the host country). This argument links us to the findings by Kopnina [2005: 206] where the researcher states that her subjects, Russians in London and Amsterdam, abandon practices of procuring goods through ethnic communities and networking once they realize that Western types of transactions are more straightforward and beneficial. To further develop this idea, I believe that this has to do not only with the realization of the usefulness of Western (which I view as capitalistic in general rather than geographically bound to the West, since my discussion focuses on Japan) approaches as such but with the fact that the migrants ultimately reach a certain level of adaptation, a degree of familiarity with the host culture that makes such transitions (speaking poetically, from a bricoleur to, if not an engineer (given his extraordinary powers to overcome nature[Johnson 2012]), but at least someone with a fuller arsenal of means of expression and clearer goals), possible.

2-2 Materiality and Migration

In an introduction to a volume discussing migration and materiality, Basu and Coleman point out that in order to achieve a better understanding of the interconnected nature of migration and objects, a “mapping of typologies of materiality and material culture onto typologies of migration and mobility” [2008: 318]needs to be undertaken. One of the approaches that could be carried out to tackle such an enormous task is to be conscious of contextuality of the migrants’ material worlds. To distinguish the contexts of various types of migratory experiences, one should be aware of “intersecting itineraries of people and things” where the movers’ materiality is shaped by the purposes and agendas of their journeys and vice versa [Basu and Coleman 2008: 317]. Although the preciseness of a certain material object seems undeniable, its connotations change dramatically according to the context of the journey, putting forward contextuality as one of the most important frameworks when discussing migration and objects. Pechurina, whose research is concerned with the cultural identity seen through “diasporic objects” in the homes of Russians in UK, suggeststhat such categories as “age, gender, class, and related categories of taste” play an important part in contextualization of the objects [2016: 31][6]. While Pechurina employs an important concept of taste, I would further suggest, following the arguments made in the introduction, that status and life stage[7] are two other important contexts that should be taken heed of when discussing migrants and their material culture. The following study by De Leon [2013] emerges as a concrete example of how status can predetermine the modes of materiality of migration. In his account of undocumented migrants, whose journeys aredangerous and physically demanding border-crossing, contextualized by their illegal status, builds his discourse on the archaeological concept of use wear that helps himinvestigate the material traces the migrants leave behind. He thusaims to determine the engagement the migrants’ bodies have with various objects and through them – with the surrounding landscape. The author demonstrates the extents of physical suffering the migrants experience during the journey, with shelters as their temporary homes, establishing an untieable connection between the migrants, objects defining and defined by their migratory experiences, and the routes they take. The context thus helps reveal the deeper levels of the migrants’ engagement with the objects, introducing a component of emotion that is projected onto the objects the migrants interact with. As Burrell [2008: 356] puts it, journeys are “so (Burrell’s italics) emotionally significant, sometimes the only way to cope with them is to try to render them as such”. Migrants’ emotions in the form of suffering as seen through material culture is present in the work by Miller [2008], although in a different light, seen as a tragedy in a more abstract yet overwhelmingsense that goes beyond the immediate physicality of a border-crossing action, illustrated by De Leon, and immigration and back-and-forth travel accounts addressed by Burrell. Having analyzed a series of projects and papers dedicated to migration and materiality, Millersuggests that a sense of lack of fulfillment and completeness seen in the migrants’ contradictory material worlds is a revelation of their failure to exercise their agency and realize their cultural aspirations in a way they could have done in their native environment. Miller’s paper also touches upon the topic of a second home through an account of a Jamaican woman who lives in UK but generously invests into her home in Jamaica, where she may never live, developedby the author in a more detailed way in his essay “Why the furniture goes to the house you can’t live in” [Miller 2007]. While this duality of homes is beyond the scope of my focus, I would like to acknowledge it as an important aspect related to material culture and cross-border mobility that most vividly surfaces in such contexts as return migration [Horst 2007; Larionescu 2012][8]. The quoted studies suggest that there are at the very least two important aspects that have to be kept in mind when dealing with the migrants’ objects –their contextuality (from their physical (re)location to the categories of status or life stage of the holder) and emotional tensions they may potentially represent. This is summarized in Pechurina’s subtitle of her book – “Material Cultures, Migration, and Identities. What the Eye Cannot See” [2015] (Italics mine). While the eye cannot see the tensions and immediately read into their contexts, unless a self-reflective researcher decides to emerge on a quest to decode them, they remain to be “embedded in the materiality” of migration, realized through various types of “furnishings” migrants adopt [Burrell 2008: 370] for the various parts (such as initial border-crossing or visits home) and stages (such as acquiring a permanent residency) of migration.

