HOMING @ TOYO UNIVERSITY: ‘NO DESTINATION? UNVEILING THE STRUGGLE TO VIEW AND ANTICIPATE THE FUTURE IN WAITHOOD’ (TOKYO, JULY 21)

Paolo Boccagni will give a lecture in the monthly series of the Hakusan Society of Anthropology at Toyo University, Tokyo, next 21 July at 6.15pm. See the abstract of his lecture below.

“No destination? Unveiling the struggle to view and anticipate the future in ‘waithood'”. 

Paolo Boccagni, University of Trento

The future, for young male asylum seekers who appear to be spatially and temporally stuck, is hard to see, or even only imagine. Social, legal and existential precarity militate against any long-term life project and investment. However, their whole pathways of displacement can also be seen as attempts at moving towards a desired future, i.e. the “good life”, and anticipating the risk of a feared one, i.e. lifelong immobility. The spatial and temporal suspension of refugehood makes this future orientation harder to nourish, but does not generally eradicate it. As my ethnography in an asylum centre in Northern Italy shows, traces of the future can be found through the residents’ narrative accounts, life routines, and material cultures. These afford a better understanding of the multiple temporal scales of the future, and of related notions such as destination and home. They also cast light on the balance between isomorphism and distinctiveness in the views of the future and in the struggle to anticipate it, as a part of the gendered transition to adulthood. Overall, the lecture challenges the link between spatial, temporal and existential immobility by looking into the interplay between future-related views, emotions, moralities and practices, given the unequal resources and opportunities accessible to turn them into better life conditions.