Nomads, Migrants, and People on the Move
The Jewish annual round of scripture led us, last Saturday, to the part of Genesis where the Holy One tells Abraham to "get yourself out...from the land of your birth and from your father's house." This comes out of the blue to Abraham, and his swift and unquestioning compliance is one of the things that makes him a biblical hero. And, yes, at least until the end of Deuteronomy, the bible is a history of nomadism and migration. And of course, anyone steeped in the history of Europe from the classical age through the Turkish conquest of Constantinople knows that it is all about the migration of one tribe after another out of someplace in Asia into Europe.
Migration is different from nomadism, though we tend to see them as identical. Nomadism is usually cyclical. Nomads usually go over the same track, often at the same times of year, and always with the same people, usually in the same order of march. There is nothing "rootless" about that kind of nomadism. The roots are just distributed over a wider area. Migration, on the other hand, means leaving a place forever, usually because it has suddenly become inhospitable, often because some other tribe has migrated into it, leading ultimately to a domino series of migrations, always straight out in one direction, rather than in the circular path of nomads. But, like nomadism, most migrations also involve a group of people who stay together on the march, rather than individuals.
I think what we are experiencing now is different from both nomadism and migration in their historical sense, and that the change was brought about by the birth of the nation-state with its non-porous borders. Nation-states deal with individual immigrants, with varying degrees of competence and organization; they never deal with mass migrations. And within any given nation-state, mass migrations happen one person or family at a time (we find out they were "mass" only in retrospect, as with the Okies, and the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South.) The Roma (and the Tinkers and the Travelers) are the only exceptions to this pattern, and they have become pariahs as a result.
According to the Bureau of the Census, 40% of us do not live in the states where we were born. The median duration of residence (how long a person has lived at his/her current residence) was 4.7 years as of 1996 (the most recent data I could find in a hurry.) Older people, married people, people without children, people with a high school education or less, people with very little money, and people with lots of money tend to stay put longer than the rest of us. And people with lots of education tend to move around more than the rest of us. Hispanics moved more often than the rest of us, and 14% of us moved last year.
The stats don't tell us much about why people move. Common sense tells us that a move can result from good things, like making more money and therefore being able to get a bigger house in a better neighborhood, and from bad things, like losing a job and being evicted or even becoming homeless. It can result in being farther away from one's extended family, or in moving back in with them. It can cause stress, or alleviate it. It can result in accumulating more "stuff," or in losing a large proportion of it (an aunt of mine used to say that three moves were the equivalent of one fire in terms of loss of household goods.) It can create a "home base" for an extended family or constellation of friends, or destroy one.
We may be unduly nostalgic about "going home again." We Americans are, after all, a nation of runaways. We are the descendants of people who decided the Old Country was no longer a viable home for them. "Lighting out for the territories" is practically programmed into our genes. When the going gets tough, the tough get going--and they keep going until they are safely out of town. Recent DNA studies of human genetics only underline the fact that almost everybody belongs to a family that comes from someplace else, just as the earlier history of migrations only underlines the fact that almost every indigenous people gets to be indigenous only by displacing somebody else.
We don't usually think about these issues much until they hit us on either the personal or the political level. Until, that is, somebody's elderly parent 2000 miles away becomes unable to live alone any more. Or until a nation formed by a bloody and forced migration out of Europe suddenly becomes a target for indignation and violence from the "locals," and its denizens are urged to "go back where you came from."
A part of us yearns to do just that, to recover the places and people of our brightest memories, or maybe of the memories of our parents or grandparents. But another corollary to the harsh reality of life on the move is that if we do get a chance to go back, we are likely to find that those people and places have vanished, and only the vaguest outlines of the geography remain. The hospital I was born in closed down long since. The place I went to kindergarten has been paved over and turned into a shopping mall. The school building in which I attended first through seventh grade burned down, though a new school was erected on the same spot. My high school was torn down for condominiums. My college has been amalgamated into a larger university. The street on which I lived during my last year of college--not merely the building, the street--has disappeared. So far, all five of my graduate schools are still pretty much intact, but it is obviously only a matter of time before they too slide off into nothingness or radical transformation. After all, I spent most of my childhood in southern Florida, and there is a good chance that most of that state will be under water by the time I myself slide off into nothingness or radical transformation.
And I'm one of the holdouts, the exceptions. My husband and I have been married to each other for 43 years, and have lived in the same place for 38 of them--almost half the time our building has been in existence. While we stayed put, most of our contemporaries were moving into "starter homes" and then having kids and moving on to larger homes in better school districts, and maybe getting divorced and moving apart, or following jobs around the country a couple of times, and are just about now starting to think about "downsizing" or retiring to someplace in the Sunbelt.
The Buddhists may have the best handle on all this: Everything changes. Everything vanishes. Maybe nothing was really there in the first place. You may as well accept impermanence, because you yourself are impermanent too. Not only is there nothing to hold onto, you have no solid hand to hold onto it with.
