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Paper short abstract

Far from benign benevolence, humanitarian ideals are employed by international organisations to reshape refugees. Drawing on ethnographic research with Bhutanese refugees, this presentation argues that as refugees perform humanitarian values, they conceal alternative constructions of themselves.

Paper long abstract

Over 20 years ago, close to one hundred thousand Bhutanese became exiles in Nepal. Living in camps run by the UNHCR the Bhutanese, as a participant informed me, "learn to be refugees". International organisations hold clear expectations of refugees and attempt to mould the Bhutanese into a particularly deserving subject. Thus, rather than physical containment and on-site surveillance, the emphasis in Nepal is governance from a distance achieved through radical moral reconfiguration. Shared humanitarian ideals, rather than direct surveillance, become a means to maintain social order. These endeavours aspire to remake the world by designing righteous humanitarian subjects (Fassin 2012).

The Bhutanese recognise the necessity of reflecting the ideals of equality and democratic governance promoted by international organisations in the camps. To access resources the Bhutanese must appear not only to adopt but also to internalise these values. Consequently, the Bhutanese cultivate an image of domesticated (controlled) subjects eligible for ongoing care and support. This performance requires the Bhutanese to transform their existing values and social norms. Drawing on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic research in Nepal and Australia, this presentation argues that as the Bhutanese perform the values of international organisations, alternative constructions of themselves are concealed. The refugees reinvent themselves to mirror the expectations of humanitarian agencies in the camps. Far from benign benevolence, humanitarian ideals are employed by international organisations to reshape refugees.

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Paper short abstract

The need for seasonal agricultural labour connects transient populations to regional Australian communities. This paper explores how senses of place are constructed and maintained through intersecting identities, ideas of temporariness and stability, and belonging and exclusion.

Paper long abstract

Seasonal labour is integral to regional Australian social structures and has considerable significance for the maintenance of agricultural industries. Seasonal labour is further sustained by place- and industry-based migration schemes, contributing to regional areas being dynamic and culturally diverse locations. While regional communities and transient labour populations are mutually interdependent, this relationship is made complex by the seemingly divergent narratives of transience and stability that become embedded in the local space. Within employment contexts, the seasonal worker exists temporarily, but the need for their labour is more permanent. The temporal and spatial conditions that structure individual experiences, however, often limit the performance of everyday life to marginal social spaces. This overemphasised focus on workers' contributions to local economies presents regional space as exclusionary. In addressing these issues, this paper questions how senses of place are constructed and maintained in regional communities where agricultural industries are reliant on transient labour populations. By exploring the experiences of seasonal workers, farmers, and other 'local' residents, this paper positions itself within broader themes of identity, mobility, temporariness and stability, and belonging and exclusion. This paper constitutes part of an initial PhD thesis proposal focussing on regional Queensland. This spatially defined study will explore sites where seasonal workers, farmers, and other local residents intersect. The dynamic flows of movement presented here are in contrast to ideas of stable regional identities, and touch on the exploitation of temporary migrant workers recently revealed in national media discourse.

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Paper short abstract

The paper presents a PhD research on how second generation Turkish Australian women imagine the moral code of modesty (namus) using own moral agency in negotiating between various moral systems in the processes of identity and moral self construction in the context of multicultural Australia.

Paper long abstract

The proposed paper will introduce a PhD project that explores the everyday life moral choices of second generation young Turkish Australian women living in Melbourne. It focuses on how these women imagine a culturally specific type of gender-based honour - modesty (namus) - and how they employ their own moral agency in negotiating between variety of moral systems in the processes of identity and moral - self construction in the context of multicultural Australia.

Research suggests that young Turks in Australia and their personal sense of self suffer under essentialist discourses of the homogenized 'Muslim other' as such category, being accorded to religion, may not concur with individuals' own developing social and cultural identities (Hopkins, 2008). Therefore a central aim of this research is to investigate the plurality of attitudes to morality and practices of modesty to disrupt such representations.

In attempt to answer the anthropology of morality's call for turning attention to moral aspects of social life, the research intends to alter the Durkheim's legacy of the moral as confined to 'unreflective norm following' (Mattingly, 2012). Conversely, Piaget's view accentuating 'the growing child's ability to actively construct her own moral guidelines' (Eberhardt, 2014) has provided the impetus to reconsider the role of subjectivity in the process of moral identity construction. For instance Marranci (2008) and Damasio (2002) point to the urgency of drawing more attention to the relationship existing between the self, identity and identity acts in the context of second generation minorities youth.

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Paper short abstract

Posthumanism accepts human emergence in the surrounding environment as part of that environment’s ‘becoming.’ Anthropologists, past and present, grasped the need for this perspective. In this way, morals cannot be ‘separate’ from the emergent becomings of environment; they too, are environment.

Paper long abstract

"Ethicality is part of the fabric of the world; the call to respond and be responsible is part of what is. There is no spatial-temporal domain that is excluded from the ethicality of what matters" (Barad 2007, p. 182). To perceive the universe thus, disallows the fragmenting divide between nature/culture and closely follows Bateson, Steiner, and Ingold in their wayfaring anthropology.

Bateson warned against attempts to control what is not understood, and of dismissing as lesser, all that is not human (2000, pp. 268-269 & 468). Steiner argued against the notion of individualism and against logic as the only path to knowledge (Steiner 1999, p. 240 & 295). Ingold wants anthropology to recalibrate humans into the universe's unfolding (Ingold 2010, p. 3).

Posthumanism is a call to accept human emergence in the surrounding environment as part of that environment's emergent 'becoming.' Talking humanities lingo, the particle physicist Barad, aligns quantum insights into the reality of matter with human matters.

I argue this aligns with a moral anthropology, past and present.

Barad, K 2007, Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, Durham & London.

Bateson, G 2000, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.

Ingold, T 2010, 'Anthropology Comes to Life', General Anthropology, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1-4.

Steiner, FB 1999, Franz Baermann Steiner: Selected Writings Volume 11: Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilisation eds J Adler & R Fardon, Berghahn Books, New York & Oxford.