The Anthropology of Suffering

Davis, Judith

doi:10.1093/jrs/5.2.149

Cited by 62 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…These intangible losses speak to the specific social networks, relationships, authority structures and institutions through which people previously engaged with each other and with their environment on a day-to-day basis (Kaiser, 2006b). As other writers have shown us, material and non-material losses of different kinds are inseparable from each other in the sense that they are experienced relationally (Davis, 1992;Loizos, 1981).…”

Section: Forced Migration Landscape and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…When people become refugees, they suffer the loss not only of the land, property, assets and material possessions that they have been unable to carry with them when they flee, but also of the less tangible networks, relationships, socio-cultural practices and identities associated with the social and physical landscapes they are obliged to abandon (Davis, 1992;Parkin, 1999). They thus also lose the benefits of a broad familiarity and intimacy with places previously occupied and known as 'home', and the ways in which material objects and other cultural forms were formerly used, managed, negotiated, transacted and understood in home locations.…”

Section: Forced Migration Landscape and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Richards (2004), Davis (1992) and Benoist & Voutira (1994), this paper understands conflict and forced migration as products of and continuous with 'normal' social relations in the sense that they are generated by social and political relations that are amenable to understanding and analysis. Peoples' responses to these challenging phenomena are no less so.…”

Section: Forced Migration Landscape and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, evidence from a range of situations suggests that accommodations are frequently made, with a reduced number and kind of such activities being maintained as the minimum that people can expect to manage with and retain their sense of what it is to be who they are (e.g. Gow, 2002; see also Davis, 1992). In her discussion of strategies employed by Ethiopian returnees, for example, Hammond shows how social norms and conventions can be deliberately subverted or avoided by returnees so that social rules may be maintained even when they cannot be fulfilled (2004).…”

Section: 'Negotiation Of Locality' In a Sudanese Refugee Settlement 381mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kaiser

2008

Mobilities

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This article argues that peoples' affective relationships with the specific physical territories that they inhabit are informed by and constructive of the social relations and practices which are enacted in them. When people are forced to leave their homes, the ways in which they engage with their physical, socio-cultural, political and spiritual landscapes are necessarily transformed. Based on ethnographic research with a group of long term Sudanese refugees in Uganda, the article shows how challenges to socio-cultural, ritual and political identities and activities are just as great as the more tangible challenges to protection and subsistence for refugees.The article examines a number of key socio-cultural activities including funeral rituals and agricultural practices, exploring the extent and ways in which 'place making' in exile involves the active mediation of external factors at a several levels as well as processes of compromise and substitution with respect both to material culture unavailable in the settlement, and also with in relation to social relations and practice.

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Section: Forced Migration Landscape and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Forced Migration Landscape and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Forced Migration Landscape and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: 'Negotiation Of Locality' In a Sudanese Refugee Settlement 381mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kaiser

2008

Mobilities

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“…The individual experience of suffering may here be transformed into a social meaning and social memory (cf. Davis 1992). Daily life in the West Bank is infused with references to violence / resistance through which its meaning is communicated and it is confirmed as unavoidable.…”

Section: Lived and Embodied Experiences Of Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Porous masculinities: agential political bodies among male Hamas youth

Malmström¹

2015

etnografica

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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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The Anthropology of Suffering

Cited by 62 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Porous masculinities: agential political bodies among male Hamas youth

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

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