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- Convenors:
-
Nefissa Naguib
(University of Oslo)
Gisele Fonseca Chagas (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
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- Chair:
-
Dawn Chatty
(University of Oxford)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D299
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The aim of this panel is to understand through words, pictures, and artifacts the practices and textures of the everyday aesthetic experiences of refugees as they piece their lives together against a backdrop of upheaval and impermanence.
Long Abstract:
In political debates as in academic discussions, migrants are often seen as a "problem" in need of a solution. Little attention has been paid to positive aspects to the aesthetic resources people bring with them from their homeland. Through exploring the movement of people, objects, and ideas over time and space, we invite colleagues to elucidate how the past remains present, and how belongings speak. Although in situations of conflict and displacement much of previous social and cultural structures are destroyed, people often find new ways to express, produce, collect, and conserve culture, and, through these practices, to create new spheres of belonging. How do people remember their home from before they left, how do they establish a feeling of belonging in the unstable conditions of the present, and what future home do they imagine? How are ties to homeland—object, places and people—recalled in the aesthetic process? How is significance attached to things made or brought along from the homeland? How is temporality materialized at departures and during settlement? Which items are invested with value, what kinds of value, and how do they transmit knowledge about the past, the present, and hopes for the future? How is loss articulated, if at all, through presence or absence of material objects?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the societal process of arrival after migration, by taking a look at the domestic orders (of things) in an urban context. In shared life-worlds interactions and relations are emerging along assemblages of domestic objects, by which people are forming the contexts where they take place.
Paper long abstract:
The city can be regarded as a specific form of simultaneity (Lefebvre), as a sphere of encounters, exchanges, and coexistence of diverging orders and aesthetics. Arrival after migration is a process which includes practices of wayfinding, of inhabiting, and becoming familiar with unknown surroundings. This process also finds expression in the material orders of households that change or become contested in the course of arrival.
The results of an ethnographic study on material orders of migratory dwellers in Germany suggest the assumption that growing familiarity is not so much expressed through objects as symbolic markers yet rather by the relations people create, maintain, and moreover disconnected by domestic devices. Thus, the ‘qualities’ of things can be as well understand as the manifold experience of relations (Merleau-Ponty) to people or places left behind, to pasts, the present, and notions of prospect living.
In this paper, I will demonstrate, how migrants negotiate between needs and demands in more or less difficult conditions, and how they can create a home, as a specific individual domestic order. Arrival is a process of (post-)migratory social interaction and transformation: it goes along with shifting (gender) roles and relations, it requires a certain ability to adapt to new/unfamiliar conditions but often also necessitates to deal with hardship and loss. The ethnography of domestic material culture allows taking a look at the entangled and shared urban life-worlds, and on how proximity and distance occur along common interrelations that escape the aesthetic assumptions of many debates on migration.
Paper short abstract:
Islamophobia and hostility experienced by British-Pakistanis, has made many second generation British-Pakistanis question their belonging and acceptance in Britain. Consequently, they are asserting their cultural identity as a way of belonging and earning capital.
Paper long abstract:
At a 'women only' dinner dance, organised by two second-generation British-Pakistani sisters, I had the opportunity to observe the women's multiple performances and celebrations of this hyphenated identity. The influence of wealthy Pakistani who had recently settled in Britain had an impact on the second-generation British-Pakistanis. Along with them they had brought an image of Pakistani culture far removed from one that is portrayed in the British media.
For the women I observed at this and similar events, the celebration of their cultural heritage was expressed through food, fashion, music, values and nostalgia. It was through a shared cultural background and interests that women established belonging and recognition. Friendships among British-Pakistanis, and participation and interest in Pakistani cultural events earned the women status and capital. Among second-generation British-Pakistanis, interest in their cultural heritage and affiliation with their cultural identity was initiated in the home through parental influence. Friendships with other British-Pakistanis strengthened this identity. It is through these friendships that women celebrate and share a British-Pakistani culture and negotiate values that earn them respect, power and status. The idea of their identity as a British-Pakistani identity was important for the women. It was an identity they could claim for themselves, one which was constructed from their experiences, upbringing, interests and surroundings.
Paper short abstract:
A visit to a museum in Shatila prompts the ethnographer to think about how rural Palestine and the days of the revolution in Lebanon (1967-1982), the fallāḥ and the fidāʾī, are selectively remembered and forgotten.
