Keywords

12.1 Introduction

We are in my mother-in-law’s bedroom, the only one with air conditioning – a “remittance gift” that my husband installed a few months ago. She’s sitting in her favorite armchair by the side of her bed. I face her in a chair borrowed from the small dining room, while my husband, who’s translating what we are saying, sits next to me on an old upholstered sofa. A small TV and some photos hang on the wall: a few of them were made in our home in Italy and portray our family, along with those of her other migrant child who lives in Switzerland. During the last two hours she has been telling me her life story sharing intimate and moving memories, while I have collected important data for my research and have also learned a lot about this distant part of my family. The interview has been emotionally demanding. Now, as she’s smiling at me, she’s both tired and serene. I ask my husband to tell her that the interview is over. Time to say thanks to her, in my bad Punjabi, and turn off the recorder. After so many words, now I can be just her daughter-in-law and start again to communicate as we usually do: with gestures I ask her how she feels, get up and hug her. (Field notes, August 2019)

In 2019 I conducted a few weeks of intense fieldwork in semi-rural Punjab as a part of HOMInG, a comparative research project on migration and homemaking. As the wife of a Punjabi men spending the summer holidays with her husband and children, I had the chance to live with my relatives and share their daily routines by being a family guest. As a white Western female researcher, I had the possibility to interview them as a “honorary insider” (Carling et al., 2014) – a temporary yet semi-familiar presence who was allowed to dwell in their intimate domestic spaces, normally inaccessible to outsiders. Doing participant and ethnographic observation was not without methodological and ethical dilemmas. I was a trusted presence, but cultural expectations and issues obvious to any insider often needed to be explained to me, not to mention the language barrier. Moreover, it was necessary to negotiate how much of what had been said and seen should remain confidential or could become part of my study, in order not to jeopardize mutual relationships. I experienced the riddles and complexities of doing research with the family (Starrs et al., 2001), as the presence of my teenage children raised a number of concrete and logistical problems and changed the perception that my informants had of me. At the same time, I did research through the family, as my Indian relatives became my first informants and gatekeepers, putting me in contact with other acquaintances, friends and in-laws, many of them living in Italy as well. In addition, the access to the field in India (and later on in Italy) was often mediated by my husband, who acted as an intercultural mediator with non-English and non-Italian-speaking relatives and informants. This resulted in 53 in-depth and semi-structured interviews (of which 22 were conducted in Punjab, 21 in Italy and 10 via Whatsapp or Skype to people residing in other countries of the diaspora). In short, this research design had its own dilemmas, particularly in terms of reflexivity. My multiple positioning influenced the type of information collected and had to be situationally defined and adapted, along with mutual expectations and responsibilities.

This chapter deals with these topics starting from my personal experience as a researcher with Punjabi people in India and in Italy. In the first section I mainly discuss questions of positionality, while in the second I focus on what we can better understand about homing and migration by conducting research in domestic settings, compared with different ones.

12.2 On Positionality and Reflexivity

My personal motivations for going to Indian Punjab were threefold (Sherif, 2001). First of all, I had to conduct research on homing practices among Indian immigrants living in Italy and their left-behinds in India. Moreover, this part of my fieldwork had to be organized during summer holidays and foresaw the presence of my children and husband. Finally, I wanted to learn more about the Punjabi part of my family. I had decided to focus my research on Indian Punjabis because I knew that I would dwell in the homes of my in-laws as if they were my “distant homes”, which was consistent with the topic of my study. I also knew that I could take advantage of the social capital (Coleman, 1988) of my extended family in terms of information, contacts, trust and cultural interpretation, getting to know other people with relative ease and in a short time. Thus, I did not experience isolation or lack of social acceptance on the field, nor strong social pressures due to behavioral expectations (Sherif, 2001). For the short period of my stay in Punjab, any culturally unorthodox behavior of mine was tolerated with humor. On the other hand, I knew that my positioning would allow me to “see” some things and not others. For example, it would have provided me with an analytical perspective from inside homes and from within the relationships in which I was embedded, at the expense of a more macrosocial or political analysis. My children as well limited the type of field-experiences that could otherwise have been made, possibly making them less adventurous. On the other hand, sometimes their presence transformed my work into family visits to distant relatives, turning the interview into a pretext for collective discussions between generations that otherwise would not have taken place. We were often allowed to see how and by whom some private areas of the house were used, according to gender and seniority as well as the rural or urban context. However, we were also asked to take part in family life as kin, and to engage with conflicts and subtle dynamics of control: family is anything but a safe haven and should not be romanticized when doing family-based research (Hall, 2014). All this required a certain methodological discipline and continuous awareness about one’s positioning and shifting boundaries across multiple roles. Needless to say, the design of my research went beyond the traditional methodological assumption that a researcher needs to remain distant from participants in order to retain objectivity, analytical sharpness and critical mind (Gabb, 2010). From a methodological point of view, this only made sense by recognizing that the researcher’s “Self” influences every aspect of the research process, from ideation to final interpretation. In the relationship between the “Self” and the “Other” there is no clear binary opposition (Sherif, 2001).

