Displacement as Condition: A Refugee, a Farmer and the Teleology of Life

Sovereignty at what price? Existential displacement at the Lebanese/Syrian border

“…The displacement that I explored here was not due to a forced movement in space alone, not for the Lebanese citizens who are the focus of my article. As other anthropologists have argued, displacement involves the disruption of ‘purposive connection to place, time and social worlds’ (Ramsay & Askland 2022: 601). My interlocutors felt that their assumed right to exist and to subsist as citizens was upended under the bombs.…”

“…Less acknowledged, however, are the forms of displacement that have affected citizens inhabiting the same social spheres as refugees and the dispossessions they have been subjected to by the same political upheavals in the region. Anthropological critique has problematized the taken‐for‐granted association of displacement with forced or involuntary migration (Bjarnesen & Vigh 2016; Çaglar & Glick Schiller 2018; Jansen & Löfving 2009; Lems 2016; Ramsay 2020; Ramsay & Askland 2022). A body of work has shown that displacement could indeed result from staying put (Askland 2018; Cabot & Ramsay 2021; Kelly 2009) and is a condition that transcends refugees, or migrants more generally.…”

“…For example, Ramsay and Askland's discussion of a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo and an Australian farmer who lived in Australia all his life shows how, in spite of their different circumstances, both felt displaced. Displacement here is a feeling of vulnerability that relates to ‘the sense of disempowerment and dispossession they [both] experienced in the meeting with external bodies of power and the subsequent impossibility to enact their imaginative resources and subjectivities within the place called home’ (Ramsay & Asland 2022: 603). Displacement, in this sense, is a common rather than exceptional condition that transcends the binaries of migrant/non‐migrant, insider/outsider, and refugee/citizen (Cabot & Ramsay 2021).…”

“…Displacement here is the experience of grief over the loss of a particular way of life and the values and morals that shaped sociality in a familiar past (Obeid 2019). There is a temporal element to this analysis of existential displacement, not only in terms of feeling that the future is no longer predictable or even recognizable – what Ramsay and Askland describe as a ‘teleological rupture’ in that future trajectories are ‘irrevocably transformed’ (2022: 614) – but also in terms of experiencing social and moral decline as a backwards move in time, when the self, as it ought to be, feels out of sync with the present.…”

Exploring equity in social impact assessment

“…Inequitable outcomes can be witnessed by comparing the recipients of positive and negative social impacts. In a meta-review of mining case studies, Mancini and Sala (2018) found that benefits accrue largely to those able to secure employment and business opportunities, and to a state's revenue, while negative impacts accrue locally, for example through displacement (see also Ramsay and Askland, 2020), increased exposure to health and safety risks, competition for land and water, housing unaffordability, gender imbalance, loss of social cohesion, and human rights violations.…”