Enacting Citizenship

In June and July 2015, a group of Syrian asylum seekers and local refugee supporters organised a protest camp in Dortmund, Germany. For 53 days, about 50 protesters at a time slept under open tarps on the pavement in front of the city’s main train station, demanding a quicker asylum review process and reunification with their families. This article focusses on the refugees’ interactions with different state actors on the municipal and state levels, and illustrates how the Syrian refugees were able to enact citizenship subjectivities. Through sustained and well-organised public protest, refugees claimed their place within the host community. Importantly, they became active contributors to the debate over Germany’s response to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and proved that political activism can help promote political and legal change.

Reports

Melissa Fleming, A Hope More Powerful than the Sea: The Journey of Doaa Al Zamel (New York: Flatiron Books, 2017), 288 pp.Omar Dewachi, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), xviii + 239 pp.Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, Sonita (Zurich: Xenix Film, 2015), 90 min.Ron Bourke, Terror and Hope: The Science of Resilience (Portland: Collective Eye Films, 2019), 36 min.

‘Life Is Tight Here’

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.

The Obligation Is the Point

This article examines how grassroots refugee-activists and ‘solidarians’ in Greece articulate a collectivist political vision and praxis of care through an expanding network of social obligation that upends narrow understandings of refugees’ ‘basic’ rights and moral obligations of care. The refugees draw on a wide range of universalising collectivist frames including Islamic, Anarcho-Marxist and Palestinian-liberationist frames to articulate visions of solidarity and nurture trust and mutual care amongst refugees.

Introduction

The plight of forcibly displaced persons may have lost the spotlight in the global news cycle due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Middle Eastern refugee crisis has continued unabated. Nearly 80 million people have been forcibly displaced, including millions of Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Syrians, and Yemenis. In this special issue, anthropologists highlight different states of displacement – protracted, repeated and recent – amongst Middle Eastern populations that have fled to Germany, Greece, Jordan and Turkey. Amidst profound precarity, refugees manage to negotiate new geographies of displacement, re-create a sense of home, plan their reproductive futures, organise protests to claim their asylum rights, and engage in activism and solidarity. Featuring nuanced ethnographic studies, this special issue bears witness to refugees’ fortitude and resilience.

Recurring Displacement, Homemaking and Solidarity amongst Syrian and Palestinian Syrian Refugees in Turkey

This article focusses on Al-Nur, a community centre in Istanbul, Turkey, that caters to Syrian and Palestinian Syrian refugees. It is based on five months of fieldwork conducted in the winter and spring of 2017 in Turkey that included participant observation as a volunteer English teacher at Al-Nur. A focus on the philosophy that guides Al-Nur’s functioning as a community centre as well as on the stories of displacement of some of its managers and volunteers sheds light on the importance of being able to (re)create home in exile. Such a focus also sheds light on how repeated displacement has shaped Palestinian Syrian refugees’ experiences of exile from Syria as well as their interactions with Syrian refugees.

‘Min Al-Mukhayyam’ (‘From the Camp’)

This article examines the implications of long-term encampment and exile for the meaning of Palestinian identity amongst refugees. It shows how the conditions of Palestinian camps in Jordan function as a key marker of social difference between refugees of the camps and the city. Whereas camp refugees see the hardships of camp life as conditions to be confronted, urban refugees take them as constitutive features of a socially distinct refugee. As I argue, the distinctions between camp and city refugees illustrate how the refugee category and the humanitarian camp exceed the ideology and function of humanitarianism. They demonstrate how, in protracted refugee situations, the refugee label and the historical context of the camp can become socially significant and contested features of identity.

Qui, entre Orient et Occident, mange de la viande, quelle viande et pourquoi ?

The consumption of meat depends first of all on religious prescripts: unlike Christianity, Judaism and Islam prohibit certain meats. Then comes the cultural status (distinct from the legal status) of animals: in Europe, the consumption of rabbits has declined due to his assimilation to a “pet”. After an increase in the post Second World War period, meat consumption has been declining in Europe since the 2000s; similarly, in North Africa and the Middle East, its consumption tends to be closer to that of Europe. These fluctuations owe more to changes in living modes and standards than to animalist activism.Résumé : La consommation carnée dépend d’abord de prescriptions religieuses : à la différence du christianisme, le judaïsme et l’islam interdisent certaines viandes. Vient ensuite le statut culturel (distinct du statut légal) des animaux : en Europe, la consommation du lapin a reculé du fait de son assimilation à un « animal de compagnie ». En Europe toujours, après une hausse après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la consommation carnée diminue depuis les années 2000 ; à l’inverse, en Afrique du Nord et au Moyen-Orient, elle tend à se rapprocher de celle de l’Europe. Ces fluctuations doivent davantage à l’évolution des genres et des niveaux de vie qu’au militantisme animaliste.

Nourrir les vivants par la grâce des saints

In Iran, the giving of food for a religious purpose is a widespread act among Shiite believers, which can be observed daily in the city and in the villages, in both affluent and popular milieus. In order to understand the social, material and spiritual virtues of such food in the everyday life and worldview of Shiite devotees, this article proposes to analyse the process of preparation and sacredness of such food, and to study some important occasions of votive food giving in the lives of believers. The information in this article comes from previous research carried out in Iranian popular milieus, in some Shiite shrines and at the Behesht Zahra cemetery in Tehran, as well as from interviews conducted for this specific purpose.Résumé : En Iran, le don de nourriture pour une intention religieuse est un acte très répandu chez les croyants chiites, que l’on peut observer quotidiennement en ville comme à la campagne, dans les milieux aisés comme dans les milieux populaires. Pour comprendre les vertus sociales, matérielles et spirituelles d’une telle nourriture dans la vie pratique et la vision du monde des pieux chiites, cet article propose d’analyser le processus de préparation et de sacralisation de cette nourriture, et d’étudier quelques occasions importantes de don de nourriture votive dans la vie des croyants. Les données de cet article proviennent de recherches précédemment effectuées dans les milieux populaires iraniens, dans quelques sanctuaires chiites et au cimetière de Behesht Zahra de Téhéran, ainsi que d’entretiens réalisés à cette fin précise.

L’estomac, le chemin du coeur et la transformation du monde

Based on a survey carried out with middle-class, married, practicing and non-practicing Muslim women living in Istanbul, this work is focused on female relational networks, their link to cooking and gender relations. The article argues that the disruptions, modifications and accommodations put in place by women and men in their management of everyday life are reflected through daily food practices. The study emphasises the pivotal role of older women in the changes in male/female relationships. The disruptions do not seem to be based on one’s positional relation to religion, but rather on one’s belonging to age, class, or social status.Résumé : Fondé sur une enquête réalisée avec des femmes de la classe moyenne, mariées, musulmanes pratiquantes et non-pratiquantes et résidant à Istanbul, ce travail s’est intéressé aux réseaux relationnels féminins, à leur lien au culinaire et aux relations de genre. Par le biais des pratiques alimentaires sont ainsi abordés les ruptures, les évolutions et accommodements mis en place par les femmes et les hommes dans leur gestion du quotidien. L’article insiste sur le rôle pivot des aînées dans les changements des rapports homme / femme. Les fractures ne semblent pas fondées sur le positionnement vis-à-vis de la religion, mais bien plutôt sur l’appartenance à une classe d’âge, ou à une classe sociale.