Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object

Displacement and the persistent problem of the migrant/non-migrant binary

It seems unlikely, of course, that anthropologists would set out intentionally to reinforce the idea of refugees as exceptional subjects. Indeed, a recurrent theme that is emphasised throughout the significant corpus of anthropological work with refugees that has emerged over the past two decades is the significance of the agency and subjectivity of refugees: it has long been established that the experiences of refugees are unable to be homogenised or reduced to the singularity of refugee status (Allan, 2013; Besteman, 2016; Feldman, 2018; Malkki, 1996). So how is it that despite these overall nuanced analyses, which emphasise the complexity of refugee lives, anthropological work can so often, nonetheless, reinforce a more uniform idea of refugee experiences as exceptional, relative to the lives of other migrants or citizens?

Part, I suspect, is due to what Joel Robbins (2013), extending the seminal critique of anthropological subject-making by Trouillot, suggests is the propensity of contemporary anthropology to privilege suffering as the primary index of subject-making. That is, as Coutin and Vogel (2016) also point out, anthropologists tend to focus on tragedy and suffering even as they emphasise the agency and unique subjectivities of migrant subjects. But, more fundamentally, anthropology is yet to overcome what I consider to be a categorical paradox in working with people we identify as refugees. ² For even as anthropologists seek to recognise and emphasise the agency and unique subjectivities of refugees, and subsequently overcome the homogeneity of refugee status, we are concurrently bound by a locus of analysis that is exclusively focused on people we identify as refugees, primarily those who have experienced forced migration. In attempting to nuance the refugee category as a heterogeneous sphere of experience, anthropologists are limited to reinscribing the significance of that category as a primary mode of differentiation: between those who have experienced forced migration, and those who have not. Recognising this categorical paradox brings up new questions about what it means to be displaced. If displacement is an existential experience (cf. Lems, 2016, 2018; Jackson, 2013), and not only an ambivalent politico-legal status attached to refugees, can people who remain in place experience displacement?

Despite the recent spotlighting, displacement is not a new area of focus in anthropology. More than 20 years ago, for example, Liisa Malkki (1992, 1995a: 496, 1995b) developed a seminal corpus of work that urged anthropologists to apply ‘critical thinking about the study of displacement’. That work formed part of a broader turn in the discipline to critique the tendency for anthropologists to approach culture and groups of people as bounded and self-contained units of study (e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1996; Appadurai, 1988, 1996; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992, 1997). Whether by choice or circumstance, people routinely move across territorial and cultural borders, making displacement, somewhat, a fundamental human experience, at least according to Malkki (1995a). Although Malkki (1995a) based this analysis on ethnography conducted with people who had received refugee status under the United Nations’ definition, the overarching point is that displacement is not reducible to a politico-legal status. Rather, displacement is an existential experience produced from situations of enforced change. Therefore, instead of putting the refugee forward as the paradigmatic figure of displacement, Malkki (1995a) argues that doing so only reinforces the significance of the national order as a seemingly ‘natural’ basis of subject-making, and, in contrast, argues for anthropologists to transcend the significance of nationalism by identifying displacement beyond conflations with statelessness.

So how does displacement continue to be approached as an exceptional experience in anthropological work, and almost invariably attached to refugeehood (Siu, 2007), despite Liisa Malkki (1992, 1995a, 1995b), one of the most oft-cited researchers associated with this topic, arguing for an almost oppositional stance in which displacement is recognised as a more pervasive characteristic of human being? I consider that there are three dominant theoretical conventions about displacement that have solidified its conceptualisation as an exceptional kind of experience. Primarily, I am referring here to the ways in which displacement has been theorised in relation to international legal conventions and their political effects, mobility, space and place and temporality. As I elaborate below, it is often in the combination of each concept at once that displacement is typically, and implicitly, rendered exceptional.

The exceptionality of displacement in anthropology

Firstly, displacement persists as a way to describe a status of politico-legal exclusion in anthropology, primarily as a state of refugeehood. One explanation for this ongoing connection between displacement and refugeehood derives from the popularity of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) theorisation of bare life, in which the figure of the refugee is put forward as the paradigmatic figure through which the disposability, absent rights, and politico-legal exclusion of the homo sacer is realised in contemporary society. Since this publication, the influence of Agamben on anthropological scholarship has been pervasive, and, in particular, bare life has become something of a trope in anthropological work with refugees and other kinds of marginal people (Stratton, 2011). Alison Ross (2008) even goes so far as to describe this emergent theoretical legacy as ‘the Agamben effect’. Although the link between refugee status and bare life makes for an interesting entry point into theorising contemporary biopolitics, it does not necessarily reflect the actual lived experiences of people caught up in those formations: indeed, characterising refugees or other people as existing in a state of bare life ignores the ways that, despite being politically and legally ambiguous figures, they continue to impact on the political structures in which they are embedded. Even in situations of constraint, the subjugation of refugees is not totalistic: they exert agency and represent political significance (Fassin, 2012). Relatedly, there are some people with full citizenship status who may, conversely, feel that they are excluded from political significance. The sovereignty through which bare life is produced is not clearly cut across the boundaries of citizen/refugee (Ramsay, 2017, 2019). If, as Didier Fassin (2012) suggests, the effects of political exclusion are constantly contingent and not easily mappable onto legal categorisations, it follows that an experience of displacement cannot be automatically loaded onto a specific politico-legal status, such as that of a refugee. Yet, the association between refugeehood as a status of politico-legal exclusion and an ensuing experience of displacement remains salient in public discourse and scholarly research, alike.

