Fox News Latino reports:

Shoes, backpacks and other objects discarded in the desert by undocumented immigrants have been collected by a team of anthropologists to document the difficult journey they make to get into the United States.

“For me, these objects aren’t trash. They reflect the history of all the great migrations,” Jason de Leon, assistant professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Undocumented Migration Project, said in an interview with Efe.

Since 2008, De Leon and his team have managed to collect 10,000 objects which, he says, “are part of the heritage of the United States and also of Mexico. It’s important for Americans to understand the history of the Mexican migration.”

Read More here:

Border Crossing Trash Worthy of Study, Say Anthropologists

Tricia Redeker Hepner, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee writes at CounterPunch about the plight of refugees:

The world’s attention is understandably fixed on the post-tsunami nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan and the equally seismic political transformations shaking North Africa and the Middle East. Much speculation swirls around the impact of these events regionally and globally. Will fallout reach the shores of Europe and North America? Will more dictatorships be swept aside by swells of democratization? What role should the international community and the United Nations play?

In at least one country, the answer to the first question is clear, if not the second. And the third is another story altogether

The Northeast African nation of Eritrea marks its 20th year of independence next month. But the festivities will be marred by mourning…

As an anthropologist who has lived in Eritrea and worked with Eritrean communities in Europe, Africa, and the U.S. for years, I dearly want to defend this country. But the best I can do is to help defend its displaced, abused, and often forgotten citizens… I struggle to place the people of this small African country on the global crisis radar. It’s a tall order in these days of perpetual disasters and mind-numbing statistics…But human experience is what anthropologists are always after – how to put life and breath and flesh onto the cold bones of statistics; how to illustrate the concrete meanings of political violence and migration policies and practices as people live them.

Go to CounterPunch for the rest of the article by Tricia Redeker Hepner, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee

Refugees and the Failure of Forced Migration Policy
Human Tsunamis
By TRICIA REDEKER HEPNER

Syriac Woman: So, Sarah, where do your parents live?
Sarah: Well, my mother lives in the U.S., and my father lives here in the Netherlands.
Syriac Woman: Oh. So…they’re…divorced?
Sarah: Yes…it happened a few years ago.
Syriac Woman: So when you’re at home you live with your mother… but why don’t you live with your father now?
Sarah: Well, actually, I don’t live with my mother either; she lives in another state from me. I live with my fiancé.
Syriac Woman: You mean you live together even though you’re not married?
Sarah: Yes, we live together.

A significant pause.

Syriac Woman: Are you a Christian?
Sarah: Well, I was raised Protestant…sort of between Dutch Reformed and American Presbyterian.
Syriac Woman: Ah well, that’s something…it’s all the same God I suppose.

I experienced what felt like hundreds of variations on this conversation during my year of research among Syriac Orthodox Christian refugees living in the Netherlands. As often as not, the conversation ended there, as my potential informants turned away from me, sadly shaking their heads and clicking their tongues.

I arrived in the Netherlands in the autumn of 2009 with the intention of studying Syriac Orthodox women’s choirs, working with the daughters and granddaughters of refugees from Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq, whose families had fled multiple waves of violent conflict and political repression throughout the twentieth century. The church itself dates back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, in the third and fourth centuries, and its members still speak Syriac, a branch of Aramaic they believe to be closely related to the dialect spoken by Christ. This ancient history is an immense source of pride for the Dutch Syriac community, who call themselves Suryoye or Suroye, and the source of many claims and counter-claims about Syriac identity. By studying how members of the church related this ancient, sacred past to the rest of their lives as modern Dutch citizens, I hoped to learn how they cultivated their sense of identity as both Middle Eastern Christians and Europeans.

From the very beginning of this project, I understood I would be working with culturally and theologically conservative Christians, but I little suspected how much my own cultural and theological identity would play a role in my ability to conduct my research, sometimes limiting my access and shaping my interactions in frustrating and emotional ways. In the early months of fieldwork, I worked on building relationships with my informants in hopes of developing a richly textured and deep ethnography that would capture their life experiences and understanding of the world. But every time I initiated a conversation, I discovered that I was scrutinized and analyzed just as much as I hoped to scrutinize and analyze. The process of gaining trust and acceptance among my informants was fraught and unstable; I often ended a day’s work fearing I’d have nothing significant to bring home from the field. I knew that their tragic history as an isolated and violently oppressed minority had given them little reason to trust outsiders, so I could never be sure just how the women and men I met viewed me. Was I too different? Was I morally suspect? Would I ever gain anyone’s trust? How much could I afford to share about my self and my life without shutting my project down?

