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

1. Appadurai in Turton, 2004.

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• refugees
• place
• socio‐ritual
• agency
• material culture

Notes

1. Appadurai in Turton, 2004.

2. The current research project, entitled ‘Answering exile: how Sudanese refugees deal with displacement’, is funded by the AHRC under its Diaspora, Migration and Identities programme. My thanks to that programme, as well as to all the refugees and others who were willing to participate in the research. While my other recent writing has concentrated more directly on the legal, political and material status of refugees in Uganda, this paper will place more emphasis on the socio‐cultural, symbolic and spiritual dimensions of experience. For more on the former (see Kaiser, 2006b and Kaiser, 2007). I would also like to thank Paul Basu and Simon Coleman, co‐convenors of the ‘Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures’ seminar series at Sussex in 2006. It was a pleasure to engage with them through the seminar and I am grateful for their insightful and helpful comments and suggestions on the paper as well as for useful and interesting feedback from other members of the seminar, some of which I have attempted to incorporate here.

3. The Kiryandongo population left home relatively early in the conflict, fleeing the arrival of the SPLA in their villages. There is an assumption within this group that some related people (notably those previously living at the Achol‐pii Settlement) who left later than they (and who are more closely associated with the SPLA), benefited from what had been left behind by them.