The Refugee in Anthropological Perspective

Over the past decade, we have witnessed new and ongoing crises around the world that have forced many people to uproot their lives in order to seek refuge elsewhere. On the news we see aerial shots of battered and dilapidated boats overflowing with passengers, or throngs of people on foot carrying their meager belongings, dusty and tired from the long trek. The visual rhetoric we see in these spaces deeply shapes how we understand refugees, and 'their' lives in 'our' national spaces. Through their movement, refugees raise many powerful questions of interest to anthropologists, but also for policy makers, governments, local communities, and for those who endure forced migration themselves.

We've collected here a few interesting resources for discussing anthropological approaches to refugees, especially in light of the more recent and very visible migration of asylum seekers around and across the Mediterranean into Europe.

First, Mayanthi Fernando and Cristiana Giordano's curated "Hot Spot" in Cultural Anthropology on "Refugees and the Crisis of Europe" collects a number of anthropological perspectives on this phenomenon. As they note in the collection's abstract, the "unprecedented" movement of refugees from Middle Eastern and African countries to Europe since 2015 has "turned immigration, asylum, border control, and state sovereignty into interconnected problems, making migration not only a political event but also a media spectacle." The diversity of issues raised in these short articles -- a mapping of "the histories, geopolitics, ethical imaginaries, forms of sovereignty, and patterns of circulation that state categories of crisis and emergency render visible and/or invisible, in Europe and elsewhere" -- recommend them as course texts in discussing a wide range of anthropological questions centred on this highly visible public issue.

In thinking about what an anthropological perspective can bring to understanding this "crisis," I would highly recommend the interview that appeared in Peeps online forum between anthropologists Monica Heller and Sarah Green on "Shifting the global conversation on refugees" (2016).

For other interesting, but non-anthropological sources, instructors might be interested in the New York Times' feature from earlier this year on the the integration of Syrian refugees in Weimar, Germany. While the journalists who wrote this piece spent months in Weimar, this long-form journalism might be interesting to use in also raising the question of how journalistic and anthropological approaches differ.

Lastly, the Refugee Atlas (http://refugeeatlas.com/) is a visual atlas, whose creators suggest could "help to construct the anthropology in motion, referring to crucial aspects of human condition without any recourse to national, ethnic or cultural essentialism."

The Refugee Atlas project is part of the larger "the European History Atlas Under Construction - the transgenerational project of Strefa WolnoSłowa Foundation organized in collaboration with artistic and research organizations from Warsaw, Paris, Bologna and Antwerp." While this is rooted in a fine arts approach to understanding migration, refugees and multiculturalism, the atlas' juxtaposition of diverse and thematic historical and contemporary images and maps may make it an interesting visual for anthropological discussions. The project organizers worked with youth and seniors of both European and migrant backgrounds to explore themes around memory and history in connection to migration. According to the atlas' creators:

The phenomenon of mass migration often cuts across traditional cultural formations, reveals hidden tensions or unmasks shameful continuities. It catches culture in its movement and shows its perpetual fluctuations, irrevocable unrest. This is why making a visual atlas on the experience of migration requires stepping out of both the journalistic news culture, which changes the “refugee crisis” into another viral celebration of the ignorance, and the injunction to always associate the suffering of the oppressed with documentary sensibility.

What kinds of narratives do these images generate, and how might they reflect or differ what we typically see in the news, or in a quick "Google Image" search?

If you have other resources that would be a good addition to this short list, please let us know via email (anthrolens@gmail.com) or tweet us @anthrolens.

Quick links:

• Refugees and the Crisis of Europe, Cultural Anthropology Hot Spot
• Shifting the global conversation on refugees, Peeps Forum (2016)
• Welcome to Weimar, New York Times (28 April 2017)
• Refugee Atlas

Doing anthropology everywhere

In August we had posted about anthropologists doing work in dangerous contexts, highlighting the imprisonment of Dr. Homa Hoodfar in Iran. While Hoodfar has been released, her story highlights how anthropologists can find people and issues to study everywhere.

Hoodfar is an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). Her research has long focused on issues of gender, Muslim women, and feminism in the Middle East and North America. Hoodfar holds Canadian, Irish, and Iranian citizenships. In February this year, Hoodfar travelled to Iran to visit family and conduct archival research. However, before her departure in March, the Counter Intelligence Unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard confiscated her personal documents (including passport and research), and subjected Hoodfar to lengthy interrogations that resulted in her imprisonment in June 2016 in the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran. Hoodfar was sentenced to 15 years in prison for "dabbling in feminism" and "trying to undermine the Iranian government." After being held in prison for 112 days, the 65 year old Hoodfar was finally released on humanitarian grounds.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Hoodfar's story is shown in her resilience, and her ability to find and do anthropology everywhere. After her release, Hoodfar discussed in interviews how she began to treat her detainment as an opportunity for ethnographic research in the infamous women's prison.