It is not just scholars who are responsible for this conflation between displacement and refugeehood. Indeed, in recent years, popular media has increasingly come to discursively characterise so-called displaced populations as ‘refugees’. For example, following Hurricane Katrina in the USA, people who were forced to leave their homes due to the storm were labelled in public media as ‘Katrina refugees’ (Masquelier, 2006). More generally, there has been a trend to describe people who have been forced to migrate due to climate change as ‘climate refugees’ (Farbotko and Lazrus, 2012). It may not be correct from a legal perspective to refer to such people—who may technically be citizens residing in their origin country—as ‘refugees’, but the link certainly captures a more fluid categorisation of displacement that defies being mapped onto distinct politico-legal categories.

This link between refugeehood and displacement reveals another theoretical paradigm through which displacement comes to be reinforced as a kind of exceptional experience: that of the ongoing assumption of displacement and mobility. As pointed out by Annika Lems (2016), displacement has been taken up in anthropology as part of the ‘spatial turn’ that emerged from the discipline in the 1990s, which detached displacement from physical place and instead made it a phenomenon that emerges as people move across and between disparate and unfamiliar spaces. This approach allows for more expansive theorisations of displacement as an experience that manifests beyond conflations with politico-legal status, but ultimately requires a kind of mobility, a movement through space, which refutes a more fundamentally existential, and more expansive, theory of displacement. Overcoming both the conflation of displacement with refugeehood and mobility, Hedda Askland (2018) has recently emphasised the existential dynamics of displacement as experienced through the intergenerational memories of people living in a small town in rural Australia that has been transformed by the mining industry. Askland (2018) provides a theory of displacement as characterised by experiences of what are termed ‘broken time’, and argues that theorisations of displacement require attention to temporality, and temporal change, as much as to relationship to physical place.

Indeed, the temporality of displacement has emerged as a recent focus of anthropological analysis. Introducing a Special Issue of Social Analysis dedicated to the that topic, Cindy Horst and Katarzyna Grabska (2015) describe how displacement that results from conflict and war brings into question the temporal stability of life, making protracted uncertainty about the future a norm for refugees and other kinds of irregular migrants. Similarly, Catherine Brun (2016) suggests that humanitarian logics are based on reinforcement of the temporal urgency of the present, with little investment in future orientations, meaning that refugees and other displaced peoples whose lives become organised through humanitarian regimes are often constrained to present concerns and void of future possibility. Of course, as Ilana Feldman (2018, 2016) points out, the lives of refugees in humanitarian spaces are never wholly determined by those logics: refugees themselves attempt to forge futures of possibility in spite of their often-depleted presents.

But there is a risk when characterising the temporalities that are produced in situations of forced migration, inadvertently suggesting that there exists a distinct temporality of displacement that is unique to those who have fled across national borders to seek asylum. That is, in attempting to characterise the uncertainty through which the lives of refugees are governed as indicative of a distinct temporality of indefinite indeterminacy, we embed an assumption that ‘normal’ life—that is, seemingly, life for citizens and those whose place in the national order of things is secure and stable—is characterised by temporal certainty and predictable futures. Such implicit assumptions about the uncertain temporalities of displacement not only reinforce the above paradigms of displacement as a condition of politico-legal exclusion and a product of mobility that I describe above, but reinforce the exceptionality of displacement as a temporal experience that is distinct from the ‘normal’ life of citizens and exclusive to the lives of those in situations of forced migration.

The emergent trope of displacement as a condition of liminality demonstrates this problem. Liminality became a significant concept in anthropology and the social sciences based on the work of Arnold van Gennep (1960), who, upon theorising rites of passage, used the term to refer to the middle stage of a tripartite structure of social transition. The concept took on further significance in anthropology following the work of Victor Turner (1967), who focused specifically on the middle stage of the rites of passage to describe the liminal subject as a person who has lost their formal social status but who is yet to be recognised in a new role. Turner (1967) conceptualised the liminal experience of being betwixt and between social categories of identification, of effectively existing without a socially confirmed and validated status, as a period marked by instability and uncertainty, whereby the established social rules of a society are no longer salient. Characterising an experience as liminal, subsequently, implies the possibility of a resolution, that is, the reincorporation of the subject into the roles and rhythms of ordinary social life.

The concept of liminality has emerged as a central trope through which the lives of refugees are analysed in anthropology. As Horst and Grabska (2015: 6) describe, ‘Displaced populations are often considered—and consider themselves—in a liminal situation, waiting and hoping for the return that will normalise their situation again’. This sense of the liminal in situations of forced migration is well documented in anthropological literature (cf. Biehl, 2015; Brun, 2015, 2016; El-Shaarawi, 2015; Grabska and Fanjoy, 2015; Horst and Grabska, 2015; Janmyr, 2016; Omata, 2016; Ryan-Saha, 2015; Turner, 2016). Rebecca Rotter (2016: 96), for example, describes the waiting experienced by asylum seekers in the United Kingdom (UK) prior to status determination as ‘akin to the liminal phase in the rites of passage’. Relatedly, Melanie Griffiths (2014) describes how people who have had their asylum claim denied in the UK and who are residing in detention, in the uncertain state of waiting for either deportation or appeals to be determined, exist in an altered temporality that is ‘profoundly uncertain and unpredictable, a time of “crisis” which stretches for weeks, months, or even years’. In such situations, especially where the exceptionality of the migrant is reflected in their spatial segregation in a detention facility, the experience of liminality is tangible, as people await the distinction of a politico-legal status that will confirm their future trajectory as either an asylee or deportee, one way or the other.

