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Home-making practices and social protection across borders: an example of Turkish migrants living in Germany

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Abstract

This article explores how Turkish migrants in Germany turn their physical houses into homes through actual day-to-day practices. It does so by drawing on participant observation and qualitative interviews. Rather than referring to home merely as a physical place, this article investigates in detail migrants’ home-making practices, particularly those activities related to social protection. In making their homes, migrants simultaneously make reference to multiple locales, material artifacts, and social relationships in countries of emigration and immigration. Through the examination of home-making practices, this article is an attempt to portray the symbolic and material expressions with transnational elements of the home unfolding in migrants’ everyday life.

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Notes

  1. All names are fictitious to assure the anonymity of participants.

  2. According to recent estimates, there are currently four million Turkish citizens living in Europe. Of these, 80 % reside in Germany (Abadan-Unat 2011: xxii).

  3. Certainly, the idea of comfort at home is problematized. For instance, home can be a location of violence, sexual abuse, rejection, hostility, anger, isolation, trauma, and fear particularly for asylum seekers, gay, and lesbians (i.e., Gorman-Murray and Dowling 2007). Likewise, home can also be conceptualized ‘as a space of tyranny, oppression or persecution’ (Mallett 2004: 64, see also Crenshaw 1991).

  4. The name of this project is ‘Transnationality, the Distribution of Informal Social Protection and Inequalities’. Funded by the German Research Foundation, it also collected data from migrants with Polish and Kazakhstani origins as well as data from various sources, such as document analysis, expert interviews, and matched interviews with interviewees’ significant others in the respective emigration countries.

  5. Altın günü (‘golden day’) generally refers to a group of women who meet once a month to pool their resources in the form of golden coins.

  6. Participants had the opportunity to choose the location of the interview and I invited them for a tea. Ahmet, Faruk, Murat, Mustafa, Cemil chose to have interviews conducted either in my office at the university, at their working places, or at cafés. My gender could have played a role insofar that they did not want to invite me to their homes as a lone woman. All of the other interviews I conducted with the remaining five men at their homes were with their wife’s presence. Nevertheless, there might be other explanations as well—such as their living situations. For instance, Ahmet was staying at a dormitory, Mustafa was staying at a ‘heim’ for asylum seekers, and Cemil’s father had a chronic illness and as he told me had intensive home care.

  7. Talismans in the shape of eyes usually used to protect their owners from curses and misfortune through believing its symbolic protection from the malicious thoughts of others.

  8. Those interviewees in the age range of 21–30 and 31–40 as indicated in Table 1.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by German Research Council (DFG) granted within the framework of Collaborative Research Centre 882 ‘From Heterogeneities to Inequalities’ at Bielefeld University. I am grateful to Thomas Faist, two editors, the participants of the research class, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. I would like to thank my interviewees who opened up to me their life stories as well as homes wholeheartedly.

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  1. Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Başak Bilecen

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Bilecen, B. Home-making practices and social protection across borders: an example of Turkish migrants living in Germany. J Hous and the Built Environ 32, 77–90 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-015-9490-1

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