Authors

Discussion

This paper is based on my PhD thesis, which explores a sense of belonging among second-generation Georgian migrants whose families moved to Moscow in the 1990s. I focus on my interlocutors’ summer trips to Georgia and their more recent, spontaneous returns there. In attempting to articulate their sense of belonging, many young Georgians in Moscow emphasised their feeling of in-betweenness: they did not feel fully at home in either Georgia or Russia. While parents often viewed the summer trips as a “rooting practice” intended to foster “Georgianness” in their children, the young people’s own experiences revealed a more complex picture. 

Drawing on ethnographic observations and young people’s narratives, I examine how these temporary visits — which usually include staying in family homes, visiting relatives, and taking sightseeing or coastal trips — intertwine emotional attachment with detachment. I argue that the experiences from these trips are shaped by a complex conflation of emotional attachments to the “meshwork” (Ingold 2011) of places they visit, people they meet, and stories they hear, and, at the same time, by experiences of detachment induced by the trips’ temporariness and the complex political and socioeconomic contexts that imbue these landscapes.

This ambivalence became especially pronounced in recent years, when some interlocutors returned to Georgia to live — marking a time of active reconfiguration of their sense of belonging. In the paper, I show that alongside a strong sense of indeterminacy, my interlocutors also experienced hope, stemming from the opportunity to try living in their ancestral country. The move, however, also revealed stark differences from their previous imaginings of Georgia and from their expectations of return, as well as a mutual estrangement between “local” Georgians and those who had arrived from Moscow. 

Furthermore, for some, choosing Georgia as a place to live reflected not only inherited ties but also aspirations for professional and personal self-realisation within a complicated geopolitical context. This shifts the perspective on rootedness from an inherited condition to an active choice. While inherited identity certainly mattered to my interlocutors, and kinship was seen as fundamental to their sense of belonging in Georgia, they also reflected on where they wanted to settle, to belong, and to fulfil themselves. The entanglement of practical concerns, kinship obligations, affective attachments, mutual estrangement, political instability, and youthful ambition invites a broader question: what does it mean to belong — and what does it mean to be young — in a world shaped by displacement and conflict?