As such, I am not debating the real sense of liminality that is experienced by people in situations of forced migration: indeed, in my own research, people have characterised their position thus (Ramsay, 2017, 2018). What I am suggesting, however, is that there is an important distinction between characterising the displacement of forced migration as a state of liminality based on the experiences of interlocutors and the theoretical conflation of such displacement with liminality. Consider, for example, how displacement is characterised by Michel Agier (2002: 337) who describes the ‘liminality of all situations of exodus that gives a frustrated, unfinished character’. And how displacement is described by Zygmut Bauman (2002: 438) who, in responding to Agier (2002), similarly refers to the ‘permanence of transitoriness’ that characterises the experiences of refugees. Bauman (2002: 347) explicitly maps the concept of displacement onto the Turner rendering of liminality, describing how:

In the tri-partite scheme of ‘passage’, the de-robing of the former role-carriers of the social attributes of the now withdrawn status—the social, power-assisted production of ‘bare body’, as Giorgio Agamben (1995) would say—was but a necessary preliminary stage for re-robing of the ‘socially naked’ in the paraphernalia of their new social role; a brief inter-mezzo separation between the two successively assumed sets of social rights and obligations. But in the case of the refugees, their condition bears all the traits (and the consequences) of the social nakedness characteristic of the intermediate, transitory stage of the passage (lack of social definition and codified rights and duties)—without this passage being either intermediate or transitory or leading to some other specific, socially defined, ‘steady state’. The ostensibly intermediate condition extends indefinitely.

But Malkki (1995a) was also careful to point out that the liminality that accompanies refugee status is not necessarily translated into their empirical experiences, but depends on how refugees themselves make sense of their situation. In Malkki’s (1995a) multi-sited research that was conducted with one group of refugees in a camp setting in Tanzania and another group of refugees living in an urban context in Tanzania, the legal status of being betwixt and between categories of national identification was experienced differently, and did not always translate into a clear situation of liminality. For refugees in the camp setting daily life was organised around the constant possibility of return to the home country. Their sense of liminality, in the sense of uncertainty, ambiguity and being outside of ordinary rules, was acute. Those refugees not only did not see themselves as part of the country in which they now lived as refugees, but the entire structure of the camp served to reinforce their liminality: emphasising their otherness from the national population, their temporariness as people unable to settle permanently there, and overall their being between states of social mobilisation. In contrast, for refugees living in the urban context, the politico-legal ambiguity of refugee status did not translate into uncertainty of daily life or ambivalent social status, but was instead incorporated into an identity of cosmopolitanism. Despite Malkki (1995a) being careful to point out that the liminal status of refugees relates to politico-legal ambiguity and does not necessarily translate into how refugees themselves experience their lives in exile, refugees are persistently characterised in anthropological work as liminal subjects.

Of course, such legal permissions to live in a country and enjoy the benefits of citizenship are generally fundamental to the stability of life for people who have experienced forced migration ³ ; the ample corpus of anthropological scholarship that documents the despair of people seeking asylum as well as the devastation of deportation attests to that (Coutin, 2015; Drotbohm and Hasselberg, 2015; Griffiths, 2014; Rotter, 2016). But, as I have explored in my own work (Ramsay, 2017) and as others have also suggested (Besteman, 2016; Khosravi, 2010; Lems, 2018), legal migration status does not automatically and completely resolve what it means to be displaced for migrants. That point is the central argument made by Arendt (1994 [1943]) in her seminal piece on the persistent ambiguity of exile, ‘We Refugees’. Somewhat tragically, Arendt (1994 [1943]) describes how, no matter how completely a migrant adopts patriotism to the nation in which they have relocated, they continue to be defined fundamentally by their assumed difference: their incorporation into the host nation is never fully accomplished, they remain always partly liminal. Reminders of liminality are everywhere for the migrant: the ever-present legal possibility of deportation, a lack of cultural symbiosis, differential rights. As such, the migrants expecting the dissolution of their liminal status through politico-legal processes—a visa, an asylum status—never fully resolve the problem of their liminality.

Therefore, although migrants experience distinct states of liminality, it would be false to assume that citizenship is automatically conducive to full inclusion and existential security. The lives of citizens themselves, who ostensibly have access to all of the resources, rights and services that some refugees might imagine make life stable and certain, are increasingly rendered into contemporary states of precarity, in which the future is unpredictable (Allison, 2012, 2013; Butler, 2004; Khosravi, 2017; Tsing, 2015). Subsequently, in a period in which global infrastructures of capitalist dispossession have come to precaritise life everywhere (Tsing, 2015), for both migrants and non-migrants, it is necessary to develop theoretical frameworks that reflect these shared rhythms of displacement through dispossession (Glick Schiller, 2018), rather than approach the temporalities of immigrant exclusion as exceptional.

Displacement as temporal dispossession

If we strip the temporal uncertainty of displacement back to a core experience of a dispossessed future, then we re-centre that experience away from the distinct figure of the refugee or migrant. Asylum seekers and other kinds of migrants may, in the middle of uncertain status determination and immigration processes, feel detached from what they imagine to be the temporal rhythms of ‘normal’ life, and feel dislocated from progressive time, speaking of ‘a timeless present, whilst the world and the people around them continue forward’ (Griffiths 2014: 1997). But are people in the ‘mainstream’ of society themselves ‘continuing forward’?

