Les départements Health et Policy ont le plaisir de vous inviter à la présentation de l’ouvrage de Nichola Khan (Anthropologue et psychologue, Université de Brighton), Arc of the Journeyman. Afghan Migrants in England paru en 2020, University of Minnesota Press.
L’événement aura lieu le mercredi 15 juin 2022 de 16 heures à 17h30 en salle 2.122 du bâtiment Recherche Sud, Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers.
Abstract
Taking an empirical and imaginary field spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan, and England, it developed anthropological takes on mobility and immobility in relation to the transnational kinship obligations and everyday lives of Pashtun migrants. It showed how the burdens of four decades of war and exile fall unforgivingly on Afghan families and their remitting sons—whose enduring struggles, after many years, still enrich an inner archive of dreams, fears, rememberings, and anxieties.
Critique
A monumental achievement—of impressive, wide-ranging scholarship and original thinking, finely analyzed and sensitively portrayed. We have here the first full-length anthropological study of Afghan refugees, making this a vital and much-needed contribution. Through her richly historicized analysis of migrant life histories, fantasies, and even dreams, Nichola Khan collapses the past and the present and explodes received cartographies of Anglo–Afghan relations. — Kaveri Qureshi, University of Edinburgh.
Le livre de Nichola Khan a été nominé au prix 2021 AAA Society for Humanistic Anthropology Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.
Modération : Betty Rouland (ICM, CSD, Département HEALTH) et Emeline Zougbédé (ICM, CSD, Département POLICY)
Lieu : 2.122 du bâtiment Recherche Sud, Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers (Métro : ligne 12, station de métro ‘Front populaire’).
Format : Hybride, Participer à la réunion Zoom
Résumé détaillé :
Forty years of continuous war and conflict have made Afghans the largest refugee group in the world. This first full-scale ethnography of Afghan migrants in England examines the imprint of violence, displacement, kinship obligations, and mobility on the lives and work of Pashtun journeyman taxi drivers in Britain. The analysis is centered in the county of Sussex, site of Brighton’s orientalist Royal Pavilion, and the former home of colonial propagandist Rudyard Kipling. Nearly two decades of relationships and fieldwork provide a deep understanding of the everyday lives of Afghan migrants, who face unrelenting pressures to remit money to their struggling relatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, adhere to traditional values, and resettle the wives and children they have left behind. Given Pakistan is the largest host country for Afghan refugees, the book also brings the political territory of Afghanistan firmly into the fold of South Asia. These foci shift us toward some fresh starting points, which the book develops through three organising frames : language and life, historical and temporal transformation, and movement and mobility.
First, the perspective of Afghans in England can disrupt stubborn asymmetries and concerns with Afghanistan as either humanitarianism’s deserving subject, or Europe’s threatening immigration problem : from an Orientalist view of a backward nation in permanent crisis, to refugee crises as forms of circular and traumatic repetition, or descent into chaos. Second, the focus on living history underpins some psychosocial harms, and political and economic rationalities working through the logic of exchange which impels migrants to cross the world in hopes of renewal—while remaining in ambivalent relation to their primary ties, affines, and cultural attachments. Third, analyzing the local and transnational movements of migrant taxi-drivers offers fresh insights into ways cultural knowledge is contingently constituted within the multivalent labor of moving (literally and symbolically) through life.
This kaleidoscopic narrative is enriched by the migrants’ stories and dreams, which take on extra significance among sleep-deprived taxi drivers. Khan chronicles the way these men rely on Pashto poems and aphorisms to make sense of what is strange or difficult to bear. She also attests to the pleasures of family and friends who are less demanding than kin back home—sharing connection and moments of joy in dance, excursions, picnics, and humorous banter. Khan views these men’s lives through the lens of movement—the arrival of friends and family, return visits to Pakistan, driving customers, the journey of remitting money overseas. Conversely, Khan describes the immobility of migrants who experience “stuckness” caused by unresponsive bureaucracies, chronic insecurity, or struggles with depression and other mental health conditions. Arc of the Journeyman expands and complicates current perceptions of Afghan migrants, offering a finely analyzed description of their lives and communities as a moving, contingent, and fully contemporary force.