Cartographies of Resettlement: the Performativity of Containment and the Ontological Uncertainties of Certainty

Cartographies of Resettlement: The Performativity of Containment and the Ontological Uncertainties of Certainty

Nayana Deepthi Bibile

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

University of New South Wales, Australia

August 2014

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES THESIS/DISSERTATION SHEET Surname or Family name: Bibile

First name: Nayana Deepthi Other name/s:

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: School of Social Sciences Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Title: Cartographies of resettlement: the performativity of containment and the ontological uncertainties of certainty

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) This thesis examines the dynamics of the first-ever resettlement of Bhutanese refugees, who entered Australia under the Humanitarian Programme. There are few detailed empirical studies of humanitarian regimes of care enacted in the transnational space that focus on the micro-physics of routine interactions of the initial resettlement phase. This thesis seeks to chart the transformative effect of these interactions. As a once disenfranchised people the Bhutanese have come to Australia with hopes and dreams, yet in this new space, existential realities find expression of their past curtailed and ensuing social interactions imbued with affective disjunctures. The research for this thesis was conducted in several states in Australia and the majority of it with one particular service provider organisation, where an extended period of fieldwork enabled participant observation of the everyday resettlement activities and interviews with a range of people. The empirical material is divided according to different focal aspects: the Bhutanese, the service providers and the dynamics or interactions that overtly include the anthropologist herself. Resettlement in Australia is a government-tendered service implemented by non-governmental organisations. In this space, local caseworkers and volunteers enact their own fantasies, whereas for the Bhutanese resettlement constitutes a desired imaginary to transcend refugee status. The stories of this transition highlight a conditional compassion toward the Bhutanese refugees informed by, as much as it invokes, particular circulating narratives, images and histories. The thesis asserts that this set of processes enables and engenders ‘compassionate condescension’ in which the moral imperative to act is accompanied by practices of containment. Navigating these spaces, the thesis reveals an entanglement between different rationalities, which are explored through a nuanced understanding of intersubjectivity, of how selves are formed in and through relations with others. Such writing, instead of from within canonical perspectives and hegemonic forms of othering, attempts a contrapuntal analysis from interstitial spaces, the fissures created by displacements, to articulate the dynamics operative in these experiences and captured from insights of being in the ‘blind-spots’ of academic thought. The conclusion emphasises how investigating the multiple interfaces of humanitarian resettlement requires a deeper understanding of subjectivity and intersubjectivity to enable theorising ethnography from the interstices and to illuminate cartographies of resettlement and their ontological uncertainties of certainty.

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I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

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ORIGINALITY STATEMENT

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

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iii

I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.

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v ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the dynamics of the first-ever resettlement of Bhutanese refugees, who entered Australia under the Humanitarian Programme. Only a few empirical studies of humanitarian care focus on the micro-physics of routine interactions of the initial resettlement phase. This thesis seeks to chart their transformative effects. The Bhutanese have come to Australia with hopes and dreams, yet in this new space, existential realities find expression of their past curtailed and ensuing social interactions imbued with affective disjunctures.

The research for this thesis was conducted in Australia and the majority of it with one particular service provider organisation, where an extended period of fieldwork enabled participant observation of the everyday resettlement activities and interviews with a range of people. The empirical material is divided according to different focal aspects: the Bhutanese, the service providers and the dynamics or interactions that overtly include the anthropologist herself.

Resettlement in Australia is a government-tendered service implemented by non- governmental organisations. In this space, service providers enact their own fantasies, whereas for the Bhutanese resettlement constitutes a desired imaginary to transcend refugee status. Stories of this transition highlight a conditional compassion towards the refugees informed by, as much as it invokes, particular circulating narratives, images and histories. The thesis asserts that these processes enable and engender compassionate condescension in which the moral imperative to act is accompanied by practices of containment. Navigating these spaces, reveals an entanglement between different rationalities, which are explored through a nuanced understanding of intersubjectivity, of how selves are formed in and through relations with others. Rather than reproducing canonical perspectives and hegemonic forms of othering, such writing attempts a contrapuntal analysis from interstitial spaces, the fissures created by displacements, to articulate the dynamics operative in these experiences and captured from insights of being in the blind-spots of academic thought. The conclusion emphasises how investigating the multiple interfaces of humanitarian resettlement requires a deeper understanding of subjectivity and intersubjectivity to enable theorising ethnography from the interstices and to illuminate cartographies of resettlement and their ontological uncertainties of certainty.

vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For my mother and father – for teaching me to seek wisdom’s sagacity and showing me reflection’s heart.

The journey that was this thesis took many a curious turn. It gave much joy and could be testing at times. What it has undoubtedly done is enrich my life with many encounters I might otherwise not have had. Hence, the number of people who have contributed in various ways to this thesis taking its shape is not small. I would like to acknowledge the following.

I wish to thank the community of Bhutanese refugees resettling in Australia and the service providers who have made this research possible. Despite being at a very early phase of resettlement in Australia, the Bhutanese showed remarkable hospitality and welcomed my research. The service providers and the organisations were generous in their support towards the project. I appreciate the patience they had with my questions and the ease with which they incorporated my presence into their daily routines.

My biggest thanks go to my supervisors, without whose support this thesis would not have come to fruition. I am especially grateful to Associate Professor Claudia Tazreiter, who has seen this thesis to completion as my main supervisor. Claudia has shown unwavering support and channelled energy when it was at its most difficult, as if guiding critical inquiry and shaping a thesis document were not enough! Thank you, Claudia, for the many hours of discussions, lamentations and reading you have endured as my supervisor. I am indebted to you. I am grateful to Professor Ursula Rao, who fulfilled this role early on in my doctoral life and insisted on having Claudia on board the supervisory team in the first place! Ursula’s keen eye for theory and structured approach to developing a research proposal put me on the path to this document. Thank you, Ursula, for many robust discussions and intellectual disagreements that honed my critical thinking, as well as time spent in your new academic home in Leipzig in 2012 and 2013. Dr. Katrina Moore, who had been part of my thesis review committee, took on a role as co-supervisor towards the later stages. Thank you, Katrina, for having a penchant for tapping on my intellectual shoulders and nudging me insightfully towards interesting angles.

Over the course of this thesis, Professor Eileen Baldry, Associate Professor Paul Jones, Associate Professor Leanne Dowse, Dr. Andrea Benvenuti and Dr. Melanie White were part of my review committee. I thank them for their support and guidance. Dr. Melanie White especially offered valuable suggestions to theorise a previously underdeveloped aspect and together with Dr. Mary Zournazi provided me with a teaching opportunity. I am grateful to Andrew Metcalfe, Professor and conjurer of time, who found three weeks when there were none. Thank you, for providing me with a great teaching opportunity and for being a teacher, who inspires a nostalgic zest for a learning of another time.

My life as a doctoral scholar has been enlivened by many colleagues and friends, too numerous to mention all. The veritable Intelligentsia Central lab 48, which is my term of

vii endearment to a place I spent a significant part of my intellectual life, is where friendships were made, inspirations created and exasperations encountered. The interlocutor presence of my colleagues made this journey all the more adventurous, particularly: Amy, Anisha, Azadeh, Brett, Ele, Emilie, Holi, Isabelle, Josina, Maia, Rose, Sally, Sunil, Tamara J, Vettie and Zoe.

I would also like to thank Dr. Amanda Kearney, Professor Vicky Kirby, Associate Professor Kama Maclean, and Dr. Helen Pringle, who besides my supervisors have made life at UNSW academically engaging. A special thanks to Associate Professor Eileen Pittaway, who early on saw potential in this research.

During my PhD candidature, I also received a generous six-month Residence on a Visiting Researcher Fellowship to the Fondation Brocher to spend part of 2012 at Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Here, inspiring intellectual camaraderie helped this project towards its sharper turns. I especially wish to thank Dr. Kirsten Bell and Assistant Professor Mara Buchbinder for their generous intellectual conversations and time together traversing vineyards and chocolateries, as well as Professor Browne Lewis and Dr. Linda and Assistant Professor Torsten Heinemann for long walks and friendship. I express my appreciation to gardener extraordinaire Rolande and his family, whose dedication to the garden meant joy and beauty was a constant in any season. My thanks to the terrific staff at the Fondation, who showed great attentiveness towards creating an ambience for critical reflection and scholarly exchange.

I have enjoyed the company of many colleagues and their insightful and robust questions at conferences at the Universities of Oxford and Sussex, Queen Mary in London and at the Australian National University in Canberra. I thank you for your spirit of critical engagement. I am thankful to Professor Maya Unnithan for reviewing my paper and giving great encouragement; Professor Raminder Kaur Kahlon for encouraging my research to be published; and Dr. Rubina Jasani for highlighting my concept of compassionate condescension as a novel and valuable way of articulating some of her own work in the mental health space, thereby giving me greater impetus to tangibly see how one’s work as early as doctoral research can translate across fields. I am particularly thankful to a serendipitous encounter with Dr. Yasmin Gunaratnam, Reader at Goldsmiths, whose interest and encouragement gave inspiration to my thesis heartdrive! I have been fortunate to receive competitive but generous funding from my institution to be able to attend these conferences. My thanks also to Professor Michael Hutt for showing enthusiasm for my research.

In a rather peripatetic life, particular people have influenced in small and big ways to actively channel my wish to engage in doctoral scholarship. Many years ago in London, Dr. Susan Pattie, luminary and teacher, instilled confidence in my interest in Anthropology; for this and her incredible faith in the potential of my anthropological voice, I owe her a debt of gratitude. In Berne, Professor Karenina Kollmar-Paulenz, outstanding intellect and trailblazer in her field, was my guide and mentor. My heartfelt thanks for her continued interest in my intellectual journey.

viii Many friends and family have loved and sustained me throughout these years. Among them, I would like to thank especially, Ursula and Marco for exceptional friendship and chocolate; Maria Tumarkin, writer and sharp thinker, whom I encountered early in my time in Melbourne and whose warm friendship is always present and pertinent; Patricia and Pierre, for becoming delightful friends over a short time and evenings spent in animated conversation at the hearth of their cosy home with Socks, the resident cat and swims in the lake. I would also like to thank Andrea and Alcir, friends from far away in South America, who came into my life at various times during fellowships in Europe and whose friendships’ affection remains. To Roanna Gonsalves my wholehearted gratitude for her generous gestures of alliance and spontaneous, embracing care. Antje Kuehnast, friend from earliest times at Intelligentsia Central for stolen afternoons of lunches, barbecues, plays at Sydney Theatre and essential commiserations. André Eliatamby, for articulated virtuosity, reminiscent Sri Lankan comradeship and searing conversations on the cultural precarity of living peripatetically. Georgia Van Toorn and Lloyd Cox for friendship when least expected, great laughs and an easy kinship.

I thank Konsta, my emotional ally and intellectual muse, who into the wee hours of the night with an impossible incisiveness and a luminous grasp, debated, discussed and enriched this thesis with absolute generosity.

ix TABLE OF CONTENTS

Thesis/Dissertation Sheet ...... ii

Originality Statement ...... iii

Authenticity Statement ...... v

Abstract ...... vi

Acknowledgements ...... vii

Table of Contents ...... x

Glossary ...... xv

Preface ...... xvii

Chapter 1 – Introduction ...... 1

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 2

1.1 Thesis aims and research questions ...... 4 1.1.1 Research questions ...... 4

1.2 Fieldwork and analysis of the ethnographic material ...... 5 1.2.1 Fieldwork ...... 5 1.2.2 Analysis of the ethnographic material ...... 10

1.3 The case for ethnography ...... 11 1.3.1 “Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio” ...... 13

1.4 Structure of the thesis ...... 16 1.4.1 Thesis structure overview ...... 17 1.4.2 Section one: theoretical framing and background to the thesis ...... 18 1.4.3 Section two: interpretation of fieldwork data ...... 20 1.4.4 Section three: concluding thoughts ...... 23

Section ONE: Theoretical Framing and Background to the Thesis ...... 24

Chapter 2 – The Gross National Happiness of Disenfranchisement in Bhutan ...... 25

2 THE GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS OF DISENFRANCHISEMENT IN BHUTAN ...... 26

2.1 Recent history ...... 26

2.2 Gross National Happiness ...... 27 x 2.3 Becoming one of the 100 people who shape the world ...... 30

2.4 The politics of citizenship in systematic disenfranchisement ...... 32 2.4.1 Land ownership in the democratisation process ...... 34 2.4.2 Law – customary and national ...... 35

2.5 Changes to citizenship legislation ...... 36

2.6 Unbecoming Bhutanese ...... 37 2.6.1 The routes to democracy and the growth of dissent ...... 39

2.7 The GNH of democracy in Bhutan ...... 40

2.8 Does the GNH tantamount to a denial of ethnic cleansing? ...... 41

Chapter 3 – Resettlement Services in Australia ...... 43

3 REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT IN AUSTRALIA ...... 44

3.1 Refugees ...... 44

3.2 UNHCR ...... 45 3.2.1 UNHCR funding ...... 46 3.2.2 UNHCR resettlement programme ...... 46 3.2.2.1 Definition of resettlement ...... 47 3.2.2.2 Resettlement countries ...... 48 3.2.3 Some key UNHCR resettlement statistics ...... 50 3.2.4 UNHCR assisted resettlement of the Bhutanese in Nepal ...... 50

3.3 Refugee resettlement in Australia ...... 51 3.3.1 Department of Immigration and Ethnic/Multicultural (and Indigenous) Affairs/Citizenship/Border Protection ...... 55 3.3.2 Humanitarian Settlement Services (HSS) Program ...... 57 3.3.2.1 Quality of HSS delivery ...... 58

3.4 Recent challenges for Australian NGOs engaged in resettlement ...... 59

3.5 NGOs and the paradoxical remit of refugee resettlement ...... 61

3.6 Citizenship and belonging in a governmentalised society ...... 64

Chapter 4 – The Governmentality of Neoliberal Resettlement ...... 69

4 THE GOVERNMENTALITY OF NEOLIBERAL RESETTLEMENT ...... 70

4.1 The Everyday as methodology ...... 71 4.1.1 Defining the Everyday ...... 72 4.1.2 The reader, the ethnographer and the research ‘object’ – a novel Everyday perspective ..... 74 4.1.2.1 Witnessing within Everyday methodology ...... 75 4.1.3 Some practical thoughts on transcripts and unknowing in the Everyday ...... 76 4.1.3.1 Public and hidden transcripts ...... 77 xi 4.1.3.2 Unknowing ...... 78 4.1.4 Accessing intricate spheres of representation, gaps and imbalances ...... 79

4.2 Foucault: Truth, Subjectivity and Governmentality ...... 81

4.3 Neoliberalism ...... 89

4.4 Neoliberal forms of governmentality ...... 91 4.4.1 The role of NGOs in neoliberal, governmentalised society ...... 93 4.4.1.1 The origins and current expressions of NGO moral superiority ...... 94 4.4.2 Encountering NGOs as a researcher ...... 96 4.4.2.1 The ‘gift’ of altruism ...... 97

Section TWO: Results Chapters – Interpretation of Fieldwork Data ...... 100

Chapter 5 – Narratives of Transition and Imagined Citizenship: Desired Conditions of Belonging and the Performativity of Containment ...... 101

5 NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION AND IMAGINED CITIZENSHIP: DESIRED CONDITIONS OF BELONGING AND THE PERFORMATIVITY OF CONTAINMENT 102

5.1 Background ...... 102

5.2 Citizenship and belonging in Australian context ...... 104 5.2.1 The Subject and Power – how Foucauldian ‘dividing practices’ enter the HSS ...... 106 5.2.2 The fictive ideal of becoming white ...... 108

5.3 Narratives of transition – the beguiling appeal of becoming Australian ...... 110 5.3.1 Wijaya ...... 110 5.3.2 Rashmi ...... 111 5.3.3 Thilin ...... 113 5.3.4 Kanchana – the stratagem of status making ...... 115

5.4 Discussion ...... 116 5.4.1 Reflections and inflections of ethnographic encounters ...... 119

5.5 Conclusion ...... 124 5.5.1 Operationalisation of control mechanisms ...... 125 5.5.2 Alternate recognition in the refraction of regimes of power ...... 127

Chapter 6 – Strategic Loyalties, Partial (Dis)Connections and Assumed Hierarchies ...... 133

6 STRATEGIC LOYALTIES, PARTIAL (DIS)CONNECTIONS AND ASSUMED HIERARCHIES ...... 134

6.1 Introduction ...... 134

6.2 One evening in the winter of 2010 – a housewarming party ...... 136 6.2.1 The evening unfolds ...... 136

xii 6.2.2 A social drama unfolds ...... 140 6.2.2.1 Situating the social drama ...... 143 6.2.2.2 (Un)centring (un)certainties ...... 147

6.3 The poetics of language and its constituents...... 151

6.4 Anil’s lost time ...... 154 6.4.1 The seduction of strategic status ...... 156

6.5 The ethnographer’s soliloquy ...... 159 6.5.1 What’s in a name, what’s in an ethnicity? ...... 161

6.6 After the crisis ...... 164 6.6.1 The next day(s) ...... 165 6.6.2 Fourth phase – either reintegration or recognition of schism ...... 167

6.7 Powers of desire in the politics of positionality ...... 169

Chapter 7 – Ethical Emissaries, Caring Adversaries and Social Brokers: The Romance of the Refugee in the Making of the Mobile Self ...... 176

7 ETHICAL EMISSARIES, CARING ADVERSARIES AND SOCIAL BROKERS: THE ROMANCE OF THE REFUGEE IN THE MAKING OF THE MOBILE SELF ..... 177

7.1 Introduction ...... 177

7.2 Maggie’s paradigmatic conception of the cosmopolitan service provider philosopher ...... 178

7.3 Aims ...... 180

7.4 The dream machine ...... 180 7.4.1 Fantastic imaginaries...... 183 7.4.2 The making of a select bourgeoisie and celebrated salvation ...... 184 7.4.3 Moral selving and the moral imperative ...... 186

7.5 Productivity of race and gender’s cognate inequalities ...... 187 7.5.1 The non-art of leadership and the meaning of salient silence ...... 189 7.5.2 Taming the non-white ethnographer ...... 191 7.5.2.1 Popping the bubble, or how to provincialise English ...... 192

7.6 The mechanics of patronage ...... 194 7.6.1 Casual interpreting work at the service provider organisation ...... 195 7.6.2 Desirables ...... 196

7.7 Pulling the rug under ethnographic enquiry ...... 197 7.7.1 Beguiling materiality and affective aficionados ...... 198

7.8 Afterlife – the echo of dissonance ...... 199

7.9 Conclusion – them Gods have feet of clay ...... 200

xiii Section THREE: Concluding Thoughts ...... 204

Chapter 8 – Meta-Discussion ...... 205

8 META-DISCUSSION ...... 206

8.1 Introduction ...... 206 8.1.1 Anthropology’s other ...... 209 8.1.2 Fantasy, Desire and the Ethical Imagination – approaching intersubjective self ...... 211 8.1.3 Subjectification...... 214

8.2 Insertion of the non-white ethnographer ...... 215 8.2.1 Alternative polarisations ...... 217 8.2.2 Gatekeeping ...... 217

8.3 Power / loss and the cusp of ethnographic authority ...... 218

Chapter 9 – Conclusion ...... 220

9 CONCLUSION ...... 221

9.1 Fieldwork findings ...... 221 9.1.1 Disciplining opportunities – Subjectification ...... 223 9.1.2 White mythologies and colonial imagination in the making of the ambiguous zone ...... 225 9.1.2.1 Fantasies, imaginaries and radical mobility ...... 225 9.1.3 A reconfiguration of the research field ...... 226 9.1.4 Intersubjective race and the ethical imagination ...... 227

9.2 Summary ...... 228

9.3 Limitations and future research possibilities ...... 230 9.3.1 Gaps in the research ...... 231 9.3.2 Future research ...... 231

Bibliography ...... 233

10 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 234

11 APPENDIX A ...... 253

xiv GLOSSARY

Term / Description Acronym Ad hoc Created or done for a particular purpose as necessary Affective Subjective location that encompasses a feeling of emotional disjuncture disenchantment AMEP Adult Migrant English Programme AO Officer of the Order of Australia AUSCO Australian Cultural Orientation CCS Complex Case Support Centrelink As part of the Australian Government Department of Human Services, Centrelink delivers payments and services for retirees, the unemployed, families, carers, parents, people with disabilities, Indigenous Australians, and people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and provides services at times of major change. Chöké Classical Tibetan used in Bhutan is called Chöké (chos-skad), the ‘language of religion’ DDC Dzongkha Development Commission DIAC Department of Immigration and Citizenship (2007 – 2013) DIBP Department of Immigration and Border Protection (2013 onwards) DIEA Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (1993 – 1996) DIMA Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (1996 – 2001). DIMIA Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (2001 – 2006) Driglam Bhutanese national customs and etiquette Namzha Drukpa Ethnic group in Bhutan: Mahayana Buddhist; ethnicity Ngalung DSS Department of Social Services Duars Nepali term for the flood plains and foothills of the eastern Himalayas around Bhutan Dzong Fortress-Monastery in Bhutan Dzongkha National language of Bhutan EU European Union FYP Five-year development plans Gewog A block, or group of villages is an administrative sub-division of a district in Bhutan Gho Knee-length robe for men; requirement of Driglam Namzha GNH Gross National Happiness GNP Gross National Product Gup Headman, representing a gewog, or cluster of villages HREC Human Research Ethics Committee HSS Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (since 2011) IHSS Integrated Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (from 2005-11) IOM International Organisation for Migration IRO International Refugee Organisation

xv Kheap Dzongkha term for free (unbonded) peasants Kira Ankle-length dress for women; requirement of Driglam Namzha Lhotshampa Dzongkha term for the Bhutanese ethnic group of largely Nepali extraction; translates roughly as ‘Southerners’ Mise-en-scène The setting or surroundings of an event Ngalung Ethnic group in Bhutan of Tibetan origin: Buddhist; mostly in north- western parts of the country NGO Non-governmental organisation NOC No Objection Certificates Penlop Dzongkha term for Governor Post hoc Occurring or done after the event RGB The Royal Government of Bhutan RMAS Refugee and Migrant Assistance Society (pseudonym) RRF Resettlement Registration Forms RSPO Refugee Service Provision Organisation (pseudonym) SAARC South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation SAC Special Assistance Category Shabdrung Tibetan title for great lamas Sharchop Ethnic group in Bhutan of Burmese/Indian origin: Buddhist; mostly in eastern parts of the country SHP Special Humanitarian Programme STARTTS Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors TAFE Technical and further education; refers also to institutions of this kind UN United Nations UNHCR Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNSW University of New South Wales USA The United States of America USD United States Dollar WHO World Health Organisation

xvi PREFACE

The meeting is going swimmingly well. The community liaison officers, who represent different communities – except the Bhutanese – are all present. They have been invited to talk about their role and their communities. One officer suddenly turns towards me, catches my eye and starts talking about the lack of opportunities he and others face. He says, his wife was a teacher in Burma and it has been many years since she has retrained here, but it is difficult to get a job. The staff manager interjects gently but firmly to remind him about the community and redirects the conversation towards a different community liaison officer.

I realise that as a newly resettling group the Bhutanese have no diaspora. To counter numerous setbacks in trying to make contact with the Bhutanese community,1 I turn my attention to an Australian non-governmental organisation (NGO) with a long-established

1 The term ‘Bhutanese community’ here refers specifically to the group of refugees of Bhutanese origin, who had been resettled by the Australian Government under UNHCR auspices as part of Australia’s annual scheduled refugee intake. Chapter 3 details Australia’s refugee resettlement. This community is constituted of diverse members with varied backgrounds, in terms of ethnicity, age, professional skills, etc. One uniting factor is that they (or their parents, if they were born in refugee camps) have all been disenfranchised by the former Royal Government of Bhutan, expelled from Bhutan in the early 1990s and lived in refugee camps in Nepal. Hence the reference as the ‘Bhutanese community’ for the purposes of this thesis. Chapter 2 gives further detailed background to the conditions that led to their refugee status. While ‘community’ as such is not used as a mode of analysis, recognising the terms wide-spread and multifaceted usage, a short overview of pertinent literature is provided here. Academic research on ‘community’ often traces back to the late nineteenth century text Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society in English) by Ferdinand Tönnies (1887). Other classical theorists of community frequently referred to are Marx, Durkheim and Weber (Cohen 1985: 11ff.). More recently, Anthony Cohen has provided an influential conceptualisation of community as a symbolic construct (Rapport and Overing 2007: 74). Cohen identifies as key feature that community is created through relations between its members that function as “repositories of meaning” (1985: 98). Community in that sense does not provide an integrating mechanism, but as an aggregating device reflecting the environment of its membership (Cohen 1985: 20). Therefore, members of a community partake in a “system of values, norms, and moral codes” (Hamilton 1985: 9), and thus share a perception of commonalities, while simultaneously being differentiated from other communities. Thus, it is a repository of identities and encompasses these by a common symbolic boundary, which both sustains diversity and expresses commonality (Cohen 1985: 20). The symbolic nature of the boundary means that it may be perceived “in rather different terms, not only by people on opposite sides of it, but also by people on the same side” (Cohen 1985: 12). Unsurprisingly, this interpretative room creates the conditions of possibility for disagreements about the actual location of the boundary, which can give rise to “ideas of identity clash, overlap and coincide between and within cultures” (Crewe and Axelby 2013: 126). From this follows that ‘commonality’ need not be uniformity and that its content may differ widely among members (Cohen 1985: 20). However, the “triumph of community is to so contain this variety that its inherent discordance does not subvert the apparent coherence which is expressed by its boundaries” (Cohen 1985: 20). Moreover, since communities are conceptually created, “their boundaries shift and people are put or put themselves in different or several communities depending on context” (Crewe and Axelby 2013: 126). This fluid character of ‘community’ contingent on its symbolic definition Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport frame as “slipperiness [as it is] too vague, too variable in its applications and definitions to be of much utility as an analytical tool” (2002: 13). xvii track record of counselling refugees exposed to torture and trauma. After some email exchanges and phone calls, I have arrived at this juncture having previously met on a couple of occasions to discuss specifics of my research interests and relevant formalities. The staff, whom I am in communication with, appear reticently keen and ply me with brochures of what they do. It is after several rounds of vetting that I am invited to attend the meeting above.

The liaison officers have been requested to give me a brief on the background to their work and their communities as a show of support towards my research. I am flattered and excited. What seemed initially an obstacle seems to have become an opportunity vis-à- vis the NGO organisation. Lulled into a sense of openness towards research, when the community liaison officers finish showcasing their role, I ask the staff-member-in-charge, if I could ask some questions. I sense a mild displeasure even as she assents. I ask, if there is a Bhutanese community liaison officer and the staff member says he could not come. The Burmese liaison officer says he is here, but next door, as he was called in for another meeting. An awkward silence ensues. I ask a few more questions on the nuts and bolts of settling in Australia. Progressively, the staff manager is mediating the answers or simply answering them herself. The space allocated is becoming less and less forthcoming. I realise the gate is being shut and ask if it would be possible to stay in touch. Many say yes, and the Burmese liaison officer takes out a notebook to write down his email address. The staff member in charge says she will send their details to me. The gate has been shut.

Now that the gate is closed, perhaps this route is not as easy as it nearly seemed after all. Irrespective of such contingencies, it is pertinent to question what the implications of this experience are. One needs to think about this in terms of the implications of critical thinking and its application to NGO activities. While there will be a longer exposition about NGOs and humanitarian rationalities later on in the thesis, I would nevertheless like to highlight a few points here. Humanitarian work, and I include the work of the NGO featured in the vignette above into this category, is impelled by a (Kantian) moral imperative. The act of applying a critical lens to this moral imperative, interrogating its self-evidence “by taking it as an object of study rather than an object of judgements and emotions, [...] drive[s] a wedge into what is generally the subject of consensus” (Fassin 2012: 244).

xviii Such disruption of consensus is rarely greeted with unanimous enthusiasm; rather, although equally emotive, it tends to cause displeasure, perhaps due to an underlying cognitive dissonance. However, without attempting to pry too deeply into any one individual consciousness – the domain of psychology, psychiatry or perhaps psychoanalysis – is it possible to elicit some understanding? Analysing the moral imperative (or humanitarian reason in general) tends to produce two types of responses, that of a charge of relativism due to the historicising and contextualising of this imperative, or that of cynicism when political, ideological, practical or personal motivations are demonstrated to be collinear with this imperative. As a result, the moral imperative – and by extension the work of NGOs – is generally held to be beyond the remit of examination of the social sciences (Mosse 2005a; Lewis and Mosse 2006; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Fassin 2011; Mosse 2011; Ticktin 2011; Fassin 2012: 244).

Nevertheless, such notions should not hold back critical investigation. However, what is important is consciousness of one’s position, to resist “the self-evidence of the social world [and maintain] a capacity for surprise” (Fassin 2012: 244). Following Michael Walzer, “we would do better to study its internal rules, maxims, conventions, and ideals, rather than to detach ourselves from it in search of a universal and transcendent standpoint” (1988: xix). Nevertheless, one should not lose sight of an outside perspective, but rather than be caught in the outside-inside binary, “we have to be at the frontiers [because] criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits” (Foucault 1984: 35). Participant observation as an anthropologist provides these means to straddle both aspects of perspective, which makes for a liminal positioning. Such a critique is inherently fragile, having to contend with a multitude of logics as well as human intentions and activities, which can render issues uncertain due to their irreducibility. Faced with such complexity, Didier Fassin argues for a critique that includes everyone, individually and collectively, including the researcher (2012: 246). Hence, I will briefly sketch out my induction into the academic field of anthropology before elaborating further on the thesis.

The predicament of arriving before

Baptised by fire in a London autumn, I came to anthropology late. It was the culmination of years of searching for a home to hang the thoughts that fragmented as a transient being

xix among many places and people and never quite knowing how to get the (in)distinctly disparate to relate to one’s pulse. Despite two decades of peripatetic living and many encounters this tryst remains unstable and unresolved.

The resounding initiation to Social Anthropology took place during a small class as part of the Master of Science at University College London (UCL). I was mesmerised by anthropology’s content, particularly as I had no previous background to anthropology. It was early in the Master’s programme and the class was learning about Marshall Sahlins’ thesis on the arrival of Europeans in the Hawaiian archipelago. Engaged and enthusiastic to its vivid reading, but green to anthropology’s conventionalism, I tentatively ventured my opinion; one that was rather different and somewhat in disagreement with Sahlins. “Do you mean to say similar to Obeyesekere’s?” said the professor with a mixture of incredulity and disappointment. The class seemed to suddenly fall into a spell I had hitherto not known I was able to cast. Not knowing who he was, I uttered “I don’t know that person’s work” and repeated somewhat hesitatingly that it was surely possible to read Captain Cook’s Hawaiian encounters differently. The rest, as they say, is history. A history, however, that is tinged with a continuing present.

There is a poiesis and poignancy in the realities experienced, one could say. It is as if faced with ‘obvious difference’ a contemporary historical imagination is instrumentalised as a conduit to efface the cerebral while productively entangling with the physical presence. Routine encounters are rarely purely cordial; they occur in contested social space and are constitutive of a degree of friction that at times leads to a kind of everyday malice.

In encounters with people considered not white the quotidian seems to offer a space to practice certain social imaginaries that are deployed to emplace or remove context. In many encounters a play with a contemporary historical imagination takes place that simply asserts an axiomatic sense of superiority that precludes the possibility of meeting at eye level, giving the person full consideration that one extends to people in most routine interactions, rather than resorting to chromatically apprehending one. However, on occasions where social markers situate one obviously at the centre, the encounter morphs to a ‘defence’ against the claim to the centre, seeking ways to evade engaging with the person. This is put into effect through a dual system of exclusion and hierarchy, which

xx gives additional ways of amplifying the consequences of regular everyday friction and competing interests.

Opinions have a strange life of their own if they are viewed as too bold. It is considered offensive and impolite to talk about such dynamics, partially because speaking back shifts focus and unsettles the moral, material and geographical high ground that is a taken for granted, inherited entitlement. In effect, it frequently inverts the stereotype that is being deployed to the so called third world person – the provincial and underexposed – back onto the speaker. In a twist of empirical fate it becomes possible for the loaded stereotype to reversely albeit temporarily be inhabited by the ‘superior’ speaker. This process renders a double-enhancement of the articulation of superiority, because it reveals a disjuncture between a desire and its reality. Any unwillingness to accept strategic corporeal typecasting and thereby interrupt the fetishising of difference is perceived as an extraordinarily bold move.

The sociality of practising prejudice is the need to manage the other in terms predictable to one’s own imaginary. How one is made productive for social imaginaries gives insights into how race is practiced. Whiteness is voice of reason, “while the actions, experiences and interactions of people of colour can be labelled as irrational, manipulative, or detrimental to the common good” (Davis 2010: 157). Even in situations where in current ethical practice one is accorded priority, maintaining the other’s own prerogative is nevertheless robustly pursued in an ad hoc adjustment of their response. Voicing critique in this space is taken as absence of gratitude to the hospitality of the place.

What is evident here then is a dual (mis)representation vis-à-vis the other, both of themselves and the other, which has an over-determining effect on the situation and forecloses possibilities of genuine communication, as neither position is grounded in reality. Instead there is a borrowing from historical and present asymmetries, delving into the library of identifiable markers of privilege, while simultaneously referencing the corporeal for marked visibility. Unable to deny one’s physical presence, affective misgivings impel attempts to remove the cerebral and align an exotic symbolism or a misrepresentative narrative of an imagined version of one’s part of the world.

The following summer, I discussed the aporia of the egregious encounters in a term paper entitled ‘My Colour Arrives Before Me’.

xxi

CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION

1 1 Introduction

This thesis analyses routine encounters of Bhutanese refugees resettling in Australia. The fieldwork material presented here stems mostly from extended participant observation and interviews conducted within one field site.

The Bhutanese are a group of refugees who were exiled from Bhutan as a consequence of the implementation of ethno-nationalist policies and practices by the then Royal Government of Bhutan. A subsequent democratisation process, aiming towards a constitutional monarchy loosely modelled on the United Kingdom, has not contributed to a policy change despite its ratification in 2008. The group of Bhutanese refugees is heterogeneous, even if it includes a majority element of people who can trace their ancestry and/or cultural affinity to Nepal. Due to the refusal of Bhutan to enable these refugees to return home to Bhutan (Joseph C. 1999; Hutt 2003; Rizal and Yokota 2006), the UNHCR2, which coordinated the relief camps in Nepal, has brokered an agreement with a range of nations, including Australia, to resettle at least a majority of the refugees in third countries. This resettlement process began in 2008 and Australia has agreed to take up a contingent of 5,000 refugees, whose transition into Australian society is facilitated through the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP)3 Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (HSS),4 whose programmes are run by – mostly NGO5 – service provider organisations, which compete for these by tender. This ethnography is about the everyday interactions of NGO service provider case workers and volunteers

2 The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly. The agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. Source: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c2.html; accessed 11/08/2013. 3 Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) is the current (since 2013) name of the government department responsible for refugee resettlement services. At the time of the fieldwork, it operated with a slightly different focus as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC; from 2007-13). For reasons of consistency, throughout the thesis this government department will be referred to by its most recent acronym DIBP. 4 The previous iteration of HSS under the auspices of the previous incarnation of the department (DIAC) was named Integrated Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (IHSS). The fieldwork reported in this thesis was conducted with DIAC approval and during the early-phase resettlement support provided through IHSS. However, for purposes of consistency this programme will be referred to by its current name, HSS, except where explicitly necessary, such as when discussing its historical development or when contrasting it with HSS. 5 Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) is used here in the inclusive sense of the term, recognising that a vast diversity of organisations can be termed NGOs and that there is no universally accepted definition of NGOs. 2 with the resettling refugees, and how these dynamics are differentially diffracted through the presence of a non-white ethnographer.

In many ways the aim of the HSS is to turn these citizens-in-waiting into integrated members of Australian society. The programme constitutes a social process of mediated production of values concerning freedom, autonomy, and security, which is intended to shape the refugees’ ideas about what being Australian might mean, and how they may become active participants in that society. Through ensembles of interconnected issues this chapter highlights that ‘freedom’ is of a particular, advanced neoliberal denotation and that active participation can only occur within social and institutional constraints. Although a multiplicity of official and public domains subjects the refugees to norms, rules, and systems, the refugees also modify practices and agendas while adroitly sidestepping some elements of control and quietly inserting subtle forms of critique.

One early key observation during fieldwork concerned the perception among service providers of an ostensibly ‘easy’ resettlement process with regard to the Bhutanese. The service providers6 talked with delight about how fluidly the transition to life in Australia seemed to proceed and how polite and constructive the Bhutanese were in their engagement with this process. A process that the service providers have found much more challenging when resettling refugees from other communities. However, this general bonhomie did not preclude confusion about Bhutanese community dynamics on the part of the service providers, and they seemed to be caught unawares when some of it was brought into the territory of visibility through the presence of a non-white ethnographer. The Bhutanese, on the other hand, showed awareness but seemed unwilling to directly engage the service providers about it.

6 The resettlement of refugees is managed by the Australian Government through the Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (HSS) discussed in detail in a following section in Chapter 3. It is subcontracted by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) through a competitive tendering process and most settlement service provider organisations are not-for-profit enterprises. This text will refer to the case workers, support workers, counsellors, and so on working on behalf of service provision organisations implementing the government tendered HSS contract collectively as ‘service providers’. Implicitly, the volunteers recruited by these organisations are also included, other than when directly specified, as the context requires. 3 1.1 Thesis aims and research questions The principal focus of my research is on the dynamics of the interrelations between a group of Bhutanese refugees resettling in Australia and the case workers and volunteers of service provider organisations, who conduct this facilitation into Australian society. In this “in-between space” (Bhabha 1994: 225) there is a certain immanent instability to the relationships, where the presence of the non-white ethnographer7 renders subtle underlying articulations into the territory of visibility.

Cognisant of an understanding that “ethnographic facts, before being set down in the final written account, first pass through the observer’s subjectivity” (Davies 2010: 229), this thesis aims to break new ground with a candid exposition of the research process and its implications. The fundamental epistemological consequences of data both on as well as of the ethnographer for the ethnographic research process are frequently suppressed rather than explicated (Coffey 1999). Accordingly, this thesis aims to break new ground with a candid exposition of the research process and its implications for the ethnographer’s reception and response to conditions in the field. What is hoped for, is an elaboration of the essential contribution that data both on as well as of the ethnographer make to an informed and nuanced understanding of the communities participating in the ethnographic project.

1.1.1 Research questions The research questions are grouped into three strands of enquiry that are interleaved throughout the fieldwork interpretation chapters with the emphasis varying corresponding to each chapter’s overall focus.

I.a What are the tensions constituent in resettlement in the pursuit of ontological certainty of a group of Bhutanese refugees resettling Australia?

7 The use of the term ‘non-white ethnographer’ is deployed in this thesis as a strategic essentialism in the deconstuctivist sense that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined the term: “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (Spivak 1996: 214). Its purpose is to facilitate the illumination of the dynamics encountered in the field by constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced. As a black anthropologist, I would much prefer to use the term black ethnographer, but for the purpose of this study, I deploy non-white as a strategic positioning, because to do otherwise risks foreclosing interpretive space through myriad meaning making possibilities it often evokes. 4 I.b What are the specific conditions that result in the emergence of what I call an ambiguous zone?

II.a What are the dynamics of routine encounters between the resettling Bhutanese refugees and the service providers?

II.b How do the ontological uncertainties8 resulting from the intimate encounter of the sociality of becoming Australian manifest?

III.a How does the presence of a non-white ethnographer affect the field?

III.b How is a non-white ethnographer able to cast light and shape perspectives and insights into fieldwork encounters differently?

1.2 Fieldwork and analysis of the ethnographic material The following section describes the fieldwork, the sites and methods. The fieldwork was conducted over a two-year period and investigated a number of avenues to establish contact with the resettling Bhutanese community, which was challenging as there was no extant diaspora, and resettlement itself had only just begun at the time. Eventually, a service provider organisation resettling Bhutanese refugees came on board to support this research project. This section will introduce my field sites and how I engaged with the informants who provided material for this thesis through interviews and participant observation. It details the methods and techniques used to conduct and carry out my fieldwork among my informants and show the context of engaging with informants and how they were invited to participate in this research. Secondly, this chapter details the methods deployed in the analysis of the qualitative ethnographic material.

1.2.1 Fieldwork The study of urban refugees encompasses particularities related to issues of access to the field. There is no circumscribed field when studying people who reside in urban settings.

8 My usage of ‘ontological uncertainties’ draws on Nils Bubandt’s (2005: 277) definition: “‘Ontological uncertainty’ may here be defined as the socially constructed anxiety that shapes pertinent kinds of danger, fears and concerns for a particular community at a particular time.” 5 Instead, the ethnographer has to construct one’s field by entering into existing networks of relationships and creating interpersonal relations with members of the group. In the case of refugee groups this procedure is complex. Urban refugees are not easy to trace, their sociality is mostly limited to resettlement service providers and small networks of people of that community. In the case of the Bhutanese resettled refugees, it was doubly challenging as there was no previous history of members of their community settling overseas. Thus, there was no established Bhutanese diaspora at the onset of this doctoral research project in Australia. Hence, locating the community and gaining access clearly posed challenges.

A range of different approaches were explored, which included contacting local academics who have worked on issues relating to Bhutan or are active in refugee research, representatives of DIBP9 and even a chance encounter with a couple of Bhutanese from the same community that was resettling since 2008, who themselves, however, had come to Australia many years earlier on a different route. However, it emerged that conducting this fieldwork would most likely be productive if done in conjunction with a settlement service provider. It took several attempts, because most approaches fared, if in detail different, very much like the vignette above, where the service provider organisation, despite an appearance of friendly openness, preferred to enact a gate keeping role. In the end, the setbacks were enormously informative and provided me with crucial insights to the field. Subsequently, due to a serendipitous meeting of one senior member of a settlement service organisation, who was genuinely enthusiastic about research, I was able to garner support to carry out fieldwork.

Working in conjunction with a service provider organisation entails its own set of challenges on multiple fronts. Firstly, there is the question of what role the researcher should embody – volunteer, assistant to case worker, general office hand, and so on. Secondly, there is a related question, if a researcher conducts fieldwork in conjunction with the provision of settlement services, how does that affect the relationships? How the researcher’s role is construed and understood by the refugees is crucial here, because of potential hierarchies of power relationships or a perceived need to participate in the research due to the researcher’s alignment with the service organisation. The third major

9 DIBP is the current acronym of the responsible government department, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. However, at the time of the fieldwork, this department’s official name was Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC). 6 question that arises concerns the independence of the researcher. How is it possible to be part of the ‘system’ of resettlement provision while maintaining academic independence or resist instrumentalisation by the service provider organisation?

All three areas above are connected to the nexus of the definition of the role of the researcher. After extensive consultation with academics specialising in research with refugees, service provider organisations and human research ethics requirements, the following strategy for fieldwork was adopted. Fieldwork was conducted as an independent researcher, who undertakes fieldwork from within the system of settlement service provision to refugees and with the explicit support of the organisation. This meant I neither took any role in the actual provision of the settlement services, nor did I act as a volunteer assigned to certain families to assist them beyond the immediate remit of the government tendered services and/or office hours. This was made possible by the generous support of the service provider organisation, which not only facilitated contact with the Bhutanese community, but also allowed me to shadow its case workers implementing resettlement procedures. Fieldwork commenced only after the organisation had consulted with the Bhutanese community and obtained DIBP approval for this research to take place during resettlement service provision.

As any strategy attempting to address the three major questions above, this one was also a compromise; it was a compromise in the sense that it required ongoing effort and attention to ensure all three criteria would continue to be addressed, as they could not be ‘engineered’ out of the research project. In doing so, the prime focus was the Bhutanese community, to ensure that the role of the researcher and research objectives were clearly communicated and understood. This process started with the organisation approaching the community to seek people who were willing to attend a meeting where this research project would be introduced and a first face-to-face conversation with the researcher could take place. Then, appointments were made with individuals or families who showed interest in participating in this research project. These appointments were usually in their homes, but could also take place at the facilities of the service provider, depending on the potential participants’ preference. This first individual meeting provided opportunity to talk to them about the project, explain in greater detail how they could contribute and what it might mean for me to conduct participant observation or interviews. Emphasis was laid on safeguarding their wellbeing and the right to refuse aspects of the research process or their complete withdrawal from it at any point in time. These potential

7 participants were provided with a written project description and the informed consent form, which was discussed in detail to ensure the concept of ‘informed consent’ was understood. At this stage, neither commitment to the project, nor signatures for informed consent were sought, as it was important that the potential participants would have time to consider and discuss participation in their own time. Lastly, a follow-up meeting was agreed upon if that was suitable. At a later date, usually within a few days’ time, a second visit would take place during which further clarifications were provided as required and those individuals wishing to participate were included in the project through obtaining informed consent.

The information provided to potential participants included a delineation of the role of the researcher in relation to service provision and emphasised independence from the service provider organisation. In practice, although maintaining independence from instrumentalisation could require ongoing effort and adjustments, the staff and volunteers of the service provider organisation very efficiently assisted in reminding about the independence of service provision, whether in terms of quality or quantity, vis-à-vis the presence of the researcher. The service provider organisation furthermore expressed willingness to talk about the delivery of settlement support. A number of staff who deliver settlement support services were quite keen to share their perspectives. However, it is important to state that the perspectives the staff contributed represent their own views and opinions, and not those of the organisation.

What this fieldwork has attempted to do is use ethnographic methods and techniques to gain an understanding of dynamics and experiences of routine resettlement processes and activities of a community of Bhutanese refugees being resettled in Australia. Resettlement of Bhutanese refugees to Australia started in the latter part of 2008. Participants were at the time of joining the research project at different time points of their resettlement assistance period, ranging from within the first week of arrival to about six months in Australia. Participant observation and interviews were carried out with 32 individuals. Out of these, 15 were selected for further in-depth interviews and extended participant observation. In addition, a number of other informants have contributed to this thesis through encounters and informal interviews. All names of persons, places and organisations have been changed to protect the privacy of participants. Moreover, to reduce the likelihood of identification from within communities in the resettlement space,

8 whether Bhutanese or service providers, certain details have been omitted or slightly modified.

The fieldwork was conducted over a two-year period following a number of individuals and families from the early stage of resettlement. The majority of research activities consisted of participant observation, where I spent time with the different informants either individually or together with their family, partaking in their everyday activities. Due to the nature of this thesis research focussing on the early stages of resettlement, I was also frequently accompanied for participant observation by case workers or volunteers, who were delivering resettlement services to the Bhutanese. This research component was complemented with semi-structured and unstructured interviews.

The interviews were conducted in a location suitable for the participants, where they felt comfortable to meet and engage with the researcher. Therefore, the interviews were mostly conducted in their homes and at the facilities of the service provider organisation. The interviews provided me with the opportunity to take detailed notes of the responses of my informants. The semi-structured and unstructured nature of these interviews enabled the informants to relate their views and perceptions or narrate experiences in a form they were comfortable with, while the guidance of some key areas and questions that informed the semi-structured interviews ensured their representation in interviews from all informant interviews. The interview process was informal and casual, and interviews were conducted only after a rapport had been developed and informants were likely to feel comfortable to share their stories. They took the form of conversations where I could, according to the degree that it was required, guide the discussion, while it allowed for flexibility to divert to topics that would come up during the interview and enrich our conversation in a way that was meaningful to the informants as much as it was valuable to the interviewer. In some instances additional separate interview schedules were negotiated with informants where there were indications that answers might not have been as forthcoming due to other family members’ presence.

Participant observation is complementary to interview techniques, as its aim is to observe informants in their daily routine activities and it therefore enables understanding informants’ experiences, actions and behaviours in a natural setting. Apart from being a productive way of establishing trust and rapport, participant observation also enables accessing wider aspects of their experience, group dynamics, as well as observing a

9 broader range of non-verbal cues than could be covered in interviews. Nevertheless, participant observation also has limitations, as the active participation of the researcher has to be balanced with the ability to record events by taking notes.

For the conduct of this fieldwork, I have benefitted from previous experience of working with refugees and in sensitive contexts. In addition, I also completed prior to the fieldwork the professional development course Core Concepts in Working with Survivors of Torture and Trauma provided by STARTTS (Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors). Last, but not least, ethics approval (UNSW HREC 09279) was obtained from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Human Research Ethics Committee and all data are handled in accordance National Guidelines for Research Ethics.

1.2.2 Analysis of the ethnographic material The narratives elicited in my interviews were analysed using a grounded theory approach, where common categories, patterns and themes are inductively drawn from fieldwork data, which assists in the systematic study of narratives of personal experience (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 238-39). A key characteristic of this method is emergence: it aims to formulate hypotheses based on conceptual ideas and to build a theory from the data. The key points in the data are derived with a series of codes that are extracted from the text. The method employs a hierarchical four-stage analysis that requires constant comparison through an ongoing and iterative process that revisits the texts and codes as they are grouped into similar concepts, which are formed into categories that eventually are the basis for the creation of a theory. This iterative process is particularly well suited to the analysis of data from ethnographic fieldwork, because its longitudinal aspect allows the emergent themes to be tested and refined through triangulation, the effort to find “convergence among sources of information, different investigators, or different methods of data collection” (Cresswell 1994: 158). Hence, the openness of this theoretical approach has allowed me to develop new understandings of the dynamics of fieldwork encounters, the unravelling of ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott 1990: 2), as well as to critique existing understandings of local resettlement service provision.

10 1.3 The case for ethnography This thesis is an ethnography, an interpreted record of fieldwork encounters, dynamics and reflections. Although the method of ethnography has begun permeating qualitative inquiries in a number of academic fields, particularly amongst social and political scientists, it remains the foremost methodology for anthropologists. Its interpretive method of inductive reasoning enables a unique approach to the social world that can account for some of its complexity and do a higher degree of “justice to the people with whom and among whom we conduct our research” (Fassin 2014). This thesis centres on a group of refugees resettling in Australia and their interaction with their new environment, particularly during the early phase of resettlement where they receive assistance from NGO10 service providers, who implement Australian government programmes. This process as such is neither new, since Australia has resettled refugees for many decades, nor has it been neglected by academic research. The government department responsible for resettlement itself collects a range of statistics, as do the organisations implementing the programmes, all types of which have been investigated. If my thesis is an ethnography, what makes an ethnography special, what makes it different from any other inquiry? I will attempt to demonstrate this in its fullness and in my own words with this thesis, for I believe it provides insights inaccessible through other means – and perhaps even through other ethnographers. However, to sketch out a few parameters that capture on the meta-level key differentiating arguments about ethnography’s claim to authority, I build on the thoughts and reflections of among others, Lila Abu-Lughod, Ruth Behar, James Clifford, Didier Fassin, Clifford Geertz, John Jackson Jr., George Marcus, Irma McClaurin, Henrietta Moore, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

To my mind, ethnography is characterised by a balance between presence and distance, as Fassin (2013) also elaborates. Perhaps the most obvious component of the fieldwork underlying an ethnographic approach is that of the presence in the field – one has to go ‘out there’ and be among research participants. This presence is characterised by temporality in its immediate sense, as well as in the mundane aspects of routine that can shed light on patterns and regularities. Secondly, there is distance, which can take

10 NGO, or non-governmental organisation, is an umbrella term for a range of diverse organisational incorporation types, mostly not-for-profit. NGO is used in the context of this thesis in the inclusive sense of the term, recognising that a vast diversity of organisations can be termed NGOs and that there is no universally accepted definition of NGOs. 11 multifarious forms that lead to a distantiation, whether they be driven by the ethnographer’s astonishment or estrangement, or conversely by research participants’ actions and reactions. This latter point, especially that of ‘actions’, is of special interest to this thesis in the context of research access with service provider organisations. Distance makes us relate the field and its happenings to wider configurations of the social and the historical to seek understandings beyond the limits of immediate vision in our field.

Whatever the features of presence and distance though, they are governed by perhaps the most fundamental of all features of ethnography – which as much as it is odd to mention in the same breath is also one of the least written about – that of the relationships. “Of course they are written about!” one may wish to protest, as Writing Culture and its after- effects would demonstrate. And there is little doubt these issues have not been given much thought. Rather, what is at stake here is, and this is where this ethnography will present one of its marks of distinction, the level of the writing and positioning of the ethnographer. This is not about reflexive statements in the preface, musings about levels of collaboration in an introductory passage, or a methodological paper theorised outside of its fieldwork context, but about the substantial inclusion of the detailed levels of interactions and relationships in the field, and how those in all their intricacy, intimacy, intrigue and ongoing re-evaluation have shaped insights, perspectives, access, data and interpretations. As ethnographers we build relationships first and foremost. With that “reciprocal acquaintance between the observer and the observed” (Fassin 2013 : xi) comes a familiarity that simultaneously is never without alienation. While ethnographers enjoy unique access to the logics of the insider from a simultaneous vantage point of an outsider, all field data are determined by the relationships built in the field. In Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large Vicky Kirby underscores this possibility: “by making yourself at home in the very logic of your [interlocutor’s] argument and [to show] how the direction of that argument can comprehend a very different set of implications” (2011: 86). Whether information, knowledge, data, and so on derives from observing participants’ interaction with those around or the researcher, it is inevitably framed through extant and nascent relationships in the field. It is this data that explicitly informs interpretation in this ethnography.

