The Modern Nomad

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

+ 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.

Boulderpavement, a literary magazine published by The Banff Centre, in Canada, has just published an excerpt from the modern nomad book that looks at Occupy London and the life of a temporary community.

Read it here: http://bit.ly/PEcYQY

The London Underground was quick to the mark when Apple recently brought out its new operating system for iPhones, iOS6. Seen on a noticeboard at Highbury & Islington Station: “For the benefit of passengers using Apple iOS 6, local area maps are available from the booking office.” Dropping Google Maps from iOS6 left many iPhone users lost and confused. In a city like London, where people are happy to give you directions if only they knew where they were, Google Maps was indispensible.

Which makes you wonder: How does Google build its maps? Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, asks this very question in a recent story. Madrigal, who met with numerous Google mappers, including a former engineer for NASA, writes that, “How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars.”

Part of that data is collected from Google’s Street View cars. Setting aside the creepy issue of seeing people and your own home online, without your permission, Google Maps is an example of the blurring and blending real worlds and digital worlds. “Humans are coding every bit of the logic of the road onto a representation of the world,” Madrigal writes, “so that computers can simply duplicate (infinitely, instantly) the judgments that a person already made.”

Think about this as more than just humans using data and creating real-world maps. This is about how our mental images of the physical world will change as we create more sophisticated programs to represent it. Manik Gupta, a product manager, told Madrigal, “If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online. Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part.”

Madrigal continues: “As we slip and slide into a world where our augmented reality is increasingly visible to us off and online, Google’s geographic data may become its most valuable asset. Not solely because of this data alone, but because location data makes everything else Google does and knows more valuable.”

But Google Maps is about more than just accurate information or, with the case of Street View, privacy issues, or even about how data is king. It’s about how our perception of real and virtual have already changed so much. The same way our children will not remember the era of cassette tapes and the world pre-smartphone, they will likely have different mental reconstructions of the world around them.

Unless they’re using iOS6. Then they might just get lost.

Reading List
+ Shout-out to long-form journalism. I first read this on Longreads.

+ Worried about being caught walking through your living naked when one of Google’s Street View vehicles rolls by? Read The Guardian’s story about Google’s latest privacy controversy.

thepetitesophisticate:

More fun with travel: artist Adolf Konrad’s 1963 “packing list!” Via http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=53

I arrived home to find a note from a friend about the Moken nomads, a tribe of seafarers from Burma and Thailand. These are not modern nomads—their migrant roots go back up to 4,000 years, according to a story in The Guardian. As borders shut for many people, they open up for others, such as those of us with the privilege of money and dual citizenship and multiple passports (in Jay-Z’s words, “Got five passports / I ain’t never going to jail.”) If the modern nomad is the individual with the luxury to work across borders, to move three, four, five times in as many years, to form communities across continents, the traditional nomad is seeing their world get smaller. The Moken, for instance, are being forced ashore by falling fish stocks (thanks to overfishing by international companies and the 2004 tsunami).

The challenges they face illustrate the complexity of nomadism. In 2012, you must be from somewhere, you must claim (and prove) citizenship.

A recent push by various charities and the Thai government to issue Thai identity cards has granted some access to state-run schools and health care, but claiming full-blown citizenship – by proving that they, or a parent, were born in Thailand – is a complex issue for a nomadic people who hardly use numbers and mark the date according to the tide, not the Gregorian calendar.

The result is a dislocation that eerily matches that of modern nomads, but with different results. Social problems, such as substance abuse, are spreading; luxury resorts squeeze Moken into housing situations that sound very much like the reserve structure of Canada’s First Nations (with similar problems); and cultural amnesia seems inevitable. What happens when a nomadic group can no longer migrate? “Moken are supposed to travel, to be nomadic, to travel freely. So if we cannot travel freely, we are dead, culturally at least,” a community leader named Hong told The Guardian. “Moken children use mobile phones, study English and choose to be educated. We’ve abandoned our old traditions so much we risk losing them entirely.”

+ See “Living With the Moken,” The Guardian’s photo gallery with Taraschi’s pictures of Moken nomads.

+ As some nomads are being forced out of the sea, others are flocking there. Is “seasteading”–ocean-based cities–the final frontier in urban design? See this piece in The Economist for more.

Are we born nomads? Are we meant to be restless? How does one tackle a chapter on that ocean called “community”? These are the sorts of questions I wrestle as I research for my book about modern nomads, drifters and next-gen communities.

What does this mean? Well, I’m wading, like a child who is only learning to swim, into a deep philosophical pool of citizenship, community and home–those esoteric things of which there are many definitions and no fixed answers. And with uncertainty comes restlessness.