These questions were complicated by the fact that in some ways, for some people, I was easy to let in. I learned over time that my own religious background provided a reassuring sense that I could at some basic level understand them and wouldn’t mock or minimize their religious convictions and commitments. As an earnest, dark-haired, indeterminately youngish-looking woman, I plausibly fit in with the girls and young women singing in the church choirs and I would often be mistaken as Syriac Orthodox by people who didn’t know me. This began, after a while, to inspire an uneasy familiarity. Older women of the church took a maternal interest in me, worrying about whether I had enough clothing, whether I was eating enough, whether I was cold and lonely in my student room. The fact that I learned to read the classical Syriac script after a few months and could (more or less) participate in the liturgy drew approving smiles and invitations to dinner. But this warm welcome could turn to dismay, disapproval, or disappointment as they discovered incongruous things about my life that cast suspicion on my moral identity. How good a Christian daughter could I be if I was unmarried at thirty two and travelling the world alone?

My younger friends, on the other hand, were able to create a more accepting, if also somewhat ambivalent, space for me in their lives. They were the second and third generation who, while being committed to the moral precepts of their church and families, had grown up in the Netherlands attending Dutch schools and taking an occasional anthropology class at university. They understood perfectly well what a researcher was and they had Dutch friends of different backgrounds, so they knew that even with a Christian background it wasn’t likely that I would share their ideas of how to live one’s life. They tried as well as they could to meet me somewhere in the middle of our differing life experiences. But even with this good will, our conversations could lead us into difficult terrain. I heard in their words emotional, contradictory claims about what it means to be a Syriac Orthodox Christian. My informants judged themselves and each other harshly, scrutinizing their own moral behavior and drawing conclusions about identity and worth in terms I could never survive if I were actually Syriac Orthodox.

Because of my own anxiety about whether I could at any time be expelled from the community before I had learned something significant, it took me a long time to realize that the fraught emotion of these disagreements among my informants was itself a significant discovery. The painful emotions aroused in me by my interactions with them – about my religious history, my bicultural family, the lifechoices I had made in order to become an anthropologist – were activated by my informants’ complicated emotions as they struggled to define and articulate to me their own moral, cultural, and religious identities in a moment of tremendous transformation and uncertainty in their community’s history.

Coming to this realization mid-way in my research process was bittersweet. I had been prepared by my training in ethnographic methods to expect that who I was as a person would affect the kind of knowledge I could produce. As a young woman, I had access to the lives and feelings of young Syriac Orthodox women, an often over-looked segment of the community, but older, male, and more “official” bearers of Syriac culture generally wouldn’t speak to or even acknowledge me. As a Dutch-American, I had an ear for the community’s engagement with mainstream Dutch social mores and expectations of recent migrants, but struggled to keep from projecting my own history onto theirs. As a sympathetic but deep-down-mostly-agnostic ex-Christian, I could enter the aesthetic and affective world of Christian belief and practice but often had to suppress my anger at the kinds of socially conservative moral claims made in the name of Christianity, which resonated too closely with the claims that drove me out of my childhood churches in the first place. My anthropological training had taught me that the researcher’s identity and subjectivity shapes the kind of knowledge she can produce but it couldn’t prepare me for how much it would demand of me emotionally, to stay present and open to my informants’ lives and experiences no matter how much discomfort I experienced.

In anthropology, we are trained to pay attention to subjectivity, both our informants’ and our own. This is one of the reasons that, as anthropologists, we take so many years to research and write about our projects; we must develop a critical distance for our analysis of other people’s problems with self-awareness and maturity, which takes time and thought and a clear-eyed view of our own emotional engagement. Questions of subjectivity don’t necessarily have to take center-stage in the final product of our written work, as we try to keep the focus on our subject rather than ourselves, but these questions play an essential role in our research and writing process. As social scientists, self-reflection is crucially important to understanding the limits of our perception and the kinds of claims we can make about the world.

So the heart of my research process this past year has been the discovery of a complicated and ambivalent web of emotions that bind my informants’ sense of moral identity to their families and to their church. The expansion and development of my ethnographic research involves contextualizing these feelings within broader political and social histories, both European and Middle Eastern, which have brought them to where they are now and which give some insight into their fraught disagreements with each other.