Like much of anthropological work, the primary material for analysis is derived from everyday interactions in the field; this is the focus of the ethnographic endeavour. Even a

12 cursory glance at the history of the academic field of Anthropology will, however, suggest that despite continuity in name, this method has undergone dramatic changes. Without wishing to recast the historiography of the method over the next pages, I shall only briefly allude to the well published and ongoing methodological debate focussing on one of its major turning points, encapsulated for many in the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Since then, the ethnographic writing process and authorial authority have come under increasing scrutiny and the method has extended its reach to other academic disciplines outside anthropology and novel forms of ethnography, such as multi-sited fieldwork (Marcus 1995) or autoethnography (for example, Bochner and Ellis 2002; Ellis 2004), to name a few. Like many innovations, they have stirred vigorous debates (for example, Coffey 1999; Denzin and Lincoln 2002; Anderson 2006; Denzin 2006); one particularly emotive aspect of which is the positioning of and relative emphasis on the ethnographer: should we anthropologists write about ourselves, and if so, how much? The position I take with reference to this debate is that data, knowledge and understanding are accumulated primarily through personal relationships, so we do need to explicate those, if we are to achieve the level of transparency and accountability that ethical and responsible academic researchers strive for. This position is echoed in Sarah Harding’s view that “[t]he beliefs and behaviors [sic] of the researcher are part of the empirical evidence for (or against) the claims advanced in the results of research. This evidence too must be open to critical scrutiny no less than what is traditionally defined as relevant evidence” (Harding 1987: 9, original emphasis). The necessity for this stance in the ethnographic spectrum is emphasised with something bordering on obdurateness in the everyday experience as a non-white ethnographer – both within the field and the academy.

1.3.1 “Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio”11 As a non-white ethnographer, “anthropological work is as much about [the] intellectual struggles as it is about the words and ways of others” (Rodriguez 2001: 247). It does not suffice to put forward a cogent argument, to frame one’s perspective in recognisable professional terminology or theory, because the assumptions inherent to the reception of

11 From: Shakespeare (2001: 293), Hamlet, act 1, scene 1, line 45. 13 the argument – by the reader, whose interpretation and understanding of the ethnographic writing is the ultimate goal – is inevitably entangled with its canonical conception.

This dilemma is also referenced in the debate about ‘native’ anthropologists. The dichotomy between unmarked and ‘native’ anthropologists is drawn between those who study other cultural worlds they are not familiar with and those who are believed to study and write about their own cultures (Narayan 1993: 671). In analogy to Arjun Appadurai’s critique of the concept ‘native’, which he identified as associated with an ideology of authenticity – “[p]roper natives are somehow assumed to represent their selves and their history, without distortion or residue” (1988: 37) – the label native anthropologist frequently is applied without concern for underlying complexities. The inherent notion of an unquestioned insider-status of ‘native’ anthropologists is complicated by the differentiated nature of society, which does not give all members of that society equal access to all levels. This is of course true for all anthropologists, as those ‘studying up’ have experienced (for example, Hertz and Imber 1995; Anderson-Levy 2010). However, the extent to which anyone is an authentic insider is questionable:

These questions about the precarious possibility of unproblematically being native and the political implications of embracing nativity, speak to some of the important fault lines that define how native anthropology is understood in contemporary contexts, especially when the relationship between informant and research is often inherently hierarchized no matter how closely the native fieldworker identifies with those studied in the field. (Jackson Jr 2005: 158)

The attempts of many non-white ethnographers to “speak as situated anthropologists are viewed with ‘objective’ suspicion or dismissed as ‘essentialist’” (McClaurin 2001: 52), while furtively glossing over the fact that every position is strategic, whether it is obviously marked or not, because “every view is a view from somewhere and every act of speaking, a speaking from somewhere” (Abu-Lughod 1991: 141). It is, then, impossible or unavoidable to take a position as a subject – and even more so as a visibly marked one, because “issues of Self and subjectivity are never secondary but are intricately woven into the direction, content, analysis, praxis, and materiality of our scholarship” (McClaurin 2001: 52). This does not, however, resolve the above interruption of intention and perception. As Kath Weston argues, there is almost a

14 stubborn intractability to seeing such “work through something besides persona and physique” (1997: 174).

However, as this thesis’ expatiation conveys, ethnographies, whether written by ‘canonical’ ethnographers or those who are non-white or marginal, are “our own interpretations of what our informants are up to, or think they are up to” (Geertz 1973: 15). Consequently, “[e]thnographic findings are not privileged, just particular [and the] important thing about the anthropologist’s findings is their complex specificness, their circumstantiality” (Geertz 1973: 23). To take up Geertz’ point serves to underscore the emphasis of this thesis on the explication of the ethnographer and her relations in the field. This focus elevates that particular circumstantiality, which at the same time is the distorting lens applied to all aspects of the ethnographic material, to the level of clarity through its analysis.

Ruth Behar outlines ways to interrupt synthetically linear trajectories between ethnographic writing and reception, and instead maps out “an intermediate space” (Behar 1996: 174) from which to begin forging bridges across analysis and subjectivity. Her expository device is that of the anthropologist as a “vulnerable observer” (Behar 1996), whose subjectivity is inextricable from social observation, which achieves a qualitative depth to the analysis otherwise inaccessible. As Behar notes, “[w]hen you write vulnerably, others respond vulnerably. This form of reflexivity gains theoretical and heuristic purchase, because it is not an alignment reducible to easy sociological classifications, but instead troubles these very categories themselves. Accordingly, “marking oneself as black and a researcher doesn’t simply make one native [as] it merely provides some of [the] phenomenological pretext for the fraught social interactions one will necessarily experience in the field” (Jackson Jr 2005: 163). What becomes clear, then, is that a different set of problems and predicaments arise which would never surface in response to more detached writing” (Behar 1996: 16). I see this not as a criticism, but an inclusion that moves towards a repertoire of a multiplicity of writings that acknowledge multiplex and shifting identifications:

By situating ourselves as subjects simultaneously touched by life-experience and swayed by professional concerns, we can acknowledge the hybrid and positioned nature of our identities. Writing texts that mix lively narrative and rigorous

15 analysis involves enacting hybridity, regardless of our origins. (Narayan 1993: 682)

And while Geertz (1973: 23) cautions about “the attempt to invest [ethnographic writing] with the authority of physical experimentation”, this analogy with the physical sciences is instructive on another level. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle asserts a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be known simultaneously. In other words, the more precisely one attempts to measure one quantity, the more precision is lost in another: quantum mechanics determines that the flow of information from a measurement inevitably changes the course of the object measured. Similarly, the insertion of an ethnographer into a field site necessarily changes its dynamics. I believe this also translates to the challenges of communicating one’s ethnographic findings, where the specific positionalities of the researcher, the research participants and the reader all impact on the ethnography, yet the process of writing an ethnography necessitates the emphasising and explication of some aspects at the cost of others. This should not be read to mean that all writing is meaningless as some could critique, but rather that the implicit assumptions of all, including the reader, inform the ultimate interpretation of the writing. Drawing on Roland Barthes (1977) and Gaston Bachelard (1971), Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe suggest that “[r]eading is a process of meaning or signification, a process in which a text is transformed [...] The reading self might be produced as contradictory, wandering (Barthes 1977: 159) or as fixed, but whatever the specific nature of this self might be, it is constituted in that relation with the text” (1996: 129-30). Writing vulnerably (Behar 1996) renders possible what is at stake in the constitution of the reading self and allows contesting an apparent “coherence of effects” (Mohanty 1991: 52) originating from dominant conceptions.

1.4 Structure of the thesis In writing this thesis several selective processes have necessarily been applied, laying emphasis on some areas of anthropological enquiry at the expense of others. This concerns the focus on qualitative methods, limitations of location and time in the field, as well as the stipulations of length of the doctoral thesis. Hence, this thesis’ overall focus is on an extended period of fieldwork in one particular field site, a corollary of which is

16 that the material herein provides neither a comprehensive catalogue of events, nor a representative account of resettlement experience for Bhutanese refugees in Australia.

Resettlement is a complex process that affects individuals in very different ways. The number of Bhutanese refugees agreed to be resettled in Australia is 5,000 and apart from the sheer logistical impossibility of capturing the experiences of all, a significant aspect of those experiences are private and not accessible through social research methodologies. Hence, even in a localised fieldwork study it would be impossible to capture or analyse all experiences. Therefore, this thesis is concerned with only some individuals, their experiences and relations with service providers, and the social life of resettlement. This focus was chosen in an attempt to understand routine and dynamic interactions during the early phase of resettlement.

My broader aim is to discuss the emergent relationship proximities during resettlement between refugees and service providers, how the social and local conditions within which these forms of relationships and selves are produced, practiced, and maintained in relation to each other. Moreover, the alternative polarisations of fieldwork encounters through the non-white ethnographer‘s presence in the field are highlighted to pursue some of the theoretical issues that ensued as a result.

In choosing this focus for my thesis, a number of other important aspects that warrant consideration in greater depth have been given less attention; for example, intra- community hierarchies and relationships, the formation of a diaspora, the conflict of old and young, changing gender roles and identifications, or the (re)making of (a multicultural) identity in Australia.

1.4.1 Thesis structure overview Following the general introduction, this thesis is divided into three sections that introduce the reader to: (i) the Bhutanese community, refugee resettlement and methods informing the thesis; (ii) the interpretation of the fieldwork data; and (iii) a meta-discussion and conclusion, respectively.

The first section introduces the reader to the Bhutanese community by giving some historical background information, refugee resettlement, and the theoretical framing informing this thesis. It is comprised of three chapters. Chapter two explores the back-

17 story to the refugee status of the Bhutanese resettling in Australia. Chapter three introduces the reader briefly to the global refugee situation and UNHCR assistance delivered to refugees, including resettlement in third countries. This is followed by a focused discussion of the history of Australian refugee resettlement. Subsequently, the current implementation of the Australian resettlement programme is given detailed consideration. Chapter four focuses on the larger theoretical framing of the thesis, which derives from Foucauldian conceptualisations of power, subjectification and governmentality, and their intersection with the Everyday and neoliberal political forms of social ordering.

The second section covers the interpretations of the fieldwork in three parts. Chapter five introduces the field site and the ethnographer’s position within it, as well as the different groups constitutive to it, including some of the active research participants of the fieldwork encounter. This chapter traces the intended effects and unintended consequences of the resettlement process and how this positions the refugees in Australian society for their much anticipated new beginning. The focus shifts in Chapter six to the potential for precariousness in encounters of resettlement and how unexpected turns can deliver incisive insights. This chapter centres around one evocative encounter and demonstrates how ensuing field dynamics can constrain the field site and what it means to do fieldwork as a black ethnographer in such a context. This section is completed by Chapter seven, which turns its attention to the other major group constitutive of the field, the service providers implementing routine resettlement services. This chapter contains an exploration of the fantasies and imaginaries of service providers and how they are ostensibly articulated towards “moral capital” (Ong 2003: 267), while actively producing a heterotopic space as an apparatus of control.

The final section provides a meta-discussion to the fieldwork interpretations and conclusion of the thesis.

1.4.2 Section one: theoretical framing and background to the thesis The first section introduces the reader to the Bhutanese community by giving some historical background information on the Bhutanese community and refugee resettlement, as well as the theoretical framing informing this thesis. This section provides relevant background information on the resettling community of refugees from Bhutan, including

18 relevant historical information about the Bhutanese refugee crisis and the roles language and democratisation played in the emergent nation state. It also provides background information about Australian refugee resettlement and citizenship, as well as theoretical underpinnings to provide contextualisation of the fieldwork situation and its analysis. Thus, this section prepares the reader for the fieldwork data interpretation chapters in the following section.

Chapter two provides historical and political contexts to the Bhutanese refugee crisis. Shortly after arriving in Bhutan these inhabitants of the southern belt, the Lhotshampa (Dzongkha, translates roughly as ‘Southerners’) as they came to be known, became relatively prosperous farmers. Since the advent of Bhutan’s ‘modern development’ policies with its first five-year plan in 1961, due to Bhutan’s geographical features, these southern Bhutanese lowland regions became key areas of industrialisation, and thus the southern Bhutanese commercially successful (Hutt 1997). Nevertheless, the Royal Bhutanese Government put restrictions to their movement and opportunities to fully participate in society – for example, there was an ‘invisible’ border to the north they were not able to cross for permanent inhabitation and their movement within the country was closely monitored requiring government permissions (Rose 1977: 47). Their farming and commercial success, at the same time, meant they had strong links across the national border into India and further afield to Nepal. In short, the southern Bhutanese, who are mostly of Nepali extraction, are a borderlands people (Evans 2010: 27); one could say paradigmatically so, for in every dimension of engagement external to their immediate community their movement was circumscribed and required the traversing of boundaries. These people were shaped into a ‘community’ over the course of historical events, beginning perhaps with their migration to the southern fringes of Bhutanese territory (Rose 1977), but most noticeably with their increasing isolation in Bhutan through homogenising ethno-nationalist policies (Joseph C. 1996, 1999) and their subsequent expulsion in the early 1990s (Hutt 2003; Evans 2010). The refugees spent nearly 20 years in UNHCR organised refugee camps. To date these camps harbour substantial numbers of refugees, although since 2008 a third country resettlement procedure, including to Australia, has come into effect.

Chapter three leads on from the community of refugees to consider refugee resettlement, which is one of the three durable solutions the UNHCR has identified to refugee situations (definition and details are found in Chapter 3.2.2). The chapter outlines the global refugee

19 situation, highlighting resettlement challenges and details the Australian resettlement programme, which extends beyond the UNHCR provisions, for example through opportunities for family reunification. The current implementation of the Humanitarian Settlement Strategy, which comprises the Government’s assistance services for newly arrived resettling refugees, is also described, as are the challenges brought about by changes introduced to the NGO sector in Australia by the Howard Government (1996- 2007) that were largely maintained or extended by subsequent governments.

Chapter four outlines the theoretical underpinnings of this thesis, which is placed in the nexus of a Lefebvrian Everyday and Foucauldian power/knowledge, subjectification and governmentality in the context of a neoliberally organised nation state. This melding of Foucauldian and Lefebvrian theory is perhaps a tad unusual; however, I believe that it has enhanced the understanding of the complex implications of the fieldwork contexts and enables drawing linkages between wider social imaginaries and their effects in intersubjective contexts. There is also a discussion of the specific role Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) play as part of devolved state authority through contracted services implementing the actual work of resettlement on behalf of the nation state.

1.4.3 Section two: interpretation of fieldwork data This section details the interpretation of the fieldwork data over three chapters. This thesis attempts to understand how the Bhutanese refugees experience the particular journey between social worlds and how they engage with their present. Migrating, following nearly two decades in refugee camps, from a South Asian country to Australia, inevitably brings about new conceptualisations and approaches to ethnicity and ‘nation-ness’, that is, citizen-in-waiting in multicultural Australia, which following Benedict Anderson (1991: 3) happen every day, even if many such happenings are invisible or appear overtly uninteresting. They are embodied and expressed not only in political claims and nationalist rhetoric, but in everyday encounters, practical categories, common sense knowledge, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, mental maps, interactional cues, discursive frames, organizational routines, and social networks. Designing a research project about the experiences that the Bhutanese resettling overseas have, I am therefore faced with researching everyday experience.

20 The social and political contexts are essential to situate the experiences of the Bhutanese, because if the historical and social forces that have shaped and structured their lives are not taken into account, a failure to realise how the contexts give their individual stories their meanings necessarily ensues (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Ortner 1995). But the significance of historical contextualisation notwithstanding, the ethnographic stance of this study necessitates close attention to the lived subjective realities of the people, their actions, understandings and beliefs. My approach to understanding the refugee and resettlement realities therefore builds on knowledge grounded in the lived realities of the people concerned. In informal group discussions, interviews and participant observation the ebb and flow of ordinary social life was observed, including routine encounters in public, with the service providers and taking part in ordinary social interaction among family and friends. I have talked with the Bhutanese about their everyday problems and preoccupations – raising children, paying bills, celebrating family milestones, planning for the future and listened to their stories and anecdotes, to their complaints and frustrations.

The second significant group of people who form part of this research are the service providers, the organisations and individuals carrying out the actual work of the resettlement assistance. Considering the early stages of resettlement that are the focus of this thesis, the service providers are incorporated into the research plan, because it is in the routine interactions with the Bhutanese refugees that the parameters for their life in Australia are being set. In effect, the service providers are catalysts facilitating the Bhutanese’ entry to Australian society. Through the maintenance of an intimate sphere, they inhabit the everyday lives of the Bhutanese, forging close and yet unequal links. The interaction between the Bhutanese, the service providers, and the ethnographer made for informative insights. Chapters six and seven also include considerations about their findings’ potential impact on ethnographic authority.

Chapter five is the first of the fieldwork interpretation chapters and gives the reader the first insights into the fieldwork interactions. It includes four vignettes that form the basis of most of the analysis and discussion of the interdependency of the Bhutanese and those implementing the resettlement services. The different strands elucidated in the chapter emphasise notable discordances in the expectations of the resettlement process by both, the refugees and the service providers. The chapter illuminates how particular imagery is deployed in order to shape the Bhutanese’ ideas, hopes and aspirations of their life in

21 Australia. Making these insights discernible from superficially ‘apparent’ situations requires careful analysis of the public performance witnessed in encounters, which takes two aspects, the public performance as the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate, or the ‘public transcript’ and its counterpart, the ‘hidden transcript’ (Scott 1990: 2). Investigating the discrepancies between the public and hidden transcripts and their different conditions of production highlighted a degree of – at least of superficial – adherence consent from those in a subordinate position, that is the resettling Bhutanese. This ambivalence of this ‘domination’ due to its “half-voluntary” notion is interestingly conceptualised in the form of ‘unknowing’, which involves strategic elision through an ongoing mutual recognition to maintain a fictive ideal (Geissler 2013). Thus, unknowing provides an opening to expose the mechanisms of how it harnesses the social category of refugee into the imagination of the service providers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of fundamental issues that have emerged in this fieldwork, but also in other research settings where impervious social barriers and over-determining power imbalances shape the fieldwork relationships, such as in the study of elites (see also: Hertz and Imber 1995; Anderson-Levy 2010).

Chapter six has at its focal plane a particular event that occurred during the time in the field. One evening, one of the resettling Bhutanese had invited guests over to a housewarming party. There were a number of other members of the Bhutanese community, as well as a range of staff and volunteers of service provider organisations. As this event coincided with my fieldwork with the community, I had been invited as well. As the evening unfolds, several developments set in motion dynamics crucial to this thesis that illuminate critical aspects of the resettlement environment in its interactions.

Chapter seven illuminates an infrequently interrogated aspect of contemporary Australian resettlement practices by focussing on the service providers and volunteers, who are the practitioners of its implementation. The specific circumstances of refugee resettlement result in the embodiment of an imagined status between the self and an idealised image of the nation. These sentiments are enacted and performed by mobilising the social category of refugee for the construction of an identity of the imagined self as patron and protector, which serves as a site for a moral imperative to ‘care’ in the modelling of a virtuous personhood. This manifests in an intimate and exclusive social arena between the Bhutanese refugees and service providers, where the service providers enjoy largely unfettered autonomy in routine interaction. By entering into transactional relationships as

22 ‘givers’, their social lives are transformed, whereby their quotidian, anonymous lives are literally catapulted into significance that was formerly unavailable. However, the presence of the non-white ethnographer engenders an alternative pole that creates some interference in the linear exchange of power and casts a different light that unveils the contingency of such hierarchical relations. Simultaneously, this specific environment of resettlement is also revealed as one carefully guarded and screened from outsiders. Consequently, the shift in perception positioned fieldwork as an interference that disturbs and disrupts the naturalised hierarchy, revealing the lives of the Bhutanese and the service providers as imbricated rather than neatly separated.

1.4.4 Section three: concluding thoughts The meta-discussion in Chapter eight draws on literature by Henrietta Moore (1994, 1996, 2007, 2011) to assist in developing a theoretical framework with which to connect the different aspects that have emerged from the fieldwork observations and interviews. In order to theorise ethnography from the interstices effectively, I am using conceptualisations of fantasy, desire and the “ethical imagination” (1994, 2007, 2011). With the aid of these three key terms, considering their explanatory power when applied to the formation of the subject through intersectionality and intersubjectivity, it has become possible to articulate the effects of colonial imagination, race and gender that permeate the data of this thesis. This framing enables the productive incorporation of the non-white ethnographer in tying together the various strands, elucidating nuanced insights not despite, but precisely due to their divergent levels and aspects of subjectivity.

The conclusion presented in Chapter nine, in turn, attempts to highlight how the differently situated yet connected threads of the thesis chapters provide novel insights into the resettlement process that draw on three innovative aspects of this thesis: (i) being the first doctoral thesis research on the early resettlement of Bhutanese refugees in Australia; (ii) conducting fieldwork at the very early stages of resettlement when important early parameters are determined; and (iii) providing distinctive insights through an application of feminist anthropological theory of subjectification to fieldwork data obtained as a non-white anthropologist studying ‘at home’ in the society where my academic institution is based.

SECTION ONE: THEORETICAL FRAMING AND BACKGROUND TO THE

THESIS

CHAPTER 2 – THE GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS OF

DISENFRANCHISEMENT IN BHUTAN

25 2 The Gross National Happiness of Disenfranchisement in Bhutan

This chapter will provide a brief introduction to Bhutan, which remains to date one of the less accessible and less frequently researched countries in the world. All access to researchers is strictly monitored by the government (and previously the Royal House); in fact, the level of control is of a degree that has several scholars perceive much of the research as tinged with notions of ‘court scholarship’. However, in Bhutan itself concerns about independent scholarship on Bhutan exist as well, even if much less piqued: “Presently there is no system in place that will allow foreign scholars to conduct an independent or joint research in Bhutan” (Penjore 2013: 153). Nevertheless, this thesis does not concern itself directly with Bhutan, nor with the situation in refugee camps in Nepal where a significant part of the Bhutanese nation has lived since disenfranchisement in the early 1990s. However, this chapter aims to familiarise the reader with the historical background that led to the protracted situation of the Bhutanese refugees in Nepal, which eventually was given high priority in the UNHCR resettlement programme.

2.1 Recent history In the early 1990s, the kingdom of Bhutan expelled the southern Bhutanese of Nepali origin, who in Bhutan are also known as the Lhotshampa, a Dzongkha term literally meaning the ‘Southern People’ introduced by the Bhutanese Royal House (Joseph C. 1996; Sinha 1998; Joseph C. 1999; Hutt 2003; Rizal and Yokota 2006). For the purpose of this chapter I shall use this term to collectively refer to this part of Bhutan’s population. Camps in neighbouring Nepal accommodated more than 100,000 refugees12 and a dissident movement in exile has called for radical changes to the political system. Due to the intransigence of negotiations between Bhutan and Nepal about the return of these refugees, resettlement of some of the refugees in other countries, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the USA, has begun (UNHCR 2007b). A situation that the United Nations Organisation13 has described as one

12 Due to the ongoing resettlement process this number is in flux: however, previously the total refugee population has been in excess of 107,000 (UNHCR 2007a). 13 The UNHCR has been supporting the refugees at the request of His Majesty's Government of Nepal since September 1991 (http://www.un.org.np/resources/refugee.php, accessed 27 March 2008) with the provision of refugee camps and by developing a dialogue between Nepal and Bhutan. 26 of the largest resettlement programmes in the world (UN News Service 2008), it follows nearly two decades in refugee camps.

For the most part, the laws of Bhutan are secular, but draw on and present themselves as encompassing and putting into practice Buddhist principles. However, the law is a form of symbolic force that secures the position of the dominant class. Symptomatic of this process in Bhutan were three modalities of violence, namely: the hierarchical classification in terms of descent, religion, and birth; residence and property status, expropriation and eviction of Lhotshampa from legally acquired land; and, consequentially, their expulsion from the kingdom. This chapter analyses how the reinforcement of the titular nation is legitimated through cultural policy.

2.2 Gross National Happiness According to the Royal Government of Bhutan (RGB), decentralisation and participation are key components of the democratisation process initiated by them to “modernise” Bhutan and strengthen the nation (Rose 1977: 38). However, Bhutan was also acutely aware of its unique position, being the last independent Buddhist kingdom, and has therefore stressed the importance of cultural preservation in the context of modernisation. Since its introduction by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in the late 1980s, Gross National Happiness (GNH) has been Bhutan’s “central development concept” and the king decreed to align national policies closely with this concept (RGB 1999; Mathou 2000a: 135). It dispenses with the widely used development and wealth measure of Gross National Product (GNP) and focuses on the idea that “happiness is the ultimate desire of all human beings and that all else is a means for achieving happiness” (RGB 1999: 45). The concept of GNH has brought wide acclaim to King Jigme Singye Wangchuck and Bhutan, projecting its positive image even further. In 2006, Time Magazine (Vol. 167 No. 19) named Jigme Singye Wangchuck one of the 100 people who have shaped our world.

GNH has been instrumental to Bhutan’s unique path for development as an umbrella for identifying concerns and commitments related to environmental and cultural conservation, equitable economic development, and good governance. While GNH initially became an objective of both ministries and knowledge communities, there were limited, but promising efforts to infuse policy formulation and institutional development with Buddhist concepts and traditional Bhutanese values, which were defined in 27 accordance with the Drukpa Kagyu school of Buddhism and values of the north-western Bhutanese elite from which the Royal House stems. Perhaps the most fully articulated of these efforts was that undertaken by the Judiciary. Efforts have been made to use traditional Buddhist teachings and texts to inform not only the spatial practices of the courts (through the incorporation of specifically Buddhist architectural and iconographic elements), but also to ground jurisprudence practices in Buddhist textual traditions. Consequentially, Buddhist training for judicial professionals has been undertaken and efforts are ongoing to establish the compatibility of contemporary judicial institutions with Buddhist traditions (Hershock 2004: 99).

With the democratic elections held on 24 March 2008, the last of the Himalayan kingdoms has transformed itself from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. On 24 November 2008 the Prime Minister of Bhutan, Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley, formally ratified the GNH Index into Bhutan’s national development policy to reflect GNH values as its unique benchmarks.

Nestled between India and China, Bhutan has a long history of political, religious and ethnic struggles. The current nation state was formed in 1907, when Ugyen Wangchuck unified warring fiefdoms to take control as an absolute monarch and his dynasty still holds the throne. While Bhutan has most likely not been ruled by outside forces since the ninth century, the history of Bhutan as a political unity only begins with the Shabdrung (Tibetan title for great lamas) Ngawang Namgyal, a monk statesman, who in the seventeenth century was the first to unite, probably helped by the external threat of Tibetan aggression, the various independent principalities of what approximately falls within the borders of modern Bhutan (Rose 1977: 26; Aris 1979, 1994b; Sinha 1998). The role of the Shabdrung, whose reincarnations were legitimately the rulers of Bhutan, was relegated to spiritual matters with the ascendance of the Wangchuck dynasty and has since then been gradually undermined by the Royal House (Sinha 1998: 136) to the extent that since the mid twenty-first century incarnations were not given any official recognition and were forced into exile (Sinha 1998: 157). However, in early 2008 the first elections were held, paving the way to a constitutional monarchy with democratically elected parliamentary representation.

According to Ura (1994) the constitutional change that brought in monarchy did not entail a radical break with the Buddhist ideology of the past that governed Bhutan. However,

28 the direct purpose of government was gradually transformed and enlarged from its former primary duty of maintaining the institutions of religion (Ura 1994: 25). The welfare of the public has always been a principal task of the government of Bhutan and thus there is a need for the government to take practical measures to assuage material causes of suffering (Ura 1994: 35-6). Therefore, the reforms and movement towards modern development introduced by the third king, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, can always be presented in this light, that is, in very traditional terms.

It is in this context that it is pertinent to analyse GNH. While it has attracted global attention to the tiny kingdom, what is less well known is that Bhutan, sublime splendour of monasteries and mountains, is not only heir to a great national wellbeing measure, but it has been the largest per capita producer of refugees in the world (Amnesty International 2002: 2; Kharat 2005: 166).

Bhutan, “this most isolated country in the world” (Mathou 1994: 55), interestingly is a place where people from various parts of the region have migrated to or sought refuge at one time or another. The four broad, but not necessarily exclusive ethnic groups are the Ngalung (of Tibetan origin; Buddhist; mostly north-western), the Sharchop (of Burmese/Indian origin; Buddhist; mostly eastern), the Lhotshampa (of Nepali origin; Hindu; mostly southern) and several indigenous peoples (Upreti 1996: 80). The Ngalung themselves are composed of several groups who have migrated from different parts of Tibet to Bhutan from as early as the ninth century to as recent as the mid twentieth century (Rose 1977: 44). The Sharchop on the other hand are considered to be of Burmese and/or Indian origin, especially of the Assamese Himalayas and to have migrated largely into the eastern region of modern Bhutan during the past millennium. The indigenous peoples comprise mostly of diverse smaller groups.

The southern Bhutanese, largely of Nepalese origin, have migrated into the southern duar14 region of Bhutan, either via Darjeeling or Assam as part of their larger migration movement across northeast India (Nath 2005: 57). The exact dates of the arrival of the Lhotshampa are disputed, but on many accounts the migration to Bhutan has been strongly encouraged since the Treaty of Sinchula in 1865, not least by the British, but by the Bhutanese rulers as well (Upreti 1996: 80). Although some accounts put the first migrations much earlier (Aris 1979: 27), a large majority were certainly encouraged to

14 Duars is the Nepali term for the flood plains and foothills of the eastern Himalayas around Bhutan. 29 migrate by the British to clear the exceedingly fertile yet dense southern jungles that were porous parts of India’s and Nepal’s unmarked borders during the rule of the British (Aris 1979: 27). However, there has also been a substantial drive for labour migration since the inception of the five-year development plans (FYP) in 1961, a call to which many Nepalese have responded (Joseph C. 1996: 129).

Incidentally the British, supported a local Penlop (Dzongkha: governor) to become the first king of a unified Bhutan in exchange for access to Tibet and China, while simultaneously performing the role of a buffer zone to China (Aris 1994a; Sinha 2001: 102). Thus the birth of modern Bhutan is inextricably linked to the British and subsequently to India, who since its independence directs Bhutan’s foreign policy and financial capital (Sinha 1998: 175). Following the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and China’s annexation of Tibet in 1950, Bhutan has become further closely allied to India (Yadav 1996: 66).

All three main ethnic groups – Ngalung, Sharchop and Lhotshampa – have distinct identities shaped by their geographic origin and based on culture and religion. The Lhotshampa have largely retained their language, religion and other aspects of their culture. The lifestyles of the Lhotshampa thus noticeably differ from those of the other main ethnic groups.

Bhutan is a multi-ethnic state, where ethnic groups of different faiths coexisted in relative peace. However, ethnic conflict has flared after the Drukpa (Mahayana Buddhist; ethnicity Ngalung) began asserting a strong influence over Bhutan’s national policy through the Royal House in the 1980s and pursued a divisive ethno-sectarian form of nationalism. The dominant Drukpa elite has pursued a policy of stringent, self-serving, ethno-sectarian nationalism with the purported aim of unifying the country under the motto, ‘One Nation, One People’ (Rizal 2002: 109). Many Lhotshampa were given no choice but to leave, and were officially designated as illegal immigrants. This policy has created the crisis of Bhutanese refugees.

2.3 Becoming one of the 100 people who shape the world The former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who was crowned in 1972 at the young age of 16, has taken the nation in a new direction. To minimise the risk of a challenge to his

30 authority by any kind of factionalism, which could exploit the reincarnations of the Shabdrung for political gains, he married four women, who are descendants of the pre- monarchy rulers and thereby legitimising the Drukpa sect’s ascension to power. From the late 1980s, Bhutan’s national policy was given a complete turnover with the assertion of Drukpa dominance. Aspects of the Drukpa Kagyu sect of Buddhism were adopted in the national policy as the core of the nation and the Bhutanese national heritage. In the 1980s, the Bhutanese ruling elite, believing their identity threatened by a growing Nepalese minority (RGB 1993: 4), promulgated the cultural policy of Driglam Namzha, which loosely translates as national customs and etiquette. It required the Lhotshampa to undertake training in Drukpa traditional etiquette. Drukpa dress became mandatory for all employment and official business while Dzongkha, the language of the Drukpa elite, was declared to be the official language to be used in all schools and government offices of Bhutan. In 1989, teaching of the Nepali language as an optional language in schools was discontinued.

These national integration programmes implemented in the 1980s were cast as fostering harmony and mutual understanding between different ethnic communities. Yet, as the slogan ‘One Nation, One People’ (Rizal 2002: 109) implies, government policies sought explicitly to compact all ethnic groups into a single cultural category (Mathou 2000b: 245). The government embarked here on what Anthony Smith has called a programme of “vernacular mobilization”, in which the “genuine membership” of the ethnic nation was to be re-educated in the “true culture, the pristine culture of their ancestors, unsullied by contact with modern civilization” (1986: 151). Although the Lhotshampa constitute a minority of the population,15 there were evidently great fears that they would continue to arrive in large numbers and ultimately take over the country. One government minister, describing the Nepalese as “aggressive” and “colonising”, has claimed that “beyond the simple, economic reasons, the[ir] large scale infiltration was conceived to change the demographic character of an unsuspecting people” (Thinley 1994: 65).

Bhutan is cringing at what it sees as a demographic invasion as the Nepali population pans the entire Himalayan belt. Highlighting a ratio of one Drukpa to seventy Nepalis in the region and looking at the migratory habits of the rapidly-

15 The proportion of Nepalese in Bhutan is a controversial issue and estimates range from 15% (RGB) to 52% (SAARC), cited in Upreti (1996: 81). 31 expanding Nepali population, Bhutan sees its very survival as a distinct nation threatened. (Hutt 1994: 90)

Proverbially, the situation with the Lhotshampa is analogous to the Bhutanese folk tale of the bat that would show its teeth to the birds to evade the bird tax, and show its wings to the beasts to evade the beast tax. But come winter, when the food supplies are distributed, the bat would show its wings to the birds and teeth to the beasts to claim its share from both, thereby benefitting all-round and end up being ostracised by both parties (Phuntsho 2000: 104). These myths are exacerbated by the real fear that India could annex Bhutan as it did to Sikkim. The minority Nepalese overtook the Lepcha and Bhutia as the majority, resulting in political and social turmoil that ultimately prompted the incorporation of Sikkim into India (Hiltz 2003: 82).

Determined to modernise but equally tenaciously straddling tradition and modernity (Basu 1996: 88), the RGB privileges Drukpa culture. However, this is problematic considering Bhutan’s geopolitical position and ethnic composition (Huntington 1968: 155; Geertz 1973: 277). In any decentralisation and modernisation process, ethnic groups emerge as intermediate levels of identification (Horowitz 1994: 51), between local kinship groupings and the “maximal collectivity” of the nation (Tambiah 1996: 335). Correspondingly, the status of the Lhotshampa has changed over time. Until 1958 their presence was acknowledged, but their civic participation was limited. However, the 1958 citizenship act integrated them into Bhutanese society, albeit with restrictions at higher levels of government (Rustomji 1978: 86). From the late 1970s the RGB began to enforce a Drukpa-centred ethnic vision, which led to heightened tensions. This tension between the government and the Lhotshampa reached its climax in the early 1990s when as a result of escalating violence and atrocities an estimated 90,000 people left the country, taking up residence predominantly in refugee camps set up by the UNHCR in South East Nepal, despite having lived in Bhutan for several generations (Amnesty International 2002: 2; Kharat 2005: 164-170).

2.4 The politics of citizenship in systematic disenfranchisement John Scott and Gordon Marshall’s (2009: 80) definition of citizenship states that “[i]t is argued by historians that citizenship has expanded with democratization to include a wider definition of the citizen regardless of sex, age, or ethnicity [...] and gradually 32 become identified more with rights than obligations.” Bhutan depends on its reinforcement and maintenance of an ethnicised national identity, given the geographical dispersal of its land. What the landscape of settlement suggests is that the current identities of the various ethnic groups have complex histories. On this basis one can then imagine a language made dominant through regional power dynamics and layering onto other existing languages. Regional dominant languages, such as Ngalop in west Bhutan, Bumthap in central Bhutan, and Tsangla in east Bhutan, gained ascendancy but did not totally displace other languages (van Driem 1994: 99). Thus, a layered model emerges, where subordinate local groups, dominated by a larger regional identity such as Ngalop, Bumthap, and Tsangla, are finally overlain with a national layer, with the Drukpa language Dzongkha extending across to encompass the entire country.

With regard to the south of Bhutan, this model is more challenging to apply. A number of authors (for example, Sinha 1998: 39) have mentioned the existence of a boundary to the north of the area of Nepali settlement, beyond which they were not permitted to settle or own land. Morris (1935) provided an early reference that a line had been fixed beyond which the Nepali were not permitted to settle, but he understood that “the people knew nothing of this”, and in practice there was little to prevent a continued movement northward. However, he emphasised the degree to which the ‘Nepalese’ and ‘Bhutanese’ were isolated from each other, and rejected the idea of the “Bhutanese being pushed” by the Nepalese because a wide strip of uninhabited land lay between them (Morris 1935: 207). Leo Rose describes the Bhutanese authorities’ initial policy as “to isolate the Nepali Bhutanese as completely as possible from the rest of Bhutan’s society by restricting them to southern Bhutan” (Rose 1977: 47). He believes that, although this had the desired effect of minimizing interaction, it also had negative consequences, because it populated the area of Bhutan most susceptible to rapid economic development and ideological penetration from India with a community that had not been integrated, either socially or politically, into the broader Bhutanese society. Most of them resided in villages which were as classically Nepali Hindu as any in Nepal, harbouring at least some sense of alienation from the broader society in which they lived and the government which ruled over them (Rose 1977: 47ff; Zeppa 1999).

More recently, Michael Hutt (2003: 62) has written about the agreements on the northern limit of the ‘Nepali area’ that were reached at local level at several places in the foothills of southern Bhutan. He writes of having photographed a handwritten Nepali document,

33 dated 30 March 1925, which recorded that an official from Thimphu was sent to a village in the Daga district, accompanied by a headman named Makhudas to settle a dispute between Nepali farmers and Drukpa landowners. However, Thinley (1994: 55) records that the boundary restriction was lifted by a resolution of the 43rd National Assembly of Bhutan in 1975. Nevertheless, varied accounts point to the isolation of the two ethnic communities, possibly as a result of an historical accident. Hutt (2003: 62) states that, after all, it is clear that the ‘Nepalese’ moved into a part of Bhutan from which ‘Bhutanese’ were almost entirely absent, except as seasonal visitors. From an early stage, however, instances of conflict over land use seem to have arisen, especially when ‘Bhutanese’ pastoralists brought their flocks and herds south during winter months or when ‘Nepalese’ graziers took theirs north during the summer (White 1971: 113).

2.4.1 Land ownership in the democratisation process If one considers that systems of administration and governance did not become uniform throughout Bhutan until national plans for development were implemented in the early 1960s, the role of land ownership in the dynamics of citizenship becomes very interesting.

Historically land was held in private ownership for the most part, although other arrangements existed alongside private property ownership. Monastic estates, and estates belonging to the handful of nobility, were worked by tenured serfs and slaves. The generally accepted view is that Bhutan was a feudal society until general manumission in 1956 (Mathur 1996: 47), much like Europe was in the Middle Ages before the Enlightenment. However, the tenurial system and property rights in Bhutan can hardly be labelled as feudal. Rather, this may well have been a conclusion reached following Eurocentric modes of reasoning, possibly because scholars have tended to look to Tibet for explanation. While there were strong religious and cultural influences from Tibet, Tibetan systems were not wholly transplanted onto Bhutan. Rather, a hybridity between “roots” and “routes” (Clifford 1997) of rooted cultures and cultures on the move offer a more intricate understanding.

For Bloch (1961), feudalism comprises “a subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (that is the fief) instead of salary [...] supremacy of a class of specialised warriors; and [...] fragmentation of authority.” In this vein, pre-modern Bhutan had a subject peasantry who was heavily taxed in kind and labour by the state. State authority

34 was increasingly fragmented after the death of the first Shabdrung and forms the basis for Michael Aris (1994b) to describe pre-modern Bhutan as composed of fiefdoms ruled by regional governors under limited authority of the centre. However, there never was service tenement nor had Bhutan ever had a knighthood, but rather a “church bureaucracy” (Carrasco Pizana 1959) to administer public legal and financial matters. According to Strayer (1968: 12) it is only when the “rights of government and not merely political influence are attached to lordships and fiefs that one can speak of fully developed feudalism.”

Considering there were 700 to 5,000 serf/slave families (Karan and Jenkins 1963: 31; Rose 1977: 127), all of whom were granted manumission by the third king in 1956 (Mathur 1996: 47), they would have formed only about 10 per cent of the population. The others were mostly kheap (Dzongkha: free peasants) who paid taxes to the government. Hence, rights in property have always been held in private hands.

2.4.2 Law – customary and national After 1953, the distinction between private and public property was legalised through the Supreme Laws (Ura 1995). Customary law was overlain with various national legislation; however, this does not mean that customary laws disappeared entirely. At the local level, customs still determine everyday decisions in many significant ways. For instance, village sacred groves and forests, which may not be distinguished from other forests by state laws, are protected by customary laws.

Agrarian custom was never a fact. It was ambience. It may be understood with the aid of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ – a lived in environment comprised of practices, inherited expectations, rules [...] norms, and sanctions. [...] Within this habitus all parties strove to maximise their own advantages. Each encroached upon the usages of others. (Thompson 1991: 102)

In Bhutan, this is also the nexus where customs meet formal laws and are negotiated, contested and used. Thus to acknowledge the existence of only one system would deny history to a rich process. For instance, to look at the Forest Act (1969) and to assume forest usage existing on the ground as legislated in the act would be an incomplete picture. However, the general effect of the legislation resulted in private property in general or

35 forests in particular being measured, recorded, and titled in a systematic way. Consequently, the schemes should be seen as an exercise in “administrative ordering” and making legible a complex society. Until the 1960s, the government did not intervene in local resource use and management choices. However, this has increasingly been regulated by the state. Peasants legally lost common property resources such as pastures and community forests through such legislation. However, the state’s lack of resources to completely monitor and enforce the legislation has created space for peasants to continue managing the resources within certain constraints imposed by legislation.

2.5 Changes to citizenship legislation The southern part of Bhutan, inhabited mainly by Lhotshampa, had run its own affairs for more than half a century with minimal contact with the northern part of Bhutan inhabited by Drukpa Buddhists. From 1952 onwards, the two parts of Bhutan were brought much closer together. Lhotshampa entered government service and began to occupy some senior positions in the administration and sometimes even represented the kingdom overseas (Rose 1977; Sinha 1998). Om Pradhan, for example, was the Permanent Representative of Bhutan to the United Nations from 1980-1984 and 1998-2003 (Sinha 1998: 188). However, in the 1980s this impetus to integrate the Southerners slowed down.

With the introduction of the Nationality Law of Bhutan (1958) a foreigner could become a Bhutanese citizen by presenting a petition and an oath of loyalty “according to the rules laid down by the official”. The foreign wife of a Bhutanese national could become a national herself if she took an oath of loyalty “to the satisfaction of the official concerned” (Hutt 2003: 147). At the time this law was enacted by the National Assembly, all Nepalis who had taken up residence in Bhutan before 1958 were granted citizenship. In one instance, Nari Rustomji reports, Prime Minister Jigme Dorji informed the Lhotshampa that if they wanted to stay in Bhutan, they would have to work and contribute to the development of the country. However, if they did not, then it was advisable to go back (1978: 141).

Since the 1960s Lhotshampa memories are dominated by the work they contributed to the massive infrastructure schemes of Bhutan’s first FYP (1961-6). Large numbers of migrant workers were recruited and deployed on various infrastructure projects. Part of

36 the overall development programme also included resettlement schemes that were targeted at landless people.

The 1958 nationality law and subsequent legal practice implied that the non-citizen Lhotshampa living legally in Bhutan would be able to attain citizenship reasonably easily. However, a new Citizenship Act formulated in 1977 has made the conditions for attaining citizenship more difficult. An applicant had to have been in government service for 15 rather than 5 years or resided for 20 instead of previously 10 years in Bhutan. Moreover, non-Bhutanese wives now had to apply for citizenship as any other foreigner, as had been the case for foreign husbands since 1958. Applicants also had to demonstrate knowledge of Dzongkha, both spoken and written, as well as of Bhutan’s history. The Marriage Act of 1980 however introduced punitive measures against Bhutanese, who married non- Bhutanese, including a stop to further promotion for government servants, no access to new land, cash loans, grants of seeds, livestock schemes, or medical treatment abroad (Hutt 2003: 148). Equally, all support for education and training was revoked in case of such a marriage, requiring the refund of any support received, even before the marriage.

The third act of nationality and citizenship was passed in 1985. The requirement for the duration of residency did not alter, however, the level of documentary evidence was tightened and children of parents where one parent was non-Bhutanese did not enjoy immediate citizenship anymore, but had to fulfil the same criteria as all other applicants. Additionally, applicants now had to be fully fluent in Dzongkha and demonstrate a good knowledge of the culture, customs, traditions and history of Bhutan; these skills were assessed by written tests (Hutt 2003: 148).

2.6 Unbecoming Bhutanese These three acts of 1977, 1980 and 1985 had an obvious and therefore intentional effect almost exclusively on the Lhotshampa, for whom it was quite common to seek a wife from India or Nepal. However, these acts appear not to have had a major impact, until they were brought into effect in the census exercise of 1988. There had been censuses prior to 1988; however, their main purpose had been to ensure issues like tax revenue and issuing of identity cards.

37 Thinley (1996: 245) claims the 1988 census was implemented because it had come to the RGB’s attention that there were great numbers of illegal immigrants in Southern Bhutan; however, it resulted in the explicit policy of “Bhutanisation” of the Lhotshampa. The census exercise created great insecurity amongst people, many of whom were faced with the prospect of losing their citizenship. The allocation of Lhotshampa into seven separate categories (F1-F7) of which only the first, F1, applied to “Genuine Bhutanese”, was seen as a highly discriminatory and iniquitous exercise, since it was not as strictly or pervasively applied to other groups (Rizal and Yokota 2006: 102). One particular requirement was a receipt from 1958 showing tax had been paid for land holdings. Failure to produce this 30-year old document was grounds for immediate classification as F7, a migrant and illegal settler. A second document, the Certificate of Origin, was required for people who had moved to a different block16 or district after 1958, as was typically the case for women. These people had to return to their places of birth to acquire this certificate from the authorities there. If it could not be procured, the person was liable to be registered as F7. Moreover, the 1988 census meant that a number of individuals lost the Bhutanese citizenship they had previously been granted (Hutt 2003: 156).

Another indication of the purpose of the census is that the teams came repeatedly to the same villages and often re-categorised, that is, downgraded, individuals, even from the F1 category. It was often seen that members of the same family were placed in separate categories (Hutt 2003: 156). As cultural policies discriminating against the Lhotshampa were introduced in parallel, resistance to the government arose in southern Bhutan. The returning census teams were then used against suspected dissidents and their families. While the government maintained that masses of Nepalese had infiltrated the South and taken advantage of its economic prosperity, Lhotshampa maintain this as improbable, as every movement of theirs outside of the block had to be registered with district officials who would issue very narrowly defined and timed permits. So systematic was the monitoring, they assert, that mass immigration going unnoticed was impossible (Hutt 2003: 158).

16 A block is an administrative sub-division of a district in some South Asian countries. In Bhutan a block comprises a cluster of villages represented by a gup, headman, and is called a gewog. 38 2.6.1 The routes to democracy and the growth of dissent In 1989, concerns about the census were conveyed to the King by two Royal Advisory Councillors elected to represent the south in an appeal requesting that the ‘cut-off date’ for citizenship be altered from 1958 to 1985, the year the new Citizenship Act came into force. Hutt (2003) reports the government’s response was to imprison one of the Councillors, Tek Nath Rizal, for three days on a charge of sedition. Rizal subsequently fled to Nepal where he joined other dissidents, who had established the ‘People’s Forum for Human Rights’ and printed a pamphlet entitled Bhutan: We Want Justice. This 5,000- word document played a crucial role in influencing the manner in which the Bhutanese government responded to dissent in the years that followed.

Bhutan’s sixth FYP (1987-92) included a policy of ‘One nation, One people’ and introduced a code of traditional Drukpa dress and etiquette called Driglam Namzha (Ura 1994: 247) as an ‘elaborate choreography of deference’ (Aris 1994a: 17-18). The dress element of this code required all citizens to wear the gho (a knee-length robe for men) and the kira (an ankle-length dress for women) in the following contexts: inside and outside Dzong premises (fortress-monasteries now used as centres of district administration), at all government offices, schools, official functions and “public congregations” (RGB 1992: appendix). This rule, it is now admitted by the Bhutanese authorities, was applied far beyond the letter of the decree, to the extent that many Bhutanese could not venture out of their homes in their everyday attire without facing the prospect of a fine or imprisonment (Hutt 1992: 7).

Government policy of denying nationality to Lhotshampa was justified largely by claims that many of them were, in fact, very recent illegal immigrants taking advantage of Bhutan’s open border with India and its generous hospitality. On the other hand, the Lhotshampa point to more than a century of continuous residence in Bhutan to justify their claims to nationality.

With tensions growing since the 1980s, in autumn 1990 demonstrations were held by the Lhotshampa that the Bhutanese authorities viewed as violent, anti-national activities and reacted to severely. The aftermath of the demonstrations led to the exodus of the Lhotshampa during the early 1990s (Joseph C. 1996: 205). The government does not deny that a mass exodus took place. However, it contests that large numbers of genuine citizens were compelled to leave by Bhutanese security forces. It asserts that they were illegal

39 immigrants, who agreed to depart after receiving full compensation for land which they had illegally occupied, and that they were persuaded or coerced by anti-national organisations, who sought to create a distorted image of expulsion and mass displacement, to make claims to that effect. This version of voluntary migration is strongly contested by refugees and human rights organisations, who argue that many refugees were forced into signing migratory forms under severe threat and physical coercion (Hart 2001: 18).

The southern Bhutanese, who left the country, have consistently claimed they were subjected to a wide range of abuse by the security forces, including arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial, torture, intimidation, and house demolition. In reported cases, those who left the country claimed that they did so as a result of some form of threat or assault (Amnesty International 2002: 2). It has been widely alleged that even those Lhotshampa, who were classified as F1 (genuine Bhutanese), became subject to a range of discriminatory practices including expulsion during the 1990s. One such way of discriminating is through the system of No Objection Certificates (NOCs) that was introduced in 1990 following the demonstrations. These certificates, which are necessary for accessing educational services, government employment and obtaining business licenses and passports, are granted only to those individuals who have no connection to so-called anti-national activities, including relatives’ actions.

Due to the wide-reaching impact of the NOCs the situation for the remaining Lhotshampa in Bhutan remains dire. They cannot engage in communication with their friends or relatives who have left Bhutan, because they risk losing their NOCs and access to essential resources (Sinha 1998: 240). This curtailing of civil liberties is paradoxical to the purportedly human friendly GNH policy.

2.7 The GNH of democracy in Bhutan The recent “unprecedented and historic transition” (Wangchuck 2008) of the Buddhist kingdom into a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary representation also prefigured a comprehensive upgrading of the GNH philosophy. In the absence of a highly resolved, consensual definition of happiness, and despite early doubts by observers on the challenges of operationalising GNH, Bhutan has developed a methodology that has been incorporated into national policy as the GNH Index. The purpose of this is to reflect GNH 40 values, set benchmarks, and track policies and the performance of the country. For Johannes Hirata happiness-inspired policy recommendations are neither illegitimate nor illusory, provided that “they are submitted as justified suggestions to the democratic decision making process” (2005: 18). It is at this interface of legitimacy of democratic processes and beneficial outcomes for the people that the GNH Index is articulated. Its aim is to serve as a tool for democratic transparency and accountability by its nature of being quantifiable. The desired focus is on values to ensure “we are able to recognize Bhutanese character irrespective of how far we look back into the past or into the future” (Wangchuck 2008). However, the preceding disenfranchisement of the Lhotshampa means they have been edited out of this ‘Bhutanese character’. This appears incongruous if the fourth King “believed in the legitimacy of public deliberation, public discussion, and public opinion in defining any goal, including GNH, through democracy and enlightened citizenship” (Ura 2008).

What emerges is that the law is a form of symbolic force that “provide[s] the dominant class with what Max Weber terms ‘a theodicy of its own privilege’” (Bourdieu 1977: 188). Bhutan’s policy aimed at ensuring firm control over the kingdom has centred on two complementary measures: Firstly, Bhutan has implemented a purportedly Buddhist- inspired GNH policy, which concentrates the resources and civil rights in the hands of an ethno-centric elite (Sinha 1998: 224). Indeed, the GNH policy has been much extolled by academics, notably in the West, as an alternative to liberal capitalistic development, while ignoring the impact it had on sections of the Bhutanese society. Secondly, the introduction of this concept coincided with the implementation of national integration programmes under the umbrella of “One Nation, One People” (Rizal and Yokota 2006: 107). Simultaneously, a revision of citizenship rights was undertaken, converting large numbers of indigenous residents into aliens legitimately subject to expulsion. Yet, studies of GNH policies maintain a veil of silence over the status of these refugees.

