Paper short abstract:

Syrian Druze women who have married across the border between Israel and Syria with no possibility of return, recount marriage, family, and youth to remember their homeland and protect the identity of their children from the double jeopardy of diasporic life.

Paper long abstract:

Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the last days of 1967’s Six-Day-War. Most of the Syrian Arabs who lived there for generations fled the area in the wake of the conflict, splitting across the UN-brokered border. In a relentless effort to maintain ethnic and demographic sustainability, brides and grooms are sought strictly within the Druze community.

“All my life in Syria, my parents told me stories about the Golan: the villages, the orchards, the hills… When my husband arrived from the Golan to Damascus, it was as if he had descended from The Garden of Eden”. Rabeaa is the daughter of Golan Druze refugees who fled the plateau to Damascus. When she married her cousin, she moved back to the land of her ancestors. Her parents’ stories and memories of the Golan ignited and nurtured her resolve to leave Syria and her life behind to ‘go back home’.

Like Rabeea, other so-called Syrian Brides were stripped of their documents at the Quneitra checkpoint, were forced to re-invent themselves, and go through the core experiences of life on their own. They built their new personal identity using their personal and collective memories from Syria. Now, their experience and stories will mold their children's identity, navigating the harsh reality of doubly diasporic life.

Paper short abstract:

This study utilizes explores the ways in which resettled refugees produce knowledge about themselves and their communities, including how they visually represent themselves and tell stories about displacement. This project includes 40,000 images, with more than 1,700 publicly available.

Paper long abstract:

This study utilizes explores the ways in which resettled refugees produce knowledge about themselves and their communities, including how they visually represent themselves and how they tell stories about displacement through photography and social media. The creation of visual “refugee spaces” include representations of life before resettlement (such as camps in Nepal and Thailand), in resettled communities (including in Utica, New York), and in the digital world created via Facebook, Instagram, and other virtual platforms. Analysis of visual representations reveal the desire to exert agency and self-expression, consideration of the role of elders in community life, revisit shared memories, and document objects that relate to rapid culture change.

This project draws from a collection of more than 40,000 images that have been gathered since 2012, with more than 1,700 of them now available from the New York Heritage Digital Collection via the “Refugees Starting Over” project (https://nyheritage.org/collections/refugees-starting-over-collection). Oral history interviews associated with 100 selected photographs within this collection offer perspectives from refugee photographers and photo subjects, centering the perspectives of displaced people in the viewing of these images. This paper is part of a larger project aimed at making this photography collection accessible to the public, including the creation of grade school lesson plans associated with refugee history, memories, and rights.

Paper short abstract:

Weaving together stories and recollections elicited by listening to Somali love songs, this paper explores the deeply personal and political ‘work’ that memory performs in the shadow of war and forced displacement, with a focus on memory-work as a form of ‘re-membering’ and affective placemaking.

Paper long abstract:

‘Music’, writes Tia DeNora, ‘moves through time, it is a temporal medium’. For this and other reasons, scholars have noted the unique potential of music to trigger memories that are particularly dynamic and emergent—to make the past ‘come alive’, as DeNora puts it. Indeed, during research on the social and political lives of love songs in Somaliland, nearly every conversation I had with a diverse set of interlocutors included some kind of reflection on the way that love songs conjured powerful memories of people, of places, of special moments in individuals’ lives. And in the wake of a war that decimated the artistic sphere and scattered people—and cassette tapes—across the globe, the memories evoked by pre-war love songs seemed to offer a special type of comfort and connection, both for those who had returned to Somaliland and those still living abroad. In this paper, I reflect on the kinds of memories that are facilitated by listening to or speaking about love songs. Weaving together a variety of love song-elicited recollections, I pay particular attention to the kind of ‘work’ that memories perform in the shadow of war and mass forced displacement. Sometimes deeply personal and sometimes political, these stories reveal memory to be about far more than reminiscing about the past. I ultimately suggest that this love song-facilitated memory-work is about ‘re-membering’ the present, to borrow from Anne-Marie Fortier, and a kind of affective placemaking that stitches together people and feeling across space and generation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the idea of embodied storytelling to consider how young people in Pibor in eastern South Sudan are narrating individual and collective pasts, and simultaneously making claims to the promises of modernity and globalisation, especially through song and body art.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on the idea of embodied storytelling to consider how young people are narrating their individual and collective pasts, their presents and their futures. The stories told through permanent body scarification cannot be untold; the designs and images inscribed on the body cannot be undone. These are interwoven with the songs young people are composing and sing as privileged means of individual and collective storytelling: narrating pasts, representations of the present and allusions to visions of the future. Together, these mediums of embodied storytelling are part of a repertoire of communication that young people across the countryside of Pibor draw on to assert personhood, individual and collective identity and claim their place in a changing society and global world. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Pibor in eastern South Sudan, the paper discusses how young people have, since the early 2000s, been incorporating new images and symbols of power and modernity into traditional practices of body scarification and to traditional genres of songs, ranging from symbols of and references to network towers, pens and water pumps to mobile phones and Ak-47s. The paper explores what these means of embodied storytelling and shifting iconography reveal in relation to the militarisation of society and, subsequently, fragmentation of social institutions, and, in turn, to inter-generational relations and transformations.

Paper short abstract:

Chinese immigrants’ nostalgia is promoted both by their individual hardships and by the ethnic memory of suffering. As “eating bitterness” and “speaking bitterness” become collective narration, a community consensus is built and suffering is transformed into an essential nostalgia mechanism.

