Chapter Thirteen — Itinerant Belonging

When Leaving Becomes a Skill

There is a point at which leaving stops feeling like departure and starts feeling like competence. The person knows how to enter a new room, learn its rules, locate the useful people, find the neighborhood, decode the institutional language, translate the self into locally intelligible form, and leave before the place can become too binding. Each move can be reasonable. A city no longer fits. A job has become narrow. A community has turned punitive. A relationship cannot be repaired. A political order is dangerous. A family system requires too much concealment. Movement can save a life. It can enlarge a life. It can return a person to possibilities that staying had made invisible.

But the capacity to leave can also become self-sealing. If departure is always available before disappointment becomes negotiation, before difference becomes mutual adjustment, before boredom becomes intimacy, before error requires repair, before another person acquires enough history to contradict the preferred self-description, then mobility begins doing psychological work beyond transportation. The person does not have to feel frightened of attachment. The exits may be elegant: a new institution, a new city, another friendship, another intellectual world, a more fitting community. The explanation for each departure may be true. The pattern can still deserve inquiry.

That is the adversarial question of this chapter: when does freedom of movement cease to be plurality and become an inability to stay?

The question cannot be answered by counting moves. Some people remain physically in one place while withdrawing from every consequential attachment available there. Others cross borders repeatedly while sustaining obligations, histories, and memberships of extraordinary durability. Some departures are exercises of sovereignty. Others are imposed by war, deportation, housing precarity, labor markets, family rupture, or political exclusion. Some people possess abundant geographic mobility and little social freedom. Others are geographically constrained and belong to several worlds at once. Movement, staying, attachment, and freedom are related, but they are not synonyms.

Chapter Twelve argued that cross-boundary life can produce real capacities without making the border itself virtuous. This chapter takes the next step. The capacity to cross worlds does not tell us whether the person can belong within them. Translation can secure entry without producing attachment. Adaptability can make one welcome without making anyone entitled to expect one’s return. A person can be exceptionally legible everywhere and deeply claimed nowhere.

Belonging Is Not Location

Psychology’s strongest general account of belonging begins not with geography but with relationship. Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary argued that human beings possess a powerful motivation to form and maintain enduring interpersonal bonds characterized by repeated, nonaversive interaction and concern for the continuity of the relationship. Their review did not establish that every person needs the same number or type of bonds, nor that every existing attachment should be preserved. Its durable contribution is narrower: belonging is not satisfied by contact alone. The relevant unit is an ongoing bond.¹

That distinction matters for mobile lives. A person can accumulate encounters, networks, affiliations, followers, colleagues, collaborators, and temporary intimacies without acquiring what Baumeister and Leary meant by belonging. Social abundance can coexist with relational replaceability. The test is not how many people know the person’s name. It is whether some relationships have enough continuity that their disruption would register as a loss rather than a simple change of venue.

Human geography complicates the picture by showing that belonging also exceeds interpersonal attachment. Marco Antonsich distinguishes an intimate sense of being at home in a place—place-belongingness—from the politics of belonging through which inclusion, exclusion, entitlement, and membership are publicly organized.² Nira Yuval-Davis similarly separates social location, identification and emotional attachment, and ethical or political values.³ These frameworks prevent the concept from collapsing into feeling. A person can feel at home where they lack legal or social entitlement. They can possess citizenship where they feel alien. They can participate in a community whose normative project they reject. They can be emotionally attached to a place that institutionally refuses them.

Belonging therefore has at least three relevant registers for this chapter: relational attachment, lived or affective at-homeness, and publicly consequential membership. None is reducible to the others. Itinerancy becomes psychologically interesting because movement can redistribute these registers. One city may hold intimate friendship, another professional recognition, another language, another family history, another legal status, another spiritual world. The person need not choose one as the metaphysical location of the true self.

The mistake would be to conclude that because belonging can be plural, it can remain consequence-free. If a place, community, or relationship counts as a site of belonging, the connection normally carries some reciprocal structure. People can expect something. Absence means something. Return means something. Failure to appear can matter. The connection persists when immediate gratification disappears. Belonging is not ownership, but neither is it tourism.

The Sedentarist Error

Any chapter asking whether a person can stay must first refuse a much older error: the assumption that normal persons are naturally rooted in one territory and that movement marks loss, pathology, or incompleteness. Liisa Malkki’s critique of the “rooting” of peoples remains indispensable because it exposes how scholarly and political language can treat nation, culture, and identity as though human beings naturally grow from soil. Refugees then appear as uprooted anomalies whose very movement is read as social disorder.⁴

Malkki’s argument is not that displacement is harmless. It is that territorial rootedness should not be mistaken for the natural form of identity against which every mobile life is measured. That distinction is essential here. A theory of belonging that treats geographic stability as maturity would reproduce exactly the territorial metaphysics Chapter Twelve refused. It would pathologize diasporic, migrant, transnational, nomadic, military, itinerant, exile, and multi-local lives simply because their attachments do not map neatly onto one place.

