scholarly journals ‘Life Is Tight Here’

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Morgen A. Chalmiers
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork

Since the civil war began in 2011, 5.5 million Syrians have fled their home country and are now living as refugees. Building upon anthropological studies of precarity, the article draws upon 14 months of person-centered ethnographic fieldwork to examine the contextual specificities of Syrian women’s protracted displacement in Jordan. By foregrounding bodily experience as described by three interlocutors during person-centered interviews, the article considers how subjectivities are reshaped under such conditions. The narratives analysed here illustrate how the precarity of displacement fosters an embodied sense of tightness, constriction and stagnation while reconfiguring temporal horizons and rendering visions of imagined futures increasingly myopic.

scholarly journals MEMORIES AND STORIES OF RETURNING HOME IN KHALED HOSSEINI'S NOVELS THE KITE RUNNER, AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED, A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

2020 ◽  
Vol XI (31) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Spirovska
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Sibling Relationships ◽  
Home Country ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Leaving Home ◽  
Returning Home ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Afghan Civil War ◽  
The Relationship

The aim of this paper is to analyze the acts of returning home, thinking about home and the significance of home and returning home in Khaled Hosseini’s novels The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and in the novel And the Mountains Echoed. As an American writer of Afghan origin, who left his home country as a child and moved to USA, Khaled Hosseini addresses the concepts of leaving home, immigration, and returning home in all of his published novels. In 2003, Khaled Hosseini published his first novel The Kite Runner. This story depicts the friendship between two Afghan boys, whose relationship is broken by the Afghan civil war and the violence before and in the aftermath of the war. In this novel, returning home is an act of redemption on behalf of Amir, for the betrayal of his best friend Hassan. Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, describes the relationship between two women and their lives under the Taliban regime. Mariam’s and Laila’s life stories are intertwined the moment Laila, forced by the circumstances in Kabul during the civil war and the loss of her parents and her home, accepts Rasheed’s marriage proposal, becoming his second wife. The strained relationship between her and Mariam develops into close friendship, which ends the day Mariam kills Rasheed to protect Laila. Laila returns to Afghanistan and visits Mariam’s home. For her, this is an act of paying respect, of visiting a place where she can sense Mariam’s soul and her presence. And the Mountains Echoed presents the life stories of a number of characters, mutually connected in different ways. One of the sibling relationships described is the relationship between Pari and Abdullah who are separated as children. Pari, who leaves her home and is adopted, always feels the strange sensation of being homesick and missing somebody or something in her life. For Pari, who plans to travel to Afghanistan in attempt to find the answers to her questions, the act of returning home is exploring her own personality and heritage.

W. H. Auden

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Galvin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
The Press

This chapter argues that W. H. Auden developed meta-rhetoric in response to his guilt about being too young to fight in World War I and to his reservations concerning the ethics of making verse out of other people’s bodily experience. After demonstrating that Auden’s Spanish Civil War poetry and prose was shaped by his critique of how the press mediates and represents war, the chapter examines his mock reportage of the Sino–Japanese War, contending that ethically motivated self-scrutiny drives Auden’s use of rhetoric during this period and is an unmistakable hallmark of his wartime poetry.

scholarly journals Francoism and the Republican Exiles: the Case of the Composer Julián Bautista (1901–61)

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-173
Author(s):  
EVA MOREDA-RODRíGUEZ
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Central European ◽  
High Profile

AbstractExile studies in musicology have generally focused on Central European exiles fleeing from Nazism; at the same time studies of the Republican exile following the Spanish Civil War have tended to deal primarily with writers rather than musicians. This article intends to address both these areas of neglect by focusing on the composer Julián Bautista, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1940. In the late 1950s, after more than a decade of oblivion in his home country, Bautista, like other anti-Francoist exiles, started to become the object of interest again in Spain, an interest which continued after the composer's death in 1961. By exploring Bautista's presence in the Francoist musical press and in high-profile, state-sponsored events such as the Festivales de Música de América y España, I shall explore the reasons for his rehabilitation – reasons that, far from amounting to straightforward liberalization, seem to have been closely aligned with the strategies of the régime, and the cultural values and historical narratives that underpinned them.