Paper long abstract:
Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut where I conducted my fieldwork, is home to a tiny museum, the Memories Museum. This paper recalls my visit to it, which prompted me to think about the ways in which and the reasons as to why rural Palestine and the ayyām al-thawra (the days of the Revolution, the heyday of the Palestinian Military Resistance in Lebanon and other diasporas, 1967-1982) are selectively remembered and forgotten. The Memories Museum celebrates the fallāḥīn's (peasants') saga. For an older generation of Palestinian refugees, who lost close to everything, investment in certain identity markers - the most prominent of which being precisely the fallāḥ, with his strong claims to connection to the land - made complete sense. As a matter of fact, in Palestinian imagery, the land-bound fallāḥ - duly stripped from diacritical markers, in terms of class, origin, kinship and accent - became a unifying figure for Palestinian nationalism. For the generation who came of age during the thawra, the freedom fighter (fidāʾī) worked as the symbolic inheritor to the fallāḥ. Interestingly, at the Memories Museum, however, objects associated with the fidāʾiyyīn saga were partially hidden and not properly identified. In any case, for today's generation, the relation to both figures - the fallāḥ and the fidāʾī - is far from straightforward. It is indeed revealing that present day shabāb (lads) from Shatila seemed to have no idea where the Museum was, with none but a handful having effectively visited it.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the dynamics ways through which Syrian refugees experience their ethnic and national identities in Brazil through activities of cooking and selling "Arabic food" in the streets of the Rio de Janeiro's city.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the dynamics ways through which Syrian refugees experience their ethnic and national identities in Brazil through activities of cooking and selling "Arabic food" in the streets of the Rio de Janeiro's city. In order to discuss how this activity creates new "senses of staying" in the local (im)permanent landscape and opens possibilities to (re)imagine the future, we will focus on the role of the "Arabic food" as a connector which pieces different elements of belonging for the local Syrian refugees such as the necessity to be engaged in a network to make a living, creativity in the "art of selling", objects and modes of cooking, aesthetic sensitivity, and, mostly important, memories of home. Therefore, our aim is to highlight the processes of production, circulation, sale and consumption of "Arabic food" by Syrian refugees, analyzing the ways through which food will be mobilized not only as a channel of cultural mediation between Syrians and Brazilians, but also as cultural constructions on what means to be a "Syrian" and, ultimately, about Syria itself. The data we present here is result of fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2017 in Rio de Janeiro with Syrian's street vendors.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will analyse immigrant stories of Russian-speaking young adults to show how ethics and aesthetics of home-made things that were necessary for their domestic life represent the shift in their local identities and belonging in Finland.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will show how ethics and aesthetics of immigrant practices of making home-made things represent the shift in their new local identities and belonging.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russian families with children immigrated to Finland. Today these children are adults, and their recollections about the arrival to the new place are always full of details describing the material world they faced - new landscapes, infrastructures and items. Especially, mass consumption things are strikingly important in their narratives; they represent the material splendidness of the new country. Hand-made things produced at home have an opposite meaning. Practices of making things themselves of improvised means (that was usual in the USSR) are remembered as shameful signs of economic scarcity experienced by the families in the new society of mass consumption. Immigrants could not be similar to local people in purchasing things. That is why parents should make some domestic items themselves.
However, observing their childhood pasts from their present positions, the young people can re-evaluate the practices of making things at home and the items themselves. In their narratives, the practices of making things are morally approved, and home-made things become aestheticised. The reconsidering is also accompanied by new ideological premises, for example, ecologically oriented. Thus, the old values have been replaced by the new ones. These new values also mark the gap between generations of parents and children in Russian-speaking immigrant families in Finland.
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to show - through photography, voice recordings and poems - how Somalis in London seek to establish relationships that enable reciprocation, and how they ascribe moral value to changes associated with the prohibition of khat in the UK.
Paper long abstract:
On 24 June 2014, khat (Catha edulis) became listed as a class C drug in the United Kingdom. Khat is native to the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. In the UK, khat use increased significantly with the arrival of Somali refugees in early 1990s.
Scholarship on refugees often revolves around testimonials and the protection of 'bare life'. This paper addresses the limitations of this framework and emphasises the importance of paying attention to forms of reciprocation in refugee communities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a London Somali community, I demonstrate through photography, poems and audio recordings of poetry recitals how negotiations of khat use and prohibition came to shape interpersonal relationships.
Khat itself is an artefact that 'travels' from East Africa to London. Gatherings in khat cafes, chewing khat, listening to music, sharing jokes and stories instilled Somali chewers with a sense of life that they once had. But, khat prohibition was also seen by many as a momentum which can revitalise Somali social and political fabric and thus lead to a better life in London and, ultimately, in Somalia. This became particularly visible in polemical poems that I recorded during my fieldwork. These were not just records of personal sentiments. The Somali oral poetic tradition has a long history of political importance to persuade people, to disgrace or to honour, to win hearts or incite hatred. In this context, poems combined an aesthetic and political message about pride and regrets of Somali life in the past, concerns about present and aspirations for the future.
Paper short abstract:
Using the pastry kunafa as an image this paper explores love, longing and family amongst Egyptian expats in Qatar. Food here functions as symbols of Egyptianness, but also displays the social connections across borders that make men full social persons.
Paper long abstract:
A box of kunafa is brought out of a car and put gently into my hand, it is to be carried to Qatar as a gift for Mostafa from his family in Cairo.
Kunafa is a dessert made up of many, many thin threads of crispy pastry which are then mixed with cream and fruits, or wrapped around nuts and spices, or layered on top of cream and cheese, drizzled with syrup. The thin strands of pastry, infinitely delicate, make a picture of the type of loving connectivity gifts of food from home draw across the Middle East.
Mostafa lives alone in Qatar to work and earn, hopefully creating a future where he can build a family. His mother misses him dearly and calls him several times every day just to hear his voice. He laughs at her, and says "Why do you call again Mama, I have no news yet?", but as he hangs up he worries about her, about his father, and his siblings back in Cairo. Gifts of food are both a way to express love and longing, but also, as they are passed on to friends as special treats, they place persons into networks making them whole, as sons, fathers, brothers - embedded social persons. Using Kunafa-strands as an image, this paper traces the connections Kamal, and other Egyptian expats in Qatar have to home, and how sharing foods from home is a way in which he expresses his Egyptianness.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how re-crafting of artisanship in migrancy function as sites where cultural values are affirmed, modified, reformulated or obliterated.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is about how recollections and re-crafting of artisanship in migrancy function as sites where cultural values are affirmed, modified, reformulated or obliterated. Through the lens of crafting jewellery, this is an effort to probe migrancy from a direction that is more able to grasp ongoing transformations beyond the field of rupture. This process may involve treating migrancy as an emergence and partial formation that is responsive to historical roads taken. My sketch of the Armenian jeweller, Artin Safarian, in Cairo, is an effort to get at the question of how specific crafts inform and sustain perceptions of specific historical moments and choices made in migrancy.