The corrective is not to reverse the hierarchy and celebrate mobility as enlightenment. Forced displacement can destroy homes, networks, livelihoods, status, records, routines, language environments, and access to the people who carry one’s history. A refugee is not liberated by being rendered mobile. A precariously housed family is not practicing plural belonging because it moves repeatedly. A migrant worker whose legal status binds residence to employment may cross national borders while possessing far less freedom than the sedentary citizen. The opposite of sedentarism is not romantic nomadism. It is analytical refusal to decide in advance what spatial form a coherent life must take.

Tim Cresswell’s account of a politics of mobility is useful precisely because it breaks “mobility” into questions of motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction. Who moves, under what pressure, by which routes, at whose chosen pace, with what ability to stop, and at what cost are different questions. Two people can trace identical lines across a map while inhabiting opposite political realities. Movement is therefore not freedom in itself. Freedom includes meaningful control over movement and immobility.⁵

This becomes the chapter’s first safeguard. No inference about attachment, courage, avoidance, or maturity follows from movement alone.

Belonging Across Social Fields

Transnational migration scholarship provides a stronger alternative to the one-place model. Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller distinguish “ways of being” in transnational social fields from “ways of belonging” that involve conscious identification with those fields. More importantly for this book, they reject the assumption that incorporation into a receiving society and enduring transnational ties are binary opposites. People can participate in social relations, institutions, obligations, and identities that cross national boundaries while also becoming deeply embedded locally.⁶

This is not a psychological permission slip for saying that everyone belongs everywhere they maintain a connection. It is a sociological correction to methodological nationalism. A person’s effective social world can exceed the borders of one state. Family obligations, remittances, political participation, professional networks, religious practices, media, language, property, memory, and everyday communication can connect lives across territories at the same time. Yan Tan and Xuchun Liu’s review of transnationalism and diaspora literature similarly distinguishes familial, political, economic, sociocultural, and subjective linkages rather than treating transnational connection as a single identity state.⁷

The implication for personhood is substantial. A plural person need not resolve multiple attachments by identifying one “real” home and classifying the others as secondary. Social fields can overlap without becoming one field. Memberships can remain differently weighted, differently consequential, and differently activated. The person can be locally embedded and transnationally attached at once.

That simultaneity also creates obligations. Transnational belonging is not demonstrated by liking several cultures or enjoying travel. A person may participate in one community economically, another politically, another linguistically, and another through family. These relations can make claims on time, money, care, memory, loyalty, and future planning. Distributed belonging is therefore more demanding than distributed preference.

Home Can Be More Than One Place

The psychology and geography of place attachment make a parallel point. Research accumulated over decades shows that places can become objects of strong emotional and identity-relevant attachment even in highly mobile societies. Scannell and Gifford’s work organizes place attachment around person, process, and place rather than reducing it to simple residence duration.⁸ Later reviews emphasize that mobility and globalization have not eliminated the psychological importance of place.⁹

Research with migrants makes the multiplicity more concrete. A scoping review by Vittoria Romoli and colleagues describes “psychological home” as involving belonging, intimacy, security, and identity without requiring that home be reducible to one fixed environment.¹⁰ Tingting Elle Li and Eric Chan’s interviews across multiple generations of Chinese diaspora found distinct forms of connection to ancestral home—from personal attachment to more cognitive or symbolic relationships.¹¹ Huimin Du’s study of educated young migrants and returnees in China likewise challenges the assumption that attachment is necessarily limited to one place, while also finding that geographic mobility can alter the intensity and form of attachment.¹²

These literatures do not prove a universal capacity for multiple homes. They show that the binary is false. A person can become attached to a new place without erasing an earlier place. An ancestral home can remain meaningful without functioning as a daily residence. A city can become home through routine and relationship without becoming a total identity. A place can matter through people who no longer live there.¹³

The word home therefore needs discipline. It can refer to residence, origin, attachment, safety, recognition, memory, routine, citizenship, kinship, or fantasy. Mobile people often carry several of these meanings in different directions. The important question is not which place wins the title. It is what forms of dependence and recognition each attachment actually bears.

Mobility Reorganizes Social Life

If belonging can be distributed, mobility still has consequences for the architecture of relationship. Shigehiro Oishi’s review of residential-mobility research argues that frequent mobility is associated with greater emphasis on the personal rather than collective self, more “duty-free” friendships and group memberships, and lower well-being at the individual level in much of the literature he reviewed.¹⁴ A decade-later review with Hyewon Choi describes replications and extensions while also emphasizing gaps and heterogeneity in the evidence.¹⁵

These findings are not a moral diagnosis of movers. Residential mobility is entangled with age, education, employment, family resources, housing markets, culture, and selection effects. People who move frequently may differ before they move. Different kinds of moves—chosen or forced, upward or downward, solitary or familial, temporary or permanent—cannot be assumed equivalent. The point is narrower: environments with high turnover alter the relational economy. If people expect themselves and others to leave, relationships can rationally be organized around portability and lower obligation.

