Welcome to The Modern Nomad, a meditation on geographic promiscuity and the pathological need to travel. On the urge to stay and to go. On the people you meet on the road. On a search for community. On here, there, and everywhere else. And on nomads past and present.
The photo on the top is of Joseph and Elizabeth Hodder on their cod flakes in Ireland’s Eye, Newfoundland, circa 1950. The photo on the bottom is Llewellyn Toopes’ abandoned twine shop and house in 1989, more than twenty years after most people on Ireland’s Eye were relocated under the Newfoundland government’s resettlement program.
Source: Maritime History Museum’s “Resettlement Photos” collection.
In early June I’ll head to Newfoundland to research communities that were resettled between the 1950s and 1960s. Curious about outsider perspectives on “The Rock,” a nickname that gives you a sense of the landscape, I’ve been wading through articles from the mid to late 19th century. The description below made me smile, though I can’t say I agree.
This is from an 1878 issue of Chambers’s Journal.
‘The Soldier’s Dream,’ an 1860s Currier & Ives lithograph of a Union solder during the American Civil War.
Homesickness. The French called it maladie du pays, the Germans heimweh. But it was the Swiss who first conceived of homesickness as a mental illness. They called it nostalgia.
A Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer invented the word in 1688, taking it from nóstos, meaning ‘homecoming’ in Greek and álgos, which was Homer’s word for ‘pain’ or ‘ache’. Hofer believed nostalgia was caused by the body’s ‘living spirits’. Soon doctors encountered restless migrants and soldiers far from home with curious symptoms: loss of appetite, unconsolable crying, heart palpitations. They were, it was thought, dying to go home. Treatments included opium, weekends in the Swiss Alps, and the ever-popular use of leeches. (Some people with tuberculosis were misdiagnosed with nostalgia and returned home to, in fact, die.)
Like the later phenomenon of mad travel, where sufferers wandered far from home in a state of mania, homesickness was soon pathologised. Nostalgia for one’s home and family was considered pious. At first it was a uniquely Swiss affliction, but soon it spread to the United States and beyond. (The English, those rugged colonizers, were thought to be immune.)
Every generation gets the neuroses it deserves. Nostalgia has gone in and out of fashion over the years, Susan Matt writes in Homesickness: An American History. in the early 1970s, doctors who treated miners in California described their migrant patients as, ‘discontented, restless, enterprising, and ambitious.’ The miner combined ‘the elements of character prone to mental aberration.’ Missing one’s family was certainly the cause, but they also attributed it to a more abstract ‘want of fixedness.’ Doctors said patients had ‘the idea that this [California] is but a temporary home, creating the sensation of being adrift in the world.’ How familiar.
Curiously, California had higher than average levels of insanity, partly blamed on the prevalence of homesickness—which now seems like a reasonable response to frontier life in America.
Nostalgia might have been first considered a virtue, but it was scorned in the Enlightenment. ‘Rather than seeing individuals as defined by their communities and divine will,’ says Matt, ‘followers of the Enlightenment came to see them as having the potential to be self-directed and autonomous, pursuing happiness, possessing rights and abilities that went beyond those conferred by their families, their churches, or their towns. They would be citizens of the world.’ This dialectic, between being adrift and individuality, is a holdover of the times. The modern nomad is adrift by choice, individual by nature, restless by spirit, yet seeking community.
They have a quarrel between nostalgia and individuality. Ask the expat who never intends to go home if he is nostalgic and he will say no. If he were, how could he square his fondness for the place he is from with the place he chooses to temporarily live? And most moves are temporary—Matt says that about 20 to 40 percent of foreigners will eventually return home. (That’s not to mention the problem of defining ‘home’. An American survey in 2008 found that people disagreed widely on whether home was where they were from, where they lived now, or where their families lived. Foreigners most often thought that home was where they currently were, not their country of birth.)
There is one place where nostalgia and individuality, mobility and community can co-exist: the internet. Skype connects us in real-time with loved ones far away, a proxy for time spent with them. Barry Wellman, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, talks about ‘networked individualism’ The internet let us be simultaneously networked and individual: We have more connections but weaker ties to those connections. We are moving, Wellman says, from insular communities with clear boundaries to flatter, ‘more recursive’ networks. ‘Unlike a village, where everyone knows (almost) everything about everyone else,’ he writes in the book Networked, ‘modern people live segmented lives in which they cycle among different social networks. They handle things by a combination of compartmentalizing their relationships and overlapping their networks.’
What will this do to nostalgia? The expats I meet in London are hardly nostalgic for anything but their dwindling savings. A few people I meet go home a couple times a year, but many would just as well forget it. And technology, that great enabler, has its limitations. ‘The idea that we can and should feel at home anyplace on the globe is based on a worldview that celebrates the solitary, mobile individual and envisions men and women as easily separated from family, from home and from the past,’ Matt wrote in an editorial for the New York Times. ‘But this vision doesn’t square with our emotions, for our ties to home, although often underestimated, are strong and enduring.’
+ Read Matt’s New York Times editorial ‘The New Globalist is Homesick.’
+ Check out her (heavily American) list of the best books on homesickness.