But I’ve leave aside these intellectual insecurities for a moment to share a thought by Benjamin Phelan about another restless soul, the late author Bruce Chatwin. In the following quote, Phelan is thinking about the transition from nomadism to agriculture and about Chatwin’s theory that humankind was built to be nomadic. (I’m quite broadly synthesizing this, so if you like Chatwin, follow the link above to read Phelan’s book review in the New York Observer.)

It’s a long quote, tangentially linked to the meaning of home and notions of community, so bear with me:

Since Chatwin died, it has been shown by molecular genomics that humanity teetered on the verge of extinction in the distant, prehistoric past, and that our genomes are still reeling from the violent transition from nomadism to agriculture. The humans who survived weren’t the strongest or the smartest, necessarily, but the most restless—the ones who upped sticks and left the trouble behind. We are their descendants. We carry that DNA that saved them.

This hyperbolic assertion of our innate nomadism is one I only partly share. But I find something comforting in it, as if it affirms the inevitability of restlessness.

Tangential, eh? Geeky, certainly.

Well, you were warned.

Yet, as many scholars observe, it is this boundedness of citizenship to the nation-state that has become problematic in the age of migration and globalisation. Many scholars have noted that with the increasing movements of people across boundaries there have been transnational, cosmopolitan, global forms of citizenship where dual and multiple nationalities are being negotiated. Some have attempted to develop concepts of cosmopolitan or global citizenship. Others have called for open borders. Yet, all these pre-suppose, I submit, a moving subject rather than an acting subject.

These are some of the ideas I’ll explore in my otherwise un-academic exploration of community and migration, of what makes a place a home and what fosters community. I suspect I will come across stories about ambiguity and confusion, migrants who can’t quite say where is home or what citizenship they feel in their hearts–never mind the one on their passports.

I’ve thought about citizenship and belonging for a long time. My mother was born in Northern Ireland and emigrated for Canada in the mid 1960s. Time wore away one accent and replaced it with another. Decades passed before she took Canadian citizenship. So is she Canadian or British? Is she both? For some people, it becomes a quest, a question, a riddle: Where is home? This is central to the question of citizenship.

Another question: Is it time to come up with new notions of citizenship and new definitions of community?

Photo by Kristian Schuller, via The Nomad Chronicles. First published in Beware magazine.

As the London 2012 Olympics arrive in my ‘hood of Hackney, I’m reminded of something the British-born author Jonathan Raban once wrote in Granta: The English are “born into a casual phlegmatic acceptance of astounding alterations to the landscape.” It was what he described as second nature, kind of like nature 2.0, where the old growth forests are long gone and what we think of as nature is deeded, divided and landscaped. We are not talking about, say, northern British Columbia or the wilds of Alaska, where a tree could fall in the forest and no one would hear.

There’s some nostalgia for “wilderness” right now, and I’m not talking about the foxes who follow me down the streets of London as I walk my dog. Consider Wilderness Festival, one of many (sure to be rain-soaked) festival weekends in the UK. Sharon Jones is playing. Lianne la Havas is playing.
The visual branding for the festival hints at the kind of boutiquing of wilderness that seems trendy now. Case in point: the festival comes with its own beach-side “spa” with everything from “hand-built luxurious oak hot tubs to soak and relax in to wooden saunas and a champagne bar…” I suspect that Raban would dispute the festival’s claim that it is in the “wilds of England.” There is no such thing, I can hear him argue.

But why put words in his mouth? Here’s his definition of wilderness in an interview with Granta:

“A wilderness that’s truly wild is beyond human rule, which is something I’ve always loved about the idea of the wilderness of the sea, at least before we fucked it up and made it wild no more, just one more critically endangered habitat.”

When it comes to the Wilderness Festival, I’m only partly cynical about such branding . If I wasn’t oppressed by what seems like relentless, endless rain and put off by the hefty ticket price, I’d probably go. (See, a true outdoors person would not be deterred by weather.)

And just to link it back to The Modern Nomad and notions of community, I wonder if true wilderness is a rejection of community. The Wilderness Festival is less a way to approximate the outdoors and more of an excuse to throw a party. And who can complain about that?

+ I am getting somewhat off topic, because this is a blog first about communities shaped by mobility, but I’ve just started reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, so all definitions of wilderness are coming up. I like Macfarlane’s estimation:

“…this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.”