That organization has advantages. Mobile settings can reduce the cost of entering new groups. They can make friendship less dependent on inherited status. They can allow reinvention and weaken the monopoly of local reputation. They can create social worlds in which newcomers are normal rather than suspect. But mobility can also make replaceability an environmental default. The person who expects every role, city, organization, and network to be temporary may invest differently because temporary investment is often rational.

This is where the chapter’s adversarial question becomes behavioral rather than symbolic. A person may sincerely value belonging while repeatedly choosing contexts in which no one can acquire much claim on them. The contexts can be attractive precisely because they make departure inexpensive.

Freedom Is Not the Same as Alternatives

Relationship science offers a useful but limited analogy. Caryl Rusbult’s investment model distinguishes satisfaction, quality of alternatives, investment, and commitment.¹⁶ Later meta-analyses by Benjamin Le and Christopher Agnew, and by Peter Tran et al., found strong and replicable associations among these variables.¹⁷ In the updated meta-analysis, satisfaction showed the largest aggregate association with commitment, investments were also positively associated, and quality of alternatives was negatively associated.¹⁸

This literature does not establish that geographically mobile people are less capable of commitment. It does establish something conceptually relevant: the availability and quality of alternatives can shape persistence independently of whether the current relationship is good. An open door changes the structure of commitment even when nobody walks through it.

For a highly mobile person, alternatives may exist at several levels at once: other institutions, cities, professional identities, communities, scenes, friendship networks, or ways of life.¹⁹ Having alternatives is a form of freedom. The danger begins only when the existence of alternatives prevents any present attachment from becoming thick enough to survive disappointment. Freedom from captivity then drifts into freedom from claim.

The distinction matters because a life with no alternatives can look extremely committed. Constraint can imitate devotion. A person may remain because leaving is financially impossible, legally dangerous, socially punished, or materially unthinkable. Commitment cannot therefore be inferred from duration, and maturity cannot be inferred from staying.

The question is more demanding: what does a person do with available alternatives when the current attachment becomes difficult but remains viable?

Exit and Voice

Albert Hirschman’s distinction among exit, voice, and loyalty offers language for the problem, provided it is used as an analogy rather than a psychological law.²⁰ In organizations and markets, exit means leaving or switching; voice means attempting to repair or improve the declining arrangement from within; loyalty can sometimes delay exit long enough for voice to operate. Hirschman’s framework has been extended far beyond its original domain, but this chapter needs only one implication: easy exit can sometimes reduce the pressure to develop voice.

That implication becomes psychologically interesting in a mobile life. Some problems should produce exit. Abuse, exploitation, persecution, persistent contempt, irreparable value conflict, and institutions that punish voice are not improved by staying longer. But other problems can be known only after one remains: the colleague who is difficult but correct; the community norm that initially feels constraining because it requires reciprocity; the friendship that survives its first serious disappointment; the place that becomes legible only after novelty ends; the self-image that fails under enough repeated observation from people who know one well.

A person who always exits at the first credible sign of misfit protects possibility but may never learn which frictions are incompatibilities and which are the ordinary costs of being in relation. The ability to leave preserves sovereignty. The ability to stay long enough for voice, repair, and mutual revision preserves belonging.

The distinction cannot be made by outsiders through a simple rule. No one can inspect a departure and infer avoidance from it. Exit may be the most mature act available. The pattern becomes interpretable only longitudinally: what kinds of conditions repeatedly precipitate leaving, what attempts at repair preceded departure, what costs were avoided, what obligations were discharged, and whether the next attachment reproduces the same point of exit.

Staying Is Not Virtue

The inverse error is just as serious. A theory of belonging that celebrates staying can become morally grotesque. Rusbult and John Martz applied the investment model to women entering a shelter for battered women and found that commitment and stay/leave behavior were related to poor economic alternatives, greater investments, and lower reported dissatisfaction.²¹ The study does not explain every abusive relationship and should not be generalized beyond its design. It makes one principle impossible to ignore: persistence can be produced by dependence.

This is why duration must never function as proof of healthy attachment. Families can trap. Religions can excommunicate. Employers can bind immigration status to work. Communities can threaten social death. Nations can deny exit. Relationships can make leaving materially dangerous. A person may stay because they are deeply committed, because they are afraid, because they lack alternatives, because they are economically dependent, because they are protecting children, because their identity has become organized around the relationship, or because all of these are true at once.

