Social and Ritual Activity In and Out of Place: the ‘Negotiation of Locality’ in a Sudanese Refugee Settlement1

Kaiser, Tania

doi:10.1080/17450100802376670

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Similar to my findings, research on protracted displacement and uncertainty shows that while forced migration disrupts long-standing power hierarchies and gendered practices, it also creates possibilities for the reconstruction and renegotiation of identity and social relations (see Grabska 2014;Kaiser 2008Kaiser , 2016Malkki 1995;Turner 2016). My data shows that when forced to adapt to major disruptions to their political, cultural, and gendered world and the uncertainty that accompanies protracted forced displacement, imagination allows a forced migrant to explore alternatives, including possibilities that were previously unknown, or even thought to be impossible, before displacement.…”

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confidence: 79%

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

Chrostowsky

2021

Ethos

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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.

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confidence: 79%

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

Chrostowsky

2021

Ethos

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“…The fact that they did so as refugees was only one part of their story and their experience. Nevertheless, transformation in social process and relationships have been negotiated in interesting ways; the social categories and practices employed have been modified to allow change to take place, while preserving valued features of socio-cultural life (see also Kaiser 2008).…”

Section: Conclusion; Diversity Change and Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk and social transformation: gender and forced migration

Kaiser¹

2016

Handbook on Gender and War

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Forced migration is one of the most visible and disruptive consequences of armed conflict for civilian populations, regardless of gender. People flee their homes, often crossing international borders in order to escape specific instances or fear of persecution or of 'generalized violence' due to conflict and insecurity. As conflict has transformed in the decades since the end of the cold war, front lines have been harder to fix, and civilian populations have borne the brunt of chronic, protracted and unpredictable conflict dynamics. The impacts are staggering in scale; the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced in June 2015 that 59.5 million people are now forcibly displaced worldwide (UNHCR 2015a). No region of the world remains untouched by forced migration. Both Africa and Asia have been heavily affected by large scale refugee movements over the last two decades, and South America has seen a vast Internally Displaced People (IDP) population in Colombia over many years. Numbers of refugees globally (just over 11 million at mid-2015(UNHCR 2015b)) are now considerably lower than those of IDPs (38 million in 2015(IDMC 2015)), for whom flight from danger does not necessarily lead to the crossing of an international border. In Asia, the largest refugee populations by far have for several decades been Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, and large numbers of Iraqis have also been displaced. More recently still, over 3 million refugees have fled Syria, with 6.5 million more displaced within Georg Frerks and Joke Schrijvers (eds.) Refugees and the Transformation of Societies:

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“…The interaction between subjects and objects (and subjects as objects) should therefore hold considerable interest to the social scientist, and perhaps especially so in contexts where subjects find themselves unavoidably among new objects (including the landscape). Yet this materiality approach has not been extensively applied to understanding the experience of forced displacement (the small number of exceptions include Parkin, 1999; Kaiser, 2008; Dudley, 2010a; Turan, 2010). Exploring aspects of refugee life ranging from how people produce and use ritual space to such everyday matters as clothing and food, can enable insight not only into refugees' perceptions of and interactions with the world, but also – and helpfully divergent from the myths of refugee passivity and dependency so often believed by outsiders – into the qualities of their agency and inventiveness (c.f.…”

Section: A Materiality Approach To Forced Displacementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeling at home: Producing and consuming things in Karenni refugee camps on the Thai‐Burma border

Dudley

2010

Population Space and Place

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This article concentrates on production and consumption, particularly of food and textiles, and the contribution of such processes and bodily action to feeling at home, for the highly heterogeneous population of Karenni refugees from Burma living in camps on the Thai border. Looking at eating, weaving and wearing, I examine the implications and associations of the production and consumption processes and their similarities and differences with pre-exile life. I argue that an investigation into sensory aspects of such issues can illuminate how it feels to be a refugee, in a physical sense: to be out of one's familiar place and ecology, seeking actively to bring about a sense of being 'at home' in the exiled context of a border camp. Being displaced inevitably alters forced migrants' connections with the physical world of places, objects and other people of which they are a part. To focus on this aspect of forced migration, rather than following the more usual emphases on causes, protection and assistance, or psychosocial impacts, facilitates exploration of the fundamentally cultural processes through which refugees make meaning out of the rupture they have experienced. It is an approach which demonstrates local agency and makes it clear that refugees are not passive victims, but active agents working hard to make the best of their circumstances. For the Karenni as for other displaced and non-displaced peoples alike, an important part of feeling 'at home' is the cultivation of a sense of spatiotemporal continuity of place and of emplacement. Yet real, physical continuity of place is impossible for refugees: the camp is not and never will be the place whence they have come. I demonstrate that refugees make considerable efforts to create a sense of purpose and home in displacement, and that embodied knowledge and the opportunity for its repeated enactment, and, especially, sensory experience, are central components in this. While the camp is in some ways perpetually becoming more like home, it will never quite be it. Nonetheless, repeated and active engagement in the present with the objects and actions of the past, are in a refugee setting particularly powerful and dynamic in forming and re-forming connections with the pre-exile past.

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Social and Ritual Activity In and Out of Place: the ‘Negotiation of Locality’ in a Sudanese Refugee Settlement1

Cited by 16 publications

References 16 publications

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

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

Risk and social transformation: gender and forced migration

Feeling at home: Producing and consuming things in Karenni refugee camps on the Thai‐Burma border

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