Ethnos

Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: 0014-1844 (Print) 1469-588X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

Placing Displacement: Place-making in a World of

Movement

Annika Lems

To cite this article: Annika Lems (2016) Placing Displacement: Place-making in a World of
Movement, Ethnos, 81:2, 315-337, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2014.931328

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.931328

Published online: 14 Aug 2014.

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Placing Displacement:
Place-making in a World of Movement

Annika Lems
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

abstract Over the last two decades, there has been a radical shift in anthropology
from stable, rooted and mappable identities to fluid, transitory and migratory forms
of belonging. Displacement has become the new trope through which anthropologists
have come to look at the world. As a result, place has received an ambiguous position.
Focusing on the life experiences of one Somali refugee woman living in Melbourne and
her engagement with place, this article questions the current emphasis on space and
boundlessness in anthropological discourses on displacement. It argues that rather
than developing theoretical concepts that bypass people’s experiences, the zooming
in on individuals’ lifeworlds allows for a close look at the particularity and everydayness
of being-in-place. It shows the need for a more complex and nuanced view of displace-
ment – one that values people’s lived experiences and one that takes the placement in
displacement more seriously.

keywords Emplacement, displacement, existential anthropology, storytelling, move-

ment

An Arrival Story
hen Halima arrived in Melbourne on a winter evening in 2003, she

W was overwhelmed by the strangeness of her new surroundings.

Everything about the place – its smells and sounds, looks and
language – made her feel alienated. After fleeing the mayhem in Mogadishu
with the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia in 1991 and after having spent
years in limbo in the United Arab Emirates with the threat of deportation con-
stantly looming, she and her four children had been accepted for resettlement in
Melbourne.

ethnos, vol. 81:2, 2016 (pp. 315 –337), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.931328

# 2014 Taylor & Francis
316 annika lems

When I arrived here I thought I had come to the wrong place, that it was not Aus-
tralia. Because I came from Dubai where it was so beautiful, when I came here I
thought I had come to the wrong place. My little son, my nephew who grew up
with my kids, he said: ‘Mum, I think we came to the wrong place, it’s not Australia!
Is this the Australian airport?’ When I came, I found that all the houses were small,
small, small, because where I came from in Dubai I was used to seeing all the highrises.
Everything was very strange. When I came out of the airport, it was so dark. In Dubai,
when it is night there are so many lights that it is still not dark. So when I came here I
thought: ‘What’s going on? This is a developed country, what happened? Why is it so
dark?’.

Upon leaving the airport and driving towards the place that was to become
her new home, Halima felt disoriented and confused by the sea of darkness that
surrounded her. In the Emirates, where she had spent the last 12 years, the
streets and buildings had been saturated with such dazzling lights that even
in the middle of the night there was no real darkness. Driving through this dark-
ness even made her question whether she had actually arrived in the right place.
The silhouettes of the first suburban houses she could see made the order of this
place even more ungraspable. Grappling with these feelings of estrangement, it
seemed incomprehensible to her that this was where she was going to live.
Years later and drinking cups of sweet Somali tea in the living room of her
house in Maidstone in Melbourne’s Western suburbs, Halima could share a
laugh over the memories of her first encounters with the new place. Since I
first met her in early 2011 and started working with her on her life story she
has often told me the story of her arrival in Australia. With the years, the
‘shock of the new’ (Jackson 2008) has waned and the story has become a part
of the family history she and her daughters enjoy recounting. Yet, while we
often laughed about the comicality of her first steps through Melbourne,
steps which, as we joked, had something of the dreamlike movements of a sleep-
walker, Halima’s story is telling. It has much to say about the force of displace-
ment and about how it enters bodies and minds. It also, and perhaps even more
so, has much to say about the inescapable power of place and of the ways being-
in and out-of-place intersect, mingle and merge, to the point that it becomes
almost impossible to distinguish the one from the other. As soon as Halima
stepped out of the airport, the new place made itself felt. The intense darkness
of the night introduced her to some of its habits – habits she did not yet grasp
and that appeared to her as unfamiliar, strange and daunting. At the same time
as the place made itself felt, it also created an utter sense of displacement within

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her. Taking in all the strange and unknown features of this new place made her
realise how much she had become part and parcel of another place, a place she
had left behind. Although Halima described the time in the Emirates as ‘the
hardest part of my life’, its inner workings had become so familiar to her that
upon stepping into a new environment, she immediately felt its absence. But
is there really an absence we can speak of here? Was not it rather the new
place’s presence that made itself felt so forcefully?
Halima’s arrival story draws attention to the complex interplay between
emplacement and displacement as lived and felt in people’s everyday lives. It
raises questions about the links between place and memory, place and the
sensual, place and movement, and place and the larger world. Most importantly,
it forces us to look into the inescapable presence of places and into the ways they
continue to shape us existentially – even in the face of violent disruption and
displacement. It is precisely these dynamics I am attempting to shed light on
in this article. By using an existential focus on the links between self, place
and experience, I suggest that we need to confront the absence of place in
current readings of displacement. Where dominant anthropological discourses
tend to become tangled up in a fascination with the boundlessness refugees and
migrants embody, I am attempting to move beyond the metaphorical and
towards a focus on people’s everyday engagements with their surroundings.
After spelling out some of the theoretical and epistemological questions that
frame my thoughts and approach, I turn to Halima’s life and stories. In
moving between storytelling and everyday practices, I elaborate two crucial
existential strategies she deployed to actively engage with the place she had
come to (Melbourne) as well as with the one she had been forced to leave
behind (Somalia). Turning the focus on one individual’s acts of doing, place-
making and storying allows for a more nuanced understanding of displacement
– one that takes the groundedness of social life more seriously and one that
works towards a deeper understanding of the ways place and displacement
intersect.

