New neighbours in a time of change: local pragmatics and the perception of asylum centres in rural Denmark

ABSTRACT

Asylum centres in rural areas are an increasingly common mode of managing asylum seekers in Denmark. These centres’ arrival occurs in a context of protracted rural crisis, as demographic and economic changes reshape local communities. Yet research on these processes remains scarce, issues concerning asylum and the rural being seldom conceived together. At the same time, majority population attitudes towards refugees are often depicted through the opposed poles of xenophobia and humanitarianism. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines the meanings and consequences of asylum centres for rural Danish communities. Drawing on anthropological theory on the mutuality of social life we argue that asylum centres become embedded in pre-existing relations within local communities and between them and the centralising Danish welfare state. Local communities sometimes were initially sceptical about asylum centres, but they generally developed a collective, pragmatic approach towards them in contrast to the divided, ideological cast of national debates on asylum. By shifting focus from the national to the local, from the urban to the rural, and from the migrants to the neighbouring communities, a less polarising and more everyday mode of relating to the arrival of asylum seekers becomes visible.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum centres
• Denmark
• rural communities
• interactions of mutuality
• local pragmatism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Zachary Whyte http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4767-4307

Notes

1 Here and in the following, we are using ‘pragmatic’ in its dictionary sense, as ‘the quality of dealing with a problem in a sensible way that suits the conditions that really exist, rather than following fixed theories, ideas, or rules’ as opposed to pragmatism as a philosophical doctrine (The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pragmatism, accessed 13 March 2018).

2 The limited statistics available on the impact of asylum centres in local communities suggest that they generally do not result in increased crime or lower real estate values (Bolius Boligejernes Videncenter 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Landdistriktspuljen [Grant Number 1022-370].