Abstract
This article examines the boredom of asylum seekers living in a refugee camp in southern Europe. It concerns the understudied yet widespread phenomenon of boredom in the detention centers and other places where people wait several months/years to obtain permits to stay in a given state (EU) and cannot work. Boredom is defined as a socially constructed feeling that is an effect of the interaction between people and institutional/organizational ambiance that lacks qualities necessary to arouse engagement. We distinguished three modalities of the phenomenon: “doing nothing,” “life in limbo,” and “strategic boredom.” We claim that the last is the most powerful phenomenon. Strategic boredom is the specific tool of strict control exercised on the asylum seekers by the administration of the camp to force them to be idle and passive. On the other hand, the dominated group uses the expected mood of boredom as a strategy to obtain the favors of camp administration; this strategy—they hope—will conclude in the obtention of a permit of stay and/or the legal status of a refugee.
Introduction
I picked up a lonely hitchhiker in my car. It was in the middle of empty fields under the strong sun with a temperature over 40 degrees Celsius. I am almost sure that this is one of the “refugees” living nearby in this desert area. No one (local inhabitants or tourists) would risk a walk in that zone near noon. I propose the lift. After a short hesitation, he accepted the invitation, saying that it is his lucky day—because thanks to me he will be on time for his lunch. “I live in the camp,” he said. He looks tired and not very well. Tiny, not tall, in his mid-twenties. Dressed in sports clothes and without a hat or something for protecting his head. I asked him why he was in the middle of nowhere at this time of day, and he responded: “I cannot stay in the camp—there is nothing to do.” I told him that I was waiting for legal permission to conduct a workshop in the camp and I asked: “Do you think that people will be interested in it?” He said: “Obviously! We have nothing to do. We are completely bored. (Author A’s fieldnotes)
These are words I heard all the time when I was conducting my research project. Although the project was not focused on boredom but on the dynamic of the relationship between the local population and refugees from the camp situated in the village the boredom as a research subject appeared during the observation as one of the key problems refugees face. In spite of the fact that a growing number of studies is published every year in the domain of refugee/forced migration studies, we have not found even a single one focusing on refugee camp inhabitants’ boredom. The literature on refugees has covered a broad array of topics, yet boredom is usually mentioned very briefly or not mentioned at all. In the present article, we aim to bridge this gap and provide a thorough description and analysis of refugee camp inhabitants’ everyday experience of boredom and the process of its social construction based on a prolonged, grounded ethnographic field study. The main questions that this article aims to answer are the following: what are the causes of refugees’ boredom, what modalities/types of boredom can be distinguished in the everyday experience of refugees, and how boredom influences the life of refugees. In other words, we attempt to understand the social dynamics of boredom. We consider boredom a social emotion, which is produced and reproduced in the course of social interactions between people and/or people and social/institutional order.
We examined the boredom of asylum seekers living in a Southern European reception camp (also called a hosting center). Reception camps are places of forced residence where asylum seekers in the EU are retained for the duration of the administrative process during which their requests are assessed. Starting from the perception of the phenomenon by participants who employed the term “boredom,” we completed our analysis by examining existing literature on boredom. Our goal was to capture the social specificity of the studied space and, in particular, to understand the phenomenon of boredom omnipresent in such settings. In our article, we are using interchangeably the terms asylum seekers, participants, camp residents, inhabitants, and refugees. In using the term “refugee,” we are following the terminology of participants who use this term to describe themselves. We do not use this category as a juridical notion (participants’ juridical status is “asylum seekers”), but to define the population which, for various reasons, abandoned their previous place of living and whose life in exile is characterized by precarious living conditions and, in some cases, poverty, racism, corruption and marginalization.
Literature Review
Refugees in the Sociological Literature
There have been several groups of refugees/asylum seekers that have received much attention in relevant studies thus far, i.e., (1) African refugees in African settlements (Agier 2002, 2008; Onyut et al. 2009), especially in Kenya (Chandrashekhar Oka 2014; De la Chaux, Haugh, and Greenwood 2018; Horst 2006), Western Sahara and Maghreb (Human Rights Watch 2008); (2) Middle Eastern refugees including Palestinian (Gren 2015; Hamzeh 2001; Jabr 1989; Peteet 2005; Sukarieh and Tannock 2012), Syrian (Murray 2017; Taha 2015) and Iraqi (Sassoon 2009) refugees predominantly in the Arab States and Israel; and (3) refugees from the Far East, predominantly Vietnamese refugees in the USA (Brown, Schale, and Nilsson 2010; Kelly 1977; Liu, Lamanna, and Murata 1979; Phan, Torres Rivera, and Roberts-Wilbur 2005), Hong Kong, Philippines, and Japan (Knudsen 1983; Westwood and Lawrance 1990), or refugees of various nationality living in Thailand (Dudley 2011; Mange 1992). In comparison to these three groups, refugees reaching Europe have still received little scientific attention, although they have periodically drawn much media interest and coverage. According to migration specialists, for instance, experts working at the French Institut Convergence Migration, this substantive public interest is disproportionate to the actual scale of the phenomenon (Heron 2019). While in Lebanon refugees constitute 25% of the whole population, in European countries they constituted less than 1% (0.25%) of the EU population at its peak—2016 (1,337,000 asylum seekers out of a total population of 510,000,000). Despite this statistical reality, politicians along with the media have spread fear of refugees. Used as a political tool, this moral panic enabled the introduction of securitization policy and the closing of the EU’s borders (Agier 2016; Bauman 2016).
While journalists covered this phenomenon from the very beginning, researchers need more time to do research (especially ethnographic inquiries, which are very time-consuming) and publish their results. The issue of refugee newcomers to Europe is probably researched and discussed on the local level in vernacular languages, but it still receives little coverage in the international scientific discussion. We found only a few publications on that subject describing French (Godin et al. 2017), Irish (Conlon 2011), Austrian (Steindl, Winding, and Runge 2008), and Finnish (Kohli and Kaukko 2017) cases. Our article is aimed at presenting the previously unstudied (in an ethnographic sense) South-European case to the international scientific community.
The refugee literature has covered various subject areas associated with camp inhabitants’ lives. Starting with the most basic issues such as refugees’ nutrition and physical health (Mange 1992) housing conditions (Jabr 1989), poverty (Onyut et al. 2009), human rights (Human Rights Watch 2008) through mental health including experience of trauma (Brown et al. 2010; Onyut et al. 2009; Sassoon 2009; Spinhoven et al. 2006), dreams (Cernovsky 1988), sense of insecurity (Horst 2006), marginalization (Agier 2008; Goodkind and Deacon 2004), homelessness (Dudley 2011), lack of agency (Gren 2015), the process of identity development (Phan et al. 2005) and meaning (re)construction (Dudley 2011) to the analysis of macro perspective, for instance, refugee policymaking and its influence on asylum seekers (Dettlaff and Fong 2016; Watters 2000). In that array of topics, boredom is one of the major issues that are absent, and even studies focused on refugees’ everydayness do not mention it at all (Conlon 2011; Steindl et al. 2008) or deal with it only briefly (Kohli and Kaukko 2017). We suppose that this deficit is due to the time-consuming nature of the methodology. Participant observation is rarely employed, and data collection focused on everyday life topics is difficult. In the present study, we were able to bridge this gap at least partially.
