on identity, trajectory, sedentarism and nomadism

Individual identity, until now mainly linked to the place where one is born, to the native land, is progressively changing to the idea of trajectory. One starts being one’s trajectory.

 

 

“The nature of being sedentary and nomadic has changed. […] Sedentary people are at home wherever they go. With their cell phones or laptops, [they are] as comfortable in an elevator or on a plane as in a high-speed train. This is the sedentary person. The nomad, on the other hand, is someone who is never at home, anywhere. ”

Paul Virilio

http://fondation.cartier.com/main.php?lang=4&small=0

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Anonymous Quote

Posting: Visa territory

Below is an exerpt that I took from an article about being in Visa territory. It is a personal story. The website is also very nice for all kinds of articles about our postmodern times:

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-02-22-goncharova-en.html

“I recall the events and procedures that accompanied all those stamps I was
accumulating in my passport, the time wasted on filling out forms, queuing in
consulates, collecting the necessary references; weeks and sometimes
months of wearisome uncertainty. Then there was the subliminal feeling of
guilt about my vagabond spirit, as if my intention to cross the borders of my
homeland was suspicious in itself. I get this vague guilt feeling every time I
appear before a functionary of a consulate or immigration office. I back up my
answers to their questions with countless documents. Every such meeting is
pregnant with the suggestion that you are a violator – if not of borders, then of
some intuitive notion of normal human life.
In the Middle Ages, a wanderer or person unattached to one place was as
normal. Jacques Le Goff has described such chaotic migration along the
roads of Europe:
On the roads, knights and peasants would meet clerics who were either on a
journey prescribed by the rules, or who had severed their connections with
their monasteries […] They would meet students travelling to renowned
schools and universities (was it not said in a twelfth century poem that exile,
the terra aliena, is the lot of the scholar?), as well as pilgrims and all kinds of
vagabonds. The Middle Ages, the epoch of travels on foot and horseback,
came to an end after the fourteenth century, when travellers became tramps,
or accursed people.
People began to value their lives according to standards of the place in which
they lived. Exceptions to this rule, such as merchants or missionaries, only
emphasised the norm of a settled life. Today, the norm remains in effect. The
right of EU citizens to unhindered, visa-free travel throughout Europe is
another kind of exception. Not only does it fail to change the norm, but it
reinforces it, adding new importance to the connection between a person and
his or her abode. That place has now become an additional indicator of one’s
economic and political status. The country that issues your passport, its
image, and its international geopolitical status now determines the extent of
your freedom, your right to travel, and the number of visas in your passport.
Europeans’ exemption from the need for visas has only strengthened the rigid
norm of individual existence – that of possessing one’s own place on earth.
“You belong wherever you were born”

Tags: travel

Posting: welcome dwellers of the home&homeless society!

welcome dwellers of the homeless society!

well…just to take it off as the beginning of our exploration of home & homelessness, I would like to share these different meanings of homelessness with you all…

“Homelessness is an inadequate experience of connectedness with family and or community.” -Social Worker and Director of Rebeccas Community, Mr. Dominic Mapstone-

“A person is homeless if, and only if, he or she has inadequate access to safe and secure housing” -Australia

“One who does not have his/her own dwelling or is not living in someone else’s home permanently and must resort to living in temporary placements” -Sweden

Homelessness ~ Connectedness

Some definitions of homelessness which take into account the need for connectedness:

Homelessness carries implications of belonging nowhere rather than simply having nowhere to sleep.

Homelessness is a condition of detachment from society characterised by the absence or attenuation of the affiliative bonds that link settled persons to a network of interconnected social structures (Caplow, Bahr and Sternberg, 1968: 494).

Homelessness – an inadequate experience of connectedness with family and or community (Dominic Mapstone, Director – Rebeccas Community).

Houselessness – an inadequate experience of shelter, ranging from a complete lack of shelter at one end of the continuum to severely inadequate housing conditions at the other.