12.2.1 Beyond the Insider/Outsider Divide

Migration research has long engaged with the advantages and disadvantages connected to the researcher’s being an insider or an outsider, relative to the group under study. The general conclusion is that this dualism is not as stable as it is often assumed to be, and that each of these positions does not in itself imply better knowledge (Herod, 1999; Mullings, 1999; Chako, 2004). The insider/outsider divide has been questioned as a discursive reality that is constructed in a relational, context-specific way and as a result of the interplay between the researcher’s characteristics and particular social contexts. An ethnographer can be positioned by the interlocutors according to more or less visible and specific “markers” that are linked to the researcher’s person and behavior. Markers vary in terms of their visibility to informants and the researcher’s ability to modify them. They can be selectively communicated depending on the situation, opening up to a series of possible “third positions” in migration research (Carling et al., 2014: 49). Being married to a Punjabi, I was an “honorary insider” to his kin (Ibidem: 50). This position allowed me continuous interaction with them. As a result, the process of knowledge production was dialogic and intersubjective (van Stapele, 2014). My third position, however, changed through time depending on the social and national context where I was conducting research (Carling et al., 2014). In Punjab I was the guest who went to her relatives’ homes and struggled to comply with very different customs and symbols, while in Italy this balance was reversed. I tried to make the most of my insider/outsider position to gain information, going beyond what was taken for granted, to “uncover hidden layers and unpack self-evidences and alternative meanings” (van Stapele, 2014: 15). In Punjab, everyone expected me to be quite ignorant about some cultural and behavioral habits. Sometimes I used my attributed positioning in order to ask for explanations, relying on advice in certain circumstances, enhancing the expertise of my interlocutors (Sherif, 2001). If I gave proof of knowing a few words of Punjabi, I would arouse reactions of surprise and satisfaction, while my shortcomings became an opportunity to discuss the different ways of conceiving the house and its spaces. In any case, my non-binary positioning has imposed a constant reflection on relational boundaries and thresholds, including when these should be built, moved and blurred and therefore how to manage research control, rapport maintenance, confidentiality and disengagement from the field.

12.2.2 Relational Thresholds

By “relational thresholds” I refer to the communicative expedients I used, in various situations, to distinguish my roles with my interlocutors or to manage information. This helped to sort out ethical dilemmas that could arise when the spatial and temporal boundaries of the setting were not so clear, or to define and switch from one to another: was I asking something as a researcher or as a relative? Could I use this for my research? Was our informal dialogue something that should remain confidential or not? In the most ethically thorny situations, I clearly and directly agreed with people on how and to what extent to use the information I had received, with the aim of not compromising our relational bond. I also attended to the confidentiality of the participants by using pseudonyms. To a certain extent, this has rebalanced the disparity of power that exists between researcher and informants, introducing a principle of agency on their part (Mullings, 1999). In other words, following Goffman’s metaphor of everyday life as a representation (Goffman, 1959), I tried to experiment with a series of “staging”, and to define the situation in an explicit and agreed way. Some communicative expedients, objects and rituals made it possible to determine the boundaries between an interview and different settings. For example, during interviews I asked my relatives not to use kinship designations when referring to our common family members but instead personal names or professional qualifications. Many family stories needed to be retold to me, I added, as what was known to all might not be known to me, or it had to be made explicit for research purposes. I would also take advantage of some traditional cultural practices linked to Punjabi hospitality as a relational threshold to circumscribe a transition space and time. For instance, the offer of chai (the traditional spiced milk tea), fruit juices and food usually marked the beginning and the end of the interviews, limiting the phases of “representation”.

My relationship with the cultural mediator – my husband and part of the family network – also required attention. We agreed at the beginning of the research that during the interviews we would not behave as husband and wife but rather as professionals. A cultural mediator exercises a power that presupposes a very high level of awareness and reflexivity. He is concerned with the selection of information, the translation and interpretation of situations and cultural meanings (Barberis & Boccagni, 2017). In some cases, this involved “leadership adjustments” during interviews. As a researcher I was responsible for conducting the interview, while he as a cultural mediator could suggest how to deal with certain situations and ask certain questions. In our case, short sentences or words in Italian, as well as mutual knowledge and trust allowed us to consciously make the necessary tunings.

Maintaining confidentiality for participants living or operating within the same community is considered a challenge in ethnographic research (Hall, 2014; Ellis, 1995), even more so in my case. The privacy of each informant within the same family and also between different families was particularly at stake during group interviews. These typically occurred in unexpected ways: sometimes just before starting an interview I was asked if other family members might be present. Or possibly, during the interview neighbors or other relatives passed by on an unexpected visit. These situations occurred especially in villages, showing the porosity of domestic spaces and home thresholds (Baxter & Brickell, 2014) and the pervasive influence of collective life within rural contexts (Hershman, 1981). Sometimes family and friends remained silent, whereas in other cases they decided to join the discussion. In both scenarios, the presence of other people would undermine the relational threshold of confidentiality. It was not easy, then, to decide when it was best to accept the audience’s presence or insist on a separate conversation without sounding impolite. As Hall claims (2014: 2182), “group interviews can be a site for the renegotiation of family relationships, identities and intimacies”. In my case, these “performances” were also used to share and transmit a family narrative to the children, or to disclose past conflicts within extended families resulting in the division of the house and in the construction of new homes (Bertolani & Boccagni, 2021). At the same time, group interviews were not always easy to manage, leading to unexpected situations and revealing latent conflicts between elderly parents and children.