Space Travellers
In anthropology, the symbolic power of displacement has come to be of
paradigmatic importance for the way place is conceptualised. Over the last
two decades, there has been a radical shift from stable, rooted and mappable
identities to fluid, transitory and migratory phenomena. Rather than being
bounded by a timeless and unmovable place, people are now thought of
as moving continuously through flexible, open-ended and contested space.

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Refugees and migrants have come to be the symbolic figures of this shift. They
challenge established notions of a ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995b), of a
world that can be neatly mapped and of cultures that are deeply rooted in places
that ‘belong’ to them.
As Casey (1997: 288) has argued, this paradigmatic shift towards displace-
ment needs to be seen in conjunction with a wider transformation in modern
Western thought that dissolved place into space as the dominant term of Euro-
centric discourse. Koyré (1979) poignantly described this movement away from
place as one ‘from the closed world to the infinite universe’. In anthropology,
this fascination with boundlessness reached its climax with the spatial turn, a
turn that unfolded across the social sciences and humanities (see Warf &
Arias 2009). From the early 1990s key anthropological thinkers, such as
Appadurai (1988a; 1988b; 1996), Gupta and Ferguson (1992; 1997a; 1997b), Clif-
ford (1992; 1997) and Malkki (1992; 1995a; 1995b; 1997), began to question the
essentialist ways place had been dealt with in the discipline. While the body
of work these authors produced was diverse and branched out into different
directions, it heralded the beginning of a new focus on fluidity and movement
as the quintessential characteristics of our time. Twenty years later, the effects of
the spatial turn prove to have been nothing less than profound: On the one
hand, the shift allowed for a fundamental problematisation of the field as the
pre-given locus for anthropological research. Following on from Appadurai’s
(1988b: 37) suggestion that much ethnographic writing tends to ‘incarcerate
natives’ in places, anthropologists began to concentrate on the constructedness
of the field and look for alternative methods – methods that would not, by
default, root people in places (Malkki 1992; Gupta & Ferguson 1997a; 1997b;
Olwig & Hastrup 1997). As a result, anthropologists began to loosen the fixation
and boundedness of the field and let movement become an intrinsic part of their
self-understanding. On the other hand, the spatial turn also opened the doors
for a new theoretical and empirical focus on the connections between space,
power and identity. Directly related to the project of dislocating the anthropo-
logical field, some anthropologists opted for a close look at the production of
space through questions of power and resistance (Bammer 1994; Augé 1995;
Malkki 1995a; Castells 1996; Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003). Inspired by philo-
sophers such as De Certeau (1984), Foucault (1986), Deleuze and Guattari (1986)
and Lefebvre (1991), who wrote about the use of space as a technique of power
and social control, they questioned the rigidity of place by emphasising the
growing importance of global or transnational identities. Displacement became
the new trope through which anthropologists came to look at the world.

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Rather than viewing refugees and migrants from the places they find themselves
at, the focus has shifted towards the open-endedness of the space they are
moving through.
Although the spatial turn in anthropology, as well as in the social sciences
and humanities in general, set out to re-conceptualise place, I suggest that it
did not make the term any clearer. Paradoxically, the inflationary use of loca-
tional vocabulary in contemporary scholarly writing could suggest the opposite:
terms such as ‘spatiality’, ‘location’, ‘mapping’, ‘scapes’, ‘centre/margin’, ‘inside-
outside’, ‘liminal space’, ‘third space’, ‘threshold’, ‘interstices’ and so on, have
become the staple of academic writing in the humanities and social sciences.
Yet as Keith and Pile (1993: 1) argue in the introduction to their landmark col-
lection of essays, Place and the Politics of Identity, these terms are commonly used
to refer to complexity but are hardly ever directly explored or confronted.
Trying to grasp the concept of place after the spatial turn, Relph (2008: 5) has
noted, is ‘like walking into the aftermath of an academic explosion’. Although
there has been much talk about place, the focus has tended to be not so
much on place itself, but on the boundlessness of space and time and on the
spatial politics place is believed to be a result of. Following Casey’s suggestion
of a paradigmatic shift towards space in modern and postmodern thinking, the
current fascination with homelessness, exile and displacement is perhaps not
surprising. He points out that the disregard of place in modern philosophy
had massive impacts on Western theoretical thinking and specifically on the
way the human became imagined as an inconsequential dot within the immen-
sity of the universe (Casey 1997: 292). In a world that is made up of fluid, bound-
less and indifferent open space, humans have become space travellers. Roots
have become replaced by routes (Friedman 2002) and the human subject is
left moving back and forth within the vastness of the universe without any
abiding place to rest and take roots or dwell.
While in anthropology, the turn towards space was of crucial importance for
the de-essentialisation of place, it came with the side effect of creating a deep
chasm between theory and lived experience. For although researchers have
gone into much pain to develop theoretical concepts that emphasise the impor-
tance of ‘globalised’, ‘transnational’, ‘rhizomic’ or ‘nomadic’ spaces and identi-
ties, this treatment of space is essentially metaphorical and is often bypassed
in migrants’ everyday lives, where the particularity of place continues to be of
importance. Over the years, this chasm has been pointed at by a number of
anthropologists, who, in looking at people’s experiences of place-attachment,
have questioned the overemphasis of boundlessness (Basso 1996; Feld &