My own experiences in the field as I came to understand my informants’ problems and preoccupations recall an important insight of our discipline: as social and cultural anthropologists, regardless of how much of ourselves we choose to put into our ethnographic writing, we must account for how our own subjectivity shapes our research agendas and haunts our relationships. In doing so, we ensure that when we go home to write, we can clearly disentangle our informants’ stories from our own.

Sarah A. Bakker is a Ph.D Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California – Santa Cruz. Her dissertation research conducted among Syriac Orthodox Christian refugees and their families, living in the Netherlands, focuses on music, morality, and the construction of religious and racial difference in Middle Eastern Christian identity amidst the Dutch multiculturalism debates. Her work explores questions of gender, kinship, postcolonialism, and the secular as intertwined and multi-layered problems for the ethnography of Europe.

photo courtesy of A. Bishara

This summer I’m doing interviews with Palestinian journalists and refugees in which I ask them to interpret and critique U.S. news articles. Why, you might ask, did I choose journalists and refugees as my commentators? Why didn’t I try to obtain a broader cross-section of Palestinian society?

In looking for Palestinian commentary on U.S. news articles, I knew that I couldn’t find one Palestinian voice that would represent all Palestinians. Not all Palestinians would respond to an article in the same way. Instead, I wanted to select types of people whose voices tend to be excluded not only by U.S. media, but also by their own political processes, like those of the less-than-democratic Palestinian Authority.

Refugees certainly fit this bill. Palestinian refugees were forced to leave their home villages and cities in 1948. Since then, Israel has refused to allow them to return to those homes. A United Nations agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), set up temporary houses for them in dozens of camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Though refugees share a common claim to their right to return to their home villages, on a practical level, they have fared differently in each location.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, refugees are constrained in the same ways as non-refugees by the Israeli military occupation. However, refugee camps are distinct communities, physically set apart from other neighborhoods. For example, you know you are entering a refugee camp because the streets are narrower. Refugees are also slightly poorer than the rest of the Palestinian population. Moreover, for decades refugee camps have led challenges to Israeli occupation. This has made refugees a significant political group in Palestinian society.

Yet sympathetic U.S. human interest stories about Palestinians often report on middle class or wealthy Palestinians who work in computer technology, run fancy restaurants, or open cinemas. If we do not attend to the voices of other Palestinians, we will exclude an important part of Palestinian society from political dialogues in the news.

My reasons for asking journalists to comment on articles are a bit different. This is a part of a larger project in which I study how Palestinian journalists contribute to the production of U.S. news. Palestinians work as reporters, producers, fixers, and photojournalists for U.S. news organizations. Photojournalists and reporters gather information to be shaped by writers and editors. Fixers and producers guide foreign correspondents to information. Rarely, however, do these Palestinian journalists select a feature story and write it exactly as they would like.

So with this project, I wanted to give them the opportunity to comment on stories that they might have worked on, but may not have seen in their final forms. I also wanted to talk to journalists because I presumed their expertise on the craft of reporting would allow them to make specific critiques, but also be sympathetic to the challenges of this work.

In my interviews, I’ve found a lot of diversity within the refugee and journalist groups themselves. One refugee had the sharp critical eye I expected from journalists due to his frequent attendance at protests. [Just from the descriptions and quotes in an article on a demonstration, he surmised that the journalist made the report while standing with the Israeli commmander repressing the protest, rather than with the protesters]. One journalist was harshly critical of an article by a Palestinian journalist while another embraced it – but neither referred to technical aspects of the reporting, like where the journalist might have been positioned or whether the journalist should have spoken to different sources.

Even when people were critical of an article, they presented different reasonings. For example, an article described a new and expensive restaurant as evidence that the Ramallah economy was picking up. One journalist’s opinion was that such restaurants were not where most Palestinians liked to have fun. Rather, she and her friends liked to go to coffeehouses. Also, they socialized during the day, not at night. One refugee commented that this restaurant in particular was only for the wealthy. If he wanted to write an article about whether or not the Palestinian economy was picking up, he’d talk to vegetable sellers, rather than restauranteurs, since, after all, everybody buys vegetables. This rich variety of responses, I thought, was one reason to continue these kinds of conversations.

This research was funded by the Tufts University Faculty Research Fund.

Amahl Bishara is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. This is the 3rd and last post in a series of 'Fieldnotes' she has written for www.anthronow.com. You can find her previous posts under the 'Fieldnotes' category.