Despite such imaginaries of ‘normal’ time, there is no distinct rhythm to life after and beyond the uncertainties of immigration processes. Indeed, if modern time could be reduced down to any dominant characteristic, it would be heterochrony and temporalities in tension (Bear, 2014). That is, members of the mainstream society—non-migrants and citizens—who are imagined to be leading lives of forward momentum may not, in reality, feel that way themselves. Indeed, the temporality of forward momentum is often itself a source of tension (Hodges, 2014), since those entwined or invested in rhythms of continual ‘progress’ are often reproducing the insatiable logics of capitalist accumulation that wear on populations, rather than enrich them (Berlant, 2007). By de-exceptionalising displacement away from the spectacle of refugeehood, we open up a new way to think about time: not only as temporalities in tension, but as temporal trajectories and anticipated futures that have been forcibly dispossessed.

In my own fieldwork, for example, I have witnessed how experiences of displacement, broadly theorised, cut across categories of migrant and non-migrant. Upon beginning my research on homelessness in the USA, I was immediately struck by the ways in which being without access to safe and stable housing not only creates a sense of displacement for those who experience this, but also by how pervasive—and easy—it is for ordinary citizens to become homeless. Although homelessness is often construed in public discourse as an individualised problem that results from ‘poor’ personal choices, many of the people I met were acutely aware of the significance that structural forces play in preventing people from accessing safe and affordable housing in the USA. One person I met, Mark, told me at first that being homeless was ‘my own fault’: he blamed it on a series of poor personal decisions. But later in that same conversation, Mark told me that his inability to re-enter the housing market was compounded by numerous intersecting structural forces, particularly the lack of regulation in regards to the housing market in Philadelphia and the low minimum wage in Pennsylvania, which makes it seemingly impossible to afford rent if you only have one job. Add to that a long-standing disability and a series of discriminatory exclusions from both employment and housing situations because of his homelessness, and Mark felt like there were very few options through which to feasibly get out of street living. Somewhat darkly, Mark laughed off the constraints of housing access by stating, dryly, ‘That’s capitalism for ya!’ He was not the only homeless person I met who directly questioned systemic forms of dispossession in relation to the pervasiveness of homelessness.

The conversation with Mark, however, which oscillated between his own sense of personal responsibility for becoming homeless and the structural forces that prevented him from overcoming it, reminded me of Phillipe Bourgois’ (2003) work in El Barrio in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was then a Puerto Rican neighbourhood in Harlem, New York. There, Bourgois describes how, even though it is poverty that structures the kinds of options people have available to them to create livelihoods, people nonetheless describe their descent into criminal activity as a result of personal responsibility, such as Primo, a key informant, who describes how, ‘I don’t blame where I’m at right now on nobody else but myself’ (Bourgois, 2003: 1). Of course, the USA has changed since that research was done, but the fundamental vulnerability of poverty remains, and is even exacerbated. Recent scholarly work (Desmond, 2016; Heiman, 2015; Stout, 2019) and journalism (Outside in America Team, 2017; Thrush, 2019) on the precarity that is faced by the poor in the USA attests to just how close people are to experiencing the displacement of homelessness. The situation is not getting better. The recent federal government shutdown in January 2019 and the resulting precarity for thousands of federal employees emphasised just how close so many people are—that is, a pay cheque away—from crisis (Moore, 2019; Thrush, 2019). Amongst people I was conducting fieldwork with at the time, the shutdown was another crisis in a stream of other disasters. Sherry, a woman I met at an organisation that provides support to homeless and low-income people, showed me a letter she had received from the federal government in January 2019 which, in anticipating a lengthy shutdown period, was advising recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP) to stockpile food from the January benefits, since it was likely that the programme would be delayed in February. Sherry was visibly concerned. She told me that she relied on the food she got through SNAP to ensure that she had enough money to make the rental payments on her subsidised housing. She would have to skip meals in order to avoid becoming homeless as a result of the shutdown. Another person who was talking with Sherry and me that day, Geoff, also saw the letter, and guffawed: ‘Stockpile food’, he muttered, ‘How ya ‘sposed to do that when you’re homeless, huh?’ He made a very good point.

But homelessness in the USA strikes indiscriminately across categories of citizen and migrant, alike. My fieldwork also brought me into contact with people who had been resettled in the USA as refugees, who were also experiencing problems with access to stable and affordable housing. As part of research, I came to meet Dianna, a woman who, despite coming to the USA through a refugee resettlement programme some years previously, had found that her sense of displacement had been exacerbated, rather than resolved, through her migration and settlement to, in her words, ‘the richest country in the world’. On an unseasonably cold afternoon in April 2018, I sat with Dianna in the small townhouse into which she and her family had recently moved. Before that, she and her family had spent a highly stressful month of homelessness. As part of the US refugee resettlement programme, Dianna and her family had received three months of intensive casework support to help them with the immediate processes of securing a rental property, employment and basic medical and education services. After the three-month period, however, the casework and support ceased, and the family was expected to be fully independent. It did not take long—less than a year—for disaster to strike. Like so many other people—migrant and non-migrant—living off a minimum (but not a living) wage in the USA, Dianna and her family were just one financial setback away from the stark reality of homelessness. Dianna and her husband had hoped to move interstate to be closer to other family members, and had put all of their small savings towards a deposit for a moving company to transport their things. They resigned from their jobs and gave notice on their rental property. When the planned move fell through because of a family crisis, however, there was no money for them to re-enter the low-cost housing market in their local city. Without the support or guarantee of the refugee resettlement agency (and in an already competitive low-cost housing market), few landlords were willing to consider the family’s applications for tenancy. They had to sell most of their possessions, and, for over a month, lived in and out of the living rooms of people whom they had met at their church.