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Basso 1996; Fortier 2000; Ingold 2000; 2009; 2011; Bender 2001; Friedman 2002;
Kirby 2009; Korac 2009). In recent years, a noticeable number of anthropolo-
gists writing on global and migratory phenomena, including prominent
authors associated with the spatial turn, have called for more balanced views
on place, movement and deterritorialisation (Appadurai 2006; Rapport & Will-
iksen 2010; Appadurai & Morley 2011; Coleman & Von Hellermann 2011). Yet,
while there has been talk about an impending ‘topographic turn’ (Hastrup
2005: 145) in anthropology and while the voices calling for a stronger focus
on ontology and materiality in migration studies are becoming louder, anthro-
pologists still seem to be reluctant to initiate a full-fledged shift from space to
place. Part of this might have to do with the sense of backwardness and exclu-
sion place has become associated with.
While I value the insight from the spatial turn that places cannot be seen as
bounded, immobile territories, I suggest that we need to establish a more
nuanced view on the links between place and displacement. I propose that
place does not cease to exist, even if it is experienced as a sense of deep and
utter disruption (or displacement). It is always there, where we are. Because we
cannot escape its presence, it plays into the way we see and engage with the
world. We come to the world and keep returning to it, Casey (2000: 17–18)
suggests, as already placed there. Humans, he stresses, are always already in
place, never not emplaced. The perspective I want to propose is informed by
the recognition that as place continues to be of such importance in people’s
lives, anthropologists cannot bypass it by creating ever-tightening theoretical cat-
egories. Rather than stylising refugees into the quintessential postmodern sub-
jects to capture the unsettling character of modernity, I believe that there is a
need to look into the ways people actively make sense of displacement in their
everyday lives. Such a focus on experience does not only demand a shift away
from the metaphorical, but also an openness to explore different modes of
anthropological meaning-making that value knowledge as part and parcel of
the world it grew out of. The complexity and diversity of that very world requires
anthropologists to move beyond the detached eye of scientific reasoning and let
the creativity people deploy to make sense of the events they find themselves
thrown into become an integral part of their research and writing. Finally, it
requires us to cherish both a politics and poetics of anthropological meaning-
making. For where the academic eye might find it hard not to get lost in elucida-
tions, explanations and representations, the poetic eye can often better reveal
experiences in all their nuances. In my own research, it was the intersubjective
force of the storytelling moment and its ability to move between the here and

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there, now and then, that flung open a window towards the existential importance
of place. By listening to Halima’s stories and by walking and talking some of the
paths and ways of Melbourne together, I came to see that even people on the
move, whether on the run from war, hunger or destruction, or, perhaps, simply
looking for greener pastures elsewhere, do not move through an indifferent
space. Rather, they move through places – and in moving through shape
them and are in turn shaped by them.

Telling and Being

Over the two-and-a-half years I have known Halima now our lives have
become closely intertwined. The dynamics of the storytelling process moved
both of us towards each other. When I was first introduced to Halima in
early 2011, she was in her mid-fifties and had been in Melbourne for eight
years. Before the civil war in Somalia erupted, her entire life had revolved
around Mogadishu, where she had grown up as part of a well-educated and
close-knit family, where she had started her career in Somali politics, where
she had married and where her four children were born. Because of her involve-
ment in Siyaad Barre’s socialist government, she had been forced to leave Moga-
dishu in 1991 when the regime collapsed and guerrillas from rival clans began to
systematically target members of her clan, the Majerteen. In the chaos of fleeing
Somalia, Halima lost her husband, and for 12 years she did not know that he was
still alive. Her own exodus led her, her four children and her sister’s son through
many different countries and finally to the United Arab Emirates, where she
stayed for 12 years. After years of being in a constant state of limbo in a
country where she did not have a legal status and on the verge of being
deported back to Somalia, she was granted a humanitarian visa to live in Aus-
tralia. After three fruitless attempts to bring Halima and her children into the
country, in 2002 her sister Sahra, who had been resettled to Melbourne 10
years earlier, finally succeeded with her application for family reunion.1
Like Halima, I had also come to Melbourne as a stranger – albeit under very
different circumstances. I had moved from Austria to Australia in 2009 on a
three-year scholarship to write my PhD on Somali refugees. Although the
movements that led our paths to cross in Melbourne had been of such different
natures, the shared experience of being new to a place instantly connected
Halima and me. After agreeing to participate in my research by telling me
her life story in recorded storytelling sessions, she quickly took on the role of
my Australian surrogate mother. She came to guide me through new places
and shielded me from loneliness and homesickness by integrating me into

