Forced Migration and Forced Disjunctions: An Exploration of Imagination's Role in Changing Long‐Standing Cultural Identity and Lifeways

Abstract

In this article, I show how attention to cognitive processes such as imagination can help anthropology better understand the contextual factors that influence change in long-standing cultural identity and lifeways.Using data from a 14-month ethnographic study among returned male Dinka Bor of Southern Sudan, I illustrate how imagination allows a forced migrant to explore alternatives, including possibilities that were previously unknown, or even thought to be impossible, before displacement. As forced migrants in my study adapted to their new environment, including major disruptions to their political, cultural, and gendered world, certain events, experiences, and scenarios were more cognitively available. These salient and easily available contextual factors are influential not only in short-term solutions but also in the reconstruction of identity and imagined futures.This empirical case shows a pattern among some male Dinka Bor forced migrants who appear to subscribe to a newly developing Dinkahood that includes an understood urbane lifestyle and an imagined future that differs from customary Dinka Bor identity and lifeways.Many forced migrants around the world find themselves in asylum locations for a decade or more. In this type of protracted displacement, forced migrants find themselves "stuck in a present that they do not want to inhabit and awaiting a future they cannot reach" (Brun 2015, 19). Further, they experience a sense of protracted uncertainty in which "the past and the present are marked with precariousness and unpredictability" (Grabska and Fanjoy 2015, 76−77). This uncertainty proved to be the reality for many Dinka Bor forced migrants who fled conflict in Jonglei state in the south of Sudan during the 22-year-long Second Sudanese Civil War (1983War ( −2005. Many of them averaged 10 to 15 years in asylum. In their various asylum locations, they often faced cultural beliefs, values, and gender norms that were radically different from those in their places of origin. As a result, these Dinka Bor experienced a rupture, or disjunction, between their customary cultural identity and lifeways and the constraints placed on (or freedoms from) their conventional practices. These protracted challenges to their customary Dinka Bor cultural identity and lifeways were overladen with the burden of an unknown future, of wishing to return, but not knowing when or if peace would arrive. The difficult task of dealing with these cultural disjunctions and an unknown future became an enduring normality for Dinka Bor living in asylum.This article sheds light on the effects of protracted displacement and uncertainty on male Dinka Bor identity among those who fled during the Second Sudanese Civil War.

Research on Cultural Confidence of Contemporary College Students and Its Cultivation Based on BSO Algorithm

“…Young college students are the representatives of the new strength of the country, one of the main forces of socialist modernization construction, and the main force for the future prosperity of China's various construction projects [11][12]. Young college students' strong cultural confidence in the modern period is crucial for advancing socialist modernization and developing top-tier inventive potential [13][14]. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the fundamental meaning of young college students' solid cultural self-confidence in the modern day and their specific route to realizing such confidence.…”