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- Convenors:
-
Elena Borisova
(University of Sussex)
Jérémie Voirol (University of Manchester)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 01/052
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to generate insights about how migrants carve out lives worth living without reducing their experiences to the suffering inflicted by oppressive migration regimes, and what purchase current trends in anthropologies of the good and morality have to offer to migration research.
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to generate insights about how migrants carve out lives worth living and create the good in different domains of their lives without reducing their experiences to the suffering inflicted by oppressive migration regimes. It explores what analytical and empirical purchase current trends in anthropologies of the good and morality have to offer to migration research. As Katerina Rozakou argued (2019), our gaps in knowledge about migration originate not necessarily from the lack of access to certain sites, such as refugee camps and detention centres, but from our epistemological imagination, which colours our writing with 'particular aesthetic modalities'. Although recent research on migration has paid attention to the relationship between (im)mobility and the imaginative, the desired, and the hoped for, much of current migration scholarship is still produced along the lines of 'suffering slot anthropology' (Robbins 2013). Without downplaying the importance of critically analysing the issues of power, violence and inequalities, we ask, how can moving beyond the 'analytic of desperation' (Elliot 2020) help us understand the multiplicity of lived experiences of (im)mobility in their fullness? How can we balance out the focus between suffering, violence and power with attention to the good? And how can this approach further destabilise the worn out dichotomies, such as forced/voluntary, economic/humanitarian migration premised upon different hierarchically organised types of suffering that dominate public and policy-making discourse? We welcome submissions grounded in fine-grained ethnographic research across different contexts that look at migrants' and their families' projects of self-fashioning and creating valuable lives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Within this paper I draw on 4 years of ethnographic fieldwork with young Chinese migrants in Tokyo to posit that extant framings of migrant community reduce questions of togetherness to a political economy of exclusion. I focus on play as a way of moving beyond the migrant as 'suffering subject'.
Paper long abstract:
Within this paper I draw on 4 years of ethnographic fieldwork with young mobile Chinese people in Ikebukuro, Tokyo to problematise how we frame migrant togetherness. I posit that extant framings of migrant community rely too heavily on negative aesthetic modalities that reduce questions of togetherness to coping strategies within a political economy of exclusion. Whether as Chinatowns, enclaves, networks or communities, much of the work on Chinese migration has focused on these socialities as a politics of recognition that responds to forms of marginalisation. However, for new and relatively mobile Chinese people in Tokyo, the politics of recognition and concerns about stigma are often a lower priority than we might assume. Finding inspiration in theories of play and playfulness, I explore how learning from the playful practices of migrants is an important opportunity for social theoretical reflection. There is a rich tradition of ethnographic work on migrant playfulness, and on play as a concept metaphor for anthropological inquiry. Yet, within migration studies and its cognate fields these approaches are too often side-lined through a focus on migrants as suffering subjects. From challenging assumptions about migrant communities and identities, to theorising how meanings and affects are re-produced in new contexts, putting play at the centre of migration studies affords new possibilities. It directs our attention away from focusing on those who move as a means to address the ‘problem’ of migration, and encourages us to learn from migrant lives to reflect on other anthropological horizons.
Paper short abstract:
Despite the difficulties many migrants in Russia faced during COVID-19, Kyrgyz migrants from Kara-Kulja in particular helped each other in different ways, depending on the migrants' needs.
Paper long abstract:
Kyrgyzstan remains one of the most migration dependent regions in the world. It is no surprise then that when borders closed and lockdowns came into place in the wake of Covid-19, this part of the world was struck particularly hard. During the pandemic, migrants from Kyrgyzstan as well as from other Central Asian countries were frequently in the news. As borders closed, thousands of migrants were stuck on the Russian-Kazakh border. With many migrants unable to work during lockdowns or not able to travel to Russia, remittances plummeted before rapidly recovering as migration restarted. However, despite the difficulties many migrants in Russia faced during COVID-19, Kyrgyz migrants from Kara-Kulja in particular helped each other in different ways, depending on the migrants' needs. My informants indicated that they understood the importance of translocal lineage communities especially in the times of COVID-19, when there was no support from Russia or Kyrgyzstan and they had to rely on themselves. The COVID-19 pandemic actually strengthened this informal social security network. Many community leaders worked on a volunteer basis. Thanks to the strict written record of the names of the lineage members held by leaders and Whatsapp connection, it was possible to reach almost everyone. They managed not only to help their own lineage members, but were also asked to assist the Kyrgyz Embassy in Moscow.
Paper short abstract:
Berlin’s anglophone comedy clubs are insightful for migration research beyond the ‘suffering subject’ because they provide a space that facilitates coping with challenges that result from arriving in the German capital: club owners, comedians and members of the audience come from all over the world.
