Statement about my submission at the Visual Ethnography Showcase today

I had the pleasure of talking about my submission for the 2021 ANSA Visual Anthropology Competition this morning at the (virtual) Visual Ethnography Showcase at the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) conference – well, that was a mouthful!

I’m currently in Bangkok, Thailand, after having escaped the winter Budapest blues en route back home to Melbourne.

It was my first time talking about “my work” as a budding anthropologist, so I was quite nervous to say the least. To alleviate these nerves, I prepared a short statement prior to the showcase that I planned on just reading verbatim.

Of course, when it actually came time to speak, I just decided to speak from the heart. Having said that, I am definitely WAY more articulate in the written form…

Here’s the short statement I prepared, but never professed, from today’s conference:

With this submission, I wanted to make the point that the notion of “home” tied to territory is a deeply Western-centric idea, and a relatively new idea at that. Our ancestors were nomadic, and as my photos demonstrated, there are still communities around the world – such as the nomads of Mongolia – that practice a nomadic lifestyle, in which “home” isn’t singular and static, but mobile and multiple.

The portability of “home” is something I’m interested in with my own research on digital nomads. Like traditional nomads, digital nomads disrupt the traditional view of home as tethered to territory. In my own experience of being a digital nomad for the last decade and in those that I’ve met along the way, “home” is more of a feeling than a fixed point in space. Whilst the relationship between people and geographical space or place is important in unpacking the symbolic content of home, the spatial indexing of this concept is only part of the story. Home is equally – if not more so – about the relationships and communities people create in that space. And as people and communities can move, so can our home.

Digital nomadism, I would argue, is actually a more radical challenge to a territorialised idea of home because the disruptors are not some nomadic community outside the contours of Western discourse, but are disrupting it from within, mobilised by the pursuit of freedom and individualism – which are also deeply Western ideas.

Even still, the nomads of Mongolia continue to remind us that “home” isn’t just a fixed point in space, but is also tethered to the people who dwell there, which has increasing relevance for all of us that live in a world that is “on the move” in which international mobility – in the form of travel or in the function of work – is part and parcel of modernity.

It is possible, perhaps, to argue that in a world in which mobility has become such a fundamental part of contemporary life that a static and singular conception of home is no longer relevant – that it needs to be updated. But then, it’s useful to remember that 10,000 years ago, before the agricultural revolution, we were all nomadic and a multiple and mobile sense of home was the norm. So the reconceptualisation of home doesn’t require an update, but a going back to its "routes" – so to speak – which perhaps better captures what it is to be human and who we are as a species.