Crossing: leaving for Germany

In the Introduction to this volume the editors identify several subjects of relevance with respect to the topics of boundary marking. One of them is ‘how individuals scrutinise their own understanding of how things work’ within the process of crossing boundaries, be it between different countries, between different languages, or socialising into a new group.

In a worldwide perspective, crossing boundaries comes hand in hand with complex urbanisation by which living, working and talking together is becoming more and more abstract, opaque as well as multifaceted, and so the societal structures are increasingly difficult to grasp not only for the immigrant but also for the domestic citizen (Rehbein 2010). Closely examined, by the process of urbanisation, leaders (entrepreneurs) and clerks, white-and blue-collar workers, agents and clients of institutions and other actants are equally subjected to the objective determinants of the social space of action, its contrariness, vicissitudes and unpredictabilities as are those who cross the boundaries and have to discern the objective determinants in the new urban framework from the very first (Zikic et al. 2010).

In view of globalised societies being in a state of flux, it seems that we are dealing with two antagonistic types of activities connected to different ‘actancies’. Intervening ‘actancy’, the first type, based on planning and decision-making and aiming at the restructuring of the space of action, is generally known as ‘agency’ (e.g. von Wright 1968; Goldman 1970; Davidson 1971; Rehbein 1977; Ahearn 2001; Duranti 2004; Helfferich 2012). The second type, which requires accommodation to objective social structures, involves perception, processing of new experiences (Ehlich and Rehbein 1977) and mental restructuring. In what follows, we focus on the concrete analysis of the second type of actancy based on narrative fragments, stemming from interviews with Turkish migrant workers which were conducted in the early 1980s in Germany's Ruhr region.

The reason why we rely on these early data has to do with the specific history of mass immigration into Germany. Let us briefly recall the situation of immigrants leaving Turkey for Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s.