During the interview the whole family of Narinder Singh is present: in addition to his wife, his mother who has just arrived from India and an elderly relative who has suddenly come to visit her. At first, I don’t understand why my interlocutor seems uncomfortable as he answers seemingly trivial questions about his father’s house in Punjab. Then the older guest begins to contest his answers and to put moral pressure on him in Punjabi. Narinder’s answers, in his view, are disrespectful towards his old father. I could not have predicted that there would be an intergenerational conflict in that family. I am sorry to see that my questions embarrass my interlocutor. On our way home, the cultural mediator tells me it would have been better to insist on having the interview separately, in the kitchen. (Field notes, Italy, November 2020)

As the families in my network of relatives and friends knew who was being interviewed, it became clear to me that they had particular expectations about it. Getting involved in the research was seen like a sign of respect for one’s influence within the family. Being excluded, instead, could make them seem less authoritative in the eyes of their kin. In these cases, I found myself balancing two contrasting needs, i.e. maintaining complete control over the research vs preserving the rapport with my guests, accepting compromises. In fact, as I realized, adjustments and exceptions are inevitable upon fieldwork. They are precisely what allows it to progress (Hall, 2014).

My sister-in-law thought I wanted to interview her too, as I had already interviewed her husband along with other in-laws, and she was the only elderly woman I hadn’t spoken to yet. So, she decided where, when and how we would conduct the interview. She agreed to take us to her niece’s house for a scheduled interview and she informed me that she would be interviewed in the car during the trip, “so we don’t waste time.” I accepted because refusing would be rude, but also because this same request had already revealed something about her home. (Field notes, Punjab, August 2019)

Maintaining the relationship also meant choosing carefully how, to whom and when to reciprocate, in the context of a family exchange of small gifts and counter-gifts (Mauss, 1954). This was especially true at the end of my stay in Punjab. Disengagement from the field (Hall, 2014) can be an emotionally intense experience (Snow, 1980). In my case it was not a question of interrupting relationships but of continuing them while physically leaving the field in Punjab (Ellis, 1995) and entering a connected research field in Italy. This meant switching to a previously tested remote communication through Skype or Whatsapp calls and typing, along with the exchange of pictures, drawings and audio-messages. The night before we returned to Italy, my sister-in-law had invited the entire extended family to dinner. That afternoon I had asked my niece to help me buy some sutes, the traditional Punjabi women’s dress, as a gift for the hostess and also for my mother-in-law. Indeed, I wanted to reciprocate their help in my research. It soon became clear to me that, since I was going to give the gift during the dinner, my choice had to be culturally appropriate and respect the family hierarchy in order not to create embarrassment. As my niece explained to me, “Your sister-in-law knows exactly the price of each sute according to its quality. If your gift is considered too cheap for her, it can be interpreted as an act of ignorance or as rude or provocative, but if it is too expensive, this will create problems for your mother-in-law, to whom you have to show respect.” Soon the choice of the gift turned from a pleasant event into a diplomatic matter. However, that trivial experience made me test the dynamics of control within extended families that underlie home (un)making practices in semi-rural Punjab (Bertolani & Boccagni, 2021). I could not have understood all of this if the research had not been conducted in their homes.

12.3 Inside Homes

Before talking about the homes of those I interviewed and lived with in Punjab and Italy, a few notes are necessary on my own home. Whenever my mother-in-law comes to Italy and lives with us for a few weeks, the house undergoes a series of transformations to make her feel more “at home”. Unsurprisingly, her presence attracts other relatives and acquaintances who wish to pay her a visit. This immediately changes the thresholds of my home, making them more permeable to the outside. Guests pass by without precise arrival and departure times and often without notice. Their presence requires a number of adjustments concerning its objects and affordances. I remember the first times when my sister-in-law and my mother-in-law, being strict vegetarians and wanting to cook some Punjabi food for us, opened my fridge to close it immediately afterwards, laughing embarrassed to find eggs, ham and various types of meat. As a matter of fact, the presence of my Punjabi kin causes some things to temporarily leave the house (or to be hidden) and others to enter, or some spaces and objects to be used in another way. The pantry and the fridge get filled with Punjabi vegetables and our palates get used to savoring the flavor of spices every day. The television broadcasts Bollywood films or kirtan (Sikh religious hymns) that are performed directly from the Golden Temple of Amritsar in Punjab, while the air smells of incense and the sofa becomes the place for reading the breviary every few hours. In other words, different sound-, smell-, visual-, taste- and touch- scapes are recreated (Hirvi, 2016) that connect in a multi-sensorial way my house in Italy with those of my relatives (Ahmed, 1999). Stuff and spaces of the house change their function according to the moments of the day and the people who occupy them (Miranda-Nieto, 2021a; Bonfanti, 2021). Certain objects are then used to reproduce an ecstatic atmosphere (Bille, 2017), allowing for different visceral experiences (Longhurst et al., 2009). Some of these habits I have also found in the homes of my Punjabi informants in Italy but, curiously, I have not noticed them in Punjab. For example, in the houses I visited or lived in I rarely found the radio or television turned on to listen to kirtan, or incense sticks that perfumed the air. In a way, there was no need to materialize through the senses one’s distinctive identity within the home, relative to the outer environment. So, what can we understand about migrants’ life experience by doing research within their domestic spaces? As a way to address this question I will turn to the houses I lived in while being in Punjab and which I visited while conducting interviews in Italy.

