The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration (original) (raw)
Related papers
Material Culture and (Forced) Migration: Materializing the transient
UCLPress, 2022
Material Culture and (Forced) Migration argues that materiality is a fundamental dimension of migration. During journeys of migration, people take things with them, or they lose, find and engage things along the way. Movements themselves are framed by objects such as borders, passports, tents, camp infrastructures, boats and mobile phones. This volume brings together chapters that are based on research into a broad range of movements – from the study of forced migration and displacement to the analysis of retirement migration. What ties the chapters together is the perspective of material culture and an understanding of materiality that does not reduce objects to mere symbols. Centring on four interconnected themes – temporality and materiality, methods of object-based migration research, the affective capacities of objects, and the engagement of things in place-making practices – the volume provides a material culture perspective for migration scholars around the globe, representing disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, contemporary archaeology, curatorial studies, history and human geography. The ethnographic nature of the chapters and the focus on everyday objects and practices will appeal to all those interested in the broader conditions and tangible experiences of migration.
Material Culture and (Forced) Migration: Materialising the transient
Material Culture and (Forced) Migration argues that materiality is a fundamental dimension of migration. During journeys of migration, people take things with them, or they lose, find and engage things along the way. Movements themselves are framed by objects such as borders, passports, tents, camp infrastructures, boats and mobile phones. This volume brings together chapters that are based on research into a broad range of movements – from the study of forced migration and displacement to the analysis of retirement migration. What ties the chapters together is the perspective of material culture and an understanding of materiality that does not reduce objects to mere symbols. Centring on four interconnected themes – temporality and materiality, methods of object-based migration research, the affective capacities of objects, and the engagement of things in place-making practices – the volume provides a material culture perspective for migration scholars around the globe, representin...
The invitation to this workshop on the 'archaeology of forced movement' presented a thorny question, connecting the lessons learned from present-day undocumented forced migration and its materiality to those gleaned from the study of past behaviour, mostly relating to the crisis at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Currently, the vast majority of studies that can be assigned to the growing field of the archaeology of forced migration are humanising projects, aimed to broaden the understanding of a current undocumented refugee and migration crisis through the use of archaeological methods: An archaeology of the refugee crisis could help us recognize what these displaced people value when they are forced to leave their homes, what they look for and need during their arduous journeys, and how they arrange their lives when thrust into the unfamiliar (and usually under-resourced) conditions in a foreign place. Archaeological inventories, plans, and descriptions of refugee camps, places of transit, and personal goods could also help local communities accommodate and understand the influx of temporary residents. Archaeology can both protect the distant past and contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the current human crisis. (Caraher & Rothaus 2016) The multiple levels of investigation in the archaeology of undocumented migration suggested by Hamilakis (2016: 134), i.e. sensorial-material, epistemic, affective and archival, are all focused on understanding and even identifying with contemporary migrants' experiences and their interactions with nation states. While three of these levels deal with the here and now conditions of migrants and refugees, the fourth, archival study, involves an approach that combines deeper timescales, materiality and a comparative look at migration events. Such a level of study includes " exploring the entanglement of materiality with temporality as well as the entanglement of the temporality of contemporary migration with other temporalities, such as that of long-term human mobility, of the never-ending era of colonialism, and of other episodes of forced migration in the recent past " (Hamilakis 2016: 134).I fully agree that there is need for a comparative study of both contemporary and past events of forced and other forms of migration using archaeological methods and theory. But, at the same time, one must be acutely aware of the tremendous moral responsibility when dealing with narratives — material or other — of human suffering. In a previous study (Yasur-Landau 2010: 345), I urged to look at migration at the end of the Late Bronze Age primarily as a human history, being the sum of the aspirations, fears and hopes of a great number of real people who went through intense experiences of travel and settlement. A recent blog post (November 20, 2017) by archaeology students at Vassar College, titled " The need for archaeology of Syrian refugees and migrants " , plainly puts forward in a perhaps naïve, yet compelling, manner the raison d'être for this investigation: " This archaeology of forced migration serves to humanize the refugees. Instead of just viewing them as numbers or statistics, they should be seen as people with hopes, dreams, and precious items just like everyone else " (Real Archaeology 2017). Again, agreeing with this point of view, in the present paper I chose not to separate between ancient and modern case studies of refugees, seeking, instead, a method in which both can be harnessed towards putting a human face on these large-scale social processes. Furthermore, I would like to argue here that the archaeology of forced migration might go beyond the use of archaeological methods to illuminate, understand and empathise the contemporary of near-contemporary. Rather, insights from its acute observations about materiality of migrants and refugees (most notably by contributions to the 2016 special issue of Journal of Contemporary Archaeology), and attention to faint details of material culture traits ('archaeology of care') may, with due reflexive caution and 1 University of Haifa.
