Displacement as Condition: A Refugee, a Farmer and the Teleology of Life

ABSTRACT

The focus on migration ‘crisis’ in recent years has reinforced tropes of displacement as a concept that refers to involuntary movement, foreclosing the possibility of thinking through displacement in relation to the politicisation of place more broadly. Here, we take up two radically different case studies – a farmer and a refugee – to ask whether it is possible to speak of displacement beyond assumptions of involuntary mobility, and what theoretical insights doing so might reveal. By bringing attention to these cases, we show commonalities of displacement experiences that have little to do with involuntary movement but are, instead, intertwined in existential processes of having the teleology of life, and the sense of connection to place, disrupted by external forces of dispossession. We argue that, if anthropologists are to understand displacement as a condition, we need to focus on lived experiences of conflict between self, place, and contemporary modes of dispossession.

KEYWORDS:

• Displacement
• migration
• mining
• phenomenology
• place
• refugee
• dispossession

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To protect the anonymity of our interlocutors, pseudonyms are used throughout the paper. Further care has had to be taken in the protection of Alistair’s anonymity and details about the mine proposal and village in which he grew up has been omitted. Both case studies rests on long-term ethnographic fieldwork. In the case of Camille, Georgina undertook fieldwork between 2012 and 2014. During the fieldwork, she spent significant time conducting participant observation research with Camille, both during and after the removal of her children and as Camille attempted to have her parental rights recovered to her through the family court system. Alistair’s case is drawn from an ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with mining-affected communities through New South Wales, which started in 2015. The material cited here was collected during a field visit in 2015 and an interview with Alistair and his family, as well as through review of secondary sources related to the specific proposal for this mine.

2 This article emerged out of conversations that took place during the course of Georgina’s PhD research with refugee women from Central Africa who have resettled in Australia (Ramsay 2016). At the same time as Georgina was writing up her analysis, Hedda was conducting ethnographic fieldwork with mining-affected communities in rural New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Having previously worked with refugees and asylum seekers from East Timor (e.g. Askland 2014a, 2014b, 2015), Hedda was already puzzled by how the accounts from the coal frontier divulged emotions that resonated with those of her former work on diasporic negotiations of exile and home. These emotions, captured in the tropes of dissonance, discontinuity and dispossession, pointed to a rupture in people’s sense of self as it connected to a place of significance (that being the place called ‘home’). Similar emotions were deeply embedded in Georgina’s ethnographic data, leading us to the theoretical proposition forwarded in this article.

3 This case and others that are similar have been outlined in detail in other publications, including Ramsay (2016, 2017).

4 We adopt an understanding of home that exceeds it common reference to materiality and the domestic sphere. Home, in our contention, is a concept that is inextricable from subjectivity. Whilst it is often associated with a distinct and mappable location, the materiality and aesthetics of a particular space, domesticity, privacy and intimacy, we approach home as a concept that cannot be reduced to either of these associations and that transcends traditional ways of looking at individual’s position within space and their identity. Home concerns memory and longing, the past and the present, the creative and the conventional, the physical and the affective, the intimate and the foreign, the spatial and the temporal, origin and destination. Home is at the same time a physical place, a psychological state, and a site of inter-subjective contentment (Papadopoulos 2002). Home, as a concept, speak to localised belonging; it emerges, as Jansen and Löfving (2011: 7) contend, ‘through political and social histories of inclusion and exclusion and is thus not only about place but also about the people through whom we ‘feel-at-home’.

5 The observation that people can be displaced whilst still in place is theorised by Albrecht (2005) who proposes the concept of solastalgia to capture the sense of place-based distress that may emerge when the place where one resides and one loves is under assault (for example due to significant change in landscape due to mining or climate change impacts). Solastalgia has become a widely adopted term in scholarship on individual’s experiences of environmental change. For a review of this literature, as well as a discussion and call for expansion of Albrecht’s argument to incorporate a broader understanding of place and home and to, accordingly, capture the ontological component of place (and displacement), see Askland & Bunn (2018).