12.3.1 Food, Everyday Habits and Space Control as Ways of Home-Making and Unmaking in Punjab

My research involved the use of semi-structured and informal interviews, along with participant observation. However, I soon found myself also using participatory visual research tools, such as photos, videos, drawings and maps to record the material interactions between inhabitants, their pets, objects and domestic spaces. These audiovisual materials provided the pretext for further in-depth analysis as they documented how the “home atmosphere” was produced (or jeopardized) through the (un)making of routines (Pink & Mackley, 2016) and space control. Audiovisual data enabled a better analysis of the interplay between human and nonhuman actors like rooms, objects and affordances (Latour, 1993), as they mutually constituted one another through the lived experience of the domestic space (Vellinga, 2007). It was precisely the existence of home-rituals, as well as the profound knowledge of the domestic environment and the arrangement of objects – unknown to a guest like me – that created a sense of intimacy for the inhabitants, allowing spontaneous movements in space. As I reported in my fieldnotes:

Surinder Kaur, my sister-in-law, “admitted” me in her kitchen because she wanted to teach me some Punjabi recipes. She moves naturally in this space, grabs objects with her eyes closed because she knows where she has stored them, gives me short and precise commands on what to do with nods, hand gestures or pointing, while she is busy with the stove. Her cooking class includes almost no words but only precise and confident gestures, while I’m slow and clumsy. (Field notes, August 2019)

While dwelling in my relatives’ homes at various times of the day I observed the “backstage” of domestic representations (Goffman, 1959) and the discrepancies between the official narratives about home and the actions performed unknowingly by its inhabitants. Latent conflicts among the members of the household became evident in body language or in space “detours” (Ratnam & Drozdzewski, 2020). Family members deliberately avoided staying in certain common parts of the house, like the courtyard or the lobby, as if these were crossed by invisible boundaries. Or they purposely moved (or instead, avoided touching) certain objects from one place to another, thereby marking the portion of the domestic space that was under their control, playing a silent game of mutual mortification and communicating without words the state of each other’s relationships. In other words, the functions and meanings attributed to nonhuman entities affected the daily life of my interlocutors and their efforts to create a sense of security, comfort and control while relating with them (Handel, 2019). The house itself was sometimes turned into a “battlefield” (Bertolani & Boccagni, 2021) between contrasting practices and moralities about home, as some dwellers could use objects and modify spaces to the detriment of others, starting from unequal power positions.

There is a clear hierarchy between the women of this house. The one who washes the dishes is always Surinder’s young daughter-in-law, as Surinder hates washing dishes. Her small kitchen hosts a new dishwasher, a very rare luxury item in Indian villages and an anniversary gift from her husband a few years ago. This is placed at the centre of the small kitchen and is covered with a sheet because, in practice, it is never used. It represents Surinder’s authority precisely because it is immobile and silent. If it were used, it would affect the distribution of tasks and the exercise of female power. (Field notes, August 2019)

Doing research within homes also meant using my own body as a research tool (Crang, 2003; Longhurst et al., 2008). By being there, I was actively involved in the sensorial co-production of the home: the scents or stinks, the flavors of food and all the visual and auditory stimuli that created memories and a homely atmosphere, or possibly prevented it, among my interlocutors (Ahmed, 1999; Longhurst et al., 2009). For example, during my stay in Punjab, the food I was offered as a family guest proved to be a powerful tool to articulate power relationships and home-making practices. Within the same extended family in semi-rural contexts, the tasks related to food preparation were the basis of precise hierarchies and responsibilities among the women of the house. The older woman was in charge of cooking the daal (the traditional lentil soup) and the sabji (the main vegetarian course). Instead, the younger ones had to stay in the kitchen to prepare hot rotis (wholemeal flour wraps, grilled) and chai (spiced milk tea). In practice, they were the last to eat, once all the others had finished to do so. Moreover, the kind of food and the ways it was served displayed contrasting views of home adequacy, depending on the local context, but also on the degree of intimacy between host and guest. For example, I remember sharing appetizing meals prepared by my mother-in-law and served directly inside the pots in which they were cooked, sitting at the table in front of her small kitchen. The absence of formalities and the care of this intimate, home-cooked lunch communicated affection and familiarity towards me. At the same time, dinners at other relatives’ homes were also an opportunity for them to emphasize, in relation to ourselves as guests, their distinctive backgrounds and lifestyles. In other words, the “visceral” concerns relationships, along with feelings and memories (Longhurst et al., 2009):

My cousin’s family lives in a village in the countryside. For the occasion, dinner is served in formica plates instead of traditional steel ones, and the water is served in a glass jug. My niece compliments her hostess on her “modern” tableware by asking where she bought it. Apparently, the food was cooked with few spices specially for us, but it is still so spicy that I can hardly eat it. This causes a certain hilarity: the spicy taste and the ability to bear it symbolize strength and resistance, the typical qualities of rural life in contrast with city life. The hostess knows that we were also invited by her sister-in-law, who lives in the city. It looks like she wants to highlight the differences between the two houses (and families). In fact, the meal that had been served to us in the other house was brought from the Chinese rotisserie and symbolized a more urban and cosmopolitan (but inevitably more anonymous) lifestyle. (Field notes, August 2019)