2.8 Does the GNH tantamount to a denial of ethnic cleansing? GNH served two purposes: (i) internationally it served as a distraction from what was happening to the Lhotshampa in Bhutan and (ii) internally it demonstrated to the Bhutanese that they have an original culture that needed protection. This became the

41 centre around which efforts to preserve and protect Bhutanese culture could be constructed.

If Gross National Happiness, a measure of national well-being, is a development concept based in Bhutan’s particular circumstances, how then is it possible for such mass-scale ethnic displacement to take place in a country that insists that “[t]he key to happiness is to be found, once basic material needs have been met, in the satisfaction of non-material needs and in emotional and spiritual growth” (RGB 1999: 46)? Yet, neighbouring Nepal was to host over 100,000 Lhotshampa refugees whose return Bhutan has rejected.

However, overcoming the impasse of negotiations between Nepal and Bhutan to reconcile the situation of the refugees is the recent offer of permanent residence by third countries (UNHCR 2007b). Many refugees have initially been reluctant to accept this and those who have welcomed it have been intimidated to rescind the offers. This open opposition to the third country resettlement was motivated by the perception that accepting resettlement would deem the refugees were no longer interested in returning to Bhutan, while it would tantamount to legitimizing the RGB’s actions. However, resettlement activity began in 2008 and since then groups of Bhutanese have arrived in several countries, including in Australia. A recent academic report provides resettlement statistics as of March 2014: 88,841 Bhutanese refugees have resettled to third countries and 28,735 remain in the camps, of whom 7,206 have not expressed interest in resettlement (Banki and Phillips 2014: 5).

The next chapter gives a brief overview of the global refugee challenge and of the role of Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), before it considers resettlement of refugees in third countries. Following a concise history of the resettlement of refugees in Australia, current policy is detailed and its reliance on the ‘third sector’ of non-governmental organisations implementing the actual provision of services is discussed in order to provide the necessary background and context for the fieldwork data presented in this thesis.

CHAPTER 3 – RESETTLEMENT SERVICES IN AUSTRALIA

43 3 Refugee Resettlement in Australia

Following the historical background of the Bhutanese refugee situation and announcement of a resolution strategy through third-country resettlement, this chapter will give the challenges of the global refugee situation and UNHCR durable solutions, including refugee resettlement, broader consideration, before concentrating on refugee resettlement in Australia.

3.1 Refugees There is a precondition for the emergence of refugees, as well as asylum-seekers: humans living together in communities, whether settled or not. However, the increasing clustering of groups living together with the advent of agriculture has intensified communal relations and it is likely that some members were forcibly expelled from these communities. The earliest historical references to this are perhaps in the form of texts written 3,500 years ago during the blossoming of the great Hittite, Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian empires of the Middle East about the assistance provided to people fleeing persecution (UNHCR 2012: 3).

The current definition of a refugee is set out in Article 1A (2) of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, as any person who

owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (United Nations 1951: 14)

The United Nations (UN) General Assembly established the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) with effect from 1st January 1951 by UN General Assembly Resolution 319 (IV) passed on 3rd December 1949 (UNHCR 2011b: 3). This agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect

44 refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. As part of its mandate, the UNHCR has broadened the definition to recognise

as refugees persons who are outside their country of nationality or habitual residence and unable to return there owing to serious and indiscriminate threats to life, physical integrity or freedom resulting from generalized violence or events seriously disturbing public order. (UNHCR 2011b: 19)

While in public discourse frequently conflated, refugees and asylum-seekers differ in their right to protection in that a refugee is recognised in the need for protection, whereas an asylum-seeker only has access to temporary protection, usually until the claim for asylum has been processed and decided on by a nation state. This means that not every asylum-seeker will ultimately be recognized as a refugee. The obverse is the case, however, namely that every refugee in such countries is initially an asylum-seeker (UNHCR 2011b: 407). Therefore, once the status has been determined, “those judged not to be refugees, nor to be in need of any other form of international protection, can be sent back to their home countries” (UNHCR 2012: 6).

3.2 UNHCR UNHCR’s primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. In its efforts to achieve this objective, the Office strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another state, and to return home voluntarily. By assisting refugees to return to their own country or to settle permanently in another country, UNHCR also seeks lasting solutions to their plight (UNHCR 2014b: 2).

As of end of December 2013 there were 42,876,586 people of concern to the High Commissioner (UNHCR 2014b: 2). Among them, there are 16.7 million refugees, of which 11.7 million fall under UNHCR’s mandate and 86% of whom are hosted in developing countries. (UNHCR 2014c: 2). This is the highest level of refugees since 2001 (UNHCR 2014c: 11).

Of special concern to the UNHCR are protracted refugee situations, which it defines “as one in which 25,000 or more refugees of the same nationality have been in exile for five years or longer in a given asylum country” (UNHCR 2014c: 12). At the time of writing,

45 the latest available comprehensive statistics indicate that in 2013 the number of protracted situations based on this definition totalled 33, with an estimated 6.3 million refugees (54%) living in 27 different host countries (UNHCR 2014c: 12). The current number of refugees in protracted situations is significantly higher than in the early 1990s and the average duration has increased from nine years to almost 20 years in the same time frame, indicating that these situations are lasting longer (Loescher and Milner 2009: 9).

3.2.1 UNHCR funding UNHCR relies on a range of funding sources and mechanisms for its nearly USD 3 billion budget in 2013 (UNHCR 2014b: 2). However, of interest to this thesis is a glimpse into UNHCR’s private-sector fundraising strategy, which contributed a total of USD 110.5 million in 2013 (UNHCR 2014b: 94). Surpassing for the first time the USD 100 million mark, the largest share of private-sector contributions was generated through face-to-face fundraising (UNHCR 2014b: 94). In this context, Australia for UNHCR motivated a total number of 70,000 active Australian donors to raise USD 18.2 million, which was the second largest contribution of any of the UNHCR’s national fundraising partners (UNHCR 2014b: 94).

3.2.2 UNHCR resettlement programme Seeking and providing durable solutions is an essential element of international protection, which requires identifying and actioning plans to end the cycle of displacement in order to allow refugees to lead normal lives. UNHCR’s mandate for the protection of refugees is focused on developing and providing durable solutions to refugee problems, which the organisation approaches with three complementary major strategies. The three types of durable solutions are:

i. Voluntary repatriation, in which refugees return in safety and with dignity to their country of origin and re-avail themselves of national protection;

ii. Local integration, in which refugees legally, economically and socially integrate in the host country, availing themselves of the national protection of the host government;

46 iii. Resettlement, in which refugees are selected and transferred from the country of refuge to a third State which has agreed to admit them as refugees with permanent residence status. (UNHCR 2011b: 28)

The three solutions above are listed in a ranked order of preference, that is, repatriation is seen – provided appropriate safeguards are in place – as the most beneficial solution, followed by integration into the host society and resettlement as the last solution, which is of particular relevance to refugees in protracted situations (UNHCR 2011b: 41). One reason for resettlement to appear as the least favourable of the solutions would be the limited capability, both in terms of resettlement processing and places provided by recipient countries. Nevertheless, resettlement is an invaluable protection tool and durable solution for refugees under UNHCR’s mandate whose life, liberty, safety, health or fundamental human rights are at risk (UNHCR 2011b: 4).

3.2.2.1 Definition of resettlement Resettlement involves the selection and transfer of refugees from a State in which they have sought protection to a third State which has agreed to admit them – as refugees – with permanent residence status. The status provided ensures protection against refoulement and provides a resettled refugee and his/her family or dependants with access to rights similar to those enjoyed by nationals. Resettlement also carries with it the opportunity to eventually become a naturalized citizen of the resettlement country. (UNHCR 2011b: 3)

Resettlement, however, has far wider ramifications that the simple relocation of refugees to a third country, which is just the first step towards a durable solution. Firstly, resettlement requires a long-term commitment because for refugees in protracted situations it is envisioned over a period of several years. Secondly, it involves processes of being received and integrated within a new society. In order for resettlement to be effective, receiving countries must offer refugees adequate support and opportunities to facilitate their integration into the new society (UNHCR 2013d: 11). Accordingly, effective resettlement is not evaluated only how many refugees in need of resettlement have access to this solution each year, but also how well they are received and supported in the process of becoming full participants in their new communities (UNHCR 2013d: 11).

47 There is, then, a substantial effort and commitment required by receiving third countries, which need to implement a range of programmes that support the reception and integration of resettled refugees. The best results are achieved through close coordination, cooperation and collaboration between the receiving countries and partners, including the UNHCR and the active participation of refugees in all stages of the process. The resettlement process usually includes a pre-departure preparation, as for example the Australian Cultural Orientation (AUSCO) programme provided through the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) on behalf of the Australian Government (UNHCR 2013e: 9). Following arrival in the destination country access to a range of services will enhance the programme’s success: financial and housing assistance; health care; opportunities for language training, skills development, and employment; the support of communities in the resettlement countries, including the availability of services tailored to vulnerable groups; and the coordination and engagement of all relevant governmental authorities, particularly at the local level.

Resettlement is a life-changing experience that is both challenging and rewarding. Refugees difficult life trajectories indicate resilience and they generally exhibit a high level of motivation only to rebuild their own lives and also to make contributions to their local communities (Tazreiter 2012: 43). Nevertheless, there is an expectation that UNHCR field offices inform refugees that in their resettlement countries there will be high expectations on them to enter the job market at any available level, including early employment into positions which may be below their professional training and qualifications (UNHCR 2011b: 395). While humanitarian motivations to resettle refugees are important, there is also a perception among many resettlement countries that refugee resettlement as part of their general migration programmes is valuable to their societies (UNHCR 2011b: 7). Hence, providing for their effective reception and integration is beneficial for both the resettled refugee and the receiving country.

3.2.2.2 Resettlement countries The number of countries offering resettlement programmes has grown significantly in recent years, from 14 in 2005 to reach 27 resettlement countries17 in 2013 (UNHCR

17 Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Belgium (implementation in 2013), Bulgaria (implementation in 2014 onwards), Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary (implementation in 2013 onwards), Iceland, Ireland, Japan (pilot programme), the Netherlands, New 48 2014b: 61). Other countries may also accept refugees for resettlement on an ad hoc basis in response to special appeals.

There is a core of what are considered “traditional” resettlement countries that have long‐ standing programmes, namely: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) and the United States of America (UNHCR 2013b: 6). Other countries have established programmes over the last decade, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and the United Kingdom. However, since 2007 14 new countries18 have indicated their readiness to receive a limited number of resettlement submissions from UNHCR, all of which but Italy and Luxembourg have formally announced the establishment of resettlement programmes: Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and Uruguay (UNHCR 2013b: 6). Moreover, the European Union announced in 2012 to offer a joint resettlement scheme, which aims to increase resettlement places and enhance practical cooperation in resettlement amongst EU Member States (UNHCR 2013a).

Nevertheless, this increased number of countries has not resulted in a significant increase in the number of resettlement places, which stands at approximately 80,000 places available annually. New resettlement countries are initially able to offer only a very limited number of places, as they require time and resources to build capacity to develop and implement resettlement programmes.

Overall, three countries, the United States of America, Australia and Canada, provide nearly ninety per cent of global resettlement places, while European Union countries provide about 6 per cent. Four Latin American countries continue to offer a small number of resettlement places mainly for Colombian refugees from the region, and in Asia, Japan is the only resettlement country, implementing a small pilot programme.

Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, the United States of America. 18 A number of these countries previously had refugee resettlement programmes in the 1980s and 1990s (UNHCR 2013b: 6). 49 3.2.3 Some key UNHCR resettlement statistics For 2014, UNHCR has estimated the global resettlement needs at around 691,000 persons, which does not include a projection of the resettlement needs of Syrian refugees due to the rapidly evolving situations surrounding the Syrian Arab Republic that might result in massive outflows of refugees into neighbouring countries (UNHCR 2013d: 8). Given there are approximately 80,000 resettlement places available annually, needs continue to outpace available resettlement places by about nine to one.

In 2012, UNHCR proposed over 74,800 refugees for resettlement consideration in third countries, including more than 9,900 Bhutanese in refugee camps in Nepal, who have been in the top five of resettlement groups since their resettlement commenced in 2007 (UNHCR 2013d: 6). Compared to the total number of 10.5 million refugees under UNHCR’s mandate in 2012 (UNHCR 2013c: ), only less than 0.7% were departing for resettlement in a third country.

In 2013, UNHCR offices in 80 countries submitted over 93,200 refugees to countries for resettlement consideration, including around 7,100 from Bhutan, and some 71,600 departed with UNHCR’s assistance (UNHCR 2014b: 20-21). Around 90 per cent of these refugees resettled in 2013 were admitted by United States of America, Australia, and Canada (UNHCR 2014b: 20-21). According to government statistics collated by UNHCR approximately 26,200 refugees were resettled through other channels, such as the Australian Special Humanitarian Programme and similar schemes mostly in Canada and the United States of America, bringing the total resettlement numbers during 2013 for the 21 admitting countries to approximately 98,400 refugees (UNHCR 2014b: 3). This means that approximately 0.6% of refugees under the UNHCR mandate were resettled with its assistance, and considering the total number of estimated refugees of 16.7 million, the total global resettlement ratio was comparable (UNHCR 2014c: 2).

3.2.4 UNHCR assisted resettlement of the Bhutanese in Nepal One of the longest-running protracted refugee situations in Asia, resettlement of the Bhutanese from Nepal reached a major milestone in April 2013, with 100,000 people submitted for consideration by third countries. At the end of 2013, nearly 80,000 of them have commenced a new life in eight different countries (UNHCR 2013d: 7). This level of resettlement of the Bhutanese in the protracted situation in Nepal is possible because it is

50 supported through a Core Group of States for group processing19 to the United States and individual processing to other resettlement countries. Five camps in Nepal have been closed in the meantime, with only the Beldangi and Sanischare camps in eastern Nepal remaining open. The refugee population from Bhutan in UNHCR administered camps has reduced from a peak of 112,263 persons in 2002 to 30,977 persons by the end of 2013 (UNHCR 2014d). The resettlement programme in Nepal scaled down in 2012 due to increasing case complexities, and is set to decrease further in 2014 to a projected number of 7,320 individual submissions (UNHCR 2013d: 48).

The recent most available comprehensive UNHCR resettlement statistics indicate that during 2012 a total of 38,020 refugees (9,923 persons, or 26% from Bhutan) were submitted from the Asia and the Pacific region for consideration by 15 resettlement countries and Australia received the second largest contingent (14%) of those (UNHCR 2013d: 43). 16,674 Bhutanese departed for third country resettlement from Nepal in 2012 (UNHCR 2013d: 76).

Overall, the United States has accepted the largest number of refugees (66,134), followed by Canada (5,376), Australia (4,190), New Zealand (747), Denmark (746), Norway (546), the Netherlands (326) and the United Kingdom (317) (UNHCR 2013d: 51). The acceptance rate of UNHCR’s referrals in Nepal by resettlement countries is the highest in the world – at 99.4 per cent of total submissions in 2012 and with rates as high as 99.8% in 2010 (UNHCR 2011a: 4; 2013d: 51).

3.3 Refugee resettlement in Australia The resettlement of persecuted people in Australia can be traced back as far as 1838, when German Lutherans, persecuted for their faith by King Frederick William III of Prussia (3 August 1770 – 7 June 1840) made their voyage to South Australia (Harmstorf 2001: 360), merely two years after its proclamation as a British colony (Macintyre 2009: 79). The threat of persecution in Prussia largely ended with the death of Frederick William III and

19 The UNHCR Resettlement Handbook defines group processing thus: “Identifying groups in need of resettlement through UNHCR’s group methodology supplements individual identification and serves as an additional component of UNHCR’s resettlement and durable solution activities. [....] In practice, group processing involves a simplified large-scale processing of cases by UNHCR and resettlement States without requiring the full completion of individual Resettlement Registration Forms (RRFs). Considerable time is saved through the use of standardized abridged RRFs for groups” (UNHCR 2011b: 233-234). 51 by this time several hundred Lutherans had fled to South Australia and in 1845 their numbers exceeded 1,200 (Harmstorf 2001: 361).

The White Australia policy traces back to 1841, when first articulated by the permanent under-secretary for the colonies, James Stephen (Evans 2001: 44). Its ideology draws on notions of superiority and purity of the English race and the Australian gold-rush in the latter half of the nineteenth century magnified and intensified its exclusivist standpoint (Evans 2001: 45). Even before being enshrined in legislature after Federation in 1901 through the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, it had already been used in several of the colonies as an instrument of exclusion (Evans 2001: 44-45). The Act provided restrictions on health grounds and those considered insane or anyone likely to become a burden to the public or charitable institutions. Criminals and those of ‘dangerous character’ were excluded, as were manual labourers. While there rather cunningly was no direct reference to race or ethnicity in the Act, it enabled immigration officers to nominate applicants to undergo a written test in a language they were not familiar with and that the officer could specify (DIBP 2013b). Hence, the act with its severe measures being implemented in a xenophobic climate enabled a scrupulous implementation of the White Australia policy, which Prime Minister William Morris Hughes in 1919 hailed as “the greatest thing we have achieved” cited in (DIBP 2013b). The White Australia policy remained in force for over 70 years before being repealed by the Whitlam government in 1973 (Evans 2001: 48). The White Australia policy has thus significantly shaped immigration and resettlement to Australia. However, its impact up until the post-World War II humanitarian settlement is difficult to quantify.

Australia’s Humanitarian resettlement programme began in 1947, when Arthur Calwell, the first Minister for Immigration, signed an agreement with the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) that had been tasked by the United Nations to accept and annual minimum of 12,000 refugees (Jupp 2001a: 65). The IRO was responsible for approximately 11 million survivors of Nazi slave and concentration camps, many of whom were not willing to return to their previous home countries that had been absorbed by the Soviet Union (Jordens 2001: 65). Accordingly, these refugees were European and thus could be subsumed under the White Australia policy. Around 170,000 refugees from camps in Europe arrived in Australia until the IRO ceased its operations in the early 1950s to be replaced by the UNHCR (Jordens 2001: 66). At its peak during the financial year

52 1949-1950, the nearly 90,000 humanitarian arrivals accounted for nearly half of the entire Australian immigrant intake (RCOA 2014: 8).

In 1954 Australia ratified the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which applied only to events that had occurred before 1st January 1951; moreover, in accordance with its Immigration Restriction Act 1901 it exercised the option of limiting obligations to European refugees (Neumann 2004: 12). In 1973 Australia acceded to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which removed the 1951 Convention’s geographical and time limitations (Neumann 2004: 12). The relaxation of the White Australia policy since the mid-1960s,20 and especially following its abolishment in 1973, has changed refugee resettlement to Australia (Jordens 2001: 67). The first major non- European admissions were from Turkey and Lebanon, which had begun from the late 1960s, but a significant change was signalled in 1975 by the fall of Saigon marking the end of the Vietnam war, the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon and the annexation of East Timor by Indonesia (Jupp 2001b: 75). While the Whitlam Government had lifted immigration restrictions, they had had little net impact due to overall reduced numbers of intake. However, these events in 1975 required the newly elected Fraser Government to respond and led to a diversification of refugees (and immigrants in general), from a European focus to the Middle East and the Balkans and the Asia-Pacific region (Jupp 2001b: 78). The Indochinese refugee crisis prompted the Australian Government to introduce in 1977 a proactive refugee policy and administration, rather than the previously reactive approach to specific international events. The purpose was to establish a programme that would engage with the international community and develop efficient and fair mechanisms for refugee status determination.

The fundamental principles of sharing responsibility with other countries for protecting and finding solutions for refugees have persisted for well over 30 years. Australia provides support in accepting refugees and supporting refugee operations internationally through aid and capacity building, as well as through financial assistance to UNHCR. The Australian Humanitarian programme, which is an integral part of the overall immigration programme, is one of its cornerstones.

20 In an intriguing development, Cabinet had decided that “these changes should be made administratively, i.e. without public announcement” Cabinet minute, decision no. 481, 15 September 1964, A446 1970/95021, National Archives of Australia; cited in (Neumann 2004: 51). 53 Some of the key modification to the programme were the 1981 introduction of the Special Humanitarian Programme (SHP) in order “to provide resettlement in Australia for people who, while not identified as refugees, were living outside their home country, were subject to substantial discrimination amounting to a gross violation of human rights in their home country and had family or community ties to Australia” (DIBP 2013a: 13). The Woman at Risk and Emergency Rescue visa provisions were introduced in the late 1980s, followed by the Special Assistance Category (SAC) in 1991, which is available to groups of people in vulnerable situations that did not fit the other Australian categories of humanitarian resettlement, but who also had to have strong links with Australia. However, at the time of writing in 2014 no SAC visa categories were active.

Like the shifting composition of the Humanitarian Programme, many changes have occurred to policy and processing under the Program since its inception. The Programme has evolved and responded to changing environments, which has included hotly contested domestic political and public discourses about migration, ‘big’ Australia and especially on-shore protection in the form of ‘irregular maritime arrivals’, as the current euphemism indicates. In other words, “[t]he state also increasingly utilises a ‘politics of affect’ in generating negative emotions towards certain categories of immigrants who are deemed burdensome or unwanted” (Tazreiter 2013: 131). DIBP has, signalling their approach to dealing with asylum seekers arriving by sea, modified this term found in academic literature to ‘illegal maritime arrivals’ and this terminology extends to other government departments as well (DIAC 2009; DIBP 2014c). Nevertheless, Australian Government contributions to UNHCR reached its highest level in 2013 and 2014 contributions already accumulate to 74% of 2013 contributions as of 2 July 2014 (UNHCR 2014a). The refugee intake has been steady over the last decade at between 13,000 – 14,000 humanitarian programme visa grants (RCOA 2014: 9), except for the year 2012-2013, when the refugee (subclass 200) intake doubled to just over 12,000, bringing the total number up to 20,019 visa grants (DIBP 2013c). However, with a change of Government in September 2013, that increase was annulled and planning reduced to previous levels at 13,750 places since then (DIBP 2013a, 2014b; Neumann 2014). Moreover, as a proportion of the total immigrant intake, the humanitarian visa category has shrunk and stands at only half (5.5%) of the annual average of 10.7% for the period from 1977-78 to 2012-13 (RCOA 2014: 9).

54 3.3.1 Department of Immigration and Ethnic/Multicultural (and Indigenous) Affairs/Citizenship/Border Protection The Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) is the current name of the Australian Government Department responsible for managing the movement and settlement of people in and out of Australia, including the resettlement of refugees. Since its inception in 1945 the department’s name has gone through a range of permutations, ten to be precise, and one might argue so has a certain emphasis of its direction; these responsibilities have included local government, ethnic affairs, Indigenous affairs, multicultural affairs and citizenship (DIBP 2014a). As the subtitle above indicates, in the last 20 years alone it has gone through six iterations, reusing a previous name once.21 The department has overseen the entry of some 7.6 million immigrants from around 200 countries, including over 800,000 arrivals under the humanitarian programme (DIBP 2014a).

The migration programme in Australia consists of two main components, skilled and family migration and the humanitarian programme. Humanitarian settlement is split into two components depending on how the persons arrive in Australia. There are the ‘regular’ arrivals that are part of a planned and managed effort by DIBP, which form the offshore component, that is, they are recognised as refugees and processed for entry to Australia before travel. The second component is the onshore processing of people who have travelled to Australia and seek protection as asylum seekers. The onshore component is highly politicised and has gone through a range of different implementations. However, in its current form it takes a fairly punitive approach, especially for irregular maritime arrivals, who are put in detention and processed in centres outside Australia, or as has happened most recently, are forcibly towed away or returned to other countries’ authorities, including those from countries where the asylum seekers originally departed. This contested area is, however, not the focus of this thesis and will therefore not be explored any further than to give a rounded overview of migration and settlement in Australia (Pickering 2001; Tazreiter 2004; Every and Augoustinos 2007; Tazreiter 2010, 2012, 2013; Bui 2015; Lueck, Due et al. 2015).

The offshore component itself is further divided into two categories: Refugee and the Special Humanitarian Programme (SHP). The Refugee category is largely referred by the

21 DIEA (1993 – 1996), DIMA (1996 – 2001), DIMIA (2001 – 2006), DIMA (2006 – 2007), DIAC (2007 – 2013), and DIBP (2013 – current). 55 UNHCR. The SHP is intended to assist people who do not completely fall into the Refugee category, but who left their home country due to the experience of gross violation of their human rights. An SHP applicant needs, moreover, to be proposed by an eligible Australian resident, who is required to provide assistance (including financial) to the SHP applicant.

To facilitate a successful settlement in Australia, DIBP and the Department of Social Services (DSS) offers services to help new arrivals adjust to life in Australia in the early settlement period, with a focus on introducing clients to Australian cultural, social and legal norms. These programmes focus on building self-reliance, developing English language skills and fostering connections with mainstream services as soon as possible after arrival in Australia. Services are available for a range of migrants, especially those in rural areas or with low English skills through the two major programmes, the Adult Migrant English Programme (AMEP) and the Settlement Grants Programme, which offers funding to organisations for programs for capacity building for newly-arrived communities or that assist eligible new arrivals to become self-reliant and participate equitably in Australian society. AMEP is the largest and oldest settlement programme offered since 1948 and provides up to 510 hours of English language tuition to help them learn foundation English language and settlement skills, and can include eligible further tuition, for example to refugees who suffered trauma, to strengthen work readiness (Department of Industry 2014).

For refugees and other humanitarian entrants DSS provides the Humanitarian Settlement Services (HSS) programme, which with effect from 30th August 2013 are no longer available to a sizeable part of the onshore stream (DSS 2013). Humanitarian entrants are provided with far more intensive support than general migrants in recognition of the additional challenges they face due to their pre‐embarkation experiences. Nevertheless, as refugees also share needs with the wider Australian community, Government agencies concerned with employment, education and healthcare to name a few, are required to ensure that their services are accessible to refugees and other new migrants. However, a range of non-government and community groups are also involved in the delivery and provision of services.

56 3.3.2 Humanitarian Settlement Services (HSS) Program The HSS is designed to offer additional and complementary support to new humanitarian arrivals through a number of different programmes that aim to facilitate the transition of refugees from supported living in camps outside Australia to becoming self-supported and productive members of the nation. This begins with a pre-departure orientation programme, the Australian Cultural orientation (AUSCO), which is delivered by the IOM on behalf of DIBP.

The Humanitarian Settlement Services (HSS) program, which in 2011 replaced the Integrated Humanitarian Settlement Services (IHSS; from 2005-11) provides intensive settlement support to newly arrived humanitarian clients (usually six to twelve months) through a coordinated case management approach (UNHCR 2013e: 11). The overarching objectives of the program are to provide tailored on‐arrival support, to equip clients with the skills and knowledge they will need to independently access services beyond the initial settlement period, and to lay the foundations for participation in the social and economic life of Australia. For clients with exceptional or highly complex needs a Complex Case Support (CCS) system is in place. DIPB can refer individuals requiring particularly high levels of support to this programme, which has assisted only about 3 percent of humanitarian entrants (UNHCR 2013e: 12). Lastly, humanitarian entrants also have access to a free translating and interpreting service to assist participation in Australian society.

The delivery of these services is awarded by competitive tender to service provider organisations, many of which are from the not-for-profit sector, in 24 separate contract regions across Australia (UNHCR 2013e: 11). Volunteers form a valuable and important function in the effective service provision to new humanitarian entrants, while offering the service provider organisations greater flexibility, both in how they assist clients and in the level of volunteer involvement. Accordingly, the involvement and use of volunteers varies between different service provider organisations, as well as States and Territories. The main contracted services are: (i) case coordination, information and referrals; (ii) accommodation services; and (iii) torture and trauma counselling. HSS services are required to be delivered in accordance with a set of principles which enshrine culturally sensitive service delivery; flexible, tailored services; respect for clients and recognition of their strengths; and collaboration with other agencies (Richmond 2011: 114).

57 Case management coordinates the delivery of all services to clients and includes an assessment of client needs to deliver a customised set of relevant services. Case Management Plans are developed for each single client and family based on this comprehensive assessment. The services include: airport reception and transit assistance; initial accommodation, food and basic household goods provision; assistance with registrations at Centrelink, Medicare, banks, schools and an AMEP provider; and ensuring health needs are addressed. Clients are also given structured orientation programmes and assisted to participate in their local communities through links to local social, recreational and sporting organisations.

The HSS objective is to enable humanitarian clients to achieve sustainable and measurable settlement outcomes and exit from the programme is based on defined settlement outcomes. These include: long-term accommodation; being linked to the required services identified in their case management plan; school-age children enrolled and attending school; and ensuring clients are equipped to manage navigating life in Australia.

3.3.2.1 Quality of HSS delivery A recent Review of HSS delivery and management, commissioned by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship on 30th May 2011, has investigated and assessed the effectiveness of departmental oversight and management of the current HSS program. The overall conclusion of the report by David Richmond, AO, is that DIBP’s management and oversight of HSS is adequate and delivered effectively by professional and committed service provider organisations, but that there are significant gaps in a number of elements of HSS activity, including in the areas of quality assurance and risk management (Richmond 2011: 6-7). However, the report also emphasises that HSS “is a program under stress” (Richmond 2011: 7), because at a time of both increased demand and a significant change in the supply arrangements due to the replacement of IHSS with HSS, resource allocation was reduced rather than increased (Richmond 2011: 7). Richmond found continuity between the IHSS and HSS programmes and that despite a wider “evolution in philosophy and objectives of settlement services [...] from a largely ‘welfare’ to a ‘wellbeing’ model [...] there are still many different values and philosophies at work in the sector” (Richmond 2011: 7).

58 The views and philosophies in the sector are frequently competing and contradictory, ranging from “what some may consider, a paternalistic and long‐term approach to welfare and wellbeing in order to assist clients to settle, to a view from some clients, and others, that such an approach is disabling and impairing of clients in achieving successful settlement” (Richmond 2011: 28). Similarly polarising are concerns that especially the early phase of HSS is too intensive with government agency registrations, accommodation, and so on to be sorted out, while others see it as productive and necessary that humanitarian entrants are busy and engaged in their resettlement (Richmond 2011: 28). A related question raising a wide spectrum of responses centres around how much intensive support is required, as well as the regularity and availability of case workers and case managers (Richmond 2011: 28). Another criticism expressed by those consulted for the report highlighted HSS limitations that the programme will “too narrowly define the ambit of issues to be addressed and that broader connections to wider social and economic networks may not be facilitated by HSS, particularly as clients exit HSS (Richmond 2011: 28). The appropriate response, in Richmond’s view, on each of these issues “should depend on the client’s circumstances and needs consistent with the HSS approval of individual and family assessment and tailoring of responses to needs through Case Management Plans” (Richmond 2011: 28).

3.4 Recent challenges for Australian NGOs engaged in resettlement In Australia there is a sophisticated and diverse NGO sector engaged in refugee and immigration matters. The relative degree of NGO engagement with the government varies. Whereas some NGOs have close and cooperative relations with government for the provision of refugee-specific programs and services, others have retained a more distant and cautious approach to government (Tazreiter 2010).

With the coming to power of the Howard government in 1996, the portfolio of immigration underwent a fundamental realignment. In keeping with the neoliberal ideology of privatisation, the provision of services to new entrants to Australia, including refugee resettlement, was put to private tender in 1997 (Tazreiter 2010). DIBP22

22 At the time in 1997, the DIBP was named the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA; 1996-2001). 59 developed the HSS23 from 1997, as a national framework for improving humanitarian settlement services. The strategy aimed to make more effective use of settlement services for humanitarian entrants through partnerships with community organisations and improving links between settlement planning activities and service delivery.

Moreover, the non-government sector was shaken up with radical policy changes and cutbacks to resources, which had a severe impact on many NGOs (Maddison 2009). The NGO sector has a tradition of networks and extensive information sharing; however, due to the introduction of competitive funding, tensions began to emerge due to distrust and competitiveness. Additionally, the changes to the system through which state-based support or funding is made accessible to NGOs also require changes to their internal organisation that created a greater reliance on (repeated) government contracts, which increasingly included milestones or deliverables against which continuing of funding or its renewal were measured. This led to a more organisation centric focus, where at times the “interest of refugees and asylum seekers was secondary to tensions and rivalries between particular NGOs” (Tazreiter 2010: 206-7). Shamir (2008) asserts that in refugee resettlement the potential for NGOs ‘to do things better’ through effective partnerships has deteriorated due to a state policy of competitive contractualism, leading to what Shamir terms as the ‘economisation of civil society’. “Indeed, it is one of the contradictions of a shrinking state under neoliberal reform that the NGO, or ‘third’ sector, has proliferated, and become in some cases pseudo ‘agents of the state’” (Tazreiter 2010: 204).

The radical economic restructuring of the state and sectors of the economy and society reliant on direct state funding according to neoliberal principles has been characterised by substantial processes of deinstitutionalisation and decentralisation, resulting in a move towards economisation and privatisation, as well as corporatisation or re-corporatisation. As a corollary, a significant reliance on the voluntary sector, also called the ‘third sector’, has emerged to provide essential assistance previously provided by the state through a range of services, including the provision of settlement services for immigrant groups. These developments are, nevertheless, not unique to Australia, but rather follow a wider trend in industrialised nations, especially in the Anglo-American countries: “in most immigrant receiving nations the use of NGOs as an extension of the state is common”

23 At the time in 1997, the HSS was developed in its precursor form of Integrated Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (IHSS). 60 (Lampugnani 1997: 27). As early as 1986, a report by the Committee of Review of Migrant and Multicultural Programs and Services in Australia indicated the central importance of NGOs to welfare provision:

Psychological, ethno-cultural, religious and professional settlement authorities, among others, have become more responsible for refugees, more involved in governing their conduct and fate in light of conceptions of what is sane, normal, good and efficient. (Rose and Miller 1992: 175; cited in Lippert 1998: 391)

A new, hybrid form of association of mutual interdependency between the formerly disparate state and NGO sectors is seen emerging with this devolution of welfare responsibility from the state to various ‘non-political’ authorities. These associations, even though NGOs are key players, ultimately form a governmental network that makes resettling refugees possible. However, there is no explicit chain of command running through, for example, from the Minister of Immigration to refugee resettlement case workers, volunteers, members of the education and ‘psy’ professions and to refugees. Rather, there is a complex and loose assemblage of a diverse set of agents and authorities working towards completion of targets specified in the respective resettlement tender award and which as a consequence has a bearing on refugees’ lives. Each authority remains formally autonomous. The Minister of Immigration, for example, has no line management authority over volunteers or case workers from the service provider organisation. But the degree to which refugees can be resettled in desired ways, is the extent to which these associations can be implemented and how successfully the state’s ethopolitics (Rose 2000) can persuade these associations to embody the state’s desired parameters and outcomes for the resettlement process. Together these varied associations allow refugees to be ‘governed at a distance’ (Rose and Miller 1992) and create the desired environment to achieve specific goals, such as ‘successfully’ resettling a set number of refugees.

3.5 NGOs and the paradoxical remit of refugee resettlement The UNHCR annually proposes a quota of refugees from particular countries to be resettled in third countries as a permanent solution. A few countries, including Australia, participate in this programme. The annual intake for Australia has been fairly constant over the past two decades at an average of around 13,000 (RCOA 2014). Third country 61 resettlement is often understood as a process that begins with refugees applying for resettlement and ends with their arrival to a host nation. However, the process of resettlement does not terminate upon arrival in the host nation. Rather, this is the beginning of a long process for the refugees to rebuild their lives, familiarise, and adapt to the dynamic social, economic, and political environment of the new place.

In order to understand how the refugees engage with the new environment, it is important to examine how they are supported in this process of resettlement. It goes without saying that there is an asymmetry of power relations between the service providers and the resettling community. However, a perhaps not so evident layer is the subtly enacted but significantly impacting governmentality of the resettlement process, where the refugees’ life outlook is shaped and managed according to the neoliberal space they are resettled into.

Recent anthropological literature has examined the ambiguities that arise in the relationship between the state and citizens, residents and newcomers (Ong 2003; Fassin and d'Halluin 2005; Bloemraad 2006). Social inequalities are also explored via anthropological studies of socio-cultural barriers that refugees face in host communities, such as issues of language, religious practices, and cultural differences (Fadiman 1997; Haines 1997; Holtzman 2007). These barriers illuminate larger structural issues of the politics of identity and belonging and issues related to assimilation and integration (Zucker 1983; Holman 1996; McKinnon 2008). Refugee resettlement studies have frequently explored these structural issues of identity and assimilation politics by examining forms of governance and surveillance that legitimise institutional and structural power and sustain notions of deservingness by demarcating who belongs and who does not (Loescher and Scanlan 1986; Harrell-Bond 2002; Keles 2008).

If we consider, for example, the analysis of NGO practices in Rajasthan by Weisgrau (1997) and Mehta (1996), showing how the relationships between organisations and their constituents come to replicate older patron/client patterns, it appears that NGOs are less independent of their social and cultural environment than often portrayed, but rather end up repeating the structures they are embedded in. There is a transfer of an embodied understanding of their own social structures given within their own society. Moreover, the service provider organisation is placed in a paradoxical position wherein on the one hand it has a moral obligation to support refugees, but on the other, as an organisation

62 dependent on the state funding, it simultaneously acts as a regulatory body that monitors and controls refugees’ behaviour.

The ethopolitics (Rose 2000) of humanitarian resettlement are based on specific assumptions and bureaucratic mechanisms. The state spatialization vis-à-vis civil society actors has impacts on refugees that would be construed as unintentional, if the rhetoric purported by the state and these organisations were to be taken literally. This research throws into question the value neutrality of such humanitarian work and the mechanisms through which these organisations control and regulate refugees’ everyday lives.

In examining the complexities and paradoxes present in routine resettlement, this thesis illuminates the far reaching consequences of the service provision and resettlement process. These – often unintended – consequences “are of central importance to social theory in so far as they are systematically incorporated within the process of the reproduction of institutions” (Tazreiter 2004: 60). Anthropological analyses of resettlement open up a space to examine bureaucratic management of resettled refugees by different institutions and reveal social inequalities and politics of power in humanitarian work. NGOs or service providers’ stated purpose is the provision of welfare to the refugees. However, it is the neoliberal spatialization of the state that forces these organisations into webs of dependencies that ultimately allow governance at a distance. Thus, in enacting these regulating measures the service providers become conduits of the neoliberal state spatialization. This does not necessarily mean that NGOs or service providers have ulterior motives, but it is also clear that they are functioning within the parameters of their own environment and are not always able to transcend these limitations. Hence, resettlement projects in their routine interaction with resettling refugees frequently resort to forms of surveillance and mechanisms of control.

This contrasts significantly with service provider organisations frequent over-use of terms such as privacy, empowerment, independence and self-sufficiency, which demonstrates their idealism; yet in reality, this dissipates into rhetoric that obscures their perpetuation of a range of dependencies among refugees (Hinton 1996). Paradoxes and politics in service provision reveal inherent ambivalences and asymmetries at micro levels, which are especially pronounced for women who additionally have to contend with gendered inequities. Bronwyn Winter suggests:

63 For, even if it can be found that UN documents and the principles on which they are based are unambiguous and lacking in all internal contradiction, the real-life situations in which women find themselves are not. They are messy, contradictory, often unstable and thus far from straightforward—not least because applications and interpretations of rights by State and non-State actors alike are inconsistent and opportunistic, especially where women's rights are concerned. (Winter 2006: 382)

Michel Foucault’s (1980) micro-politics of power is useful to interrogate how institutional power operates and impacts on the microcosms of quotidian lives of refugees, as in the case of the Bhutanese. Foucault argues that power is not only manifest in overt forms as in the state, but it “passes through finer channels, and is much more ambiguous, since each individual has at his disposal a certain power and for that very reason can also act as the vehicle for transmitting a wider power” (1980: 72). Power operates through the micro-physics of everyday interactions between NGO workers and the refugees. However, all interactions take place within the wider framework of neoliberal state spatialization, which influences and restricts the mandates of service providers. In this enactment, the service provider is instrumentalised by state actors for its political agenda through the appropriation of the benevolent-saviour paradigm that superficially demonstrates independence of these organisations for the provision of welfare services to a “vulnerable groups” (Gerometta, Haussermann et al. 2005: 2012).

3.6 Citizenship and belonging in a governmentalised society A whole body of literature exists on the processes of imposition of a dominant normativity on ‘citizens in waiting’, that is, how larger structures and institutions of power reify hegemony of a dominant culture and shape refugees’ understanding of what it means to belong and become a citizen (Abu-Lughod 1991; Ong 2003; Brettell and Sargent 2006; Warriner 2007; Ager and Strang 2008; Phillimore and Goodson 2008). These understandings of power dynamics and complexities in resettlement are made visible only through anthropology’s unique methodologies of ethnography, participant-observation, and interviews that are able to grasp the nuances of resettlement and integration. The path to achieving citizenship for immigrants has long been constructed along a set of expectations that some scholars refer to as ethnic succession (for example, Park 1950;

64 White 1984). However, increasingly this theory is viewed more as a structure of beliefs than an empirical reality, because its inherent assumption that ethnic minorities will become part of the (invisible) mainstream of society through the “moral capital of suffering” (Ong 2003: 3) and contribution in successive generations is found wanting (for example, Lee and Wood 1991; Gotham 2002). This absorption into a higher social rank, even as members of that group improve materially as well as in class terms, which would eventually culminate with them becoming equal citizens, has so far not born out in the empirical reality of social life. Whatever the gains, it appears there are always additional differentiators found that continue to maintain a division. Much rather, I view this perception, which has proven itself as remarkably resilient (Tazreiter 2004: 36-7), as linked to the inherent hierarchies of the colonial imagination24, with its paternalistic view of ‘lifting up’ those of the ‘Third World’ or ‘less advanced societies’ to the levels of European civilization. Therefore, ethnic succession is a social myth that makes explaining why the ‘Other’ is accorded a certain and an inferior position in society more palatable by dressing it up with a peculiar rationality.

Moreover, numerous studies have demonstrated the various ways in which dominant norms discriminate against cultural expressions that are at variance with those norms and with middle-class sensibilities (for example, Collins 1998). Indeed, middle-class citizens seek to maintain their comfortable distance by ciphering such oppositions in behavioural and discursive strategies that demarcate those perceived to be culturally deviant. These “semi-conscious codes are exquisitely clear to newcomers” (Ong 2003: 4) and are at the core of everyday experiences of newcomers as they begin charting the rules of belonging

24 I use colonial imagination to denote “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices [...] and traces of power’s presence” (Gordon 1997: 25). The interrelationship of these crosscutting currents involves questions of entitlement and classification. In Orientalism, Edward Said laid out the various discourses that created a landscape of the exotic, strange, and different, stating that “[r]hetorically speaking, Orientalism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative, to use its vocabulary is to engage in the particularising and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts. Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical knowledge” (Said 1978: 72). In the colonies, these, Orientalism’s drive to make encompass-able through a particular form of knowledge nurtured an “illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to colonial imaginary in which countable abstractions, of people and resources at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created the sense of a controllable indigenous reality” (Appadurai 1996: 117). This drive manifested in various forms, such as the census exercises by the British colonial administration in India. Interestingly, British censuses in Britain “tended to reserve their most invasive investigations for their social margins: the poor, the sexually profligate, the lunatic, and the criminal” (Appadurai 1996: 118). In the colonies, by contrast, the concern with deviance and marginality was extended to the management of entire populations (Rabinow 1989; Armstrong 1990). It is clear, then, that entire populations in the colonies were seen as different in problematic ways. An embodiment of these historicities and discourses is constitutive of colonial imagination as used in this thesis. 65 that members of society’s mainstream take for granted. These rules of belonging are, moreover, tied to notions of the ideal citizen, which are embedded in a variety of official programmes and unofficial practices in governing subjects. Foucault’s work on the social technologies of governmentality – which he defines as “ways of conducting the conduct” (Foucault 2008: 186) – provides an analytical basis for examining and interlinking the multiplex everyday technologies of self-making and of being-made in a variety of regulatory environments (Foucault 1991). He argues that advanced liberal societies tend to depend on regulation rather than discipline; they rely on human-science policy and techniques whereby “[i]ndividuals are to be governed through their freedom” (Miller and Rose 2008: 25), thereby inducing citizen-subjects to become self-motivated, self-reliant, and entrepreneurial.

Approaching refugee resettlement in terms of a Foucauldian “analytics of power” highlights how its underlying rationalities shape people’s attitudes, behaviour, and aspirations in regard to belonging to a modern liberal society. Such a diffusion model of power locates its dynamism in the fluctuating system of relations and interactions among individuals and problematises the connection between the rationality and the action, the aspirations to citizenship and the internalisation of norms as self-government. These human ‘technologies of citizenship’ (Cruikshank 1993, 1994) highlight the political calculations about bodies and humanity through the connection of the conception of the ideal citizen with Protestant ethics, a now-unconscious association that is made operational by governmentality and manifests in everyday life through various apparatuses and agencies. Such a neo-liberal regime of government attempts to construct a world of autonomous individuals, or ‘free subjects’. However, “in order to act freely, the subject must first be shaped, guided and moulded into one capable of responsibly exercising that freedom through systems of domination” (Dean 2010: 193).

This style of rule is composite and operates through a multiplicity of technologies, apparatuses and systems, be it, for example, through disciplinary practices acting on the body or those of liberty, that is, practices concerned with structuring, shaping, predicting and making calculable the operation of our freedom (Dean 2010: 194). It is clear, hence, that the idea of the ‘free’ subject is in fact the product of governmentality and its hidden religious and cultural presuppositions, and that the practice of freedom often depends on means of subjection. Nevertheless, this subjection is not necessarily an overt one; it rather works through every day interactions that contain underlying assumptions about the

66 relative moral worthiness of different categories of subjects, which in turn are embodied and influence social practices and shape the possibilities of citizenship. These social technologies can be conceptualised as a mode not of ruling through oppression, but of “governing through the freedom and aspirations of subjects rather than in spite of them” (Rose 1992: 147). Thus, contemporary neo-liberal regimes are concerned with the deployment of the culturally acquired rules of conduct to safeguard our civilization and the freedom it secures through the invocation of virtues associated with the spontaneous orders of market and family (Dean 2010: 191).

The emphasis on family is particularly relevant in the context of the results of this thesis research. While the rules of market and the indoctrination of the newcomers in its logics are essential to the making of ‘free’ citizens, in the everyday interactions and the establishment of hierarchies of belonging the ordering following a family model is most pertinent. Family is a site that reconciles the contradictory relationship between equality and hierarchy, because in contrast to an idealised version of equality where everyone is concerned for the other members of the family, actual families remain organised around varying patterns of hierarchy. Linking these multifarious power-effects to the routine interactive space between resettling refugees and service providers is the nexus of the family model. As Ann McClintock observes, “the family image came to figure hierarchy within unity as an organic element of historical progress, and thus became indispensable for legitimating exclusion and hierarchy within nonfamilial social forms such as nationalism, liberal individualism and imperialism” (McClintock 1995: 45, original emphasis). Since family links social hierarchies of gender, race, and nation, and “with racial ideologies and practices so reliant on family for meaning, family writ large becomes race” (Collins 1998: 65).

Despite a frequent attentiveness on disciplinary power, Foucault clearly does not see it as a totalising determinant, but rather conceives of power as schemas of sovereignty in functional harmony with systems of disciplinary power (2006: 87). Importantly, Foucault locates this appearance of sovereignty in the family, as a “cell” of the sovereign type of power (2006: 79). The family does not, however, stand in contradistinction to disciplinary power, because of the progressive “internal disciplinarization of the family” since the late 19th century, which means it is not “a vestige of sovereignty, but rather an essential component, and an increasingly essential component, of the disciplinary system […] I think we could say that it is the hinge, the interlocking point, which is absolutely

67 indispensable to the very functioning of all the disciplinary systems” (Foucault 2006: 124, 80-81).

However, these different forms of power discussed here – governmentality, sovereignty, and discipline – are not mutually exclusive or in any specific historical order. Rather, they exist in complex interactions and articulations between these three forms of power:

[W]e need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty – discipline – government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security. (Foucault 1991: 102)

In his lectures at the College de France for the year 1977-1978 Foucault introduces a new term for the description of the power-effects of governmentality: security (2007). Instead of the ‘norm’ of discipline, which carries a prior definition in reference to which it categorizes as ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, the concept of security is concerned with identifying an average or a mean, trying to measure empirical ‘normalities’ and to establish their interplay: “The normal comes first and the norm is deduced from it, or the norm is fixed and plays its operational role of the basis of this study of normalities” (Foucault 2007: 63). Security thus determines a range of acceptable deviance and its apparatuses are initiated when elements transgress these limits. Foucault argues that security acknowledges the naturalness of the realm it is applied to, which is reminiscent of the ideas developed by Scottish Enlightenment philosophers about self-regulating capacities of the market and the spontaneous order of societal arrangements. This amounts to a genuine, empirical normalisation; disciplinary power on the other hand can only produce a predetermined normativity. While discipline remains instrumental, security is strictly utilitarian. Accordingly, the target of security is the population, whereas discipline focuses on the body and sovereignty on territory. Therefore, it is not possible to elucidate state power only in terms of an overarching state apparatus, but necessitates approaching it in terms of a multiplicity of networks through which various authorities, non-profit agencies, programmes, and experts translate governmental goals in relation to target populations.

CHAPTER 4 – THE GOVERNMENTALITY OF NEOLIBERAL RESETTLEMENT

69 4 The governmentality of neoliberal resettlement

There has been quite an anthropological interest in the state, which stems in part from a growing appreciation of the central role that states play in shaping “local communities” and the reflection of an ever increasing ethnographic gaze upon the cultural practices of states themselves (Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Das and Poole 2004; Geertz 2004; Herzfeld 2005; Krohn-Hansen and Nustad 2005; Sharma and Gupta 2006; Kapferer 2012).

As this literature demonstrates “states are not simply functional bureaucratic apparatuses, but powerful locations of symbolic and cultural production that are culturally represented and understood in particular ways” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Leaning on Benedict Anderson’s (1991) idea allows for an understanding of states as “imagined”. James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002: 981) perceive states as “constructed entities that are conceptualized and made socially effective through particular imaginative and symbolic devices (Bayart 1993; Bernal 1997; Cohn 1996; Comaroff 1998; Coronil 1997; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; cf. Fallers 1971; Geertz 1980; Joseph and Nugent 1994; Nugent 1997; Scott 1998; Taussig 1996)”. What interests me are the peculiar ways in which this manifests in the context of neoliberal rationalities and refugee resettlement in Australia.

This thesis focuses on specific practices of governmentality through their effects on a newly resettled community of Bhutanese refugees. I intend to reveal how in the process of resettlement the Australian state comes to bear on bodies. I will demonstrate how this spatialization is effected through a neoliberal state, how the state outsources some of its ‘security apparatus’ (in the Foucauldian sense), or controlling mechanisms of ‘others’. In my particular example, they are those who are alien to the Australian way of life, but yet come to inhabit and cohabit within its national borders through refugee resettlement. My specific focus is on the everyday routine interactions between the service providers implementing the resettlement provision on behalf of the Australian Government and the Bhutanese refugees they assist in a new start to their lives in Australia.

70 The refugee resettlement services offered under the rubric of HSS25 are awarded through an open tender process and a key point of selection is that the most competitive bidder procures the tender, which in itself throws up the question of an economisation of the refugee resettlement welfare services. This process of tendering of welfare services forms part of the neoliberal premise of governmentality in Australia. In practice, many – if not most – service provider organisations in Australia are non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This thesis reports on extended fieldwork with one such NGO and will consider some implications of this devolution of resettlement services. While this thesis trains a critical lens on aspects of resettlement services, it offers no systematic critique of resettlement service provision, as its focus is on the everyday interactions between resettling refugees and service providers. This thesis also cannot provide a directly comparative perspective, as resettlement services in Australia have been implemented outside of the state sector for a significant length of time. Moreover, it does not argue for a greater state involvement either, as this would entail its own set of issues and concerns requiring interrogation, as the current form of implementation does. What this thesis does argue is that in this context of the devolution of the implementation of government policy to NGO service providers, it is essential to consider the intersection of governmentality and the everyday. This intersection is productive, because “governmentality is at once too precise about the effects, and too vague about the location, of ordering power” (Mosse 2005b: 14) and such an approach alone would not be able to capture the sets of practices and instrumentalities; instead the routine interactions observed during the everyday of resettlement service implementation provide for this complementary prism. However, the overall aim is not to critique resettlement service provision, but to better understand its social processes.

4.1 The Everyday as methodology Following on from a discussion of relationships in Chapter 1.3, the ethnographic method seeks immersion in the field and consequently focuses on everyday interactions. However, this does not necessarily translate to an explicit consideration of the everyday, for in ethnography’s traditional or perhaps Malinowskian approach, the mundane

25 HSS is the Humanitarian Settlement Strategy implemented by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to assist specific groups of migrants, such as refugees entering as offshore humanitarian entrants, with settling in Australia. 71 everyday merely functions as a backdrop for the delineation and extraction of patterns, regularities and generalities. The everyday – as a methodological focus on the quotidian aspects of life – is of a different and specific configuration that has been theorised extensively by two leading French post-modernist philosophers, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau.

