Description
Through the story of two Jordanian brothers, this chapter explores how feelings of belonging and legitimacy are impacting of, and impacted by, experiences of displacement. Based on ongoing ethnography in a rural host community in northern Jordan, I investigate how (un)ease is created, maintained or expunged through a multiplicity of perceptions about people, history and space.
In tracing the history of movement and migration to the village before the arrival of displaced Syrians in 2012, the narrative shifts to conceptualise a host space as one not inherently defined by strategies of governance aimed to control current refugee populations. Rather, this historical perspective identifies new ways to conceptualise space based on kinship history and movement, which have implications for present day migration patterns. This approach fractures the commonly held humanitarian understanding of a host community to depict how space reflects the histories, relationships and patterns of movement which penetrate the landscape.
Engaging in Doreen Massey’s call to ‘conceive of a meeting-up of histories’, this paper seeks to understand how a settlement exists and changes in the memories of those who have intimate lived histories with the space. The stories weaved throughout depict how space becomes fixed in memory over time, and in doing so censors different understandings of authenticity.
This paper thinks through the relationship between space and history, and how this effects the present-day articulation of a space largely defined by migration and mechanisms of migration. Consequently, I question the understanding of authentic bodies, intervening in the local/migrant paradigm.