Boredom in the Refugee Literature
Even the word boredom is rarely used in the refugee literature, and the issue is virtually never studied. Admittedly, some authors seemed to acknowledge the significance of the experience of camp boredom when they claimed that “[o]ne of the problems faced by refugees in camps worldwide is sheer boredom” (Hammond 1993, 110), or that “[t]he average refugee camp, therefore, exhibits little of the humanitarian despair depicted in the media—instead, the prevailing emotions are extreme boredom” (De la Chaux et al. 2018, 156), but they usually equate it with simple idleness: Outside, in the sandy streets of tented suburbia, boredom rules. Unlike urban refugees, they are not free to move outside the camp and therefore cannot find work during the cotton harvest. And so thousands sit or stand and wait. There is, for them, little else to do (Murray 2017; cf. Wilke 2016).
Even such an extended and insightful study as that of Julie Peteet (2005) on Palestinian refugees mentioned boredom only once in an anecdotal way in reference to the statement of the Lebanese Interior Minister, Michel Murr, who claimed that refugees have a greater propensity to reproduce than the Lebanese population because of boredom due to lack of television (p. 174). In the same manner, boredom is seen as the primary cause of early marriages (Mandalawi 2014). Thus, boredom, articulated or not, is associated almost solely with “dead,” empty time, a time of waiting characterized by the low density of events, little opportunity to pursuing engaging activity and the passive role that refugees are cast into (Chandrashekhar Oka 2014; Dettmer 2016; Kelly 1977; Knudsen 1983; Kohli and Kaukko 2017).
A similar picture presents the literature on total institutions, of which refugee camp is a proper exemplification as “[a] place of residence . . . where a large number of like-situated individuals cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (Goffman 1961, xiii). Erving Goffman, the founder of the concept, in his Asylum mentioned boredom only several times mostly in the context of having “little work” to do (1961, 10). Boredom has been frequently mentioned in prison literature as an inevitable outcome of reduced activity and stimulation (Shalev 2008 Hill, Rapp, and Capella 2015): A drop in sensory input through sensory restriction produces a drop in mental alertness, an inabilityto concentrate, a drop in planning and motivation, together with a drop in physical activity in thespeech and motor systems. . .. In prison life boredom generates boredom. A drop in stimulus inputresults in mental sluggishness, a disinclination to learn and a correlated drop in planning, motivationand physical activity (Scott and Gendreau 1969, 338 in Shalev 2008, 20).
Boredom is a part of the punishment that has significant consequences on inmates ranging from apathy and listlessness to aggression and nervous instability (Sutherland and Cressey 1955, 473 in Shalev 2008, 20). Another issue in the relevant literature constitutes lack of control over one’s time (preordered sequence of events), constraints in self-realization and lack of agency that were evidenced to engender boredom among youth confinement residents (Bengtsson 2012). Yet, except for Tea Bengtsson’s (2012) article, we have not found a study focused primarily on boredom in total institution settings.
The second boredom-related issue present in the relevant literature is coping with boredom, i.e., coping with forced idleness through consumption (Chandrashekhar Oka 2014), political activity (Hammond 1993), active struggle against restrictions (Steindl et al. 2008), making carpets (Murray 2017), reading books (Taha 2015), or participating in other activities provided by volunteers (Nianias 2018), to name a few examples. Similarly, we can see Goffman’s concept of “removal activities” “voluntary unserious pursuits which are sufficiently engrossing and exciting to lift the participant out of himself, making him oblivious for the time being to his actual situation” (Goffman 1961, 68–69) as another example of alleviating and/or preventing the feeling of boredom in total institutions.
Refugee camp boredom, therefore, has never been an object of thorough analysis and has been treated rather perfunctorily in the relevant literature. The present article is intended to provide the reader with a sociological analysis of the specificity of the refugee camp residents’ boredom. Although boredom is generally perceived as a strictly individual sensation of a psychological nature, we would like to show that it also constitutes a social experience—reflective, negotiable, relational, and processual in nature—which is the product/outcome of social/structural/organizational circumstances of refugees’ life.
Defining Boredom—An Interactionist Approach
Herbert Blumer claimed that meaning is the central category in human life—individuals act “on the basis of the meanings that things have for them” (Blumer 1986, 2). The feeling of boredom is closely associated with the sense of meaninglessness (Barbalet 1999), which is strictly interpretative and relational in nature, just as the fact that something (e.g., the situation) is bereft of meaning involves an assumption about things that do have meaning for people. Meaning is forged in the process of interaction and modified in the process of interpretation—it constitutes a quintessentially social product (Blumer 1986, 4–5)—and likewise for boredom (Finkielsztein 2019). Therefore, we define boredom in an interactional, relational manner as an emotion that emerges when an interaction between social actors lacks qualities necessary to arouse engagement in one or more parties. The social world is a place of constant interaction and acts of communication with others (Berger and Luckmann 1991). Boredom occurs when there is no meaning in the interaction (Barbalet 1999) and an individual stays “out of synch with the ongoing rhythms of social life,” “being disengaged from the ebb and flow of human interaction” (Brisset and Snow 1993, 239, 241). Boredom is a stance of “role distance” (Darden and Marks 1999, 25), a fracture in one’s performance of their role (Goffman 1956), a visible sign of one’s discontent with the situation at hand when there is no particular role to play instead or none of the available roles “measure[s] up to our standards” (Darden and Marks 1999, 24), satisfies us.
Thus, in the sociological literature, boredom is interpreted as the feeling that breaks the standard course of social rituals, which are far from being automatic but are constantly under construction in the ever-ongoing process of mutual interactional work (Goffman 1956; Collins 2004). Boredom is “a way of disqualifying oneself from participation in the situation” (Brisset and Snow 1993, 242) or an outcome of being disqualified from it. When prolonged, boredom may become chronic or existential, embracing all spheres of human life. In the article, we deal with both transient and chronic/existential types of refugee boredom. However, our work differs from the aforementioned studies—it includes a basic linguistic explanation of the difficulties that hamper researching emotions in a linguistically diverse population. Our understanding of boredom, derived mainly from English language sources, became even more important in the French linguistic space (see the next section).
Methodology
Research History, Design, and Methods
This article is based on the research data collected as a part of an ethnographic project focused on the relationships between refugee camp inhabitants and their entourage (administration and local population) conducted by Author A. The theoretical background related to boredom was the contribution of Author B. Both authors provided interpretative/analytical work. The data analysis process was composed of four stages: (1) the analysis of the field notes (observation in situ data, that included personal observations, discussions in situ, the information provided by our key informants about the situation in our absence); (2) the analysis of the interviews; (3) the analysis of the complementary interviews (precisions about the exact African terminology); (4) presentation of the draft to the key informants (three researchers and three participants-assistant researchers) who participated in phases 2 and 3. The concepts were derived solely from the empirical data. Only after did the theoretical framework from the boredom studies be included as a part of the analysis (from the second stage).
