DISPLACEMENT AS EVERYDAY LIFE: HOTEL SPACE, MEMORY, AND SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63410/jo202601Keywords:
Displacement, Social Boundaries, Liminal Space, Urban Marginalization, Collective HousingAbstract
Displacement is not merely a political status or a technical-administrative category; it is an everyday condition that structurally produces boundaries between “us” and “them,” transforming space into a site of marginalization and exception. This article examines how social boundaries are materialized and reproduced in the everyday lives of internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in collective centers, focusing on the case of Hotel Sakartvelo in Tbilisi. Drawing on anthropological approaches to borders
– not as fixed geographic or administrative lines, but as mechanisms of symbolic and social ordering (Barth 1969; Lamont & Molnár 2002) – the study explores how displacement generates spatial and socio-cultural separation (Malkki 1995). Based on ethnographic research conducted in 2022, including interviews with residents and a personal narrative by a third-generation IDP raised in the hotel, the article analyzes how displaced persons navigate marginality and reimagine “home.” The hotel, once a symbol of luxury, now functions as a liminal space in which temporariness has become a long-term condition of existence. Residents’ everyday practices – anchored in memory, materiality, and sensory rituals – continuously reshape the symbolic boundaries between belonging and exclusion. As Navaro-Yashin (2012) suggests, these imaginative acts produce a “conjured space” marked by tension between impermanence and the longing for stability
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