Focusing on food to do research on homes and migration involved paying attention to emotions linked to sensory experiences (Longhurst et al., 2008; Bennett, 2004; Longhurst, 2001; Rose, 1997) and to the attendant relationships. These enabled translocal and “transtemporal” connections between different homes. It was not by chance, then, that my husband made a singular request to his aunt for her dinner invitation: he asked for saag (a spinach purée) accompanied by cornmeal wraps. Most important, he asked that the food be cooked in the earthenware pot over the wood fire of the chulla, the traditional Punjabi earthenware hearth. He knew that his aunt kept the chulla in an abandoned corner of the courtyard of her house. In his opinion, that was the “original taste” of the saag that his grandmother made for him as a child, and was not comparable to the one cooked on the gas stove. If the chulla had been destroyed, it would have been a great disappointment for him, as he would have lost a piece of those memories that recalled his past home (Fig. 12.1).

Fig. 12.1
A photo of the Chulla in an abandoned corner of the aunt's house. A clumsy staircase, a clay oven, a plastic tub, and a few other things are presented in the photo.

The chulla in an abandoned corner of the aunt’s house. (Author’s picture)

Full size image

12.3.2 Empty Migrant Rooms in Remittance Houses

“You must own a house, otherwise when you return to Punjab where would you sleep – in the hotel?” asked one of my informants during an interview in Italy. This apparently obvious statement sums up all the contradictions of migrants’ double absence (Sayad, 2002). Some of the remittance houses I visited in Punjab seemed to me to perform their function precisely because they could not be used by the owners, except for short periods of the year. They symbolized the promise of a future return that was always delayed in time. Indeed, they manifested a presence that implied a necessary absence, since in order to build and maintain them it was necessary to live abroad. Along with their “Italian” counterparts, these houses formed a tangible and well-structured transnational social space (Levin & Fincher, 2010). For some, however, remittance houses seemed to have fallen short of expectations especially if permanently uninhabited, that is, emptied of those relationships that could make them feel like “homes”. Sukhwinder Kaur, a 40-year-old entrepreneur for many years in Italy, had summarized this concept during her interview, by comparing her childhood home in the countryside with the house that she had built over time in a new residential neighborhood, arisen out of nowhere and full of similar buildings:

When we were children, we all lived in one room. Now our houses are full of rooms, but they’re empty. My house is finished but it is without furniture and it’s closed. Every now and then, when I go to Punjab, I go to see it and meet neighbors who don’t know me. None of my children wants to live there, not even my father who doesn’t want to leave his old home. When I go there, I live with him because I want to be close to him. My children have no idea of returning to India and recently asked me “mom, what are you doing with it?” I thought about selling it. (Italy, July 2021)

Research on homemaking and migration cannot ignore remittance houses. There is now an extensive literature on them (Boccagni & Bivand-Erdal, 2021). For example, they have been analyzed as tangible symbols of economic success and social redemption and competition (Taylor, 2013a). Or possibly as connections with one’s family and country of origin and as relational places, in practical and symbolic ways (Bivand-Erdal, 2012, Taylor, 2013b), as well as ambiguous artefacts with respect to local development (Taylor et al., 2007). With the term “remittance houses” I refer to all those buildings that have been rebuilt, enlarged, restored or modernized thanks to migrant remittances. While doing research in Punjab, I got the chance to visit and to live inside some of them. Considering their spaces and objects, I was intrigued by empty migrants’ rooms therein not only in themselves, but for the rapports and family expectations that they implied and suggested. From my point of view, remittance houses were a sort of family representation made of brick and concrete, embodied relationships and mutual expectations between family members.

Among the many houses I have visited, three of them had been built from scratch with remitted money. They reflected in their spaces the structure of the traditional patrilocal and agnatic Punjabi enlarged household, where different nuclear families live together under the same roof (Ballard, 1982): elderly parents, sons with their families and unmarried daughters, whereas women should move to their in-laws after marriage and become part of their husband’s family. Traditionally, especially in rural contexts, the house of their parents (as well as any real estate inheritance) does not belong to them but is passed to their brothers, as women are given a part of the family patrimony through the dowry at marriage. Grown-up daughters may come back to their parents’ house only in case of divorce or widowhood. Under these circumstances they are entitled to live in their father’s house (Hershman, 1981).

