I'm never in one place I roam from town to town....
'Cause I'm a wanderer yeah a wanderer
I roam around around around...
It seems that I have joined a tribe. Or at least that’s how the definitions seem to portray the migration that I and many others like me have done recently. Apparently the mere mention of a group of people without a fix place of residence conjures up visions of tribes, bands of merry men (or women), wandering, homeless and without a stake in the world. All definitions that I have found for the word Nomad have had the term tribe in them, so by my mere migration from one part of the country 1800 miles, uprooted from the structure and networks that were created by time and presence, I have become a nomad, and therefore belong to a tribe.
But by the newest interpretations of the term, it is a tribe without a structure, it is a group without hierarchy, floating above and between the fixed and rooted. But this transitory nature is bound to American culture as much as any other unifying trait. We as Americans are migrants.
Historically, this country was based upon movement. Barring native tribes (and many of them were migratory as well) everyone who is on this hemisphere of the Americas has migrant in his blood. My parents moved from Evansville, Indiana to Indianapolis in the 1960’s, but stories of movement generally go back much, much farther. My fraternal grandparents families migrated to Evansville from Germany and met in the interwar period of the 1930’s. They came from the same town in Germany at different times (my grandmother was actually born in Jasper, Indiana) and moved into houses next to each other. My maternal grandparents come from a long line of Kentuckians, actually (my grandfather crossed the Ohio River to Indiana “as soon as he heard about it”, as the story goes), but their history goes back to the founding of Baltimore city, crossing the Atlantic with Lord Baltimore himself.
And if we all look at our own family histories, we all have these sorts of stories. It was a concept made popular by Manifest Destiny, but it’s lineage goes back to whatever motivated people to leave their homeland to find another set of opportunities here. French fur trappers. Migrants. Religious freedom seekers. Migrants. Indentured servants. Migrants. African slaves. Forced Migrants. Before the term Manifest Destiny was coined to describe the rapid movement across the continent by individuals seeking their stake in the world, this country and continent was built by people moving from their homeland to here for a myriad of reasons. And since the 1850’s the migrants have expanded to include Chinese and Japanese, Spanish and Mexican and Latino, and eventually Eastern European countries in the early 1900’s. By now the migration comes from all across the world, but all are doing the same thing, all are subscribing to the same tribe. All are becoming nomads. American nomads.
This movement, this transitory attitude that drives the individual to migration, has begun to be analyzed and questioned, pondered and written about. Beginning with the tradition that had started with Rimbaud in Paris and France of wandering and writing about the experience of being placeless, American writers have cornered the market on the practice of writing about movement. Gospel songs about the Underground Railroad sparked folk songs written by Woody Guthrie about the Populist movement. Some of the most important books of our country have been about migration and movement, written by authors like Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Roughing It, Following the Equator), John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charlie), and Jack Kerouac (On the Road) describe how, at different times in our country’s history, migration for the sake of sanity or security has been necessary.
Certainly after World War II, with the boom in manufacturing and a decentralization of the work force across the breadth of our geography, migration for work became more mandatory, and now movement for the purpose of employment is almost necessary. It is true that this migration is much more severe and more often than previous generations, but I believe that this nation, by the definition of it’s migration, has rabbit in the blood, and historically has had a hard time with sitting still, a hard time staying in the same place, and a hard time therefore with playing nice with its neighbors. “Good fences make good neighbors” as an ethos only leads to more fences and less gates between them.
I have officially became a part of this migratory tribe, then, this America that uproots itself for the promise of a different history. But it is an invisible tribe, one without real rules of engagement or even membership privileges. Membership can even be fluid, not everyone expects to move for work in the future or desires to transplant themselves into another town, state, or region only to move again a year or two later. But the knowledge that this can happen alters our attitudes about engagement and commitment. Who wants to become completely invested into a neighborhood or a town when they may be forced to move in the not too distant future?
