Home is who you make it: Place, agency, and relationships among Fula refugees in Guinea

Refugee crises, from the normative perspective of the international humanitarian community, follow a particular trajectory of events: People are displaced from their home communities due to war and persecution, they become refugees when they cross an international border into a neighboring country, they are housed temporarily in a refugee camp or among the local population, and then, when peace is re-established, they return home. Assumptions concerning the meaning and process of displacement and return underlie each stage of this neatly contained refugee cycle.; My research illustrates, however, that peoples' life plans do not cleanly map onto this ordered, cyclical narrative. Refugees' perspectives on identity, relationships, agency, and place conflict with this model and provide the basis for the following three counter narratives: (1) the category "refugee" is flexible in reality, inclusive of varying responses to displacement; (2) refugee life is not social limbo; lives are planned and actions taken during "displacement"; and (3) refugees work both within and against the refugee "system". I examine these counter-narratives through the lenses of kinship, gender, and social reproduction, employing ethnographic material to examine and identify the processes that are taking place in conflict-affected communities.; Rather than time suspended, I argue that the refugee experience is an intensification of "normal" life, where changes in family structure and gender roles occur in a situation of extreme pressure. In situations of protracted conflict, concerns about leading a good life, raising and educating children, and marrying well are as central to day-to-day living as are concerns about food and basic necessities. People are resuscitating certain family connections and letting others go, exploring different possibilities of support through marriage, temporary partnerships, fostering of children, trade relationships, and new employment opportunities. Social reciprocity is of crucial importance; a cultivated co-dependence that enables the calling up of debt in times of need. The ways in which family structures are reconstituted and kinship patterns reformed are central aspects of how people see themselves and their future. This analysis is grounded in the ethnography of the Fula people, whose sense of place and family stretches beyond the camp and national borders.