The research project emerged from the volunteer activity performed by Author A with her partner, who proposed providing “cultural activities” to the refugees of one South-European camp in 2017. Four times a week (each person twice), we (Author A and her partner) conducted workshops called “music” and “cine-club.” The proposed activities involved “doing music together” and “watching movies and discussing their content.” We had in mind the “togetherness” of the workshops: the communication, exchange, and discussions about everything that was interesting for them (camp inhabitants) and us. Our goal was to reduce distance and meet in the commonly shared communication space—the arts (music and cinema) seemed to us an accessible and pleasant way to communicate. We chose arts activities (passive movie watching and active music-playing) not because of a largely shared conviction that the arts are the universal language, but simply because of our ability to conduct such workshops, as for both of us the arts (music and cinema) are serious leisure (Stebbins 1992).
Although the activities were planned as voluntary actions, almost immediately, it became research. At the second meeting, I (Author A) told the asylum seekers that I am a researcher and, with their permission, I would take notes after our meetings. The participants knew that I am writing books and that my next piece would be about them—they treated me as a messenger who would report their hardships and difficult situation in the camp. From the very beginning, our contact with the administration of the facility was difficult when we refused to report on the “behavior” of participants in our workshops. 1 It is crucial to notice that asylum seekers staying in the camp had limited freedom of movement (they should be present at the dinner and cannot leave the camp during the night). Because the observed camp was located in an isolated place, the refugees were in the situation that they qualified as “prison”—they frequently complained about the injustice of being “in a jail without committing a crime.” We immediately noticed the tensions in the camp, related primarily to the asymmetric relation (which we considered a typical case of abuse of power) between the administration and hosted refugees. Due to this situation, we decided to keep our research and data collection covert—only the asylum seekers were informed about it. Although in some countries an undercover study is strictly forbidden or unacceptable for legal/ethical/professional reasons, in the EU it is still authorized in some particular contexts. Our study is exactly such a case. The study obtained the ethical approval of the commission of National Center for Science being a grant funding institution of the project and was led by the ethical principles of International Sociological Association’s Code of Ethics (ISA 2001).
Those who attended our activities were informed about the protection of their anonymity and all agreed to participate in the research. Some of them enthusiastically helped us to collect data to which we would not have had access otherwise. After some months of our work, the nature of our relationship changed. Progressively, we managed to build a relationship trusting enough that the group of people spontaneously sharing their stories and describing their present situation in detail constantly grew. In that way, we learned about the context of refugees’ life in the camp, and we accumulated the necessary data for better interpreting what we observed and understanding asylum seekers’ particular situation. It was not a strategic attitude; in the situation of prolongated relationships between researcher and a group experiencing freedom deprivation and poor nutrition, in the process of our regular support (in addition to our camp’s activity, we organized weekly lunches at our home, which completed their diet; Wagner 2019) we created ties of friendship with some of our participants. We did not select those who became closer—it was the result of an ethnographical study (Whyte, 1956, Appendix). Our presence in the camp lasted 1 year. After several conflicts with the administration, we were forced to cease our activity. However, we have maintained very close contact with thirteen asylum seekers who had attended our workshops (which consists of about 20% of participants). This article is based mainly on the data collected during that year of our activity in the camp.
The research project was based mainly on participant observation in the role of facilitators of cultural activities, which became a daily activity as the voluntary activity quickly became intertwined with everyday contact with the most active participants in our workshops. Yet, being fully aware of all limitations of participant observation and difficulties with obtaining data through it, while “[m]uch of the observation of human conduct does not even get into the field of visual perception” (Blumer 1986, 181), we collected further data through individual interviews. Twenty-five interviews were conducted with refugees—the majority of them (20 interviews) were conducted during the first year and five supplementary interviews were collected after we left the camp. The interviews were conducted in African languages (mainly in Malinke, Soussou, and Pulaar) by two refugees (volunteers) who also help to refine the questions.
After 6 months, when in addition to the meetings in the camp, some participants began to frequently come to our (Author A’s family’s) house, the idea to include refugees in the process of data collection arose. We trained two refugees they became research assistants in the art of interviewing (they read manuals and we conducted practical exercises and ethical training). We acted following Gramsci’s idea that all people are intellectuals and academic knowledge is only one specific category of knowledge equal with other types. By training in academic sociology (especially the methodology of interviewing) we hope to create the organic intellectuals (people who completed their common-sense knowledge (original to their culture of origin; Gramsci, 1971) with the professional sociological training) who will not only contribute to our study but also would represent their group. Their involvement enabled us to improve the data collection process they significantly helped us create interview scenario more adapted to their culture and delicate situation, analyze collected data, and by the incorporation of their voices and ideas, avoid ethnocentrism bias.
The interviews were focused on refugees’ perception of Europe and Europeans—their image and expectations before the journey and their present experiences; we aimed to capture part of the process of “becoming a European.” While the interviews sought to identity process construction—inspired by the work of sociolinguists who claim that emotions (and identity processes) are strongly connected with the mother tongue (Wierzbicka 1994)—we decided to conduct them in African languages and not in English, French or Italian (the European languages in which we communicated with participants). Another factor that pushed us to conduct interviews in participants’ native languages was our intention to avoid the bias provoked by the colonial relationship between a researcher and the underprivileged population. This is a situation to avoid: a French scholar representing the academic world investigating refugees from French postcolonial areas; they represented the lower and middle class, and (except for one person) had no higher education degree. To substitute the European interviewer with a participant who was introduced into the art of conducting interviews was, in our opinion, the best way (1) to reduce the distance between the interviewer and interviewee (they not only both originated from the same culture but also they shared the same difficult situation of asylum seeker) and (2) to “generate participant insight into aspects of group life” (Prus 1987, 254), which is the ultimate and definitional goal of any ethnographic research project.
Yet, the strategy of asking for help from the participants (which is an old idea that William Whyte in the 1940s had already implemented; see methodological appendix in Whyte, 1956, [1943]) also resulted from other factors. While our linguistic handicap (we do not speak African languages) was the main problem in interviewing, the second, equally important problem was the lack of trust. Refugees for years have lived in constant fear of being observed, spied on, manipulated, and exploited by people around them (traffickers, employers, the administration of a host country, administrators of the camps and camp employees). While we were introduced to the refugees by the administration during the first meetings, some of them thought that we were a part of the oppressive system (it is how they perceive the camp and civil officers presiding over their immigration process). Doing the interviews by ourselves, we could obtain credible results only from those who trusted us, knew us for months, and had a good command of French. These requirements were fulfilled by only a few participants whose linguistic skills in French were sufficient enough not to limit the consistency of their responses. However, by including assistant-researchers who came from the same culture as the interviewees and inviting them to participate in the process of data analysis, which is particularly recommended by some researchers in the case of refugees (Krause 2017), we hoped to avoid (or at least to limit) our ethnocentric approach. All interviews were translated into French by the research assistants (they were remunerated for their work thanks to the Author’s A grant), who cannot be acknowledged here due to the maintenance of anonymity, which is particularly important in the case of asylum seekers. This would also compromise the confidentiality of all participants. Actually, independently from those ethical rules, the research assistants—refugees—also wished to keep their identity secret.