I pack:

Passports (Canadian and European)

Photocopy of my citizenship papers (Britain)

Photocopy of my birth certificate (Canada)

One or two or three books (paperback, not eReader)

Laptop, fully charged

iPod shuffle filled with podcasts

Running shoes

Notebook & pens (ballpoint, as I’ve had countless of my favourite liquid pens explode on planes)

Knitting

Clothes—one week’s worth

Camera and digital recorder

Toothbrush, toothpaste, hair brush

Ear plugs

Sometimes I pack my camera but not the charger, or I pack the wrong charger and the battery expires on the first day of my trip. Or I change the settings without realizing it and, as happened in Scandinavia, come home with only a photo of a small bird trapped on a cruise ship and a pretty yellow flower.

Sometimes I forget my pajamas. Sometimes I forget my trousers. I almost always bring one pair of shoes too many.

Sometimes the airport security guards question the legality of knitting needles on planes. (Once, on a flight from Denmark to Canada a starched flight attendant stopped by my seat when we were halfway across the ocean and said, incredulous,“You can’t have those on here!” But I already did, I told her, and kept on knitting.)

I must take off my shoes at La Guardia, in New York, and Dulles, in Washington, but am allowed to keep them on in Toronto and London. In Vancouver, the American customs agent smiles and he does not seem to be trying to trick me with friendliness into admitting some immigration error. (Tip: Never joke with customs agents.) In Toronto, an agent interrogates me when I arrive, sleepless, on a red-eye from Paris. “You mean you went alone? Why would you travel alone?” It is a judgment presented as a question. She waves me through.

Every airport looks the same but different, like a brightly lit, too-clean shopping mall. The terminal in Zurich is bright and spacious and the one in Copenhagen is small and intimate. I spend five hours in an almost-deserted section of O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, and do my daily stretches. A man in a uniform sleeps on the other side of the room. Up the hallway, a queue forms in front of a flight to Guadelajara. A stream of Mexicans going home for a visit or for good. In Edmonton, I negotiate for two hours with the airline sales attendant about the matter of a refund for a cancelled flight and then walk to a competing airline to buy a ticket. Deprived of sleep, fresh off a flight from London, I begin to cry and she says, calmly, “Don’t worry. We’re going to sort this out.” I half expect her to offer me cookies and a glass of warm milk.

I have already mapped out my directions from the airport to the city I am visiting. The city is still fresh and new in those first few hours. When I arrive in a new place, I walk the streets, poke in shops, right myself. I am trying to place myself within its geography. I want to map the space, wrap my head around the city. For a long time I would immediately begin to imagine where I would live, what my flat or house would be like. I tried to picture myself living there. I don’t do that so much anymore.

But soon, after a few days, some strange emptiness gnaws at me. Even after all these years I rarely sit in a bar alone, even if I bring a book. I circle cafés in Paris unable to take a table. It takes many trips and moves to overcome what is not quite shyness but some inarticulate discomfort. The only reason I ended up chatting with a stranger from France and a few locals at a “ruin pub,” or kert in Budapest is because I was on assignment for a travel magazine and my editor would have been angry if I simply stood, like a wallflower. I needed quotes.

That emptiness is a temporary dislocation. I could probe it further, but blogs are not the place for deep psychoanalysis. And anyway, part of the beauty of a new place is that you are invisible. This is also the peril.

I rarely leave anything behind when I leave a place. Except perhaps a person I have grown fond of, or a memory. Sometimes I shed books. In a guesthouse in Prince Edward Island, on the east coast of Canada, I left a Michael Ondaatje novel, its spine uncracked, hoping that the next person along would find more in it than I did. On that trip I scraped the red Prince Edward Island sand off my shoes. But it didn’t quite come off and was the only souvenir I took home.

Further Reading

+ “Lost and Found” is a short personal essay by philosopher Mark Kingwell that I commissioned when I worked at enRoute magazine. Getting lost in a city, he writes, might be the best way to discover who you are. “Becoming strange to ourselves is the gateway to seeing how dependent on strangers we are for our own identities.”

+ “Why We Travel,” a classic think-piece by Pico Iyer, who writes “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.”

+ Which brings up Rebecca Solnit’s non-fiction book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, a plotless, meditative book on all kinds of ways of being lost: abandon, transformation, and self realization. (From The Guardian’s review: “reading her prose is like spending time in the company of an earnest, determined hiker who disdains maps but nevertheless knows some unexpected and fascinating fact about every house, hill or tree that you pass.”)

+ Do you, like my mother, proofread your packing list? Do you illustrate it, like Adolf Konrad, above? Do you even make one? See more lists from the 2010 exhibit on lists from the Smithsonian’s archives here on the Archive of American Art’s website.