When People Stay and Things Make Their Way: Airports, Mobilities and Materialities of a Transnational Landscape

This article explores different meanings of mobility and place by examining the interweaving of people, things and airports in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two airports - of departure and arrival of this migratory route - I look at the practices of sending and receiving objects by migrants in Lisbon and their kin in Bissau. The transnational yet grounded setting helps to provide a better understanding of the complexity associated with different forms of mobility - including corporeal, imagined and desired - and their key role in socially and relationally constructing a lived airport space, as well as wider social landscapes. Bringing in evidence from a less-explored setting - a small airport in a West African country - will particularly challenge some of the assumptions that tend to associate mobility with 'modernity' and fixity with 'tradition'. It will show how people in Guinea-Bissau are, as much as migrants abroad, dynamically involved in global practices of movement - materialised in trading and reciprocating objects between two continents - through local performances of mobility that do not necessarily involve corporeal travel across borders.