One of the houses I visited had been built in a rural village about twenty years ago by Sukhwinder Singh, a 60-year-old man who had spent many years in Saudi Arabia and Italy, had reunited there with his family, and eventually decided to come back to Punjab for retirement with his two daughters and wife. His son still lived in Italy and economically supported his parents. When I met him, he was living in his house with his wife, his unmarried daughter and his mother-in-law. His elderly and married daughter was temporarily there for a visit, while his son was supposed to come during winter holidays. I was impressed by the fact that Sukhwinder’s daughters had never had any private bedroom in that house. Instead, the son had a room that remained permanently empty. The two young women were sleeping with their grandmother, or together with their cousins in other nearby-houses. The fully furnished room of the migrant son stayed constantly empty and unused, waiting for him and his family. It was well kept and clean, the double bed was made, and the air conditioning was on as if he could arrive at any moment (cf. Boccagni & Echeverria, Chap. 13). An unlit flat-screen television stood on a wall, surrounded by a series of photos of the adult son, his wife and children. At the same time, this room was fix and immobile as a museum of nostalgia (Pistrick & Bachmeier, 2016) whose primary function was to memorialize: no object out of place, no mess, only emptiness frozen in time and the presence of the absent ones through this uninhabited space. When I came back to Italy, I met Sukhwinder Singh’s son and his family and had the chance to visit his Italian house. The young man was torn by divergent family expectations. His father expected him to return to India for good and join him in the small family business, living in the house that was waiting for him as soon as possible. His wife, on the other hand, wanted to go to Canada and reunite there with her sister. He instead preferred to stay in Italy, where he had a stable and well-paid job and where he was paying the mortgage on another dwelling. His Italian house reflected those family conflicts and his unclear migratory project: it had already been stripped of its furnishings to be destined for sale some years ago according to his elderly father’s will, but then the family project had changed and it was once again dwelled by the family, “as my father realized that I still had to save some money to be able to return to India”. For this reason, the Italian house was only partially furnished, and yet permanently inhabited. “In this moment, I don’t have enough money to buy new furnishings”, he said to me. He then added that this “suspension” was also due to the uncertainty of his migratory project. Even the house in Italy, therefore, despite being inhabited, was immobile, almost waiting. The comparison with the empty but fully furnished bedroom waiting for him in the Punjabi house was striking.

Another house I visited was inhabited by an old lady, Harpreet Kaur, and her widowed daughter. Married to a soldier, Harpreet was very soon a widow and had to raise four children by herself, facing significant financial difficulties. The house had been built about twenty years before in a little town by her elderly son, who had emigrated to the Philippines and was still living there with his family, running his own trade business. The house was a large three-storey building with numerous terraces, standing in the centre of the town in a privileged position. When it was built, it had been the first building of its kind in town, as she was keen to point out, and was still “the tallest”. With its large courtyard area, it was a symbol of economic redemption and a form of social security for the widowed and lonely mother and sister. From the outside, it was newly plastered and well cared for. However, inside many rooms were semi-empty or used as warehouses. The only well-furnished, clean and “alive” rooms consisted of the kitchen, the mother’s and the landlord’s bedrooms. Again, despite the abundance of space and empty rooms, the adult daughter did not have her bedroom but she slept with her old mother, also to take care of her. The living room was equally well cared for, but the shelves and the most precious objects were covered with newspaper sheets to protect them against dust and wear. It was almost as if it were an uninhabited house, at any time ready to be put back into use, in case of visits by the landlord. In the room of the absent son there was his old scooter, parked there and covered with a sheet, to preserve it from someone else of the extended family in the village using it. Its only function was to symbolically embody a presence and a promise of return. Like many other objects and spaces in that house, the scooter had deteriorated for not being used. However, and more important, it had been preserved, pending the return of the rightful owner, as it attested to the care of the relationship with the landlord, through the conservation of his material goods. In this case, the increased symbolic value of the house, its objects and affordances seemed to be linked to its diminished function or use value (Lopez, 2010).

Yet another house I visited was inhabited by a widowed woman in her sixties, Kulwinder Kaur, with her two daughters. The eldest, Manjit Kaur, had come back to her parents’ house with her child after divorce; the second was still unmarried. This house belonged to Kulwinder’s eldest son, who lived in Dubai, managing his own truck company together with his brother. The three-storey building was built on the foundations of the old family house. It stood in the centre of a small town and was finished one year ago after three years of building under the supervision of Manjit. With the help of an architect and interior designer, she had planned a series of innovative and “modern” solutions to optimize the inner spaces (i.e. built-in wardrobes with sliding or revolving doors, double foldaway beds), which she proudly showed me upon my visit. She had been inspired by many furniture magazines and also by the furnishings of the houses in Italy, where she had lived when she was still married. In this house every member of the family had its own space, except for the unmarried daughter that slept together with her mother. The house was completely furnished and well kept. All bedrooms seemed to be in use and were made with elegant sheets, and the bathrooms were clean and furnished. Everything was well-ordered and clean.

On the wall of the landlord’s bedroom, a photo of his wedding was hanging. However, the bride did not live in that house nor in Dubai. Due to a conflict with Manjit over the control of the family ménage, she has returned to her parents’ house with her newly born child, leaving only a few accessories in the wardrobes. Nothing really personal, just a few nail polishes that could have belonged to anyone, testified to the still-unresolved family conflict, frozen in time (Pistrick & Bachmeier, 2016), and also to the bride’s material absence.

12.3.3 Memory Objects within Punjabi Homes

In addition to remittance houses as such, during my stay in Punjab I was also struck by what I call “memory objects”, that is all that stuff whose primary function is to trigger recollections (Cieraad, 2010). There is an extensive literature on the importance of objects for people, influencing human behavior (Bourdieu, 1970) and being constitutive of social identity. Materialities may be the depositories of feelings, memories and desires (Noble, 2012). They may turn the dwelling into a home through the way they are selected and arranged, made meaningful and deployed in everyday activities (Bonfanti, 2021; Cieraad, 1999; Miller, 2001; Pink, 2004). For migrants, they may prove the search for steadiness while living abroad or being on the move (Boccagni, 2017; Pechurina, Chap. 6). For the left behinds, objects within homes – especially gifts and pictures – may symbolize a persisting rapport with their distant relatives and friends. Visiting and living in the houses in Punjab, I was able to investigate them above all from the point of view of the relationships and bonds they implied.