This thesis focuses on the dynamics between different parties during fieldwork: the Bhutanese, the service providers and the ethnographer. The lens taken is manifestly of the everyday. The relationships in the field were simultaneously complicated through the insertion of a female, non-white ethnographer. Here one runs into the danger of unthinkingly stating that this particular complication prompted the decision to make her experiences explicit in this ethnography. However, it is pertinent to recall that this exposition is always required. Although white (and especially male) ethnographers sort of ‘get away’ with it, not having to fully explicate their individuality and circumstantiality of fieldwork and perception by the fiat of ‘traditional’ or canonical acceptance of whiteness being invisible. By way of negotiating this insertion of the non-white ethnographer into the fieldwork through an approach of the study of the everyday, it is possible to elicit specific dynamics between different parties inherent to the fieldwork, including the interactions with the ethnographer. This inclusion requires specific attention, because “[e]thnographic knowledge is heavily dependent on the presence and experience of the fieldworker” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 15). In this context of the increasing explication of the ethnographer’s positionality and “shifting locations” of field sites (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 38), it is of particular interest how the insertion of a non- white ethnographer can provide new spaces for strategic entanglements between the two groups, that is, the Bhutanese and the service providers.

4.1.1 Defining the Everyday Taking the concept of the ‘everyday’ to locate this particular analysis, I am situating it here to mean “’what is left over’ after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis” (Lefebvre 1991: 97). It should be clear from this statement that an ethnography of the everyday is, if not diametrically opposed to the Malinowskian method, then certainly complementary in its focus. However, I do see this shift of perspective to mean not a regression to the infinite, but rather a drawing out of

72 implicit complexities and “sedimentations of meaning” (Husserl 1970: 371). In a paradoxical turn that contradicts and almost parodies its lexical meaning, the everyday does not offer a readily readable landscape, a superficial ‘on the go’ tableau vivant, rather calls for a nuanced mapping of its interstices. Developing an understanding of “what is left over after all [...] analysis” requires the ethnographer to identify the object of analysis in – as well as between – the modalities of representation, for she/he is observing its meaning and its development from within the totality of the everyday (Lefebvre 1991: 97). On perusing the literature on the everyday, there are a variety of competing ways to approach the everyday and there is no one consensus to a final definition of this concept. However, for the purpose of situating my analysis, I will draw upon the above perspective.

The everyday is useful through its fine grained detail that allows accessing the interstitial spaces from where one can begin mapping out the underlying dynamics. However, the everyday is not a reality readily available for scrutiny, but a “problematic, contested and opaque terrain, where meanings are not to be found ready-made” (Highmore 2002: 1). One aspect responsible for this is its almost impossibly heterogenic and heteroglossic nature stemming from an irreducible liminality of lived experience. Therefore, another actuality is to be found beyond the surface of everyday life: “[f]or most part ‘culture and society’ can be understood as the name given to the checking and censorship that manages the troubling presence of these drives [of fear and desire]” (Highmore 2002: 6). Erving Goffman’s work has investigated how social agents act in the context of such sanctioned forms of social behaviour and concluded that resistance can indeed be observed in everyday interactions as manifest in some of the plural performances of the self (Goffman 1959). de Certeau has also emphasised the practical and singular nature of the everyday, which requires training attention to the use and ways of operating in the social field. In distinction to Goffman, however, de Certeau emphatically refuses to take identity as the locus of meaning in everyday life. While Ben Highmore concurs on the dangers of privileging identity, because the “micro-geography of daily life provides a way of pluralising the self that a concentration on ‘identity’ in the singular would miss”, he also “finds evidence for the way that identity categories animate such a geography” (Highmore 2002: 17). Perhaps there is one more important point emphasised by Lefebvre to consider about the everyday: “the supra-individual [invariably is] already registered at the micro- cultural level” (Lefebvre 1991: 57; original emphasis). Lefebvre exemplifies this with an incident of a Parisian buying some sugar and how the central role of sugar in the history

73 of Western colonialism inflects shoppers with the continued (neo)colonialism articulated by the global market.

4.1.2 The reader, the ethnographer and the research ‘object’ – a novel Everyday perspective This sense of the extant registration of outwardly manifest relationships extending beyond the immediate encounter at the micro level, as expounded by Lefebvre, informs the drive of this chapter: using the study of the everyday to incorporate the invisible third party of the reader to Marcus’ (1995) meditations on the relationship of the ethnographer and the research ‘object’ through the text, that is, forms of representation, and so on. Marcus (1995) discusses ethical dilemmas within the practice of ethnographic fieldwork and the means to move beyond the limits of the singularly local. While both parties, the representor and the represented, in a project of knowledge generation recognise and understand its inherent limitations, it simultaneously suggests a way into a new kind of multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995), which “take[s] multi-sited ethnography necessarily to imply some form of (geographical) spatial de-centredness” (Falzon 2009: 2). However, I suggest that this critique of the fieldwork practice could constructively be extended by considering the third person to this interaction, the reader of the ethnographic text, where the ethnographer and the reader both have to question their assumptions, and the reader would be aided in this by the ethnographer’s on the ground experience. Such an inclusion of the reader in their plurality would complicate the mediation. It is, then, specifically in the context of the everyday that such a project can be approached.

Mindful of these dynamics the aim of this thesis is to incorporate in a proactive, exploratory sense the reader into the writing. This is possible precisely because the writing is about the quotidian, and taking for example the Brechtian approach to it, would use multiple modalities to bring the everyday to life in the text. Working with multiple modalities also emphasises certain silences frequently encountered in the research process and in writing, such as affect, which nevertheless has substantial impact on the nature, quality and quantity of fieldwork data.

It is important that we all pay attention to the presence or absence of love and affection in our scholarship – at all stages of the production of our scholarship. If it is not there, it is important to ask ourselves why and what we should do about

74 it. If it is there, we owe it to our readers to show it, to enable them to evaluate its role in the nature of our work. (Viginia R. Dominguez, quoted in Jackson Jr 2005: 225)

With these different modalities, employing among other things a thick-descriptive form, it is possible to bring in the reader more closely in a speculative fashion. Of course, as this is construed based on the fieldwork encounters, it requires certain transposition (and perhaps also transformation) of the observations. The cognitive dissonance, for example, of encountering a non-white ethnographer, is transposed conceptually in the text, not literally, and this is where the everyday is useful to shift it to the writing. It is characterised by a double dimension of “platitude and profoundness, banality and drama” (Lefebvre 2002: 65). Therefore, it is here that human dramas take place, where profoundness surfaces and the question of authenticity is posed. However, platitude and profundity do not coexist peacefully in their encounters: “[o]nce profundity and beauty are lived (and not simply gazed at or seen as a spectacle) they become moments, combinations which marvellously overturn structures established in the everyday, replacing them by other structures, unforeseen ones, and fully authentic” (Lefebvre 2002: 66). Hence, the everyday is also the site where assumptions are foregrounded and can be made visible. In this specific context of a non-white ethnographer embedded within a white dominant society such a move is essential and must include a consideration of the assumptions of not just the ethnographer, but those of dominant society as well.

4.1.2.1 Witnessing within Everyday methodology One specifically suited methodology to interpret this situation would be the concept of witnessing26 as introduced by Liisa Malkki, who has developed it from Hebdige’s and Gramsci’s notions. Hebdige (1993, cited in Malkki 1997: 94) suggests developing “a new kind of political imagination” that instead of focussing on ethnographic “description” attempts a “different, more open critique of objects” as a form of “witnessing.” Such a move would shift from field data about someone else to a witness’ testimony, that is, a statement about the witness herself. The paradigm of the ethnographer as ‘witness’

26 The use of the term witnessing is not limited to the field of anthropology, but also has its own meaning for example in the legal system, where it is frequently used in the context of the establishment of the veracity of claims. In the field of anthropology there are also multiple divergent definitions, such as concerning religious connotations in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ work. 75 represents a different modality of ethnographic authority, which nevertheless does not dispense with questions of evidence or explanation. However, the ethnographer as a witness is differently located: “trying to be an attentive listener, recognizing the situatedness of one’s intellectual work (Haraway 1991), and affirming one’s own connection to the ideas, processes, and people one is studying are more important in this kind of practice” (Malkki 1997: 96). In this process, the ethnographer is witnessing events and the informants are aware that the ethnographer is witnessing, so one is indelibly inscribed into the observations, the data – in other words, the ethnographer is implicated. Therefore, it is integral to the understanding of why one interprets something in a particular way as opposed to another that the ethnographer’s situatedness is made clear to the reader. Instead of studying villages, communities, peoples, and so on, Malkki (1997: 94) argues, such an ethnographic practice would seek out and “move toward centre-stage” what Gramsci has termed “traces”: “’knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory” (Gramsci 1971: 324).

Thus, in order to make cogent the resultant reconfigurations, it is indispensable to include the reader to highlight how assumptions and approaches of dominant society impact on the research process, the researcher and the development of the ethnographic material, and are subsequently consumed through readership by a diverse audience. The purpose is to make the conception of the reader explicit: how does that knowing connect back to the residual, that is, the everyday (Lefebvre 1991: 97); and how does this deepen and extend the analysis.

4.1.3 Some practical thoughts on transcripts and unknowing in the Everyday Thus far, focussing the study onto the everyday and its routine interactions promises to give access to deeply held views and assumptions informing these encounters and exchanges. However, it is also clear that simply framing a study in the everyday does not necessarily deliver these hoped for results. Rather, pursuing this aim requires carefully nuanced and insightful treatment of the material, firmly grounded in knowledge of global and local history and politicalities. One key challenge lies in the fact that this research addresses itself to situations with significant power imbalances, imbalances that are greater than simple workplace hierarchies, for example, or even than between social

76 worker and benefit recipient, because the group of people who are the target of this particular government intervention are refugees from Bhutan resettling in Australia as part of the HSS programme.27 The Bhutanese are in the first year of their resettlement, and many not more than a few months into their experience of Australia. Hence, many do not possess a solid and clear understanding of Australian political culture, the social milieu and the various formal and informal support systems available, the communication of which is a central task of the HSS programmes implemented on behalf of the Australian Government by service providers.

4.1.3.1 Public and hidden transcripts In order to make the diverse subtexts implicit in the superficially ‘apparent’ situations discernible, the researcher must tread carefully, for the public performance witnessed in encounters in such strong forms of dependency must be assumed to convey only parts of each party’s intentions, most obviously of those at the lower scale of the hierarchy. If we consider public performance as the “open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate,” then we might follow James Scott and term this performance, which mostly would be a misrepresentation based on a tacit understanding as a “public transcript” (1990: 2). Its counterpart is the “hidden transcript,” the “discourse that takes place ‘offstage’, beyond direct observation by powerholders” (Scott 1990: 4). Not wanting to risk an overly simplified representation of the matter, such as construing the public transcript as a gratuitous performance compared to the hidden transcript as the truth, this distinction guides one towards investigating the discrepancies between the public and hidden transcripts and their different conditions of production, as well as the impact of situational contingencies on their conveyance of multiple meanings to the respective intended audiences. Public transcripts aim at affirming and naturalising the represented hierarchies, and frequently can be stereotypical and ritualistic, which also means that they are often treated with mistrust from both sides of the power divide. Nevertheless, they represent most clearly the desires of powerholders and practically manufacture – at least in terms of superficial adherence – a degree of consent from subordinates. As a consequence, the complementary hidden transcript “is thus derivative in the sense that it

27 The first arrivals came under the auspices of IHSS, the resettlement programme’s previous manifestation. 77 consists of those offstage speeches, gestures, and practices that confirm, contradict, or inflect what appears in the public transcript” (Scott 1990: 4).

There are broadly three different arenas of engagement: the open and public discourse; the private backstage28, a sequestered social site where subordinates can (more) freely converse among themselves; and the arena of disguise, where a limited freedom of expression in the public sphere is tentatively reclaimed through indirect means, such as ambiguity, anonymity or coded forms of communication (Scott 1990: 18-19). The ‘stage’ where this third arena of disguise plays out is of course the everyday. What should be clear by now, but perhaps warrants reiteration, is the fact that these forms of domination are never fully deterministic: “This social control of individual possibilities is not absolutely imposed; it is accepted, half-imposed, half-voluntary, in a never-ending ambiguity” (Lefebvre 2002: 62).

4.1.3.2 Unknowing Another intriguing aspect of this domination is its “half-voluntary” notion or the ‘degree of consent’ that Lefebvre and Scott touch upon, respectively. I find this phenomenon quite interestingly conceptualised in the form of ‘unknowing’ as deployed by P. Wenzel Geissler (2013) in his ethnography of transnational scientific knowledge making in Africa. Unknowing involves “strategic elision and the delicate art of knowing what ‘not to know’ [in order to maintain] the fictive ideal of equality” (Redfield 2013: 35). Such unknowing does not exclude sincere efforts by individuals involved to act in an ethical and caring manner. However, one of Geissler’s key insights is that “all actors involved have a stake in not knowing as well as limited direct capacity to transform the larger material framing of their mutual endeavour” (Redfield 2013: 35).

Nonknowledge does not suppress truth and thus cannot be remedied through better knowledge [and if] everybody involved in a collaboration can tell truths from untruths and engage both registers simultaneously, anthropologists add little

28 [Space for Dissident Subculture] “‘This space was not a gift; it had to be created by the people who fought to create it.’ [Ref in fn. 27 on p. 123] Thus, to think of anti-hegemonic discourse as occupying merely the social space left empty by domination would be to miss the struggle by which such sites are won, cleared, built, and defended” (Scott 1990: 123). 78 by “telling the truth” and even less by relativist denial of such a distinction. (Geissler 2013: 30)

Thus, this form of deliberate non-knowledge “perform[s] double work [...] to maintain consensus over the ontological premises and principal values that underlie research [that] sustain working relations and procedures [through] flexible, malleable operational guidance” (Geissler 2013: 28). These concerns, of course, attach equally to ethnographic knowledge making. In the particular context of this thesis, though, unknowing provides an opening to expose the mechanisms of how it harnesses the social category of refugee into the colonial imagination29 to make it available to be controlled. This form of subjection “can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet without involving violence” (Foucault 1977: 26). On the other hand, those exposed to the deceptive manifestations of privilege are enacting their privilege to not notice and thereby exacerbating power differentials and silencing critique, “since the force of making violence unknowable exceeds that of the violent act itself” (Geissler 2013: 15). The key features of unknowing are its mutuality of understanding and its tacit agreement of un-acknowledgement of the same. This is rather different from the concept of unlearning, which may come about as the result of the acceptance or inevitability that certain expectations or paths of life may be foreclosed to the person in question, that is, unlearning does not require an ongoing mutual recognition to maintain a fictive ideal.

4.1.4 Accessing intricate spheres of representation, gaps and imbalances To begin to assemble the methodological tool kit applied in this thesis, let us then briefly return to the everyday, which is explicitly concerned with individual social beings’ existence in society. This should allow us now to build connections between the everyday and hidden transcripts, and how in the present constellation of the field the conditionings of power relations are made accessible to the non-white ethnographer. The everyday encompasses the “immediate and natural forms of necessity” and the appropriation of objects, the elaboration of needs to desires, as well as the “realm of the dialectic between ‘alienation’ and ‘disalienation’” (Lefebvre 2002: 62). The most crucial aspect of the everyday, however, is its ‘third level’: “a set of practices, representations, norms and

29 I use colonial imagination to denote “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices [...] and traces of power’s presence” (Gordon 1997: 25). For a more detailed definition, please refer to footnote 24. 79 techniques, established by society itself to regulate consciousness, to give it some ‘order’ [and] close the excessive gaps between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’” (Lefebvre 2002: 62).

The everyday methodology provides access to these intricate spheres as it uncovers in these representations gaps and imbalances, inconsistencies and omissions – it enables to posit a critique to the “pseudo-coherence” society imposes:

What we have discovered are more like systems of representations. They are very relative and, despite their tenacity, rather fragile, but they guarantee the everyday an amount of stability even in its moments of disappointment and drama. (Lefebvre 2002: 61; original emphasis)

In other words, the critique of the everyday reveals the equivocal and ambiguous representations by which symbols are underpinned and encircled, and thus apprehend aspects of social interactions as tractable that otherwise would appear too deeply embedded within individual psyches. Searching for the context and meaning of the hidden transcript, as it makes itself tangible through nuanced and coded forms of communication, enables drawing together from the multitude of encounters and interactions those specific details individuals themselves would not necessarily disclose in their entirety. The ‘third level’ takes on the function of a mediator between the individual and the social, as well as between the individual and its own self within an individual consciousness (Lefebvre 2002: 62), and is thus the appropriate sphere for this kind of investigation.

Both hidden transcripts and the everyday approach the same questions, however, come to the interrogation from slightly different angles. Since neither the group, nor the individual, are divorced from each other, each on its own becomes a too narrow lens. By combining the two approaches it is hoped to elicit or draw out the nuances of even the veiled subterfuges. Entering into the deeper sphere of the “third layer”, which is “an affective nucleus [...] with its own characteristic tonality,” enables the mapping of tenuous dissonances in the public performance of subordinates suggesting the presence of elements of the hidden transcript (Lefebvre 2002: 59). Located here is the dramatic situation of the individual in society in all its nuances, from hesitations and misunderstandings through to resistances and non-adaptation, to vague rejections and unrecognised voids: “[t]his is where the process of alienation and disalienation, of fulfilment and incompleteness, of (partial) satisfaction and (partial) dissatisfaction

80 unfolds” (Lefebvre 2002: 60). Being non-white sometimes makes navigating this already awkward terrain more complex, as:

on every ‘level’, in every ‘sphere’ and in every ‘layer’ we discover social representations which are like representations of society: norms, models, values, collective and imperative forms of conduct, rules and forms of control, in short what is meant rather vaguely by the terms ‘ideology’, ‘culture’, ‘knowledge’, etc. (Lefebvre 2002: 60; original emphasis)

This “calls for an understanding of the representation as contiguous with that being represented and not as something suspended above and distant from the represented” (Taussig 1992: 10). What we need to turn our attention to, therefore, is a nuanced consideration of what metaphors or allusions subordinate groups “have been able to introduce in muted or veiled form into the public transcript” (Scott 1990: 138) and carefully contextualise the different degrees of ‘public’ or ‘hidden’ that pertain to the specific transcript and its specific audience in question. Juxtaposing different situations and their respective contexts will shed light on these insertions and their meanings.

4.2 Foucault: Truth, Subjectivity and Governmentality Unearthing the underlying contexts and meanings leads to a consideration of how ‘truths’ are established and how respective truth-claims are interlinked with the making of subjects. These concerns are central to Foucault’s project of developing “a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (Foucault 1982: 777). One of his main concerns was power and its relations, which he captured in the couplet power/knowledge (see Foucault 1980), thereby emphasising their dynamic co-investment. Some authors have described Foucault as more a methodologist than a theorist, whose “analytics of power do not follow the route of a grand theory” (Hook 2007: 3). Rather, it aims resisting final formulations of power in favour of “solid analytical grounds from which [to] fix aspects of its operational force and logic” (Hook 2007: 3).

Foucault uses three concepts of rationality pertinent to the study of power/knowledge: strategies, technologies and programmes. Programmes of power “define a domain of social reality to be turned into an object of rational knowledge, intervened in and made

81 functional” (Gledhill 2000: 150). Technologies are apparatuses of power designed to implement that knowledge. Strategies of power are what agencies do in practice in exercising power and in operationalising programmes and technologies (Gledhill 2000: 150). All three concepts serve as means of conceiving relations of power in terms of the differential and differentiated interaction between distinct orders of historical events. In order to understand their functioning, it is necessary to have a distinction between three types of events: explicit, rational, reflected discourse; non-discursive social and institutional practices; and effects produced within the social field.

If discourses generate truths, or to be more precise truth-claims, then truth is produced with a ‘will to truth’:

Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the type of discourse which accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded values in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault 1980: 131)

As a result of the conditions of discourse, the idea of ‘truth’ as a reality understood through the deployment of the discursive schemas of language must give way to the study of what discourse actually produces – truth effects. Therefore every act of interpretation entails comprehending the idea of truth and the constructive effects such an idea has on the forms and organisations of social life. Truth is not counterpoised to falsity or error, but rather regimes of truth lay down what is true and what is false. Truth operates through the exclusion, marginalisation and even prohibition of other competing truths; indeed it is itself a “prodigious machinery designed to exclude” (Foucault 1981: 55). Truth is thus not separated from power, rather it is one of the most important modes and expressions of power; power is exercised through the production and dissemination of truth.

The key to understanding and historicising the operations of power is to attend to the ways that specific practices of professional disciplines (and other social institutions) – surveillance, particular ways of categorisation, particular bodily disciplines – covertly undermine some forms of power and reorganise others, especially the law. Practice thus produces subjectivity (both in the sense of identity and the sense of subjection), simultaneously constituting and limiting social subjects.

82 Foucault’s thesis of the omnipresence of relations of power or power/knowledge is all too easily simplified to absolute rule or command. Of course if this were the case history would assume the form of a homogeneous narrative of relentless despotism, and the subtleties of genealogical analysis (a method Foucault espouses) would be entirely superfluous. In fact, the concepts of strategies, programmes and technologies of power serve to analyse not the perfect correspondence between the orders of discourse, practice and effect, but the manner in which they fail to correspond and the positive significance that can attach to such discrepancies.

Therefore understanding the formation of any body of knowledge always involves consideration of the power dimensions within which the knowledge is produced. Foucault proposes a radically different account of power to get away from the simple equation of power with repression. Considering a more analytical – and even descriptive – approach instead of simplistic positions of power being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, automatically rejects a ‘zero-sum’ view of power by which power on one side always means a lack of it on the other. Power is not held by agents, but is present in all forms of social relations as something that is ‘at work’; power is everywhere, it is productive:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. (Foucault 1995: 194)

Power is an ‘unstructured formation’, which means it is essential to suspend the assumption that the category of the individual has primacy over the constitutive role of power/knowledge. Instead one should focus on the importance of ‘desubstantialising’ power, to view its relations of control, influence and subjectification not with reference to power as a structure, possession or repressive capability, but rather as a dynamic, relational, contingent assembly of forces working in both top-down and bottom-up directions.

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be

83 considered as a productive network ... more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault 1980: 119)

Rejecting a negative or repressive view of power leads to a perspective of the ‘micro- physics of power’ (Foucault 1995: 12). These involve the application of detailed techniques for the training of the body by making use of ‘micro-penalties’, minor punishments such as deprivation of privileges. It is not that Foucault thinks that ‘big power’ has disappeared. Rather he makes a broad historical generalisation that in modernity ‘small power’, in particular power located in sites away from the central locations of ‘big power’ (for example the state or capital), has become a defining characteristic of power. And this power operates largely through the disciplines.

In disciplinary systems surveillance is an integral part of their programme of production and control such that the individual subject can be precisely and comparatively observed (O'Neill 1986: 50ff.). An additional factor is apparent here, namely subjects’ consciousness of their own visibility; this is a type of self-awareness that makes such subjects “themselves assume responsibility for the constraints of power” (Foucault 1995: 187).

The mechanisms of discipline, as a set of techniques rather than a solid institution, can be easily applied across a number of settings without being reduced to them. Employed by pre-existing authorities or apparatuses, used in conjunction with other modes of power without supplanting them, disciplinary techniques permit an endless variety of adaptations and customisations. This ease of incorporation has meant, historically, that their use has spread from prisons to other disciplinary sectors, to other administrations of controls, other places of reform, rehabilitation and education. (Hook 2007: 26)

Thus, all of its mechanisms aim to ensure that subjects adopt certain fundamentally reflexive, self-monitoring and self-assessing relations to themselves.

Comparisons or hierarchies of performance and ability quickly become a preoccupation of modern disciplinary culture. This is epitomised in sets of norms, which lead to a quantitative hierarchisation of the nature of individuals, a ‘value-giving’ measure of individuals themselves and of their potentialities (Foucault 1995: 181). Driving society towards such predefined normativity does not merely concern the homogenising effects

84 of certain standards of conformity, or the moralising implication of the hierarchical judgement of subjects themselves, but also results in a set of exclusionary principles with the production of deviance. Therefore it becomes clear that disciplinary institutions are not the result of various problematic individuals within society who need to be cared for and protected, but rather that such individuals should be seen as the outcome of the installation of disciplinary systems (Foucault 1995: 193). Disciplinarity hence may be said to engender its own deviance, thereby enabling and justifying its own recovery systems. The real goal of rehabilitative and punitive endeavours is thus not the complete elimination of deviances and transgressions, but rather the tactical use, the strategic deployment of such problems as a means of justification for ever greater schedules of control and surveillance (Hook 2007: 38-9).

Although power-relations are non-subjective and they are not thought to be fundamentally ‘agented’, they remain nonetheless intentional. The fact that power- relations are intelligible at all is because they are so thoroughly saturated with calculation:

There is no power that is extended without a series of aims and objectives ... the rationality of power is characterised by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed [...] tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another [...] end by forming comprehensive systems. (Foucault 1980: 95)

Moreover, while there is a rudimentary awareness of action, which can be located in an agent, there is however no awareness of the overarching rationality, the broader consequences of power of which their actions are part. However, “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault 1978: 95). Because power is not coercive in the sense of direct threat of violence, it must be understood as an asymmetrical set of relations in which the existence of this multiplicity of relations necessarily entails the possibility of resistance. Resistance, through defiance, defines power and hence becomes possible through power: “there are no relations of power without resistance” (Foucault 1980: 142). This interdependence of power and resistance can result in a serious misapprehension, a propositional fallacy of denying the antecedent, that is, unless there is some relation of resistance, the relation is not one of power, but of agreement. However, the “factor resistance, which is seen as power’s precondition, may not always be obvious

85 or overtly present” (Hook 2007: 85). This potential for obscurity of resistance requires careful consideration of its alternative or less obvious forms, those that may have previously existed, or what future forms of resistance are imaginable. Hence, the interplay of power and resistance and their occasional obscurity initiate a “priority of finding alternative routes of access to such obstacles that lends power the appearance of forethought, of strategy and intentionality” (Hook 2007: 85; original emphasis).

This shift in the characteristic of power is concomitant with the advent of a new form of governing mentality:

This word [government] must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. ‘Government’ did not refer only to political structures or the management of states; rather it designates the way in which the conduct of individuals or states might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not cover only the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also modes of action, more or less considered, which were designed to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. (Foucault 1981: 221)

One of the misconceptions in the theory of governmentality (Foucault 1979) is the notion that questions of government are predominantly, if not exclusively, questions of the macro-politics of statecraft. There are, rather, multiple ‘lower-order’ categories of government: the government of the family, of the workplace, of one’s relationship to one’s self and so on. This broader usage of the concept, as Mitchell Dean (1999: 3) puts it, “gives particular emphasis to issues of the government of human conduct in all contexts, by various authorities and agencies, invoking particular forms of truth, and using definite resources, means and techniques”. Government thus refers to any calculated direction of human conduct. However, one important implication of Foucault’s definition is the downgrading of the importance of the state:

Maybe, after all, the State is no more than a composite reality and a mythical abstraction whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think. Maybe what is really important for our modern times [...] is not so much the State- domination of society, but the ‘governmentalisation’ of the State. (Foucault 1979)

86 Indeed, the traditional practices of state sovereignty did not disappear; rather new forms of governmental rationality became more important: “the instruments of government, instead of being laws, now come to be a range of multiform tactics. Within the perspective of government, law is not what is important” (Foucault 1979: 13). Unlike the interventions of sovereignty which are intermittent, violent and which are typically obliged to take the form of response, disciplinary power has “an inherent tendency to intervene at the same level as what is happening, at the point where the virtual is becoming real” (Foucault 2006: 51).

One key illustration of this is the way in which population came to constitute a central focus for a variety of projects of government and related agencies. Medicine, religion, education and other mechanisms became concerned with the number, health, education and productivity of the aggregated individuals and organisations that made up a population. The deployment of ‘multiform tactics’ is illustrated in the link that exists between ‘government’ and population where a variety of experts (quantifying, calculating and codifying) scattered across a range of disciplines and agencies generate social policies that operate both to constitute the social problems at which governmental action is directed and actively regulate, control and subordinate the targets thus created. Historically a lasting governmental focus has been on ‘improvement’; when focused on entities external to the state often took the form of a preoccupation with ‘civilising’, which played a decisive role in colonialism.

Foucault draws attention to the emergence of new and distinctive mentalities of government or ‘governmental rationality’, which involve a calculating preoccupation with activities directed at shaping, channelling and guiding the conduct of others (Raco 2003: 76); they are based on the production, dissemination and utilisation of knowledge. The ends of government now lie not simply in ruling itself, or in increasing the sovereignty of the ruler, but in improving the condition of the population, in increasing its wealth, its longevity, its health as a whole; power is now intent on growing and ordering this set of resources, it “exerts a positive influence on life [...] endeavour[ing] to administer, optimise and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensible regulations” (Foucault 1978: 137). Therefore, this transformation of government depended on and was brought about by the rise of the professional ‘disciplines’. The operation of the new disciplinary mechanisms of power is ensured not by law, but rather by the inculcation of normative expectations, which eventually leads to effective self-

87 discipline of subjects. However, although the basis of this power is located in minute, capillary relations of domination, this is not to say that the governance of collectives or societies is merely a resultant or a projection of discipline to individuals. The different forms of exercise of power focused around the regulative ideas of individual and society are genealogically interdependent and coeval. The ‘capillary’ is not equivalent to the individual: “it may be sub-individual or trans-individual” (Gordon 1980: 255). And the state is neither the definitive form assumed by government nor its subject, but rather one of its effects or instruments.

Whereas government frequently is held to be exclusive to the macro-political sphere of statecraft, micro-physical forms of power typically work in conjunction with it, often in unpredictable relations of combination that seem to work in discontinuous or indirect ways (Hook 2007: 224). This disciplinary bio-power hence enables to join ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ flows of power. Within governmental regimes multiplicities of diverse forms of control work in a complementary way without necessarily being arranged in any systematic or intentionally devised manner. Nonetheless, the micro-politics of government typically work to support and extend the overarching agendas of macro- power. What this conceptualisation requires, however, is the provision of a relay, a ‘go- between’, connecting micro- and macro-physics of power; Foucault provides this with the ‘apparatuses of security’ (Hook 2007: 229-30).

Foucault (1980) uses the designation ‘apparatuses of security’ – or, alternatively, ‘dispositif’ – to describe the various semi-autonomous techniques of government necessary to the regulation of the modern state. Such apparatuses are the essential technical means of governmentality and are established in response to a situation of crisis, as a means of addressing a problem of social control. Apparatuses, furthermore, are:

Thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble[s] consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, policy decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions; in sum, the said and the not said, these are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network than can be established between these elements. (Foucault 1980: 194)

The apparatus is particularly interesting for analytical purposes as it enables to delineate a regularity of functioning of its inherent political rationality across different parts of an

88 effective whole; it shows up composite patterns of power-relations that may otherwise not be discernible: “understanding of the apparatus draws out attention to the plasticity of governmental power” (Hook 2007: 234).

[W]e should [not] consider the ‘modern state’ as an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are [...] but on the contrary as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns [...] we can see the state as a modern matrix of individualisation. (Foucault 1982: 214-15)

Hence, the state is never reducible to structural mechanisms of control. It is precisely the connection of individualising and totalising qualities of power that best evokes what Foucault (1979) means by ‘governmentality’.

4.3 Neoliberalism Neoliberalism is a transformation that has fundamentally changed the way national policy makers attempt to manage economic activity. In the Anglo-American economies, a remarkable ‘convergence’ has occurred about the most feasible ways to influence economic activity within national borders. A programme of economic liberalisation free of state intervention, which traces to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, came into effect in the ‘Washington consensus’ of the 1980s at a time when the ‘interventionist’ policy tools of the Keynesian era appeared increasingly less well equipped to deal with the economic crises that emerged during the 1970s (Taylor 1997). The policy innovations, which initiated a list of ten specific policy reforms that included privatisation, deregulation, trade liberalisation, and tax reforms among other recommendations (Williamson 2004), ultimately led to the consolidation of a new and distinctive mode of governance. Although not simply an economic doctrine, ‘neoliberalism’ is an easy catch- all phrase for a range of ideas, practices, and approaches to the conduct of government centring on a normative preference for a small state and on market mechanisms to determine economic outcomes (Beeson and Firth 1998). For Dean, neoliberalism is “a peculiar art of political invention that at once problematises the state by an invocation of choice as it multiplies the domains of life restructured according to the norms of a market” (1994: 193). One of the consequences of the international trend towards neoliberal

89 policies foregrounding enhanced competition is the disaggregation of public services (Dunleavy 1994).

Neoliberalism has become a dominant economic system within what is known as ‘developed nations’, and one that has had a major influence on the policies of successive Australian governments, to the extent that all levels embrace many of the principles and rationales of neoliberalism (Beer, Clower et al. 2005: 49). Market individualism is the key to economic and social progress, and the greatest benefit for society will be realised when governments remove constraints from business and withdraw from involvement in social and other programmes, especially those construed as leading to a dependency on welfare-style payments for the population (Gray and Lawrence 2001; Stillwell 2012). One of the fundamental assumptions is, therefore, that everyone has the potential to benefit from capitalism and that poverty exists because of poor people’s inherent inability to take advantage of open-market systems (Harvey 2007). Moreover, “[i]t has also gained rhetorical favour as a ‘philosophy of life’ premised on liberty; freeing the individual from all forms of unnecessary intervention” (Tazreiter 2010).

In real terms this means that the neoliberal state transfers the responsibility for the fulfilment of a substantial range of needs to the individual: “Individual success or failure is interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings [...] rather than being attributed to any systemic property” (Harvey 2005: 65-6). This demonstrates that neoliberalism’s overt focus on economic measures is accompanied by extensive changes to a society’s value system by projecting inequalities as an individual’s failure of application or hard work (Storper 2001: 98). Where under other circumstances inequalities may be identified as a form of injustice, an adherent to neoliberal philosophy or rationality would dismiss such an assertion counter-positing such a status quo as having individual rather than group or societal roots (Tazreiter 2010). These developments, in turn, lead to additional pressures on individuals, as “neoliberal logic requires populations to be free, self-managing, and self-enterprising individuals in different spheres of everyday life – health, education, bureaucracy, the professions, and so on” (Ong 2006: 14).

90 4.4 Neoliberal forms of governmentality Beeson and Firth (1998) suggest that neoliberalism may best be thought of as representing a distinctive ‘political rationality’, which provides a useful way of understanding how governments conduct the management of economic stability and other activities, such as refugee resettlement. Political rationalities are particular and historically specific instances of ‘governmentality’.

Neoliberal political rationality is the product of a deep seated and complex process, where a new economic paradigm emerges as its nexus, although it is not limited to economics. Ronen Shamir (2008) has identified two developments that have resulted from neoliberal governmentality, the ‘economisation of the political’, that is, the state’s deployment of market rationalities, and the ‘economisation of the social’ – the practices, knowledges, and discourses that dissipate the separation of the economic and social spheres of life. “It is in and through the project of economising the social that civil society actors, including not-for-profit welfare bodies, are targeted as potential resources for government and sites for governmental action” (Sidhu and Taylor 2009: 5). Civil society actors are thus expected to bind individuals together into a self-sufficient and responsible collective of ‘community’ at the same time as working according to the norms of professionalism and accountability. Nikolas Rose refers to this form of governance as ethopolitics – working as it does through values, beliefs, morals and sentiments (2000: 1399). Moore extends this analysis by demonstrating that “the management of affect is now a form of governmentality” (2011: 168) and cautions that resultant forms of political ontology require critical attention before embracing their seductive appeal.

Aihwa Ong argues that neo-liberalism is central to the shaping of “our notion of the deserving citizen,” which is not just “an ethos but a regime of normalizing whereby homo- economicus is the standard against which all other citizens are measured and ranked” (1999: 129). The economy and the market are pervasive. Hence, everything is evaluated according to markers of economic outcomes and individual or communal advancement. One of the concealing mechanisms that enables this normalisation is the increasingly diversified practice of governmentality from a distance through organisations, networks and individuals, thus blurring the boundaries between the state and civil society. At its most encompassing, the neoliberal political rationality that has increasingly come to inform Australian public policy is a strategy for extending market mechanisms to areas of individual and organisational activity that had previously been considered as non- 91 market spheres of allocation, with major implications for the conduct of private and public life.

There is, however, a curious twist to the perception of economic efficiency and disaggregation of public services in that despite the Australian government’s (and also UK and US) use of anti-welfare rhetoric, they are in fact (partly) disguising a fundamental reliance upon forms of governance which incorporate major elements of the welfare state. “Contrary to their claims that welfare provisions must be dismantled for the health of the nation, neoliberal rationalities have in fact pursued a strategy of reshaping but not abolishing welfare regimes, which [...] form an integral component of a neoliberal governmentality” (Hartman 2005: 57).

Interestingly, Albo (2002: 47) suggests that:

it is a cold hard fact of contemporary politics that regimes of different political stripes have all endorsed capitalist globalization and implemented policies of deregulation, privatization, and social austerity. We get neoliberalism even when we elect social democratic governments.

This devolution of state services imposes a new onus of responsibility on civil society, which is embedded in a complex set of relationships within a geography of power. In effect the relationship between civil society and the state is one of balancing power from below (Cohen and Arato 1992: 24). The aims of civil society, however, run counter to the neoliberal emphasis on “elite governance, mistrust of democracy, and the maintenance of market freedoms” (Harvey 2005: 82). This withdrawal of the state has resulted in the formation of a number of NGOs, which engage in an increasingly diverse range of activities, including implementing grass-roots development, promoting human rights and social justice, and work in areas previously fulfilled by governmental agencies (Fisher 1997). The understanding of NGOs is complicated not only by their diversification of purposes, but also by their innovative and increasingly complex formal and informal linkages, including with a range of government services and departments (Carroll 1988; Peterson 1992; Sikkink 1993; Princen and Finger 1994; Lopez, Smith et al. 1995; Sikkink 1995).

92 4.4.1 The role of NGOs in neoliberal, governmentalised society NGOs are frequently perceived as being focused on helping the disadvantaged for reasons other than profit or politics (Brown and Korten 1989; Fisher 1993). “This idealisation of NGOs as disinterested apolitical participants in a field of otherwise implicated actors has led theorists and practitioners alike to expect much of them” (Fisher 1997: 442). But as Milton Friedman (1962: 3) has observed, “the power to do good is also the power to do harm,” a process that is all the more difficult to sort out when “what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.”

While NGOs frequently originate as voluntary groups with no governmental affiliation or support, some NGOs are created and maintained by governments. Nonetheless, in popular discourse – and frequently in academic discourse as well – NGOs are taken to embody action which is non-state, non-corporate and contributes broadly to civil society (Cohen and Arato 1992). NGOs tend to be organisations that have become formalised over time in distinction from social movements, which are more ephemeral and subject to waning interest (Tazreiter 2010).

The description of NGOs as part of a voluntary (Brown and Korten 1989), non-profit, independent (Fisher 1993) or “third” sector (Korten 1990; Salamon 1993; Hulme 1994; Salamon 1994) that is separate from both market and state (Wolfe 1991) reinforces the perception of NGOs as a segment of society that is separate from politics. If politics, however, is taken to refer to power-structured relationships maintained by techniques of control, then politics is not confined to institutions but pervades every aspect of life (Millet 1971; Foucault 1979; Kauffmann 1990; Gordon 1991)

There is hardly any attention to the discourse within which NGOs are depicted as the solution to problems of welfare service delivery. Fisher (1997) concurs that there are but few detailed studies of what is happening in particular places or within specific organisations, few analyses of the impact of NGO practices on relations of power among individuals, communities, and the state. I would agree with Fisher’s (1997) comment that the majority of literature is;

replete with sweeping generalizations; optimistic statements about the potentials of NGOs for delivering welfare services, implementing development projects, and facilitating democratization; and instrumental treatises on building the capacity of NGOs to perform these functions. (Fisher 1997: 441)

93 One of the reasons I see for such generalisations is that it is nearly impossible to penetrate these organisations, particularly for research. Behind a rhetoric of transparency and democracy lies a very strong culture of gate-keeping, where any access is expected to be received with gratitude; consequently researchers knowing the difficulty of re-access and not wanting to burn bridges tread with caution. Unpacking the literature on NGOs, much of which obscures its political stance in simple categories and generalisations, requires attention to (a) how discourses about NGOs create knowledge, define sets of appropriate practices, and facilitate and encourage NGO behaviour defined as appropriate; (b) how complex sets of relationships among various kinds of associations, the agencies and agents of the state, and individuals and communities have had an impact in specific locales at specific times (Fisher 1997). Fassin (2011) illustrates the challenges thus:

The exercise in critical analysis that focuses on humanitarian government30 exemplifies the difficulties that may be encountered in any anthropological study of morally prized social activities, precisely because those activities involve persons and institutions believed to be above suspicion because they are acting for the good of individuals and groups understood to be vulnerable. (Fassin 2011: 37)

Fassin’s analysis demonstrates the specific set of conditions of conducting research with humanitarian NGOs, which is linked by those organisations and their workers to a certain morally-based untouchability that is frequently articulated through the language of ‘ethics’. However, the deployment of such language results in a perplexing difficulty for anthropological inquiry, as it begets the question: how can independent analysis be permissible when the object of analysis is composed of intrinsic moral superiority?

4.4.1.1 The origins and current expressions of NGO moral superiority Tracing the origin of this intrinsic moral superiority has been variously argued, but may be summarised to incorporate two important dimensions. Firstly, developments that began with European Enlightenment, because “[a]n unprecedented wave of humanitarian reform sentiment swept through the societies of Western Europe, England, and North America in the hundred years following 1750” (Haskell 1985: 339). A key change

30 “The introduction of moral sentiments into the political and policy spheres” (Fassin 2010: 269). 94 relevant to this chapter was the emergent consideration of responsibility to strangers, based on “deontic moral principles of the worth of each human life” (Calhoun 2008: 74). Thomas Haskell expounds the thesis that the rise of capitalism had a “telling influence on the origins of humanitarianism through changes the market wrought in perception or cognitive style [that is] the power of market discipline [...] inculcate[d] altered perceptions of causation in human affairs” (1985: 342, original emphasis). The overall pattern was, in Weber’s (1968) sense, one of “rationalization,” shifting towards an “ethic of responsibility.” This “idea of humanitarian action [...] reflect[s] religious roots, but also a new emphasis on the secular – improving the human condition in this world” (Calhoun 2008: 106).

It is pertinent to remember, though, that the resultant social construction of humanity with its inherent – and thus transcending of national, cultural and other barriers – ethical obligations is a historically particular development. Thus, the second dimension concerns the universalistic nature of the notions of humanitarian obligations and human rights, which “bear the marks not only of a philosophical history of thinking about self and ethics, but also of specific religious traditions [and] of the growth of the modern state with its construction of equivalent subjects” (Calhoun 2008: 81). The pervasiveness of specific – mostly Christian – religious traditions is of course evident in both dimensions, whether concerning the transformation of economic relations through the market, for example Weber’s (1992) The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, or the secularisation of a “religious tradition of caring for the other and the giving of oneself” (Fassin 2011: 37). However, what characterises the relations under forms of humanitarian government falls into the remit of “pastoral power”, which is exercised on “a multiplicity in movement,” that is the “flock” (Foucault 2007: 123, 125), rather than on a state or a territory. It is in its essence a religious power that “God exercises over his people” (Foucault 2007: 125). Although this power is individualising in that the shepherd “can only really direct [the whole flock] insofar as not a single sheep escapes him [and] the shepherd owes everything to his flock to the extent of agreeing to sacrifice himself for its salvation,” pastoral power is “fundamentally beneficent” in the sense that “it’s only raison d’être is doing good” (Foucault 2007: 126, 128). “Humanitarian action is thus grounded simultaneously in an individual ethical imperative to save life or alleviate suffering and social organization designed to improve collective conditions of life”

95 (Calhoun 2008: 99). It is perceived to be worldly, as a secular good, yet it evokes religious categories and legacies of the sacred (Redfield and Bornstein 2011: 17).

In contemporary society, this humanitarian action is frequently claimed by a wide variety of civil society organisations that share as defining feature their declared not-for-profit orientation and freedom from governmental association. Despite these organisations’ enormous diversity of structures, aims and philosophies, they are compacted – rather misleadingly – into the unitary category of non-governmental organisation, or NGO. While the categorisation as NGO suggests autonomy from government, this conception of civil society not as a sector that contests the will of governments, but as a “vector of agonistic contentions over governmental relations” (Gordon 1991: 23), means that frequently NGOs are intricately situated in relationship with governments (Fisher 1997: 451). Moreover, NGOs are dependent on funding, whether they are charitable donations or (government tendered) contracts for service provision. The NGO sector’s interesting manifestation of complexity is a function of the interdependency of funding and organisational objectives, which creates a reality where “the humanitarian world always exceeds what we can say about it” (Fassin 2011: 35). If they are dependent on funding, it raises an issue of how that influences their modes of operation and how their philosophical mandate is constituted, particularly, as they have an idealised vision of themselves and rather grand designs for caring. NGOs emphasise “normative values such as solidarity and democracy,” and “promote themselves as altruistically based organisations” whose professional and committed staff exhibit “caring and understanding personalities” (Arvidson 2008: 109). Moreover, the fact that they are non-governmental and non-profit organisations helps sustain an image of NGOs as “doing good” (Zivetz 1991), unencumbered and untainted by the politics of government or the greed of the market (Fisher 1997: 442).

4.4.2 Encountering NGOs as a researcher In the popular conscience, NGOs are perceived to have – and they also invest substantial effort to maintain this – a pristine image of benevolent, caring and supra-political associations, concerned with an “ethics of responsibility” towards the equivalent worth of human lives. Attempting to submit to anthropological examination this pristine image is further complicated because NGOs “themselves are the ones to circumscribe the

96 relevant questions and define what may legitimately be said about them” (Fassin 2011: 35). The humanitarian sector elides critical analysis “because it operates by internalizing debate on the meaning and effects of its actions [and thus] resists the inquiry of social sciences” (Fassin 2011: 36). The encounter of repeated resistance by NGOs during my fieldwork prompted a reflection and the ensuing critique of this resistance vis-à-vis the social practice of ethics.

Locating the drivers of the service provider staff and volunteers31 highlights the ethical imperative coupled with a particular conception of altruism,32 which in turn is a key articulated motivation of their professional or volunteer engagement. There is a tension between their desired motivation and that which they are compelled to perform, which demonstrates internal conflict and at times even substantial moral dilemmas emanating from the incommensurability of an idealised rhetoric and a complex reality. Observing the ambiguous actions or discrepant statements of individual service providers definitely impels one’s anthropological curiosity. In her innovative study of volunteers at two Catholic charitable organisations, Rebecca Anne Allahyari advances the concept of moral selving, “the work of creating oneself as a more virtuous, and often more spiritual, person” through the practice of charity work (2000: 4). If it then suggests that the process of moral selving is linked to a more general and cultural interpretation of caring for others, I want to explore what it means to be altruistic, how it is performed and what the performativity entails. This directs one to ponder its various associated meanings, and the close relationship between altruism and self-interest.

4.4.2.1 The ‘gift’ of altruism Malin Arvidson finds that the term ‘altruistic’, even if “not commonly used in literature by or about NGOs, [...] captures the ideal image attached to these organisations” (2008: 114), as being professional, accountable, responsible, caring and understanding. So what are the unintended consequences of the motivations of altruism? There appears no firm consensus if ‘pure’ altruism, that is, an action that is entirely void of self-interest, is possible (see Batson 2011). However, if one were to assume, irrespective of its existence,

31 For the remainder of this thesis, both employees and volunteers of the service provider organisations will be referred to jointly as ‘service providers’, as well as separately when situational context necessitates. 32 The term altruism was first coined by the founder of positivism, August Comte, in The Catechism of Positive Religion (1973 [1858]). 97 that ‘pure’ altruism existed, it would only account for some very specific situations that do not frequently occur in social life. In fact, as soon as the term social enters the equation, so tend to do fellow human beings and the establishment of social relations, however weak or intangible. The pure and self-less ‘doing good’ is untenable because a succession of altruistic actions necessarily contributes to the building of relations and, thus, to expectations of reward or reciprocity where “I give in order that you may give” (Mauss 2007: 185). This theory of the model of sacrifice as exchange is less concerned with the apparent exchange of goods, but rather with the establishment of the two dimensions of existence between which such exchange can take place (Boothby 2001: 178).

The establishment of social bonding and stability that the ‘gift’ creates suggests “an implicit contract which guarantees that any effort will lead to a reasonable contribution by others when needed” (Brett 1993: 284). In the case of service providers, whose commitment to their ‘work’ – whether or not remunerated – is frequently framed in terms of altruism, the question arises how this idealised image of altruistic NGO work manifests in reality, when they clearly establish a relationship with the recipients of their ‘gifts’. Stirrat and Henkel have taken up this line of thought and argue that such a pure gift, “an act of seemingly disinterested giving, morally and ethically divorced from the mundane world” without expectation of reciprocity, would build relations that are “paradoxical in terms of their implications” (1997: 69). While charity as a gift is intended to do good, “it both presupposes and reinforces relations of patronage and inequality between the donor and the receiver” (Arvidson 2008: 114), because regardless of the ostensibly unidirectional issue of ‘benefits’, “symbolic forms of reciprocity” ultimately ensure a reciprocal bind (Stirrat and Henkel 1997: 66). Approaching altruism from this perspective, some commentators have argued that it amounts to “a form of far-sighted self-interest: we recognize that we too will lose if everyone maximizes short-term self- interest” (Brett 1993: 283). While this definition may stretch the concept of altruism to an extreme, self-interest can take different shapes that have different consequences. Olson (1997), for example, argues that self-interest can be narrow or one that is encompassing, which then has implications for the analysis of – in our case here perhaps somewhat conditional – altruistic actions. However, Keith Graham draws attention to a frequent misapprehension of altruism and self-interest as polarised concepts, which fails to take into account “that we individual agents are often constituents in plural subjects, rather than simply being individual agents” (2002: 61).

98 Amita Baviskar (1995) has illustrated the discrepancy between the rhetoric of NGOs and the failure of these organisations to live up to their own egalitarian rhetoric. Moreover, NGO practices in Rajasthan, for example, show how the relationships between organisations and their constituents come to replicate older patron/client patterns (Mehta 1996; Weisgrau 1997). These observations have given rise to some critics to suggest that the propensity of organisations to descend from participatory to oligarchic political structures resembles an “iron law of oligarchy” (Michels 1959; Fox 1992; Fisher 1994; Uphoff 1996). Hence, it is pertinent to be conscious of political realities and the individual subjectivities of NGO workers, and that the routine performative interaction between NGO service provision and its recipients produces consequences paradoxical to the transformative euphemism extolled by the discourse of NGOs.

The next section of the thesis comprises of the three chapters discussing the fieldwork data. Each chapter has a different analytic drive/motivation drawing on the theoretical concepts and methods introduced above in this section. The fieldwork material was collected during the two-year period as described above and some of the material, especially parts of chapters 5 and 7, have been presented at international conferences and refined following valuable feedback.

SECTION TWO: RESULTS CHAPTERS – INTERPRETATION OF FIELDWORK

DATA

100

CHAPTER 5 – NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION AND IMAGINED CITIZENSHIP:

DESIRED CONDITIONS OF BELONGING AND THE PERFORMATIVITY OF

CONTAINMENT

101 5 Narratives of Transition and Imagined Citizenship: Desired Conditions of Belonging and the Performativity of Containment

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest…

(Foucault 1988b: 155)

5.1 Background A key observation during fieldwork was that an ostensibly ‘easy’ resettlement process with the Bhutanese did not preclude confusion about community dynamics on part of the service providers. They seemed to be caught unawares when some of it was brought into the territory of visibility through the presence of a non-white ethnographer. The Bhutanese, on the other hand, showed awareness but seemed unwilling to directly engage the service providers about it. Cognisant of an understanding that “ethnographic facts, before being set down in the final written account, first pass through the observer’s subjectivity” (Davies 2010: 229), this chapter aims to break new ground with a candid exposition of the research process and its implications on the ethnographer’s response to conditions in the field. The fundamental epistemological consequences of data both on as well as of the ethnographer for the ethnographic research process are frequently suppressed rather than explicated (Coffey 1999). However, they make an essential contribution to an informed and nuanced understanding of the communities participating in the ethnographic project.

102 ancestry and/or cultural affinity to Nepal. Hence, for the Bhutanese refugees, “ethnic identity is a political project prefaced on collective and social memory that attests to difficult or traumatic histories and contemporary inequities” (Kearney 2012: 40). Due to the refusal of Bhutan to enable these refugees to return home to Bhutan (Joseph C. 1999; Hutt 2003; Rizal and Yokota 2006), the UNHCR33, which coordinated the relief camps in Nepal, has brokered an agreement with a range of nations, including Australia, to resettle at least a majority of the refugees in third countries. This resettlement process began in 2008 and Australia has agreed to take up a contingent of 5,000 refugees, whose transition into Australian society is facilitated through the DIBP34 Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (HSS),35 whose programmes are run by – mostly NGO36 – service provider organisations, which compete for these by tender. This ethnography is about the everyday interactions of NGO service provider case workers and volunteers with the resettling refugees, and how these dynamics are differentially diffracted through the presence of a non-white ethnographer.