It is important to note that the refugees have been interviewed by several different categories of professionals since they were rescued: military and police officers, medical doctors, psychologists and/or social workers. They are aware of the power of their accounts, which are crucial for being qualified for the status of a political refugee (they should always tell the same story and be careful to include some specific information)—their account is an essential tool in their request for documents. Those multiple interrogations were very painful, as the majority of rescued persons are traumatized (it is estimated that about 50% of asylum seekers suffer from mental problems; for Italy, see Crepet et al. (2017); for France, see the report by Center Primo Levi (2018); specifically for PTSD, see Nose et al. 2017). For all the aforementioned reasons, we left these traumatic issues aside in the interviews.
While the semi structured interviews aimed to discuss their relationship with Europeans, the respondents devoted the vast majority of their time to describe their lives in the camp. This is all that they had experienced about Europe since they entered the EU. Their narratives confirmed our observations that the feeling of boredom is a painful, omnipresent, and inevitable aspect of their camp life. For this reason, we added specific questions concerning boredom to the interview scenario. We wished to learn what situations they found boring and what coping strategies they employed to mitigate the feeling in the camp.
Research Context: The Camp and the Participants
The studied camp was located in the Southern part of Europe, in a small village affected by high unemployment. This economically disadvantaged region had been suffering from the emigration of its youth—each year the population decreased, and the majority of inhabitants were in the retirement age (it is a general trend in this region since the late sixties when the presence of industry progressively started to decline). The camp is the biggest employer in the area, with about ten people working permanently. 2 In 2017 the camp hosted about 110 people; 2 years later, about 30 were still there (some people obtained their documents and were able to leave, others escaped, and a few left were waiting for documents outside the official structures). The studied camp hosts adults who have recently arrived in Europe and applied for political asylum. Almost always, they were men between 20 and 35 years old; women are rare (two or three in the camp), and children with parents are exceptions and stay there only a few days. 3 Other camps were organized in this region for minor refugees without parents, but our project did not concern this population. While the biggest influx of refugees crossing the border in the South of the EU occurred in 2013–2015, the centers for retention of asylum seekers were created in an emergency situation—some vacant former military buildings were transformed into camps. Another frequent strategy employed in the studied area was renting existing hotels to host newly arrived refugees. They lived 3 to 4 per room and their roommates were usually from the same region—country and/or linguistic area, which was not a random process of room assignment—the administration decided on the roommates. Each room change required the permission of the administration.
The majority of asylum seekers in the study were from Subsaharan Africa and were Francophones. The Anglophones (between 30% and 40%) are from Africa and Asia. The majority came through the Mediterranean Sea and experienced concentration camps in Libya. 4 According to the EU’s law (so-called “Dublin agreement”), all newcomers are obliged to request asylum status in the first EU country they enter. The process is long and it takes from 18 months to over 2 years. We should keep in mind that the number of camp inhabitants is constantly changing. New residents were coming on average every 2–3 months. Each month, a small group would leave the camp when their legal status was determined. Each week, some people disappeared—they were leaving the camp spontaneously, which is illegal. Changes in the political situation strongly influence how asylum seekers are treated—some camps were closed (due to the decrease of newcomers); the tendency observed from 2017 was to concentrate asylum seekers in the bigger units. The living conditions and well-being of refugees are usually not taken into account in selecting the camps that will continue operating. The largest structures, such as those large networks of institutions hosting refugees, have survived better—our camp belongs to that category (medium-sized, but belongs to an extensive network of institutions hosting refugees). Our fieldwork was conducted in a climate of dynamic political changes (e.g., the populist government modified the immigration laws).
Linguistic Bias
Before examining the phenomenon of camp boredom, we must mention the significant linguistic problem that we encountered in employing the term “boredom,” which contains a language bias. In the studies cited in the literature review section devoted to boredom—all published in English—the participants came from several different linguistic areas. Except for Finkielsztein’s (2019) recent study, we have not found a sociolinguistic analysis of this term either in the English, French or Polish literature. This is surprising considering that the English term “boredom” and its French equivalent ennui, to some extent, differ in their definitions. While boredom is usually defined as “the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest” (Merriam-Webster n.d.), the French ennui, except this meaning, also signifies “a feeling of weariness coinciding with a more or less profound impression of emptiness, uselessness that gnaws at the soul without a specific cause or which is inspired by metaphysical or moral considerations” (Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales n.d.)—which is closer to the meaning of the English words tedium, ennui or melancholy. The French term also has another meaning, totally absent in the English” boredom,” i.e., having a problem with somebody or something. It can connote all kinds of problems, such as unemployment, homelessness, missing family, loneliness, nostalgia for the country of origin, etc. The multiple meanings of the word were a significant challenge in our discussions with refugees and caused many difficulties during the analysis of the interviews.
It turned out that a similar distinction between boredom-as-weariness and boredom-as-problems exists in many African languages. For example, in Malinke being bored in the sense of French s’ennuyer—Kire ye la, nala suma ye la or gnanmilila in Malinke from Guinea; but in Pulaar,—Mapagole, means “I worry.” Boredom—Sawthédhé or Mi dho mappî in Pulaar means—nothing to do. A similar distinction exists in Soussou where sessé mouna nahannabama signifies boredom/nothing to do and “I have problems I should think about”—nan ma gnakhounfé.
The interviews were conducted in African languages with the inclusion of French words (it is a frequent habit of people from West Africa). It is worth noticing that independently from the meanings boredom has in their original languages (boredom as a separate category from worries), participants originated from former French colonies responded according to its French meaning and thought ofennui in terms of both meanings(boredom and problems). Some of them who spoke in their mother tongue used the French term je m’ennuie (Iam bored), explaining that it is a frequently used French expression in conversations held in African languages (Western African countries are mainly former French colonies). As one of the participants explained: “In many African languages, the translations into French are not correct and vice versa, and in our generation, we have a mix of the languages—a lot of the original words disappeared and are replaced by French words.” This explains why, despite having precise definitions for boredom in their native languages, our participants used the same meaning of the term as French-speaking people. African languages are transmitted mainly orally, with important migration and mutual cultural influences not limited to state borders (which do not correspond to linguistic maps) and ethnic diversity contributing to the mix of the languages; they are an essential dynamic of the vocabulary’s evolution. Consequently, for most of the participants in this study, when speaking about boredom, they discussed boredom not only in the usual sense present in their African languages (as in English) but also included the second (French) broader meaning—problems. This is one of the terms that includes all kinds of unpleasant emotions.
In our study, we considered both categories separately even if it appeared that both phenomena—the feeling of boredom and problems (ennui-souci—anxiety, worry)—were intertwined and interdependent. In this double sense, ennui is a more powerful concept than boredom, while consisting of the emotion (doing nothing, being disengaged) and/or the particular situation, which causes worries and anxiety. In the first meaning, it is a verb in the first person (je m’ennuie/I am bored), while in the second meaning it extends beyond the individual feeling of boredom (j’ai des ennuis/I have problems). While emotion is subjective, the state of boredom as having a problem is an objective issue—they both interact with one another and at the level of discussion (in our interviews) appeared jointly.
