Isla Turner-Holmes

MA Student in Cultural Anthropology

Supervisors: Amir Sayadabdi and Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich

Place, Memory and Migration: Stories Told by Our Grandmothers

In this thesis, I aim to critically examine the relationship between memory, place, and migration through stories told by multiple sets of grandmothers and grandchildren. Using narrative analysis and storytelling, I think across various experiences of migration to construct an understanding of memory and place through my participants’ storied ways and experiences. Drawing on my previous research project and building on recent anthropological research on migration and memory, I explore the ways in which mobility creates memory: how one could live in multiple places at once, in recollection and in the now – a collage of experience fabricated through movement across a conglomeration of places. In doing so, I will engage with innovative methods such as storytelling as a research method. After all, anthropology is ‘theoretical storytelling’ (McGranahan 2020, 73); it is ‘an attempt to understand a story-telling animal by being a story-telling animal’ (Reck 1983, 8). Thus, as an anthropologist-in-training, I am keen to conduct research within a context that allows me to experiment with telling stories, listening to stories, and most importantly thinking in, and with, stories. I will also conduct sensory interviews, in particular grandchild-grandmother walking-interviews, a method that I have been experimenting with since starting my honour’s research project. Building on Sarah Pink’s and Tim Ingold’s theoretical and methodological frameworks, I will show how walking (in particular ‘walking with’) can bridge the past and the present to crystallise, reinforce and reconnect with past relations or events, specially in migratory contexts. I would further argue that moving through a landscape (cityscape, seascape of forest) alongside others can allow one to understand another's sense of place and simultaneously cause one to consider the social infrastructure which surrounds and informs their way of being across different time(s) and places(s).