1,721,006 research outputs found
Keeping the faith: Syriac Christian diasporas
No full textIndigenous Christian communities in Turkey and the Middle East have declined dramatically in recent years, with large numbers emigrating in the face of violence, war and conflict. Keeping the Faith explores the impact of historical persecution and massmigration on the Suryoye, Syriac Orthodox Christians, from Turkey. Victims of genocide in 1915-16, subjugated by state nationalism in the Turkish Republic, part of the Turkish exodus of guest workers to Europe post 1960 and hemmed in by the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in the last decades of the twentieth century, they dispersed globally from eastern Anatolia. Only a few now remain in Turkey.This book argues that these experiences migrated with those who re-settled abroad and became incorporated into their life story. Heidi Armbruster's ethnographic fieldwork both in rural villages and a monastery in their Anatolian homeland, and with migrants and their families in Berlin and Vienna, allows her to investigate a number of contexts in which Syriac Christians create identities for themselves, contested through the potent symbolic resources of the Aramaic language, Christian religion, and Assyrian and Aramean ethnicity.Suryoye personal relationships to a collective history are not accessed through historians' accounts or institutional narratives, but through the intimate social worlds the author sensitively observes, in which experience and memories are formed, and in which individuals articulate their stake in a larger and more collective story. This discourse centres on 'community endangerment' and lies at the heart of negotiations of identity, family and group membership that are key to the spatial and historical processes of migration and diaspora. This account delineates with wonderful clarity how 'keeping the faith', has both imperilled and formed the foundations of continuity and community, for this fascinating group
'With hard work and determination you can make it here': narratives of identity among German immigrants in post-colonial Namibia
No full textThis article is based on ethnographic pilot research among German immigrants in Namibia. It employs content and discourse analysis of interview narratives emerging in conversations with two generations of German migrants: individuals who settled in the 1950s and 1960s and a younger cohort who immigrated in the 1980s and 1990s. Interview extracts in which respondents address their arrival and adjustment are chosen to explore narrative reconstructions of integration in (post)-colonial Namibia. However, integration is largely sought in the social and symbolic context defined as ‘German’ and ‘white’, and in dissociation from Namibia as ‘Africa’. Silences, ambivalences, and contradictions at the narrative level reveal these generational cohorts to be slightly different, yet equally evasive about the problematic inheritance of white privilege. While, in contrast to the earlier migrants, the more recent arrivals maintain appeals to liberalism, these interviews suggest that 16 years after independence Namibian whites have not yet begun a process of critical self-reflection
Realising the self and 'developing the African': German immigrants in Namibia
No full textThis paper is based on research among German immigrants in Namibia, a country with a long history of colonisation. After Germany, the first colonial power, ceded the territory as a consequence of the First World War, South Africa effectively ruled the country until 1990. Both former colonial powers established principles of white rule and initiated settler communities, whose descendants still live in the country. This article examines biographical narratives of German immigrants who have settled in Namibia since the 1950s. It focuses on their discourses of self-understanding in this postcolonial, post-apartheid context. The discussion follows two related issues: the cultural models of personhood that narrators use to represent their historical selves, and the ways in which these models are applied to recent historical change in Namibia. The article concludes by showing how both perspectives work to recycle colonial imaginations
Between redemption and affirmation: German identity in affective narratives of the ‘refugee crisis’
No full textThe German ‘refugee crisis’ produced formidable levels of civil society assistance, involving citizens and locations with no previous experience in refugee support. Grounded in research with citizen volunteers in a rural region in southern Germany conducted at a time when rightwing populism gained strength, this article explores how volunteers reflect on their relations with refugees while negotiating distinctly German identities. Scholarship on volunteering in refugee settings has looked at the emotional aspect of this work largely for its political import. This article expands attention to emotions in volunteering from a form of political practice on the ground to a practice of narrative reasoning. In a close reading of interview-derived narratives as affective practices the relevance of locality, identity and history for refugee reception comes to the fore. Deploying the notions of ‘redemptive’ and ‘affirmative’ Germanness the article shows how volunteers draw on specific historical trajectories to produce moral arguments about the support and incorporation of strangers. This article argues that volunteers’ affective involvement with history and locality needs unpacking if their relations of solidarity are to be understood
“It was the photograph of the little boy”: reflections on the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme in the UK
No full textThis article examines the “Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme” (SVPRP) as a specific British response to the “European refugee crisis”. Based on an analysis of media reporting (2014–17) and empirical evidence from agencies and volunteers tasked with implementing the programme, this essay reveals the ethical and political ambiguities at its heart. By focusing on the notion of “vulnerability” I argue that the humanitarian configuration of a refugee worthy of care is implicated in two significant practices: exceptionalising a small group of Syrians as legitimate targets for compassion and constructing compassion itself as a rationed resource in a climate of anti-immigrant hostility, austerity and Brexit
Vécu et perception de la frontière entre la RDA et la RFA
No full textThis chapter is based on our study of Border identities on the former German-German border in the region of northern Bavaria/southern Thuringia. It discusses narratives about three historical phases of border definition: The late 1950s which saw a gradual coming to terms with division on both sides; the 1960s onwards where the Cold War confirmed the status quo for people on either side, and the period after 1989/90, which led to a dissolution of the sociopolitical division with the fall of the wall, but without necessarily creating a new sense of togetherness. We explore the significance of landscape and embodied knowledge in our data. Evidently, the border we are concerned with was a virtually unsurmountable physical construct which cut through a once unified cultural region and changed people’s lives in often dramatic ways. The border landscape was always both: an item of tangible geography and a cultural and cognitive map, both shaping and constraining people’s experiences and personal histories. By looking at the significance of the border landscape in people’s narratives we investigate the relationship between the physical and the cultural, and elucidate in how far the experience of historical transformation is narrated as embodied spatial knowledge
- …
