• “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”

    -Baruch Spinoza

    Bouton

  • "Nothing is self-evident. Nothing is given. Everything is built."

    -Gaston Bachelard

    Bouton

  • "If you think like me, you are my brother. If you don't think like me, you are my brother twice over because you open me up to a new world."

    -Amadou Hampâté Bâ

    Bouton

  • "The essential is always threatened by the insignificant."

    -René Char

    Bouton

  • "We must always try to understand our fellow man. If we exist, we must admit that he too, exists."

    -Amadou Hampâté Bâ

    Bouton

  • "The real sometimes quenches hope’s thirst. That is why, against all odds, hope survives."

    -René Char

    Bouton

  • "The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know."

    -Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    Bouton

  • "Listen carefully, we used to say in old Africa, everything speaks, everything is word, everything tries to communicate knowledge to us."

    -Amadou Hampâté Bâ

    Bouton

  • "The simplifying modes of knowledge mutilate more than they express the realities or the phenomena they give an account of."

    -Edgar Morin

    Bouton

  • "Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."

    -Charles Mingus

    Bouton

  • "When you do something, know that you will have against you those who would like to do the same thing, those who would like to do the opposite, and the vast majority of those who would not do anything."

    -Confucius

    Bouton

  • "There is no simple, there is simplification. The simple is always simplified."

    -Gaston Bachelard

    Bouton

  • "The disease is not cured by saying the name of the medicine, but by taking the medicine."

    -Thomas Sankara

    Bouton

  • "Be ever vigilant, hold government accountable, struggle for peace and justice."

    -Nelson Mandela

    Bouton
Une anthropologue dans un camp de réfugiés

An Anthropologist in a Refugee Camp:
How to do an ethnography in a context of institutional discursive imposition?

Academic Paper
Aurore Vermylen 
Published by the journal Parcours Anthropologiques

How to build a "World of You" in a refugee camp? This article proposes to think about how to make an ethnography in the face of refugee management policies based on a victimary or suspicious imaginary of the refugee figure. Faced with this institutional discursive imposition, which asks refugees to act out or tell their traumatic life stories, how can anthropology be done? This article is based on fieldwork in the Congolese refugee camp of Kinama in Burundi, where a resettlement programme has been implemented. Resettlement aims to send refugees from the camps to third countries in the West on a permanent basis.

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