Belonging worthy of defense therefore requires more than persistence. It requires enough freedom that staying can have some evidentiary meaning. Where exit is impossible, loyalty cannot be inferred from immobility. Where exit is dangerously costly, continued membership may reveal constraint rather than attachment.

The chapter’s adversarial question must therefore remain symmetrical. Too much exit can prevent belonging from thickening. Too little exit can convert belonging into captivity. The mature capacity is not staying. It is being able both to remain and to leave under conditions where each response can still answer to reality.

Itinerant Belonging

The book now needs a construct that names distributed attachment without turning motion into virtue. Itinerant belonging is Proposed here as the capacity to sustain reciprocal and consequential attachments across more than one place, community, institution, or relationship while retaining legitimate freedom of movement and remaining able, when conditions permit, to stay long enough for dependence, repair, obligation, and recognition to acquire force.²²

The adjective itinerant names movement without making movement the highest good. The noun belonging places a harder demand on mobility. To belong is not simply to have access to several worlds. It is to participate in attachments that can legitimately affect one’s choices even when another exit is available.

Five features follow from the definition.²³

First is plural attachment. More than one place or community can matter deeply without being ranked into one authentic center and several decorative peripheries. The attachments may differ in kind and weight. One may carry family, another work, another language, another history, another friendship, another spiritual practice. Plurality does not require equivalence.

Second is reciprocity. Belonging includes claims that run in both directions. The person receives recognition, support, memory, hospitality, opportunity, or care; the person also becomes answerable to some expectations of presence, contribution, repair, or fidelity. Reciprocity is not submission. Communities can make illegitimate claims. But a belonging in which the member retains every freedom while no one else may expect anything is indistinguishable from consumption.

Third is continuity. Attachments survive temporary absence, inconvenience, and changes in immediate utility. The person does not have to be constantly present. The relationship remains part of the architecture of decision. An old friend still matters during a new season. A place continues to orient memory and return. A community’s well-being remains relevant even when another world is more immediately rewarding.

Fourth is stayability. This is not a demand for geographic permanence. It is the capacity to remain in a viable attachment long enough for novelty to wear off, for one’s own imperfections to become visible, for local constraints to matter, for disagreement to acquire history, and for repair to become possible. Stayability can be exercised in a city, a marriage, a friendship, a profession, a congregation, a movement, or an intellectual community. Its opposite is not travel. Its opposite is systematic pre-emption of depth.

Fifth is discriminating exit. A mature mobile person must be able to distinguish departures that protect life, integrity, development, or legitimate plural commitments from departures that mainly prevent dependence, correction, boredom, grief, reciprocity, or the loss of optionality. The distinction will never be perfect. It must remain revisable. But without it, freedom of movement can become a universal explanation for why no attachment ever acquires enough force to inconvenience the self.

These features are Proposed. No existing scale validates itinerant belonging as an independent construct. Each feature has neighboring literatures—belongingness, place attachment, commitment, migration, transnationalism, mobility, relational dependence, and social identity—but the synthesis belongs to this book and should survive only if it adds explanatory value.

The First Counterfeit: Cosmopolitan Immunity

The first counterfeit is a sophisticated version of rootlessness: the belief that because one can belong in many places, no place may legitimately claim much. The person is cosmopolitan in the shallowest sense—comfortable almost everywhere, beholden almost nowhere. Difference becomes stimulating because it never has to mature into obligation.

This can look admirable. The person has friends in several cities, fluency across social codes, professional networks across institutions, perhaps homes or routines in more than one place. They resist provincialism and reject the demand to choose a single tribe. None of that is itself a problem. The counterfeit appears when multiplicity becomes immunity from local consequence.

Every community contains inconveniences that cannot be solved by finding a better community. People misunderstand. Institutions disappoint. Norms constrain. Friends become needy at bad times. Neighbors require consideration. Political projects require boring maintenance after charismatic beginnings. The local is where ideals encounter friction. If every such friction can be answered by reclassifying the current world as too narrow and moving to another, plurality protects possibility at the expense of repair.

The person may sincerely believe they are honoring complexity. From the perspective of others, the pattern can feel different: someone arrives with intelligence and generosity, forms rapid connection, draws value from the world, and disappears when reciprocal dependence begins. The wound is not that the person left. It is that the relationship was allowed to feel consequential before the member disclosed that consequence would remain optional.

Cosmopolitan immunity therefore violates the chapter’s reciprocity criterion. It asks many worlds to recognize the self while reserving the right to deny those worlds reciprocal standing.²⁴

The Second Counterfeit: Rootedness as Captivity

The second counterfeit is the mirror image. Communities often moralize staying because departure threatens their authority. Family systems call leaving betrayal. Religious communities call it apostasy. Nations call it disloyalty. Organizations call it lack of commitment. Small communities may treat ambition elsewhere as contempt for home. Partners may describe separation as proof that love was never real.