The research assistants did not ask directly about boredom. The question was about their current situation and respondents spoke about the differences between African and European culture. Their responses were so similar, so we asked ourselves if the practice of speaking between them about this topic (it was what our research assistant reported) shaped their shared opinion about boredom. Interestingly, they employed the group-voice speaking in the first person in the plural we, which signified “we-Africans—refugees” as numerous examples below will illustrate.
To resolve this complexity and to capture the deep sense of the phenomenon of refugees’ boredom and understand the refugees’ life as a sociologically important issue, we elaborated the following modalities of the phenomenon in question: “doing nothing” (the expression that signifies the state of boredom), “life in limbo” (the particular feeling related to the specific situation of refugees) and “strategic boredom” (the specific relationship between administrators and refugees). All three are neatly connected and the first two culminate in the third. Still, simultaneously this is the same feeling but seen from different perspectives—the first is causal, the second—affective, and the third—interactional (the power relations).
(Refugee) Camp Boredom
Modality 1: “Doing Nothing”
This expression is borrowed from the current language of the participants. They are using it as the response for the simple introductory form of greetings, responding to “Hi, how are you?”—“Hi, well, OK, but we have nothing to do. . ..” (with resigning tone). [“Comment ça va? Ça va, mais on a rien à faire”] This short expression was repeatedly noticed during our meetings. When we proposed something new (music, watching a movie, invitation to our home for lunch, going to the exposition), the recurrent response was “Yes, why not. We have nothing to do. We are bored all the time here.”
This no-occupation state was also identified as a significant factor in boredom (yet, they are far from being equivalent), frequently mentioned in studies of partial or total deprivation of freedom and consequently, occupational deprivation (compare criminal incarceration, for example, in Whiteford 1997). In our setting, the typical day of a resident often began late in the morning (it was common for them to miss breakfast because they slept late). If someone missed mealtimes, they were unable to eat later. Breakfast lasts 30–60 minutes and starts at 8, but in practice, it is frequently later. It takes place in a huge hall, the former restaurant of the hotel. Three long rows of tables left no doubt about the military/prison organization of the space. The place is noisy, quasi-industrial, impersonal, without decoration and with plastic chairs. The meals are in single-use plastic containers—they are from a catering service that was brought in daily by the person in charge of logistics. At 9:30/10, lessons in the local language began. The teachers (volunteers or working in exchange for modest remuneration) came twice per week, but the holiday calendar is extensive and the organizational obstacles are numerous. For nearly half the year, the lessons did not occur, so the morning activity was suspended. Lunch was at 12:30—again in the same big hall with long lines of tables (easier to organize the fast distribution of food). The plastic lunch boxes were the same—their quality already was the subject of numerous complaints. The administration explained that this was not their fault—the quality of the meals was the responsibility of the external supplier, which successfully passed all sanitary inspections (one person from the administration told me that “they are capricious”). In the inspection documents, all was correct, even though mold regularly covered the rice or pasta. The portions were small, but the refugees frequently did not finish their meals because of food safety issues. The majority of camp inhabitants were skinny.
After some months of conducting our project, our workshop participants started to trust us and confessed that they are permanently hungry. In response to this information, we organized lunches on the weekend or even during the week at our home: they cooked African meals and ate much more than they did at the regular meals (Wagner 2019).
After lunch in the camp, as usual in this part of the world, it was siesta time. We conducted our workshops in the afternoon (3 to 5–6
At 7:30
In the evening, some refugees could walk to the nearby village, but most of the time, the participants stayed in their rooms watching TV. This last activity was the most popular “occupation.”
Therefore, some necessary cleaning tasks completed those “empty” days (expression employed by the participants). The refugees spent some time manually washing their scarce clothes and keeping their rooms clean. For shared spaces, the cleaning staff (hired from among the family of the hotel’s owner) worked regularly. Asylum seekers occasionally cooked their own food, which was illegal and occurred in deplorable hygienic conditions: behind the hotel building, space was inhabited by wild dogs, cats, and rats. Not all refugees risked eating the food prepared on the spontaneously improvised grill (during the summer—May–October—in this region, making a fire outside was strictly prohibited because of the danger of fire) without clean dishes or a decent eating environment. Preparing these meals was forbidden. Disobedience such as other transgressions (using electric heat in the winter, possessing a personal computer, cooking rice or hot water in the room, keeping food in the room) could be reported to the higher administration. Indeed, the head of the camp collected data about each asylum seeker and late in the evening he was required to report to the central institution that managed the refugees’ everyday schedule, all possible transgressions, “bad behaviors,” problems or escapes. It was impossible to be away for the night without the administrator’s permission.
This specific context of heavy control provokes enormous situational boredom.
The boredom factors related to the particular context of the camp are partial enclosure, the lack of agency that increased because of authoritarian direction, the similarity of the daily schedule (and meals), and above all, the absence of interest in the activities that were available before we started our fieldwork.
Boredom coping strategies (removal activities)
When we first came to the camp and explained our activities and invited refugees to participate in them, some of them immediately told us that this was welcome because they had nothing to do. The feeling of deep social isolation was very strong among our participants.
The majority of them were keen to learn the local language, even if only a few anticipated staying in the country where the camp was. Our Francophone participants most often decided to come to France or Belgium, Anglophones mainly the UK and Germany. Some people wished to reach Scandinavian countries or Spain. They were not really motivated to learn the local language for any other purpose than to “pass commission” (to receive a positive answer from the jury deciding about their legal situation). This was the most important immediate goal of all of them. They waited for the appointment date (several months) and usually after their first rejection, they waited again (more months) for another commission. Being fluent in the local language could help in the interview and facilitated the obtention of protected status. 6
When I proposed to help them with local language learning by following the short lessons on YouTube, only one person followed my advice. There were similar results with all proposed activities. If we did something together (discussing the films we watched together, dancing, playing music or singing), it was a social occasion—participants enjoyed this shared time. Yet, if the activity required some individual (or collective) preparation without the volunteer, we never had positive results. Nothing was done and our presence turned out to be indispensable to motivate participants in the first place. As they frequently mentioned, the workshop helped them fight boredom.
According to several participants, the cultural activities that we proposed modified life in the camp, being bright spots in their lonely and boring life. We watched two movies per week and we discussed with them social issues that came out of these movies and the news (mainly via French TV). The political situation was followed by several refugees—especially regarding issues that could change migration policy and, in the end, influence their own situation. While our after-film-watching discussions were not always relaxed time and sometimes we raised difficult topics (racism, slavery, exploitation, the condition of women, emigration, war and organized crime, corruption), during the music workshops, participants were fully relaxed and had a good time.
The music workshops were more challenging to organize than the cinema ones (because of the need for instruments) and participation was not so large. The first class, which involved the construction of simple instruments, did not draw much interest at all. There was an ambiance of passivity and a lack of involvement. This is not about a conversation but about how to play music, sing and dance. Our goal was to help refugees escape the immobile way of living and engage them in a creative activity. After some meetings, a team was created that included the most motivated participants (who in their country of origin also played, sang, and danced), and participants in the music workshops became so engaged that they prepared a concert that was performed in the center of the village. We considered this event the most successful meeting of the two populations and the closest we came to achieving our workshops’ goals. For us, as researchers and activists, it was a short period of hope that doing things together and communicating was possible.
