English Summary

The present dissertation investigates the relationship between nego­tia­tions and constructions of senses of belonging and being-at-home, as well as the given socio-cultural and political contexts that indi­viduals move through and are positioned in over time.

The focus on refugees pinpoints these processes in a particularly radical way, as well as bringing the relationship between continuity and change, between mobility and immobility, to the fore. Empirically the dissertation sheds light on these processes by focusing on a group of Bosnian refugee households from their flight to Denmark and their stay in Danish refugee camps at the beginning of the 1990s to the lives they lead in Denmark eight years later. Two periods of ethno­graphic fieldwork, consisting of five months in 1994 in the refugee camps and eight months in 2001/2002 mainly in two housing estates, as well as a shorter field trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, form the basis of the research.

In chapter one the research is positioned within the debates on globalization, migration, home and belonging. The meta-theoretical approach to the field, described in chapter two, is double-stranded and dialectical. On the one hand, the approach is inspired by a social constructivist focus on how ‘Bosnian refugees’ have been constructed and perceived differently in public debates over time. On the other hand, a phenomenologically inspired focus on 1) how these construc­tions have in turn impinged upon social practices, and 2) on how every­day practices have unfolded in attempts to order and come to grips with existence and thus create a foothold enabling the individual and the group to anchor its elusive meaning.

The empirical chapters in the dissertation are structured as a linear tale, dealing initially in Chapter three with experiences in the camps under the policy of Temporary Protection Status; in Chapter four the time of yet another new beginning, of leaving the camps and the attempts to reconstruct lives in the new setting; in Chapter five, with the first trip to BiH, the encounter with ‘strangerness at home’ and a sense of social exclusion experienced on the basis of the current life in Denmark; and finally, having returned to Denmark from their summer trips, Chapter six deals with the construction of ‘Bosnian refugees’ and how this construction is inextricably related to a specific way of ‘doing Danishness’.

I argue, then, that the reconstruction of an existential foothold and of senses of belonging and being-at-home is imbedded in everyday social practices and therefore requires scholarly attention being direc­ted towards everyday life. The social practices identified in this case form part of what are called ‘processes of home-making’. These processes consist of four important dimensions: the (re)construction of rou­tines and thereby senses of order; a transformation of space into place through bodily inscriptions and naming practices; the reconstruction of social relations and positions; and finally a sense of being recognized as a (valuable) ‘part of’ a given setting.

Processes of home-making do not, however, unfurl in a structural vacuum, but are inextricably linked to and influenced especially by political and public debates on, and conceptions of refugees and foreigners (in Denmark) and diasporas (in BiH), constructions of Danishness and Bosnianness, and the political status accorded the households at different moments in time (e.g. as ‘pre-asylumseekers’ or as permanent residents). Furthermore, they are also imbedded in a global political situation of an increased focus on fluidity and mobility as threatening to undermine the modern ordering principle of percieved nation states. In this context, the migrant/refugee/foreigner has become a powerful symbol of the fluidity supposedly chal­lenging these ordering principles. She is at one and the same time indispensable to the definitions of the nation state ‘us’ and constituted as its ‘waste’ or surplus.

In this situation, the Bosnian refugees were suspended between the different expectations of identification and thus social regulations of belonging cast as binary oppositions operating in Danish society, as well as in BiH. This suspension implied balancing continuity and change, sameness and difference, related to discourses of Danishness as well as Bosnianness. The images sustained about Bosnians in these two contexts over time thus had implications for the social practices that became meaningful and relevant in the two settings. 

First, I have argued that, in the refugee camps, the pivotal points of the processes of identification and constructions of some form of normal life within anomalous life circumstances were generally con­sti­tu­ted by former social positions, a nationalist discourses ‘lurking’ in BiH as a consequence of the war, and the political context of temporality and schemes of repatriation in Denmark. This contributed to a doxic construction and performance of a publicly undisputed Bosnian nationalistic patriotism, adherence to an incontrovertible return, the dominance of a specific and patriotic image of the Bosnian woman, and the avoidance of non-Muslims in the camps. Whereas, from the perspectives of some of the Red Cross staff, this was seen as an expression of former Yugoslavs’ lack of democratic education, I have argued instead that these processes were fundamentally related to the context of the refugee camps, the policy of Temporary Protection Status and repatriation as a given, as well as to the experiences of war and flight.

 Secondly, I have pointed out the importance of a specific discourse on Danishness, based on ‘sameness’ and similarity, which situated the Bosnians at the top of a hierarchy of foreigners as a consequence of their perceived similarity with a majority Danish ‘us’ defined through the definition of ‘the other’. I have argued that this situation contributed to the shaping of social practices in two specific ways. It contributed on the one hand to an avoidance of social interaction with the majority Danes, which highlighted differences readily interpreted as cultural, and on the other hand to an active dissociation from other immigrants or refugees with whom the Bosnians shared the foreigner category, but who were positioned at a greater distance from the ‘Danes’ in the hierarchy. Whereas this has been interpreted as an expression of Bos­nian arrogance, self-sufficiency and even racism, I have argued that it could instead be viewed as an expression of successful integration into an exclusivist discourse of Danishness, premised upon an ideal of sameness, and operating on the basis of hierarchical binary oppositions tied to the social regulation of belonging and thus to questions of exclusion from and inclusion within the Danish welfare state.

Thirdly, I have identified a discourse of ’the diaspora’ in BiH, which has come to encompass the refugees and places them in an ambivalent position, marked by a complicated mix of social distance, guilt and envy, in relation to their national ‘homeland’. this discourse on the diaspora excludes these households from the Bosnian ‘us’ by posi­tio­ning them on the one hand as arrogant, different and sometimes as traitors, and on the other hand as people who are envied by those who stayed in BiH as a consequence of what is perceived and imagined (often rightly so) as their access to a superior (material) standard of living or at least security and their (often not so) easy lives. In both cases, Bosnians come to occupy ambivalent positions as both the constitutive outside as well as, to a certain extent, the inside of definitions of Danishness and Bosnianess by showing the arbitrary and fragile nature of definitions of belonging to a specific ‘us’ in different contexts.

As I have shown in the dissertation, all these dynamics are to a certain extent experienced differently, depending on how a particular household member is gendered and where she is positioned in her life-course vis-à-vis the specific contexts of interaction. Nonetheless these dynamics have contributed to an engagement of some Bosnians in the formal construction of a transnational diaspora organization (The World Union) and for others in participation in emergent, informal, transnational, losely knit communities of people who meet in different parts of BiH or on the Croatian coast during their summer trips.

Contrary to what many current political debates in Denmark seem to indicate, senses of belonging and feelings of being-at-home are thus relative and dynamic structures that are continuously being nego­tiated, not only between and within given households, but also in relation to the specific contexts which the individuals and groups relate to at specific points in time. Whereas this point is valid on a general level, the focus on refugees pushes the point to its extremes by showing how people who have lost their homes and have had to revise their senses of belonging continuously work towards re-making these senses of belonging and being-at-home in different ways. These processes are, furthermore, shaped by perceptions of gender and positions in the life course and, not least, by the different premises for recognition in the different socio-cultural and political contexts they are part of.