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her family life, creating the feeling of being-part-of that, as I came to understand,
is so essential for the possibility of emplacement. At the same time, I took on the
role of Halima’s surrogate daughter, bridging the distance to Amal, her second-
born child who, like me, had left the protection of the family to build up her
own life in the USA. The act of storytelling thus initiated a powerful
dynamic. Through the intimate process of telling and listening to each
other’s stories, by becoming emotionally involved, our lives began to interweave
and mingle, to cross and touch.
The importance of personal involvement moved my research focus beyond
the recorded life storytelling setting and into Halima’s everyday life. Participant
observation came to form an important companion to the recorded life story-
telling sessions. As a result, my research focus continually moved between
storied, reflected experience (Erfahrung) and immediate, lived experience
(Erlebnis). The interrelatedness of human existence – the ways being-with
(Al-Mohammad 2010) spins its webs into our being-in-the-world – thus
came to guide and frame my research. It formed my understanding of ethno-
graphic meaning-making as a lived intersubjective reality, as the product of a
dialogue that includes the material, imaginative and emotional landscapes of
human relationships. This dialogue moved my research away from the idea
of life stories as biographical texts, ready to be collected and reproduced by
the researcher, and towards an emphasis on the social process of storytelling
instead. It made me understand the many layers of experience storytelling
relates to, that while the stories Halima told me were reflections on past experi-
ences, the very act of telling also allowed her to actively reshape and re-live
some of these experiences. Storytelling as an anthropological method, then,
has more to reveal than one individual’s life. The creative possibility of the
story to remodel and retell, to meet and overcome obstacles, to point at or trans-
form conflict makes it a crucial means for understanding the ways humans
actively make sense of their being-in-the-world. To borrow from Jackson
(1996: 39), as much as storytelling is about a way of saying, it is also a form of
being. These dynamics led my focus to shift from cultural to existential ques-
tions, an orientation that can be read in the tradition of existential phenomen-
ology, specifically the work of Martin Heidegger, who wrote about the
existential dynamics of our Dasein as a Geworfenheit (thrownness) into the
world (Heidegger 1962: 219 – 224). He stresses that humans find themselves
thrown into a situation that is not of their making. This does not mean that
they do not have the means to leap into action or obtain changes, but rather
that human life is never undetermined or neutral, that we are always already

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situated in something. This being in constitutes the setting and limits for our
meaning-making (Withy 2014: 62). Applied to the anthropological setting,
thrownness becomes a way of approaching the means and strategies people
deploy for dealing with the situations they find themselves in. Rather than
studying culture, the emphasis shifts towards the grounds and possibilities for
human existence. It is within these lines that my focus overlaps with the
work of Jackson who mapped out the contours of an existential anthropology
(Jackson 1996; 2005; 2012; 2013).
Over the one and a half years Halima and I spent working on her life story,
she told me a body of stories that encompassed a lifetime and moved between
different places, people and events. In order to tease out the existential strategies
she deployed to overcome the debilitating feeling of displacement and make
Melbourne a home, I focus on one specific set of stories. Reflecting the research
process, however, these stories will not stand alone as isolated texts. Rather, a
continuous back and forth between storied and lived experience will create a
more complex picture of the interplay between place and displacement. Impor-
tantly, it also allows for a closer look at the habits and daily practices that were
essential to Halima’s place-making attempts.

Against Transit
Becoming so closely involved in Halima’s life, I was struck by the sense
of ceaseless activity that characterised her everyday trajectories through
Melbourne. She was always on the move between different people, projects,
ideas and suburbs – always planning or doing something. Sitting in the living
room of her house in Melbourne’s Western suburbs and observing the constant
activity that was at the heart of Halima’s entire family, I once joked that the
place felt like a beehive, with people and ideas always flying about. Halima’s
husband, hearing my words, laughed. ‘Sister, look’, he said. ‘I’m an old man. If
I sit down once I will stop completely’. ‘He’s right’, Halima agreed. ‘If I sit
down and rest I will get sick. Besides, my heart never tells me to sit down. It
tells me: “You know you can help, your people need you”’. All of Halima’s
thoughts and activities were driven by this one single question of how to
help her people – the Somali community both in Melbourne and in Somalia.
From a sewing group where she gathered Somali women with different clan-
affiliations to initiate a dialogue between them, to the multicultural children’s
playgroup in the community housing estates in a suburb nearby where she
spent a day a week, from the logistics of organising fundraisers for projects in
Somalia, to the primary school where, together with a group of five Somali

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women, she had taken over the school canteen, the urge to help and guide her
community spoke through all of Halima’s involvements. Helping her commu-
nity had become a fulltime occupation – even though none of the projects
she was involved in brought any income. Instead, Halima volunteered all of
her time, and she was happy to do so. Even on the rare occasion when she
took a day off from all of her projects and stayed at home, she was organising,
planning and thinking. While resting physically, her mind was still moving
about, already anticipating the paths that needed to be walked next.
And yet, despite the tireless movements that marked Halima’s everyday life
in Melbourne, she insisted that all she was aiming for was stability. From the
very first time we met in a small Iraqi Kebab shop that was to become the
place where we met for the recorded life storytelling sessions, Halima told
me that all she wanted was to remain exactly where she was – not just in the
same suburb, but in the same street, with the same neighbours and with the fam-
iliar streets, shops and public transport routes around her. People who had
suffered the hardships she had been through, Halima explained, risked remain-
ing in transit forever. ‘But I want to cancel that word “transit”’, she insisted. ‘I
don’t want to be in transit. My heart is working hard to settle, to settle and
to belong to this country’. At first, Halima’s conviction that she was aiming
for a stable base while moving about endlessly seemed paradoxical to me.
But listening to her life story and observing her everyday activities, I began to
see how this contradictoriness revealed something essential about being-
in-place. It alerted me to the ways in which Dasein (literally: being-here) is
always grounded and on the move at the same time. The stories Halima told
me about her life reflected this need for both movement and stillness. As the
stories spanning different times, places and people unfolded, I began to
realise that her insistence on the need to settle and become-at-home in
Melbourne was not just a practical necessity. It was of critical existential impor-
tance – and so was her urge to help her community.

