Procuring, Crafting, and Sensing: Affect and Material Practices of Russian Women in Japan

Abstract

This paper draws its data from fieldwork on female Russian migrants in Japan, paying close attention to their material practices and, notably, their craftwork. The discussion focuses on the objects and clothes observed in localities where these material practices are enacted, namely, migrants’ homes and places where migrant festive events take place. Second-hand shops are discussed in detail as a popular shopping destination among Russian migrants. This paper also looks at online groups for Russian-speaking migrants in Japan that serve as sites for the display and exchange of their material possessions. In these offline and online spaces, migrants search for ways to affectively reenact the materiality and accompanying sensations of their pre-migratory past, while simultaneously interiorizing the material expressions of the host culture. By investigating the connection between migration and materiality through the evocative ethnography approach, this study attempts to explore how the affective turn in social inquiry helps us better capture the multilayeredness of migrant experiences. The processes of procuring, making, and sensing that the migrants are engaged in and the resulting objects function as locales charged with affective forces that enable actors to subdue the displacement they have experienced as a result of migration and try out new meanings and modes of being.