That ephemeral success and significant improvement of the refugees’ well-being was reflected in numerous comments, e.g., “we are finally doing something more interesting than watching stupid TV all day.” However, their visible happiness and the local success of their concert provoked a negative reaction from the camp administrators. The isolation policy practiced during the years before we started our workshops was in the eyes of the administration staff the best way of managing the camp. We had more and more difficulty organizing our workshops. The TV remote control with which we watched our films was lost, the screen did not work and when I became “technically independent” (equipped with the university’s projector and my own computer), we were moved to another space. We were sent to the basement, where the conditions were unacceptable. The lack of space, no heat in winter, mold in the dark and icy rooms made our meetings impossible. Finally, the open conflict situation between the administration and us (volunteers) increased to the point of the strict (but not documented) prohibition of our presence in the camp. The situation of the asylum seekers returned to the previous state—waiting for documents for months and years doing nothing. By our actions, we clearly disrupted the negotiated and confirmed consensus—camp boredom.
Imposing social isolation
Without workshops, only the courses in the local language were occasions for the refugees to meet a European not related to the administration (also a volunteer teacher). If some participants more actively learned that language it was because of the hope for getting a job in this country but also because they said they were motivated by their wish to “have friends there.” In our discussions, they often complained that “in Africa, we had many friends—here only the people from the camp”: Africans are more open in relationships. Customs are very different . . . I would like everyone to make an effort to accept others as they are. . .. But here I am alone. We are all here . . . waiting for papers, months and months and—I am here 19 months waiting . . . we are locked in our rooms most of the time. We have nothing to do . . . we’re bored. (Guinea, 31 years old, over one year in the camp)
During one interview, the research assistant asked what is the worse in life in the camp and got a short and direct response: “Boredom.” He asked—“Why?” No family, no friends, no work . . . you are alone and there is nothing you can do. I am not the prisoner we did nothing wrong, we are not criminals and we are being prevented from living. They don’t want us to work. You have to stay here to get the documents. We have nothing to do. (Guinea, 28 years old)
Their command of the local language could facilitate communication with the local population. Two former asylum seekers worked and lived in the village, so their cases suggested that contact with the inhabitants was possible. The region was rich in local cultural events, which would be a perfect opportunity for meeting them. Although at the beginning of our work that was possible (on the occasion of the local event, we organized a concert in the town square), some months later, the refugees got an informal prohibition on participation in the festivities and were told to keep their distance from the local villagers. It was said (the decision was attributed to the director of the camp and repeated by the refugees) that local people were afraid that the presence of refugees downtown would frighten tourists. We observed a similar situation with sports activities; at first, for several months, there was an exciting football activity (also an initiative of a local football fan). However, the matches and training were rarely occasions to meet with village inhabitants (some teenagers were playing football as well). One day, the village boys wished to play with the refugees who were already on the football field, but the group from the camp stormily discussed the proposition and the final decision was to not play with the young village sportsmen. They wished to avoid later problems with the administration, which forbade all contact with the local population. Refugees who tried to be seen by the administration in the most positive way possible (always keeping in mind their “commission” and daily reports on their “behavior”) stopped going to the village, stopped walking around and became invisible.
The camp is not surrounded by barbed wire; however, it is an unwelcoming place. There is an invisible line separating the village people and camp residents. The majority of the latter remain in their rooms laying on their bed, chatting with their smartphones with other refugees met in their travels or with their family and/or watching TV.
Modality 2: The Life in Limbo
Failure of expectations
Those who continue to meet us (in our home when they came secretly) reported: “as previously, we are in jail—without being inmates.” The days were not stimulating—food deprivation, lack of contact with administration personnel and village inhabitants. “We are not treated as a person but as an object. Why? We are also human beings!” Others recalled that they escaped inhuman treatment in Africa in order to have a decent life. They wished to leave “the hell” they were still in, as some said. Therefore, all of them risked their lives on the journey, motivated by their desire to seek a better future. Some came to Europe to fulfill specific aspirations—finding a decent job, going to school, and developing their skills. All came with the hope of having a “civilized” life and respecting their human rights.
The tensions between their expectations and previous hopes and the camp’s situation were tackled by sociologists who found in this phenomenon another source of boredom (Conrad 1997). The gap between refugees’ unsatisfactory everyday life in the camps and their aspirations for ‘a better life’ (which drove them to seek asylum in the first place) created boredom. They became bored both situationally (there is nothing constructive to do on a daily basis) and chronically/existentially (it was not easy to be comfortably included in the host society’s culture; Healy, 1984; Toohey, 2011).
Lack of agency
This was exactly the situation of participants in this study, dominated by the administrator’s desire for total control over them. They responded to this treatment by plunging into boredom. As Allison Pease succinctly summarizes Wolf Lepenies’ point (1992), “boredom is a structural response on the part of social groups whose lack of public significance inhibits their action, leaving them bored” (2012, 8). In this sense, boredom is not solely a matter of an individual’s anguish but it can also refer to a group’s condition derived from a shared social position. To clarify the point, boredom can occur either in a situation of overregulation or one of normlessness (anomie).
In our participant’s case, it was both: the lack of public significance and the normlessness. As was shown above, the refugees were marginalized not only by their particular status on a lower rung of the social ladder or rather below that ladder (they have no legal status attributed to them yet) but probably foremost by the focused actions aimed at their marginalization and isolation, which were performed by administrators who were supposed to take care of them.
Imposing boredom constitutes a powerful tool of social control and power over refugees. One form of this strategy was “caring” but not providing the resources to create meaningful ways to spend time (e.g., for our cinema workshops, we had no television and limited access to the internet; camp inhabitants have no access to the internet in their room and limited access in the entrance hall). Refugees are thus forced to be idle and are not allowed to work. In that capacity, their situation can be compared to that of unemployed and homeless people living in semiclosed institutions.
According to Lepenies, boredom is a collective mood, closely connected to melancholy or even identical to some form of it. It is regarded as an outcome of one’s reflection on the significant systemic constraints of one’s social position. The members of a given group experience inhibition of action, which prompts a sense of powerlessness associated with the lack of freedom and control and, by the same token, the lack of agency. Refugees had to wait for the outcome of the events (obtention of documents) having absolutely no control over it, which was actually the situation desired by the administration—people deprived of control who feel no agency are easier to manipulate and to maintain control over.
In-betweenness—limbo state
In the observed camp, except for some sports activities (always in isolation from the local population), refugees had expressed a deep feeling of limitation and wasted time. “Two or more years—the best (young) years of our lives are lost. . ..” several times we heard this complaint. As one respondent said: “The worst you see we get bored and we can do anything about it. You can’t do anything. You can only wait for this to pass” (Mali, 33 years old). For them, this is a frozen life (they cannot work, study, have friends, marry, or start a family). They are stuck in-between, in some transitional state of the suspended present, unrealization, in a situation in which the past is “no more” and the future is “not yet” (Frederiksen 2013, 6). They remain in limbo, marked by a deep boredom, which is “an experience of purgatory” (Kohli 2014, 89) and “refers to the marginalization, control and stasis of people. It is a phase in which both people and the sites that they inhabit are neither precisely “here” nor “there” (Mountz 2011, 382).
