nine - Ageing in the ancestral homeland: ethno-biographical reflections on return migration in later life

Summary

Introduction: researching age and migration in the Greek diaspora in Denmark

This chapter is based on a wider research project exploring first and second generation Greek-Danes and their experiences of migration, identity, gender, home and belonging in Denmark and Greece. The study used a multi-method approach based on qualitative, ethnographic, life history, narrative and biographical methodologies. During participant life story narrations and focus group discussions, experiences, feelings, thoughts, reflections and personal information were shared and recorded. From 2004 to 2005 a total of 40 participants contributed to the study; the 16 participants aged between 50 and 85 are the focus of this chapter.

In this chapter I have chosen to follow an eclectic and synthetic approach to narrative that takes into methodological consideration dimensions of emotionality emerging during the interactive research process. I view the process of narrative analysis as being intertwined with both the emotional experience of storytelling as well as in response to the sociocultural context of the themes under discussion, with participants as storytellers. Similarly, Gubrium and Holstein call for a perspective that takes into account ‘the practical dimensions of narrativity … that call for a form of analysis and related research procedure that take us outside of stories and their veridical relationship to storytellers and experience’ (2009:22). They call this approach ‘narrative ethnography’ and point out that while the word ethnography has become almost meaningless because it is currently used to mean so many things, Gubrium and Holstein use it in relation to narrative specifically to connote ‘a method of procedure and analysis involving the close scrutiny of circumstances, their actors and actions in the process of formulating and communicating accounts’.

It has been argued (Riessman, 1993) that storytelling, while having originated from ancient Greek myths, has been perceived as a fundamental way to interpret experiential meanings, but most importantly, life stories are very often saturated by emotion and constructed subjectively as portrayals of lives that illuminate certain angles of such lives by the experience of re-telling and reflection. My use of narrative analysis focuses on the emotional and embodied ways through which my participants’ stories interpret their diasporic worlds, not as ‘factual-truthful’ accounts but as phenomenological-interactionist constructions of sociocultural worlds. These ‘ethnobiographies’ are storied life accounts, that is, they are in the form of personal stories in a narrative account.