In many ways the aim of the HSS is to turn these citizens-in-waiting into integrated members of Australian society. The programme constitutes a social process of mediated production of values concerning freedom, autonomy, and security, which is intended to shape the refugees’ ideas about what being Australian might mean, and how they may become active participants in that society. Through ensembles of interconnected issues this chapter highlights that ‘freedom’ is of a particular, advanced neoliberal denotation and that active participation can only occur within social and institutional constraints. Although a multiplicity of official and public domains subjects the refugees to norms, rules, and systems, they also modify practices and agendas while adroitly sidestepping some elements of control and quietly inserting subtle forms of critique.

33 The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly. The agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. Source: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c2.html; accessed 11/08/2013. 34 Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the former name (since 2007) of an Australian Government department, which in 2013 has been changed to Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP). 35 The first arrivals came under the auspices of the Integrated Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (IHSS), the resettlement programme’s previous manifestation. 36 Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) is used here in the inclusive sense of the term, recognising that a vast diversity of organisations can be termed NGOs and that there is no universally accepted definition of NGOs. 103 5.2 Citizenship and belonging in Australian context For immigrants the path to achieving citizenship and belonging to society has long been constructed along a set of expectations that entails as a substantial component the “moral capital of suffering” (Ong 2003: 3). This capital of suffering does not, however, guarantee them eventually becoming equal citizens with the mainstream white population, as there are always additional differentiators found that continue to maintain a division. I view this existential reality of migration to a country considered European or ‘white’ as linked to the inherent hierarchies of the colonial imagination,37 with its paternalistic view of ‘lifting up’ those of the ‘Third World’ or ‘less advanced societies’ to the levels of European civilization.

Nevertheless, many of those who migrate to Australia to live there long-term or permanently eventually take up Australian citizenship. Accessing the rights that are tied in with residency status or citizenship as such are thus not the main concerns, rather it is a question of “the mode of accessing such rights” (Hage 2002: 2). In order to develop a sense of belonging, and thus also a sense of responsibility towards society in a mutual transaction of respect, migrants’ dignity requires consideration for them not to feel as ‘second-class’ citizens. These human ‘technologies of citizenship’ (Cruikshank 1993, 1994) highlight the political calculations about bodies and humanity that are inherent in Australia’s (and other neo-liberally organised countries’) migration policy, which amount to an “increasingly instrumental conception of ‘what kind of migrants we need’” (Hage 2002: 4).

These drives feed into the national imagination and shape how ‘ordinary’ Australians, ordinary in the sense of already living there with a sense of belonging, relate to migrants and refugees and asylum seekers in particular. Claudia Tazreiter (2012: 44) suggests that the “motif of immigrant as hard-working, self-sacrificing and grateful for the opportunity of life in Australia remains a popular trope.” This relationship is often construed as one of opposites in terms of a spatialised imaginary of the nation, ‘us’ Australians in contrast to those others outside our borders. Such oppositions are coded in behavioural and discursive strategies that demarcate those perceived to be culturally deviant, and these “semi-conscious codes are exquisitely clear to newcomers” (Ong 2003: 4). They are at

37 I use colonial imagination to denote “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices ... and traces of power’s presence” (Gordon 1997: 25). For a more detailed definition, please refer to footnote 24. 104 the core of everyday experiences of newcomers as they begin charting the rules of belonging that members of society’s mainstream take for granted. These rules of belonging are, moreover, tied to notions of the ideal citizen, which are embedded in a variety of official programmes and unofficial practices that partake in governing subjects.

The social technologies of governmentality – “ways of conducting the conduct” (Foucault 2008: 186) – provide an analytical basis for examining and interlinking the multiplex everyday technologies of self-making and of being-made in an advanced liberal society, such as Australia, which tend to depend on regulation rather than discipline, thereby inducing citizen-subjects to become self-motivated, self-reliant, and entrepreneurial. Approaching resettlement in terms of a Foucauldian “analytics of power” highlights how its underlying rationalities shape people’s attitudes, behaviour, and aspirations in regard to belonging to a modern liberal society. This analytical model locates the dynamism in the fluctuating system of relations and interactions among individuals and problematises the connection between the rationality and the action, the aspirations to citizenship and the internalisation of norms as self-government.

Such a neo-liberal regime of government requires responsibilisation in order to act freely and thus the process of freedom often depends on means of subjection, which is not necessarily an overt one; rather it is imbued with assumptions about the relative moral worthiness of different categories of subjects, which in turn are embodied and influence social practices and shape the possibilities of citizenship. Thus, contemporary neoliberalism is concerned with the deployment of the culturally acquired rules of conduct to safeguard our civilization and the freedom it secures through the invocation of virtues associated with the spontaneous orders of market and family (Dean 2010: 191).

This emphasis on family is particularly relevant in the context of the results of this chapter. While the rules of market and the indoctrination of the newcomers in its logics are essential to the making of ‘free’ citizens, in the everyday interactions and the establishment of hierarchies of belonging the ordering following a family model is most pertinent. Family is a site that reconciles the contradictory relationship between equality and hierarchy, because in contrast to an idealised version of equality where everyone is concerned for the other members of the family, actual families remain organized around varying patterns of hierarchy.

105 Foucault locates this appearance of sovereignty in the family, as a “cell” of the sovereign type of power (2006: 79) that due to the “internal disciplinarization of the family” since the late 19th century has become “an increasingly essential component of the disciplinary system” (Foucault 2006: 124, 80-81). In effect, “one has a triangle, sovereignty – discipline – government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security” (Foucault 1991: 102). Instead of the ‘norm’ of discipline, which carries a prior definition in reference to which it categorizes as ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, the concept of security is concerned with identifying an average or a mean, trying to measure empirical ‘normalities’ and to establish their interplay (Foucault 2007: 63). Security thus determines a range of acceptable deviance and its apparatuses are initiated when elements transgress these limits.

Linking these multifarious power-effects to the observed fieldwork interactions is the nexus of the family model. As Ann McClintock observes, “the family image came to figure hierarchy within unity as an organic element of historical progress, and thus became indispensable for legitimating exclusion and hierarchy within nonfamilial social forms such as nationalism, liberal individualism and imperialism” (McClintock 1995: 45, emphasis in original). Since family links social hierarchies of gender, race, and nation, and “with racial ideologies and practices so reliant on family for meaning, family writ large becomes race” (Collins 1998: 65).

5.2.1 The Subject and Power – how Foucauldian ‘dividing practices’ enter the HSS In a situation of naturalised hierarchy as found in Australia, where through a range of political interventions and discursive strategies the white European settlers have positioned themselves at the centre of the nation, differential patterns of divulgence of the rights and obligations of citizenship are evident in the collective ‘national family’. Some members receive full benefits of membership while others encounter inferior treatment. The underlying racialising schemes draw on an extant social and political unconscious and overlap with and are informed by technologies of control. Consequently, “such thinking influences the conduct of social experts and social workers who seek to regulate the behaviour of minoritized populations considered less civilized than society at large” (Ong 2003: 13). This relative positioning within the national moral order is thus not a direct state policy; it is rather the result of the social and political unconscious

106 underpinning official action and public perception. An alternative viewpoint would perceive these racial categories as fundamentally pertaining to degrees of deservingness, which points to the question of how such ‘dividing practices’ function and how their consequences determine who is to be punished or rewarded, marginalized or supported, disliked or approved by immigration officials, HSS or social workers, and members of civil society.

These effects of the multiple rationalities that directly and indirectly prescribe techniques for living to independent subjects further complicate the notion of citizenship through two entangled processes of subjectification: one is “subjected to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to one’s own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge” (Foucault 1982: 781); however, because no relationship of power is all-encompassing, “[e]very power relation implies at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle” (Foucault 1982: 794). A strategy of power thus elicits a counterstrategy, which means that interactions through power relations engender processes of ongoing adjustment, negotiation, and conflict. Technologies of governing – as relayed through social programmes and experts seeking to shape one’s subjectivity – “can be rejected, modified, or transformed by individuals who somehow do not entirely come to imagine, to act, or to be enabled in quite the ways envisioned in the plans and projects of authorities” (Ong 2003: 16). Despite these governing technologies intent on the making of particular types of citizens by subjecting them to given rationalities, norms, and practices, individuals themselves are also entangled in their own subjectification or self-making. The resultant ambivalence is unavoidable, especially so, because these problematics of government are translated into everyday operations by professionals, whether they are doctors, teachers, social workers, or church workers, on behalf of individual local authorities. As these mediators are engaged in the micro-politics of everyday encounters to “transfigure existentialist questions [...] and the meaning of suffering into technical problems about the most effective ways of managing malfunction and improving ‘quality of life’,” Rose terms them “experts of subjectivity” (1992: 142). Due to their interfacing nature with the population to be governed, these experts of subjectivity exert through their individual unconscious shaping influences beyond the prescribed remit of their role. Service providers, for example, do not just build relations with a community, they also render dominant discourses into micro-practices that assign, label, and determine categories of the human – refugee, raced or multicultural subject, middle-class citizen, and so on – and

107 then try to shape their subjects into prototypes of the desirable categories. Bruno Latour identifies in this context a relay of governmental power dynamics when a successful command “results from the actions of a chain of agents each of whom ‘translates’ it in accordance with his/her own projects” (1986: 264).

Examining the fieldwork encounters reveals a multiplicity of micro-practices of control that allude to specific technologies of governmentality – grids of knowledge/power, mechanisms of surveillance, hierarchical categories – that are involved in the everyday shaping of the refugees into citizens. It is in this space of encounter and enmeshment, where one can observe the practices directed at newcomers, their agency and strategies of resistance, and the mutual daily interactions that ensue from the researcher’s presence. It is important to realise at this point that these technologies of government and apparatuses of security have impinged on the refugees for a much longer timeframe than the refugees’ stay in Australia. Already in the camps they have encountered aid donor patronage modes for defining, ‘saving’, and governing refugees through aid agencies and immigration authorities, all of which have contributed to shaping understandings about the superiority of white Australians as first-class citizens, as well as about the importance of patronage systems in gaining access to resources. By exploring the day-to-day experiences of the resettling Bhutanese refugees beyond the context of Foucault’s power- resistance axis, this chapter demonstrates how neo-liberal governance routinely practices what I term ‘compassionate condescension.’ It inheres a certain “violent subjection in the process of becoming free” (Ong 2003: 17), and how at the same time these structures of control are resisted by subjects in culturally creative, and frequently surprising ways.

5.2.2 The fictive ideal of becoming white The categories of refugee and citizen are political effects of institutional processes that are deeply imbued with socio-cultural values38 that result in complex ways in which different categories of refugees are variously imagined and received by the host country (Ong 2003: 79). The idea of becoming Australian is also defined by unofficial social meanings and criteria, “how the Self and Other have been mapped through imagined links between geography, history and cultural location” (Winter 2012: 1), which shape the

38 For an excellent overview of this complex area, see Nira Yuval-Davis’ recent book: The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (2011). 108 access to resources for those in the country. These have historically not only shaped the selective welcome of newcomers, but also the internal stratifications and unequal access to prestige and power among those already here (see Hage 1998). Citizens by birth or naturalization acquire certain rights and responsibilities that accrue from membership. For example, “using a logic of birth order elevates the importance of time of arrival in the country for citizenship entitlements [underscoring c]laims that early-migrating, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are entitled to more benefits than more recent [non-white] arrivals” (Collins 1998: 66). For the resettling refugees, these administrative, economic, and social realms are where bureaucrats and service workers guide and act upon their conduct, seeking to shape their destiny and to achieving desirable qualities in their subjects, such as productivity vis-à-vis employability or social integration. Such modes of government, intending to create normalised citizens, are “regularly critiqued, deflected, manipulated, and transformed by newcomers as they learn to become self-governing subjects in ways not fully intended by the programs” (Ong 2003: 10).

However, the service provision apparatus of the state as a technology of disciplining has some unintended social effects on the recipients of its attention. Arthur Frank notes that “the body is both the privileged site of the modernist will-to-truth and the equally privileged of the equally modernist display of cultural relativity, if not relativism” (1991: 40). The resettling refugees are disciplined through a lack of recognition of their intellectual ability, training and experience into the manual labour section of the labour market. Moreover, they are frequently praised by service providers for their exceptional ability of gardening, again emphasising the body as the site of recognition.

Within the apparatus39 of resettlement service provision in the form of the HSS, one technology stands out as having an especially pervasive impact on the refugees: it is what I term disciplining opportunities. It entails both a limitation of the possibilities that are provided for the refugees to engage in their new society, as well as technologies of control through which the refugees can be shaped into a specific form of self-sufficient, ‘free’ and self-governing subjects.

In what tantamounts to a highly prescriptive suasion by the service providers of a ‘natural’ place in society, resettling refugees through disciplining opportunities are prepared for

39 The apparatus is a specific strategic response to a specific historical problem. But such an initial response to a pressing situation can gradually have a more general rationality extracted from it, and hence be turned into a technology of power applicable to other situations (Rabinow and Rose 2003: xviii). 109 low-skilled jobs as seasonal agricultural labourers, hotel maids or care assistants. Refugee training reflects the implicit official perception that regardless of their former backgrounds, the majority of the refugees are going to be members of the working poor.

5.3 Narratives of transition – the beguiling appeal of becoming Australian

5.3.1 Wijaya40 When I arrived for fieldwork in 2010, Wijaya was one of the first people I spent time talking with. He was perceptive and resolutely hopeful. Since his and the family’s disenfranchisement from Bhutan and living in exile with refugee status in Nepal close upon two decades, he has been the secretary of a Bhutanese human rights group, which has worked with international aid and human rights organisations towards mediation for recognition of the Lhotshampa and their re-entry to Bhutan. Within that year I saw him many times. Each time he had stories to share both of his time past and of his time present. Thoughtful, mulled over words of observation. During our early encounters he was quietly optimistic of the new possibilities Australia offered him and his family. He was observant about his new place of home, its people and opportunities and looked forward to finding work.

Yet, when I meet him again in 2010, he is wistful and reclusive. He was always a man of few words unless directly engaging in conversation. However, I noticed that the timbre in his voice had become less resolute and his hope less. The fire in his eyes appeared to be diminishing, there was a significant change. Wijaya is not well. He says he has been diagnosed with depression and type 2 diabetes. While he was a civil servant in Bhutan, he was picked up by the military and had to face imprisonment and torture. Subsequently, for close upon 20 years he has lived in exile as a refugee in Nepal. Nonetheless, he like others who were resettled through an UNHCR brokered agreement with the Australian Government had been cleared of any chronic disease on being accepted as a humanitarian entrant to Australia. Hence, his recent illnesses are intriguing. I will not elaborate on his illnesses; however, I make reference to it here because it has bearing on the overall thrust of my argument contained in this chapter. My aim is to merely highlight how the

40 Names have been changed and some details modified in accordance with ethics protocol with the intent to conceal the identity of research participants. All quoted direct speech has been reconstructed from field notes. 110 resettlement experience has unintended consequences. Wijaya’s story is pertinent, because it compels the question what were the terms Wijaya was assuming in his relocation and what were the terms he encountered. I want to interrogate the discrepancies between these imaginaries and realities.

Relating his recent work experience he was given as part of the resettlement programme, he says he got to work for a short time at the local council. In his native home of Bhutan, for many years he had been a civil servant holding a senior rank in the district administration. In a country known for its mountainous terrain and arduous transport, he has had to master logistics, communications and road access in his work as a regional manager for trade and produce, where he had been responsible for uninterrupted supplies to his district. Wijaya is of the opinion he got the chance at the local council in Australia, because he used to “work in government.” And then he gives me a rueful smile and says: “Do you know what I had to do for work experience here? Put invitations into envelopes and stick stamps on them for mailing.”

In our ensuing conversation it is obvious there is a paradox in his expectations (respect him and recognition for his former employment) and their assumptions of his abilities. Wijaya had anticipated that the local council in Australia would be able to capture the essence of his former work experience, if not in entirety, at least to some degree. There is disbelief at the triviality of the task assigned to him.

5.3.2 Rashmi A similar lack of recognition of qualifications, paired with an insensitivity to the dreams and ambitions of some of the newcomers is also evident in the narratives Rashmi shared. She is an articulate young refugee woman resettling in a harbour city in Australia with great hope and big dreams. In her imaginary this act of physical mobility is a catalyst to realise her biggest dream to pursue postgraduate education.

The following narrative stems from when we met on a winter evening in her home in Australia. There are four of us, Rashmi and her husband Mithun, Maggie and myself. Three of us are sitting snug around the kitchen table, talking about hopes, overcoming obstacles, and so on and for over three hours we chat. Maggie sat a small distance away,

111 intermittently listening in or joining the conversation, while she appeared absorbed in her own thoughts at other times.

Rashmi has great hopes of going on to do a Masters at a university in Australia, perhaps become a teacher or even study further. Her excitement is palpable. Her husband Mithun says: “She is the smarter one, so for now she will do the studying and get a good job while I work and then I will pursue a further degree.” The look of admiration and respect in her partner’s eyes is evident. I have come with Maggie, the caseworker who prides herself in being close to the Bhutanese. She has a soft spot for Mithun as she has told me he is hardworking as a casual interpreter for her organisation. She has also commented previously that he is a good looking man who looks smart in his black leather jacket. I am not surprised by these comments anymore, as I have heard several of the case workers and volunteers talking about him in this vein before. What did cause surprise to me was seeing Maggie so taken aback on hearing their intimate stories of dreams. What about children, don’t they want to have children, she asks them. Rashmi laughs happily and replies firmly: “No. Not for many years. When I am thirty maybe. We have held back from having children, in spite of pressure from our relatives, even when we were in the refugee camps, because it was so important for us that we study and educate ourselves to find good jobs, like being a teacher.” She is a confident young woman, assured of her own abilities to achieve great things given the opportunity. Maggie has recommended that they gain local work experience by doing berry picking during the summer.

Later in the car when Maggie and I are together going for dinner after our conversation with Rashmi and Mithun, she says she is surprised by the things they have shared, and says the things they want to do seem a little lofty. She expresses genuine surprise at what has transpired during the conversation. I say to her Mithun seems disappointed that he has applied for so many jobs and hasn’t been successful, which is surprising considering his qualifications and positive attitude. The caseworkers have frequently told me his English is very good and he does his work very well when he does the casual interpretation for some of their other Bhutanese clients. And then, when I say it is funny how he is finding it so hard to get any interviews, even for jobs he seems overqualified for, she dismisses my concern, saying “oh he doesn’t have to worry, I have told him to wait till summer, when he can work as a berry picker.” It is my turn to look surprised that she tells this obviously talented and confident young man to wait for casual labour jobs instead of encouraging him to pursue ways of finding meaningful employment as he

112 seems to desire. It is obvious that such an idea is inconsistent with how she sees him. I am taken aback by the casualness with which she has categorised his and Rashmi’s aspirations as ‘lofty’ and the matter-of-fact way with which she consigns their skills, talents and qualifications to irrelevance. This is particularly striking, as they have overcome tremendous obstacles during exile in Nepal to pursue their education.

The year after, when I go back, Rashmi is heavily pregnant. Faced with an uncertain future, she has chosen motherhood over intractable hopes.

5.3.3 Thilin Thilin‘s work experience placement at an old age care home offered to him during resettlement is revealing. He has been placed as a care assistant and a vacancy has come up for the position while he is on work placement. The company cannot find an outside replacement, and Thilin would like to continue. Many of the residents at the care home, he says, are keen for his shift as say they like his easy going and cheerful manner. Maggie also tells me that she has heard this from the supervisor and not just from Thilin. Of course Maggie is somewhat partial towards Thilin, I am aware of this having been told by her that Thilin and his family are the nicest. He is the son of a mayor in his part of Bhutan who was abducted and tortured because the government suspected one of his brothers of being involved in ‘anti-government’ activities. After his release from prison Thilin was expelled from Bhutan and had to find his wife and family who by that time had gone to the refugee camps in Nepal. Their story of survival is one of resilience and perseverance. Having arrived in Australia Thilin, like Mithun, has been working casually as an interpreter for RSPO, one of the service provision organisations. He and his family are definitely Maggie’s favourite which she has told me repeatedly. There appears to be a preference to employ Thilin as a casual interpreter more so than others perhaps based on Maggie’s personal partiality.

So when the aged care place vacancy is not filled due to a lack of suitable external candidates, and because Thilin has been praised by the care home residents and his immediate supervisors, he wonders if he can continue in the role and has decided to apply for the job. In spite of his performance, he says they are reluctant to employ him, saying he has not the right qualifications and that he would need do some of that at the TAFE. He is prepared to complete those requirements in his spare time, while continuing to do

113 his work experience there. The management has suggested that if he completes a particular TAFE qualification he might have a chance at the job, which he does. At this stage as they had still not filled the position they hire him on probation. So during our chat he tells me his probation is soon coming to an end and he has good feedback from everyone; however, it has been suggested to him that there is no certainty in his securing the job.

The strategies deployed by Thilin’s work placement employer are revealing. Probation is a regular feature for everyone. However, in Thilin’s case they offer him the job on probation and at the end of it he is given positive feedback by both his supervisors and care home residents. Nevertheless, the probation period is extended beyond the usual period instead of his position being confirmed. It is obvious that the company is imposing extra conditions.

Interestingly, Thilin tells me this story at the RSPO office when we happen to meet because he has dropped in for a couple of hours to work as an interpreter that day. On hearing the story I say, in front Maggie: “well if you are completing your probation you are sure to get the job, especially if everyone likes you there and thinks you are doing a great job you would have to get the job Thilin.” When I say this, Maggie interjects hurriedly and says, looking cross: “he does not have to get it, I am not so sure about that.”

At no point is Thilin critical of his employer while telling the story. However, he communicates in a subtle manner the subtext of the story. The tension I want to highlight here is Thilin’s anxiety and uncertainty of securing the job and how Maggie through her response sustains that. Indeed she is annoyed with my exclamation “of course you should get the job.” Maggie is irked at what she seems to perceive as my impertinence to ‘create’ an expectation in Thilin of Australian employment laws and their equal application. Here, as in some other instances, my being a non-white migrant to Australia and asserting through my experience explicitly or implicitly becomes a transgression and is interpreted as an expression of my assumption of authority over things Australian. She fails to see that Thilin, for all his cheerfulness (which is often assumed by the service providers to be one of compliance), is aware of his situation at the Care Home, and has obviously chosen to ‘share the information’ with me in front of Maggie on our chance encounter.

There is perhaps another reason why Thilin chose to mention this in front of Maggie. Previously, I had been his family’s guest, as had been Maggie and the volunteer assigned

114 to his family. The volunteer, who is a white woman in her 50s, started displaying her “Englishness and affiliation to Britain” (as people are wont to do frequently in Australia). However, when she says she has lived in London and mentions the suburb, I say cheerfully “oh I lived there for many long years too,” upon which she becomes irritated by this unexpected coincidence. She is visibly annoyed and almost shouts at me saying “where,” “what” and tries to trip me up by interrogating about the “landmarks in the area” in order for me to “prove” that I did live in the area. However, when I ask her the whereabouts of her home, she says looking sheepish, “in fact it is not my place, I have only occasionally gone there, it’s a friend’s, but it is quite nice to be able to say it and sound posh!”

Although on this occasion I had felt uncomfortable when she had got annoyed over our shared experience of living in London, I replied confidently to her questions looking rather surprised at her animosity. I remember Thilin’s family looking embarrassed. Vivian, the volunteer, found it disconcerting that I had the same access to a world that she and other volunteers see as a white privilege. She is fond of Thilin’s family and frequently drops in to ‘give’ stuff that she has got from the op-shop. Even on this day, as we are leaving after the dinner she says, “I have some nice things I got for you,” and takes out two bags. While Thilin and his wife are walking us to the door, Vivian says I’ll just put them in your bedroom, opens a closed door and casually walks in.

5.3.4 Kanchana – the stratagem of status making Despite the strong disciplining of opportunities, the Bhutanese assert agency in multiple ways beyond a sometimes rather unsophisticatedly subsumed notion of resistance to mechanisms of control.

One example would be Kanchana, who accompanied me to assist with some interpretation to one of the Bhutanese families I visited. Sister Mildred had suggested she could pick us up when we were ready and drop Kanchana home, which is on the way. During a conversation in the car, Kanchana suddenly changes her usual form of address from Sister Mildred to Mildred, that is, the same way that I used to address her because of our friendship. Kanchana, however, altered her address to the informal manner of a personal friend without Mildred inviting her to do so. I noticed Mildred showing some discomfort by Kanchana’s projected familiarity. Instinctively, to reduce the discomfort

115 for Sister Mildred, I steered the conversation to imply the emphasis of Mildred’s title of Sister Mildred, which is how most people address her including her colleagues at RSPO.

It is clear that governmentality never exerts totalising levels of control, and this incident highlights how targets of its activities deploy their agency to work within and around the power structures and manage, in subtle ways, to modulate outcomes. Kanchana’s actions in the car show clearly how she is attempting to deploy the non-white ethnographer’s presence to challenge some of the perceived unevenness in hierarchy. Working within the existing power structures, she aims to project herself differently, trying to locate a connection to do that through the ethnographer, she is trying to elevate her own position – as a Brahmin she is among the highest levels of the social order in the Bhutanese community – to that of a non-refugee position in the local context, that is, within her own community and their interactions with RSPO. More than an act of resistance to outside power structures, perhaps this rather reflects a strategy to rebuild pre-eminence within her own community, where the ‘old’ structures are slowly beginning to be challenged and displaced by the resettlement experience and its possibilities in terms of adaptation, job opportunities and financial independence.

5.4 Discussion This chapter investigates subtle applications in the modus operandi of neoliberal apparatuses, in this instance the HSS, and how they intersect with personal biographies in routine interactions. It illuminates how they come to bear upon resettling refugees and how the staff and volunteers implementing the HSS programme become purveyors and surveyors, and at times voyeurs of their lives. The resulting set of relations is mutually though unequally produced. Through these actions the Bhutanese are put into new sets of relations of dependency. The everyday interactions between the resettling Bhutanese refugees and the service providers detailed in this chapter highlight some assumptions of the Bhutanese, whose fantasies of resettling are informed by two aspects, the loss inhered in a past refugee status and the abundance of ‘first world’ possibilities, including unequivocal equality and a haven of human rights. This is buttressed by a variety of actors in organisations, both locally and internationally, who contribute to their third country resettlement.

116 This chapter also highlights how the service providers in turn have their own assumptions that inflect in significant ways the shaping of the Bhutanese’ opportunities and outlook. Even though refugees are ostensibly admitted to the country due to their refugee status, rather than the country’s need (unlike with skilled migrants),41 the resettlement programme does not entail an expectation of repayment of a ‘debt’ incurred in the process of resettlement;42 much rather, they have to pay for the host nation’s imaginary of refugees,43 which is explored in greater detail in Chapter 7. For example, there is an expectation that refugees engage in unskilled, labour-intensive work, such as seasonal agricultural work, where there is always a strong demand for additional labour. Amongst the advice for new arrivals is the suggestion to leave behind their perceptions of what is and is not a suitable job in terms derived from their former social hierarchy, encouraging them that working at fast food outlets, as a care assistant, or being a cleaner is not a stigmatised occupation in Australia. This advice is meant to facilitate their entry into the Australian workforce; simultaneously, it also inheres a preparation for what will become the segment of their possibilities in the Australian labour market.

This containment of options is effected through disciplining opportunities, which are based on a constellation of disregard of the qualifications and experience, expectations of gratitude, subservience and deference, as well as a need to first prove themselves as hardworking contributors suitable to Australian society. These disciplining opportunities can be discerned, for example, in Rashmi’s complete turn-around in foregoing education and embracing motherhood – an act of irony seeing she had resisted social pressure to become a mother and tenaciously clung to hopes of higher education in spite of her refugee status in the camps. However, there is an incentive in becoming mother in Australia, because “childbearing and sometimes motherhood too are associated with [...] social status and self-esteem” (Moore 1988: 108) and motherhood would assign an imperative to stay at home. However, Thilin’s experience of probation also demonstrates that these notions are not confined to the staff at service organisations, but rather held

41 However, consider that Australia’s refugee resettlement intake is incorporated into its overall migration intake calculation, as it forms an integral part of Australia’s migration policy. See also Chapter 3.3.1. 42 For example, humanitarian entrants in the Special Humanitarian Programme, or their Australian resident sponsors, usually have to pay the costs of their travel to Australia, although there are additional financial support mechanisms they can apply for. On the other hand, those in the ‘Refugee’ category arriving though UNHCR assisted resettlement programmes, who constitute the majority of humanitarian entrants, are completely sponsored by the Australian Government. See also Chapter 3.3. 43 Skilled migrants, who are not of white ethnic background, are also exposed to an expectation of complying with a related imaginary in similar fashion, which is outside the scope of this thesis. 117 more widely in Australian society, as theoretical undertakings would indicate. These disciplining opportunities furthermore complicate the notion of governmentality enacted through the structures established in the HSS programme, as they are substantially inflected by service providers and volunteers who interact with the resettling refugees.

For some of the resettling Bhutanese the service providers’ talk of a lack of hierarchy in jobs and an openness to taking up certain types of work they may have previously avoided provides novel opportunities. While such articulations impel the community into specific types of work, some, particularly those of a lower caste, appear to have noticed how an aptitude to succeed in these segments of the labour market might provide them with creative ways to make themselves more visible within the community, for example through the use of conspicuous consumer elements that denote prosperity and social ascendancy, that is, forms of social success in the Australian context.

The early phase of resettlement in Australia is fraught with challenges and adjustment and for many of the refugees it seems that the time of uncertainty really begins here. It may appear counterintuitive at first to consider it a time of uncertainty given the prospect of a new, ‘safe’ and stable life in Australia. However, in the refugee camps there seems to have been more clarity of what their role and perspective was: they were refugees. On the one hand, there was aid for their day-to-day survival, on the other, along with some of their own elite, there were attempts to broker their return to Bhutan through various channels. Moreover, many tried to engage in some form of work, others tried to educate themselves, including tertiary and technical qualifications. Without resorting to overly deterministic generalisations, there nevertheless was something akin to a common cause, which seems to have significantly contributed to the shaping of an identity that all could subscribe to. In Australia, however, for the first time these parameters have lost their easy identifiability. Their exposure to a very different style of social ordering based on individualism and self-government is guided by liberal notions of ‘freedom’ and market rationalities, which has opened avenues for disparate ways and claims of becoming Australian. Hence, their once common identity is challenged, because old forms of social ordering are turning obsolete and meaningless, and are declared as such by the service providers, too. The HSS programme exhorts ‘Australian values’ of equality, yet that does not fully transfer to their existential realities. On the one hand they are encouraged to access and adopt a multicultural identity that includes, among other things, the unrestricted practice of religion vis-à-vis possibilities of support for the establishment of

118 their own temple, which is then again linked to ‘equality’ in Australia. In the process, the service providers fetishise equality and what Australia signifies, and contribute to expectations of how different it will be from Bhutan – be it practicing a religion, wearing what they want, or speaking any language, and so on – but the available reality turns out to be a journey of paradoxes. On the other hand, their lived experience demonstrates that contrary to a near mythic state of equality in Australia their opportunities are limited and disciplined. Nevertheless, despite the effects of the disciplining opportunities, this “shaping of conduct according to certain norms [not only] set[s] limits on individuals[,] but also make[s] possible certain forms of agency and individuality” (Nixon 2013: 311).

5.4.1 Reflections and inflections of ethnographic encounters Indeed, during the early resettlement period my presence as a non-white ethnographer became pivotal for what transpired and did not. The presence of the non-white ethnographer, rather than treating it as “intrusive measurement error” (Hunter 1995: 158), was a catalyst in various ways that elucidated subtle aspects of power relationships among participants. To remove ambiguity about this statement from the outset, it is not to say that events did only take place because of an ethnographer’s presence, for there are numerous events I draw on that occurred independently and were brought to my attention by my interlocutors. However, the interpretation and impact of some events were altered. What form participation takes and how one’s presence impacts on the relations is dependent on the status within that context.

In a structural, organisational sense, I was situated as one of the service providers, akin to a colleague from another organisation who was temporarily there. However, such an organisational alignment in itself does not guarantee ‘freedom to operate’, as there is an ongoing evaluation, a “checking out” by service providers (Ostrander 1995: 135) of the researcher and her claim to occupational prestige. Coxon, Davies et al. (1986) suggest that occupational cognition is dynamic and grounded in social context. Rather than possessing one dominant “image” of occupational standing, prestige is multidimensional, fluid, and context dependent, and consequently people employ a repertoire of such images in different contexts for different purposes (Aldridge 1995: 117). One consequence of this reality is that it affects the nature of the data, because this is contingent on kinds of relationships of trust beyond the approval to enter an organisation (Ostrander 1995: 135).

119 Similarly, the relationships with the resettling refugees were not set in immutable parameters. Instead, the dynamics of these relationships were in constant flux, updated by current events or impressions taken from other interactions. The implications for an ethnographic study are thus inescapable. Perhaps our attention should be diverted from the query if the researcher influenced the study to a more principled analysis of how the researcher influenced the study (Kleinman and Copp 1993). Treating the researcher and one’s own responses to the fieldwork encounters and dynamics as data, as an integral part of the ethnographic project to be “made visible and brought into the work rather than something that has to be erased entirely” (Ostrander 1995: 143), provides valuable insights. The above narratives articulate some of the ways in which the non-white ethnographer’s entanglement with the research participants yielded important insights about power, knowledge, and fieldwork dynamics that are never formally stated.

For example, Wijaya was not able to freely express how he felt about his work experience at the local council to the service providers or even the volunteers, apprehensive it might be construed negatively and affect his relationship with them. That this was indeed a well- founded concern will be illuminated later in this discussion with events unrelated to him. Similarly, for Rashmi and Kanchana, even if for both in different ways, the encounter with a non-white ethnographer provided impetus to re-imagine a different reality to their resettlement experience. As these three examples also quite emphatically highlight, my presence was not an ‘intervention’. In fact, it had little immediate impact on the specific situations where it most clearly made itself felt. Rather, it provided the resettling refugees with an alternative perspective into Australia, outside the parameters of their ‘normal’ HSS-guided resettlement experience and their limited everyday encounters with society. In addition, through my geo-regional affinity with the resettling refugees the Bhutanese entered with me into a different social sphere, where they felt they could voice their hopes, dreams and desires in a way that the ambiguous ground of the resettlement service provision could not make available. Nevertheless, what impact, if any, beyond extending their views of Australia these experiences harbour will have to be discerned at a later stage in another study.

Interestingly, the drawing of relations out of the ambiguous ground affected the service providers as well, who frequently appeared as if the ethnographer’s presence challenged their naturalised and comfortable hierarchy of the setting. In extremis, these notions

120 precipitated a cataclysmic turn of events of what should have been a cheerful get together when a senior male service provider figure felt upstaged (see Chapter 6).

Some aspects of these forms of agency and individuality Sean Nixon (2013) identified above become evident during the fieldwork encounters, be it Thilin’s carefully timed and placed statement about his probation, or Kanchana’s push for a recalibration of specific relations. After the experience of the compression of their community’s hierarchy by the service providers, who treat all the Bhutanese refugees as a flat social category with little complexity, Kanchana tries to establish a signifier re-claiming her position by recasting the community’s hierarchy. She observes my relationship with Sister Mildred, but suspends her knowledge of the reality – and complexity – of the nature of my relationship with Mildred, and sees my easy familiarity with her as an opportunity to reclaim some of her own lost significance within the community. Within that close environment of the three of us, she trials out if she too can call Sister Mildred just Mildred. I did not see my friendship with Mildred as a social marker. Many address her as Sister Mildred, and not merely due to her carrying this honorific title, but also because of a respect that was accorded to her for her long-term engagement tackling social issues in that state. Reflecting on Kanchana’s actions, I later realise that my friendship with Mildred was perceived as a signifier, especially as the Bhutanese do not call their religious leaders by their first names. Moreover, many of Mildred’s colleagues use the honorific title, hence through Kanchana’s actions it became evident that the possibility to address Mildred by her first name was perceived as a privilege. What perhaps warrants some emphasis here is that it would not be meaningful to reduce these forms of agency to ‘resistance’. Much rather, they are part of a complex network of relations, of knowing and unknowing, in extant hierarchies of colonial imagination and ‘donor-receiver’ obligations.

An encounter from the field elaborates this, with my comment to Thilin about the extension of his probation. It was aimed at implying that if he has satisfied the employment criteria he should then be entitled to the job as anyone else would be, which Maggie did not find agreeable. Applying her own interpretation, she perceives my suggestion could carry even a subtle criticism of the Australian employer, which provokes an affront to a moral world view where Australian translates to axiomatically fair. In effect, it implies that Thilin, as a resettling refugee to be considered in the pool of contenders by the company, is already ‘fair’ enough, because merely providing him with this opportunity has advantaged him.

121 In the encounter with Vivian, in response to my shared experience of living in the same part of London, Vivian’s hostility shows embodied assumptions of an implicit social hierarchy that my statement collapsed. My claiming equality of experience causes her cognitive dissonance (see also, Hage 2003: 48-9). Hence, her request to ‘prove’ through knowledge of local landmarks the authenticity of the statement. What is noteworthy here is that Vivian, in spite of her discomfort, is moved to request proof, because there is social capital inherent to a university affiliation. Once again the increased refractive index of the non-white ethnographer illuminates interesting articulations of social signifiers drawn from colonial imagination when unpacking how this event unfolded. Wijaya on the other hand, who had a senior role in Bhutan’s civil service and even as a refugee in exile in Nepal worked with international power brokers to negotiate a repatriation agreement, was not offered such an opportunity to ‘prove’ himself. His curriculum vitae had been modified with the help of Sister Mildred for an Australian audience, which is what the council received. Regardless, his work experience outside of Australia, before becoming a refugee and after, seemed to not have featured in the assessment for his work experience at the local council. For the entire duration of his work experience, he was assigned a ‘safe’ job of inserting invitations into envelopes and sticking stamps onto them, that is, where there was no cerebral work required on the part of the performer. What transpires here is that Wijaya did not even get an opportunity to demonstrate his skills and experience.

Those who migrate from what is called a ‘third world’ country, also euphemistically known as a ‘developing nation’, are exposed to a colonial imaginary of patronage with its implicit scalar assumptions of their knowledge and experience in the ‘first world’ society. This gets further compounded when the label ‘refugee’ is attached. The social category of refugee privileges suffering and frequently hyper-accentuates a lack and neediness, which is then construed as a valid reason to be granted entry to resettle in a ‘first world’ country. Moreover, the fetishising of the category of refugee also drives an apparatus of “compassionate care” (see Ticktin 2011), though the paradox of this care is that it is reductive and infantilising, as in the case of Wijaya. His work experience, which was limited to role playing as a council employee, exemplifies how the category of refugee is thus burdened with imagery and yet devoid of complexity. The non-white ethnographer, who is not a refugee, on the other hand, was allowed the space to prove her familiarity of

122 her claim to equal experience to a white Australian, because she has Australian professional experience and her knowledge can thus be validated.

Thilin’s work place’s creative stretching of employment conditions as well as Maggie’s comment about his probation conditions furthermore demonstrate how in such entanglements inequalities become reinscribed and uneven opportunities are created. Maggie has previously stated to me that Thilin and his family are her most favourite out of all the Bhutanese. And still, when she perceives what could be seen as the slightest assessment or critique of living in Australia, she is unhappy and quick to reassert implicitly that the ‘refugee’ is not welcome to make this critique and conceals what should be his right of employment. Maggie’s response is to blur the application of employment conditions, which simultaneously negates the possibility of Thilin critiquing his experience by reasserting that he, as a resettling refugee, is not in a position to issue it. Through the strategically placed disclosure of this situation, Thilin was in effect corralling the ethnographer to comment from the outside of the ambiguous ground. In this situation, despite the ethnographer stating the normative position, Maggie leveraged her structurally privileged position of a service provider working with and on behalf of the Bhutanese refugees and their welfare to silence a valid critique. This way, the logic of domination is concealed. Similarly, the employer is exerting such logics when they extend the probation and Maggie tacitly lends complicity when she reprimands the signs of critique despite the allusion to the norm.

Vivian on the other hand taps into the label of exalted – a form of superior exoticism – that being British and European has in Australia. Being of British extraction, Vivian fetishises its special value and projects herself into this lofty status of British, when she positions herself in that social setting. She is situating herself in respect of both, Maggie and the ethnographer through a strategic erasure of certain identities, while bolstering others, that is, British, with the weight of a superiority that naturalises social hierarchies. Here specifically, she tries to demonstrate to Maggie, the caseworker and professional, that even though she as a volunteer carries less professional kudos, her social standing is of an altogether different and a desirable one. Secondly, she also positions herself in respect to the non-white ethnographer, whose presence and institutional affiliation signifies a professional role. Both positioning efforts draw on the colonial imagination that puts Britain at the centre and the (former) colonies and their inhabitants at the periphery. As it happens, words often elicit unanticipated cognitive and affective

123 responses. My spontaneous statement about the shared experience at the hub of the former empire, thus, sits rather uneasy with Vivian’s self-assessment of her desired position. Her response is manifest of an axiomatic privilege that the non-white ethnographer should not have been privy to.

5.5 Conclusion The different strands elucidated in the discussion are connected in various ways in as much as they emphasise the notable discordances in the expectations of the resettlement process by both, the refugees and the service providers. These discordances surfaced when events brought different sets of assumptions into crisis, although these crises were not necessarily always made known to all parties, especially the service providers. As recipients of the HSS programme, the Bhutanese are grateful for the services provided that offer a new start in Australia. Moreover, their experience of aid donor patronage in the refugee camps and its extension in resettlement has demonstrated that these relationships require a delicate approach to not upsetting a certain performative expectation of the refugees by the ‘donors’ (see Ong 2003). Hence, being at the receiving end of this hierarchy, the Bhutanese exercise caution about how and what they communicate, which occludes some crucial aspects of their resettlement experience from the service providers’ gaze. At the same time, they exercise their agency in creative ways to leverage the ethnographer’s presence to subtly interject critique, as Thilin did with his strategic disclosure of unduly onerous probation requirements to secure a job or Wijaya’s wry retelling of his work experience. Nevertheless, the service providers too exhibit their own assumptions. Maggie for example tries to reassert her vision of how an Australian employer should evaluate a refugee’s performance and eligibility for employment, whereas the volunteer Vivian finds her positioning stratagem of British extraction and attendant imperial prerogative of centredness destabilised by the non-white ethnographer.

What ties together these seemingly disparate strands is an overarching reality of the power effects everyday racism informed by colonial imagination. These effects manifest in multiple forms, the perceived ‘lack’ in the refugees, the paternalism of the service providers, and the embodied hierarchies. Focussing on the embodiment of naturalised social hierarchies, interrogating the experiential residues therein, can enable one to fully grasp the ways in which structural inequalities personally and cumulatively impact lives.

124 Rosemarie Roberts (2013: 12) identifies “[non-white] bodies as sites of knowledge production,” whereas white bodies cannot serve this purpose in an analogous fashion as they are ‘invisible’ at the centre. Non-white bodies on the other hand, being marked and visible – perhaps even hyper-visible – serve as the nucleation point for the creation of particular knowledge. Consequently, there is a wide range of experiences that is not available to the ‘white centre’. Through the label ‘refugee’ the body is made unintelligible, as it is denuded of personal or specific history. This is particularly evident in Wijaya’s story and the trivialising act of ‘employment’ offered to him. He, on the other hand assumed, in spite of his contemporary resettling refugee status, that the council would allow complexity to his personal history and recognise his previous civil servant experience and engage in a mutual exchange. Instead, his work experience became reduced to an act of pseudo-recognition enacted perfunctorily.

5.5.1 Operationalisation of control mechanisms These disciplining opportunities – not all explicitly discussed here – are operationalised mainly through two discernible mechanisms: ‘unknowing’ and embodiment. I refer here to the concept of ‘unknowing’ as deployed by Geissler (2013), which involves a mutually recognised strategic elision, a mutual obligation to maintain a perceived situation. Thus, this form of deliberate non-knowledge “perform[s] double work [...] to maintain consensus over the ontological premises and principal values that underlie research [that] sustain working relations and procedures [through] flexible, malleable operational guidance” (Geissler 2013: 28). In this way, the inherent ambivalence of unknowing provides a pragmatic approach of disciplining opportunities, as it harnesses the social category of refugee into the colonial imagination as a mechanism to make available to be controlled. This form of subjection “can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet without involving violence” (Foucault 1977: 26). White Australian privilege of ‘not having to notice’, as exhibited by service providers – be it Maggie with Thilin’s probation or Sister Mildred with William’s performance (see Chapter 6) – is informed by an inherent hierarchy that facilitates rationalising events or incidents as ‘good enough’ for situational contingencies. It is critical to discern that the operations of white Australian privilege in this context are further exemplified by the fact that only a subset of actors, especially the refugees and the non-white ethnographer when she is being re-hierarchised, are resisting. Those exposed to the deceptive manifestations

125 of privilege are enacting their privilege to not notice and thereby exacerbating power differentials and silencing critique, “since the force of making violence unknowable exceeds that of the violent act itself” (Geissler 2013: 15). The service providers view their role through a sentiment of care and compassion (Ticktin 2011: 3) and filtered through their own lived experience they are oblivious to a subterranean interaction of a collective imagination that is practised in this space of compassion, which then produces new sets of inequalities and dependencies.

For the resettling refugees, the lived meanings of citizenship are entangled with such systems of exclusion, selection, and assessment. The desired citizen-in-the-making is a post-refugee “productive [...] and subjected body” (Foucault 1977: 26), who is imagined through the prism of civilizing, tied to the notion of a ‘lack’. Thus, their assumptions, hopes and conduct need to be shaped, so that they learn to govern themselves in order to become ‘free’. Thus able to realise their potential as productive citizens, this will then enable a claim to continued material wealth. It is evident that “liberalism in the grand historical sense of subject formation around legal autonomy and choice, not simply the market rationalities of neoliberal policy” weighs in heavily in this regard (Redfield 2013: 37). The desired Australian that is imagined of the resettling refugee is a much longer term process, and in this shaping of the Bhutanese’ ideas, hopes and aspirations they are disciplined and directed into more containable opportunities. In the process, the Bhutanese refugees’ ideas of what it means to become ‘Australian’ are re-jigged and reshaped. Simultaneously with greater encouragement to send their children to Australian schools to facilitate becoming more authentic Australian, there is the implicit assumption that through small things the service providers say that the children and their children will be the most authentic Australians, who will move into mainstream professions and thus become fully-fledged ‘proper’ Australians. It is interesting to note that this notion, which is consonant of theories of ‘ethnic succession’, is more widely held, that is, it is not limited to service providers or the ambiguous zone.44 For example, when presenting some of my research in Geneva, a senior WHO member of staff commenting on my paper said: “We know it takes at least three generations for them to become properly integrated and fully functioning citizens.” As this chapter’s argument reveals in the process of offering a new home to a disenfranchised people certain fantasies and assumptions of a national image

44 I use this term to make clear the function of the intimate space of exchange the service providers and refugees encounter and where the personal and political entangle. 126 become mythologised, such as fairness and equality. However, the reality is that of a paradox, as these myths are entangled in the creation of new inequalities and dependencies that reinscribe on the Bhutanese a new form of hierarchy. One could say that in the routine interaction of everyday life we are continually shaped by governmentality. Perhaps this makes oblivious to its pervasive and shaping influences.

5.5.2 Alternate recognition in the refraction of regimes of power The insertion of the non-white ethnographer into the mise-en-scène unsettles this space of compassion, the ambiguous ground occupied by the refugees and the service providers, and turns it into a zone of awkward engagement. The alternate perspectives into Australian society thus created lead to friction between differing sets of rationalities that make the service providers feel their normal social hierarchy challenged. To restore a setting they are comfortable with they engage the Bhutanese community – or more precisely, select members of the Bhutanese community – whom they treat as co- conspirators, or collaborators, and together they work towards declaring the ethnographer problematic and to effect exclusion.

For the Bhutanese, on the other hand, the non-white ethnographer stands for two things that are in competition with each other: The non-white ethnographer shows the tangible possibilities other to those the HSS contains the Bhutanese to, which are highly desirable in their eyes. Secondly, these possibilities are out of reach for the moment, denied through disciplining opportunities; hence, causing envy and anxiety about why the non-white ethnographer should have particular opportunities and the Bhutanese not. While there are two different strategies at play, things end up in a collaboration, where the temporary unknowing of difference that normally structures the relationships between the service providers and the Bhutanese is leveraged to atone each collaborators’ own sets of discomfort through the exclusion of the non-white ethnographer.

These strands point to issues of mobility – and more specifically relative mobility – of the research participants and in the context of a non-white ethnographer to the necessity of explicating the insertion into the fieldwork site, both by herself and the other participants. As a conceptual aid to problematising the consequences of the ethnographer’s non-whiteness, I will define it as encapsulated in a form of ‘auto-sited’ fieldwork, where the ethnographer carries the field site – although of course not in its

127 entirety – with herself. This partial containment is paradoxically of an extrinsic disposition, for it is neither actuated by the ethnographer herself, nor is it available to this effect. Hence, this phenomenon is better apprehended through auto-sited fieldwork as a social location. This concept builds on Marcus’ (1995) notion of multi-sited fieldwork and incorporates more directly the ethnographer herself into the method by emphasising not just mobility or fragmentedness of the field site, but also the insertion of the ethnographer. It is simultaneously a social location, because it is neither functional by itself, nor containable to the ethnographer. Rather, it is a travelling surface that refracts into enhanced relief the microphysics of encounters that yield deeper insights into the prevailing regimes of power.

In one sense this emphasis on the ethnographer herself might be construed as a form of reflexivity, but it is not just that. Simultaneously, it is worthwhile exploring how far one can usefully push this concept without having to endure a regress to the infinite. Criticisms of reflexivity, for example, frequently state that either there is too much or too little of it, but there is rarely an attempt to actually define the boundaries or adequate dosages; instead, criticism is limited to stating that the ethnographer has transgressed the appropriate remit, which rarely is instructive. However,

[t]here is a difference between vulnerable reflexivities and mechanical ones, differences in levels of transparency, differences in methodological rigor, differences in susceptibility to authenticity’s seductions. Here, distance becomes important in placing space not just between the anthropologist and their own presuppositions, especially presuppositions about what critically defines the self in the first place, distinguishing between postpositivisms and truly honest invocations of subjectivity. (Jackson Jr 2005: 164-5)

Approaching this issue as a non-white ethnographer, through an auto-sited fieldwork site, can help defining some boundaries around the notoriously uncertain level of ‘appropriate’ reflexivity. As a conceptual aid, and through the definition of the locus of attention of reflexivity, we can see that to be productive it needs to extend beyond the person and her transient presence to the immanence of the phenomenon of the encounter. The focus is thus away from self-absorbed navel gazing and hollow positioning statements declaring one’s allegiances or encapsulating one’s supposed ‘world views’ perfunctorily: “for a truly rigorous reflexivity, simply flashing one’s social categories is not nearly vulnerable

128 enough” (Jackson Jr 2005: 164). It is also to provide space for non-normative statements that some might find uncomfortable. As a non-white ethnographer one encounters a particular site of epistemology, because certain conditions for the production of knowledge are produced in the dynamics of the white and non-white groups’ encounter and these ensuing dynamics are often highly contested in conventional anthropology or by the invisible centre.

One reason for this discomfort is a lack of exposure to alternative forms of knowledge production. While it has been a main stay of anthropology to study other cultures, including forms of knowledge production, its own epistemology has been treated with much greater conservatism. As a results of such a strongly defined boundary around its orthodoxy and canon of literature, and because relatively fewer non-white ethnographers write about their experience, it is not adequately reflected in influential or mainstream academic literature, even though the fieldwork dynamics are rather different and would provide a new richness to the wider ethnographic enterprise. So to remove the ethnographer, or offer a fleeting self-reflexive ritual, amounts to an empty gesture of inconsequential qualifiers, seeing only the ethnographer herself in the picture, denuded of the context of field site relations, is clearly not enough because it misses all the intriguing complexity that gave impetus to the ethnographic impulse. In short, it would be supercilious to assume that race-relations are suspended just because a non-white ethnographer goes to do fieldwork!

The auto-site of fieldwork that one carries, moving non-white into non-white ethnographer and then into field site, depends among other things on unknowing. Geissler (2013) discusses unknowing, but to him this only became clear after reflecting about one uncomfortable encounter. It was only then that the messy work of ignoring inequality started coming to him. Nevertheless, this is just one epiphany in one ethnographer – albeit one that was productive and advanced the ethnographers thinking and insights into his fieldwork site. As a non-white ethnographer, on the other hand, one is always aware of these dynamics and is forced to work with and around them – there is no possibility to avoid it. And hence, recognising that such perspectives produce highly valuable insights into the phenomena under study, this should simultaneously highlight the inherent value of diverse possibilities of knowledge generation, not all of which are transferable.