Recounting her devastation after realising that the life of promise she had imagined in the USA was, evidently, a ‘resettlement imaginary’ (Ramsay, 2018), Dianna, who knew I was planning an upcoming research trip to work with migrants in Africa, told me:

Tell them, tell the refugees, that the life in America is too hard. Here it is only working—but for what? To make small money to keep a house? To get food? In Africa there is little food but there is life. Here, working, sleeping, eating, working again—it is not life. It is not living. My husband, he would wake up at 3 a.m. to go to work and get home at 7 p.m., and hurt his hand [referring to a repetitive stress injury caused by the assembly job her husband worked at a meat packaging factory]. And for $300, maybe $400, a week. And all of it goes to just keeping the house, bills, food. What is the future here?

Of course, Dianna’s experiences reflect not only the hardship of contemporary precarity in the US, but also the enduring effects of the ‘refugee’ label. Although a person ceases to be a refugee, in international legal terms, after being resettled to another country through the UNHCR refugee resettlement programme (which provides participants in that programme with a direct pathway to permanent residency), the meanings attached to the label of ‘refugee’ do not simply dissolve upon politico-legal inclusion. Indeed, even the legal basis of residency status has been degraded over recent years: in the USA, permanent residency is no longer a guarantee against future deportation or other kinds of immigration instability (Abrego and Lakhani, 2015). It is not only in the USA, however, that the status of long-term residents has come under threat: the recent Windrush scandal in the UK involved the depreciation of rights and the possibility of deportation for people who had arrived there immediately following World War II (Wardle and Obermuller, 2018); and, recently, Australia has introduced a ‘character test’ for migrant residents that, if failed, can lead to immigration detention and deportation (Billings, 2019). Some migrants, who have resided legally in Australia since they were children, have been deported as adults on the basis of these laws. As such, the legal inclusion of migrants never feels entirely stable (I also speak here from personal experience of being a migrant in the USA).

So, even though Dianna and her family members did, after a year of living in the USA, become permanent residents, the ambiguity of migrant status nonetheless persists. As Arendt (1994 [1943]) describes, the position of migrants (and this applies particularly to people from a refugee background but also to migrants more generally), no matter how intense the attempt to embrace the cultural identity of the receiving nation, the migrant is always marked, first, by difference. Migrant is a fundamental category of alterity. The attempt to mediate such difference, which can be a political imperative for those seeking asylum and refuge in particular, is wearing, since it can never be completely overcome. What this means is that, for people like Dianna, the precarity she experiences in attempting to secure a livelihood and a future in the USA is always mediated somewhat through the inescapable fact of her migrant background. The inability to ‘make a life’, as she calls it, in the USA reflects a fundamental contradiction between a US cultural imperative to be good neoliberal subjects with independent livelihoods that are detached from state systems of support, and the reality of structural forces that make achieving such livelihoods increasingly difficult for many, not just newly arrived migrants. Although they do not have to contend with the fundamental alterity of migration status, even citizens increasingly fail to ‘make a life’ in the USA (as elsewhere).

Despite vastly different entry points, what is common about the experiences of precarity and the homelessness described is a distinct temporality of displacement. Each of the people whose experiences I describe above live with a sense of a future that is dispossessed: the possibility of a future that has been wrested from them. They do not have access to the resources required, under the version of neoliberal capitalism that organises US society, to navigate towards the futures they have anticipated for themselves. Instead, like the sentiments voiced by people awaiting asylum determinations, people like Mark, Sherry, and Dianna are left in the ‘timeless present’ (Griffiths, 2014: 1997), living day-to-day with the pressures of securing resources (in their cases, economic rather than politico-legal) that will enable them to continue simply surviving their lives. Their displacement, at once existential and politico-economic, is a temporal hostage system in which the very possibility of a future is dependent on unstable determining factors over which they have little to no control.

From a phenomenological standpoint, of course, the sense of continuity and stability that underlies what people conceive of as ‘ordinary’ life is illusory, since the future is always fundamentally uncertain (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Nonetheless, as Vigh (2009) suggests, we generally enter into this fundamental uncertainty of life through a process of social navigation, in which we take into account contemporary pressures and possibilities to manoeuvre ourselves towards an envisioned trajectory. But, in a state of displacement, it is this ability to project action into a predictable future, and the ensuing sense of stability, that is lost. Displacement is the existential experience of existing in a contemporary situation in which external forces or pressures make the future seem impossible to navigate, and the present unable to be aligned with an aspired to or projected future.

Of course, the inability to reconcile contemporary action with a predictable future is not the sole domain of refugees. Indeed, the above conceptualisation of displacement aligns well with recent anthropological work on capitalism and austerity, and particularly with the idea of precarity as ‘life without the promise of stability’ (Tsing, 2015: 4). What is interesting about Tsing’s (2015) definition of precarity is the inclusion of the term ‘promise’. Instead of just conceptualising precarity as life without stability, the absent ‘promise’ of stability immediately attaches temporality to the theorisation, recognising that precarity is not simply a state of contemporary insecurity but a projection of continuous instability into the future. Although precarity and displacement are not precisely the same experience, given such conceptual echoes, they are, I consider, linked and co-constitutive: precarity being a general state of protracted instability and displacement being an existential awareness of a fundamental contradiction in the unfolding of contemporary action towards a future that is unpredictable and controlled by external forces. Precarity captures the politico-economic forces that create uncertainty; displacement captures the existential experience of being immobilised by those forces and having a sense of the future arrested and dispossessed.

