Homemaking as Homesickness. Romanian Migrants’ Strategies of Coping with Cultural Difference

Abstract

Homemaking achieved materially and emotionally within a diasporic environment represents an important step in the long process of settling in a foreign country. This paper is devoted to explaining the Romanian concept of “home” as it is perceived by Romanian migrants who lived for long periods of time in western European countries. Interviews with Romanian migrants and Moldovan returned migrants, and participant observation during fieldwork revealed different levels of the psychological state of missing the home they departed from, the emotional underpinnings on having to manage life in two places, the concrete and
spiritual significance of homemaking in a foreign country, the psychological undertones of “home” and “host” societies, questions on “identity” and “belonging”, ethnic homeland attachments. The reality of pluri-local and/or trans-local identity, and of multi-located homes and specific transnational lifestyles is compared with Romanian collective memory and imaginary of “home” and the strong territorial attachments that are considered by autochthonous ethnopsychologies as part of the Romanian cultural intimacy. The paper analyses both residence (as the material cultures of home, such as design and commodities, the material world of objects that shape a home environment) and dwelling (meanings, values and beliefs, emotional significance of domesticity). For migrants, the various strategies of homemaking are connected in various ways with homesickness as not only longing for a specific residence, but a feeling of loss of a specific past that is even more accentuated for people in a diasporic condition.