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ABSTRACT
This article examines how young unaccompanied refugees living together within the confines of an asylum centre in Denmark construct different kinds of social relations and the meanings attached to these relationships. By investigating their routinised practices of everyday life as ‘rituals’, I analyse how young refugees negotiate different kinds of relatedness that enable them to exert agency. The ethnography points to the progression and expansion of different modes of relatedness to include friendships as well as consociate relationships, both with peers with whom they create a sense of community, and with adults who help them navigate the asylum landscape. The study underscores the deeply social nature of the young refugees’ agency. I argue that in the intensity of living together they transform weak ties into strong ties, described through idioms of friendship and kinship, that express the profound meaning of these relationships in the context of the uncertainty they face.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the young refugees who were part of this research. I am also grateful to the Red Cross staff and teachers for their generosity in creating ample opportunities for my fieldwork to unfold. I would also like to thank Amanda Kearney, Zachary Whyte, Daniela Lazoroska and especially Karen Fog Olwig for their careful readings and suggestions on earlier drafts of the article. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous peer-reviewers and the editor for their fruitful insights and suggestions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 With due regard to the legal distinction between the terms ‘asylum-seeker’ and ‘refugee’, I use the latter term to refer to those who applied for asylum even though they have not yet been granted refugee status. This is reflective of the emic wording of my interlocutors, who referred to themselves as such.
2 For a comprehensive overview of deterrence measures across the Scandinavian countries, see Gammeltoft-Hansen Citation2017.
3 Up until 2007, Denmark received an average of a hundred unaccompanied minors every year. By 2009, there were over five hundred arrivals every year.
4 The names of the asylum centre and all interlocutors have been changed to preserve anonymity.
5 In the autumn of 2016 there were a total of 48 asylum centres, but numbers fluctuate constantly, as centres open and close on a regular basis.
6 However, as a female anthropologist I spent a considerable amount of time with the two Muslim girls, who would often invite me to spend time in their rooms or to eat with them.
7 The use of technologies as a way of relating cannot be discussed here, but it is important to note that, by means of smart phones, young refugees also negotiated and contested relatedness with their family, relatives and friends, both locally and globally.
8 According to Barth (Citation1969), ethnicity is constructed in specific situations as social groups demarcate themselves as culturally different in relation to others.
9 The pocket money they received increased as they moved through the asylum-seeking process from Phase I to Phase II, that is, before and after the immigration authorities decided that their case would be assessed in Denmark (cf. Verdasco Citation2018b). In 2016, unaccompanied minors in Phase I received 850DKK (115€), whilst those in Phase II received 1100DKK (147€).
10 The Red Cross staff and teachers had a mixed ethnic composition, some having shared the experience of asylum-seeking during the 1980s and 1990s.
11 The opportunity to live in a shared apartment with other young refugees was an exception available to a few refugees whom the staff considered would benefit from independent housing. Following a tightening of asylum accommodation policies, this practice was discontinued in 2017.
12 Interviews and participant observation took place in English and Danish, and the emic phrases ‘my friends’ and ‘mine venner’ were used. Had I used an interpreter, kinship idioms may have been more widely used instead.
13 The Dublin regulation is applicable to unaccompanied minors when the minor has a family member or a sibling living in another EU country who can take responsibility for the ‘child’, ‘provided that it is in the best interests of the child’ (Article 8).