Or maybe the physicists have it right. We are, all of us, made of the first matter that was ever created. Everything changes, but nothing vanishes. Everything moves around, but nothing moves out.
Migration is different from nomadism, though we tend to see them as identical. Nomadism is usually cyclical. Nomads usually go over the same track, often at the same times of year, and always with the same people, usually in the same order of march. There is nothing "rootless" about that kind of nomadism. The roots are just distributed over a wider area. Migration, on the other hand, means leaving a place forever, usually because it has suddenly become inhospitable, often because some other tribe has migrated into it, leading ultimately to a domino series of migrations, always straight out in one direction, rather than in the circular path of nomads. But, like nomadism, most migrations also involve a group of people who stay together on the march, rather than individuals.
I think what we are experiencing now is different from both nomadism and migration in their historical sense, and that the change was brought about by the birth of the nation-state with its non-porous borders. Nation-states deal with individual immigrants, with varying degrees of competence and organization; they never deal with mass migrations. And within any given nation-state, mass migrations happen one person or family at a time (we find out they were "mass" only in retrospect, as with the Okies, and the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South.) The Roma (and the Tinkers and the Travelers) are the only exceptions to this pattern, and they have become pariahs as a result.
According to the Bureau of the Census, 40% of us do not live in the states where we were born. The median duration of residence (how long a person has lived at his/her current residence) was 4.7 years as of 1996 (the most recent data I could find in a hurry.) Older people, married people, people without children, people with a high school education or less, people with very little money, and people with lots of money tend to stay put longer than the rest of us. And people with lots of education tend to move around more than the rest of us. Hispanics moved more often than the rest of us, and 14% of us moved last year.
The stats don't tell us much about why people move. Common sense tells us that a move can result from good things, like making more money and therefore being able to get a bigger house in a better neighborhood, and from bad things, like losing a job and being evicted or even becoming homeless. It can result in being farther away from one's extended family, or in moving back in with them. It can cause stress, or alleviate it. It can result in accumulating more "stuff," or in losing a large proportion of it (an aunt of mine used to say that three moves were the equivalent of one fire in terms of loss of household goods.) It can create a "home base" for an extended family or constellation of friends, or destroy one.
We may be unduly nostalgic about "going home again." We Americans are, after all, a nation of runaways. We are the descendants of people who decided the Old Country was no longer a viable home for them. "Lighting out for the territories" is practically programmed into our genes. When the going gets tough, the tough get going--and they keep going until they are safely out of town. Recent DNA studies of human genetics only underline the fact that almost everybody belongs to a family that comes from someplace else, just as the earlier history of migrations only underlines the fact that almost every indigenous people gets to be indigenous only by displacing somebody else.
We don't usually think about these issues much until they hit us on either the personal or the political level. Until, that is, somebody's elderly parent 2000 miles away becomes unable to live alone any more. Or until a nation formed by a bloody and forced migration out of Europe suddenly becomes a target for indignation and violence from the "locals," and its denizens are urged to "go back where you came from."
A part of us yearns to do just that, to recover the places and people of our brightest memories, or maybe of the memories of our parents or grandparents. But another corollary to the harsh reality of life on the move is that if we do get a chance to go back, we are likely to find that those people and places have vanished, and only the vaguest outlines of the geography remain. The hospital I was born in closed down long since. The place I went to kindergarten has been paved over and turned into a shopping mall. The school building in which I attended first through seventh grade burned down, though a new school was erected on the same spot. My high school was torn down for condominiums. My college has been amalgamated into a larger university. The street on which I lived during my last year of college--not merely the building, the street--has disappeared. So far, all five of my graduate schools are still pretty much intact, but it is obviously only a matter of time before they too slide off into nothingness or radical transformation. After all, I spent most of my childhood in southern Florida, and there is a good chance that most of that state will be under water by the time I myself slide off into nothingness or radical transformation.
And I'm one of the holdouts, the exceptions. My husband and I have been married to each other for 43 years, and have lived in the same place for 38 of them--almost half the time our building has been in existence. While we stayed put, most of our contemporaries were moving into "starter homes" and then having kids and moving on to larger homes in better school districts, and maybe getting divorced and moving apart, or following jobs around the country a couple of times, and are just about now starting to think about "downsizing" or retiring to someplace in the Sunbelt.
The Buddhists may have the best handle on all this: Everything changes. Everything vanishes. Maybe nothing was really there in the first place. You may as well accept impermanence, because you yourself are impermanent too. Not only is there nothing to hold onto, you have no solid hand to hold onto it with.
Or maybe the physicists have it right. We are, all of us, made of the first matter that was ever created. Everything changes, but nothing vanishes. Everything moves around, but nothing moves out.
posted by WiredSisters at 12:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home