This rhetoric confuses belonging with possession. A community worthy of belonging must be able to survive the fact that its members have alternatives. If the only loyal member is the member who cannot leave, loyalty has lost its meaning.

The investment-model literature helps again by separating commitment from satisfaction and from alternatives. A person can remain because investments are high even when the relationship is poor. That structure is not confined to romance. Years of professional training, immigration status, pension rules, family reputation, religious identity, property, social networks, or caregiving obligations can make departure costly. Those investments may deepen meaningful commitment. They can also trap.

The mature community therefore does not demand permanence as proof. It makes continued membership sufficiently valuable, reciprocal, and revisable that staying can remain chosen. It may grieve departure. It may impose legitimate consequences for broken commitments. It may refuse immediate return. But it does not claim that leaving erases the reality of prior belonging.

This matters especially for people whose plurality was produced by oppressive environments. A queer person leaving a hostile religious community, a dissident leaving an authoritarian institution, a worker leaving an exploitative employer, or an abused partner leaving a violent relationship is not failing the test of stayability. Stayability applies only where enough safety and reciprocity exist for staying to be a real developmental option.

The Third Counterfeit: Forced Itinerary as Freedom

The third counterfeit belongs to observers more than movers. Contemporary culture often aestheticizes mobility: the global professional, the digital nomad, the migrant entrepreneur, the endlessly adaptable worker, the person whose home is wherever the laptop opens. That image can erase the coercive architectures that make other people mobile.

Cresswell’s politics of mobility is useful here because movement has motive force, route, rhythm, friction, and regulation. A person crossing borders under threat of deportation does not inhabit the same mobility as a citizen choosing among residencies. A family repeatedly priced out of housing is mobile in a different sense from a professional changing cities for opportunity. A refugee’s movement may be extensive while their ability to choose destination, timing, documentation, work, or return is radically constrained.

Recent psychological work on migration emphasizes that migration transforms the material, social, and cultural environment and creates demands that can be experienced as challenges or threats; responses also depend on receiving contexts rather than on migrant psychology alone.²⁵ That interaction matters. The person’s ability to adapt does not prove that the movement was benign.

Forced movement should therefore never be coded as itinerant belonging simply because multiple attachments emerge afterward. People can build new homes under conditions they never chose. The belonging can be real. The coercion remains real too.

The Justice Pressure: Who Can Afford to Leave?

Freedom of movement is distributed unequally. Money changes the meaning of exit. Citizenship changes it. Race, gender, disability, caregiving obligations, language, passport power, housing markets, criminal records, education, health, and family wealth all shape which departures are available and which returns remain possible.

This means that the chapter’s adversarial question—when does movement become inability to stay?—must never be applied without a prior question: how much real control does this person have over movement in the first place?

The executive who changes cities whenever an institution becomes constraining and the asylum seeker relocated by policy may both have long residential histories. The same count measures different phenomena. The worker who stays because health insurance binds them to employment and the artist who remains because a community has become precious may both have long tenure. Again, the same count measures different realities.

A politics of itinerant belonging must therefore examine not just movement but **optionality under constraint**: the practical ability to leave, the practical ability to stay, the social cost of each, and who is permitted to move without moral suspicion. Some people are told to assimilate and stop looking elsewhere. Others are praised for global fluency. Some departures are called ambition. Others are called abandonment. Some returns are celebrated. Others are treated as evidence that the person never belonged in the first place.

Belonging is political because communities regulate the terms under which people may enter, remain, leave, and return. That regulation can be legal, economic, reputational, familial, or symbolic. No psychology of staying is adequate if it ignores who controls the doors.

What Staying Actually Requires

Once coercion is separated from commitment, stayability can be defined more precisely. Staying is developmentally meaningful when at least four conditions are present.

There must be enough safety that remaining does not require tolerating violence, degradation, or serious coercion. There must be enough reciprocity that the member’s needs and objections have some standing. There must be enough revisability that the relationship or institution can learn rather than demand unilateral adaptation. And there must be enough freedom that departure remains genuinely thinkable.²⁶

Under those conditions, staying exposes the self to kinds of information mobility can interrupt. Other people accumulate longitudinal evidence. One’s own reputation becomes harder to reset. Patterns that seemed situational recur. Repair becomes observable rather than promised. The consequences of previous behavior remain present. Commitments become inconvenient. The person becomes knowable in ways that cannot be produced by rapid entry.

This is not an argument for duration as a moral accomplishment. It is an argument about information. Some truths about the self require time because they are distributions, not episodes. Reliability, generosity, conflict style, jealousy, endurance, follow-through, capacity for repair, tolerance of boredom, and willingness to share power emerge through repeated conditions. A mobile person can know these truths. But serial departure can sometimes reset the sampling process before the distribution becomes clear.

