Russian Dolls, Icons, and Pushkin: Practicing Cultural Identity through Material Possessions in Immigration

Over recent decades scholars of home and material culture have been linking their research to ideas surrounding national and cultural identities, not least because of the changing character of social life and international migration, which has provided them with a new context. New types of communication and networking that migrant and local communities utilise in their everyday lives affect the ways in which the feeling of belonging to a homeland, and having a cultural identity, are created and maintained. The processes of displacement and permanent or temporary detachment from their homeland that migrants undertake shifted the focus of research from studying solely material objects to the studies of practices of homemaking that make a place “home.” The emergence of transnational migration has affected the ways in which deteritorialised migrant communities and diasporas sustain their ties and networks as well as reproduce images of the homeland. As research shows, various material artefacts and home possessions which migrants keep, use, exchange—and, in a way, “curate”—appear to play an important role in linking migrants with their “imagined” homes and in helping them to “repair their new identities” (Miller 2009:97). The principal focus of this article is to explore the relationship between the meanings of objects, homes, and cultural identity, using data from my research into Russian migrants[1] homes in the UK, conducted in 2006–2010 at the University of Manchester. As I discovered in my research, various objects that migrants keep in their homes are part of complex processes that involve multiple social relationships, meanings, and practices and by this constitute the overall meaning of home and a complex migrant identity. I will develop this argument by first presenting an overview of the existing literatures concerning the home and its understanding as a multidimensional space (Brednikova and Tkach 2010). I will then discuss a number of case studies, intentionally focusing on a range of “typical” or iconic Russian home possessions which are often found in migrants’ homes. The reason for my intentionally circumscribed focus on these particular objects is that they simultaneously circulate in transnational semiotic spaces (book covers, film posters, and other printed media) where they index “Russia” and “Russian” at the same time as they mediate complex feelings and engagements with notions of “Russian-ness” and “home” for migrants. At the same time, placed in the domestic space these objects lose the straightforward typicality and acquire fluid and multiple meanings. Using these examples I will look at these variations in the meanings of such home artefacts, in relation to migrant cultural identity and sense of belonging