Writer Miwon Kwon writes about this phenomenon in her book One Place After Another: “ The more we travel for work, the more we are called upon to provide institutions in other parts of the country and the world with our presence and services, the more we give in to the logic of nomadism, one could say, the more we are made to feel wanted, needed, validated, and relevant. Our very sense of self-worth seems predicated more and more on our suffering through the inconveniences and psychic destabilizations of ungrounded transience, of not being at home (or not having a home), of always traveling through elsewheres.... We are out of place all too often. Or, perhaps more accurately, the distinction between home and elsewhere, between "right" and "wrong" places, seems less and less relevant in the constitution of the self.” I would argue, though, that we as an American culture are built upon this destabilizations and transience, they have just been accelerated in the past few generations to become more necessary.
Nomadism, as Kwon names it, has effects on our psyche, and in how we perceive place and our connection to it. Kwon writes “Place, according to [Lucy] Lippard, is "a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is know and familiar... "the external world mediated through human subjective experience'". Lippard contends that since our sense of identity is fundamentally tied to our relationship to places and the histories they embody, the uprooting of our lives from specific local cultures and places--through voluntary migrations or forced displacements--has contributed to the waning of our abilities to locate ourselves. Consequently, a sense of place remains remote to most of us.” This leads to a difficulty in understanding how we fit into the ever transient world which happens more frequently than generations before, even within a historical context of a generationally migratory culture.
Kwon describes Lippard again, “More specifically, she believes that the rapacious growth and transformation of capitalism have subsumed the distinctions of local difference and cultures, and that the particularity of places is continually being homogenized, genericized, and commodified to better accommodate the expansion of capitalism via abstraction of space (or creation of "nonplaces", as some sociologists prefer). These processes, in turn, exasperate the senses of placelessness in contemporary life.” So, we’re screwed... especially if you’ve moved at some point in your life. It seems a bit of a pessimistic viewpoint that Lippard has chosen to advocate, and the optimist in me seems to think that there is a way for the individual to seek out a history for themselves in these nonplaces, even if it is strikingly similar to what was there before.
Kwon also points out that “Often we are comforted by the thought that a place is ours, that we belong to it, even come from it, and therefore are tied to it in some fundamental way. Such places ("right" places?) are thought to reaffirm our sense of self, reflecting back to us an unthreatening picture of a grounded identity. This kind of continuous relationship between a place and a person is what many critics declare to be lost, and needed, in contemporary society. In contrast the "wrong" place is generally thought of as a place where one feels one does not belong--unfamiliar, disorienting, destabilizing, even threatening. This kind of stressful relationship to a place is, in turn, thought to be detrimental to a subject's capacity to constitute a coherent sense of self and the world.” So what is needed is to find the “right” places, correct? To find the places that connect to us and the world. The places that make the most sense. But how do we know what those places are? This is the fundamental American question, the curiosity to ask “how do I know that over there will not be better than what I have here”?
I think this motif is the basis of Kwon’s statement “An analogous double mediation in site-specific art practice might mean finding a terrain between mobilization and specificity--to be out of place with punctuality and precision. Homi Bhabha has said,"The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers."” What Bhabha is admitting to is a curiosity prevalent in the migration, the awesomeness of answering the question of “what is over there”. But doesn’t this become just as much a part of the individual’s sense of place, this curiosity about the other, as a connectedness through history?
This curiosity, this need to feed questions about how others fit into the puzzle as a way of describing how the individual fits into the same riddle, I believe is completely valid and useful, maybe more useful than social scientists give credence to. And it is this investigation that is paramount to many relational and community based artists’ process.
We live in a transitory and fluid world, built on migration and fostered by technology’s ability to take us to every place imaginable as often as possible, but at some point, we are all going to need a rock, a foundation. We are building our histories as we breathe, day by day and city by city the present is becoming our story, the migratory story of how we came to be, here, and now. The trick is to leave some sort of footprint on the earth as we float from place to place, to make some sort of mark and leave some sort of statement that says that this place was important in the making of me. At least for a time. This, I am beginning to understand, is at the core of the art that I hope to create, the Art of the Nomad Tribe.
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