129 Like other black and brown bodies (Roberts 2013), the non-white ethnographer is hypervisible, which results in changes of the fieldwork encounters and dynamics, and thereby providing space for new types of knowledge generation not accessible to white ethnographers. If the same ethnographer were white, then the noise of the social ‘chatter’ would drown out the dynamics of positioning, and so on, because there is a differently construed social differential. For example, Vivian the volunteer would do a similar positioning to a white ethnographer – and indeed she did so to a white Australian service provider – but may not achieve a re-hierarchisation in the way she attempted with the non-white ethnographer. Contrasting this with the dynamics between Maggie and Vivian, who were equally engaged in a game of social positioning, it seems that both parties are more prepared to live with a compromise, where it is not necessary to decide who will ultimately take the ‘upper hand’. However, the high visibility of the non-white ethnographer is a constant reminder of a presence that oscillates between its inherent social capital and the colonial imagination and appears to compel activation of containment routines. Race, ethnicity, colour – only the naive among us would believe that this would not be socially actionable. However, at the same time this movement between positions galvanised by the hypervisibility unveils the complex operations of power in the field and gives clarity to the ethnographic enterprise, as it provides insights into mechanisms and social technologies that otherwise remain invisible, concealed, or hidden in the background noise of social dynamics among those agreed to belong to a group of sameness. It is a question of real and perceived hierarchies, which in turn leads to a consideration of ethnographic authority.

Jennifer Pierce (1995: 95) argues that the classic conception of ethnographic authority, which denotes an unproblematic position of authority over the ethnographic enterprise, research participants, and their representations, obscures the varied ways power and authority can and do shift and change in differing relationships and situations in the field. In the composition of the ethnography, I possess the textual authority to define the reality of others. “However, when women [and especially non-white women] hold the researcher position, there is a strange inversion of and disruption of power by the researcher” (Kondo 1986; Easton 1994: 22, cited in Pierce 1995), which manifests most clearly in the dissonance between being non-white and occupying an authoritative researcher position. Consequently, ethnographic authority was often challenged and renegotiated during fieldwork encounters, revealing it to be a contested process. The conventional practice of

130 implicitly privileging a particular type of ethnographic authority – that of the male as author – conceals these shifting and changing interactions of power in the field (Pierce 1995: 107-8). The dilemma of ethnographic authority is thus unavoidable in any research configuration. However, this dilemma and its particular relation of power – researcher- dominant, subject-subordinate – must be considered in the context of other matrices of domination that may intersect with them, matrices shaped by race and gender relations that have consequences for the responses their multiple subject positions provoke: “In a society strongly stratified by race and gender, the tables cannot be turned with an equivalent force” (Pierce 1995: 107). Hence, in the context of an inversion of ethnographic authority concerns about inequality and exploitation become more complicated.

These notions above emerged from the dynamics of my fieldwork encounters. However, they are not unique to this particular study. Nor are they, in fact, unique to a non-white ethnographer, because similar fundamental issues have emerged in research settings where a similarly impervious social barriers and over-determining power imbalances shape the fieldwork relationships; for example, in the study of elites. In the social location of the encounter, the insertion of a non-white ethnographer opens different sites of knowledge production by casting in strong relief the power dynamics operative, which are refracted through the auto-sited field site.

Approaching these complex fieldwork interactions from the perspective of auto-sited fieldwork as social location, where the ethnographer’s presence transforms the recognition of each other’s mobility into a transient surface mirroring desires and refracting regimes of power, generates a differing kind of important knowledge that is frequently ignored despite its insights to nuanced social realities. Entering from the fringes, as the refugees are required to do, merely casts these social forces into sharper relief.

Casting these forces into sharper relief is also what the next chapter will do, if with a different focus. It relates the events of one evening that in unequivocal expressions elucidated the depth and strength of this ambiguous ground of resettlement provision. Before the assumptions that inform and motivate the practitioners of the implementation of resettlement services are given detailed consideration in Chapter 7, the following chapter will examine a housewarming party held by one of the resettling Bhutanese to

131 celebrate her move to permanent accommodation as a step towards exiting the HSS services with the service provider organisation. The party was attended by a mix of Bhutanese and staff and volunteers from service provider organisations engaged with the community, and thus was an instructive event to illuminate some of the underpinning aspects of the practitioners’ engagement in resettlement provision and its ambiguous ground that will subsequently inform the discussion of the material presented in Chapter 7.

132

CHAPTER 6 – STRATEGIC LOYALTIES, PARTIAL (DIS)CONNECTIONS AND

ASSUMED HIERARCHIES

133 6 Strategic Loyalties, Partial (Dis)Connections and Assumed Hierarchies

More than any other discipline, the truths of anthropology are grounded in the experience of the participant observer.

Gupta 1997: 15

6.1 Introduction This chapter discusses a particular event that took place during fieldwork and how the dynamics between the different parties, the Bhutanese, the service providers and the ethnographer, unfolded. These relationships were simultaneously complicated through the insertion of the female, non-white ethnographer; hence, her experiences are made explicit in this chapter.

This chapter centres around one particular event, a housewarming party held by one of the resettling Bhutanese, where a number of Bhutanese as well as a range of staff and volunteers of service provider organisations were present. This event coincided with my presence in the field and I had been invited as well. This chapter will take the reader on a somewhat tumultuous tour of what fieldwork encounters can entail and several of the developments set in motion during that evening provide crucial dynamics that illuminate critical aspects of the resettlement environment in its interactions.

In order to make the various dynamics analytically accessible, the material is considered with an analytical approach outlined in the previous chapters. Taking the concept of the ‘everyday’ – introduced in Chapter 4.1 – to locate this particular analysis, I am situating it by mapping interstices and drawing out implicit complexities. The everyday is useful through its fine grained detail that allows accessing the interstitial spaces from where one can begin mapping out the underlying dynamics stemming from an irreducible liminality of lived experience. This enables the registration of outwardly manifest relationships extending beyond the immediate encounter at the micro level and explore them as a contested terrain, as expounded by Lefebvre (1991, 2002).

134 What is of particular interest here is how social agents act in the context of such sanctioned forms of social behaviour, which requires training attention to the use and ways of operating in the social field. In this context, the insertion of the non-white ethnographer requires specific attention, because the knowledge generated by the ethnographer is idiosyncratic, as it passes through her/his subjectivity, increasing the necessity of explication of the ethnographer’s positionality. Simultaneously, the insertion of a non-white ethnographer can provide new spaces for strategic entanglements between the two groups, that is, the Bhutanese and the service providers.

This chapter argues that this critique of fieldwork practice could constructively be extended by the inclusion of the reader, where the ethnographer and the reader both have to challenge their internalised assumptions, and the reader would be aided in this by the ethnographer’s on the ground experience. While these attempts to bring in the reader more closely in a speculative fashion require certain transpositions as part of the writing strategy, the everyday is the site where assumptions are foregrounded and can be made visible. A specifically suited methodology is an open critique as a form of witnessing, where the paradigm of the ethnographer as ‘witness’ represents a different modality of ethnographic authority, because the informants are aware that the ethnographer is witnessing, so one is indelibly inscribed into the observations. The ethnographer as a witness is differently located: “trying to be an attentive listener, recognizing the situatedness of one’s intellectual work (Haraway 1991), and affirming one’s own connection to the ideas, processes, and people one is studying are more important in this kind of practice” (Malkki 1997: 96). In this specific context of a non-white ethnographer embedded within a white dominant society such a move is essential and must include a consideration of the assumptions of not just the ethnographer, but those of dominant society as well.

Thus, in order to make cogent the resultant reconfigurations, it is indispensable to include the reader to highlight how assumptions and approaches of dominant society impact on the research process, the researcher and the development of the ethnographic material, and are subsequently consumed through readership by a diverse audience. The purpose is to make the conception of the reader explicit: how does that knowing connect back to the residual, that is, the everyday (Lefebvre 1991: 97), and how does this deepen and extend the analysis.

135 6.2 One evening in the winter of 2010 – a housewarming party One of the Bhutanese refugees had moved into a larger home and to celebrate this she hosted a dinner party for a number of guests from her community, as well as some service providers. As I happened to be doing my fieldwork during this time, I too was invited to attend.

In fact, I was not so much invited by the host as I was granted an invitation upon the urging of Mildred,45 who took for granted that I should be included among the attendees. So my presence/admission was largely due to the goodwill and enthusiasm of Mildred towards research with the Bhutanese community, who has a reputation for hospitality among the service providers. Suffice to say, I did feel a little like a gate crasher, nevertheless eager, and being on “fieldwork” gave me a valid cover to engage in participant observation, so I awkward-gladly accompanied Mildred.

The party took place at Soumya’s46 residence, and the following narrative encompasses a reconstruction of the events and of the social dynamics at play. The ensuing conversations are rendered from field notes.

6.2.1 The evening unfolds The guests are all gathered in a generous-sized room when I enter with Mildred. The ambience is one of cheerfulness and warmth, with a large gas fire bustling away. There are about 20 people already in the room, about an equal number of service providers to the Bhutanese gathered there. The evening unfolds, the conversations are friendly and after our arrival there is a round of introductions – actually it is directed to me, the only stranger. Maggie, the case worker at RSPO47 most popular with the Bhutanese, who has been accompanying me to some of their houses, informs the room that I am the researcher from Sydney and suggests I introduce myself.

45 Sister Mildred was a counsellor for the HSS service provider in this state. She had a long history and an outstanding reputation in social work. Sister Mildred showed support for my research and enabled access to the community. In 2009 I met her by chance and we developed a camaraderie and mutual respect for each other. In late June 2011, she passed away. 46 As in the preceding chapters, the names of informants have been changed. 47 I have chosen not to identify my main field site’s particulars because it is not my intention to critique a particular institution or its staff, but to discuss general patterns. Hence, the use of the acronym for Refugee Service Provision Organisation (RSPO). 136 There is anticipation on the others’ faces. A glow of benevolence inherent to institutional kudos from the big smoke is discernible. I introduce myself by name, my institution and the research project and take the occasion to credit the research taking place to Sister Mildred, for her seeing value in research. To the generosity of my appreciation, there is visibly enhanced warmth and a whimsical cohesive unity is emerging.

Unexpectedly these remarks seem to upset a man sitting across from me, who appears to be the oldest male in the room. During our round of introductions he had not made his name, background, or connection to the Bhutanese known (indeed everyone in the room is aware of his name, except myself, the newcomer to this circle). He cuts me off rudely and interjects:

“You are ethnic Indian aren’t you?”

Startled I reply “Sri Lankan,” to which he declares derisively,

“That is ethnic Indian!”

To which I reply: “No, I am Sri Lankan.”

Again quite rudely, “Of course you are ethnic Indian.”

I am puzzled by the man’s insistent attempt to force his definition on me. Why does this old man try to assert I am an ‘ethnic Indian’ – repeatedly? Simultaneously I feel the atmosphere in the room turn tangibly cooler.

Feeling under attack, I look at the couple who sit to the left of me and had engaged in friendly conversation only a short while ago. There is a brief meeting of eyes on the premise of established camaraderie that is fleetingly an appeal on my part – an unspoken request for some token of friendly affirmation in the face of this strange man’s insistent negation. On the couple’s face there is the briefest of awkwardness, harried impassiveness, then replaced by doubt...

It’s astonishing, yet it is happening; the old man is like a bad smell one cannot shake off. Although I am agitated at the way he is embarrassing me, I manage to say ‘that’s like saying every Australian is an ethnic British.’

137 There is no outward reception of my statement from anyone, as if nothing had been said.

Feeling under attack, maybe I have chosen a bad example...

I find out later that the ‘friendly couple’ also work for the old man. I am not comfortable with his over-emphatic, classificatory insistence. There is no sign anyone else sees his actions as unwarranted, no obvious sign of empathy. No one is distracting this obsidious nasty-nagging man. I recall wondering why Mildred does not say something. It seems like everyone else she also is under the spell of this man. And yet for all my discomfiture, I am unwilling to allow him his violence affirmed, I insist on being a Sri Lankan. The room is disquieted, gradually transforming to hostility. Towards me.

He is not going to give up.

He utters curtly, “so who are the people of Sri Lanka?”

I say again “there is no such thing as an ethnic Indian, I am a Sri Lankan”

...he snorts “but you are an ethnic Indian. So who are the people of Sri Lanka?”

Anxious to rid myself of this man’s verbal appendage and establish to the 20-odd people acquiescing with him that I am a bona fide researcher, I rattle off the different ethnicities Malay, Sinhala, Tamil, Mus...lim... I trail off because he cuts me off mid-sentence and jumps in triumphantly

“ah Tamil! That’s Indian.

You are ethnic Indian!”

In fact, ordinarily I am unconcerned whether I am considered Indian or Sri Lankan, this is not a reason to be disquieted. It is the gratuitous freedom with which he has attempted trifling with my sense of self amidst this gathering that I am incredibly disturbed by, especially as I am keen to be accepted. He pedals on swiftly, interrogating:

“How many languages in Sri Lanka?”

138 Subtle shift in topic. I answer, feeling the imperative to demonstrate I am a genuine researcher and thwart his intention to make me look otherwise. He is trying to make it look, as if I were concealing the true motives of my presence with the Bhutanese community. Having got the evening off to such a terrible start, I want him to shut up and stop usurping the entire evening. And yet, not wanting to succumb to the pressure I keep answering, trying to wrench some social-self stability back. My thoughts are crowded and overwhelmed.

William repeats: “So how many languages in Sri Lanka?”

I am not anticipating this and as I respond, already the next one comes in quick succession, before I even have time to complete the answer:

“ahm about four languages,” [in Sri Lanka, that is]

and quick upon its heels

“And how many languages in Bhutan?”

Much of the room, it appears, is poised and waiting for my answer. The temperature of the cosy evening has dropped noticeably.

I am keen to show I am knowledgeable about their history. In hindsight I realise offering the opportunity to the Bhutanese would have been the socially savvy thing to do, I answer....

“25 based on the last study established after some difficult access to the mountainous terrain in Bhutan...”

Again my response is curtailed by the same impatient interlocutor. Of course this is also much too detailed an answer...48

48 David Gellner puts this dilemma thus: Anthropologists often do find themselves in an awkward position in trying to justify themselves, whether to other social science colleagues or to grant-giving bodies, or indeed to their aunts (2009: 119). 139 Early on during his hostile questioning the Bhutanese males in the room had begun exchanging sarcastic smiles. Looking around the room, I could see this had intensified to outright smirks.

Frequently difficult experiences are the most insightful to what it means to be a non-white member in a white49 dominant society.

Almost in frustration, and well before I manage to complete my sentence, William bursts out quietly, triumphant-impatiently:

“What’s the main language?”

This is followed by a discussion of Bhutan’s national language that involves chiefly myself and Anil, one male member of the Bhutanese community, which I will address later in this chapter. What came as a surprise was why Sister Mildred, who has been staunchly supportive of the research, did not say anything. I was perplexed and disconcerted at her silence during the verbal fracas. But I do not say anything to her about this later in the evening after the event is over. She, who is always in robust health has got suddenly ill with a bad stomach ache. That night I had planned to stay with her.

6.2.2 A social drama unfolds I want to discuss the opening of the evening that entrenched a fracture, which became the crux to diminish relations with some members of the Bhutanese community and impacted on subsequent research with them. Victor Turner terms such dynamics as described here a social drama:

A social drama first manifests itself as the breach of a norm, the infraction of a rule of morality, law, custom, or etiquette, in some public arena. This breach is seen as the expression of a deeper division of interests and loyalties than appears on the surface. (Turner 1980: 150)

I think it is quite apparent that on the evening in question there was indeed such a breach that Turner would have identified as the first stage of a social drama. He observed that “certain entrenched features of a given society’s social structure influence [...] the cause

49 As Spivak eloquently says: “it is what one does with the fact that one’s white that’s more important” (1990: 77). 140 of conduct in observable social events” (Turner 1980: 142). According to Turner there are certain spontaneous units of social process that are a fact of everyone’s experience in human society. It is their repeated presence in a range of socio-cultural systems, where events follow along an apprehensible and convergent dynamic, that has led him to define them into a common set of four phases termed “social drama.” These phases are labelled “breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of schism” (Turner 1980: 149; origininal emphasis).

In applying Turner’s model, I demonstrate some of the difficulties arising from its reliance on a ‘bounded notion of society’50 and its inherent linearity, one might almost

50 Victor Turner (1996[1957]) introduced the notion of social drama as a device to uncover the hidden contradictions and eruptions of conflict in the Ndembu social structure that are otherwise cloaked as regular social processes. Turner did use his highly localised, repeated observations of specific events to derive general rules that were perceived to govern society as a whole. However, in the intervening decades since Turner’s original work, this form and level of generalisation Turner’s work exhibits, as well as a number of foundational prerequisites, such as a bounded notion of society, have been superseded. The bounded notion of society refers to “a common underlying ‘logic’: the state is imagined as a unitary structure of vertical authority dominating a bounded territory […], which [is] politically and culturally understood as a unitary subject, the nation” (Oberhuber 2007: 222). For Craig Calhoun, it is “[n]ationalism [that] provides this singular and bounded notion of society with its intuitive meaning” (2003: 94). However, this conceptualisation of society has come under sustained critique, especially in the context of greater global mobility of people, goods and capital and “much has been written about the role that globalisation has played in reformulating a central conceptual system, that of ‘the social’” (Hsu 2014: 215). One of the challenges globalisation has brought to the fore that nations and society are confronted to deal with are the issues of increased and diversified mobilities (Urry 2000: 2). Even though the attendant conceptual efficacy of the territorially bounded nation state has lost analytic cachet (Hsu 2014: 216), “[p]olitical theory has surprisingly often avoided addressing the problems of political belonging in a serious, analytic way by presuming that nations exist as the prepolitical bases of state-level politics” (Calhoun 2003: 94). If, instead, the intractable connection between society and region is replaced with the metaphors of networks and fluidity (Urry 2000: 33), it becomes apparent that a territorially bounded notion of society ultimately is an inadequate model of “a world where people and objects flow in and out of networks, both virtual and literal” (Hsu 2014: 216). In the current context of global flows or ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1996), the purpose of the application of Turner’s ‘social drama’ serves as an analogical heuristic to enable a more focussed discussion of the events described in this Chapter. According to Bert States, the value of Turner’s [social drama] model is that it allows us to escape a certain solipsism by enlarging our field of reference. When Turner says that social conflicts are like plays, we are applying a model from one semantic network to a subject in another network whose characteristics we wish to elucidate by metaphorical comparison. (1996: 7) In other words, the purpose of applying a dramatic analogy is to use its heuristic strength in elucidating the social dynamics, while requiring an awareness of the inherent limitations of such analogies. Specifically, it is noteworthy that any metaphoric comparison necessarily engenders simplification, whether of its source or target. For instance, it would be inconceivable for an analogy to “encompass the entirety of contemporary dramatic arts in its complete heterogeneity” (Võsu 2010: 136). Therefore, metaphors emphasise some characteristics while ignoring or occluding others (States 1996: 7) and analogical reasoning is constructed through a selective similarity that focuses on specific properties or qualities in the source of the analogy that are in common with the target to be described (Gentner and Jeziorski 1993: 448). This approach preserves the explanatory potential of the heuristic through the transformation of a material and embodied model of reality into a cognitive tool for the purposes of explaining reality, as “a researcher making use of metaphoric analogies must inevitably show a heightened criticism and sense of reflection” (Võsu 2010: 138). Turner notes how social dramas “constitute isolable and minutely describable units of 141 say teleology, as well as the limiting nature of the strict duality of “either reintegration or recognition of schism.” This duality does not always work in real life, because different parties of the social drama may treat its ‘outcomes’ differently, for example Mildred reacted very differently to Maggie, whereas members of the Bhutanese community reacted differently again. In evaluating the dynamics and resultant reconfigurations of a social drama it is, in the end, a sum of different interpretations of the ‘outcome’ that affects how that particular social drama manifests its effects and – how in this case – I could carry out fieldwork. What is evident then, is that this evaluation is intrinsically positional and may take multiple forms.

Turner is of course very aware that “meaning is apprehended by looking back over a temporal process [... and states] that sociocultural systems are [...] fraught with structural contradictions and norm-conflicts” (1980: 157; original emphasis). Nevertheless, for the reading of social dramas it is pertinent to consider that “indeterminacy may be produced by the manipulation of existing internal contradictions, inconsistencies, and ambiguities within the universe of relatively determinate elements” (Moore 1978: 49). Needless to say that this indeterminacy applies to all stages of the social drama, and thus precludes a determinate dialectic of reintegration or schism.

Now the first moment of breach of that evening is fairly straightforward to identify around the fulcrum of an outside researcher’s entrance into a particular social setting with an interesting mix of social actors/agents, who are from different backgrounds and organisations, but as with Turner’s typical definition, form a group of “persons who share values and interests and who have a real or alleged common history” (1980: 149). However, an analysis within the framework of a social drama, as defined above, could usefully focus only on this incident with William, or it could just as well extend to include the subsequent discussion of Bhutan’s national language following on from there. I have chosen, keeping in mind the larger objective of this thesis, to treat this entire evening as one event rather than analysing the two related dynamics as individual social dramas.

social process” (1974: 33), which facilitate the transformation of the flow of social life into more manageable dramas or role performances (Riggins 1993: 163). A modern reading of Turner then focuses on his interest in exceptional, borderline situations in the life of a community and the processes of their resolution, while deploying a heightened reflexivity derived from a grounding in the politics of location. 142 With this reading in mind, it becomes apparent then that William’s contribution to the event was the opening of the breach.

Whenever I introduce my fieldwork to outsiders, as I had done that evening, I mention that it is a DIBP51 supported research project. Indeed, I mention that this research is the first-ever52 on the cusp of an emergent Bhutanese diaspora after nearly two decades in refugee camps. That evening, too, I had done this and acknowledged my gratitude53 to the Bhutanese community and to Sister Mildred of RSPO, for the fieldwork taking place.

6.2.2.1 Situating the social drama As is evident, there are a range of things to discuss from the above description of the evening. I will begin by unpacking William’s comments, which precipitated that evening’s events. His interjection came while I was appreciating Mildred’s role in this research. On the face of it, his using a category like ethnic Indian (regardless of its obvious inaccuracies) appears as if he is merely clarifying a ‘harmless’ doubt. Perhaps he is trying to look out for the community, given the role India has taken in relation to the disenfranchisement of a substantial part of the population in Bhutan.54 What were the real motivations? Such experiments with subjectivity are not politically neutral:

Postmodern understandings of the multiplicity of realities that constitute the reality of the world, leave no room for naive descriptions of women, the world, or human life that incorporate only one perspective on that reality. No matter how

51 DIBP is the Australian Government Department of Immigration and Border Protection. As the resettling community is in the DIBP Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (HSS) programme, any research can only be conducted with the department’s explicit approval based on strict criteria and is not granted lightly. 52 A cynic may well think this is limited to the researcher; however, it is an acknowledgement to the Bhutanese, who in the early days of arriving in a new country actively participated in the new society they came to resettle in by contributing to the research. 53 The Bhutanese were, at the time of the fieldwork, the most recent community to resettle in Australia, beginning in 2008. Therefore, establishing contact and access was a challenge without any existing networks of Bhutanese diaspora. Unlike with other resettled communities, service providers do not have a history of working with them. Hence the process of establishing contact with the community was subject to the whimsical predilections of a number of self-appointed gate-keepers. Consequently, fieldwork suffered several setbacks in different regions in Australia, until a serendipitous meeting with the late Sister Mildred. 54 Chapter 2 covers this in greater detail, but to sum it up, India has significant political influence in Bhutan and yet has played an expedient role. There has been consistent tacit support for the disenfranchisement through the Royal Government of Bhutan, for example the refugees were during the expulsion from Bhutan immediately moved on to Nepal from Indian Territory. Much later India supported Bhutan rather than pushing for a resolution at the Joint Verification Exercise between Bhutan and Nepal. Moreover, all attempts of staging protests or marches and reaching the Bhutanese border from the camps, which would entail crossing Indian Territory, have been thwarted. 143 privileged that reality may have been in the past, it is as partial as all others. (Espin 1995: 5)

I want to make a number of suggestions in developing my ensuing argument. I would begin by suggesting that the first question itself was a mere decoy. It is not unusual for the breach of a social drama to be “deliberately, even calculatedly, contrived by a person or party disposed to demonstrate or challenge entrenched authority” (Turner 1980: 150), as perhaps in this case the perceived authority that the position of an academic researcher would confer in such a social setting.

Thus, the question about the researcher’s ethnicity was deployed to mask grievances that had to do with William. It has become clear that his professional envy as Chairman of the Refugee and Migrant Assistance Society (RMAS) set in and that his real target was his competitor RSPO. Mildred represents his direct competitor who had won the tender for the resettlement services against his organisation; a profile that should have been his. Of course he does not dare directly challenge RSPO, or even Mildred. After all, Sister Mildred’s reputation precedes her due to vast achievements in the areas of social work and refugee support. She also has an axiomatically unquestionable status as she is Sister Mildred, a former nun.55 Consequently, the researcher became the proxy through whom to arbitrate a professional envy, made easier by the researcher’s alterity.

However, this precipitates the question, why would somebody’s alterity – or ethnicity to be more precise in this context – be the mode of choice for the covert expression of competitive grudges. In this situation ethnicity is used as a benchmark of otherness in the making of racial hierarchies of distinction; and although ethnicity is not inherent to only some, it is often used to demarcate that which is non-white, non-European. This often can been seen in things, such as ethnic foods, ethnic dance, ethnic cultural events, and so on. This does not necessarily mean that this is always negative; however, with the introduction of the term ‘ethnic’ into any situation or statement there is an immediate demarcating of boundaries and drawing of attention to that which is not normative, a difference – or perhaps an implicit inferiority – that needs to be taken note of or accommodated.56 To satisfy the conditions of recognition, postcolonial subjects have to

55 She had taken the ‘lighter’ vows of a sister later on in life in order to be able to more effectively engage in social work in the community. 56 Ethnicity is a culturally defined aggregating categorisation that refers to groups of people with shared cultural attributes that distinguish that group from other groups, be that through language, geography, 144 surmount a range of often paradoxical impulses and forces operating on them (see Povinelli 2002).

I will approach this analysis from the position of the non-white postcolonial57 ethnographer located in the space of hegemonic society. The ethnographer,

as a positioned subject, grasps certain human phenomena better than others. He or she occupies a position or structural location and observes with a particular angle of vision. [...] The notion of position also refers to how life experiences both enable and inhibit particular kinds of insight. (Rosaldo 1989: 19)

It is often difficult to expose racism, because denial is implicit in the consensus on race; it has been naturalised (Hall 1997). Therefore, the implicit must be made explicit first in trying to establish alternative definitions of reality. The everyday is a locus of manifestation of this existential reality, which makes it accessible to critique. Such naturalisation is a deliberate representational scheme intended to fix difference as

religion, traditions, values, etc. (Steinberg 1989; Takaki 1993; Jones 1997; Parillo 1997; Smedley 1999; Smedley and Smedley 2005). Thomas Hylland Eriksen (Eriksen 2002) suggests that despite a common association with ‘minority issues’ and ‘race relations’, “in social anthropology [ethnicity] simply refers to aspects of relationships between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive” (Eriksen 2002: 5). Moreover, Fredrik Barth makes the important observation that ethnic groups and ethnicity are not fixed, bounded entities, but rather liable to change (with differing degrees of flexibility) and often self-defined (Barth 1998). Race on the other hand resembles more of an ideology, or culturally invented ideas and beliefs about these differences that constitute the meaning of race (Smedley and Smedley 2005: 20). The culturally constructed concept of race can nevertheless inform people’s actions, whether it has a biological reality or not (Banks 1996: 54; Eriksen 2002: 6; Jenkins 2008: 23-4). The idea of race distorts, exaggerates, and maximizes human differences; it is the most extreme form of difference that humans can assert about another human being or group, as one of its components is the belief that differences are permanent and cannot be overcome (Smedley and Smedley 2005: 22). The underlying assumption is that hereditary characteristics differ systematically between ‘races’. Therefore, race is an important apparatus for imposing social hierarchies, a structuring mechanism for limiting and restricting access to privilege, power and wealth. However, some authors suggest that “race refers to the (negative) categorisation of people, while ethnicity has to do with (positive) group identification [i.e.,] that ethnicity is generally more concerned with the identification of ‘us’, while racism is more oriented to the categorisation of ‘them’” (Banton 1983: 106; also Jenkins 1986: 177; Eriksen 2002: 6-7). It is pertinent to consider though that these clearly delineated boundaries between race and ethnicity in real life are hazy and muddled. For example, many ethnicities are built on a unifying myth of origin and common descent (Eriksen 2002: 7), highlighting not only the significant overlap between these two conceptions, but also the danger of assuming that ethnicity is inherently benevolent. And lastly, to complicate matters further, more recent forms of racism have moved away from some of the obvious symbolism and statements to adopt the language of cultural difference instead of inherited characteristics, which nevertheless is used for the same purposes (Eriksen 2002: 7). Richard Jenkins (2008: 23) emphasises that ethnicity is a wider concept than race, even if it does not encompass it in toto. It is also a slightly more fluid categorisation than race, but nonetheless a problematic one. 57 Homi K. Bhabha underlines that postcolonialism represents a perspective that “enables the authentication of histories of exploitation and the evolution of strategies of resistance” (1994: 6). 145 immutable, to secure discursive closure. Race is thus a historically contingent, socially constructed category of knowledge. It is a discursive speech act, if a very powerful one, that retroactively constitutes and naturalises the groupings to which it refers:

[R]ace is [...] one of the ways that hegemonic social fictions are produced and maintained as ‘natural’ facts about the world and its inhabitants. (Pellegrini 1997: 98)

One establishes relations and relationships in/with social groups, but they are always inflected by the dominant discourse, that is, here it would be the invisible normativity of whiteness. However, it is not a default position for those to whom whiteness is not normative. Nevertheless, some are aware of it, some even develop a critical consciousness to its routine function. This in turn opens up the possibility to problematise it, critique it, or draw attention to it.

[The] process [of becoming subjects] emerges as one comes to understand how structures of domination work in one’s own life, as one develops critical thinking and critical consciousness, as one invents new, alternative habits of being, and resists from that marginal space of difference inwardly defined. (hooks 1990: 15)

However, this is a highly contentious position to take as whiteness is axiomatically considered the centre, because:

we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other [...] or has the upper hand. (Derrida 1981: 41)

In order to expose whiteness as a cultural construction and the relations that embed its centrality, one has to decentre it and make it visible, so as to be able to examine the strategic rhetoric that permeates everyday life.

In the realm of categories, [non-white] is always marked as a colour [...] and is always particularizing; whereas white is not anything really [...] not a particularizing quality, because it is everything. (Dyer 1988: 45)

Due to this dynamic and mobility whiteness is suffused with it is difficult to demonstrate its centeredness. As Foucault (1972) observed, discursive formations are replete with contradictions. In the assemblage of whiteness, these contradictions are important

146 elements in its construction, as it is through these contradictions that whiteness is able to manoeuvre through and around challenges to its centeredness. This dynamic element is a crucial aspect of the persuasive power of this strategic rhetoric. It gathers its representational power through its ability to be many things at once; to be universal and particular, to be a source of specificity and difference. Hence, the marginal becomes an open canvas, which enables those from the unmarked centre to project upon frequently without restraint. The marginal thus is also a repository for fears and anxieties, which otherwise might not easily find expression. Due to the remit of authority the centre can assert, the resistance from the margins has constraints upon its effectiveness.

As is evident, it is nearly impossible to decentre whiteness, but what one can attempt within those constraints is to decentre the normative position by delineating specific discursive formations. When that happens, the challenge is interrogated from the centre. On the other hand, some from the margin might acquiesce with the perspective of the centre, attempting to claim clandestine membership, even if temporal,58 to the hegemonic normativity. As a result, there is an impossible demand on the one who takes the onus of critiquing to substantiate the challenge, attempting to make the position of the peripheral voice tenable.

6.2.2.2 (Un)centring (un)certainties Social interaction, Taylor (1971) and Geertz (1973) point out, is itself meaningful, because it is contingent on the continuous interpretation of what others' actions mean. These meanings are not limited to individuals, but publicly shared understandings that constitute "a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures" or public "frames of meaning" in terms of which particular actions are "produced, perceived and interpreted" (Geertz 1973: 10, 28).

If one looks at the events of the evening, it is possible to see this strategic dynamic in action. William in his attempt to compromise the researcher’s standing in the eyes of those present in the room moves swiftly albeit arbitrarily from one angle of pointed questioning to another and then yet another. However, this enactment of axiomatic power was either not noticed, or not criticised. Instead the onus to explain herself was on the

58 It is not a full membership, and hence does not afford the protection full membership provides. 147 researcher even after the event (except Mildred) communicating with unmistakeable antipathy that there clearly is an expectation to answer. As Weston points out, the non- white ethnographer too often “finds her work judged less than legitimate, always one step removed from the real stuff” (Weston 1997: 164). If the question about the language had been posed in a less hostile manner, recognising its politically charged nature, it is possible I would have deferred it to the Bhutanese by suggesting to ask the very people in the room.

Despite not yielding to William’s inscribing of ethnicity in order to resist the naturalising effect of his “re-iterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names” (Butler 1993: 2), he used the unsettled situation to shift focus. Judith Butler asserts that we are all “constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies” – vulnerable to “a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot pre-empt. This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions” (Butler 2004: 20, 29). This precipitation of events was desirable, because the researcher, whose title and presence implied questions and probing about their engagement with the Bhutanese, simultaneously brought RSPO to the limelight. However, it were the researcher’s alterity and William’s axiomatic power that created the conditions of possibility to disassociate the professional credentials of the ethnographer by artificially separating the non-white ethnographer, emphasising the ‘ethnic’ while dissipating the association to ethnographer.

William strategically deployed the performative elements of normative social hierarchy. Unmarked members of the centre frequently dispense with normative social contractual obligations of behaviour when interacting with non-white members of society. However, William encountered unexpected resistance, because the researcher refused to submit to his arrogation of power constituted in him being white and male, a sanctioned double power expressed by his arbitrary claiming of authoritative knowledge of a stranger’s ethnicity. And as Sister Mildred’s comments the next day show, these mechanisms are effective in that William’s purportedly greater knowledge of the ‘Other’, which in itself is justified through a whole host of Orientalist tropes (Said 1978), was ‘not detected’ by white members of the audience, thus making his behaviour acceptable to the normative expectation of whiteness.

148 The mechanisms of ‘not detecting’ racism are manifold and complex, and Philomena Essed offers an instructive reading:

Although all action is intentional, the implications and consequences of these acts, and the realisation that one could have acted otherwise, are not inherently explicit for the actor(s) involved. Neither is it inherently explicit to agents of racism that (group) interests are involved in the reinforcement of racial (ethnic) domination through the exercise of power. (Essed 1991: 177-8)

This ideological discourse legitimises practices that sustain hierarchical ordering of this difference. While each situation is unique, it is biographically articulated “by the insertion of individual existence in the ontological structure of the world” (Schutz 1972: 111). Nancy Henley has elaborated on this in her classic book Body Politics (1977) to show how non-verbal behaviour is bound to people’s power relationships. She notes that:

the ‘trivia’ of everyday life – touching others, moving closer or farther away, dropping the eyes, smiling, interrupting – are commonly interpreted as facilitating social intercourse, but not recognised in their position as micro-political gestures, defenders of the status quo – of the state, of the wealthy, of authority, of all those whose power may be challenged. (Henley 1977: 3)

The apparent ‘absence’ of – or rather normatively conditioned embodied blindness to – such gestures is neither innocent nor does it make their effect any less. It is salient to posit, however, that domination inherently begets opposition. In what I would call Goffman’s dictum, meanings are negotiated and established by all parties, not by single actors. Hence, we have here the closing of the loop, to bring Goffman’s dictum to touch upon Essed’s everyday racist practice through the Foucauldian micro-physics of power.

On this particular evening, I had resisted the projected trajectory of his questioning, because, as Butler has noted, the subject can only ever be precariously constituted:

if the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again. (Butler 1995: 223)

This constitution is achieved through discursive speech acts. They are performative, and Derrida suggests that a “general citationality – or rather, a general iterability – [is required

149 for] a ‘successful’ performative” (1988: 17). Hence the performative can succeed “only because that action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation or a prior, authoritative set of practices” (Butler 1993: 226-7). However, it is precisely through this virtue of iteration that:

gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor [sic] of that norm. (Butler 1993: 10)

This is also precisely the entry point for critical analysis for Foucault, that which in practice enabled my resistance that frustrated the enactment of William’s performative power. However, before the balance could return to the room, William received unscripted support from the Bhutanese community.

Turner emphasises that once a breach has become visible, it can hardly be revoked:

Whatever may be the case, a mounting crisis follows, a momentous juncture or turning point in the relations between components of a social field – at which seeming peace becomes overt conflict and covert antagonisms become visible. (1980: 150)

And so it happened with the events of that evening, William’s insistent questioning morphed from precipitating the breach towards the crisis and then a sudden shift in topic led to a change in the lead male protagonist from William to Anil, one member of the Bhutanese community. William was able to take a back seat and observe the drama he had perhaps not fully envisaged orchestrating take hold and move to its second act, where:

Sides are taken, factions are formed, and unless the conflict can be sealed off quickly within a limited area of social interaction, there is a tendency for the breach to widen and spread until it coincides with some dominant cleavage in the widest set of relevant social relations to which the parties in conflict belong. (Turner 1980: 150)

On that evening, when I begin answering William’s quietly charged question about the Bhutanese national language, the Bhutanese in the room are uncertain – it is a faint vibe

150 I am picking up of a diffident anxiety the answer cannot be challenged like my ethnicity had been. But given the atmosphere, the negotiations operative in this room are limited.

The nuanced information I provide about the language does not go down well, possibly because it is an academically detailed answer, constituting arcane information about Bhutan and its many languages that is not readily available. Internal information flow in Bhutan between the different regions has always been minimal and only through government controlled scarce media. Television was introduced (as the last nation to do so) only in June 1999. The expulsion of the Bhutanese Lhotshampa, some of whom are currently resettling in Australia, took place in the early 1990s. This internal lack of information is parallel to that of the international awareness of the large-scale disenfranchisement, which was practically non-existent prior to the publication of Hutt’s book in 2003.

Before I continue further, a brief interlude about Bhutan’s national language is warranted.

6.3 The poetics of language and its constituents Since the last major linguistic survey, 25 languages have been documented as being spoken in Bhutan (van Driem 1994). In monitoring and recording the different languages, one key challenge lies in the disambiguation between local dialects vs. languages, which is subject to academic debate, although only area experts are mostly aware of these ongoing debates. Southerners (aka Lhotshampa, that is, the resettling refugees in this study) had very little to do with the other populations in a country that due to its geography is highly isolated within itself. In addition to the physical separations due to its mountainous terrain, mobility within the country is also politically discouraged, and especially so for the Lhotshampa (Morris 1935: 207; invisible line).

There was no official national language in Bhutan until in 1961 Dzongkha was officialised, but this in itself was an ‘empty’ declaration as Dzongkha was only a dialect, spoken at the Dzong59, that is, a vernacular of Chöke. This I believe was the basis for the

59 The Dzong is a fortress monastery, which also functions as the administrative hub. The official written language at the Dzong was Chöke (a Tibetan language) and the local dialect derived from it, spoken by Dzong officials was called Dzongkha (literally translated the language of the Dzong). The Dzong officials, certainly the middle and higher ranks, were from north-western Bhutan, that is, where the Drukpa Royal House lineage is based. 151 misunderstanding, or the dialogue de sourds60. On the following Sunday morning, Mildred said to me that Kusuma too had reinforced to her during the dinner that she had learned Dzongkha in school in the 1960s. However, what I think she means is that she had learnt Chöke, the ancient monastic language of Bhutan from which Dzongkha was derived. However, as Dzongkha did not have a written form, it was spoken for a long time as a dialect – literally the language spoken at the Dzong, that is, by religious and administrative staff at Bhutan’s fortress monasteries. Although it was declared national language in 1961, only from 1971 was there any effort towards making a language proper out of what is best described as a vernacular.

The medium of Buddhist Bhutan’s literate culture had always been Classical Tibetan rather than Dzongkha per se. In Bhutan, Classical Tibetan is called Chöké (chos-skad, ‘language of religion’). When a Dzongkha-speaking government official put pen to paper the language he wrote was Chöke, because Dzongkha possessed no written form. (Hutt 2003: 178)

Dzongkha is more similar to standard Tibetan than any other Bhutanese language, and van Driem records that “the depth of tradition was so great that the Dzongkha, which was taught in schools until 1971, was actually Chöke” (1994: 95).61 The Royal Government of Bhutan began the codification of Dzongkha in 1971 with the introduction of a Dzongkha Division in the Department of Education, which merged in 1989 with a Dzongkha Advisory Committee that had been established in 1986 into an independent government organ, the Dzongkha Development Commission (DDC).

Hence only in the 1980s, as I had attempted to communicate during our dinner gathering, were the tools of a language introduced with the forming of the DDC. Since there were no teaching materials up until the 1980s,62 the Bhutanese would have learnt Chöke up to the mid-1980s as opposed to Dzongkha. A quick and simplistic reply to William would

60 According to Winter, this French expression “means ‘dialogue of the deaf’ and refers to situations in which people talk past each other because they are remaining within two separate logics, two frames of meaning, and so are ‘deaf’ to the arguments of their interlocutor” (2008: 14). 61 To obtain access to conduct research in Bhutan, the Regent has to sanction it. Therefore, most scholarship tends to veer towards court scholarship. And as can be observed from this linguistics scholar’s rather complicated syntax, he tries within the restrictive parameters to communicate the actual earliest date from which Dzongkha could be construed a language. 62 Hutt (2003: 178-9) describes succinctly the magnitude of the effort required: If Dzongkha was to become a fully-fledged and distinctively Bhutanese language in its own right, with all the appurtenances of a modern national language (for example, a standard grammar, standard dictionaries, a simple and consistent system of spelling, standard works both original and translated, and proficiency in the language among all Bhutanese), concrete measures would need to be taken in order to develop it. 152 gloss over the conditions of “vernacular mobilization” where “citizenship becomes coextensive with the membership of the dominant ethnic community” (Smith 1994: 192, 193). Instead of an implicit reinforcing of Bhutan’s language policy, I wished to complicate the status of the current national language.63 That evening, in responding to the question regarding Bhutan’s languages, my aim had been to demonstrate the intimate connection to the ethno-nationalist ‘One nation, One people’ project of the government of Bhutan, whereby the Bhutanese present in the room had become uncitizens.

Such an academically detailed answer can often fly in the face of the people who are members of that country or those who consider autochthonous knowledge somehow the only sacred form of knowing. On occasion it can lead to confrontational situations, particularly, when their refugee status is premised on this. As the mood of the evening had already become precarious, a discussion of Bhutan’s languages would have to be a touchy subject, especially after such a pointed challenge to the researcher that simultaneously undermined specialist subject knowledge, while calling into question the researcher’s presence.

Hence, William’s question about the Bhutanese national language was posed in a fragile moment. While the service providers present are the insiders to the Bhutanese in the room, the researcher is the insider to this community from an academic and South Asian regional perspective. So there is an almost paradoxical double-bind (to the insider-outsider, in a situation such as with a hall-of-mirrors, one becomes at once the insider and the outsider, unsure where to orient oneself towards) in the tension of presenting one’s knowledge about the community64 to the white service providers, while at the same time this will be refracted through the closer relations between them and the Bhutanese present in the room. As is evident, this situation is replete with “syntactical relations” (Goffman 1967:

63 “The linguistic situation in Bhutan is complex. [...] The standard dialect of Dzongkha is spoken in Wang, the traditional name for the Thimphu Valley, and Thê, as the Punakha valley traditionally used to be known. There are also several highly divergent dialects of Dzongkha spoken in the south” (van Driem 1994: 87, 94). However, this is often conflated with the construction of the national language Dzongkha along with the introduction of ethno-nationalist policies. 64 In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Anthropology, David Gellner (2009: 119) encapsulates these concerns thus: Then, anthropologists studied radical difference, now they study different ‘perspectives’ on shared aspirations. Two aspects that have remained constant are: (1) the concern, one may say obsession, with having a minute, in-depth, and personal relationship to the material on which generalizations are made; and (2) a constant doubt and questioning about the adequacy and coherence of those materials. Anthropology has indeed been afflicted, perhaps more than other disciplines, with doubts about its viability, about whether one can ever know anything about another culture, about whether anything remains to be studied, and about whether anthropologists have the right to go about poking their noses into other people’s business. 153 3) that are deployed for the purposes of “image management” (Perinbanayagam 1974: 532), but with great uncertainty about the actual overlap of the different actors’ “context models”,65 even though they are clearly substantial. Hence, the reading of actors’ orientations is hampered noticeably by the ability of strategic use of different identities, of modifying or locally constructing them. It is such situated identity that influences the situation, and while one is not entirely dependent on situational contingencies, as this chapter demonstrates, it can at times feel rather as if only the latter is relevant.

6.4 Anil’s lost time It is always a burden of responsibility to represent another community’s circumstance to an audience, but the atmosphere of this situation multiplied the onus I felt at the time. William’s actions influenced the process of forming identity by social ratification. The mood had become belligerent among the male Bhutanese, largely because the researcher was standing ground against an older white male and a leader of a service provider organisation that is relevant to them, which to the Bhutanese would have been an indication of ‘female deviance’. Here multiple ideologies are at play, such as horizontal racism in seeing an axiomatic superiority of the white person, which also lends positively to the Bhutanese cultural trope of older male occupying an exalted position in the social hierarchy. William’s attitude clearly empowered the Bhutanese males, who became increasingly restless, started sniggering and shared scornful glances as I insistently repudiated his ethnicity claim. Nevertheless, they had not said anything until William had directed the ‘conversation’ towards Bhutan, which gave one of the Bhutanese men sufficient ‘courage’ to tackle the researcher on the language of Bhutan using his native status.

The situation had moved to the crisis stage of the social drama, where “false friendship is winnowed from true communality of interests,” as “the limits of consensus are reached and realised” (Turner 1980: 151). During our previous encounters Anil had symbolically

65 For the analysis of relations between context and interaction, the institutional embedding of social actors, interactions and situations, and more generally the influence of social structure on the definition of the situation, “context models” are helpful devices. They are both contextual and discursive. In fact, the relationship between context and discourse is bidirectional: “context definitions control both discourse production and understanding, and – through its understanding by addressees – discourse itself contributes to, changes or otherwise influences the social situation” (van Dijk 2009: 86-7). Shanon (1990: 159) emphasises that the term ‘context’ is just a trope that does not suggest a conceptual definition, rather that contexts are mental representations that serve as premises or presuppositions. 154 communicated his chauvinist contempt for females who do not fit his understanding of women in his community. Here, he mobilised the Bhutanese community’s affinity to claim a stake for himself. I have observed with males in this community that there are two frequently deployed ways of corralling women. The younger males would deploy the sexist gaze with a plethora of smirks, sarcastic looks and disdain, geared to elicit awkwardness, shame and out-of-placeness, while the older males would mostly show disapproval or implicitly refuse to engage in verbal communication. However, amongst the older males this was rare in contrast to the younger males. Moreover, many of the older Bhutanese males were welcoming and openly engaging with the researcher, often demonstrating great resilience and dignity with the uncertainties of their new environment in Australia.

William’s actions had created an opening for Anil. For him this was an opportunity to show his own authority on par with William’s claim for greater expertise, as well as reinforce his sexist attitude. He interpreted William’s actions as credible, as he is an older, white male who has standing in Australian society as the chairman of the RMAS. Hence, Anil radically challenged the statement that Dzongkha is a young language that has been taught only recently, and instead claimed that Dzongkha had been taught since the 1960s – which in itself makes it a very young language. Taking up the comment that the government of Bhutan had introduced the language of Dzongkha in the 1980s, Anil mocked: “the Government of Bhutan tells a lot of lies!” Anil’s point is of course not entirely untrue, we are all aware that governments make expedient statements, and the Bhutanese one is no exception. Nevertheless, his position is neither accurate, nor does it put the community’s circumstances of disenfranchisement in perspective.

It is not accurate, because the information on Bhutan’s languages is not based on government data alone, although this contributes to it. Secondly, Anil’s claim demonstrates a circle of power that after some 20 years as refugees in exile he still takes the position of the Bhutanese government, which was used to disenfranchise this community. He is exercising the same parameters of difference that were created by the Bhutanese government in the effort to disenfranchise them. Ironically, the point he argued serves only to further the very propaganda of Bhutan’s Royal Government that Dzongkha had all along been Bhutan’s national language and that the north-western highland districts that are populated by ethnic groups hailing from Tibet are the genuine Bhutanese, and obversely that the Lhotshampa of Nepali extraction are, in fact, recent – and largely

155 illegal – immigrants that do not belong to the country. Moreover, one of the key claims documented by Human Rights Watch (2007) and Amnesty International (2002) is that the Lhotshampa were deprived linguistically of their language and were expected to know Dzongkha ‘overnight’. At this time its obligate usage in official affairs was enforced through the Driglam Namzha code of conduct, termed by Aris as an ‘elaborate choreography of deference’, which in 1989 was elevated by the Government of Bhutan from recommended to compulsory (see Chapter 2).

Interestingly, at some point of the discussion, Kusuma says that she had experience of learning Dzongkha in school in the late 1960s. In hindsight I realise it was her way of intervening by putting forward a ‘failsafe’ position of stating that she herself had learnt the language in question, to settle the dispute with unimpeachable autochthonous knowledge of lived experience. I had no intention to dispute her personal experiences. Particularly, in the public setting of the evening, I neither wanted to argue with her about her lived experiences nor engage in an academic explanation of the differences between Chöke and Dzongkha. So I said something in her direction to the effect that it was not quite the point under discussion. Anil, the vociferous opponent, was too young to have received substantial schooling in Bhutan. However, he was not concerned with the politics of language as such, but, just as William, wanted to ‘restore’ the social order he felt comfortable with, that of male authority.

6.4.1 The seduction of strategic status William’s intervention in the evening had reconfigured the social relations and removed a threshold of inhibition for Anil. Along with this the signifiers of social status, such as the educational qualifications or the reason for my presence as a researcher were discarded; things that kept his embodied sexism in check. With the containable part of the researcher’s identity increasing, he felt emboldened to challenge vis-à-vis the language. What is at work here is a form of disciplinary power, where the change in the “threshold of describable individuality” due to William’s reorganising of the social fabric caused Anil to apprehend the researcher as intersubjectively available, thus making “this description a means of control and a method of domination” (Foucault 1995: 191).

A heated discussion followed my attempt to clarify what I had said, but he kept categorically insisting that it was wrong. As it became increasingly clear Anil’s only aim

156 was to assert dominance, in an attempt to move towards closure, I said: “anyway, we are both saying the same thing in different ways.” He smiled sarcastically and said it was not the same thing and that I was wrong, but I feigned casualness to play it down and there was a brief lull.

At this moment one white older female volunteer spoke up suddenly:

Well Anil, I know that I will never argue with you, because we know you always win.

At first I was upset with the woman, for addressing Anil and offering him a victory of sorts with an implied message of chiding to the researcher. I remember feeling rebuked and thinking the woman is herself acceding to assumed gender hierarchies. By her sudden entrance and proclamation at this point she subtly shifted the locus of hostility from William to sit solely on Anil. It is an interesting shift of the mantle because it marks a strong affinity66 to William and tries to ensure that a negative association does not remain with him or the RMAS.67 She also offered a relief of sorts to the researcher with the insinuation “this young woman was foolish enough to argue with you, but we know better.” Despite the event taking place in front of everybody present, the embodied expectation of hierarchies provided the conditions of possibility for the rearrangement of power configurations through her speech act. This assumption of the position of the arbiter lifted the silent spectator white service providers back into the centre. However, this reclaiming of the normative position to themselves was combined with a destabilising of the researcher’s claim to the centre by refracting her through a paternalistic insinuation of her error of judgement in engaging Anil. In effect, she took the position of the arbiter, a clear position of power, where she asserted the white service providers’ social pre- eminence by articulating the conclusive statement to the argument and apportioning who did what and how they did it. Another effect of this comment was to subvert Anil’s attempt to dominate the encounter. Her utterance contained a backhanded compliment, however, simultaneously it manipulated Anil’s image of an argumentative and a

66 A phenomenon that has been described as ‘white bonding’: “These communication patterns take forms such as inserts into conversations, race-related ‘asides’ in conversations, strategic eye-contact, and jokes. Often they are so short and subtle that they may seem relatively harmless” (Sleeter 1994: 8). 67 This is moreover important to herself, as the HSS tender was due to be renewed and she could obtain strategic advantage through this deftly demonstrated trustworthiness. 157 pugnacious young man, who is also known as ‘mouthy’68 among some of the service providers. Mobilising this image made him available to shift the responsibility of the evening’s events to him.

Another development that seemed to have gone unnoticed by many, especially the service providers, was that after a while not just the men, but increasingly also the adolescent males became agitated. They seemed to draw courage from the entanglement between William, the researcher and Anil and showed signs of wanting to join in. Kusuma, one of the matriarchs in the Bhutanese community, whose daughter is married to Anil, intervened and hushed up the younger males in the room.

Significantly, after the argument had subsided Kusuma offered me food, although she was not the host, mentioning specifically she had made the dessert and requesting me to try it. Of course, I had lost appetite after such a terrible beginning to the evening, but realise in hindsight that she was probably making a gesture to bridge the awkwardness that had ensued. This could well be read as an indication that she felt whatever the discussion was about, and whoever was in the ‘right’, the form of its conduct by Anil was not appropriate and was also possibly trying to save face, as he is her son-in-law. Kusuma would have also not wanted to come across as hostile towards Sister Mildred’s friend and guest that evening. However, by my turning down the food, I missed giving adequate consideration to the social dynamics and ended up snubbing her offer, which would not have further endeared me. A few days later, when I met Kusuma’s family again, Anil was noticeably quieter.

