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Refugee Survey Quarterly 2007 26(3):100-118; doi:10.1093/rsq/hdi0246
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© UNHCR 2007, all rights reserved

Les réfugiés comme objet d'étude pour l'anthropologie : enjeux et perspectives

Marion Fresia *

École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, France


  Abstract

This article explores the benefits and limitations of anthropological research produced in the area of refugee studies over the past twenty years. It shows that anthropological research has been extremely useful when based on intensive fieldwork and empirical data as it highlighted the ideological bias of the refugee category and underlined the complex sociological reality it actually covers. On the other hand, the lack of historical and empirical approach has sometimes led anthropologists to reify precisely those categories they meant to deconstruct. Indeed, many studies from the 80's and 90's describe refugees alternatively as passive victims, dominated by the humanitarian system, or active agents resisting to the aid system thanks to unexpected coping strategies. Adopting a victimizing and/or populist attitude, this research has been shaped by changing historical, political and intellectual contexts, which have conducted anthropologists to judge rather than explain the social reality observed. In order to avoid such interpretative bias, this article suggests restoring an ethnographical and historical approaches to the study of forced migration and refugees by ‘suspending the judgment’ and analysing the dynamic of social change, which take place at the interface between three spaces – a humanitarian and international space, a national space and a local/historical space – each space having its own set of legitimate norms and institutions. In that respect, the author stresses the need to go beyond the ‘paradigm of the camp’ and calls for more research to be conducted on the normative and institutional pluralism created by the introduction of refugee law and humanitarian law in Southern countries.

Key Words: refugee research • forced migration • anthropology • populism • dominocentrism • camp paradigm

* Chercheure Associée au Centre d'études africaines, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).


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