Materialising Exile

Materialising Exile
Author: Sandra H. Dudley
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2010
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781845456405

Focusing on the highly diverse Karenni refugee population living in camps on the Thai-Burma border, this innovative book explores materiality, embodiment, memory, imagination, and identity among refugees, providing new and important ways of understanding how refugees make sense of experience, self, and other. It examines how and to what ends refugees perceive, represent, manipulate, use as metaphor, and otherwise engage with material objects and spaces, and includes a focus on the real and metaphorical journeys that bring about and perpetuate exile. The combined emphasis on both displacement and materiality, and the analysis of the cultural construction and intersections of exilic objects, spaces, and bodies, are unique in the study of both refugees and material culture. Drawing theoretical influences from phenomenology, aesthetics, and beyond, as well as from refugee studies and anthropology, the author addresses the current lack of theoretical analysis of the material, visual, spatial, and embodied aspects of forced migration, providing a fundamentally interlinked analysis of enforced exile and materiality.

Exile, Incorporated

Exile, Incorporated
Author: Rosanne Liebermann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2024-08-02
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 019769084X

In Exile, Incorporated, author Rosanne Liebermann argues that the biblical book of Ezekiel makes rhetorical use of the human body to construct a specific in-group identity for its ancient Judean audience--namely Judeans who experienced forced migration to Babylon in the sixth century BCE. As Liebermann shows, Ezekiel encourages certain bodily practices within this group that identifies them as "true" Judeans, while also evoking feelings of disgust regarding the bodies of those who do not conduct such practices. In this way, Ezekiel encouraged an isolationist Judean identity that could survive displacement from the homeland.

Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture

Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture
Author: Chiara Giuliani
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2022-11-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000798461

With a focus on the object and where it is situated, in time (memory) and space (mobility), Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture embodies a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach. The chapters track the movement of the objects and their owner(s), within and between continents, countries, cities, and families. Objects have always been considered with an eye to their worth – economic, aesthetic, and/or functional. If that worth is diminished, their meaning and value disappear, they are just things. Yet things can still fulfil functions in our daily lives; they hold symbolic potential, from personal memory triggers, to focal points of public ritual and religion; from collectors’ obsession, to symbols of loss, displacement, and violence. By bringing into dialogue the work of specialists in ethnology, art history, architecture, and design; literature, languages, cultures, and heritage studies, this volume considers how displaced memory – the memory of refugees, migrants, and their descendants; of those who have moved from the countryside to the city; of those who have faced personal upheaval and profound social change; those who have been forced into exile or experienced major personal or collective loss – can become embodied in material culture. This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration
Author: Friedemann Yi-Neumann
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2022-02-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180008160X

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.

Memory and Family in Australian Refugee Histories

Memory and Family in Australian Refugee Histories
Author: Alexandra Dellios
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000186423

This book revisits Australian histories of refugee arrivals and settlement – with a particular focus on family and family life. It brings together new empirical research, and methodologies in memory and oral history, to offer multilayered histories of people seeking refuge in the 20th century. Engaging with histories of refugees and ‘family’, and how these histories intersect with aspects of memory studies — including oral history, public storytelling, family history, and museum exhibitions and objects — the book moves away from a focus on individual adults and towards multilayered and rich histories of groups with a variety of intersectional affiliations. The contributions consider the conflicting layers of meaning built up around racialised and de-racialised refugee groups throughout the 20th century, and their relationship to structural inequalities, their shifting socio-economic positions, and the changing racial and religious categories of inclusion and exclusion employed by dominant institutions. As the contributors to this book suggest, ‘family’ functions as a means to revisit or research histories of mobility and refuge. This focus on ‘family’ illuminates intimate aspects of a history and the emotions it contains and enables – complicating the passive victim stereotype often applied to refugees. As interest in refugee ‘integration’ continues to rise as a result of increasingly vociferous identity politics and rising right-wing rhetoric, this book offers readers new insights into the intersections between family and memory, and the potential avenues this might open up for considering refugee studies in a more intimate way. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants & Minorities.

Objects of War

Objects of War
Author: Leora Auslander
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501720082

"Discusses the ways in which material culture affected and reflected how people grappled with social, cultural, and material upheavals during times of war"--

Myanmar's Mountain and Maritime Borderscapes

Myanmar's Mountain and Maritime Borderscapes
Author: Su-Ann Oh
Publisher: Iseas Publishing
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN:

This edited volume adds to the literature on Myanmar and its borders by drawing attention to the significance of geography, history, politics and society in the construction of the border regions and the country. First, it alerts us to the fact that the border regions are situated in the mountainous and maritime domains of the country, highlighting the commonalities that arise from shared geography. Second, the book foregrounds socio-spatio practices -- economic, intimate, spiritual, virtual -- of border and boundary-making in their local context. This demonstrates how state-defined notions of territory, borders and identity are enacted or challenged. Third, despite sharing common features, Myanmar's borderscapes also possess unique configurations of ethnic, political and economic attributes, producing social formations and figured worlds that are more cohesive or militant in some border areas than in others. Understanding and comparing these social practices and their corresponding life-worlds allows us to re-examine the connections from the borderlands back to the hinterland and to consider the value of border and boundary studies in problematizing and conceptualizing recent changes in Myanmar. "This ambitious project combines sophisticated theorization of boundary-making as a form of social practice and empirical studies of Myanmar's heterogeneous borderlands, both land and sea. Seeing the country from its edges opens up a provocative and altogether novel vision of the contestations joining diverse peripheries and centre. This volume brings together the leading scholars of the country in a collection that is a must-have for anyone interested in contemporary Myanmar, border studies, and Southeast Asia." -- Itty Abraham, Head, Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS) "This is the first book to attempt to bring together such a diverse range of Myanmar's land and maritime border regions for comparison. In doing so, it highlights the diversity of the country's demographic, social, economic and political make-up when viewed from the margins rather than the centre. It reveals how these border regions help to constitute the nation and how they shape what modern Myanmar is today -- they also give strong indicators of what it might become. This is an essential read for anyone in the social sciences interested in borderlands, as well as those requiring a broader understanding of the challenges facing the contemporary Myanmar government as it attempts to usher in social and political cohesion following decades of conflict." -- Mandy Sadan, Reader in the History of South East Asia, School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS)

Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity

Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity
Author: Joshua Barker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2014
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

This book is an innovative ethnographic work aimed at students and others interested in contemporary Southeast Asia. Its made up of short essays, or portraits, of figures that populate the social and cultural world of contemporary Southeast Asia, figure