The gesture of the food offering also highlights how the fairly strictly structured system of Turner’s social drama does not always fit exactly with the often varied ebb and flow of the detail of social dynamics. This gesture could be read as an attempt to move towards reintegration and thus skip the ‘redress’ of a social drama’s third phase. Nevertheless, its application as an overarching analytical approach tracking the key developments and outcomes of this social process remains highly relevant.

68 This shorthand reference to Anil comes from the service providers. On the first day when I went to visit Nimal, his son-in-law Anil was present, merely briefly to suss me out. He cast a particular look that is symbolic in its sexist message that one’s credibility is in question, which I have observed certain South Asian men give to women, whom they think have escaped axiological containment. 158 6.5 The ethnographer’s soliloquy Identities are enmeshed with power. The existential reality of a non-white ethnographer in a predominantly white society means the “[non-white] ethnographer [is] someone, who moves, more or less uneasily, between two fixed positions or ‘worlds’” (Weston 1997: 168). As the situation with William demonstrates, one’s complexity is received with unease and reduced to simplicity, inscribing a desired authenticity on the body. However, these acts of inscription “on the same body are not that separable,” but rather “collapse the subject/object distinction” (Weston 1997: 168).

Noticing a familiar pattern of discriminatory behaviour, I was anxious to stand up to William as well as to signal to the Bhutanese, some of whom had shared experiences of discrimination, that standing ground and “speaking truth to power” (Said 1994b: 85f.) is indeed possible. Amongst the multiplicity of pressures the adjacent thought that occurred to me was if as a researcher with acknowledged social capital this is dissociated and the researcher reduced to the “non-white” or heard as “speaking from the ‘I, Native’ rather than the ‘I, Native Ethnographer’ position” (Weston 1997: 172); what would the treatment towards the refugees who are recipients of his organisation’s services be? 69

I remember vividly looking around the room for some kind of intervention or support from the others present. However, it appeared they had not noticed anything wrong, or if they had, it was not made obvious. Discussing the subtle dynamics of racism, Essed (1991: 171; original emphasis) argues that “[o]ften Whites passively tolerate and probably hardly even notice racism.” My own experience tells me that non-whites are frequently treated differently; the power differential or the respect differential is ever present. For the majority of those belonging to the centre, racism is so embodied it is hardly noticed (Essed 1991; Wang 2006). Given these conditions, it is relatively easy to adopt the lens that William’s questions were harmless; or let’s say the politics of the question is never evaluated. However, these parameters are poles apart; if this were a question between two individuals from the centre (especially from the same class), then every nuance would be carefully weighed and evaluated, the politics of any question singularly privileged. Yet as soon as the power differential to the non-centre comes into

69 The RMAS provides a range of support services to resettling refugees, but not the central and most important service, HSS. Nevertheless, the RMAS provided the Bhutanese refugees with support in drafting the constitution of their community association and thus also had significant influence on the refugees’ resettlement and perceptions of Australian society. 159 play, it masks any need for the evaluation of the politics of a question, even though its consequences are greater (see Essed 1991).

The “inevitable interrogation” (Weston 1997: 170) is a mark of who is axiomatically considered more competent than the female non-white researcher. Ironically one of the discursive elements William activated was patronising, a form of disciplining, which is here identifiable as a form of racism and sexism (Miles 1989; Anthias, Yuval-Davis et al. 1992). Indeed, it perpetuates the normative stance of positive discrimination towards white males (Essed 1990, 1991).

Gender and racial differences become the realm of taxonomic schemas of identity through which normativity is disciplined (Foucault 1995). Normalising judgement is enacted through the micromanagement of behaviour, to ensure greater conformity. William can contain the Bhutanese, even the ‘mouthy’70 male by the fact that he is a refugee and is dependent on services from the RMAS, which puts William in a clear position of power. On the other hand, he saw my act of appreciating Mildred and the Bhutanese community as an indication that I possess the power to make such a speech act and hence have a claim to a place in the normative centre. That recognisable esteem, marking an external hegemonic visibility for myself and a validation to Mildred and her organisation, is what William at once dislikes and covets and does not want to accede to a female leader and much less to a younger non-white researcher offering it to Mildred.

When people who have not been considered entitled to the center [sic] move into it, however briefly, they are viewed as usurpers. One way the [person or] group temporarily deprived of the center [sic] reacts is to make sure nothing remains for the perceived usurpers to be in the center [sic] of. (Espin 1995: 174)

At the start of the evening during the informal round of introductions everybody introduced themselves. This man, on the other hand, had merely glanced at me and then had continued talking to the woman next to him, feigning disregard – an act symbolic of dismissal. However, during the time I was introducing myself and the research he cut in rudely, using the bodily encounter’s alterity to enact his antagonism, “which involve[d] the refusal to share social space” (Ahmed 2000: 54).

70 See footnote 68. 160 William deliberately concealed his identity when I asked him his name and role among the Bhutanese after our verbal fracas. In fact, I recall lucidly how when I walked up to him later and asked who he was, he looked apprehensively at me, waiting it out and then with great reluctance parted with his first name, making me feel as if I were imposing on him, trespassing on his privacy, by requesting his name. When I asked what his connection to the Bhutanese family throwing the party was, he merely gestured to the woman next to him and said my wife is a volunteer71 at RSPO and communicated with unmistakable body language that he was not interested in further conversation. I became intrigued, because when I was introduced he forced the conversation under his control, but when I approached him personally and wished to know his name, he seemed disconcerted, dismissive and in a hurry to end the conversation from centring on him. It is as if the “articulate presence of these domestic but not domesticated natives is doubly disturbing because it disrupts the homogeneity of ‘home,’ that imagined space of sameness and security” (Weston 1997: 167). Here the refugees, who are the domesticated vis-à-vis an apprehended assumption, occupy an allocated certainty in the social space. However, the encounter with the non-white ethnographer disrupts and makes uncertain this embodied imaginary of the ‘Other.’

6.5.1 What’s in a name, what’s in an ethnicity? It was the ordinary everyday encounter with a non-white researcher, “rather an unremarkable principle of metropolitan life” (Gilroy 2004: 105), that was strategically deployed by William, while relying on the white service providers’ ignorance of why Indian ethnicity has a specific meaning in this context. Mieke Bal (1996: 166) has called this an “expository discourse,” where the combination of an authoritative agent and an exhibition of evidence collude to overwhelm an audience. “You are ethnic Indian aren’t you” was uttered as a simulacrum, insistently holding on to its potential, because neither my nationality nor my ethnicity had been stated.

71 As a volunteer at RSPO, one is assigned to support some of the Bhutanese families during their early resettlement period, helping out with simple tasks, such as getting around, as well as supporting with familiarisation with relevant administrative tasks and organisations to ensure the new migrants can receive the full support available when settling in Australia. They are the refugees’ first point of contact and are in charge of giving an insight to Australia and how ‘things are done here’. 161 The relationship between the processes of incorporation and expulsion which produce the abject and the marking of, and withdrawal from, particular bodily others as strange bodies, is hence contingent rather than necessary: there is a metonymic sliding across different borders, objects and bodies within such strange encounters. (Ahmed 2000: 95)

William strategically deployed specific – even specialist – knowledge that only people who deal with this particular community in great detail would have. However, I realised only too late he was trying to deflect the attention away from himself because of the obvious inaccuracy which is “bound up with the ‘absent presence’ of historicity” (Ahmed 2000: 120) and extricate himself from the demand to ‘prove to us you are a bona fide researcher, not a suspect72 Indian.’ Instead of risking an interpretation that his authoritative knowledge was in question, he moved on to a different set of questions to produce an impression of merely asking a series of questions from the ethnographer. Moreover, he played on the Bhutanese community’s anxieties of Bhutan and its national language to distract the room from his attempt at upsetting the relational ambience that was developing with those present when he usurped the evening using the decoy of ethnicity. William’s actions make clear that the reluctance to part with his name and details was anything but inadvertent, on the contrary, it was strategic. Instead of letting the researcher know his identity, he chose not to disclose his real place in the structure of relationships. This is particularly evident given that he took cover behind his wife’s role as a volunteer at RSPO.

William had framed the questioning in a way to position himself as the knowledgeable person who was unmasking to the audience my ‘real’ intentions. The heavily charged question of Bhutan’s national language was a catachresis; just as much as ethnic Indian was, in Spivak’s terms, a metaphor without an adequate literal referent (1990: 154). In an effort to regain credible social stability, I was drawn into answering him. It is the verisimilitude of the line of questioning that made it appear convincing to the others, because it was embellished with persuasive authority. In spite of the myth of racial equality, in everyday social practice racism is (re)enacted in repetitive encounters

72 Suspect, in this particular context, refers to the role of India with regard to the refugee crisis of Bhutan. See footnote 54 for additional detail. 162 reproducing inequality. The encounter of everyday racism, as experienced here, “constitutes routine, recurrent and systematic practices” (Tamale 1996: 491).

William overhauled many prisms of how the researcher was being viewed, regarded and treated: curiosity was replaced by suspicion; the respect inherent to someone possessing social capital vis-à-vis academic achievement and university backing was replaced by disregard; the evening’s polite and welcoming approach was replaced by an ostracising and a distancing, leading to a withdrawal from the research. Two things of significance are his interpellation of the relationship between the service providers, the community and the researcher, as well as his rearranging of the social gathering by race/ethnicity and gender. William tacitly dismissed the researcher using power inherent in his double social capital of an older middleclass, white male and public office holder as the chairman of the RMAS while displacing that of the researcher to render effective his transgression.

He reinforced an implicit gendered and ethnic social hierarchy. The domestic sphere of some of the young women in the Bhutanese community is fraught with gender imbalances. During my fieldwork, I have heard instances from their English teachers how some Bhutanese male siblings will tell the teacher “not to bother with their female siblings, because they will become housewives and stay at home anyway.” In my own interviews some women frequently defer to their husbands – sometimes even young university educated women. One example of this was when I solicited Anil’s wife’s opinion, she answered that it was the same as his. On other occasions many young women have responded similarly or deferred the question to their male counterparts, which happens frequently when men are present. As the service providers themselves have commented to me, sexism is entrenched within the Bhutanese community and has been identified as problematic.

On the other hand, as the figurehead, holding public office of a not-for-profit organisation that facilitates learning about Australian society to embrace ‘Australian values’,73 there is a disjuncture between William’s actions and the Government’s intended message. Moreover, this links to observations I made on service providers and discussed in the

73 Australian values form a key information programme in the HSS: “The Australian government wishes to encourage new residents to learn as much as they can about their new country, its heritage, language, customs, values and way of life and to apply for Australian citizenship when they become eligible. The government believes it is in the best interests of new residents as well as the broader community to help people settling in Australia to become an integral part of Australian society as soon as possible.” From: http://www.immi.gov.au/living-in-australia/values/background/; last accessed on 10/09/2014. 163 previous chapter: the image of Australia, particularly of equal possibilities and no gender discrimination that the service providers imagine and project to the Bhutanese refugees is incommensurate with their own social practices.

6.6 After the crisis Turner’s redress phase in social drama is perhaps the most challenging aspect to tackle, because it can take many different forms. As there was no ritual or similar social process involved in the redress phase in my fieldwork situation, that is, things continued taking their course, albeit an altered one, it required pursuing rather subtle signifiers that emerged from multiple parties. The closest to a formal process was a conversation with the head of the HSS programme at RSPO who had not been present that evening. It was an informal and friendly meeting over breakfast, which was arranged, perhaps a touch hastily, the subsequent Saturday morning. The manager of the HSS programme had previously mentioned a few times that we should go for lunch, but had not had the time during this fieldtrip. She commented that Maggie had mentioned that something happened that evening and that I apparently had upset the Bhutanese. It was obvious she wanted to elicit my perspective of what had occurred. I referred to the misunderstanding over a technicality about languages in Bhutan and elaborated where the misunderstanding in it arose. However, I did not engage with William’s role and how he manipulated the evening’s events. Firstly, I was still reflecting on his hostility and how the celebration of the evening had been marred by it, and secondly, because he represented RSPO’s direct competitor.74 The conversation moved on to different things and she asked if I could give her any information about the community’s caste hierarchies and my observations of the gender roles. Our conversation ended with her saying that she was really looking forward to reading a report about the fieldwork. At no point did she ask the research methods to be modified or for the researcher to find different ways to carry it out.

What became evident was that the reaction to the evening was determined for the most part by that person’s or group’s relative position, the degree of autonomy in regard to wider systems of social relations. I will first talk about Sister Mildred’s reactions in the

74 I was also aware from service providers’ conversations that the tender for HSS was soon up for renewal through competition again. 164 following section and then turn to Maggie, a key person from the Service Provider, and the Bhutanese community.

6.6.1 The next day(s) By the time the evening had begun winding up, Mildred had developed quite a bad stomach ache. The food and drinks had appeared to be fine for everyone else. The next morning, a Sunday, at breakfast time Mildred broached the topic of the evening before, asking me if I knew who the old man who had hassled me was. I said yes, William, Janice the volunteer’s husband. To this she looked taken aback and then chuckled and said:

Is that what he told you? He’s the chairman of the RMAS. You might be interested to know, he used to live in South Africa.75

I am shocked:

Chairman of the RMAS? I thought that was Roger.

Mildred continues:

No, Roger is the CEO. You know, Nayana, I didn’t like how he [William] was talking to you. He was really a bit nasty to you. But then I wasn’t sure, I didn’t say anything when he questioned you about Indian ethnicity, because Roger is of Indian origin, so I thought William knew about these things a lot more than I do, especially because he used to live in South Africa. I know a lot about Africa, as you know, because I mostly work with people from there.

I realise this is Mildred’s way of saying she’s awkward about what happened last evening and her inactive role in the scenario.

I respond:

Yes, that’s alright Mildred, I know that you are fascinated by Africa and I have seen at RSPO how your African clients are very fond of you.

75 Mildred had an aversion to talking about racism. Hence, I could not explore this point further with her. However, by complicating his biography she is giving me some insights to this man so I can make my own inferences. 165 Mildred:

To come back to the point he [William] was making about your ethnicity, so what if you are of Indian ethnicity, why was it so important for him to insist, as he did? I found it strange. He is South African and he works with immigrants, as do most people who were there. Anyway, why do you think William did that? Why did Roger not say something when William was insisting that you are ethnic Indian?

Me:

Because he only came much later with his friend. I echo Mildred’s question - why do you think William did that? I think he was uncomfortable. I think he was being racist and using ‘Indian’ to send signals to the Bhutanese about India’s role in their circumstances.

Through our conversation Mildred was the only person who disclosed to me that she had seen William’s role in precipitating the evening’s events. She therefore appeared to have noticed the entanglement for its racially motivated encounter and the mechanisms deployed to enact it. Despite her general avoidance of talking about racism, she, nevertheless, expressed remarkable insight when she stated that he is the chairman of the RMAS, who is an immigrant himself and works with immigrants as did the others present in that room. She then referred to his South African origin and alluded to the strong racial discourse that exists there, as well as the existent tensions emanating from historical reasons between the Indians and native South Africans. However, she was also surprised though how and why in this context it would be important to purportedly highlight anybody’s ethnicity in the room. I would have, of course, much preferred if she had intervened during the evening, for she would have had the authority to do so. In any event, the relationship between Mildred and myself was not affected by these events.

The same cannot be said of Maggie. Her attitude to the research did not really change, but then it had from the outset been one of contradiction. She had from the start construed the research as an unnecessary interference in the lives of the resettling Bhutanese refugees. However, due to RSPO’s support for this research, she was under obligation to her employer to ‘support’ the researcher. Nevertheless, she tried to throw a caveat to the research by attempting to influence the HSS manager with the comment that I had upset the Bhutanese. On the other hand, Maggie also enjoyed having my company around and

166 used it to talk about her personal life, particularly in the evenings. Nevertheless, she did use this specific evening’s disgruntlement among members of the Bhutanese community to strengthen her own position by discouraging them from participating in the research. In what I see as seeking to retain their existing relationship of dependency, she enacted a desire to ‘protect’ the Bhutanese, but in ways that would limit their interactions to specific groups of people and shape their perspectives to nudge them towards the role in society she imagined for them. To me she suggested that participating in the research would not be good for them for ‘obvious’ reasons, without elaborating what these obvious reasons were. Maggie continued to buttress her own role as a friend and adviser about living in Australia to the Bhutanese, somebody to look up to. She had high status amongst the Bhutanese already.76 Some members of the Bhutanese community took the evening’s events as an opportunity to exercise the newly learnt about Australian privacy rights, which are taught as part of the HSS resettlement process. Hence, in a succession of strategic moves, which involved Maggie or volunteers for the service provider, some Bhutanese used the event to negotiate a distance from the research for themselves.

6.6.2 Fourth phase – either reintegration or recognition of schism As alluded to above, the conclusion one draws from this analysis of the social drama, whether it led to reintegration or schism, depends on the perspective. One can justifiably argue for both positions, because I continued my research with the community with support from RSPO unchanged. Nevertheless, it is also unambiguously clear that there were substantial changes to the dynamics of engagement with the service providers and research with at least part of the community, as well as to my own perspective of doing research with this community. Turner goes some way in acknowledging this by stating that even after reintegration “the scope and range of its relational field will have altered, the number of its parts will be different, and their size and influence will have changed” (1980: 151). Nevertheless, it does not quite encompass what happened in these circumstances. Perhaps this is so, because this analysis in my thesis incorporates as an essential element the researcher herself. As an ethnographer, I occupy an awkward terrain, my presence is accepted yet I am not given full membership to the community. Almost like an interloper, my presence is importantly also limited in the temporal sense. So

76 Maggie’s role with the Bhutanese refugees is discussed in further detail in the chapter outlining the service providers. 167 effects akin to a schism may come about from other social realities rather than the ‘drama’ itself, for example because I live by default in a state of spatial separation, that is, ordinarily residing in one state while the field site is in another. Such pre-existent spatial separation in turn could lead to an overemphatic interpretation of a schism, when that really did not take place, but rather a reconfiguration of the research field.

This reconfiguration of the research field is real, yet the necessary dynamics are not adequately encompassed by Turner’s method. It is premised on an ‘outsider’ ethnographer observing events in a society substantially different, whereas here the non- white ethnographer in travelling to the field site has shifted location but not locality and remains within the society where the research takes place, although occupying a position in the centre that is given uneasily. As indicated earlier, this particular setting of the research requires distinctive methodological considerations. Taking Lefebvre’s approach, this analysis employs the “plane of the imaginary” – or perhaps more accurately it is required to do so – because it aims to “delve into the hidden life of visible and tangible human beings” (Lefebvre 2002: 55). It should come as no surprise if at first the “result may therefore appear abstract, fictitious and negative”, but Lefebvre emphasises the legitimacy of such abstraction, “because it reaches something which psychological or sociological evidence does not reveal or make immediately apparent” (2002: 55-6).

While it may seem counterintuitive, the researcher was much dependent on the service providers and the Bhutanese, which highlights another often underreported feature of fieldwork. Jean Briggs (1970), writing about the experience of dependency on members of the community under study in the field, identifies an almost child-like dependency that an ethnographer can experience. This is especially so, as mentioned in previous chapters, due to the ‘newness’ of the Bhutanese in Australia and the strong gate-keeping both by community leaders and service providers, often using the privacy discourse. In this way it is also why the evening’s events were so significant, because like a child one is dependent upon the ‘grown-ups’ in authority to say ‘nice things about one’ to establish oneself and gain approval. Here we are entering into the deeper sphere of the “third layer”, which is “an affective nucleus [...] with its own characteristic tonality” (Lefebvre 2002: 59). Located here is the dramatic situation of the individual in society in all its nuances, from hesitations and misunderstandings through to resistances and non-adaptation, to vague rejections and unrecognised voids: “[t]his is where the process of alienation and disalienation, of fulfilment and incompleteness, of (partial) satisfaction and (partial)

168 dissatisfaction unfolds” (Lefebvre 2002: 60). Being non-white sometimes makes navigating this already awkward terrain more complex, as:

This “calls for an understanding of the representation as contiguous with that being represented and not as something suspended above and distant from the represented” (Taussig 1992: 10).

6.7 Powers of desire in the politics of positionality The researcher had been given ‘access’ by RSPO’s management, but was dependent on the service providers taking her to the Bhutanese homes or negotiating meetings with them at RSPO’s office. The researcher had to rely on the service providers to be able to carry out fieldwork while simultaneously learning about the local dynamics and relations both amongst the Bhutanese themselves and with the service providers. In this form of dependency, the researcher is particularly vulnerable to others’ criticism. The ‘third level’ takes on the function of a mediator between the individual and the social, as well as between the individual and its own self within an individual consciousness (Lefebvre 2002: 62). We can analytically enter this level and consider what William’s actions, his ‘representations’, were achieving. His pointed deployment of rhetorical devices accrued a sense of unease, which invoked normative social imaginaries that lent these performances of purpose and authenticity inscriptive potential, intent on alienation. Owing to William’s social position and the adept deployment of representations alienation manifested itself subsequently on some level with both, the service providers as well as the Bhutanese community.

The relationship with Maggie was complicated by the fact that she was very important for access to the field as the service provider working most closely with the Bhutanese – a position she managed with great dexterity. Maggie was obliged to support the research, but indicated I needed her manifest tacit approval, which configured our relationship

169 around her penchant for company being a single woman having a fair bit of time after work. However, Maggie constantly negotiated and renegotiated the politics of access to the field she could provide. The unifying feature of her gestures and utterances of caring towards the Bhutanese refugees was that their self-evident benevolence could not be challenged. In effect, this demonstrated how these representations were able to be effective, because they were not recognised as ‘symbols’, but as vital realities that consequently cannot be interrogated. However, approaching them from the ‘third level’, where the dramatic situation of the individual in society takes place, because it is mediating between the individual and the social, at once the innermost sphere of an individual as well as its outermost one, opens them up for critique. Maggie often seemed niggled, discomfited by the fact that the researcher from the ‘big city’ was non-white. While she was keen to appear helpful, she frequently navigated situations to obstruct the research. When we consider these aspects in that innermost sphere accessible through the everyday methodology, we discover a “sphere of secrecy, the secret itself is smothered to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and it is generally a petty little secret, involving a deliberate or imposed choice and a mutilation” (Lefebvre 2002: 60). Hence, while such an analysis “requires a kind of imagination if it is to delve into the hidden life of visible and tangible human beings,” it is particularly well suited to assess some of the innermost and usually hidden aspects of social life (Lefebvre 2002: 55).

From the onset of my fieldwork some members of the Bhutanese community showed reservations as discussed in Chapter 5. These tensions were most frequently communicated through gendered meanings, which were similarly directed to the only South Asian female member of the service provider organisation.77 However, the community approached the white service providers with deference and accepted them readily as Australians proper. The application of a hierarchy of belonging is not exclusive to this fieldwork data, but rather a commonly encountered social representation, as Sylvia Tamale (1996: 474) states that “the stereotypical images painted about minority people by the majoritarian population are internalized by other minorities.” While this was evident throughout the fieldwork, I believe the breach William caused during that evening

77 Due to this obstruction to her work, particularly from male members of the community, she was later allocated to work with refugee groups other than the Bhutanese. 170 brought into the realm of the possible such openly manifest horizontal racism.78 I believe the exposition of this chapter demonstrates the active social practice of racism in routine interaction in Australian society. Despite, among other things, the existence of legal frameworks outlawing discrimination based on ethnicity, vertical racism is present unambiguously in Australian society (Mansouri, Jenkins et al. 2009; Noble 2012: 2029). Consequently, it forms an inexorable part of reality of everyday experience.

However, for the community an additional tension manifested due to Sister Mildred’s supportiveness of my research. Maggie on the other hand, who is the favoured case worker of the Bhutanese community, viewed the research as an unnecessary interruption to their routine interaction. Hence, this created a disjuncture, because the Bhutanese found themselves in a paradoxical situation between their own interests and loyalties to Maggie and that of their obligate deference to Mildred, due to her being Sister Mildred, her age and being the RSPO trauma counsellor.

A few days after the evening, I am scheduled to go to Kusuma’s house for dinner, which had been arranged beforehand. However, I felt a discomfiture to visit Kusuma’s house (Anil’s mother-in-law), as I wanted to avoid any recurrence of the previous confrontational situation, as her house is the centre of the family, who engaged in the dispute over the languages. Hence, I asked Maggie to accompany me on this visit and she suggested, due to the evening’s events, it would be best that she should call and let them know that she would be coming along. When the hosts opened the door, they seemed taken aback that Maggie had accompanied me. When I asked her afterwards, Maggie confided she had forgotten to call them, as she had had a busy day at work and that it would be no problem as they invariably made enough food when a guest was invited.

Nevertheless, contrary to Maggie’s expectation we are not invited to sit at the table for a grand dinner, but instead are given a bowl of dressed up Maggie noodle soup while sitting in the reception room. Maggie utters her absolute shock after the visit is over and says that it was very out of character and inhospitable coming from the Bhutanese. I realise on hearing this, it is the researcher that this Bhutanese family intended to send a strong symbolic message by not living up to their reputation of hospitality. They chose not to cancel but go ahead with the pre-arranged dinner, but used the occasion to convey how

78 Racism enacted between non-white people. However, it is pertinent to recognise that it stands in no proportion to the impact of vertical racism, that is, between white and non-white members of society (Harris and Ordona 1990). 171 unwelcome the researcher had become. It became clear that I had forfeited my welcome to conduct fieldwork with members of this family. This becomes even clearer the next day when Anil cancels his interview appointment at the last minute, on such short notice that it is not possible to arrange another appointment with someone else, well aware I was leaving in a few days’ time. Although the Bhutanese respondents had my phone number, the message of non-appearance was conveyed through a phone call to Maggie. Here both Maggie and Anil strategically enacted their allocated social roles. While this performance of communication engendered only select tropes, in the process they reinforced a wider set of assumptions held about each other.

Dorinne Kondo (1986) has written about this inversion of power during fieldwork, where the ‘violence’ of the anthropological encounter, which usually is attributed to the ethnographer who manipulates informants to obtain data and then has sole custody about the final picture/story in the ethnography, is instead meted out to the anthropologist. She describes how informants can be “seeking to dominate the anthropological encounter through control of the ethnographer’s behaviour” (Kondo 1986: 80). The social representations observed here that seek to yield such control are working at the level of an individual while taking shape corresponding to the regulations that provide a rudimentary stability within the social entity. They also work to normalise the individual by compensating for deficiencies, concealing of frustrations and thus impose some cohesion and coherence. In other words, they appear to ‘empower’ the individual, while at the same time masking the very fact they are simply social representations.

What emerges from here is a situation where the ethnographer frequently has to contend for the autonomy of the research while simultaneously having to placate or be conciliatory to research participants in fear of, or in response to, upsetting the individual(s) at hand, or others who might become upset on behalf of them, especially the service providers. This was evident, for example, in the way how Maggie communicated the evening’s events to the HSS manager and subsequently began blocking research efforts using euphemistic language, such as ‘obvious reasons’. In some situations it is plainly not possible to fulfil the expectations that some research participants bring to the process, as with a particular community leader who was tetchy about giving access if there were no mainstream TV appearance, where he wished to showcase his leadership and talk about “the story of my people.” Such dynamics curtail the remit of possibilities of a researcher, it is as if one is reduced to the level of a dependent in many regards pertaining to the

172 research process (Briggs 1970), whether it were gate keepers trying to enact their own fantasies of what research is or ought to be, or community members who wanted to use the research to negotiate their own social position. Moreover, as the encounters with William, Sister Mildred and Maggie demonstrate, the service providers are not a monolithic group, but are comprised of competitive organisations and individuals with their own desires and imaginary of their particular role in the Australian refugee resettlement process.

Taking up Turner’s previous quote on the “expression of a deeper division of interests and loyalties” (1980: 150) highlights a number of the realities that manifested throughout the fieldwork. Coming at this from the level of the everyday elucidates the dynamics of these divisions of interests and loyalties for it demonstrates “what is possible and what is impossible for the individual [when] the history of the individual reveals itself in the history of society” (Lefebvre 2002: 60). Lefebvre elevates this observation to a law:

‘Commonplaces’ are to be found both in the peripheral layer of the individual and in his affective nucleus. He has a limited and subjective perception of the conditioned responses to stimuli by which society adapts him, willingly or by force, to external conditions [...] For him, conditioning and symbols, external or internal constraints, are all mixed up together. (Lefebvre 2002: 61)

The everyday is concerned with the individual social beings existence in society. It encompasses the “immediate and natural forms of necessity” and the appropriation of objects, the elaboration of needs to desires, as well as the “realm of the dialectic between ‘alienation’ and ‘disalienation’” (Lefebvre 2002: 62). The most crucial aspect of the everyday is, however, its ‘third level, “a set of practices, representations, norms and techniques, established by society itself to regulate consciousness, to give it some ‘order’ [and] close the excessive gaps between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’” (Lefebvre 2002: 62). However, “[t]his social control of individual possibilities is not absolutely imposed; it is accepted, half-imposed, half-voluntary, in a never-ending ambiguity” (Lefebvre 2002: 62).

This very ambiguity of that control, whether it is the neoliberal ideology underpinning a refugee resettlement programme such as the Australian HSS, the hierarchisation of Australian society, or the management decision to support academic research with the Bhutanese community, is what makes for the various qualities of individual encounters.

173 The everyday methodology provides access to these intricate spheres as it uncovers in these representations gaps and imbalances, inconsistencies and omissions – it enables to posit a critique to the “pseudo-coherence” society imposes:

As a non-white ethnographer, “anthropological work is as much about [the] intellectual struggles as it is about the words and ways of others” (Rodriguez 2001: 247). For example, the reader, whose interpretation and understanding of the ethnographic writing is the ultimate goal – is inevitably entangled with its canonical conception. However, as this chapter’s expatiation conveys, ethnographies are “our own interpretations of what our informants are up to, or think they are up to” (Geertz 1973: 15), contingent on the specific positionalities of the researcher and the subjects. This does not make the writing meaningless, but rather that the implicit assumptions an apparent “coherence of effects” (Mohanty 1991: 52) originating from dominant conceptions need to be challenged.

The preceding chapter has argued that resettlement service provision takes place in the heterotopia of the ambiguous ground. This chapter has illuminated just how pervasive its influence is through the articulation of the inscriptive potential of normative social imaginaries intent on alienation of the non-white ethnographer. Together, they suggest investigating the embodiment of an imagined status between the self and an idealised image of the nation mobilised vis-à-vis the social categories of refugee and non-white, which highlights a tension between a moral imperative to ‘care’ and colonial

174 imagination.79 These dynamics and how they impinge on the subjectivity of the service providers and the conduct of ethnography are explored in the following chapter.

79 I use colonial imagination to denote “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices [...] and traces of power’s presence” (Gordon 1997: 25). For a more detailed definition, please refer to footnote 24. 175

CHAPTER 7 – ETHICAL EMISSARIES, CARING ADVERSARIES AND SOCIAL

BROKERS: THE ROMANCE OF THE REFUGEE IN THE MAKING OF THE

MOBILE SELF

176 7 Ethical Emissaries, Caring Adversaries and Social Brokers: The Romance of the Refugee in the Making of the Mobile Self

7.1 Introduction The previous chapter focussed on the unravelling of events at a housewarming party, where the non-white ethnographer’s presence collapsed categories that resulted in a violent intersection of ontology and ideology, whereas another elucidated the revelation of disciplined opportunities predestined in the ambiguous zone.80 One of the threads common to both that will be extended in this chapter is the ubiquitous influence of colonial imagination81 in the resettlement service provision. Whereas the preceding chapters had the resettling refugees in the focal plane of the analytical lens, this chapter turns its attention more keenly on the other major player constitutive of the ambiguous zone, the service providers.

The analysis of relations in the ambiguous zone aims to capture the ambiguity, rather than to fix it in place. A sensitive analysis of how positioning, mobility and exclusion are generated through these systems of inscription is pivotal to this effect and enables demonstrating how differences and inequalities are produced. It is as Bourdieu argues:

It is in these intermediate zones of social space that the indeterminacy and the fuzziness of the relationships between practices and positions are the greatest, and that the room left open for symbolic strategies designed to jam this relationship is the largest. (1987: 12)

However, the way relations between groups and individuals are established may not be directly articulated, but instead take the form of ‘euphemistic transference’ (Bromley 2000: 51) precisely because it represents the interests of particular groups, especially those of one with access to circuits of symbolic distribution, such as the service providers, who are able to legitimate their own interests and establish their own authority within the ambiguous zone. In the process, a colonial imaginary that draws on fantasy and desire is “mapped onto moral values so that distance could be drawn” (Skeggs 2004: 4). These

80 I use this term to make clear the function of the intimate space of exchange the service providers and refugees encounter and where the personal and political entangle. 81 I use colonial imagination to denote “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices [...] and traces of power’s presence” (Gordon 1997: 25). For a more detailed definition, please refer to footnote 24. 177 processes of inscription, through the practical deployment of forces on bodies, in ways that harness their energies, hierarchises them and make them functional, establishes constitutive limits and fixes attributes to particular bodies. Hence, “the bodies of certain groups [become] the bearers of social difference and moral status” (Appadurai 1996: 119).

One of the defining characteristics of the sociality within the ambiguous zone is a coalescence of forces, where the moral selving82 of service providers propels them to a valorised celebrity status and a certain bourgeoisieness that is narrativised as an exclusive kind of public salvation. Inherent to these processes is laying claim to a discernible moral superiority. However, as the disciplined opportunities have already alluded to, these claims require interrogation; this chapter demonstrates how the fetishising of Australian gender equality and its reification illuminates its precarious position. Lastly, this chapter explores the informal economy permeating the ambiguous zone and its foundational role in the creation and sustenance of hierarchical relations. The interpellation of these binary relations by the non-white ethnographer introduced heterogeneous mobilities to the resettlement entanglements. Correspondingly, in order for the analysis to be able to engage the intersubjectivities, it is necessary to make use of terms, such as ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ as analytical categories. This is by no means a form of reductiveness, but an attempt to show subtle intersubjective interactions that can remain concealed to some and revealed to others.

7.2 Maggie’s paradigmatic conception of the cosmopolitan service provider philosopher Gabriel is one of the male volunteers working with Bhutanese refugees. Maggie, who has particularly strong links to the Bhutanese refugees had suggested I interview Gabriel and made arrangements for it. I only had to have the early morning hour free on a particular day and he would turn up on his way to work.

Maggie had already spoken about him with great embellishment. He is a long-standing musician of the local orchestra, who has lived in Paris in his younger days and speaks fluent French. I cannot help but think that Maggie is at pains to impress upon me that he

82 A concept developed by Rebecca Anne Allahyari (2000) and introduced in this thesis in Chapter 4.4.2. 178 is quite the bohemian philosopher. On the appointed day, on the hour, a beaming Maggie presents Gabriel, a man with silver wisps of hair, a thick scarf wrapped around him and a brown satchel casually slung across. I catch myself straining to locate the bohemian Maggie had described.

During our hour long interview, Gabriel, who had arrived punctually, left me very little room to ask any questions. Indeed, after we shook hands and no sooner had Maggie left, he had sat down on my invitation. On the first and faintest of cues, he lurched into his ‘opinion’, akin to a rehearsed speech.

I would say almost nobody's visa application or refugee application is completely honest, they are filled with fabrication. But I don't blame anybody, it's not their fault anyway, because mostly [they] can't read or write and they didn't write it, they paid somebody else to write it, write the application for them. So you have all these moral dilemmas and all this talk around Australia about the back door and the front door and this is supposedly the front door, the UNHCR programme, but it is all complete lies. In every case that I know. I was shot this many times la- di-da, raped a hundred times and the [...] and so I know it's not true.

I don't know a great deal about the Bhutanese situation. [...] I have a (Australian, parents were missionaries) friend who was brought up in Darjeeling ... and Bhutan was always the clean place, as soon as you crossed the border there was no paper on the ground and everything is clean and tidy, back in India there is a big mess everywhere. So that is the concept of Bhutan.

I can't make a moral judgement, but it is confusing then with all these issues about boat people and illegal immigrants and so on. [...] So always that kind of moral and ethical judgements are challenged. And people who work in the field ... they have the same scene all the time, there is this confrontation of these sort of simple moral and ethical positions that we take from the comfortable western situation, none of which exist anymore in these sort of high risk situations. So I find that fascinating.

179 7.3 Aims I aim to highlight with this particular excerpt above a set of three interrelated problematics that will be tackled in this chapter: the fantasy of a particular Australian whiteness; the mechanics of patronage; and gendered hierarchies. These problematics are grouped together here, because they provide an entry point to the content of this chapter and link it to one of the overall meta-narratives situating the thesis: that of making and maintaining difference. This section will deal with some of the underlying assumptions and desires that inform the protagonists’83 interactions. Subsequently, this chapter’s focus will shift to instances of how this difference is constructed, what the mechanisms of practice are, and how it is inscribed and corporeally mapped. This corporeal mapping is related to distinctions between the profane and the sacred, which in turn are linked to salvation and compassionate care (Ticktin 2011). The chapter concludes with a problematisation of the exclusive site of resettlement between service providers and refugees.

7.4 The dream machine The HSS programme is designed to serve as part of Australia’s immigration policy, while simultaneously satisfying demands of a national imaginary of a progressive, “Western” nation prioritising ‘human rights’ as a signatory to the United Nations refugee convention, including through an annual, planned uptake of a refugee quota. Bruce Kapferer notes how “nationalist constructions on social realities tend to be essentializing, often static in conception;” yet how their constitutive potential can be revealed by unpacking of the “inner logic of nationalist mythology” (2012: viii). Investigating, thus, the nature of the internal structures of their “specific imaginaries rather than a notion of its imagination as a kind of universal (for example, Benedict Anderson 1991)” adds to our understanding of specific facets of their effect, that is, how “nationalist ideology can distort and skew what are otherwise diverse sociocultural possibilities in potentially disastrous directions” (Kapferer 2012: viii). I take ideology in this context in its widest sense, as the culturally constituted symbols, meanings, and everyday “common sense” understandings that allow us to reason and perceive, to persuade, implicate, and struggle.

83 The service providers are the caseworkers and volunteers, who are tasked with implementing the resettlement programme. 180 A point of departure is the tracing of ideology and action in the service providers’ interaction with the Bhutanese refugees in everyday life. Approaching this from the longstanding focus in anthropological research on how “ideology and symbolism are always and already integral to practice” raises the question in the context of this project of how such convictions and persuasions enter social and professional arenas (Weston 1990: 139). In the space of refugee resettlement one can observe a particular practice of the national imaginary. Frequently, Australians invoke a heightened sense of white Australianness by displaying a link of shared heritage back to Europe or to Britain, the original colonial centre of their nation. They attach an extra level of sophistication to that white Australianness, to elevate it to a fantasy. What is intriguing, is how in the context of multicultural Australia, these tentative linkages are deployed to lay claim to an Ersatz centre-ness of Australia in its own peculiar colonial imagination. This bridging of spatial separation to the colonial centre in turn feeds into the embodiment of an imagined special status between the self and territory. Therefore, clever linking to and speaking about specific localities often ends up articulating this Ersatz centre-ness to the space of the nation.

If [...] classifications emphasising ‘undesirability’ cannot be conceived independently of a national spatial background against which they acquire their meaning, it is equally true that they cannot be conceived without an idealised image of what this national spatial background ought to be like. (Hage 1998: 38- 9; emphasis in original)

Through fetishising their whiteness and Australianness the service providers refract a particular kind of colonial-laden Europeanism, which performs a categorisation that precedes the hierarchisation of those subject to the national imaginary. In short, the “refugee” becomes the site of production for the fantasy of whiteness, a fantasy that is heavily leaning on an imagined and a desired European bourgeoisieness. These logics of the nationalist ideology

contain potentials that, when introduced into political practice, have the capacity to direct populations to their ongoing existential realities in particular ways, sometimes regardless of any particular reflective or conscious intent. (Kapferer 2012: ix)

181 The mechanisms of how the social category of refugee is mobilised, reconstituted and deployed in the construction of the identity of imagined self, describe a reality framed by constitutive modes of power that construct unequal identities with differential material consequences.84 Thus, some identities are privileged as legitimate and normative, while rendering others de-legitimised and non-normative. Kapferer perceives this shift for the explanations of difference to the realm of cultural practice as a

capacity of nationalist myths to achieve an overdetermining force, whereby diversities of sociocultural life – for example, those connected to class, ethnicity, kinship, or other local particularities – are suppressed or suspended in the often state-supported overriding terms of the mythological realities concerned. (Kapferer 2012: ix)

The Bhutanese, who are part of the refugee resettlement programme, came to Australia with hope and the promise of its accompanying passenger dreams. If we take hope as not static, but rather shaped to perform within the pathos of its circumstances, it nevertheless admits the question of what it actually means to begin again. Or as Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper state, “[a]rriving is both the end of a Journey and beginning of another” (2009: 2). I consider how these new beginnings are transacted, with an emphasis on the facilitators’ entanglement and how they shape the scope and space that contributes to the new beginning, how that transacted space becomes a reality through “techniques for the production of locality” (Appadurai 1996: 182). Paying close attention to practices that demonstrate meaning-making for the service providers, and how they deploy and insert themselves into the space of resettlement, allows delineating and mapping of the interstices of the ambiguous zone against the existential reality of the new beginnings.

“The Anglo-Australian group has the most power to shape how space is used and monitor the boundaries of [that] space” (Elder 2007: 306). In either consummate coincidence or in a possible alignment with such a prerogative, all the volunteers I met were older white women and the occasional man, many were retired or those whose children had left home. They form a double act to the service providers, as catalysts and facilitators, who closely tail and show the newly resettling refugees the “ropes” to Australian society. Concomitantly, as the chapter demonstrates, the entanglement effects new contradictions

84 I wish to add here, as a short point of clarification, that there is no intention to construe this as any form of critique in the Marxist tradition, even if a subaltern status is clearly identifiable in this context; the aim is neither to provide a ‘voice’, nor to ascertain an economically- or class-based suppression. 182 in the mutual constitution of difference making of a white Australia as part of an enactment ritual of becoming Australian. “Outsiders are easily characterised as trespassers or exploiters, and the matter of cultural preservation and renewal is frequently construed as a sacred trust passing from one generation to another” (Kapferer 1996: 74). Thus, the service providers become the purveyors of a social transformation in the practicing of whiteness vis-à-vis the refugee resettlement space and the new contradictions that these processes engender.

7.4.1 Fantastic imaginaries Maggie presents Gabriel as an ideal of a cultured, sophisticated white male, who embodies not only her fantasy of Australianness, but more so encapsulates – or at least stands in for – the notionality of the HSS: Australia that has the cultural capital – and a moral capital – to uplift refugees. Thus, Gabriel is deployed as a paradigmatic symbol of the civilising project of resettlement.

The trope Maggie has conjured is familiar territory, that is, white Australian locals subscribing to an identity of Britishness and/or blurring it with Europeanness. The imaginary of the locally located Australian is of an image of a Europe that is steeped in mythologies of greatness – a material and moral superiority – that is somatically embodied by a kinship through whiteness (see also, Elder 2007: 118). Indeed, in my interview of Gabriel his impression of Bhutan is one gleaned from the past:

A subtly fragmented British whiteness is alluded to and a referential coloniality and a pious past are performed through an alliance, which is done from a specific vantage point of delving into colonial archival terrain. This is not to say that a total colonial enterprise is re-enacted, but its epistemology is discursively incorporated into, resisted and affected to create a space for the present imagining of a morally superior bourgeois self. Particularly, as it is an image of a desired Europeanness that seeks coevality, which

183 simultaneously is elusive to the realities that are Australian, because Australia and the Continent are not one. However, through a historic present, a link to an Anglo-Celtic and parallel kinship to Europe is politically and culturally made (Stratton 1998). “It is [thus] enlivened by the social organization of [...] life past and present” in the everyday space of resettlement (Knowles 2008: 179; original emphasis). For Maggie, it is evident that Gabriel is in this vein the paragon of contemporary Australian white male authority.

7.4.2 The making of a select bourgeoisie and celebrated salvation The entanglement with the Bhutanese refugees creates for the service provider caseworkers and volunteers the conditions of possibility to reshape their own identity and fashions preconditions for the emergence of a claim to a mobile and temporary bourgeoisieness. Working or volunteering with a refugee service provider organisation offers the prospect of enhancing their social status into these imaginaries by being part of the refugee resettlement apparatus. This enhanced social status is enacted and made visible in the intimate space of the ambiguous zone of resettlement, where routine encounter takes place. Its validation comes, for example, through the temporal narrativisation to their peers or in the public space. In narrativising to their peers the moral imperative to ‘help’ is invoked, making an alternative claim to a moral superiority that is otherwise contingent on European connections.

Nora, one of the volunteers, on the urging of Maggie to relate her experiences with the Bhutanese to me, tells how a daughter of a Brahmin Bhutanese family was disowned by her mother for falling in love with a young Bhutanese, who is of a different caste; she hastens to add that he was not of a low caste, but not of the highest caste – Brahmin. The young man’s parents were supportive towards the relationship, but Nora says “I was taken aback by the rejection from the girl’s mother” and said she herself has started taking care of her, who then became very attached, “even calling me mum [...] And I will be her mum at their wedding.” To this, Maggie, who was listening nearby, says: “Yes, I’ll be going wearing my sari; Nora adds, so will I and will be getting one from Rani’s mother-in-law to be [...] We thought they were very easy to resettle, but there are big divisions in the community now. You could say, the Brahmins live over near to the river, and some others in the city.”

184 On another occasion, when I am visiting one of the families, one of them, Ravi is dropped off by Barbara, a volunteer in her sixties, who had taken him for driving lessons. The whole family, as well as Maggie and I, go out to the gate. Barbara is standing outside the car, which is full of Bhutanese refugees, who have all been for driving lessons. Ravi whispers something to Barbara as I approach along with the others. The look of friendliness on her face fades to one of sternness as I extend my hand to her. Ravi’s family, his sister Kusuma, brother-in-law Wijaya and other in-laws, all thank her profusely. When the others in the car start calling out to Maggie and make moves to get out to talk to her, Barbara shows impatience, cuts them short and says towards us “sorry we have to keep going, I have to drop everyone and get home for tea [dinner].” With that Barbara gets into the car and drives away. Maggie tells me when we leave Kusuma’s house much later in the evening that Barbara is quite fond of the young Bhutanese men she takes for driving lessons, because they are very polite and well behaved. She chuckles and says Barbara acts a bit like a mother hen. Maggie also says that she herself does not usually give them driving lessons, other than to a few she is fond of, as this is what the volunteers do. “At times they come to me though if they want to visit their relatives and friends in [city some hours’ drive away],” she continues. When I ask Maggie, why they do not go on their own, she answers, “well, they can’t drive and Ravi drops hints that it would be really nice to go to [city some hours’ drive away]. So, I realise it is his way of asking me – so, that is, what we did recently on a Saturday.” I ask her if she does not mind going on a non-work day. “Oh I don’t mind. It is quite fun and they invite me to their homes for meals and include me in everything. Sometimes it is quite funny when I go into the gas station and they all follow.” Her description makes clear that the traipsing of the Bhutanese young men deferentially makes for interesting viewing. This narrativising and giving life to intimate encounters illustrates how the remaking of the identity of some of the service providers and volunteers is co-dependent on the refugees resettling in their care. The story is placed into conversation as a sacrifice, a moral imperative that is performed, but in effect their identity is inextricably tied to them. Apart from a narrative to share with their peers, their entanglement in the ambiguous zone makes available a temporal narrative in the public arena. A seductive friendliness of Australian social interaction gives confidence to a certain familiarity, so that when the Bhutanese sight their caseworkers or volunteers in supermarkets, shops and so on, they call out and crowd around or show deference to them. Through a valorisation by the Bhutanese or other refugees in their care towards caseworkers and volunteers, who blur

185 lines of professional and private lives, an adulation usually indicative of the famous becomes temporarily publicly available. These public narratives summon attention in the social space to their normally anonymous lives.

I see salvation in this specific context a little differently from its more commonplace usage as manifesting from the governing of conduct, where the governors’ identity becomes contingent on the governed. Here, salvation differs from a very traditional form of salvation, because one is making accessible for oneself a public form of adulation, much as with the famous. These socially significant connections can be narrativised with peers, or enacted and performed by dropping off gifts, donations, and HSS provisions at refugees’ houses with friends or relatives in tow, or by canvassing for donations. The function of these narritivisations, enactments and performances lies in the demonstration of a strong link to those in their care that in turn becomes a site to perform a moral superiority in their contemporary social lives.

7.4.3 Moral selving and the moral imperative Allahyari (2000) has coined the term ‘moral selving’ in her study of volunteer participation in charities providing services to urban poor in the United States of America. This study highlights how the idealised ‘charitable’ act is not entirely selfless, but rather a type of deeply emotional work of self-betterment: “It involves a concern for transforming the experiences of an underlying moral self, in contrast to situated identity” (Allahyari 2000: 4). In Michael Schwalbe’s (1991: 288) words, “[a]s a disposition, it is the part of the self that might be described as the will to moral responsibility,” although for most volunteers there appear to be additional drivers to allay something else in their lives. In doing this self-work, the volunteers draw on the available rhetorics at the service provision organisation, as well as moral rhetorics and experiences arising within their biographies, to construct a moral self through the practice of resettling the refugees (Allahyari 2000: 6). However, Sherryl Kleinman (1996) shows us how even members of a progressive organisation committed to an alternative moral identity may end up re- enacting social hierarchies of gender, race, and class in the workplace.

The effects of moral selving, which form through an amalgamation of the individual self, its biography and a situated identity to construct a virtuous personhood, are simultaneously enacted in a moral imperative to ‘care’ (Fassin and Rechtman 2009)

186 through their engagement in refugee resettlement and an affective moral superiority, which is embedded in a mythologised fantasy of the nation. As a result, the service providers construe claims to a bourgeoisieness, which is a desired social status, inherently linked to colour. It is a mobile form of identity making that is made in interactions with the refugees. Its mobility is deployed when facets of what were once private actions are suddenly transformed in public encounters. It enters a space of sociality on perchance meetings in everyday spaces such as a supermarket and so on, where the genuflecting and deference to service providers for their institutional care is recast vis-à-vis a public statement in the social space. In its temporality materialises an exclusive kind of recognition in the form of a public salvation.

7.5 Productivity of race and gender’s cognate inequalities During my fieldwork I have observed intriguing constellations in attitudes to gender equality with service providers. In the interview Gabriel is vocal about gender inequalities and violence in the refugee communities. Several caseworkers and volunteers have made similar insinuations. This repetition by caseworkers and volunteers that gender inequality is rife within the Bhutanese community is, nevertheless, often interpellated with ‘they are easier and less violent than the Africans’ comments. By qualitatively apprehending different refugee groups, they are arranged in the social landscape “based not on skin color alone but on tenuously balanced assessments of who was judged to act with reason, affective appropriateness, and a sense of morality” (Stoler 2002: 6).

During the interview Gabriel’s qualitative moral assessments suggest that refugees introduce a moral corruption to Australia. The talk about refugees lying or exaggerating their stories to get entry to Australia translates questions of refugee resettlement into a “political terrain for the negotiation of moral-political questions [about] the larger liberal conundrum of the redistribution of agencies and responsibilities” (Schnitzler 2013: 679; original emphasis). Simultaneously, claims that doing so compromises him and other service providers by creating moral dilemmas harnesses the personal to the political. It shifts to a social terrain, where the political and personal intersect and obliquely introduce value judgements that are popularly bandied about in the media. Subsequently, this is re- politicised into specific ethico-political assemblages in the ambiguous zone. Here, the

187 political mandate85 and personal perspectives are modified and anchored to new ethical regimes by the intertwining of perspectives, which is expressed in their re-politicisation. However, reaffirming an ideal of the liberal Australia he adds that “it doesn’t matter how they come.” Parsing Gabriel’s conflictual attitudes demonstrates the complexity of circumstances that are often articulated as dichotomous, when they are simplified to the level of bipartite visions with the negatively loaded refugee/other.

Gabriel tenders a grading card of comparative severity by relating the story of Sushmita’s husband, whom he accompanies to the family court over a domestic violence dispute. He acknowledges Sushmita’s husband’s role, but implies she makes a little too much fuss about it, because he has seen much worse with the African refugee communities he has worked with. Subsequently, Maggie makes similar comments and makes reference to Sushmita’s stubbornness in refusing to accept some conditions Gabriel and she have offered her to resolve the situation.

What the two service providers are privileging here is the ‘appropriate’ response, which is based on how they had read the situation between Sushmita and her husband Rajesh that included making comparative statements about Rajesh’s level of violence towards Sushmita in relation to other refugee communities. For Sushmita it was about the promise of the West and the liberal certainties of Australia she had been pedagogically acquainted with to take for granted. Having experienced domestic violence, she was resisting housing in a poorer area on the outskirts of the city as a single mother and instead sought access to safer housing. In effect, she presents herself as “squarely situated within the framework of liberal doctrines of the responsible individual [...] shaping [...] her plight through determination and willpower” (Rao 2013: 765). There are two particular strands that contribute to the service providers’ position. Firstly, as tenders are won on the basis of economically efficient solutions, service providers attenuate their mandate to fulfil it in the quickest and most cost effective ways. Due to limited resources, issues arising from resettlement are expected to be resolved within a brief time span and resettlement with infrastructure basics has to be achieved within a recommended number of weeks. The effectiveness of these processes are measured and audited by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) on accorded parameters.

