Liminality and the asylum process in Switzerland

Abstract

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 35 NO 3, JUNE 2019 MARINA GOLD Marina Gold is a social anthropologist working as a researcher for the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Egalitarianism: Forms, processes, comparisons’ led by Bruce Kapferer at the University of Bergen. She has conducted her doctoral research on Cuba and the concept of revolution. Her post-doctoral research has focused on the European refugee crisis and its impact on human rights and humanitarian ideals. She is also an associated researcher at the Department for Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK) at the University of Zurich. Her email is margogold@gmail. com. Asylum seekers leave their homes in response to a moment of rupture, a crisis (increasingly persistent) that interrupts any semblance of normalcy, instigated by war and conflict, the roots of which involve Europe. Human Rights Watch reports that children in some Syrian towns, for example, have now been out of school for six years because of the war. For many families and young adults, becoming a refugee is the only possibility of regaining a future. When they tell their stories, refugees stress that leaving their homes was the last thing they wanted; they had no choice but to flee their situation of abjection and imminent danger in order to give their children a semblance of possibility. They imagined that leaving their towns clandestinely would be perilous, they foresaw that the trip across the Mediterranean would be dangerous and anticipated that crossing Europe would be difficult, but few were prepared for the hardships involved in the asylum procedure. ‘I thought, once I got to Switzerland, I would be reunited with my fiancée in Geneva, but this has been the hardest part of the journey. I have to settle in St Gallen instead of Geneva. I don’t know when this process will end, and I have no control over my own future. I feel I have to constantly explain that I am not a thief’, a young Syrian man explained. The European reaction against the movement of refugees in 2015 spurred a brief moment of openness from Germany and then a backlash of reactions: the closing of the Balkan route, the European Union (EU)-Turkey deal and the interception and deportation of boats in the Mediterranean (as the Italian government trains Libyan coastguards to manage the liquid border). This means that becoming a refugee is no longer a tenable solution for people fleeing crisis.