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Place Attachment and Narrative (Re)construction of Identity in a Post-Yugoslavian Family
The Case of Barbara
Abstract
The presented article is the next in the series in which I describe the results of the analytical and interpretative work of the project “Migrating Biographies – descendants of Bosnian re-emigrants in the process of identity reconstruction. Pedagogical attributes of intergenerational transmission in the light of life histories”. The research was inspired by the identity identifications of the inhabitants of the Bolesławiec district in Lower Silesia, who in 2018 referred to themselves as We, Poles from Yugoslavia, although many of them had never been to Yugoslavia and the country has not been on the world map since 1995. In this text, I analyse the process of identity constitution based on the meanings that one of the research participants, Barbara, gives to space and places, which become for her both a source of knowledge about her identity but also an inspiration to undertake activities aimed at changing the public space around her.
Referring to the description of place as geographical space, I use two theoretical approaches. The first is represented by sociologist Martina Löw, who proposes to look at space from a postmodern perspective. The second, is developed by two social and environmental psychologists Leila Scanell and Robert Gifford. I consider these two theoretical proposals as examples of interpretative tools that, on the one hand, facilitate an understanding of the possible ways of reading the human attachment with place, material and symbolic space and take into account the emotional, cognitive and social determinants of the relationship with space, and, on the other hand, allow us to recognize the strength and significance of the relationship with space, which becomes the core of biographically constituted identity.
Keywords:
attachment to the place, identity, (biographical) constrain to act, history of post-Yugoslavian familiesDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