2-3 Bricolage

Since its adoption by Levi-Strauss, the concept of bricolage,widely employed in scholarly discourse,has undergone a long process of transformationthat could be generalized as its de-traditionalization [Altglas 2014].In fact, the Levi-Straussian discourse pertaining to the term is so multi-angled that it allows for an abundance of interpretationswhere, for instance, some do and some do not see any ideological connotations in the term’s usage by Levi-Strauss. Yet, careful examination in combination with other texts by the eminent French anthropologist, as done by Johnson, reveals the term’s extensive “ideological agenda” (“divergence between traditional and modern”) [2012: 368]. The earlier examples of the concept’s application focused on its constraining nature, an element of fabrication rather than creativeness, such as we see in Garvey’s discussion of constitutionalbricolage where he argues: “Bricolage is a process of fabricating “make-do” solutions to problems as they arise, using a limited and often severely limiting store of doctrines, materials, and tools” [1971: 5]. For Garvey, an important function of bricolage is helping society to “maintain its syntax – its consistency and identity over time by selecting responses to problems as they arise from a limited cultural reserve” [1971: 5]. However, in the process of de-traditionalization of the concept, referred to earlier, it is creativeness and arbitrariness that have been put forward as the constituting principles of bricolage. Altglas argues that the most recent examples of the term utilizations indicate its understanding as often amateurish DIY, “synonymous with individual creative practices” [2014: 474], devoid of a sociocultural organizing principle. Altglas further suggests that such an oversimplification of the concept, when applied to various realities, results in its failing to grasp a range of cultural forces responsible for the individual practices in question andcontends for the reclamation of the term’s initial meaning. She illustrates the argument by drawing on an example from seemingly eclectic religious practices of the modern-day believers, who may adhere to a few spiritual systems at once, showing that it is not just a matter of random choice but a reaction to the demands of a neoliberal society that expects certain qualities from an individual that these spiritual systems in fact help to develop. Thus, the believers’ bricolage is bricolage not because it is eclectic in nature, but because, as initially envisaged by Levi-Strauss, it’s eclecticism is social, predetermined, and operates from a limited range of resources. In this fashion, the usage of the Levi-Straussian term, “reclaimed” by Altglas through careful reconstruction of its initial components, suggests that apart from eclecticism (a feature of bricolage that survived de-traditionalization), there is in fact a limited range of resources (hence constraints) that the actors can utilize when aiming to achieve the goal predetermined by the outer forces (hence organizing logic). Then, there is an element of resistance, either in the de Certeau’s sense of subversion of the dominant culture [quoted in Altglas 2014: 478], or in the sense of an earlier example from the Carribbean region where resistance (that ultimately leads to creolization) is a survival strategy[Knepper 2006]. Knepper further argues that for “bricolage to serve its full potential as an art of living (and not merely survival) demands ongoing efforts to reconstitute memory, which sometimes means an examination of traumatic moments in history, in order to engage in a transformative, dialogic process for recreating and “re-membering” one’s place in the world” [2006: 85]. Hence, although one’s “consistency and identity” are not preserved through bricolage in a strict sense suggested by Garvey [1971], it can be argued, that the transformed identity is recreated using the initial components and, although creolized [Knepper 2006], remains consistent. Thus, once again, constraints, organizing logic, and resistance emerge as constituting elements of bricolage. In the migrants context, as it will become clear from the examples that follow, their practices of making and procuring objects are constrained by what they can readily obtain in a host country both because of the actual availability of the products, and because of their knowledge of where to obtain the necessary items. There is also a predetermined range of what they may potentially want, as the objects often serve as the markers of their transforming identities. Then, they are driven by a mixture of sociocultural impulses that include curiosity towards the host culture (or complete ignorance towards it), nostalgia towards their home country (or, again, although much rarer, ignorance), often maximized by the expectations towards them as foreigners who have to behomesick[9], and sometimes longing for one’s own pre-migratory or early post-migratory interest and excitement towards the host country which have since faded (many of my informants reported that they were strongly charmed by Japan at first, but have since lost that feeling). Yet, these practices contain an element of resistance where there is something of oneself that they cannot give up, continuing to express through objects, while ultimately aiming to achieve comfort(whether within themselves or in the dialogue with the people from the host culture). Hence, this resistance is with an aim to find the middle ground, or to co-act. Finally, the eclecticism of bricolage is revealing itself through an ultimate mixture of objects and means. This discussion brings us back to the remarks made about migration and materiality where emotional tension (or “seams, scars, and visibility” as Knepper[2006: 80] argues about the effects of bricolage)was identified as one of the crucial components to look for in the migrants’ objects. Applying the concept of bricolage helps us dissect the emotional contents of these objects as the locators of feelings, anxieties, and aspirations that the migrants experience.