Staying can therefore be a method of epistemic exposure. It removes some of the self’s ability to control the sample from which others know it.²⁷

The same is true of place. A city encountered for six months is partly novelty. A city inhabited through winter, routine, illness, bureaucracy, neighborhood conflict, ordinary friendship, civic frustration, and loss becomes a different object. Mobility can deepen comparison. Staying can deepen resolution.

The chapter refuses to decide which depth is superior. A mature plural life may require both.

The Counterfeit of Infinite Optionality

Modern mobility often presents optionality as an unqualified good. More jobs, more cities, more communities, more identities, more networks, more possible futures. Options protect against capture. They also preserve the fantasy that the current attachment never has to become necessary.

Necessity is dangerous when imposed. It is also part of love. To care for someone or something is to allow its condition to affect one’s own choices. The friend’s illness changes the calendar. The child’s needs narrow geography. The institution one is trying to reform consumes time that could be spent elsewhere. A language requires maintenance. A neighborhood becomes harder to leave because people there would actually notice.

The fully optional life avoids some forms of domination by avoiding dependence itself. But a person who refuses all dependence also refuses the structure through which belonging becomes more than preference.

This does not mean that every attachment should become necessary. It means that a life in which nothing is permitted to become costly enough to matter may protect freedom by shrinking the range of things that can be loved.

Itinerant belonging therefore asks a paradoxical question: can the person retain real exits while permitting some attachments to become expensive to leave?

The answer cannot be guaranteed. That is exactly why belonging involves risk.

A Research Program, Not a Lifestyle

Itinerant belonging should not survive as a poetic description if it cannot be distinguished from existing constructs. Empirically, the proposed construct would need discriminant and incremental validity against need to belong, place attachment, sense of community, commitment, attachment avoidance, residential mobility, relational mobility, acculturation, Bicultural Identity Integration, transnational identification, social identity complexity, psychological home, and general social connectedness.²⁸

The construct would also need longitudinal rather than purely cross-sectional testing. A snapshot cannot tell whether a person with many affiliations sustains them over time, whether departures are pre-emptive or warranted, or whether reciprocal obligations survive absence. A serious research program would therefore examine attachment continuity, exit patterns, repair attempts, perceived alternatives, community claims, and the conditions under which mobility increases or decreases relational depth.

Several predictions should remain open rather than baked into the definition. Higher geographic mobility may not predict lower itinerant belonging if people maintain strong distributed obligations. Low geographic mobility may coexist with low belonging if the person remains socially detached. High numbers of communities may predict either richness or fragmentation depending on reciprocity and continuity. The key variable may prove not to be mobility at all but the person’s relation to optionality.²⁹

The construct should also be tested against adverse outcomes. A person high in the proposed capacity should not simply report more identities or more travel. They should be able to sustain meaningful ties through movement, tolerate viable local constraints, attempt repair when appropriate, and exit when the attachment becomes unsafe or fundamentally incompatible. If existing measures of commitment, place attachment, relational mobility, and avoidance already explain those patterns, itinerant belonging should contract or disappear.

What Itinerant Belonging Cannot Give You

Even if the construct survives, it cannot solve the problem of home by itself. A person can belong to several worlds and still feel exhausted by the work of maintaining them. Distributed attachment can create distributed grief. More than one place can feel like home, which also means more than one place can be missed at once. Every return can contain another departure.

Nor does plural belonging eliminate asymmetry. One community may claim the person more than the person claims it. Another may be loved but offer little recognition in return. A third may provide status without intimacy. A fourth may hold memory but no viable future. Belonging can be plural without being harmonious.

The construct also cannot tell a person where to live, whom to prioritize, when to leave, or which claims should win when obligations conflict. Those are normative decisions requiring facts the construct cannot supply.

Most importantly, itinerant belonging does not answer how continuity is carried when the person moves. If roots are not identical with staying in one soil, what makes an attachment portable without making it weightless? What persists when place, role, institution, or social audience changes? Which practices, relationships, commitments, memories, languages, objects, rituals, and obligations allow a person to move without converting every new world into a fresh start?

That is the problem Chapter Fourteen must take up.³⁰

Toward Portable Rootedness

A plural person should not have to choose between captivity and weightlessness. The freedom to move matters because some worlds become dangerous, false, or too small. The capacity to stay matters because some truths, obligations, and forms of love appear only after the exits stop dominating attention. Itinerant belonging names the possibility that a person can live among several worlds without requiring that every world remain disposable.

The next question is what such a person carries. If rootedness is not permanent residence, then roots must be understood as relations that can survive movement without pretending that place no longer matters. A person can belong in more than one direction. But belonging needs enough continuity that movement does not become disappearance. That is the problem of portable rootedness.