The state of boredom, in which refugees permanently stay in the camp, can be, thus, described as a kind of captivity, entrapment (Martin, Sadlo, and Stew 2006; O’Neill 2014), and is a typical response to their specific living conditions, to being in limbo. Boredom becomes the typical and expected state in the camp; it is an outcome of suspension of transition between statuses that inhibits the process of becoming. Living away from what used to be home, in a makeshift accommodation that is not home yet, they belong to nowhere, stuck in the quintessentially transitory situation of “double absence” (Sayad 2004). They are neither there—in their country of origin—nor here, in the host country. They no longer belong to their previous society—family relationships are modified, they miss all festivities, marriages, and religious events—and simultaneously in their current places of residence, they are not included yet, and perhaps will not be for a long time. They are “them”—others, strangers—deprived of agency and with limited rights. They are in a fragile situation, worsened by omnipresent corruption. Without defense, they have little chance to claim their rights guaranteed by the Geneva Charter. They are in a situation without exit, in which their suspended life seems to be never-ending. And boredom is the modus vivendi of people in limbo. Stuck in between their previous and their future lives, they have no present existence, while they control nothing. The only thing they can choose is a form of boring activity with which they occupy their days.
Survivor strategies: escaping
Isolation and lack of agency result from the specific life conditions in which exclusion and marginalization are structurally inscribed in the refugees’ status. In our study, those features of camp boredom were actively inflicted by the administration’s specific treatment of refugees. 7 They did everything possible to maintain and reinforce those isolating and marginalizing life conditions, and by depriving refugees of the agency, took total control over them.
Refugees responded to this treatment in two ways. The first was escape. Perhaps, as some participants said, the short experience of participation in our activities improved their feeling of agency and increased their hope for a better future. Some participants started to leave the camp illegally. We were never informed about their decision; they kept it secret to protect us. In fact, in Europe there is a relatively new phenomenon called “the criminalization of help” by journalists and activists. Volunteers are accused of being traffickers and our case was perfect for understanding this claim. People who were more active in our workshops have progressively escaped from the camp. We interpreted their acts as taking back control over their lives, the retrieval of their agency and as an expression of the wish to escape the situation of limbo. Even if their future was precarious, even dangerous, they escaped camp boredom. We can ask: is there a relationship between our workshops and the different relationships that we (also Europeans) maintained with participants and the fact that they got back their agency and decided to leave the camp?
Two people left the camp legally, taking the risk of being homeless and unemployed without any social protection. By leaving this institution, they decided to abandon their social support (such as a daily amount of money, food, and access to shelter). They looked for jobs and actively waited for the decision of the commission as to their juridical status.
Finally, those who remained hoping for the prompt end of their procedure became passive and discreet. This was the third survivor strategy.
Modality 3: Strategic Boredom
Survivor strategy: playing the role of bored refugee
Upon entering the camp building, we met a group of people with their smartphones and headphones, speaking or chatting with friends and/or family, and by this activity not able to contact other people present in this large hall. Except for some people playing checkers, there was always silence and a half-sleepy mood. Other camp inhabitants were reading something on the screens of their phones. There were no people speaking or discussing things at high volume.
In the situation of the observed camp, the group meetings could be dangerous. Discussions about spoiled food, missing documents, unclear administrative procedures, and missing pocket money could inflame the camp inhabitants. In the past, the previous groups of refugees organized protests. They blocked the highway and alerted the local press. It was not a quiet time for the camp administration as well as for complaining refugees. No one (administration, village, and local governance) wished to have these kinds of problems again. People were expected to be quiet. The daily reports, which the administrator could send to the highest authorities, were the best way of keeping people obedient. A refugee could be punished for opposing the rules imposed by the administrator. A short negative note in the administration’s file would compromise the attribution of protection status. No one dares to organize protests any more, nor are there group meetings or collective complaints lodged.
The vast majority of inhabitants remains in their rooms. Only a few were in the hall, attracted mainly by the quality of the internet connection. This could be a hospital for long-term patients under medical care, but most people staying here are healthy. Watching TV, surfing the internet, hours and hours, days, weeks, months, and years they are in permanently imposed boredom. In African languages, it signifies to be upset because of the impossibility of doing not what they wanted to do, and instead to have nothing to do. Sleeping, undergoing solitude, worry and sorrow—these are the main “occupations” of the day. This constitutes a significant problem for refugees if we are taking into account that the waiting time for documents is about 2 years. This is a time robbed from the life of each asylum seeker due to structural and relational factors.
Accordingly, to the expectations of the administrator, those who stayed in the camp waiting for documents are to adopt the role of a passive refugee. The administrators of the camp take away all job opportunities. When a farmer came to the camp asking for immediate help and requesting ten people (which is not illegal) the administrator refused, saying that nobody would agree to work in the harvest (confirming the stereotype of “lazy Africans”). Similar situations occurred several times, and the refugees learned only later about missing job offers. The only activity allowed by the administrator was related to rare municipal activities, which took place under the strict control of the authorities. Refugees did not get permission to participate in leisure activities. Their rare presence in the local festivities was controlled by the administrator and limited. The head of the camp usually refused to break the daily routine of the staff and to invest their time in the preparation of some activities that were proposed by refugees or local inhabitants. The lack of work, training, learning or leisure collective activity makes the days of the camp inhabitants “empty.” After their rare activities, they returned to their rooms, not complaining, resisting passively by doing nothing. They were back to their lives, immersed in deep boredom, playing the role of the docile and bored asylum seeker. The head of the camp prevented each situation that could allow the refugees relief from this inactive state because it was much easier for him to exercise control over the refugees if he deprived them of such opportunities. Such elements that are usually connected to the situational characteristics of boredom—lack of agency, passivity, and meaninglessness—are employed for maintaining domination over the refugee population, making it impossible to contest abusive treatment and their position or status as “victim.” The fragility of their situation (waiting for their documents—a process which partially depends on a good reference letter made by the administrator) obliged them to accept this passive role.
Being bored for the refugees corresponded both with their difficult situation (limbo life, Wagner 2019; double absence; Sayad 2004) and with the obligation of meeting the expectations of the people who control their lives in the camp.
Strategic boredom—double meaning
Strategic boredom is a social contract linking both categories—refugees and administration—in a very particular way. The former (refugees) became passive and in their inactivity they remain “not dangerous” (they are not able to demand their rights). The latter (administrator) is working on maintenance control by limiting all activities that could relieve the permanent boredom. Both categories (administration and refugees) respect their roles, except those who left the camp before obtaining documents. Both categories have opposite goals while for refugees, this is to obtain documents in the shortest period possible, for administration the refusal that applies the longest stay as possible in the camp is the best option. The boredom of refugees is a way to keep refugees inactive and dependent on the camp administration as long as it is possible. Each day this is a financial gain, which multiplied by about 100 (this was the number of refugees in the cap during 6 months of observation) constitutes a supplementary income (a gray area of financial countability, while cooperative institutions that are managing the camps should not make the profits).
