Nonlinearity and Convergent Modalities of Human Migration: A Biocultural Study of Quotidian Imperatives among Refugees in Transitional Settlements

An ongoing human tragedy of massive displacement continues to unfold across the globe due to dramatically and rapidly changing global political and economic conditions that have compelled many people to migrate and embark on dangerous journeys in search of safety outside their country of origin. Once they leave their homeland, fleeing individuals face numerous constraints that significantly impede unauthorized movements across international borders. Their precarious and clandestine journeys are often paved by ongoing stress, risks, and recurrent trauma. Those who manage to cross multi-national borders routinely end up contained within the walls of temporary settlements, such as asylum centers. Within these liminal spaces, life is often characterized by enforced dependency on relief aid, persistent precarity, and imposed restrictions on movement. Despite prescribed idleness, the indignities of life in limbo and substantial recurrent uncertainty, refugees actively strive to defy structural constraints, challenge images depicting them as passive victims, and transform into active agents contemplating ways to meet their needs beyond the relief packages. In this dissertation, I rekindle Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) concepts of habitus, doxa, and bodily hexis, and build on contemporary practice theories, using an integrative, biocultural approach. In doing so, I propose and operationalize the idea of Routinized Social Practices (RSPs) that serve as means of regularity as much as mitigators of psychosocial stress and drivers of health across and within refugee spaces. Drawing on both ethnographic data and physiological biomarkers, I show that the social, material, and personal dimensions of RSPs impart routine, promote normalcy, and afford continuity, while simultaneously alleviating an expected negative impact of unfavorable conditions of encampment.

By engaging in and valuing RSPs, the refugee’ agency and practices remain in a recursive relationship with the formal structures that shape not only what they do and think, but also construct sociocultural conditions conducive to challenging these static arrangements through daily practices and survival strategies. Refugee narratives reveal that RSPs help them maintain livable lives and negotiate their vulnerability following their migratory journeys and temporary residence in novel communities. Agentive participation in local informal economies, social consumption of food and drink, and profound social interactions render their everyday life structured, normalized, and regulated, while creating a particular niche of coping and resilience within liminal, confined spaces. In terms of mental health and stress physiology, RSPs serve to mitigate some of the adverse psychological and physical effects of the journey-related trauma and life on hold, thereby affording better health outcomes. The integrative anthropological framework shows the complexities underlying RSPs and their biological effects on the realm of the ordinary that is never quite the same but is instead ever-changing.