A Survival Story
One year after her arrival in Australia, Halima became seriously ill. She was
diagnosed with a rare blood disease and spent months in the hospital, with the
doctors only giving her a 15% chance of surviving. For Halima, becoming ill was
more than a physical breakdown. To her, it was a bodily manifestation of the
restlessness and homelessness that had marked her life for so many years:
first, the shock of having to leave Mogadishu from one day to the next,
losing not just her house and all her belongings, but also the social ties that

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had been part and parcel of her daily life and habits. Then the months she spent
on the run, constantly crippled by a feeling of uncertainty about what had hap-
pened to her husband and to other family members. And finally, the immense
strength and effort that was needed to survive in the Emirates with five children
and with no permit to stay or work, feeling like ‘I was nowhere, like I was no
one’. During all these years, Halima said that she could not do anything else
but keep on moving, for there was no place to rest and put down roots. After
her arrival in Melbourne, however, with the support of her sister Sahra and in
an environment that allowed her to pause and look back, she realised how
tired she was. ‘And then, because of the tiredness, the years of worry inside
me, and all the problems, I collapsed’, Halima explained. ‘I really, really col-
lapsed. When I realised that I was settled, my body told me that I was so
tired. That’s when I became very sick’.
In Halima’s stories about her time in Australia, the illness formed what
Jackson (2005: xi) has described as a ‘critical event’, an incident of such force
that it has the power to move beyond itself and shed light on the wider
dynamics that characterise the struggle for being ‘as a relationship between
the forces that act upon us and our capacity for bringing the new into being’.
In her stories, the illness formed such a moment – a crossroads between the dis-
placements that had marked her past and the beginning of movements towards
future emplacement. For Halima, this metamorphosis was distilled in one
specific moment, a moment of such strength that she recounted it to me
again and again.

While I was in the hospital, my sister Sahra was by my side, and she never left for a
second. I remember when I was in the most critical state, I never heard one single
word of what the doctors or other people said, but I used to hear my sister’s voice.
She came early in the morning, combed my hair and cleaned my face. While she
was doing that she was talking to me. She said: ‘Sister, you know what I am
feeling? I feel that you will survive, you will wake up and you will help us – you
always liked to help people, and I’m feeling that’s coming soon. You are so beautiful,
and I don’t want you to die. I am here for you. If you understand my words, please,
sister, squeeze my hand’. So I squeezed her hand, and she jumped up and said: ‘My
sister is ok!’.

It was in this moment between life and death that Halima realised that she
could only stay alive if she worked against the paralysing sense of transit that
had led to her total collapse. And it was out of this recognition that her decision
to help the Somali community grew. For Halima, this step was about much

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more than supporting her people. It was about combating the feelings of
estrangement that had accompanied her first steps through Melbourne and it
was about befriending this new place and its people by actively carving out
her own paths. In doing so, she was literally placing herself back into the
world: ‘To not exclude myself, I decided to be in the people’s world’, Halima
said. ‘What I found out was that my medication is to work with the community’.
The storytelling moment and its ability to open windows towards the past,
the present and the future let the meaning of the many community develop-
ment projects Halima was involved to appear in a different light. Rather than
understanding the ceaseless sense of movement and the urge to help that
marked her everyday life as evidence for the power of displacement and the
impossibility of settling down, her story allowed me to understand it as consti-
tutive to the process of becoming-at-home in Melbourne. Indeed, I suggest that
the two core ideas that marked Halima’s survival story – the idea of helping and
the idea of community – are pivotal to understanding the ways she engaged with
the place she had come to live in, as well as with the places she had been forced
to leave behind. When applied to her everyday activities, they formed core exis-
tential strategies. While grown out of Halima’s conscious decision to help in
order to survive, these strategies were not characterised by the sense of planning
and calculation the term strategy is commonly associated with. Rather, they
were practices, improvisatory acts, born in correspondence with the world
she was moving through. A focus on these two strategies will allow me to elab-
orate how, in working things out on the way, Halima could begin to watch,
learn and inhabit the place she had come to live in. This, in turn, allows for a
deeper understanding of the ways emplacement and displacement intersect.

Helping
When I became involved in Halima’s life, she had just started a new project, a
group of five Somali women with whom she took over the canteen in the
primary school of a suburb close to where she was living. As the idea was
entirely self-initiated and did not have public support or funding, the mostly
elderly women who participated as ‘cooks’ kick-started the canteen by
pooling the money they needed to buy basic equipment and developed a
weekly menu.2 Over the following months I saw the project grow. While at
the beginning Halima was worrying about the small number of orders they
received, the women were adamant that they needed to be patient. Indeed,
within a term the meal orders increased and word spread so that they also
began delivering to one of the surrounding schools. Through their work in