The link between displacement and dispossession has been explored in recent work by Çaglar and Glick Schiller (2018) who, in studying urban life across three different disempowered cities in different geographic regions, develop a theorisation of displacement as an effect of contemporary modes of dispossession. The examples they provide of how people become displaced within these urban settings emphasises that displacement is never only a problem of migrant experience. Rather, it is more often through neoliberal restructurings of urban life that people, migrants and non-migrants alike, come to be physically displaced (that is, forced to move outside of desired locations) and socially displaced (as increasingly tight economies force many into downward mobility). These experiences of displacement, Çaglar and Glick Schiller (2018) argue, are contemporary traces of longer ‘conjunctural configurations’ of dispossession that have emerged in recent years, and especially since the 2008 global financial crisis, which propelled many into precarious economic states and, with that, re-ignited new social hierarchies of exclusion and racialisation. While I agree with the fundamental idea of understanding displacement and processes of dispossession in relation to each other, I would also emphasise that existential precarity accompanies such social and physical dislocation. Displacement, fundamentally, pulls people out of the teleology of their own lives: these forces of dispossession that create displacement not only result in shifts in physical and social location, but also dictate the temporal rhythms of life. This is not to suggest that people in situations of displacement occupy one distinct temporality: variations include bored, stuck, anxious, rushed. What is shared, however, is that these temporalities stem from the effects of dispossessive forces, which work in some contexts to push displaced people into zones of political containment in which time is slowed, unmeasured, unproductive; and in other contexts to push displaced people into zones of precaritisation in which time is frantic and rushed as they seek to enter into labour markets that might secure their livelihoods. In this way, time itself emerges as a resource that is acquisitioned as part of the processes of dispossession.

I am suggesting here that time, and anticipated futures, are part of the energetic resources that are extracted from people in the pursuit of capital. Processes of dispossession have always been fundamental to capitalist systems, which require appropriating land and the means of production in order to accumulate profit (Marx, 1967). But in contemporary formations of global capitalism that intersect with logics of neoliberalism, processes of dispossession are not always so direct (Harvey, 2004): dispossession can take the form of increasing financialisation of assets (making them more vulnerable to liquidation) (Bear, 2015) and the radical reforms of neoliberal restructurings that transform public assets into private services. Debt-patronage has become a way of life for people in ‘advanced capitalist countries’, and increasingly across the globe, meaning that conventional life pathways in those societies, involving upward mobility and private ownership of assets such as houses, are increasingly impossible to achieve (Glick Schiller, 2018). With cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011), people commit themselves to situations of great suffering—undertaking dangerous migration passages across oceans or enduring gruelling hours of demanding labour—only to have their time and energy extracted and to find that the promise of a future of stability is, despite their efforts, out of reach. This is not simply dispossession at a material level. This is dispossession of time and anticipated futures. Upon having a life trajectory disrupted, people come to this experience of displacement, in which futures have become dispossessed and life in the present is dominated by external forces: in this case, specifically, through these processes of accumulation that demand control over time.

As more people across the world wrestle with the destructive effects of global capitalism, proxy wars, and the stark distinction between rich and poor that has been rendered visible through various technological advancements, the borders that separate nations from other nations, continents from other continents, and ultimately Global North from Global South, have become intensive sites of paradox. Such borders are, at once, increasingly made redundant as people from the ‘periphery’—workers, one might say (De Genova, 2016)—reject global apartheid and attempt to make their own ways into spaces that are associated with wealth and opportunity (Hage, 2016). At the same time—and in response—politicians and governments are increasingly attempting to physically reinforce such borders, and reinstate the global hierarchy, usually justifying such measures as absolutely necessary to properly represent and protect their constituents, and ultimately to securitise nation states (Besteman, 2018). In order for anthropologists to not reinforce these binaries, and to recognise the shared logics of precarity that underscore both migration and anti-immigrant sentiment—and, ultimately, the discursive significance of crisis—we must bring both migrants and non-migrants into a shared analytic through which common dynamics of their displacement can at least be recognised together. Otherwise, when focusing only on the distinctions of experience between those categories, we lose the analytical punch of addressing the shared effects of global capitalism.

The enduring denial of coevalness in anthropology

In theorising the allochronic time of anthropology, Johannes Fabian described how ethnographic research is implicitly organised around a fundamental denial of coevalness, defined as ‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’ (Fabian, 2014 [1983]: 31). The fundamental temporal discord of ethnography derives, according to Fabian, from the imperialist origins of the discipline. The binary distinctions that characterise ethnographic research, particularly those that situate the ethnographer as the ‘knower’ and the ethnographic object as the ‘known’, reflect other unequal binaries, for example the ‘civilised’ versus the ‘savage’, the ‘West’ versus the ‘rest’, ‘us’ versus the ‘other’. Ethnography has, conventionally, reproduced a ‘political economy of Western domination and exploitation’ (Fabian, 2014 [1983]: 96) by naturalising such binaries. In contrast to Fabian (2014 [1983]), however, who primarily characterised the allochronic time of anthropology as reflecting the imperialist binaries of ‘civilised’ versus ‘savage’, the kind of allochronic time I am pointing to here is one characterised by a future orientation: in which the anthropologist occupies a temporality of a definitive future, and the refugee/migrant, as an object of anthropological inquiry, occupies a temporality of indefinite ‘crisis’, of being suspended in an indeterminate present. The denial of coevalness I am characterising here is more than just the failure to recognise the shared contemporary between the ethnographer and the subjects of ethnography: it is a failure to recognise the possibility of a shared future.