Object afterlives and the burden of history: Between trash and heritage in the steps of migrants
American Anthropologist, 2018
With modern ruins, there may be diverging perspectives about whether the sites or objects are unsightly waste or artifacts. Among the local communities who routinely come into contact with such ruins, this viewpoint is often actively negotiated, and with it, so is history itself. Scholars of contemporary archaeology discuss the value of tracing these negotiations to understand the wider political and cultural process of historical creation, or negation. The situation becomes more complex in the wake of tragedy or disaster. Here, I explore the relationship of stakeholders on the Arizona–Sonora international border to the material culture of undocumented migrants, the objects left behind along the clandestine wilderness routes of migrant travelers abandoned en masse to ruin, as if in the fallout of disaster. But this disaster is human made, the product of US border policy. I consider these objects as a form of modern ruins that occupy a politically laden dialectical space between trash and heritage, a negotiation with ramifications for border policy. [contemporary archaeology, ruins, trash, heritage, US-Mexico border]
Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Archaeologica, 2019
This article examines the role of archaeology in contemporary society. It works from the premise that archaeology is a form of socio-political action and explores some of the ways in which archaeologies of the recent past can have therapeutic or cathartic effects. Three case studies are presented. The first two focus on the recovery of war dead and the memorialization of conflict landscapes at Fromelles, in northern France, and Peleliu, in Micronesia. The third explores the materiality of unauthorised migration in the US-Mexico borderlands of southern Arizona. The central argument presented in this article is that in an age of global uncertainty, where support for the humanities is in decline and respect for academic knowledge is diminishing, archaeologists should re-position their work to more clearly focus on contemporary social issues. If archaeology is to survive as a discipline it must be seen as being socially relevant research, with the capacity to contribute to contemporary ...
Ethics and Social Welfare , 2021
Feminist new materialist theory has taken up the challenge of reconfiguring politics, ethics and justice in ways that critically account for contemporary forms of materiality, affect and embodiment at work in the contemporary world. There is much at stake in such a project. The crisis of displacement, we argue, is the crisis of capitalism as it impacts on the biosphere of planet earth, necessitating an approach that can account for all the processes essential to life and living. In this paper our intention is to suggest ways of understanding displacement that unites social and environmental justice, while simultaneously merging ethical, political, ontological and epistemological concerns. Building on the nexus of capitalism and displacement, we investigate the confluence of the necropolitical (Mbembe 2003) and the necrobiopolitical (Bubandt 2017; Cooper 2008) as we sketch an uncanny tableau of more-than-human displacements across various entangled cenes – the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Shadowcene and Chthulucene. Our intention is to displace, trouble and haunt the centrality of the purely human in social work. The unfolding crisis of capitalism, we argue, is a crisis of displacement for all forms of life; a crisis that necessitates troubling humanist formulations of justice, care and ethics.
Anthropological Archaeology in 2012: Mobility, Economy, and Transformation
In 2012, archaeologists continued to grapple with large questions concerning process and structure and how they shaped the nature of humanity. The movement of populations, ideas, and material culture stands out prominently, including mobility’s role in promoting social change and how forms of travel and communication, such as pilgrimages or long-distance trade, promoted social interaction. Research concerning the structure of ancient economies acknowledges the amazing diversity within which prehistoric communities organized food production and material goods manufacture and exchange. Social complexity as transformation illustrates how local histories supported alternative pathways to power and how factors such as climate change and environmental limitations might have affected long-term social histories. Finally, there is ongoing interest in modeling human–environmental interactions—in particular, human adaptability in the face of climate change and natural disasters and how particular cultural and natural elements allowed certain societies to be resilient and sustainable in the long term.
Introduction: The 'Material Turn' in Migration Studies
Introduction: The 'material turn' in migration studies , 2016
This introduction firstly discusses the ongoing paradigm shifts in the study of transnational migration, in particular the emergent interest in the convergence of migration and material culture as the starting point of our investigation. Then it highlights three aspects that this Special Issue could further in the current study of migration and materialities: namely, historical consciousness in materialising the migration experience and the notion of generational transmission; the everyday experience of body as the site for mutual constitution between subject and object; and the unique value of a language-based, interdisciplinary-oriented approach. In the final part, it summarizes the four articles that follow, highlighting the contribution that each makes to our overall objective of making a 'material turn' in migration studies, and discusses some ways it could be further developed