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Capricious Worlds covers a period of 20 years of exile. Through the life journeys of Vietnamese refugees, the book presents a world rich in experience and wisdom, where the will to survive is complemented by the skills to do so. Individuals must learn to conquer systems that transform human beings into numbers, and men, women and children into de-personalized figures. The transformations render an unsettling peace that refugees struggle against, inspired by a search for recognition, a search not only for what is lost, but also for what might yet be. The book is about refugees en route to, and in, Norway. It also speaks to the challenges of being exiled in general: a reality for 40 million refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide.
An examination of the plight of the refugees of Burma's protracted civil war, many of whom have fled across the border into Thailand. This study looks at the changing nature of the refugee situation and the responses of the parties involved, including the United Nations, the refugees themselves, and governments in both Bangkok and Rangoon. In the process, Fear and Sanctuary addresses pertinent international questions regarding civil war, ethnic resistance against an oppressive state, displacement, and refugee protection.
When violence occurs in democracies it is often characterized as an aberration. The state that saw human rights violations and failure of law and order in Gujarat in 2002 emerged, even if by its own admission, as a model for good governance. Communal Violence, Forced Migration and the State, through an account of displaced Muslims, challenges this notion. Through the unlikely yet probing lens of displacement, it offers fresh insight into communal violence and is an important resource for the emerging domain of forced migration and the changing nature of the state in a globalized world.
Over the past decade Iranian films have received enormous international attention, garnering both critical praise and popular success. Combining his extensive ethnographic experience in Iran and his broad command of critical theory, Michael M. J. Fischer argues that the widespread appeal of Iranian cinema is based in a poetics that speaks not only to Iran’s domestic cultural politics but also to the more general ethical dilemmas of a world simultaneously torn apart and pushed together. Approaching film as a tool for anthropological analysis, he illuminates how Iranian filmmakers have incorporated and remade the rich traditions of oral, literary, and visual media in Persian culture. Fischer...
This book chronicles the local histories written by modern Palestinians about their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war.
Marred by political tumult and violent conflict since the early twentieth century, Gaza has been subject to a multiplicity of rulers. Still not part of a sovereign state, it would seem too exceptional to be a revealing site for a study of government. Ilana Feldman proves otherwise. She demonstrates that a focus on the Gaza Strip uncovers a great deal about how government actually works, not only in that small geographical space but more generally. Gaza’s experience shows how important bureaucracy is for the survival of government. Feldman analyzes civil service in Gaza under the British Mandate (1917–48) and the Egyptian Administration (1948–67). In the process, she sheds light on how ...
Through the narratives and testimonies of Bosnian refugees who survived ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this title demonstrates how ethnic cleansing has worked its way into people's lives and memories
Wave after wave of political and economic refugees poured out of Vietnam beginning in the late 1970s, overwhelming the resources available to receive them. Squalid conditions prevailed in detention centers and camps in Hong Kong and throughout Southeast Asia, where many refugees spent years languishing in poverty, neglect, and abuse while supposedly being protected by an international consortium of caregivers. Voices from the Camps tells the story of the most vulnerable of these refugees: children alone, either orphaned or separated from their families. Combining anthropology and social work with advocacy for unaccompanied children everywhere, James M. Freeman and Nguyen Dinh Huu present the...
Displacing Territory explores the core concepts of territory and belonging—and humanizes refugees in the process. Based on fieldwork with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Jordan, Displacing Territory explores how the lived realities of refugees are deeply affected by their imaginings of what constitutes territory and their sense of belonging to different places and territories. Karen Culcasi shows how these individual conceptualizations about territory don’t always fit the Western-centric division of the world into states and territories, thus revealing alternative or subordinated forms and scales of territory. She also argues that disproportionate attention to “refugee crises” in ...
This is a history and ethnography of the North-West Frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, an area of increasing strategic interest to the West