+ Barry Wellman and Lee Rainie’s 2012 book Networked: The New Social Operating System is a smart, big picture look at the misconceptions of tech-enabled social networks. It’s a good counterpoint to Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together and a good primer on social networks (hint: they didn’t start with the internet).
+ Anthony Doerr writes about moving across America 16 times (‘once with a goldfish named Fran’) in Granta’s nature issue. Along with a scene about encountering a cloud of migrating butterflies, the essay looks at how ‘the brain contains, always, two opposing desires: the urge to stay and the urge to run.’ If you can’t dig up an old issue of Granta, watch Doerr read it at PopTech.
On immigration, the evidence is overwhelming; the best way forward is clear.
The forlorn pundit doesn’t even have to make the humanitarian case that immigration reform would be a great victory for human dignity. The cold economic case by itself is so strong.
Increased immigration would boost the U.S. economy. Immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start new businesses than native-born Americans, according to a research summary by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of The Hamilton Project. They are more likely to earn patents. A quarter of new high-tech companies with more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.
A study by Madeline Zavodny, an economics professor at Agnes Scott College, found that every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for U.S. natives.
[Illustration by Glen Cummings and photo by Anderson Ross, via New York magazine.]
“It’s been hypothesized that ADHD might even be an advantage in certain change-rich environments. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that a brain receptor associated with ADHD is unusually common among certain nomads in Kenya, and that members who have the receptor are the best nourished in the group. It’s possible that we’re all evolving toward a new techno-cognitive nomadism, a rapidly shifting environment in which restlessness will be an advantage again. The deep focusers might even be hampered by having too much attention: Attention Surfeit Hypoactivity.” – Sam Anderson praises distraction in this 2009 piece for New York magazine.
As part of The Guardian’s series on global development and migration, its environment editor John Vidal recorded a podcast with three specialists who debated migrant labour, brain drain, and whether restrictions on migration should change.
Here Vidal talks about how migration is creating ghost towns with Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development:
Vidal: I was in Kerala recently and in Bangladesh, and I’ve seen whole villages there that are basically empty, people are working in the Gulf or wherever. Those remittances are helping enormously and you can say that’s for the benefit of the whole community but also for the individual and their families.
Clemens: Absolutely. A 10th of the labour force of Kerala is in the United Arab Emirates right now, that’s astonishing and reflects the incredible opportunities which they have there but not at home. That is absolutely not a sufficient development strategy, it’s not a long-term development strategy, as Sylvie rightly points out. But the alternative to migration – if we see migration as the problem – is less migration. And there’s no evidence at all that trapping some of those people against their will, removing their option to migrate to the Gulf, would develop Kerala.
More Reading
+ Listen to the Guardian’s full podcast.
+ Check out other stories in itsglobal development series.
First World problems:
‘Tom picked me up at the tiny airport in a taxi and brought me up to date. “I was living in Saigon,” he said, “and after a year I had to leave because my life was spinning out of control. Then I was living in Rome, and I had to leave after six months because my life was spinning out of control. Then I moved to Las Vegas, and I had to leave there, too, very quickly, because my life was definitely once again spinning out of control.”
“You were having trouble keeping yourself together in Rome, so you moved to Vegas?”’
I live about 4,100 miles from my mother. She’s in snowy Canada, I’m in (temporarily) snowy England. We talk regularly, email daily, and are “friends” on Facebook. I “see” her all the time. It’s not the same as in person, but still.
I wouldn’t notice if Twitter’s servers self-combusted, and I could live without Facebook, though it might be harder to find apartments or make contacts in [insert travel destination here], or to live vicariously through my acquaintances. (But then I might spend less time “liking” things and more time finding things I like.) If Skype irrevocably crashed, however, I would lose face-to-face contact (blurry and sometimes warped but still) with my family and closest friends, not to mention am affordable way to work across the Atlantic Ocean. More about that absurdity another time.
The Atlantic Monthly posted shots from photographer John Clang’s series Being Together. Clang, who immigrated from Singapore to New York more than a decade ago, superimposed photographs of people in their houses with photos of the relatives they Skype with projected on the walls. It brings them into view, if not in person. The story went online last September, but somehow it passed me in the slipstream of the internet.
I’m gearing up to write about communities the operate online and what lurks in the shadows of anonymity. I’ll also look at the perils of the modern, digital nomad. For a social science primer I’ll check out Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, a book that is at the top of my reading queue. Then I’ll probably Skype with someone far away. Then I’ll turn off my computer and go outside, dreary as a January day in London is.
More Reading
+ Go to The Atlantic for more images and quotes from Clang. And visit his website.
+ If you just so happen to be in Singapore, see Clang’s exhibit at the National Museum and take one of his masterclasses. The masterclasses end February 2 and the exhibit runs from January 23 to May 26, 2013.
+ Listen to an interview with Sherry Turkle on NPR’s Fresh Air.
American photographer Erika Larsen spent four years among the Sámi, an indigenous tribe who live in Scandinavia. Her photos show a people whose lives straddle tradition and modern life in a landscape that is beautiful, raw, and beyond stunning.
When they’re travelling, the Sámi stay in lávuts (shown above), their temporary homes on the tundra.
To see more of Larsen’s work, visit National Geographic’s online photo gallery.