In every house I visited, the pictures of the absent ones were present. Some of those portrayed had died, and many others had just emigrated. These images were normally displayed in living rooms as well as in more private spaces like bedrooms, depending on their meanings and functions (Pérez Murcia, Chap. 11). If placed in the interior “public” space of the home, pictures had often been taken during rites of passage like wedding ceremonies. They were like a way to fix the family tree over time in one single shot. These objects were significant reminders of one’s identity and relationships, as they showed foreign people (as well as kin) the history of the family and its current composition, the members’ authority and their roles, despite the physical absence of some of them. If placed in more private spaces, these pictures testified to the identity, as well as to the relational and emotional points of reference for the person sleeping in that room. In this case, there were several images taken at different moments in life. In the bedroom of Harpreet Kaur, the reciprocal positioning of every single picture was important. They were displayed together with a wall clock and flat-screen television, testifying to modernity in coexistence with the past. In practice, they were a visual representation of the life course of that person, through her affections. In her own words, they represented “where I started from and where I arrived” (Fig. 12.2).

Fig. 12.2
A photo of the showcase presents pictures and objects of Harpreet’s life course.

Pictures and objects representing Harpreet’s life course. (Author’s picture)

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Other “memory objects” were old gifts that no longer had any practical function. They were nevertheless maintained in showcases or sideboards and put on display in the living room or in the house corridors: old automated toys (like robots, walkie talkies, and game-boys), headphones and outdated cell phones. Some of them had seldom been used, in order not to spoil them. They seemed to be like relics, useless in their original functions but still crucial in themselves as reminders, to witness the long-lasting emotional bond with people’s emigrated family members. These objects made sense simply by being there (Pistrick & Bachmeier, 2016), next to family photos, trophies or traditional furnishings and local souvenirs as they worked as material substitutes of the absent ones (Fig. 12.3).

Fig. 12.3
A photo of memory objects displays in domestic showcases. The photo frames, shields, and toys are presented in the showcase.

Memory objects in domestic showcases. (Author’s picture)

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Harpreet Kaur, for example, wanted to show me her wooden cane and a large digital clock that was placed on the central shelf of the living room. These objects had been gifted to her by her son and symbolized his affection and care. The cane, on which she could lean at every step, was meant to replace the arm of the distant son. The clock illuminated at night the living room and corridor with the green light of its numbers, “So I can wake up without turning the light on and waking up my daughter who sleeps next to me”. Like an animated object (Latour, 1993) and a permanent luminous link, it guided her, while inexorably marking the time passing (Fig. 12.4).

Fig. 12.4
A photo of Harpreet's luminous clock covered by sheets of newspapers.

Harpreet’s luminous clock covered by newspapers sheets as a protection against wear and the time passing. (Author’s picture)

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12.3.4 From Punjab to Italy and Back: Circulation and Multiscalarity within Homes

“I built this house with my own sacrifices,” Harinder Singh peremptorily said during the interview. “My two sons live in Italy but the things you will find here are all Punjabi – there are no objects from there!,” he continued. A small inspection in his kitchen a few minutes earlier had suggested the opposite. In plain sight there was a five-liter can of extra virgin olive oil and various Italian brand appliances, the writings in Italian on their packaging unequivocally identifying their origin. In the dining room I had seen a lamp in the shape of a Pisa tower and the chai had just been served to us on a formica tray that I knew well, because it could only be obtained by collecting points from a famous Italian biscuit brand. Despite my host’s little lies, this stuff demonstrated the porosity of the boundaries of his home (Baxter & Brickell, 2014) and the circulation between his dwelling in Punjab and those of his sons in Italy (Ahmed et al., 2003). However, his fierce opposition communicated the existence of a family conflict: on the one hand the sons who insisted that their parents should leave Punjab and move permanently to Italy with them, and on the other the father’s desire to continue living in that house. Upon entering I noticed the presence of cameras that silently filmed every corner of the courtyard, in particular the vegetable garden where the elderly spent many hours of their day. These were not anti-intrusion objects, but “eyes” with which the sons could monitor their parents at any time, since “they are worried that something might happen to us”. The cameras, which had been the result of a painful compromise, streamed a piece of the Punjabi house into the Italian one, effectively making both of them porous (Baxter & Brickell, 2014), connected and multiscalar (Miranda-Nieto, 2021b).

In many of the houses I visited in Punjab I found items that came from homes in Italy, especially kitchen utensils and appliances, as well as Italian food. For instance, in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, the coffee is prepared only with the typical moka pot, taken from my home during one of her stays in Italy. In the houses of other relatives, who also live in Italy, there is a small Italian oven for making pizzas that is used whenever they come back to Punjab, always carrying mozzarella in their suitcase. Much more often, however, I have noticed the presence of Punjabi items (dresses and fabrics, pots, furnishings and food) in the homes of migrants in Italy. Indeed, the home – especially the migrant one – is a repository of artifacts, affordances and situated practices that play an important role for identity continuity and cultural transmission (Boccagni, 2017). Within the Italian homes of my informants, domestic material cultures seemed to operate as transitional tools (Metha & Belk, 1991; Twigger-Ross & Uzzell, 1996), connecting people with other meaningful past and present places and relationships. Furniture and furnishings contextually redefined the morals of adequacy and comfort (Hadjiyanni, 2007), while religious objects played an “intermediary role” (Cieraad, 2010) as they triggered personal memories and emotions and reminded practices and situations linked to other homes or to people’s past lives. Overall, as my fieldwork shows, migrant homes in Italy are much more multiscalar than their Punjabi counterparts, since they are strongly connected with different spatial and temporal settings of home identification (Miranda-Nieto, 2021b).

