Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway
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Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen1
The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in Oslo and Bergen, Norway, this article discusses irregular migrants’ experiences of existential displacement and the tactics they use to try to re-establish a sense of emplacement and belonging. More specifically, it argues that irregular migrants’ experiences of embodied unbelonging are a consequence of a violent form of governmentality that includes specific laws, healthcare structures, and migration management rationalities. The article makes this argument by tracing how these experiences translate into embodied effects that feature prominently in migrants’ narratives of suffering while living in a country that purports to provide welfare services to all. The narratives of their state of beingin-the-world are ways through which migrants both experience and express the violence and deprivation they face. I argue that these narratives are instances of structures of feeling (Williams 1973), which are shaped by modes of governmentality. The article shows that irregular migrants’ coping strategies centrally involve faith, religious communities and friends. Irregular migrants draw on these relationships to get by, access healthcare, and to resist the (health) effects of social deprivation and political violence. These relationships allow irregular migrants to find meaningful ways of being-in-the-world and rebuilding, to some extent, a sense of entitlement and belonging. Keywords Irregular migrants Embodied unbelonging Being-in-the-world Violence Healthcare Governmentality
& Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen [email protected] 1
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
123
Cult Med Psychiatry
Introduction This article explores the existential character of displacement and the ways in which irregular migrants struggle to find meaningful ways of being-in-the-world in Norway. It relies on an analysis of irregular migrants’ narratives about their everyday lives to examine the impact that being ‘illegal’ or irregular has on migrants’ well-being, health, and embodied belonging. The article uses the term ‘embodied un/belonging’ to call attention to the embodied, violent effects of governmentality and to migrants’ narratives of how they understand that process. For more than a decade, critical migration scholars have shown that restrictive and inhospitable immigration contexts shape irregular migrants’ social and material conditions as well as their everyday psychosocial well-being and modes of ‘‘beingin-the-world’’ (Bloch et al. 2014; De Genova 2002; Ellis, Gonzales, and Rendo´n Garcı´a 2018; Gonzales 2016; Gonzales and Chavez 2012; Willen 2007a, 2014).1 Migrant ‘illegality’ is a sociopolitical condition produced by the multiplication of everyday borders (Balibar 2004) and by ‘‘deportability’’ (De Genova 2002)—the process by which belonging is demarcated and exclusion generated. Embracing a pheno
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