Purity and Exile

Purity and Exile PDF Author: Liisa H. Malkki
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619096X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
In this study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, Liisa Malkki shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities such as "Hutu" and "Tutsi." Through extensive fieldwork in two refugee communities, Malkki finds that the refugees' current circumstances significantly influence these constructions. Those living in organized camps created an elaborate "mythico-history" of the Hutu people, which gave significance to exile, and envisioned a collective return to the homeland of Burundi. Other refugees, who had assimilated in a more urban setting, crafted identities in response to the practical circumstances of their day to day lives. Malkki reveals how such things as national identity, historical consciousness, and the social imagination of "enemies" get constructed in the process of everyday life. The book closes with an epilogue looking at the recent violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, and showing how the movement of large refugee populations across national borders has shaped patterns of violence in the region.

Purity and Exile

Purity and Exile PDF Author: Liisa H. Malkki
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619096X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book

Book Description
In this study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, Liisa Malkki shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities such as "Hutu" and "Tutsi." Through extensive fieldwork in two refugee communities, Malkki finds that the refugees' current circumstances significantly influence these constructions. Those living in organized camps created an elaborate "mythico-history" of the Hutu people, which gave significance to exile, and envisioned a collective return to the homeland of Burundi. Other refugees, who had assimilated in a more urban setting, crafted identities in response to the practical circumstances of their day to day lives. Malkki reveals how such things as national identity, historical consciousness, and the social imagination of "enemies" get constructed in the process of everyday life. The book closes with an epilogue looking at the recent violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, and showing how the movement of large refugee populations across national borders has shaped patterns of violence in the region.

Purity and Exile

Purity and Exile PDF Author: Liisa H. Malkki
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226502724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This book explores how categories of identity such as "Hutu" and "Tuts" produced through violence and exile. In 1972 the Burundi army, controlled by t Tutsis, responded to an attempted Hutu rebellion with mass killings of the Hutu The author conducted a year of anthropological field research in Western Tanzani among two groups of Hutu refugees who had fled the killings. One refugee group Kigoma township and the other in the isolated Mishamo refugee camp. The town refugees tended to seek ways of assimilating and inhabiting multiple shifting id contrast to the camp refugees who continually engaged in an impassioned reconstr of their history as a people. Ethnic traits ascribed by social scientists and were freely borrowed to assert cultural difference in this process of identity r In highlighting the different responses to exile in the two refugee groups, this against the assumption that displacement erodes collective identity and shows th possible for refugees in camps to locate their identities within their very disp Mishamo, the refugee camp itself functioned as a spatial and symbolic site for i political and moral community of Hutu.

The Need to Help

The Need to Help PDF Author: Liisa H. Malkki
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375362
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world "out there," led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness—the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit "trauma teddies" and "aid bunnies" for "needy children," the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.

Improvising Theory

Improvising Theory PDF Author: Allaine Cerwonka
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226100286
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Scholars have long recognized that ethnographic method is bound up with the construction of theory in ways that are difficult to teach. The reason, Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa H. Malkki argue, is that ethnographic theorization is essentially improvisatory in nature, conducted in real time and in necessarily unpredictable social situations. In a unique account of, and critical reflection on, the process of theoretical improvisation in ethnographic research, they demonstrate how both objects of analysis, and our ways of knowing and explaining them, are created and discovered in the give and take of real life, in all its unpredictability and immediacy. Improvising Theory centers on the year-long correspondence between Cerwonka, then a graduate student in political science conducting research in Australia, and her anthropologist mentor, Malkki. Through regular e-mail exchanges, Malkki attempted to teach Cerwonka, then new to the discipline, the basic tools and subtle intuition needed for anthropological fieldwork. The result is a strikingly original dissection of the processual ethics and politics of method in ethnography.

Purity and Danger

Purity and Danger PDF Author: Professor Mary Douglas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136489274
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Purity and Danger is acknowledged as a modern masterpiece of anthropology. It is widely cited in non-anthropological works and gave rise to a body of application, rebuttal and development within anthropology. In 1995 the book was included among the Times Literary Supplement's hundred most influential non-fiction works since WWII. Incorporating the philosophy of religion and science and a generally holistic approach to classification, Douglas demonstrates the relevance of anthropological enquiries to an audience outside her immediate academic circle. She offers an approach to understanding rules of purity by examining what is considered unclean in various cultures. She sheds light on the symbolism of what is considered clean and dirty in relation to order in secular and religious, modern and primitive life.

Yucatecans in Dallas, Texas

Yucatecans in Dallas, Texas PDF Author: Rachel H. Adler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317342380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Through fascinating vignettes and case studies, this unique text illustrates how Yucatecan migrants actively maintain social ties across borders. It also paints a vivid picture of the people and their lives. It places them in the context of current U.S. immigration policy and mesmerizes students by bringing them up to speed on one of the most crucial issues facing the U.S. today.

Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans

Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans PDF Author: Fredrik Barth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000324486
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
A classic and highly influential ethnography, which explores political leadership among Swat Pathans - and which emphasizes the importance of individual decision-making for wider social processes. This study describes certain aspects of the society of the Pathans of the Swat valley in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Except where other reference is given, the material on which it is based was collected by the author in the period February-November 1954.

Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World

Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Nicholas Terpstra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316351904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
The religious refugee first emerged as a mass phenomenon in the late fifteenth century. Over the following two and a half centuries, millions of Jews, Muslims, and Christians were forced from their homes and into temporary or permanent exile. Their migrations across Europe and around the globe shaped the early modern world and profoundly affected literature, art, and culture. Economic and political factors drove many expulsions, but religion was the factor most commonly used to justify them. This was also the period of religious revival known as the Reformation. This book explores how reformers' ambitions to purify individuals and society fueled movements to purge ideas, objects, and people considered religiously alien or spiritually contagious. It aims to explain religious ideas and movements of the Reformation in nontechnical and comparative language.

Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change

Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change PDF Author: Adam McKeown
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226560243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Inspired by recent work on diaspora and cultural globalization, Adam McKeown asks in this new book: How were the experiences of different migrant communities and hometowns in China linked together through common networks? Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change argues that the political and economic activities of Chinese migrants can best be understood by taking into account their links to each other and China through a transnational perspective. Despite their very different histories, Chinese migrant families, businesses, and villages were connected through elaborate networks and shared institutions that stretched across oceans and entire continents. Through small towns in Qing and Republican China, thriving enclaves of businesses in South Chicago, broad-based associations of merchants and traders in Peru, and an auspicious legacy of ancestors in Hawaii, migrant Chinese formed an extensive system that made cultural and commercial exchange possible.

Hopeful Imagination

Hopeful Imagination PDF Author: Walter Brueggemann
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451419627
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Professor Brueggemann here examines the literature and experience of an era in which Israel's prophets faced the pastoral responsibility of helping people to enter into exile, to be in exile, and to depart out of exile. He addresses three major prophetic traditions: Jeremiah (the pathos of God), Ezekiel (the holiness of God), and 2 Isaiah (the newness of God). This literature is seen to contain the theological resources for handling both brokenness and surprise with freedom, courage, and imagination. Throughout, Brueggemann demonstrates how these resources offer vitality for ministry today.