Since its initial publication in the early 1980s, Fabian’s (2014 [1983]) work on the allochronic time of anthropology has been critiqued, especially since it seems somewhat to rely on a reductive assumption of anthropology as a discipline that orients from the West about non-Western others, or that the idea of a denial of coevalness somewhat simplifies the contemporaneity of the ethnographic encounter (Augé, 1998). And, since the late 1970s, the disciplinary of anthropology has been reshaped around what has been termed the ‘cultural turn’, which involves resisting the reproduction of binary oppositions and bounded ideas of culture in ethnographic fieldwork (e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1996; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992), rendering Fabian’s (2014 [1983]) primary contention with ethnographic ‘othering’ seemingly less relevant. Despite such shifts in anthropological conventions approaching and representing ethnographic encounters, however, the fundamental critique of othering that is at the centre of Fabian’s (1990, 2006, 2014 [1983]) work does remain pertinent to contemporary anthropological work that is taking place in a time of seemingly increasing and exacerbated divisions and demonisations of certain peoples and perceived cultures (Samiei, 2015). Although anthropology is critically placed to deconstruct such contemporary processes of othering, as Ayse Çaglar (2016) has noted, there are ways in which anthropological work also serves to reaffirm some divisions.

As much as anthropology as a discipline now attempts to be reflexive about the imperialist history of ethnographic research, the imperial narrative of Western domination and ensuing binaries of us/them, self/other, civilised/savage persists as popular discourse to this day, and is most especially evident when rendered into contemporary ‘debates’ in the West about migration (Hage, 2016). The migration ‘crisis’, in particular, can be read as a panic about the integrity of imperialist boundaries that, in contemporary periods of mass migration, have been decried by various Western governments as increasingly porous and, subsequently, in need of further enforcement (Besteman, 2018; De Genova, 2018). Although anthropology has been crucial to identifying imperialist agendas in contemporary migration politicking, the older warning from Fabian (2014 [1983]), about recognising how our own ethnographic methods and analytic frames can be implicated in such forms of abject subject-making, also needs to be wrestled with. For example, the ways in which the refugee ‘crisis’ transformed Greece and other parts of Europe into ‘hot’ areas of research has been read by some as a resurgent kind of acceptable exoticism in the discipline (Cabot, 2016), in which the lure of the exotic refugee ‘other’ is made available in a readily accessible and less exotic space: Europe. Furthermore, I have argued, continuing to emphasis the ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant’ as a distinct category of experience that is defined by lives lived in ‘crisis’ itself reinscribes that temporal state as exceptional, during a period in which ‘crisis’ is the usual state of being for many (Vigh, 2008), migrants and non-migrants alike.

Indeed, as Ayse Çaglar (2016) has similarly argued, anthropological work continues to deny the coevalness of migrants and non-migrants by not only persistently using these terms as master categories of analysis but, in doing so, relegating migrants to the same kind of unchanging time of ‘tradition’ that Fabian (2014 [1983]) identified as being the hallmark of ethnographic othering. ⁴ According to Çaglar (2016), the ‘migrant’ categorisation allows researchers to indicate supposed cultural difference and the timelessness of tradition without explicitly stating that, meaning that the linguistic marker of ‘migrant’ acts immediately to position a research subject as incommensurably ‘other’. I agree with Çaglar’s (2016) observations on the continuing denial of coevalness in anthropology through the use of the ‘migrant’ categorisation, but I do think that there is something distinct about the ethnographic othering and allochronic time that is being reinforced in anthropological work in the wake of the migrant ‘crisis’. I consider that refugees are also relegated to a timeless present, but one that is not deigned so because of their being stuck within the temporality of ‘traditional’ past, as in the case described by Çaglar (2016), but that is defined by refugees having no distinct future. The usual association of migrants with cultural difference does not work in the case of refugees, since generally refugees are approached in popular narratives and scholarly work as dehistoricised people: stripped of their cultural particularities and personal histories, and defined only by their experiences of uprootedness in the present (Malkki, 1996). But by so often focusing on the ‘timeless present’ (Griffiths, 2014: 1997) that refugees occupy, we risk ignoring that they share the same future horizons of uncertainty as so many others, including non-migrants. We deny the coevalness of refugees by describing them as ‘stuck’ in the present, and ignoring the ways in which they share particular temporal rhythms with other people. In particular, this temporal rhythm of persistent crisis is far from unique to refugees (Vigh, 2008). The displacement of refugees may result in a dispossessed future, but that sense of temporal dispossession is not an exception to, but more often a feature of, contemporary life.

I consider that there is something useful in returning to Fabian’s (2014 [1983]) warning about ethnography having the potential to reinforce a political economy of Western exploitation. Indeed, thinking through that line of inquiry in the contemporary period raises new questions. In particular, is there something exploitative about the ways in which recent anthropological interest has concentrated on documenting the lives of presumably suffering refugees, but not in documenting the suffering of others? This is particularly important to consider in light of recent reflections on anthropology as a discipline that seemed, generally speaking, to be caught by surprise at the recent uptick of populist politicking and anti-immigration sentiments from different governments across the globe (Bessire and Bond, 2017; Mazarella, forthcoming). Did we, as anthropologists, continue to focus on the suffering of people in and from the Global South, while overlooking (or belittling) the suffering of people in the Global North? This is not to render experiences of suffering into measurable units of comparison, of course. Indeed, there is no simple or singular explanation for recent political upturns of populist nationalism, which combine elements of racism (Maskovsky, 2017) and general feelings of instability into a homogenising narrative of nationalist exclusion (Walley, 2017). Nonetheless, there is a renewed impetus, in this political moment, to broaden out the analytical frames that are taken up in anthropological work in order to understand the relation between various types of suffering across different contexts (Anderson, 2017). So often, the common link is that lives are being destabilised everywhere through the effects of global capitalism and neoliberal restructurings (Harvey, 2005, 2006). Therefore, it is imperative that in anthropological work we recognise the specificity of refugee and migrant experiences without foreclosing their experiences as isolated.

