Aleksanteri Conference 2021 Keynote: Madeleine Reeves

Madeleine Reeves: The Empty House: Towards an Anthropology of Insecure Migration in Eurasia

Migration has been identified as a strategy of exit in contexts of conflict and protracted insecurity in Central Asia, particularly for minoritised populations at times of inter-communal violence (Ismailbekova 2014, McBrien 2011). Yet studies of labour migration in the post-Soviet space have tended to pay little attention to the ways that existential insecurity can inflect decisions about the timing and organisation of exit, the duration of migration, or long-term plans about (non-)return. In the region of rural Batken where I have conducted research periodically since the early 2000s, insecurity about periodic border violence morphs into broader concerns about the viability of making a liveable life for one’s family and creating ‘roads’ (joldor) for one’s children in times of economic uncertainty and multiplying debt. Such migration is not usually framed, in policy or scholarship, as ‘forced,’ yet exit to Russia was often spoken of by my informants as a compelling necessity (majbur), even as its consequences—captured in the figure of the ‘empty house’ abandoned by all of its human habitants—were the focus of intense deliberation and moral commentary. This paper asks how we might account, ethnographically, for the experiential force of debt-driven migration in situations where departure has become integral to the imagination of life itself. It develops the analytic of insecure migration as an entry-point for a critical interrogation of the epistemological and institutional boundary-work that separates the analysis of ‘forced migration’ from migration that is putatively ‘free.’

Conference website: https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/eurasia-and-global-migration

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