Displacement as Condition: A Refugee, a Farmer and the Teleology of Life

The focus on migration ‘crisis’ in recent years has reinforced tropes of displacement as a concept that refers to involuntary movement, foreclosing the possibility of thinking through displacement in relation to the politicisation of place more broadly. Here, we take up two radically different case studies–a farmer and a refugee–to ask whether it is possible to speak of displacement beyond assumptions of involuntary mobility, and what theoretical insights doing so might reveal. By bringing attention to these cases, we show commonalities of displacement experiences that have little to do with involuntary movement but are, instead, intertwined in existential processes of having the teleology of life, and the sense of connection to place, disrupted by external forces of dispossession. We argue that, if anthropologists are to understand displacement as a condition, we need to focus on lived experiences of conflict between self, place, and contemporary modes of dispossession.