Abstract

Exploring the lifeworlds of Halima, Omar and Mohamed, three middle-aged Somalis living in Melbourne, Australia, the author discusses the interrelated meanings of emplacement and displacement as experienced in people’s everyday lives. Through their experiences of displacement and placemaking, Being-Here examines the figure of the refugee as a metaphor for societal alienation and estrangement, and moves anthropological theory towards a new understanding of the crucial existential links between Sein (Being) and Da (Here).

Annika Lems is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She completed her PhD at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia in 2013. Her work is influenced by existential and phenomenological approaches in anthropology and philosophy, and her research focuses on the themes of mobility and immobility, place and displacement, visual and narrative storytelling, and memory and temporality.

“What makes Lems’ insights unusually powerful is her skill in writing sensitively and sensuously from within the highly particular experience of her two main interlocutors, capturing the incipient and vernacular modes in which space and place figure in their consciousness in different contexts, and in relation to different events.  As an essay in phenomenological anthropology, this is groundbreaking work. As an empirically-grounded contribution to an existential anthropology of minor modes of being, it may be second to none.” · Michael D. Jackson, Harvard University

“This compelling monograph leaves us with a wonderfully clear and moving sense of the existential predicaments of displacement in a globalized world, explored through three Somali protagonists’ life stories. Written and conceived in the existential phenomenological vein, this is a strong and well-written ethnography and a moving testament to the power of story-telling to redress the obstacles of migrant life and to reclaim meaning and direction in the circumstances we are thrown into.” · Hans Lucht, Danish Institute for International Studies