Article

Lives Without a Last Stop Rural Migrant, Return Migration, and Practice of Multiple Place

Abstract

This article is concerned with the belonging and loyalty tried to be maintained by the migrant towards the place and society they consider as the true origin. The traditional migration literature has retrospectively argued that the migrant’s moving from the place of origin to the targeted place corresponds to a discontinuity and abandonment. On the other hand, as suggested in this research, the migrants maintain their lives in the target place through complying with the behaviors, attitudes and actions required by those spaces; they do not break their ties with the original place of origin and even engage in a backward movement. However, the return of these migrants often coincides with the continuation of urban and rural life in the form of a multi-site settlement. This is sometimes used to meet the need for personal loyalties and nostalgia, and sometimes for keeping the motivation of passing it down to next generation alive. In this way, rather than a definite turn, the returns often correspond to a migration movement in which the place and society of origin cannot be mentally forgotten and abandoned, and comes to be endeavored to be survived in the practice of multiple spaces. In this sense, individuals often refrain from making definite decisions on behalf of themselves and their families. This experience of the migrant corresponds to the socialization process described as “liquid modernity” by Bauman and observed as life perceptions “without a last stop” within the scope of this research. Accordingly, rural migration is the equivalent of a continuous process, not an ending one. This experience constitutes a close position to the value-oriented rationalism in Weber’s words; the decision making processes of an individual becomes possible by self-sacrifices made by the migrant between rationalism and irrationalism or beyond cost-benefit or linear and analytical rationalism foreseen by modernism. This research deals with the rural migrant’s experience of returning back, which doesn’t have a last stop and cannot be explained with a rational individual preference, through a realistic and methodological analysis of the story of rural migrant from Rize returning back

Keywords

Migration return migration ethical substantive rationality liquid modernity multiple place practice