Migration as Survival: Withheld Stories and the Limits of Ethnographic Knowability.

Perl, Gerhild (2019): Migration as Survival: Withheld Stories and the Limits of Ethnographic Knowability. In: Migration and Society, Bd. 2, Nr. 1: S. 12-25

Abstract

How to write about survival? How to tell survival? By exploring manifold reasons to withhold a story, I shed light on the limits of ethnographic knowledge production and the politics of storytelling that mobilize one story and silence another. Through engaging with the fragmented narrative of a Moroccan survivor of a shipwreck in Spanish waters in 2003, I reconceptualize the movement called "migration as survival" by theorizing it as an ethnographic concept. I explore the different temporalities of survival as living through a life-threatening event and as living on in an unjust world. These interrelated temporalities of survival are embedded in the afterlife of the historical time of al-Andalus and the resurgent fear of the Muslim "Other" By suggesting an existentially informed political understanding of the survival story, I show how the singularity of the survivor is inscribed in a regime of mobility that constrains people and their stories.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Kulturwissenschaften > Department für Kulturwissenschaften und Altertumskunde > Ethnologie
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 390 Bräuche, Etikette, Folklore
• ISSN: 2574-1306
• Sprache: Englisch