Paper long abstract:
The largest anglophone comedy scene in a foreign-language country is in Berlin. Indians, Israeli, Palestinians, US citizens, Russians and Ukrainians laugh together in clubs whose programmatic impetus responds to the turn that world politics has taken with Trump, Putin, Brexit and other disruptive events. Insights from a participant observation in these clubs from 2017 to 2019 thwart the assumption that the reception of humour always reveals and even reinforces cultural differences.
“As-salāmu ʿalaikum” − Toby Arsalan, a host, always gets an immediate many-voiced “wa-alaikumu s-salām” in reply, and then states, “many Muslims in the show tonight”. However, a lot of comedians and members of the audience identify as Jews and/or Israeli. Arsalan has fun bringing them together: “They have so much in common; an important book and an important God”, moreover, circumcision could be a vantage point for a powerful ecumenical movement. “Scissors could be a brand! Rock, paper, scissors … You know the game?” Arsalan imitates the movement of scissors with his fingers and asks, “Couldn’t this be an appropriate response to the Nazi salute?”
Humour is not only in the punchlines, it is somehow in the air, and wraps up the new Berliners in a cosy atmosphere that is opposed to the separating centrifugal forces resulting from populist politics and fuelled by German neo-Nazism. Those who refer to themselves as expats stubbornly enjoy being in Berlin. The paper suggests an approach to “the multiplicity of lived experiences of migration in their fullness” by taking their light-heartedness seriously.
Paper short abstract:
Arguing for a focus on “the good” in studies of migration, I show how Salvadorans leave their home country, in part, in search of relationships of confianza (deep trust) lacking amidst endemic gang violence. Privileging confianza over violence theoretically allows for a migrant centered analysis.
Paper long abstract:
Theorization of Salvadoran migration towards the United States often privileges US hegemonic power (see Bibler Cutin 2007). Although helpful in tracing the effects of globalization and neoliberalism, such analyses render Salvadoran migrants as suffering subjects (Robbins 2013) lacking agency (c.f. Arnold 2015). In short, according to these studies Salvadorans are unable to live a good life as opportunity structures (Fischer 2014) do not exist. In this paper, given ethnographic evidence drawn from fieldwork I conducted in rural El Salvador from 2018-2019, I argue that a focus on “the good” (Robbins 2013) can nuance our current understandings of migration as sites of suffering and power.
I hold that Salvadorans actively seek ways to live a good life amidst violence through creating confianza (deep, mutual, transactional trust) with one another. Confianza has become international due to decades of migration away from El Salvador. Because confianza dictates what kinds of transactions one can take part in, the types of conversations one has, and how one can dodge threats of gang violence, Salvadorans remaining in El Salvador must decide where their strongest bonds of confianza are located and if they will follow them across borders. Through this focus on confianza and the pursuit of the good life amidst violence, my analysis relocates agency away from global structures back to the migrants themselves. By interweaving the good with the suffering, I hold that this paper may act as a bridge between past studies of Salvadoran migration and the anthropology of the good.
Paper short abstract:
An epistemological orientation of migrant time as future driven rather than present focused often obscures the subjective process of change while remaining in place. The figure of the Nigerian entrepreneur in a time of China rising reconfigures the ‘suffering’ subject into a subject at speed.
Paper long abstract:
One explanation for the endurance of the ‘suffering slot’ in migration studies can be traced to an epistemological emphasis on migrant time as oriented toward the future rather than attentive to the present. From a perspective of futurity, migrant journeys are plagued by uncertainty and precarity captured by idioms of slowness or stasis. Shifting our focus to the present and tracking other temporal structures reveal that migrant lives are also imbued with acceleration and speed.
Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Nigerian entrepreneurs in Yiwu, China, I follow the experience of one Nigerian entrepreneur, Chinaka, over the span of two years. Unlike narratives of African migrants who face limited prospects overseas, in China, Chinaka was confronted by the tyranny of choice. Chinaka had cycled through a multitude of possible roles: student, chef, intermediary, trader, bouncer, salesman, and translator. Taking up multiple roles is a mechanism whereby one can ‘speed up’ oneself. Speed, here, is defined as an immersion into foreignness to create distance and then intimacy between the familiar and the foreign. 'Speeding up' oneself became a means to make the most of one’s time in China and to undergo a personal transformation of change while remaining in place. Thus, a subject at speed is a response to the pace of China rising in hopes of accelerating through the impasse that brought them to China in the first place. The historical conjuncture of China rising and Nigeria ‘regressing’ gives urgency to the present to rethink African migrant time.