After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives. By Shahram Khosravi

Abstract

Purgatory. That’s the idea that pervades After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives, a collection of academic essays analyzing what happens to failed asylum seekers and other migrants after they are forcibly or ‘voluntarily’ returned to their countries of origin. These people are in limbo, awaiting return to a state of grace—at home, back in the host country they have been expelled from, or maybe somewhere else—and they are suffering a great deal for their mistakes, whether criminal or administrative, in the meantime. This collection of essays is an attempt to address a gap in the literature, which was pointed out by Nathalie Peutz in ‘Embarking on an Anthropology of Removal’ in Current Anthropology, 47/2: 235–37 (2006), among others. Peutz argued that it was necessary to investigate what happens after deportation and to ‘ethnographically document the lived experiences and perspectives of the rapidly escalating number of people around the world who have been subjected to the deportation power.’ Her call to action has been much remarked on since, and the reasons for the aforementioned gap in the literature are explained in the descriptions of methodology in several of the chapters. It is difficult to follow research subjects beyond national boundaries, from detention in the West, where many of these studies start, to their hometowns scattered across the globe. And it is somewhat difficult to keep track of the persons themselves and document their experiences without doing significant fieldwork—actually going to the villages from which so many failed migrants start out and to which many are compelled to return.