Notes

1. Baumeister and Leary, “The Need to Belong,” 497–529. Their belongingness hypothesis concerns strong, stable interpersonal bonds with repeated interaction; the chapter does not treat it as a theory of geographic rootedness.

2. Marco Antonsich, “Searching for Belonging—An Analytical Framework,” Geography Compass 4, no. 6 (2010): 644–659, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00317.x. Antonsich distinguishes intimate place-belongingness from the politics through which inclusion and exclusion are constructed and contested.

3. Nira Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 3 (2006): 197–214, https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220600769331. The chapter draws specifically on her separation of social locations, identifications and emotional attachments, and ethical and political values.

4. Liisa H. Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44, https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1992.7.1.02a00030. Malkki’s article is used to criticize the naturalization of territorial rootedness, not to claim that displacement is psychologically benign or politically liberating.

5. Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 17–31, https://doi.org/10.1068/d11407. Cresswell conceptualizes mobility through movement, representation, and practice and calls attention to motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction; the present chapter uses this to resist treating all movement as equivalent.

6. Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller, “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society,” International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 1002–1039, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x. Their distinction between ways of being and ways of belonging and their rejection of a simple assimilation-versus-transnationalism binary are sociological claims, not a psychometric model of plural attachment.

7. Yan Tan et al., “Transnationalism, Diaspora, and Development: A Purposive Review of the Literature,” Geography Compass 12, no. 12 (2018): e12413, https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12413. The review identifies familial, political, economic, sociocultural, and subjective transnational linkages; the chapter uses that differentiation to resist treating transnational belonging as one undivided state.

8. Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford, “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 30, no. 1 (2010): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2009.09.006. Their person–process–place framework is used as an organizing account of place attachment, not as proof that any particular mobile person possesses multiple homes.

9. Maria Lewicka, “Place Attachment: How Far Have We Come in the Last 40 Years?,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 31, no. 3 (2011): 207–230, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.10.001. Lewicka’s review surveys several hundred theoretical and empirical publications and emphasizes that strong place attachments persist despite mobility and globalization.

10. Vittoria Romoli et al., “Migrant Perceptions of Psychological Home: A Scoping Review,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 86 (2022): 14–25, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2021.10.009. The review is used to show that psychological home can involve belonging, intimacy, security, and identity without being reducible to one fixed physical environment.

11. Tingting Elle Li and Eric Tak Hin Chan, “Connotations of Ancestral Home: An Exploration of Place Attachment by Multiple Generations of Chinese Diaspora,” Population, Space and Place 24, no. 8 (2018): e2147, https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2147. Based on fifty interviews across first- through sixth-generation Chinese migrants, the study distinguishes personal, cognitive, and symbolic connections to ancestral home; it is illustrative qualitative evidence rather than a general law of diaspora.

12. Huimin Du, “Place Attachment and Belonging among Educated Young Migrants and Returnees: The Case of Chaohu, China,” Population, Space and Place 23, no. 1 (2017): e1967, https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1967. Du’s study supports the narrower proposition that attachment need not be confined to one place and that mobility can alter, rather than simply abolish, place attachment.

13. Erika Gubrium and Laia Colomer, “Belonging on the Move: A Multi-Method Exploration of Embodied Affect, Place Attachment, and Transnational Mobility in Migrant Lives in Norway,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 15, no. 4 (2025): article 6, https://doi.org/10.33134/njmr.939. The study uses life-history interviews, mapping, and walking interviews and develops two “telling cases”; it is included as recent qualitative evidence that attachment and mobility can coexist, not as validation of itinerant belonging.

14. Shigehiro Oishi, “The Psychology of Residential Mobility: Implications for the Self, Social Relationships, and Well-Being,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5, no. 1 (2010): 5–21, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691609356781. Oishi reviews associations between residential mobility and personal versus collective self-construal, “duty-free” relationships, and well-being. The chapter does not interpret these associations as evidence that individual movers are avoidantly attached or less moral.

15. Hyewon Choi and Shigehiro Oishi, “The Psychology of Residential Mobility: A Decade of Progress,” Current Opinion in Psychology 32 (2020): 72–75, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.008. The review summarizes replications and extensions and also underscores gaps in the mobility literature, including the need to distinguish heterogeneous forms and consequences of moving.

16. Caryl E. Rusbult, “Commitment and Satisfaction in Romantic Associations: A Test of the Investment Model,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 16, no. 2 (1980): 172–186, https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(80)90007-4. The investment model is used in this chapter only to illuminate how satisfaction, alternatives, and investments can be analytically separated from persistence.