In responding to the recent sensationalism of forced migration and the reality of increasing numbers of people attempting to cross borders, anthropologists are, then, not simply documenting or nuancing a migration ‘crisis’. They are also documenting an effect of a broader system of global capitalism. When we recognise that the subjectivities of time that are experienced by refugees and other migrants are part of the wider temporal tensions of modern time (Bear, 2014), and not exceptional or excluded from these tensions, then we come to appreciate coevalness across and between the migrant/non-migrant category (Çaglar, 2016). In future work, we must recognise the relationality that sees the precarity of migrants similarly reflected in the precarity of non-migrants (Anderson, 2017; Çaglar and Glick Schiller, 2018). Recognising the temporal rhythms of refugees and migrants as shared, rather than exceptional, is a crucial way to do just that.

Future politics

What would it mean to de-exceptionalise displacement in anthropological theory? As I describe above, there is a persistent tendency to approach displacement in terms of politico-legal categories of exclusion, or through a mobility paradigm, or as a kind of liminality. Taken together, these theorisations render displacement into an exceptional experience that is precluded on differentiation from a supposedly stable non-migrant other. But such stability is imagined: it does not reflect the contemporary reality of precarity as an ‘earthwide condition’ (Tsing, 2015: 4). While anthropologists may not intend to reinforce the same logics of nationalism that are deeply implicated in contemporary regimes of global governance and capitalist infrastructures, when we use the same organising categories of ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’, or when we fail to connect our critique of dominant narratives of migration ‘crisis’ to broader contexts of global struggles over capitalist accumulation (De Genova, 2016; De Genova and Tazzioli, 2016), then we use the same language, and logics, of the very bordering practices we seek to critique. Recognising the shared temporal rhythms of displacement, and how these interplay within other hierarchical time structures under contemporary capitalist regimes, is one way through which anthropologists can make these connections, and ultimately strengthen our analyses and critiques of bordering structures.

But de-exceptionalising displacement does not push theoretical models far enough as a way to analyse situations of precarity, austerity and dispossession. It is a way of analysing the present, focused in on the violence of the contemporary, even when displaced people themselves are telling us that the problems of the present are so harrowing precisely because they are problems of the future. Subsequently, while recognising that displacement is not an exceptional experience but is, in fact, deeply implicated in more pervasive processes of dispossession is an important move, we also need to directly address the ways in which conflicted futurity, which as I have argued here is at the centre of what it means to be displaced, is also embedded in and central to the regimes of governance that create displacement. That is, displacement in the present is a way to stratify lives in the future. It limits access to resources that are crucial for stability and socio-economic mobility across numerous contemporary global contexts, stymying the possibility of social navigation for many (Appadurai, 2013).

What this leads us to is another pressing question. That is, how can anthropology develop a theory of governance that allows us to analyse not only the violence of the contemporary, but also the violence of futurity? Such anthropology can only ever be speculative since, by definition, the future is yet to be realised. And of course, anthropology has far from ignored the spectre of the future. A great deal of work has addressed what appear to be quite dramatic shifts in understandings of modern time: from the idea of the vast open future ripe for individual crafting that developed from the late eighteenth century and which reflected Enlightenment ideals of progress towards self-mastery (Koselleck, 1988), towards new modern futurities that reflect the insecurity of contemporary precarity and debt economies (Bear, 2014; Guyer, 2007). Nonetheless, our theoretical frameworks of temporality are far from exhausted. Epistemologically, we would do well to consider how we can continue to recognise the ethnographic specificity of temporality while also registering what appears to be a more broadly encompassing sense of temporal flux (Hodges, 2007). One way that the study of displacement allows us to do this is by focusing on the future not simply as an effect of political forces, but more directly to think of the future as political.

Projections and predictions of the future are central to contemporary politics of dispossession. In the current global political conjuncture, it is the idea of a future at stake that is a primary motivating discourse for political change across a spectrum of perspectives. Whether evoking the idea of an imperilled future to stoke public support for and legitimacy towards violent border regimes or evoking the idea of an imperilled future as a way to gain traction for environmental movements to preserve the sustainability of planetary resources, the idea of the yet-to-be-determined future is a political force itself. What experiences of displacement, as I describe above, suggest is that these future politics are not simply rhetoric. These future politics are imposed on and lived out by people whose lives are deemed inconsequential within contemporary and hierarchical regimes of capitalist accumulation by dispossession.

What I am suggesting here is that, through attention to more expansively conceptualised experiences of displacement, anthropologists can trace in the present such economies of life and trajectories of stratified futures. With our emphasis on lived experience, anthropology is not traditionally a science of prediction or projection, to be sure, unlike our colleagues in some health, physical and political science fields. Yet, the anthropological lens has been turned quite effectively to studies of history (Stewart, 2016): indeed, such historical anthropology deeply impacted how we understand contemporary governance regimes. In contrast to historical anthropology, however, what anthropologists may need to become more comfortable with, as we move forward into what appear to be new, and potentially devastating, situations of political upheaval, environmental destruction and social change, is new methods of tracing out the possible effects of, and futurity that is designed through, contemporary regimes of governance. What can ethnography of futurity bring to sciences of prediction that other kinds of quantified modelling cannot? Such questions are beyond the scope of this article, but nonetheless give us direction for future work. With attention to the future politics that are embedded in experiences of dispossession and temporalities of displacement, anthropological work may be less stymied by spectacles of crisis, and more attuned to such situations not as exceptional events, but as the anticipated rhythms of future politics.