Again, food is an example. Although alternated with pizza and pasta, Punjabi fresh spiced vegetarian food accompanied by homemade rotis is part of my informants’ daily routine in Italy. To prepare it, groceries are bought in local Indian shops, although some ingredients such as spices or some accessories like mortars, tawas (special pans for preparing rotis) and pressure cookers are often brought from India: even if available locally, they are considered to be tastier or more functional if they are original. Indeed, it is not just the food that is ingested, but especially the relationships, the care and affection, as well as the memories and the emotions that it implies (Cieraad, 2010). Through food, a transnational association with one’s homeland and with other distant homes is stimulated, as they get materially reproduced thousands of miles away (Taylor, 2013c; Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020).

Religious objects and spaces for prayer and meditation within homes in Italy seem to perform an analogous linking function. They connect migrants’ present lives with experiences and relationships that occurred elsewhere in the past, with other family members and in different homes (Bertolani & Boccagni, 2022). Religious practice at home becomes even more important wherever the outer environment refers to a completely different cultural identity and where gurdwaras are much less close to home than in Punjab. This practice becomes a way to make home anew, as it may change the way the house is conceived, temporally and spatially organized and lived by its inhabitants. Specific objects like breviaries, rumallas (richly decorated fabrics that wrap the religious texts) and the gurus’ images are very frequent in Sikh Punjabi homes in Italy. These pictures, along with photographs of sacred places and pilgrimage destinations such as Amritsar’s Golden Temple, visually distinguish the Sikh domestic space from the one of other South Asians. They become a “visual vocabulary” for the diaspora (Tolia-Kelly, 2004) which renders the home aesthetically suitable to Sikh values (Mazumdar & Mazumdar, 2004). On the other hand, breviaries become precious relics within the diasporic homes due to the narratives tied to them or the relationships they embody and disclose (Cieraad, 2010). If they were gifted from other family members in Punjab, they become enacted memories passed on, artifacts for family or for personal re-memory (Tolia-Kelly, 2004) serving as conductive threads of one’s entire life. At the same time, they may be critical affordances for the portability of home and its circulation. It was not by coincidence that some of my informants never left their breviaries at home but brought them from one house to the other while travelling from Italy to Punjab. Ravinder Kaur, a 30-year-old woman, told me that they would not leave the breviaries in their house when it was closed as they were a part of their family and home and because otherwise no one would take care of them. “To leave them there alone it’s not good! [They must] be in the middle of where the family is. When you leave, they come away”, she added. Like the heart of the home, these little books were installed in the Indian home for the time of the stay, only to be taken back home again to Italy upon return. In cases like this, the domestic religious practice presupposed the circulation of objects. This created, in turn, a translocal circulation between the houses.

12.4 Conclusions

I’m in my cousin’s kitchen, with my niece. The two women are chatting and preparing rotis for dinner. They quickly alternate between the table – where they roll out the dough with a rolling pin – and the hot pan– where they make it swell. While they cook, they exchange jokes, confidences, laughs and also try to teach me how to do it. In the dining room I hear our husbands chatting and joking, and from the bedroom comes the laughter of the children, who have been playing a board game for hours. It is a moment of great intimacy. I am grateful and touched, as it feels like being at home. (Field notes, August 2019)

Doing research as an honorary insider in my Indian relatives’ homes in Punjab involved many challenges from a methodological point of view. Communicative expedients were used as “relational thresholds” to distinguish my roles with my interlocutors or to manage information, sorting out possible ethical dilemmas. From this positionality, I was able to have direct experience of their domestic space, by inhabiting it. I was also able to focus my analytical attention on the relationships between habitual dwellers, which influenced their way of conceiving what the “home” was for them, along with their ways of relating to domestic objects and spaces. At the same time, my positionality implied a strong emotional involvement (Longhurst et al., 2008), as a consequence of the sensory and relational experiences in which I was engaged. Indeed, emotions were part of the research process (Longhurst, 2001), as much as reflexivity was.

Later on, back to Italy, I visited the homes of the relatives of those I had met in Punjab. This allowed me to grasp the links, but also the contradictions and conflicts that unfold transnationally between different but connected domestic spaces. My attention focused, in particular, on the objects in house interiors – many of which of a common type or linked to religious practice -, on their circulation between houses and on the porosity between domestic environments. Again, many of these objects from Punjabi homes were hybrid stuff imbued with memories and emotions (Cieraad, 2010; Tolia-Kelly, 2004). They took on different layers of meaning, adapting and transforming the space of homes in Italy (Trabert, 2020). In essence, doing research while staying inside the houses allowed me to analyze the spaces, objects and domestic practices through the relationships that tied me to my relatives, and that connected them between Italy and Punjab.