Despite their nuanced palates and cooking skills, as guests at the humanitarian table, Liberians living at the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana were expected and assumed to adapt to the “tastes of necessity.” In the refugee camp, the sensory experiences and pleasures of the taste of liberty—or “luxury”—existed, if at all, as an indicator that one was no longer in need of aid. In this article, I consider how innovations in cooking and taste shape humanitarian politics and argue that Liberian refugees subverted the biopolitics of necessity through biographies of taste. Through their sensuous encounters and critical responses to the taste of necessity, humanitarian subjects are able to produce biographies of food aid and a public accounting of the historic and contemporary conditions of humanitarianism. By prioritizing the taste of refugee food, camp residents have challenged the reason of humanitarian reason by expanding the sensibility of food aid and repositioning recipients as essential figures in humanitarian aid.
This article examines how nutrition outreach efforts address changing food practices among refugee populations resettled in the United States. Qualitative, ethnographic data for the article is drawn from the author's work with the Food and Nutrition Outreach program for resettled refugees and includes the perspectives of practitioners and refugees. Drawing on anthropological theories on the interplay between social meanings and structures of the political economy, the article examines how social meanings and socioeconomic processes facilitate changes in food practices. Findings on the topics of assessing nutritional needs, defining healthy eating, as well as the social organization and meaning of food practices illustrate the importance of going beyond dietary guidelines to incorporate discussion‐based nutrition education between service providers and refugees. The article concludes with both practical and structural suggestions for next steps in nutrition programming for refugees.
This article explores how refugees at the Buduburam Liberian refugee settlement in Ghana constructed and imagined home in and through a place they have never been to—“America.” Drawing on ethnographic examples of homemaking at Buduburam, this article develops the concept of entanglement to show how preferences for and access to the three durable solutions of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees were influenced by centuries of transnational homemaking embedded in the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization of Liberia. Refugees preferred and practised resettlement not as a final destination, but as an active form of transnationalism. The reconfiguration of homemaking through the lens of entanglement demonstrates the importance of developing migratory policies and practices that are attentive to historic and future forms of inequality.
In a long-term refugee camp with few opportunities for wage labor, giving and receiving become vital mechanisms for finding food to eat. Drawing on mixed-methods research at the Buduburam Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, this article focuses on the ethnographic details of everyday economic life to dismantle dominant narratives that shape current understandings of refugee economies. Exclusion from capitalist narratives and the lack of categories to account for the economic lives of refugees mask the dynamic and diverse impacts of the camp economy. Instead, ethnographic analysis of distributive practices and channels at Buduburam reveals how an underlying restorative narrative shapes the camp economy. Economic activities that sustain life inside the refugee camp-and the categories used to describe these activities-do not simply afford social protection; they also generate conflict and inequality.Keywords Refugee Camp Economy; Distribution; Informal Economy; Humanitarian Aid; Capitalism Situated approximately twenty-five miles west of Accra, Ghana, along an international road that stretches from Togo to Côte d'Ivoire, the Buduburam Liberian refugee camp was established in 1990 on property owned by the Ghanaian government. The succession of two civil wars in Liberia over the course of more than a decade resulted in the enduring presence of the Buduburam camp. Initially, wet (i.e., prepared) food aid was provided during the first two years, followed by a shift to dry (i.e., commodity goods such as corn), supplementary food aid. These rations were intended to compose a portion of the diet; refugees were expected to meet the bulk of their food needs on their own. However, few refugees had access to land for food production; instead, two markets at the camp offered a variety of fresh vegetables, grains, and proteins in varying degrees of quality. Generally, food was available, but many refugees faced uncertainties related to the resources to buy the food. By the time of my field research in 2008 and 2009, the distribution of humanitarian food aid had been significantly scaled back, and further reductions took place as I collected data. 1 In the wake of reduced humanitarian aid, social relationships, "petty trade," and transnational remittances constituted vital livelihood strategies
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