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Placing Displacement 327

the canteen the women were able to earn some pocket money which helped
them to increase the little income they had through the social security benefits.
But money was not the reason why they participated. Chatting to three of the
women while helping them chop vegetables during one of my visits, they all
agreed that the main motive for coming back to work in the kitchen day in
day out was to be doing something meaningful. ‘We are old’, one woman
said. ‘We won’t find a job anymore. But by coming to the canteen we get out
of our houses, we have something to do and the children and teachers appreci-
ate our work’. Sitting in the small school kitchen, surrounded by the buzz of the
schoolyard and listening to the jokes the women were throwing back and forth
while folding and frying samosas, I came to understand the importance of pro-
jects like these. For these women, running the school canteen went beyond
often proposed community development goals, such as creating paths into
the job market or enhancing leadership skills. Rather, by making, doing, creating
something together, something that was appreciated by others, they, in turn,
could begin seeing themselves as part of something wider.
Accompanying Halima to the school canteen and observing her work, I
began to grasp that the urge of giving her community a chance had to do
with much more than a moral urge to help. Rather, I came to see that the
idea of helping stood for the centrality of making, doing, creating as a means
of being-in-the-world. As Tim Ingold, focusing on people’s material practices,
has observed, the act of making is crucial for our engagement with the world.
He notes that as practitioners make things, they ‘bind their own pathways or
lines of becoming into the texture of the world’ (Ingold 2011: 178). In the same
vein, Halima’s urge to help was a way of becoming involved in the world, of
carving out her own pathways and of investing her surroundings with
meaning. By entering into a productive relationship with the place she had
come to, she was actively making Melbourne a place that could become
home. The importance of Halima’s idea of helping, then, needs to be looked
for in the practice, in the act of doing itself. From this perspective, her insistence
on the importance of becoming at home in Melbourne, of ‘working hard to
belong’ also appears in a different light. Being-at-home, this suggests, is inti-
mately connected to the act of building towards such a place.
This affinity between building and dwelling was famously pointed out by
Heidegger, whose later work was driven by an interest in the topology of
being (Topologie des Daseins). In his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ he
argues that emplacement is not about creating ties to a fixed and stable built
environment but about the very process of being-in-place. Building and

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dwelling, he stresses, are related as end and means; building is not just a means
towards dwelling, but ‘to build in itself is already to dwell’ (Heidegger 1975: 146).
Heidegger (1975: 147 – 148) continues that in everyday life building as dwelling is
experienced as ‘that which is from the outset habitual’. Given the importance of
habits (das Gewohnte) for the possibility of dwelling it is not surprising that we
also speak of inhabiting a place. Our habits, the ways we step into the world, are
intimately interwoven with the textures and dynamics of place. From this per-
spective, Halima’s urge to help is far from an unwillingness to be pinned down
and settle. Rather, the very act of helping itself is a way of place-making. When
in her survival story, Halima speaks of her decision to help as a means of becom-
ing part of the ‘people’s world’, she is referring to the importance of entering
into a productive relationship with the place she had come to. Doing, making
and building things enabled her to move beyond the disorientation that had
accompanied her first steps through Melbourne and to become part of some-
thing wider. It shows how, echoing the world that is surrounding us, the act
of making enables us to carve out our own routes while taking in the
rhythms, routes and stories of others. Looked at it from this angle, the centrality
of helping in Halima’s life and stories reveals something essential about the links
between place and being. It suggests that emplacement, the acts of investing our
surroundings with meaning, is of fundamental importance because places are
not mere backdrops against which life is written. Rather, it is through our
daily routines and habits that we come to leave our imprints on places – and
that places leave their imprints inside of us.

Community
Although Halima’s acts of helping revealed the centrality of actively growing
an attachment towards the place she had come to, this did not exclude the
importance of keeping ties with the people and places she had left behind.
Rather, her becoming-at-home in Melbourne was only possible as this place,
this hereness, was open enough to also accommodate links to the there and
then. While after the frightening experience of her total collapse Halima had
decided that in order to survive she needed to work against the risk of remaining
stuck in a limbo and make Melbourne her home, she was still deeply preoccu-
pied with Somalia’s future. To Halima, who had been a key leader in Somalia’s
socialist youth movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the pain of observing her
country’s disintegration from afar was so strong that it often rendered her
speechless. ‘It is not easy for me to see’, she said. ‘If you have worked with
the government and were nurturing and looking after your country, finding

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out that there were all these problems – it’s very hurtful’. On some days, when
Halima’s thoughts were wandering back to war-torn Somalia over and over
again, she would resort to other forms of storytelling and sing poems to me
that expressed her longing and hope for a better Somalia. ‘Don’t worry, my
country, I will be back’, Halima often sang, repeating the lines of a poem she
had written shortly after fleeing Somalia. ‘I am far from you. But, my country,
I will be with you soon, don’t worry, don’t worry’.
When Halima talked about her country, it almost seemed as if the place was
taking on human characteristics – as if the place was a person that needed help
and comforting. Likewise, when Halima was talking about her people, these
people almost seemed to form a place, a dwelling. This affinity between com-
munity and place has much to say about the existential importance of emplace-
ment, about how people are both from and of a place (Van Gelder 2008: 85). Yet,
while place and community constantly leak into each other, they are not one
and the same. Accompanying Halima in her projects, the community she was
directing her work at unravelled the contours of a place that was not stoically
stuck in the here and now, but that spun its webs into the there and then.
Exactly for its somewhat ambivalent position, the ways Halima’s idea of com-
munity played out in her everyday life has much to say about the essentially
open character of place. This became clear to me as I observed the ups and
downs of the project that was particularly close to Halima’s heart – the
‘Peace Project’.
Unlike other projects such as the school canteen or the sewing group that
were based in Melbourne, the Peace Project was directed at helping commu-
nities in Somalia. The main idea was to regularly send containers with furniture,
schoolbooks, pens and clothes, as well as money to different regions in Somalia
to help set up basic schools and employ teachers. In order for the idea to work,
Halima had to establish links with schools in Melbourne that were willing to
donate the items that were needed. She also had to organise fundraisers and
motivate Somalis living in Melbourne to contribute to the project financially.
From the beginning of the initiative, Halima knew that the step of bringing
Somalis in Melbourne to support it would be the most difficult part of the
Peace Project. Their reluctance was a direct reflection of how unsettled the
idea of community had become in the Somali context: because of the abuse
of clanism during much of Somalia’s brief history as a nation-state and the
decades of violence between members of different clans and sub-clans, the
idea of a unified community of Somalis has become out of reach. For many,
it has become replaced by an idea of community that is deeply linked to