Complicating ‘Victimhood’ In Diaspora Studies: The Saga of Tamils In Exile

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-330
Author(s):  
Kamala Ganesh
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Innovative Strategies ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Sri Lankan Tamils

As an interdisciplinary field, Diaspora Studies has drawn from many disciplines, including sociology, especially from its debates on migration, structure and agency. This lecture draws on my ethnographic fieldwork on the Sri Lankan Tamils in Germany. It analyses their transition following the civil war in Sri Lanka, from being refugee immigrants to becoming a successful diaspora, well integrated economically, yet holding a powerful identity as Tamil nationalists. Fuelled by political commitment and digital connectivity, their innovative strategies as a diaspora have contributed to the propagation of the Tamil cause. Their example extends and complicates the classic notion of ‘victim diaspora’, demonstrating the simultaneity of victimhood and agency.

scholarly journals To Be or Not to Be a Hero

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-114
Author(s):  
Matti Weisdorf ◽  
Birgitte Refslund Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Post Injury ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Benefits ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Collective Narrative

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in and around a so-called War Hero Village (Ranavirugama) in northwestern Sri Lanka, this article traces the social (un)becomings of Sri Lankan Army veterans injured during the civil war with the Tamil liberation front. It argues that such veterans have long been able to draw on a materially rewarding narrative of sacrifice and carnal capital—epitomized in the honorific ranaviru (war hero)—in order to produce a particular kind of veteran citizenship, let alone subjectivity, and thus to pursue socially meaningful post-injury existences. In the eyes of the veterans themselves, however, this celebratory narrative is eroding and a “collective narrative” characterized by a kind of social forgetting of the injured veteran is emerging. Material benefits notwithstanding, this narrative contestation entails a “struggle for recognition” that threatens to leave them not only disabled but also with no one to be, or become.

Help from Abroad

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-134
Author(s):  
Vera Mironova
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Armed Groups ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
Positive Perspective

This chapter covers the involvement in the Syrian civil war by foreigners, some of whom went to Syria and took up arms and others who stayed home and supported the group by other means. For foreigners with an interest in a civil war, their choice is not whether to leave or fight as it is with locals, but whether to go or not. While there are people who come with a positive perspective (going to the foreign battlefield), others went with a negative perspective (getting away from something back in their home country). Some foreigners decided to take a risk and go to the frontline, but other supporters did not. Instead, like local civilians, they actively helped armed groups with media outreach, raising funds, buying and sending equipment, and helping potential fighters move to the battlefield.

scholarly journals Civilian resettlement patterns in civil war

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abbey Steele
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Home Country ◽  
State Building ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The State ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Home State ◽  
Relative Safety

This article proposes a descriptive typology of civilian resettlement patterns in civil wars. The patterns vary in two dimensions: whether or not displaced civilians cluster together or resettle independently, and if they remain within their home country or not. The combination of the factors leads to four resettlement patterns: expulsion, segregation, integration, and dispersion. Expulsion and segregation occur when the displaced cluster, either within the home state (segregation) or beyond it (expulsion). Integration and dispersion occur when the displaced do not cluster but seek to blend in with other communities, either abroad (dispersion) or within core cities and towns in the state (integration). After introducing the typology and illustrating it with examples, the article engages in theory-building to explain variation in resettlement patterns. It argues that resettlement forms are based on the type of displacement that civilians experience, and the perpetrator of the violence. The displacement type influences individuals’ best strategy for achieving relative safety. Within and across wars, groups that experience political cleansing are likely to cluster together for safety. The best destination options for the displaced to resettle depend on the perpetrator, which lead to clustering either within a state if the actor is non-state, or outside the state if the actor is the state or an ally. The argument is illustrated with examples. Finally, the article considers the implications of resettlement patterns for violence, conflict, and state-building.

Power Sharing and Democracy in Post-Civil War States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline A. Hartzell ◽  
Matthew Hoddie
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Power Sharing
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