Paper long abstract:

Based on my fieldwork finding at Birmingham Chinatown in 2021, which shows that suffering works as an important nostalgia mechanism among Chinese immigrants, this paper discusses the mutual reinforcement between immigrants’ nostalgia for the suffering era and their individual experiences. Specifically, the experience of smuggling, illegal working, the upheaval during the COVID-19, and even the cultural dilemma shape the memory of hardship, and the consciousness of eating bitterness (Chiku 吃苦) and speaking bitterness (Suku 诉苦), which developed during the Mao era, encourage them to share their stories, and construct the same narrative for and arouse nostalgia for suffering. Therefore, on the one hand, their immigrant experiences are expressed as hardships; and promote empathy as well as further nostalgia for the historical suffering times; on the other hand, drawing on narrative analysis, immigrants’ narratives of individual experiences are also influenced by the memory and narration rooted in their ethnic identity, in turn, it strengthens their understanding and nostalgia of “the hard but worth remembering time”. While existing studies have shown that nostalgia can promote the continuity of identity (Davis 1979; Todorova & Gille 2010; Wilson 2014), this paper depicts how nostalgia connects Chinese immigrants’ memory with present lives, and how it constructs the immigrant community identity. It might be tempting to regard nostalgia as blissful memory, however, this research argues that suffering narration works as the essential mechanism for Chinese immigrants’ nostalgia, to enable them to “eat bitterness” and gather community consensus.

Paper short abstract:

Relying on the poetics of performance and impression management through explorations of patterned behaviour, the paper investigates the contours of self by being the ‘other’ using the ethnography of everyday stories that partake in the reaffirmation of identity for Ahmadis in the social domain.

Paper long abstract:

In an ‘unwell’ environment, how do the disenfranchised communities claim their trauma and suffering without being shrouded with aspersions and defacement? By helping to constitute the social world, suffering entwines with the social and permeates the barrier of dichotomies existing through institutions and people who refuse to acknowledge these themes as essential denominators in understanding complex phenomena of everyday life.

The paper begins by discussing ‘performance’ as a social tool to understand the predicaments that the domain of suffering expresses but cannot communicate. It also prods us into thinking: Which form of suffering is granted acclamation, and how is it different from the suffering that remains unacknowledged? Phelan (1993) speaks about Identity as emerging in the failure of the body to express being fully and the failure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly. Taking cue from Phelan’s declaration of identity and identification, the paper engages with the everyday experiences of Ahmadi Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir (a persecuted community in Islam ostracised for their religious practices) and highlights the emergence of various creative agencies employed by the community members to sustain their identity. Relying on the poetics of performance and impression management through explorations of patterned behaviour, the paper makes a diligent effort to investigate the contours of self by being the ‘other’. Proposing possible areas of convergence between the interiority of the subjects and their sociality thus leads to yet another important exploration where identifying oneself and trying to find a familiar space in the vastness of their reduced individuality is a concurrent phenomenon. The relation between real and representational is redefined using the ethnographic vignettes of everyday stories that partake in the reaffirmation and shaping of identity for Ahmadis in the social domain. Thus, story narration becomes a means to generate visibility of the Ahmadi community that is otherwise unmarked and under-represented.

Paper short abstract:

This paper elaborates on the practices and spaces of storytelling and memory-making and their intersections with humour, joking and laughter by engaging with two different post-war contexts: the Bangsamoro liberation struggle and the Guatemalan civil-war.

Paper long abstract:

Laughter and trauma are intimately entangled with one another. In the Cotabato region (Southern Philippines), Moro Islamic Liberation Front adherents would occasionally joke and laugh while telling stories of war atrocities and suffering inflicted on them and their communities by the Philippine state; equally jokes and laughter formed part of a theatre-play created by young people in Southern Mexico about the violence their parents and grandparents suffered during the Guatemalan civil-war. Such ethnographic moments are unpacked in this paper to elaborate on the practices and spaces of storytelling and memory-making and their intersections with humour, joking and laughter. By engaging two different contexts that however share certain features of internal warfare (Bangsamoro liberation struggle in the Philippines and the conflicto armado interno in Guatemala), this paper seeks to highlight how both spontaneous and crafted acts of humour and laughter contribute to the social making of moral communities. The past enters the present in the form of shared laughter that have individual and collective significance. That is, more than a means of dealing with trauma, such laughter and humour also (re)produce and reiterate community bonds. While comical acts can be viewed as disruptions in the context of civil war atrocities, loss and trauma; we instead propose understanding them as continuities of community-building, survival, and defiance amid the uncertainties and ruptures of post- and ongoing conflict.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is relevant for ethnographers who are archiving ephemerality in a variously unwell world, where the danger of erasure is rising. While restoring narratives from a "community of memory" may produce a collective history absent hitherto; does it perpetuate a "dominant narrative"?

Paper long abstract:

Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar is a weekly market for second-hand books, operating in Old Delhi for the past six decades. It has been officially recognized as a “natural-market”, "where buyers and sellers interact without significant institutional intervention". However, a hyper-institutionalised world that is ambitious about the "beautification" of the cities of the Global South may erase this bazaar. The pandemic has only added to the insecurity. So, what happens when the history of this impermanent yet culturally and economically significant site is absent?

In this paper, I will critically review my methodology of documenting the history of Daryaganj book-bazaar. While collecting narratives from its primary users –– the booksellers and the book buyers –– I asked them, “You are a character in my book; would you like to share your story?”. They narrated their personal histories: their discovery of the bazaar as a space for business or "joy", their everyday and/or repeated “arrival” in the bazaar, their “lagaav” (attachment) for the place. By participating in this project and recalling their experiences of resilience, these users have come to embody the collective history of the bazaar. However, the story produced by this “community of memory” may perpetuate a dominant narrative that excludes the experiences of marginalized members. I will examine such external or internal restrictive “boundaries” (Thomas F. Gieryn), to understand the deficiencies in the process of memory-making and archiving. This study becomes more relevant in a socially, medically, and economically unwell world, where the danger of erasure is only intensifying.