 “I decided, I’m an anthropologist and I’m here, so I can use this as a method of doing anthropological fieldwork,” she told the Guardian. “It wasn’t fieldwork that I had chosen, it was not a project I wanted to write, but there I was.”

The research recast the 30 interrogations she was put through while imprisoned. As she sat facing a wall or a one-way mirror while her interrogators screamed and yelled at her, Hoodfar analysed their choice of words. When they hurled threats at her – “They were telling me, ‘You’ll get 15 years here and we’ll send your dead body back to Canada’” – she contemplated the power dynamics at play.

Although without a pen or paper at her disposal, Hoodfar carefully scratched her notes onto her cell wall using her toothbrush. Following her release, she meticulously wrote out these fieldnotes on the long flight to Oman. Her choice to turn this brutal experience into a research project not only allowed her to express her agency in this highly constraining situation, but also proves that any social context can be a site for anthropological research.

Quick links:

• anthro everywhere! post #FreeHoma: Anthropologists in dangerous contexts (18 August 2016)
• "Exclusive | Iranian interrogators 'threatened to send my dead body back to Canada': Homa Hoodfar" (5 October 2016) - including a 5 minute interview with Dr. Hoodfar that you can watch here about her experience in prison.
• "Homa Hoodfar trying to get back to a normal life after Iranian imprisonment" (6 October 2016, Montreal Gazette)
• "Canadian-Iranian professor: I survived imprisonment by studying my captors" (10 October 2016, The Guardian)

#FreeHoma: Anthropologists in dangerous contexts

Anthropology is a discipline that was born out of colonial encounters and systems of power. Anthropologists have historically been complicit in supporting the people, systems and ideas through our research of often marginalized communities.

Today, however, many anthropologists critique and challenge the very power structures and relationships that our discipline in many ways helped to build. The topics that anthropologists research and the sites in which we conduct our research can put anthropologists in danger, including at risk of imprisonment by governments who read such research as threatening.

Dr. Homa Hoodfar

Homa Hoodfar has been imprisoned since March 2016 by the Iranian government. Hoodfar holds dual Canadian and Iranian citizenships, and has been a professor at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) since 1991. She has explored issues of gender, development, and politics especially in the Middle East, and especially known for her work on "Muslim women's ability to realize their rights within an Islamic framework, and for her critique of essentializing Western stereotypes about veiling."

As the authors of "Academics and Authors In Support of Professor Homa Hoodfar" explain,

"It is not clear what charges the Counter Intelligence Unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard might bring against her.  Any accusations against Prof. Hoodfar are undoubtedly based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of her ethnographic research which has never been a threat to the Iranian regime. Instead, her arrest points to a renewed campaign to target and intimidate other scholars writing about Iran." 

This can be a very real issue for researchers working in such contexts. In 2014, a University of Toronto political science PhD candidate, Alexander Sodiqov, was arrested during his field research in his native Tajikistan. Sodiqov was arrested and detained under charges of espionage and treason. As in Hoodfar's arrest, the "exact rationale for this charge remains murky, and may never be explained. But the wider context is anti–Western feeling and the fact that Tajikistan's security services are cracking down on domestic non-governmental organizations, emulating Putin's Russia." While Sodiqov was released, Hoodfar continues to be detained.

For instructors, these cases highlight how research, knowledge, can be considered a threat by regimes and potentially place the researcher in danger. How do we balance or value the insights of research and the potential risks inherent in conducting it -- for our participants, and for ourselves?

UPDATE 1 November 2016: Dr. Hoodfar's release from Evin Prison was confirmed on 26 September 2016. News reports following Dr. Hoodfar's release, underscored not only the resilience of this woman, but also how anthropologists can indeed find anthropology everywhere:

After a few days of intense interrogations, she decided to treat her time there as field work. Although lacking pen and paper, she used her toothbrush to scrawl her observations on the stone wall of her cell, prompting her cellmates to view her as a kind of mad professor, she said, laughing.
“My age and the fact I was an anthropologist and quite familiar with their techniques was a problem for them,” said Hoodfar, who now plans to write a book on the anthropology of interrogation. (6 October 2016, Montreal Gazette)

Quick links and further reading:

• #FreeHoma website with background and ways to show support
• Academic petition
• Student petition
• "Homa Hoodfar trying to get back to a normal life after Iranian imprisonment" (6 October 2016, Montreal Gazette)
• "Canadian-Iranian professor: I survived imprisonment by studying my captors" (10 October 2016, The Guardian)
• Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) Statement, news and links
• News stories on Alexander Sodiqov's arrest: 
• Alexander Sodiqov, University of Toronto researcher, being detained in Tajikistan (CBC, 17 July 2014)
• U of T fails to act for PhD student arrested in Tajikistan (MacLeans, 31 July 2014)
• How Alexander Sodiqov was freed following espionage charges (CBC, 23 September 2014)