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clan-affiliation. Although Somalis in Melbourne generally showed a readiness to

donate money to aid projects in their home country, they were reluctant to do
so if the project was not located in the area where their clans had the stronghold
so that their own people would benefit. Halima’s main motivation for setting up
the Peace Project was to work against these dynamics and to create a more open
and inclusive notion of community – both in Melbourne and Somalia. In order
to reach this goal, she had to be inventive and find means of accommodating all
these splintered groups and affiliations. As a result, Halima came up with the
idea of shifting the Peace Project’s focus between different regions in Somalia.
So while the first container was sent to a town in central Somalia, the following
projects were to be located in other places. Halima’s hope was that conflicting
clans living in Melbourne working together would send a signal of reconcilia-
tion to the communities receiving help in Somalia. At the same time, she also
hoped that it would be the beginning of a healing process within the commu-
nity in Melbourne.
Again, the idea of actively building a community that could accommodate
Halima’s becoming-at-home was essential. For as much as being-at-home
was about creating place-attachments, it was also about a dwelling-in-others.
While helping allowed Halima to move about and build towards a place that
could be home, community enabled her to become part of a wider whole and
inhabit this place socially. At the same time, this community did not represent
something stable or unmovable. Rather, Halima’s involvement in the Peace
Project showed the complex and multi-layered shapes this community took
on. In many ways, it took on the forms of an imagined community (Anderson
1983) of Somalis that were unified through their Somaliness, wherever in the
world they were located. This imaginary community was inextricably linked
to the Pan-Somali ideas Halima had grown up with and that had propelled
her to become involved in Somalia’s socialist movement in 1969, shortly after
Siyaad Barre came to power. Halima often told me how, only 16 years old,
she had been deeply impressed by Barre’s promise to establish a country that
was built on the national unity of all Somalis, regardless of their clan-affiliation.
While the reality of building such a community soon proved to be far more
complex than the regime’s rhetoric, Halima had never given up hoping for it.
Thus, the community she was actively building towards through the Peace
Project embodied an ideal, an aspiration after a group that would be unified
through their Somaliness. This unity of the community, she hoped, would in
turn flow back into the dynamics of the place (Somalia) and allow for its
inner workings to be rebuilt. For the Somalis living in Melbourne, she hoped

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that a restored sense of togetherness would work as a shield against the debil-
itating feelings of disorientation and liminality that had marked her own experi-
ence of displacement.
Although Halima’s idea of community carried so many idealistic character-
istics, she did not use it as a means of escaping the reality of being-here, in
Melbourne’s Western suburbs, so far away from Somalia. Despite the fact
that so many of her hopes and dreams in Melbourne were directed to a
future-Somalia where things will be better, she always told me that a return
to Somalia seemed to be something so unrealistic and far away that she did
not dare hoping for it.

Somalia is my country. I would love to be there with my people and I would like to
help them. But after I saw how they were killing the educated people and how they
were fighting about all this tribal stuff, my heart stopped encouraging me to go back. I
have seen so many beautiful souls who were trying to help die, so instead of risking
myself by going back to Somalia I decided to help from here, to create the Peace
Project and to help the orphans and little kids and their mothers from over here.
That’s the only way I can support them. The other thing is: My family is everywhere.
Some are in Somalia, some are in Ethiopia, some are in Kenya, they are everywhere.
So if Somalia settled down and became peaceful it would be good for my family to
reunite again over there, but I think that needs a long time. It’s not now and it’s
not near. Somalia needs time to settle down.

Rather than longing for a return to Somalia, Halima’s urge to help her com-
munity was an attempt of investing her being-here with some of the thereness.
This resembles some of the dynamics Hage (1997: 104) describes in his studies
on the home-building practices of Lebanese immigrants in Sydney. He argues
that migrants engage both with lost and new places to make themselves at
home where they are. He makes the point that instead of dismissing migrants’
looking back to the places they left behind as a refusal to deal with the realities
of the places they are currently at, they should be seen as an essential part of
their settlement strategies. Hage (1997: 108) notes that nostalgia for home is
not necessarily about a desire to go back, but about ‘a desire to promote the
feeling of being there here’. In a similar vein, Halima’s community involved
layers of the here and there, the now and then, which, in turn, allowed her to
bring some of the thereness into the here. While feelings of grief for the loss
of Somalia and a desire to return to an ideal community were important
drivers for the Peace Project, this desire to return was not one of literally
going back. Rather, it expressed a wish to rebuild the sense of togetherness

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the war had destroyed and make it an integral part of her being-here. Rebuilding
this sense of togetherness here in Melbourne, removed from the immediate vio-
lence of Mogadishu and determined by the settings of a new place, was essen-
tially also a way of rebuilding herself. It can be likened to the dynamics Aidani
(2010: 133) so poignantly describes as the ‘existential need of returning oneself to
oneself’.3 In the context of Iranian refugees in Australia and their yearning to
return to their homeland, Aidani stresses that their longing is not just directed
towards returning to a place but also to themselves – to restoring their sense of
self and their own identities. While the refugees he worked with linked the exis-
tential need of restoring themselves to an imaginary there (a homeland in Iran),
Halima, for whom a return was no option, did the opposite: she tried to bring
the there into the here.