17. Benjamin Le and Christopher R. Agnew, “Commitment and Its Theorized Determinants: A Meta-Analysis of the Investment Model,” Personal Relationships 10, no. 1 (2003): 37–57, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6811.00035. Across fifty-two studies, sixty independent samples, and 11,582 participants, satisfaction, alternatives, and investments jointly accounted for substantial variance in commitment, and commitment predicted breakup.

18. Peter Tran et al., “Commitment in Relationships: An Updated Meta-Analysis of the Investment Model,” Personal Relationships 26, no. 1 (2019): 158–180, https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12268. Across 202 independent samples and 50,427 participants, aggregate associations with commitment were approximately r=.65 for satisfaction, r=.53 for investments, and r=−.43 for quality of alternatives.

19. The investment-model evidence concerns dependence and commitment processes, especially in close relationships; it does not show that people with greater geographic mobility are less committed. The chapter’s use of “alternatives” across cities, jobs, and communities is therefore a synthetic extension and should be tested rather than treated as an established cross-domain equivalence.

20. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press, 1970). Hirschman’s exit/voice/loyalty framework originated in political economy and organizational analysis. Its use here is explicitly analogical; no claim is made that it independently validates the chapter’s account of mobile personhood.

21. Caryl E. Rusbult and John M. Martz, “Remaining in an Abusive Relationship: An Investment Model Analysis of Nonvoluntary Dependence,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21, no. 6 (1995): 558–571, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167295216002. In shelter intake data, poorer economic alternatives, greater investments, and lower dissatisfaction were associated with greater commitment, and commitment distinguished immediate return from nonreturn. The study does not imply that remaining in abuse is voluntary or that the investment model exhausts abusive-relationship dynamics.

22. “Itinerant belonging” is Proposed in this chapter. No cited source uses the term in the chapter’s technical sense or validates it as a psychological construct. The definition synthesizes belongingness, place attachment, transnationalism, mobility, commitment, and relational-dependence literatures.

23. The five proposed features—plural attachment, reciprocity, continuity, stayability, and discriminating exit—are likewise Proposed. They should not be interpreted as established subscales, latent factors, diagnostic criteria, or necessary-and-sufficient conditions before empirical work tests their structure.

24. “Cosmopolitan immunity” is a synthetic counterfeit used to pressure-test the theory, not a clinical category or established construct. The underlying concern is whether high optionality permits repeated entry without reciprocal dependence; no cited study warrants diagnosing such a pattern from travel, cosmopolitan identity, or multiple affiliations alone.

25. Gerald Echterhoff et al., “Migrants’ and Local Residents’ Psychological Responses to Migration,” Nature Reviews Psychology 5 (2026): 520–530, https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00576-9. The review emphasizes that migration changes material, social, and cultural environments and that migrant and receiving-context responses interact; it supports the chapter’s refusal to locate all adaptation burdens inside migrants themselves.

26. The chapter’s four conditions for developmentally meaningful staying—safety, reciprocity, revisability, and meaningful freedom to leave—are normative criteria, not an empirical algorithm. Rusbult and Martz’s study is especially important because it shows why persistence under constrained alternatives cannot be treated as evidence of healthy commitment.

27. The claim that staying can function as “epistemic exposure” is Synthetic. Place-attachment, residential-mobility, and relationship-commitment literatures show that time, investment, repeated interaction, and mobility matter to attachment and social organization, but no cited study directly tests the proposition that remaining in a viable attachment improves self-knowledge by reducing control over the interpersonal sample.

28. A serious discriminant-validity program would need to compare itinerant belonging with established neighboring constructs. For relational mobility specifically, see Masaki Yuki and Joanna Schug, “Relational Mobility: A Socioecological Approach to Personal Relationships,” in Relationship Science: Integrating Evolutionary, Neuroscience, and Sociocultural Approaches, ed. Omri Gillath, Glenn Adams, and Alan D. Kunkel (American Psychological Association, 2012), 137–151, https://doi.org/10.1037/13489-007; and Robert Thomson et al., “Relational Mobility Predicts Social Behaviors in 39 Countries and Is Tied to Historical Farming and Threat,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 29 (2018): 7521–7526, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713191115.

29. The chapter’s hypothesis that the relation to optionality may matter more than raw geographic movement is Proposed. It would require longitudinal designs capable of distinguishing chosen from forced moves, viable from dangerous attachments, actual from perceived alternatives, and repair attempts from pre-emptive exits. Cross-sectional counts of residences or affiliations would be inadequate.

30. The transition from itinerant belonging to portable rootedness is theoretical rather than empirical. None of the cited literatures establishes what a mobile plural person must “carry” in order for commitments, identity, memory, ritual, relationship, or place attachment to remain continuous across movement. Chapter Thirteen therefore ends by separating the capacity to belong across more than one world from the further problem of what makes those attachments portable without making them weightless; that burden belongs to Chapter Fourteen

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