What is Displacement
The term ‘displacement’ can name an affective state, a psychological
mechanism and a physical experience. The interaction between these meanings of the
word produces much of its richness, and perhaps explains the frequency with which it
occurs in contemporary scholarship attempting to grapple with the movement of
people around the globe today, and with the legacy of the migrations of the past ,both
of which have involved violence, coercion and exploitation as well as hope ,human
ingenuity and the creation of new bonds, communities and cultures. In this chapter, I
explore a particular definition of displacement which arises from four contemporary
literary texts. To speak of displacement is inevitably to speak of what it means to be
at home. Displacement can be understood as an experience which puts the meaning,
security and reliability of home into question in various ways.(Hirsh, Eizenberg,
Jabareen, 1).
From the 1950s on, a few anthropologists began to direct ethnographic attention to
examining the experience of refugees and those displaced by big dams and other such
projects. The willingness to focus upon displacement as a phenomenon worthy of
study reflects a number of developments within anthropology itself. There was the
realization that ethnographies deal with an historical moment, and that what takes
place within that moment needs to be put into context by attention paid to what is
happening in the larger economic and political environments that structure what
people can do and to some extent determine what they can think. The accumulating
historical scholarship meant that it was impossible to ignore what came before one’s
arrival. Displacement turned out to be part of the history of most groups studied by
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anthropologists, just as it has been the future fate of many. Ethnographic fieldwork
was also transformed by jet travel and rapid communication.
One no longer went to a
place and left and thereafter remained ignorant of what happened next. When people
we had worked among were displaced and scattered around the world, anthropology
had to change. It had already developed some tools for the study of people in
movement through work on labor migration in Africa and Latin America. It had also
begun to focus upon processes of change and to look for similarities among the
experiences of very different people exposed to the same circumstances of industri -
alization or political incorporation, and so to move beyond the unique to the general .
Each experience of displacement may be bitterly unique, but the processes of dis -
placement and subsequent responses were seen to have much in common. political
anthropologists, displacement is a special challenge, for its causes lie usually with
decisions made by political actors who are outside the limited geograph -ical area
upon which the anthropologist usually focuses.
Those displaced move through space
and through time, and in that journey encounter different political institutions and
political actors who have their own agendas and their own assump -tions about how
people should be governed. They form new groups and create networks in an attempt
to regain some control over their own lives, and they are in communication with
people in their homeland and those who have been given asylum elsewhere. With
these they consider how to influence what is happening at home or form alliances to
influence political decisions in the place of settlement. Most of what is happening
takes place over a considerable period of time and much of it is outside the
anthropologist’s own range of observation. Many of the actors are known only by
name, if at all. All of this belongs in a different universe than that of the village or
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local-level politics, the focus of the earlier anthropological engagement with political
action. Even so, something of the early work remains relevant. (Colson,114,113).
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Works Cited
- Colson, Elizabeth. "Displacement." A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (2007).
- Hirsh, Helly, Efrat Eizenberg, and Yosef Jabareen. "A new conceptual framework for understanding displacement: Bridging the gaps in displacement literature between the Global South and the Global North." Journal of Planning Literature 35.4 (2020)