Concluding Thoughts
In his brief essay on ‘Art and Space’, Martin Heidegger looks into the histori-
cal roots of the word Raum (place/space).4 He points out its close relationship
to räumen (clearing-away) and argues that this has much to say about the
characteristics of place. ‘Clearing-away brings forth the free, the openness for
man’s settling and dwelling’, he writes (Heidegger 1973: 5). Rather than thinking
of space as boundless and of place as unmovable and static, our continuous acts
of arranging, clearing and what Heidegger calls einräumen (making-room), indi-
cate the changing and essentially open character of place:

First, making-room admits something. It lets openness hold sway which, among
other things, grants the appearance of things present to which human dwelling
sees itself consigned. On the other hand, making-room prepares for things the possi-
bility to belong to their relevant whither and, out of this, to each other. (Heidegger
1973: 6)

Heidegger’s idea of place not as an imprisonment, but as something that reaches

out into the world while not losing its possibility as a dwelling for humans in the
midst of things, reverberates the characteristics of Halima’s place-making prac-
tices. Through helping, through becoming actively engaged in her surround-
ings, through making-room for herself and her community, she was able to
invest the place she had come to with meaning. Halima’s urge to keep
moving forward and make Australia a meaningful place for her community
enabled her to gradually overcome the debilitating feelings of displacement
that had led to her total collapse. The ability of her community to link the

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Placing Displacement 333

here and there, the now and then, again reveals the essentially moving and open
character of place. Halima’s practical engagement with the idea of community
through the Peace Project shows place as something that contains and sets free
at the same time, as something that is always moving, or ‘on the way’ (unter-
wegs), as Heidegger (1962: 110) puts it. By looking back and actively creating
links to Somalia, Halima was able to bridge the physical gap between herself
and the place she had been forced to leave behind. At the same time, these trans-
national ties should not be misunderstood as a refusal to accept the reality of
being-here. Rather, they need to be seen as essential ingredients in overcoming
the pain of displacement.
Perhaps it is time to re-think the current aversion to the idea of setting roots.
While roots have come to stand for the postmodern ‘horror of being bound
and fixed’ (Bauman 1995: 91), this horror does not seem to be shared by
people like Halima, whose horror seems to be the exact opposite. Her horror
is the horror of boundlessness; her fear is the fear to remain in transit and unfit-
ting forever, to never arrive anywhere, to never be someone in relation to some-
where anymore. While Halima’s quite exceptional story cannot, of course,
speak for the stories of the hundreds of thousands of other people who have
experienced displacement (from Somalia and from elsewhere in the world),
the majority of whom live in protracted situations and are forced to be
mobile, I believe that her story still opens up a window to new views on
displacement.
Without having to argue for or against boundlessness, storytelling offers a
way of exploring a more nuanced perspective, one that moves beyond the
metaphorical. Halima’s desire to stay put and her eagerness to work towards
a feeling of being-at-home in Australia throws the romantic imagination of
the world as boundless and the refugee as the embodiment of borderless
belonging into question. Rather, her desire turns the gaze from the figure of
the refugee back to those who came to imagine them as emissaries of a home-
less age of movement. Looking at refugees, migrants and other mobile peoples
in terms of a boundless paradigm does not just neglect their actual experiences
and lives. It also keeps us from having a serious look into the ways this para-
digm has been formed and into the reason why movement has come to be a
symbol of such strength. It keeps us from understanding what, in the end, all
these metaphors, symbols and representations really stand for. This is not to
suggest that displacement is an experience unique to refugees or migrants.
Rather, it is a call to take displacement seriously, to not overlook the placement
in displacement.

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Acknowledgements
I thank Klaus Neumann, whose critical eye and insightful thoughts have not just
enhanced this article, but also accompanied me throughout the research process.
I also thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Sandy Gifford, Paul Reade,
Christine Horn and all the participants of the writing group at the Swinburne Insti-
tute for Social Research for their helpful comments.

Funding
The research was funded by a SUPRA doctoral award. Parts of the article were
written during my employment in the ARC-funded research project Homelands.

Notes
1. Australia is amongst the few countries worldwide committed to resettling a substan-
tial number of refugees living in protracted situations every year. During the time
Halima arrived, the Australian Government had shifted its geographical focus
towards the resettlement of refugees from the Horn of Africa.
2. Several of Halima’s projects were funded through this system that the women called
ayuuto (from the Italian word l’aiuto, which means ‘help’). Based on trust and mutual
obligation, a group of women would gather regularly, each time putting in a certain
amount of money. Every time, another woman would receive the full amount. In her
work amongst Somalis in Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya Horst (2006: 104) describes
similar practices. She notes that this principle also became popular amongst city-
dwellers as it provided more security than the unreliable bank system in Somalia.
3. Aidani is building on a thought by Said (1985), who in After the Last Sky notes that
while Palestinian exilees keep on talking about their return, they do not mean it lit-
erally: ‘( . . . ) all of us speak of return, but do we mean that literally or do we mean we
must restore ouselves to ourselves’.
4. The German word Raum has very different connotations to the English term ‘space’.
The German term does not only mean ‘space’, it also means ‘place’ and it is related to
the English word ‘room’. As Olwig (2002: 14) points out, the Germanic concept of
Raum encompasses ‘both an enclosed room-like area, defined by the phenomena
within it, and an open, infinite and transcendent, absolute space in which things
can be located’. Thus, Raum and ‘space’ take on a very different character in
English and German, and it is this essential difference that also needs to be taken
into consideration when Heidegger, in speaking of place, often relates to vocabulary
that hints at space/Raum.

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