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This is a joint seminar between the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health and the Refugee Mental Health and Place Network.
This seminar will present a paper by our host John Borneman, Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University.
The paper examines how and why refugees resort to two coping mechanisms––dissociation and repression––to make sense and organize experience in new diaspora situations. Both mechanisms deal with unbearable mental content by removing oneself from the present; dissociation by disconnecting and losing time, repression by excluding unpleasant thoughts and memories. The paper also reflects on why refugee studies itself is engaged in dissociation or repression when it turns to race or colonialism to frame refugee experience. Finally, it addresses how the ambivalence of European societies about the terms of incorporation, and European states through policies that delay indefinitely clarification of refugee status, contribute to turning these mechanisms into mental health problems.
The talk draws from a long-term research project on the process of social incorporation of Syrian refugees in Germany since 2015.
Please note that this session will be recorded.
About the speaker
John Borneman is among the most well-known and groundbreaking theorists within the subfields of legal, political and psychological anthropology, having conducted fieldwork in Lebanon and Syria and throughout Central Europe.
He came to Princeton in 2001 after teaching at Cornell University for a decade. His early work focused on a divided Berlin, including the first two of his nine books, “After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin” (1991) and “Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation” (1992). His other books on Germany include “Sojourners: The Return of German-Jews and the Question of Identity”(1995) ; “Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe” (1997); “Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture” (1998); and “Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany” (2015).
Borneman began his ethnographic work in Lebanon and Syria after arriving in Princeton. The monographs that emerged from that research include “Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo” (2007), “Al-jinayah al-siyasiyyah wal-silm al-ijtimaei” (2007), and “Political Crime and the Memory of Loss” (2011), a comparative analysis of Germany and Lebanon.
How to join this event
This event will be held online on Zoom. Please register your free place here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZApd-ygrzwvGNWo-e9lw7x4vK4aCs-Ltq8N
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join the seminar.