Strategic boredom is the “activity “(or the lack of it) that takes the largest amount of the asylum seekers’ time. Using the adjective “strategic” enables us to focus our attention on the purpose of such social activities. Strategic boredom seems crucial to understand the particular relationships that determine the processes observed in our field. In this situation, it has a double meaning: for the administrator, a strategy of control, and for the refugees, a strategy of gaining favor with the administrator and, thanks to his recommendation, getting desirable documents—the permission of stay. The first meaning is not connected with the boredom of the administrators, who are not bored with/by the relationship with refugees; they impose boredom to maintain strict control over passive and desensitized population. Boredom concerns the refugees who, as described in the previous sections, are surrounded by the context that pushes them to experience such a state. However, we could raise the question, if strategic boredom is a goal-oriented social act (from the point of view of refugees who agree with the role of bored asylum seeker), do the refugees really remain in the state of boredom or are they just pretending to experience it? It is difficult to determine; however, taking all previously mentioned modalities of camp boredom into account (doing nothing, staying in limbo), it can be hypothesized that boredom is an actual and terrifying state felt by refugees that corresponds to the expectations of the administration.
Conclusions
Following Blumer’s approach presented in Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. (1986, 164), our conceptual proposition will serve three functions:
(1) “it introduces a new orientation or point of view”—which we fulfilled by changing the perspective on the boredom, not so much as an emotion typical for the closed settings (and total institutions) considered such as the effect of the restriction of freedom (Goffman 1961), but as the strategy employed in closed institutions;
(2) “it serves as a tool, or as a means of transacting business with one’s environment”—which was instantiated by the interactional nature of the strategic boredom appearing in the tacit agreement between administrators and refugees about the mode of their life in the camp;
(3) “it makes possible deductive reasoning and so the anticipation of new experience”—which came out in our analysis and we hope will contribute to the emergence of new studies and more nuanced perception of boredom, conducted not only in settings where freedom is restricted but also in other areas of human social activity.
Thanks to our ethnographic work, we were able to develop a substantive plan for studying the situation of people living in limbo and understanding the social forces created in the social spaces that generate social exclusion, human discrimination, and abuse. The distinction between three modalities of camp boredom (“nothing to do, “life in limbo,” and “strategic boredom”) helped us to identify the central social problems that concern the refugees living in the camps. All three are neatly connected and the first two culminate in the third. Still, simultaneously this is the same feeling but seen from different perspectives—the first—causal, the second—affective, and the third—interactional (the power relations). While the first two modalities were mentioned (partially) in previous studies, the last concept—strategic boredom—seems never to have attracted the attention of social science researchers. Yet, according to our data, this phenomenon constitutes one of the most important types of relationships that prevailed in our study.
We argue that strategic boredom is a social control tool, which is employed by the people who dominate situations in which a fragile population is living in the condition of limited freedom (restricted space, limited liberty of movement and right to work, weak formal status/absence of ID documents/clandestinity, deprivation of agency and difficult-precarious living conditions); boredom is imposed on a dominated population in order to prevent protests (group or individual) and make impossible all requests to respect refugees’ rights. Strategic boredom is a social process, which enables both parties (the administration and the refugees) to perform their social roles—a controller and controlled people. For the controllers (administrator of the camp with his collaborators), this is a disciplinary strategy, while for people under control (refugees) this is a survival strategy. Boredom is a kind of compromise maintained between both categories (administration and refugees), enabling avoidance of open conflict. This is the most frequent modus vivendi present in institutions with limited freedom (such as refugee camps). This is the most pronounced mode of life for people in limbo.
The different types of boredom overlap. With this cumulation, the effectiveness increases (by effectiveness measured by refugees’ passivity and their lack of agency from one side and by no repressive treatment and positive opinion in the documentation, which determines the obtention of documents). Strategic Boredom takes advantage of these other types of boredom, and all in all, a strong quasidepressive state is created, and this inertia is effective the refugees are losing their agency. The power strategy’s effectiveness is higher when the other types of boredom are present their accumulation ensures this. For example, if a refugee could work outside the camp, be active (not bored) during the day it would be a different situation; after having conceived his/her dignity (due to work outside the camp and earning some money), they could oppose ill-treatment. Another example would be the case in which they do not live in isolation, but with their families—with their children—they would also be fighting for their rights. During our study, only two persons found the work outside, and as soon as it happened, they left the camp. Another person worked inside the camp (he was a tailor—he sewed for everyone). He was not complaining about the boredom, and after 5 months and first refusal of his status, instead of staying in the camp (as 80% of the refugees did) he left the camp and lived on his own in the big city 400 kilometers from the camp. By doing this, he should earn his living and was not in the structure, however, he was not sure to get his documents after leaving the camp (there was information circulating among refugees that they should stay in the camp if they wish to get documents).
So, this exception (someone active) from the point of view of direction was a lost case—when a refugee is leaving the camp—the director is losing the money (at that period 35 euros per day—from this amount administration of the camp should provide decent living conditions, but, on each expense items director and his stuff made economies—they earn money on the difference between what they have got from the EU money and spent on the actual refugees care).
We were able to gather this data thanks to the ethnographic method. The methodology matters, especially if the inquiry concerns hidden phenomena, difficult to catch, dynamic and impossible to quantify. We hope that our work, in which we identified strategic boredom as an isolated phenomenon, will open the way for two possible “developments of paramount importance for science (. . .): (1) this content [strategic boredom] may become the object of separate investigation and reflection, (2) it may enter into the experience of others and so become common property” (Blumer 1986, 158).
Contrary to previous studies focused on individual aspects of boredom, we centered our analysis on the social aspects of this phenomenon. We have been inspired by the interactionist approach, which goes beyond face-to-face interaction (Goffmanian type) and encompasses a broad spectrum of social processes. We adapted this approach to the study of the refugee camp and considered boredom in the camps to be an interactional phenomenon. By deconstructing dynamics hidden in the phenomenon of strategic boredom, we hope to shed some light on the complex relationship between the management/administrators and refugees. In such a context, boredom is not as it appears in most studies—an unexpected, negative, unwanted and even a breaking element of the interaction. In our case, strategic boredom is, contrarily, an expected, imposed mood to adopt or a role to play.
Why is strategic boredom such a powerful phenomenon? Most certainly, it is because of the specific context (Camp Boredom) and the co-occurrence of several factors stimulating boredom. First of all, structures such as status alienation (lack of documents), cultural, geographical/spatial and linguistic isolation, meaninglessness, alienation, unemployment, in-betweenness, and a lack of agency are present. Secondly, there are further indirect factors that influence the feeling of boredom: post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, separation from the family, undernutrition, poor living conditions, health problems (diabetes), an unhealthy diet and lack of sports activity. Thirdly, there are social factors such as relationships between refugees and the administration.
Our focus on social factors, the most interesting and different aspect of our study from other research on boredom, enabled us to detect strategic boredom—an intentional, imposed, desired (socially constructed) situation aiming at maintaining a large group of people under the control of a few without using direct tools of power (arms, physical abuse, or complete isolation). In our case, this particular strategy of domination and strict control, unfortunately, seems to be very efficient.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all fieldwork participants. We are also grateful for inspiring discussion with reviewers.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is partially based on the research conducted under the frame of the grant OPUS 13, 2017 – HOPE [2017/25/B/HS6/01725], financed by the Polish National Science Center.
