It’s All in the Bag: Refugees and Materiality

My grandmother made us chicken and made us sandwiches to take […] My mom was telling me that her, my aunt, was trying, you know, to make sure we had everything when we came there so she like bought a package of, of course, silverware and making sure we had it, and then she, Europeans love to drink coffee, so she brought a bunch of coffee for that. So, she brought everything that we would eat or drink but when it came time we came to the checkpoint, they pretty much took everything so we were only able to take what we could. We only had, I believe, three, three or four bags of clothing and shampoo and things we needed, [but] we ended up losing two of them and we never got them back, even so we technically only ended up with two […] Then when we got to the United States, we were given a bag, this bag from the IOM [International Organization for Migration] filled with paperwork and, you know, reference guides, and things we would need for our life in Arizona.

Zeljka is a former child refugee who fled from Croatia during the Yugoslav Wars with her family in 2002. She describes each item that she pulls from the white plastic IOM bag which still bears her family’s name, the number of family members, and their assigned refugee case number. She speaks of the material consequences of each object. The 2002 Delta airline ticket stubs, the results of the mandated pre-travel medical examinations, the notice of scheduled vetting interviews, the photos of each family member, and even the bag itself, are symbolic objects, signifying her family’s past navigation of borders. They are inscribed and embedded with consequences and attributes of refugee migration—the politics of difference, the uncertainties and inequities of power and subjectivity experienced instinctually and deeply as a child refugee, and now understood consciously as a young adult with US citizenship. Pointing to the Delta ticket stubs, Zeljka remembers looking at her father’s hand, “and on the flight, he always had these things [the documents] with him,”.  In seat 34C in Coach Class, surrounded by people, Zeljka recalls thinking they were “the usual people traveling all over the world,” and noting that her family was not, on that day, “part of the usual people.” They were refugees, whose statuses were legitimized, made real that moment, by what her father held tightly throughout the flight in his hand. The materials, some in envelopes, were stamped with official seals and signed by authorities. Barad (2013) reminds us that “physical matters, matters of fact, matters of concern, matters of care, matters of justice, are not separable” (p. 17), and the IOM bag and its contents are materializations of all of these.

Zeljka

Zeljka and I met in 2016 when we both volunteered at a drop-in learning and resource hub for refugee youth, their families, and their teachers. As we got to know each other, tutoring refugee youth side-by-side, our conversations began to inform my understandings of the material turn in social science research and more specifically, it confirmed how material objects, with human investment, do play important roles in the lives of people, especially those whose connections to other people have become strained, fractured, or severed through violence, trauma and war. This essay, which emerged from our ongoing conversations, is a reflection on Zeljka and her family’s journey and on my struggle to be okay with documenting how things “matter” as an anthropologist who studies refugees.  

Thinking about Things

Everyday material things do important work in not so everyday circumstances. Matter is not neutral and those who have had to depend on material objects for survival likely best understand this. The significance of some things, such as Zeljka’s IOM bag, becomes material when they are put into use, into practice. They have purpose. Materiality can also signify consequentiality. Things come to mean something, whether symbolically or otherwise, when they are imbued with practical insinuations.

Refugees and things come together in all kinds of ways—sometimes out of necessity, other times out of convenience, and often, out of chance.  Some of the items in the IOM bag, such as the Arizona Guide to Community Resources for Refugees, are purposefully given to refugees, like Zeljka’s family, as a source of information. They are intended to be shared and are often circulated across refugee networks. Others transform and alter the meaning and identity of both the documents and the family in possession of them. Neither the documents nor those holding them are exactly the same as they were before they were joined. An IOM bag in a box of such bags is a material object without much importance. As a mass-produced plastic container, it is not of great value in and of itself. Yet, once it is assigned to a refugee family that has provided identity documents and successfully passed health examinations, interviews, and background checks, the bag becomes specific to that family and legitimizes their right to be resettled.

Concluding thoughts

Through Zeljka’s narrative, we see how important material things can be “specified by what they do and with, through, or about whom and what they interact” (Cerulo, 2009, p. 534). Acknowledging that objects matter in the life of refugees, who must leave most things behind, is fairly easy. Explicitly employing notions of materiality in research, though, can be harder. It requires considering how things are central to the fluid processes of being and becoming, knowing, understanding, and making sense of life, together, with what is at hand—the things which are central to anthropology.