85 It is political by proxy, as the service providers stand in for and act on behalf of the government. 188 Therefore, Gabriel and Maggie want a quicker and different solution, one that appeared to favour the male partner. One of the rationalisations put forth was that he had promised not to do it again and that his record of violence was not very harsh compared to some others from different refugee communities. The second specific strand is related to what is perceived as a transgression on Sushmita’s part. What is evident here is that the female caseworker does not question the male hierarchy, which manifests a disjuncture with the represented gender equality in Australia. On the other hand, a female refugee demanding a much vaunted and sanctioned right ruptures the very image of a refugee – a putative victim – in their care. Thus, for creating this disjuncture Sushmita is criticised as being a difficult, overassertive, stubborn woman, who will not accept a compromise.

Coming back to the criticisms levelled at the Bhutanese females for showing subservience – Maggie has nudged me to recall how Anil’s wife said her opinion about resettling in Australia is the same as her husband’s. This is echoed by other service providers who complain how the Bhutanese females defer to their husbands or elderly males in the family about going out, getting an education, or learning to drive, and so on. The other criticism levelled at was freedom of speech; reminding them how in Australia it is possible for them to say what they want to say, without having to defer to an older male.

7.5.1 The non-art of leadership and the meaning of salient silence Service providers frequently communicate to the Bhutanese that Australia, being a Western nation state, has equality between genders and that rights are equitably applicable. This is also what is inculcated in the teaching of Australian values and in the learning of how to navigate and negotiate everyday life in Australia, through programmes such as AMEP86 and the assigning of a volunteer, who closely monitors and works with them during their early phase of resettlement. However, it was obvious during the evening of the housewarming party discussed in a previous chapter that the white female and male service providers, irrespective if they worked for William or Mildred’s organisation, were silent during the hostile engagement with the female non-white researcher; whereas an

86 The Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) provides up to 510 hours of free English language tuition to eligible migrants and humanitarian entrants to help them learn basic English language and settlement skills to enable them to confidently participate in Australian society. http://www.industry.gov.au/skills/LiteracyAndNumeracy/AdultMigrantEnglishProgram/Pages/default.asp x; accessed 23/02/2014. 189 elder Brahmin Bhutanese woman attempted to subtly intervene. Subsequently, it was also only Mildred out of the service providers, who commented upon it and apologised for remaining silent.

This demonstrates gender inequalities are not inherent to the refugee communities alone; they are also evident in Australian society. The service providers have at numerous times critiqued what they thought was the hold the older men have over the women in the refugee communities. And yet, during many of my interactions I saw similar behaviour expressed by Australian women to older males in authority. Even Mildred, who was generally forthright, was silenced by William’s authority. It took her a night’s sleep to realise an act of ambush had taken place and to interrogate it.

None of the service providers, and there were plenty of other older white women and a couple of males, intervened. Only Anil, the Bhutanese, who fashions himself as the one in the know and a leader of opinion, inserted himself into it. However, in this instance it was the older Bhutanese woman Kusuma, Anil’s mother-in-law, who tried to bridge the awkwardness towards Sister Mildred’s guest and tried to perform an act of inclusion by demonstrating hospitality to the researcher after the crisis.87 I do not want to rehash the argument of the last chapter; however, by highlighting this, my intention here is to interrogate a different aspect.

After the discussion between Anil and I was over, the female Bhutanese teenagers came crowding around me and treated me like some celebrity. They asked to take photos with me and wished to know my mobile number and if they can call me, and so on. This was a level of interest they had not shown before the argument. One of the older girls, who had recently turned 16, said she thought “it was so cool” to argue with the men like that and wondered at the lack of fear. It was obvious that they had witnessed something unusual in the non-white ethnographer’s entanglement with both an older white male authority figure, who had ‘real’ official power and the infamous Anil with his biting sarcasm and ‘knowledge’. The female teenagers’ actions demonstrate they saw the ethnographer entangle in ways that were unfamiliar to them. On the other hand, the silence of the service providers during the crisis and subsequently in later encounters is

87 When I subsequently turned down her offer of a desert she had prepared herself, she expressed her displeasure on a later occasion by showing ‘less’ hospitality when the ethnographer was invited to her house. A subtle point of departure that escaped Maggie, the caseworker, who had looked forward to a ‘grande’ dinner, but was disappointed by Kusuma’s level of hospitality. 190 an act of maintaining a hierarchy of the social order. Moreover, specific to the argument raised here is how, by fetishising Australian gender equality and refocussing on its diametric opposite among the Bhutanese, its precarious position and the affected compliance slip their attention.

7.5.2 Taming the non-white ethnographer By affecting indifference or silence, the service providers articulate complicity, of which two deviated from: Mildred breached it, whereas Maggie amplified the complicity by extending its generative force beyond the immediate circle of the crisis. In this particular moment Maggie, being personally invested in the community, sees an opportunity to assert her special status by demonstrating care and protecting the Bhutanese from harm, as a guardian of the ‘vulnerable’. I suggest the crisis “served [Maggie] as a platform for the display of leadership, the negotiation of public images [contained in the ambiguous zone] and the communication of moral issues” (Rao 2010: 49).

Mildred’s approach of personally raising it with me interrogated William’s motivations for his actions. Maggie, on the other hand, commenced a concerted and a subtly sabotaging process of the ethnographer’s research visit. She had shown recalcitrant acceptance of the ethnographer’s presence from the outset, despite official permission by both the service provider organisation and DIBP. Simultaneously, she also at times tried to raise her profile by attaching herself to the research visit. However, she attempted to manage the presence of the researcher where she could closely monitor her activities, so that her own special position with the Bhutanese community would not be usurped by the arrival of the non-white ethnographer, who was perceived as having geographical affinity to the resettling refugees. As a single woman in her fifties, Maggie was actively seeking my company in the evenings after work and enjoyed it as she was otherwise lonely and used the opportunity to talk at length about her life and share personal and private stories of herself and the resettling Bhutanese. Given these opposing ambitions, she initially had ‘gone with the moment’, as some in the hierarchical echelons (particularly Mildred) appeared to find the researcher from Sydney adding an important dimension to the service providers’ work. In some ways such research can lend legitimacy to their work by reporting the Bhutanese refugees’ resettlement experiences. Enigmatically and

191 paradoxically, Maggie took privacy as one of the managing techniques to obstruct the ethnographer.

By the same token, the geographical proximity of the non-white ethnographer was perceived as a threat to Maggie’s privileged and exalted position. The service providers attract genuflection as a consequence of their role as brokers and agents, who transform an uncertain present. In this stratum, Maggie occupied the highest privilege. The hierarchy embedded within the ambiguous zone is simultaneously constitutive of a nexus of allegiance and alliance, which are principal sites where the strength of power manifests itself. This remarkable allegiance to the caseworkers and volunteers is also where the loyalty of individuals is tested. Although the first Bhutanese families only arrived in mid to late 2008, Maggie’s place among them as the ‘best’ service provider, who understands them, was legendary. In the short period of their resettlement, Maggie’s reputation began to precede her. Indeed, she was fond of telling me that some of the Bhutanese resettling would tell her she was known in the refugee camps in Nepal. It was made to believe that Maggie was universally liked; nevertheless, the degree of her ‘friendship alliance’ was highly coveted and she reserved it to those whom she was most partial to.

Throughout the fieldwork Maggie exerted covert influence on the interactions between the community and the ethnographer. Scheduled visits or planned interviews would hurriedly be cancelled or ad hoc postponed. By my being differently positioned, I bridge the distance between the Bhutanese and the service providers, which causes frictions and ruptures in the ambiguous zone.

7.5.2.1 Popping the bubble, or how to provincialise English Talking about life in Australia, Ravi88 says what vexes him most is his lack of ability to speak in English. When I express surprise, because he is obviously conversing in English,

88 Ravi is among the first Bhutanese to be resettled in Australia. During a private conversation Maggie shared with me that Ravi and his wife had once left to settle in Adelaide before, returning much coveted white goods to the organisation and making the difficult decision to leave some of the close family behind. To everyone’s surprise they came back shortly after. However, over the year on a subsequent field trip, Maggie says with disbelief that they are hoping to move to Adelaide again, this time to make the break permanently. “It is really unbelievable; they have had so much uncertainty in their life and still cannot make up their mind. I have only been once to Sydney, and that’s enough for me. I hate flying.” I empathise with her over her dislike of flying. “But you say that and fly all the time and live everywhere in the world.” By conflating biography and a personal quirk, she hyperbolically caricaturises the ethnographer’s empathy as disingenuous. 192 he says “we often hear it is difficult to understand us and that we must learn good English.” And then he gives an example of how the service providers and volunteers say pop the kettle on, pop in, pop out, “it’s all pop, pop, pop...” The level of frustration is clearly discernible on Ravi’s face as he says: “I thought I could speak English well.” I smile and say “perhaps it is not so much a question of having to learn English, but rather about picking up the Australian idiomatic language. I think, you could live anywhere English is spoken, and it is only a matter of adjusting to the local idiomatic language.” He looks perplexed and to put him at ease I say, “I used to be a teacher of English.” Maggie meanwhile is frowning and showing her displeasure at my comments. While such conversations superficially appear to give affirmation to language skills, what they actually transpose is an uncertainty due to an unveiling of the possibility of a critical lens to the encounter in the ambiguous zone. Perhaps, it is this potentiality of critical examination that creates discomfort among the service providers.

Such encounters disrupt and dispel the fantasy of a centred singularity of language and its universalist trope by provincialising its idiom; thus accentuating the relative mobilities in the resettlement encounters. While the service providers co-opt the mobility of the Bhutanese as a rationale for the hierarchy between them, the entry of the ethnographer through a sanctioned hyper-mobility and geographical proximity to the Bhutanese mutates the simple binary to this hierarchy by introducing an ambivalence that is dynamically updated through the variable positing of the ethnographer; thus blurring the boundaries and complicating the neat separations within the ambiguous zone. Suddenly, it is no longer possible to apprehend the Bhutanese refugee as succinctly anymore, which complicates the fetishising of the service providers’ bourgeois Europeanness and their constructed difference. By transforming language from non-ability to ability of a ‘cosmopolitan’ kind, which is inherently mobile, the question about language and its fluid inhabiters renders the service providers’ claim to a specific bourgeoisieness provincial.

Thilin, his wife Ramani and two sons were Maggie’s favourites. The ethnographer was the recipient of much hospitality from Thilin’s family and at times beyond fieldwork visits they would extend invitations. Maggie was present on all of these occasions. However, Thilin never engaged in any reciprocal communication with the ethnographer after leaving the field site. In fact, their reluctance to communicate, when I went away is incongruous with how welcoming they were previously. Mildred, one of the senior service providers, expressed surprise that the ethnographer had not been invited to their

193 son’s wedding having worked closely with them during fieldwork. Evidently, given that Maggie is the holder of much resource capital, I am in no doubt as to their choice of loyalty over more tenuous ‘benefits’ of research.

7.6 The mechanics of patronage The Bhutanese refugees are at ease with white service providers and the nexus of hierarchy that is inherent to it is taken as congruous with these circumstances. There is a precedent to aid being associated with what is termed Western nations and in the resettlement practices, whiteness is implicitly presented and instituted as intrinsic to Australia. The social life of the administrative economy and its afterlife is productive of a different set of commodities that are bartered piecemeal as elements of an incremental membership in their new society in an informal economy instituted between the refugees and the caseworker and volunteers. The refugees attempt to push the limits of resources to recalibrate their lives. In a context precariously located outside of contractual relations, Maggie is able to position herself as a conduit for their success in Australia. The Bhutanese in turn deploy their agency in creative ways negotiating the accumulation of these markers and to improve their living standards. Following a de-responsibilisation of their lives and the loss of recognition/status, combined with a strongly perceptible apprehension in their new society as void placeholders, an entity of ‘nothing-ness’, their fantasies are open to the fissures of administration and fluid attentions of the service providers and volunteers, who are accorded with charismatic transactor status.

A senior staff member was unhappy they had had to reassign the South Asian caseworker to handling non-Bhutanese resettlement work, as some of the Bhutanese disliked her handling their cases. However, Maggie managed to position herself as the greater patron and attracted reverential treatment in return, deploying certain techniques of inducement to elicit particular political dynamics. On the other hand, privy to personal politics and competing interests between caseworkers and volunteers, the Bhutanese deploy this knowledge strategically and use their agency in creative ways. This is evident in eliciting resources, such as driving long distances to visit Bhutanese family living in different towns, travel to and fro from airports, or make minor excursions through fissures of affinal connections to elude the restrictions operative in disciplined opportunities.

194 However, it is also true that the Bhutanese community is politicised in a particular form, which appears to render them ‘susceptible’ to the kind of machinations Maggie was deploying. In their 20 years in refugee camps they had become politicised (Gellner 2007: 86; Whelpton 2009: 58), including in particular human rights discourses and specific patronage systems, into which the informal economy’s strategic deployment of social capital and creative practice of its resource allocation find competing participants. Interestingly, many who are deemed as being Maggie’s favourites are frequently those who were politically active in the refugee camps. One particular Brahmin family is the exception, a family with a matriarch with some reputation for her feistiness and someone not too well liked by several of the service providers, as Kusuma rarely defers instead tends to speak her mind.

Aid workers are adept at maintaining coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorised policy (Mosse 2005a). The mechanics of patronage to achieve this operate in multiple ways and without explicitly stating this is how it functions or how to elicit the most out of the addendum to the resettlement services. Maggie is able to operationalise this system effectively by having access to resource capital and friendship insignia. Her frequent unannounced visits to Bhutanese refugees’ houses for meals are one way of reinforcing that position. In turn, the social bonds inherent to this exchange (Graeber 2001) provide conditions to gain influence in the informal economy. These roles of care enactment wield a certain power that the refugees in return deploy creatively in a competing economy of resources.

7.6.1 Casual interpreting work at the service provider organisation The service providers’ unfettered autonomy in the quotidian interactional space of the ambiguous zone is visible in the remit of reach and ways in which they choose to support. When refugees are resettled, as with the Bhutanese, until they have a steady income they are supported through Centrelink funds. All the refugees I engaged with, most of them Bhutanese, were very keen to get full-time employment and become productive members of society. Indeed, some, disenchanted with the promise of an Australian dream of equality, spoke of how their pride depended on it. However, employment was not easily available to the resettling Bhutanese, which is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. Maggie managed the patronage system such that some of the Bhutanese whom she most

195 favoured had some sort of job, even if it were casual work, such as interpreting at the organisation. This casual interpretation work was often given to three men and because I saw one person more often than the others, I asked about the allocation of these casual jobs with the organisation. In reply she said whoever was available at that time would be called upon. During interviews two of these interpreters expressed their frustration at being unable to find enough work and evidently believed Thilin was always the first on call. Nimal, in an effort to compel some of the interpretation work his way and showing great enterprise informed me, “that is why you see me here often; I just drop into see if there is any interpretation work to be done.” Thilin, on the other hand also had outside work as a casual night-time care worker. These allusions indicate that incorporated ‘friendships’ compel material boundaries and highlight the slippages of distribution that are preoccupied with subjectivities bound up with loyalties. In this fashion a range of ‘desirables’ from work experience, reference letters, having the curriculum vitae checked, to the quality of housing, and so on are bartered in this informal economy, through which so many of the proverbial boxes that needed to be ticked to negotiate survival and recalibrate their lives are made accessible.

7.6.2 Desirables Shantha is a young teenage boy of about 17 years, the son of a high-ranking police officer, who had lost his life in the political conflict in Bhutan. The entire family of four boys and his mother had made a deep impression on the service providers, particularly Shantha, who is the eldest of the boys. I am told by Mildred that Shantha has been very keen, even though he had arrived only recently, to be interviewed by the ethnographer. The interview is scheduled on a Sunday, yet Maggie offers to take me to the interview. When we arrive at Shantha’s home, Maggie suddenly pulls out a laptop, leaving me a little astonished, it is after all a Sunday. However, I am also aware in the resettling economy vis-à-vis caseworkers, laptops are precious cargo, and perhaps the most sought after item handed out by the service provider. So I am surprised why Maggie would go out of her way to collect it from the office during a weekend and needed to drop it off on a Sunday morning. I have heard there is a long waiting list and been told they are usually reserved for families with a large number of school-age children. I have been to a number of such households, who have been resettled for much longer and are awaiting a computer with much anticipation. I ask Maggie about this and she responds that there are many young boys in

196 Shantha’s family. And then says she has to protect this information from Rumina and her family, who has resettled much earlier and regales me with their story. Maggie says they are very forward,89 including the mother and especially the younger woman, Rumina. On hearing there are five of the much coveted laptops, she had suggested that one each should be given to everyone in her family. Maggie shares an obvious secret smile with me. The practice of patronage and bartering in an informal moral economy was overtly and subversively performed while giving access to an interview with the ethnographer.

7.7 Pulling the rug under ethnographic enquiry The service providers make axiomatic claims to ownership through gatekeeping due to their close relationship to the Bhutanese’ resettling lives, which impinges into their private sphere with great liberty, jettisoning the very privacy they articulate in attempts to exclude perceived external auditors, including the ethnographer. Simultaneously, service providers deploy a discourse of ethics, intent at keeping at a distance those who are not members of the resettlement arena, which constitutes the multiple organisations providing services to refugees. Performing an act of strategic subversion, the ethnographer counter-articulated being in possession of nationally prescribed and institutionally compelled ethics clearance, thus making appropriations to the high-ground of ethics enacted by the inner circle of the sacred.

During fieldwork this meant the service providers offered little in way of privacy to the Bhutanese, simply entering their houses if the front door was unlocked, and at times catching my hesitation, assuring me, ‘it’s ok they are always walking in and out of each other’s houses. At other times service providers would casually walk to the back of the house through gardens if the front door went unanswered. On another occasion, performing an act of visual affinity his family assigned volunteer opened the door of the main bedroom and walked in to drop off some things from the op-shop, demonstrating superior alliance to Thilin over Maggie. Such license highlights how the institutionalised connectedness engenders a resettlement practice that embeds recipients of this care in networks of dependency and transfers entitlements of kinship to givers.

89 A euphemistic line of speak deployed by some caseworkers and volunteers suggesting the resettling refugees are not sufficiently reticent. 197 7.7.1 Beguiling materiality and affective aficionados On a winter Sunday, Shantha greeted us cheerfully and welcomingly indicated the table and chairs made ready for the interview, belying an early morning. As I was hanging my bag on the chair, Maggie suddenly delved into her bag and took out a laptop. Nodding towards me she said: “this has nothing to do with her coming here, nothing at all.” If I had been surprised by the gesture of giving it on a Sunday, then even more so at her rather strange act of connecting it to my visit. As the interview progressed and she had left, the social life of the laptop became clear. Evidenced by signage and asserted audibly, Maggie had briskly captured the temporal space and the afterlife of the interview. Shantha is a bright young man90 keen to get a head start in Australia. His eagerness to embrace what Australia has to offer and his enthusiasm to get to know the researcher signalled a division of attention (usually reserved for the service providers) to a potential plurality outside the ambiguous zone. Maggie endeavoured to redirect the attention that is at risk of travelling outside, impelled by the fluidity and flexibility inherent to mobile migrants/refugees, back into the more restrictive parameters of the ambiguous zone; thus thwarting a potential challenge to the superior saviour status imbibed in embracing the service provider professional role. Moreover, juxtapositionally, for refugees embracing higher education (Reid and Khalil 2013: 16) is of great significance and an emotional investment and yet often times considered as an excess by those who are assigned with recalibrating their lives.

In fact, soon after Shantha had been surprised with the laptop, she requested to see him and his mother privately and went to the kitchen to have a private word with them. These stratagems right at the start of my first encounter with Shantha would prove decisive. During the interview and subsequent interactions, he affected a degree of distance, very different to the picture Mildred had evoked of his wish to participate, as well as first impressions of his enthusiastic greeting of the ethnographer on first encounter. During our interview, I found out that he had always envisaged becoming an aeronautical engineer but had recently changed his mind to enter the police force. With a smile of pride he associated the possibility of increasing the diversity of the local police force. When I asked why he had changed his mind about aeronautics engineering, at first he looked uncertain, but subsequently linked to the biography of his late father. In his short time in

90 He is very courteous and highly intelligent and many of the service providers mentioned this throughout my fieldwork. 198 Australia he had been diverted to the seductive possibility of beginning his career soon after high school, an accessible immediacy of becoming an earning and a responsible member of his new society. A career in the police force would fast-forward such a trajectory.

The kinds of furtive communication, as displayed during fieldwork visits, are difficult to describe and analyse, other than through careful theorisation of observation of daily interactions, but they are important because they reveal ruptures in the naturalised silences (Goldstein 2003: 120). They remind how through the circulation of [entrapment], repatriated through inequalities along a grammar of racial lines (McClintock 1995: 17), uneven equalities are sustained.

7.8 Afterlife – the echo of dissonance It is informative to reflect on what transpired from the crisis at Soumya’s housewarming party. During that particular evening the tangible silence was constitutive of a gender hierarchy that is located in the circumstances peculiar to resettlement: the paradoxical nature of the service providers own gender relations, where they defer to males, and yet, teach gender equality to the Bhutanese, and critique the very inequality of gender relations among the Bhutanese they themselves exhibit. The reach of William’s actions was somewhat limited, mostly contained to those at the party. What distinguishes Maggie’s approach is that she, on the other hand, extended that control mechanism’s reach. As a key figure in the resettlement provision to the Bhutanese and as their ‘favourite’ caseworker, she deployed her influence. Thus, she linked the external site of my fieldwork enquiry to this event, in order to create a rupture and ostracise the female non-white ethnographer; thereby structurally closing the circle of white male domination. Indeed, Maggie proceeded to leverage her discontent with newly gained confidence that the ethnographer was indeed disrupting the resettlement provision, a view she had all along covertly articulated.

William’s desire was to ostracise the non-white ethnographer from assuming centrality to that event and the Bhutanese community present there. Moreover, he did not want his axiomatic authority challenged, neither by an ethnographer, nor by the passing of the mantle to Mildred. Whereas William’s organisation has much less access, as they had lost the resettlement tender to Mildred’s organisation. Maggie, on the other hand, has 199 unfettered access to the Bhutanese community, influence she leveraged. However, with the tender coming to a close towards the end of the year, Maggie had told me early on that should William’s organisation win the tender next time, it could be that she (and others) could gain employment there. David Mosse underscores the significance of this statement: “interventions are not driven by policy but by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships” (2005a: 16). These actions reveal an emphasis on survival strategies that are performed not only by those in resettlement, but also by those practising it.

And when in 2011 Mildred died unexpectedly, neither Maggie nor Thilin informed me, despite knowing about my friendship with Mildred. Only Wijaya and the caseworker from South Asia, who had stopped working with the Bhutanese, got in touch with the ethnographer.

7.9 Conclusion – them Gods have feet of clay This chapter illuminates an infrequently interrogated aspect of contemporary Australian resettlement practices by focussing on the service providers and volunteers, who are the practitioners of its implementation.

Indeed, what I encountered was that “ideology and symbolism are always and already integral to practice” (Weston 1990: 139). It is illustrative of how the logics of nationalist ideology direct existential realities (Kapferer 2012: ix) and, pertaining to the specific circumstances of refugee resettlement, result in the embodiment of an imagined special status between the self and an idealised image of the national spatial background (Hage 1998: 39; 2003: 49-51; Nandy 2008). These sentiments are enacted and performed by mobilising the social category of refugee for the construction of an identity of the imagined self as patron and protector, which serves as a site for a moral imperative to ‘care’ in the modelling of a virtuous personhood (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). However, these claims to a bourgeoisieness are inherently linked to colour and effect new contradictions in the mutual constitution of difference making of a white Australia. Despite an affective moral superiority, the “refugee” becomes the site of production for the fantasy of whiteness through this “social organization of [...] life past and present” (Knowles 2008: 179). The resultant over-determining force that negates diversities of socio-cultural life (Kapferer 2012: ix) manifests in an intimate and exclusive social arena 200 between the Bhutanese refugees and service providers, what I have called here the ambiguous zone.

The ambiguous zone is an apparatus of apprehension that renders relationships hierarchical where the service providers enjoy largely unfettered autonomy in routine interaction. For the service providers,

the field of possible position-takings is open to the sense of placement (in the double sense, incorporating the meaning of investment) in the guise of a certain structure of probabilities, probable profits or losses, as much on the material plane as on the symbolic plane. (Bourdieu 1996: 238)

Moreover, it involves “the acquisition of a specific code of conduct and expression, and to discover the finite universe of freedom under constraints and objective potentialities which it offers” (Bourdieu 1996: 235). By entering into transactional relationships as givers their social lives are transformed, whereby their quotidian, anonymous lives are literally catapulted into a significance that was formerly unforthcoming and unavailable. For the Bhutanese refugees, resettlement is enlivened on the cusp of hope of an imaginary to live life differently and that another world is possible. Constitutive to this conjuncture are the service providers and volunteers, whose social and private lives acquire a new lease vis-à-vis their role as professional benefactors.

In such routine encounters, a range of incursions blur boundaries and put into question this clear-cut division. On the one hand, the service providers’ paradoxical collective representational rhetoric, by fetishising Australian gender equality, makes its precarious position and affected compliance slip their attention. On the other, the refugees are able to affect vulnerability, perform public genuflection and creatively subvert aesthetics of refugee gratitude. Nevertheless, the exclusive spatiality of the ambiguous zone engenders relationships refracted through a duality of a binary, hierarchical prism.

However, the presence of the non-white ethnographer creates an alternative pole that interferes with the linear exchange of power and casts a different light that unveils the contingency of such hierarchical relations. Accentuating the heterogeneous mobilities in the resettlement encounters, displays interstices of potential critical examination and renders the service providers’ claim to a specific bourgeoisieness provincial. Such productive cosmopolitan encounters have the potential to “create a real community of

201 interests between themselves and open a fluidity in a community building idiom” (Robbins 2006: 287). These circumstances, thus, create possibilities of social transformation from which the service providers would be excluded and could in different ways destabilise the encompassing narrative of the ambiguous zone. Consequently, the shift in perception positioned fieldwork as an interference that disturbs and disrupts the naturalised hierarchy, revealing the lives of the Bhutanese and the service providers as imbricated rather than neatly separated. This shift is mobilised to destabilise fieldwork relations, in order for the Bhutanese’ attentions to recede into the more restrictive parameters of the ambiguous zone. Through its networks of dependency, informal economy and nexus of allegiance the service providers are able to operationalise the apparatus to curtail developing further alliances with the non-white ethnographer. Indeed, the refugees are reified by the service providers as a resource for the construction of their own identity and social imaginary, who decide over their (un)availability and gatekeep research emphasising vulnerability and selective rights to privacy.

During the course of fieldwork in different states in Australia various, attempts were made to gain access to resettling Bhutanese refugees. Much mileage was made by service providers of the ethics of researching a group of individuals for whom the term vulnerable was bandied about with much fervour. However, it became evident that ‘vulnerable’ was deployed as a technology of control to gatekeep those external to it and enact an authority over the Bhutanese, especially during early resettlement. The service providers’ identity is closely bound up with the intimate space of the ambiguous zone and the social hierarchies it engenders, which is contingent on there being refugees to resettle. Relying on a discourse and rhetoric of ethics, the service providers embrace the autonomy vested in them and perform the role of adjudicator, whereby ethics is made the arbiter, but applied ad hoc.

During fieldwork observations of resettlement practices, individuals from service provider organisations were at pains to demonstrate the substantive care and ingrained ethicalness of their work. It is evident there is a taken for granted selflessness that encumbers a performance of piety inherent to the profession and to the person, who foregoes the luxury of other more financially affluent careers. In a supreme act of the proverbial confidence trickster, the ‘wretched of the earth’ (Fanon 2001) as it were, are displayed, deployed and depended upon during this entanglement.

202 The next section of the thesis comprises the meta-discussion and thesis conclusion. First, the meta-discussion will attempt to re-theorise ethnography from the interstices using conceptualisations of fantasy, desire and the ethical imagination, inspired by Moore’s scholarship (1994, 2007, 2011). Applying these terms to the formation of the subject through intersectionality and intersubjectivity, this discussion will develop an understanding how the effects of colonial imagination, race and gender that permeate the data of this thesis elucidate nuanced insights not despite, but due precisely to their divergent levels and aspects of subjectivity. The conclusion, in turn, attempts to highlight how the differently situated yet connected threads of the thesis chapters provide novel insights into the resettlement process through theorisation of subjectification in fieldwork data obtained as a non-white anthropologist studying ‘at home’ in the society where my academic institution is based.

203

SECTION THREE: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

204

CHAPTER 8 – META-DISCUSSION

205 8 Meta-Discussion The three preceding fieldwork interpretation chapters each discussed their respective events. Apart from thematic and contextual concordances, on an analytical level they also share specific characteristics. However, the narrower context of a chapter does not allow interrelating these aspects in their fullness. Specifically, the chapter discussions highlight a need for a stronger theorisation of certain dynamics that often remain hidden and under- scrutinised. Hence, this meta-discussion endeavours to re-theorise the ethnographic encounters from the interstices using conceptualisations of fantasy, desire and the ethical imagination (Moore 1994, 2007, 2011) to create and illume “an intermediate space” that enables a phototaxis of analysis and subjectivity by conceiving of the anthropologist as a “vulnerable observer” (Behar 1996: 174).

Before embarking on this theorisation of ethnography from the interstices, it is perhaps pertinent to engage once more with the question of how one becomes a vulnerable observer. I hope it has become evident that as much as any ethnographer can experience vulnerability in the field, it takes an altogether different approach to make oneself vulnerable in the writing. Being a “vulnerable observer” (Behar 1996) takes a distinctive approach to fieldwork that includes a privileging of certain aspects; in other words, an analytic writing strategy, which moreover has strong links to the ethnographer as witness (Malkki 1997). The narrative of Chapter 6 has demonstrated the fragility of inner worlds, whether our own or of those around us. Others’ inner worlds are, however, only accessible through relationships that are either extant or created in the process. Therefore, we have to talk with candour about the fragility of our own inner worlds, of how relationships affect them, in order to make inferences about how others’ worlds are affected.

8.1 Introduction This thesis set out to map the existential realities of the resettlement process that refugees from Bhutan, who had spent nearly two decades in refugee camps, would encounter in Australia. Obtaining access to the fieldwork itself emerged as the first impediment, yet it also provides rich substance to the analytical realities. Once the fieldwork with the Bhutanese community got underway, early on emerged an analytically interesting disjuncture between the promise of resettlement and its reality. On the one hand this might be explained through the complex realities of multicultural societies, where questions of

206 recognition can eclipse issues of redistributive justice (for example, Phillips 2007). On the other, a focus on multiculturalism and its discontents would merely provide an analytical gloss, because it has become evident that the entanglements of the actors furrow much deeper. Moreover, there is an inherent danger in unreflexively deploying “pre- articulated categories of western knowledge,” of the normative anthropological canon, but rather anthropologists should strive to “contest these perspectives [...] to provide the concepts and enunciative modality that symbolically remap their future” (Ong 1996: 85). My aim is to follow this lead and develop perspectives emerging from my fieldwork through Moore’s (2011) framing of ‘ethical imagination’91 to draw on scholarship that is imbued with a feminist and reflexive stance. I argue that research needs to contend with rigorous attention to ways in which informants and the researcher are socially situated (Haraway 1991; Gunaratnam 2003).

The chapters have dealt in various forms and depths with identifications and imaginaries, and – given the preponderance of these – this meta-discussion develops continuities and disjunctures in this space and the concluding chapter that follows aims to draw together strands from the fieldwork interpretation chapters in an attempt to develop an “imaginary cartography” of the ontological uncertainties of certainty, of how resettlement entails a performativity of containment that influences the conditions for the emergence of the self (Moore 2007: 6). Much of the material depends on a sensitive and nuanced understanding of affect and intersubjectivity, of how selves are formed in and through relations with others. And this analysis is not restricted to the research participants, but includes the ethnographer herself, because the mutual awareness of her witnessing indelibly inscribes itself into the observations, which in turn necessitates explication. The decision to undertake analysis along a path canonical work less frequently visits was important in order to eschew, or at the very least, reduce pre-theoretical assumptions about difference, authenticity or belonging that might otherwise encumber the analysis (Moore 2011: 11). At the same time, it is indispensable to be attentive to Fassin’s caveat that social sciences can only access “culturally significant expressions of [...] affect” (2012: 203).

Approaching the interpretation through affect and intersubjectivity emphasises inherent ambiguities of meaning, which in turn provide “valuable analytic and ethical insights into

91 Henrietta Moore’s framing of difference, intersubjectivity and ethical imagination speaks to me and has been invaluable to my thinking and writing. This approach has provided powerful ways of conceptualising my writing from the interstices, which are too frequently left under-theorised. 207 the nature and the negotiation of social, interactional and biographical difference in research encounters” (Gunaratnam 2003: 25). And while these encounters evidently are inflected by colonial imagination,92 these interactions are intrinsically composed of at least two cultures resulting in a transformation of the conditions of the encounter itself (Ahmed 2000: 11). Careful attention to the nuances of these transformations requires a research practice that deploys a “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1996: 214) to work with and against racialised categories and highlight their linkage to the production of knowledge (Gunaratnam 2003: 23). This is, indeed, no simple task. It has to endure imagined selves and others, powerful if amorphous and frequently ineffective categorisations, such as ‘Western’ or ‘white’, that suffuse daily life as much as theoretical concepts of the discipline, as well as the often powerful real-life existential effects of the deployment of these categories (Moore 1994: 129-33).

However, bell hooks reminds us that repudiating these oppositional binaries of ‘West and the Rest’ “does not mean that we should never speak of the ways [that] observing the world from the standpoint of ‘whiteness’ may indeed distort perception [or] impede understanding of the way racism works both in the larger world as well as in the world of our intimate interactions” (1992: 177). Two important points are emphasised here, which are in tension with the problematic of categorisations, such as ‘white’, ‘whiteness’, or ‘Western’; namely, that the inherent claims to universality need to be critiqued through their particularisation to a specific social location, a ‘provincialisation’ to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2007) term, while not jettisoning their existential saliency. Studies have often focussed on the margins, including reflexive treatments of positionalities vis-à-vis the centre, such as Donna Haraway’s (1991) ‘situated knowledge’ or hooks’ (1992) observations of oppositional black culture. The invisibility and negative definition of whiteness is the second important point, which brings with it an absence of recognition. It is important to recognise that this erasure engenders a multiplicity of effects. Not only is this absence of recognition a strategy that facilitates making a group the other, but it also effects an obligate positioning of those who attract the label ‘white’:

Whether or not one discursively positions oneself as “white,” there is little room for manoeuvring out of the power relations embedded in whiteness. Whiteness,

92 I use colonial imagination to denote “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices [...] and traces of power’s presence” (Gordon 1997: 25). For a more detailed definition, please refer to footnote 24. 208 stated or unstated, in any of its various forms, leaves one invoking the historically constituted and systematically exercised power relations. (Nakayama and Krizek 1999: 102)

Therefore, in order to extend the discussions in the fieldwork interpretation chapters, I am exploring how the formation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity play central roles in the ethnographic material of this thesis. The depth of this reflection will, moreover, elucidate how as a black anthropologist one is drawn into fissures when negotiating central terrain. Contemplating these aspects of fieldwork requires scrutinising desire and fantasy. These terms are used as important analytical categories of subjectivity that in their socialised form materialise due to neither the subject, nor the social, ever being complete representations (Moore 2007: 21). This thesis frames the interpretation of these analytical categories as explicitly contingent on, as well as constitutive of, colonial imagination.

8.1.1 Anthropology’s other An emphasis on subjectivity and intersubjectivity points to questions about anthropology’s other and how the other is constituted. As a non-white anthropologist one is multiply displaced and the challenge lies in converting these dynamics and insights into a critical practice, which following Edward Said (1994a) one might term a “contrapuntal analysis,” writing not from within the canonical perspectives and hegemonic forms of othering, but from the interstitial spaces, the fissures created by displacements to articulate the powers and dynamics in operation captured from the insights of being there, in the ‘blind-spots’ of western academic thought. In Ong’s words: “Indeed, belonging nowhere and everywhere has been the necessary condition for understanding twentieth- century human experience” (Ong 1996: 86). This writing from interstitial spaces, especially in the context of this thesis, also immediately blurs the boundaries of the self, and between the self and the other.

Mudimbe’s critique of anthropology emphasises how this discipline – as well as other endeavours of Western epistemological leaning – “is concerned with the study of the distance from the Same to the Other” (1988: 81). These dynamics are imbued by essentialist categories of ‘race’, yet they have “some level of resonance with lived experiences and this is something that we need to both address and interrogate rigorously”

209 (Gunaratnam 2003: 33). This measurement of distance also extends in the everyday encounters in multicultural societies and leads to what I construe as the ‘primordial displacement’ due to the inherent comparison between the self and the other, a comparison that informs and energises the dynamics of displacement, and is also reflective of “the West versus the Rest dichotomy which informs theoretical concepts in the discipline [of anthropology]” (Moore 1994: 130-1). Moore further complicates tackling these aspects by suggesting that “different discourses intertwine and over- determine each other, and [that] the academic influences the popular and vice versa,” entanglements that in turn shape our imaginations (1994: 134). This primordial displacement matters, because it has consequences for existential realities, such as the ‘invisibility’ of the centre, as it effectively removes the self, and thus the centre, from ethnographic vision. This displacement, which oftentimes manifests rather as a sidestepping or morphing of the centre to elide the non-white ethnographer’s claim to it, makes for an unstable ground. These morphing dynamics, which are never a metamorphosis as there is no transformation or other teleological path discernible, reveal underlying assumptions, as with the colonial imagination explored in further detail below.

Working through these points is work for the reader as well, because some of the material can be challenging. I submit, however, that the work of problematising positionality provides radical possibilities, as Spivak has elaborated in The Post-Colonial Critic:

What we are asking for is that the hegemonic discourses, and the holders of hegemonic discourse, should de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other rather than simply say, “O.K., sorry, we are just very good white people, therefore we do not speak for the blacks.” (1990: 121)

The realisation of a complexly-constituted self requires treating subjectivity as a dynamic process of engagement with the world and remains a challenge to most of us. Moreover, “in acknowledging the importance of alterity and diffraction in their constitution and conceptualization, one slips too easily into an unthought dialectic of opposition which is the negativity of difference” (Moore 1996: 6).

210 8.1.2 Fantasy, Desire and the Ethical Imagination – approaching intersubjective self One important effect of globalisation – as it also pertains to the research in this thesis due to the transnational nature of refugee resettlement – is the deconstruction of the key theoretical concepts, such as subjectivity and individualism. One of Foucault’s main theoretical preoccupations centres on what constitutes the subject (Foucault 1978, 1980, 1982, 1988a, 1990) and he argues not for its disappearance following deconstruction, but rather that this has led to a discursive proliferation and subsequent delineations under different disguises, such as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘post-coloniality’ and other claims to counter-subjectivity. The loss of that more rudimentary, binary axis of centre-periphery that is characteristic of globalisation, whose transnational flows of people, goods and ideas have delivered a multitude of transnational and diasporic identities, thus poses challenges to our conceptualisation of selves and identities:

The polylingual voices of the multi-located subjects of the global nomadic, diasporic, hybrid diversity are producing concretely grounded micro-narratives that call for a joyful kind of dissonance. For ethical discourse to sing the same tune some extra effort is needed. (Braidotti 2006: 93)

Foucault argues that ethics concerns the relation of the self to itself in terms of moral agency. The essential condition for the practice of ethics is the freedom or ability to choose particular action towards the intentional work on oneself to identify moral obligations and engage in transformative work on the self in order to constitute one’s own moral being. Such work of self-formation, or subjectification, goes deeper than mere self- awareness, and concentrates on the ways in which it is possible and desirable to constitute oneself as an ‘ethical subject’ (Foucault 1990: 26-28). Standing at the intersection of globalisation and the ‘ethical subject’, not just as analysts of social phenomena, but also as private persons, we have to revisit how selves are imagined in relation to our bodies, to others, to objects and to the wider social and cultural worlds, because these processes, including subjectification, are necessarily historically contingent and produce specific ethical problems and conditions for the ‘problematisation’ of self (Moore 2011: 18-20). However, one persistent criticism of Foucault’s thinking is its focus on discourse and language, whereas a problematisation of the self “also involves affect, emotion, the placement of the body, fantasy, and relations with objects, technologies and the material world” (Moore 2011: 21).

211 Deliberating subjectification also trains our analytic focus on identifications rather than on identity, and it makes identification a process that is productive of subject positions, or specific locations, and how that transacted ‘space’ manifests through “techniques for the production of locality” (Appadurai 1996: 182). Intersecting these subject positions are discourses, practices and affect, which constitute individuals as multiply layered subjects, who navigate a dynamic matrix of subject positions, some of which will be contradictory and conflicting. The resultant politics of location refers not to clearly bounded social or physical locations, but rather as Haraway puts it:

Location is not a listing of adjectives or assigning of labels such as race, sex and class. Location is not the concrete to the abstract of decontextualization. Location is the always partial, always finite, always fraught play of foreground and background, text and context, that constitutes critical enquiry. Above all, location is not self-evident or transparent. Location is also partial in the sense of being for some worlds and not others. (1997: 37)

Within this framework, the politics of location is “both materialist and immanent [in that] it combines issues of self-reflexivity and accountability” (Braidotti 2006: 93), while at the same time establishing ethical boundaries. Individuals’ identities do not arise unproblematically out of social and cultural affiliations, they “intersect, coincide or clash; they are seldom synchronized. The point is that one’s consciousness of oneself does not always coincide with all the variables all the time” (Braidotti 2006: 94). The less statist view of identification as opposed to identity also emphasises the work of identification that individuals are able and required to do, thus eliminating a concern with the over- determination of subjects by culture or ideology, as often attributed to Foucauldian notions of power.

Identification, however, also requires considerations at a deeper, personal level than Foucauldian subjectification, because it necessarily entails mental and bodily processes:

Fantasy, desire and unconscious motivation are always in play, alongside strategy, rationalization and emotional intelligence, in the process of making and sustaining a self through identification with multiple subject positions which are themselves dynamically related. (Moore 2011: 80)

212 These processes surfaced too frequently during fieldwork encounters to return to exhaustively. Maggie exhibited multiple and contradictory attitudes to the fieldwork and ethnographer in ways that reflect different aspects of desire, to fill her private time with conversations or strengthening her position with the community beyond the contractual IHSS support period to name a few. Similarly, fantasy was evident in the approaches of Bhutanese refugees to resettlement and in the case of Wijaya, the disjuncture between fantasy and existential reality, its unexpectedness, is reported as a way of coming to terms with the development of type 2 diabetes since arriving in Australia. Moreover, accessing these processes on an analytical level is challenging, because only some aspects will be available to the conscious mind, whereas others will be subconscious, tied up with bodily practices and unthought behaviour, and yet others will be unconscious (see Obeyesekere 1981). However, the volunteer assigned to Thilin’s family, for example, provided glimpses into unconscious motivation through her ‘bristling’ response to the unseating of her fantasy of exalted European credentials. This intersubjective performance links back to a desired status prevalent among service providers, which is also observable in wider Australian society and takes a socialised form:

Desire is always socialized in a specific form, but it remains unrealizable [and] cannot be integrated within the symbolic system, but nonetheless shapes it, in the sense of having a series of structural effects that can be traced and analysed. (Moore 2007: 20-1)

Among the resettling Bhutanese refugees effects of such socialised desire became evident in many constellations. Yet, one powerfully evocative example is that of Rashmi, who despite frequent and insistent urging had resisted motherhood prior to coming to Australia, because of a strong determination to pursue higher education. However, realising from her resettlement experience that her dreams of postgraduate education would not come to fruition, within less than a year of arrival in Australia she chose motherhood. These details support the view that that fantasy is part of relationality, emphasising the need to investigate the imagined relationship to bodies, to others and to the wider social and cultural world for an analysis of subjectification (Moore 2007: 139). In order to do so requires the exploration of fantasy, desire and unconscious motivation as “a series of different affective and evaluative dispositions and/or orientations that animate the ethical imagination, as well as resulting forms of agency, both conscious and unconscious” (Moore 2011: 23). This thesis has discussed such evaluative dispositions

213 animating ethical imagination, such as with Mildred, who despite a great openness and a genuine reflexivity, for example, evades discussing racism and prefers to not engage with situations on this focal plane. Nevertheless, her obvious sensitivity to underlying issues is evident in her physiological response to the housewarming party and her need to broach the subject the next morning, even if framed through her idiosyncratic prism. The same event also highlights how dispositions and orientations shape agency, as was the case with Anil, who taking a cue from William felt endorsed to articulate and exercise his affective disquiet about a female non-white ethnographer and an alternative thinking about Dzongkha. Thus, these fieldwork occurrences demonstrate that “affective responses have deeply sedimented personal and social histories, and while they can surprise us, they are rarely random” (Moore 2011: 199).

8.1.3 Subjectification The intersubjective nature of self-making, or subjectification, as an ongoing process explains why the self is constituted through multiple subject positions, as different contexts require different subject positions and thus a singular subject can neither exist, nor be equated with a single individual. Consequently, the process of subjectification is influenced by power and ideology, but even if they create a number of available subject positions, they do not determine how individuals will identify or engage with these positions. The engagement with these positions is strongly influenced by desire, which informs the motivations that shape these processes of identification and engagement with subject positions and this is always excessive to the determinism of discursive formations and hegemonic orders, because desire, fantasy and unconscious motivation cannot be contained completely by discourse (Moore 2007: 18). The intersection of fantasy, desire and unconscious motivation with strategy, rationalisation and emotion in the making of the self is ultimately a continual process because no one can possess complete knowledge of the self or others: “The self that emerges is imaginary, in that it is set up in representations” (Moore 2007: 18). The involvement of the unconscious has ramifications for the multiple subject positions that multiply constituted individuals take up in that it is characterised by contradictions, paradoxes and inconsistencies, which also means that an individual’s subject positions can be contradictory and conflicting (Braidotti 2002: 39- 40). Moreover, this process of subjectification opens up the possibility to infer unconscious motivations and experiences, which cannot be seen. For a self that is

214 imaginary and thus set up in representations, this imaginary provides the content and context for analysis. Delineating how an individual traverses discourses, creates and communicates personal narratives, positions herself/himself in discussions or arguments, or privileges some contexts above others, provides analytically accessible fissures to glimpse in these interactions dynamically related forms of agency, strategy and affect that through conscious, subconscious and unthought bodily practices, behaviour and evaluations inform the person’s ethical imagination constituting the complex subject.

8.2 Insertion of the non-white ethnographer In the work leading to the thesis, the insertion of the non-white ethnographer into the fieldwork site has emerged as a topic that requires specific attention, as discussed previously in Chapter 6. Being immersed in the fieldwork environment, she/he is observing its meaning-making and its development from within the totality of the everyday interactions, which in turn are inflected by existential realities of social, economical and political categorisations. It is thus pertinent to consider subjectivities and intersubjectivities, how “technologies of the self, forms of subjectification and imagined relations with others lead to novel ways of approaching social transformation” (Moore 2011: 15). Such elaboration is essential, because “[e]thnographic knowledge is heavily dependent on the presence and experience of the fieldworker” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 15), which in turn is dependent on the explication of the ethnographer’s positionality and “shifting locations” in field sites (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 38). While even a superficial perusal of the fieldwork data indicates that these encounters have the potential to provide new spaces for strategic entanglements between the two groups, that is, the Bhutanese and the service providers, there is an inherent risk if this were to be conceptualised in over-determining terms of resistance or other analytical approaches centring on the “experience, thoughts and feelings of the acting subject” (Moore 2011: 73). It would be superfluous to say such an approach is valuable and necessary, because agents always create at least some part of their world. Nevertheless, relying only on the ‘acting subject’ neglects theorising a fundamentally important aspect of intersubjectivity: the fantasy. “The mechanisms and forms through which I recognise myself and the other are not mine alone: they are always relational – that is, fantasised, social and affective. In this logic, the relation between self and other, between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, is historically specific, taking particular forms at particular times” (Moore 2011: 76).

215 These fantasies have specific “meanings of race and ethnicity [that] are constructed relationally and are located in particular social context” (Gunaratnam 2003: 12), which means that for a female non-white ethnographer encounters intersect with matrices shaped by race and gender relations. These intersections, in turn, have consequences for the responses their multiple subject positions provoke: “In a society strongly stratified by race and gender, the tables cannot be turned with an equivalent force” (Pierce 1995: 107). However, such multiplex strands of identification and positioning enable for some of these strands to be “tugged into the open or stuffed out of sight” (Narayan 1993: 673). Consequently, starting from Gramsci’s adjuration to know “thyself as a product of the historical process” (Gramsci 1971: 324), colonial imagination inheres a central role in my analysis. This should, however, not be construed as a weakness of the position, nor a disadvantage for the analysis, on the contrary, working with the “ethical imagination” (Moore 2011: 15) draws attention to the contingency of subject positions, their entanglements with discursive structures and fantasies of otherness (Moore 2011: 58).

Non-white bodies, being marked and visible instigate fantasies of otherness abundant with tropes drawn from colonial imagination that also entail a necessary distancing (Bhabha 1986). As an ethnographer with appurtenant social capital these fantasies intersect with multiple matrices with sometimes conflicting or incompatible denominations. Nevertheless, the category of ‘native’ anthropologist or non-white ethnographer is inherently unstable (Abu-Lughod 1991; Narayan 1993; Jackson Jr 2005), because consistent with “all identities these marginalities are partial” (Anderson-Levy 2010: 189). The social capital of being an ethnographer, a researcher from an academic institution, in turn enables the non-white ethnographer “to marginalize others even though we are also marginalized” (Anderson-Levy 2010: 189). However, to satisfy the conditions of recognition, postcolonial subjects have to surmount a range of often paradoxical impulses and forces operating on them (see Povinelli 2002). The inherent tensions and frictions serve as the nucleation point for the creation of particular knowledge by drawing out implicit complexities. Hence, it is pertinent to

acknowledge the conscious and unconscious processes at work in constructing the other – and their secrets – as an object of desire. The desire for the other, the desire to be the object of desire for the other, is a process at work in all circumstances, but one that finds specific valence and character in particular contexts. (Moore 2011: 58-9)

216 8.2.1 Alternative polarisations In a structural, organisational sense, the ethnographer was aligned with the service providers, rather like a visitor from an external organisation. However, such an organisational alignment in itself does not guarantee ‘freedom to operate’, as there is an ongoing evaluation, a “checking out” by service providers (Ostrander 1995: 135), that is, access to conducting research was “contingent upon being accepted as a ‘respectable’” researcher by the members of the host organisation (Twine 2005: 10). The high visibility of the non-white ethnographer, as an intersubjective presence that oscillates between its inherent social capital and colonial imagination, inscribed itself multifariously into various subject positions of participants in the research. This fluid nature, contingent on relationships of trust and a ‘currency’ able to be leveraged vis-à-vis the Bhutanese community, is clearly reflected in some of the changing and contradictory subject positions observed, for example, of Maggie. Her approach to the ethnographer from the outset comprised resistance to the research enterprise, which at times became modulated to affecting support when that could provide ‘currency’ with the community in specific contexts, while simultaneously seeking out company to lighten up after-work routines. Similarly, the oscillating subject positions provided a surface that refracts into enhanced relief the microphysics of encounters by emphasising the sublime fragmentedness of the field site. This became apparent, for example, through the delicately interleaved criticism of the resettlement experience in front of case workers, revealing resettlement ‘success’ to be a contested process. These ruptures emerging in some of the ethnographic encounters also charged the field and moved some elements to advance dynamics of exclusion towards ethnography, as has also been reported by other anthropologists researching similarly impervious social barriers and over-determining power imbalances, for example, in the study of Jamaican elites (Anderson-Levy 2010).

8.2.2 Gatekeeping These anxieties about evading ethnographic ‘scrutiny’ were most clearly obvious before substantial fieldwork commenced with a service provider organisation. A number of service provider organisations make axiomatic claims to ownership and desire to sustain their fantasy of unassailable moral superiority through the practice of gatekeeping. Under the guise of a discourse of ethics they articulate rationalisations aimed at excluding perceived external ‘auditors’, including the ethnographer. This deployment of ethics is

217 made possible through ethics functioning as a “social actor frequently enrolled to justify auditing practices, yet as frequently [...] in resistance to them” (Strathern 2000: 5; see also Fassin 2011, 2012). As a consequence of the exclusive spatiality of the ambiguous zone, service providers enjoy largely unfettered autonomy in routine interaction, enabling them to decide on access and to gatekeep research by emphasising the vulnerability of refugees, while asserting only selective rights to privacy. Despite acts of strategic subversion, counter-articulating appropriations to the high-ground of ethics by being in possession of nationally prescribed and institutionally compelled ethics clearance, these rationalities of the moral high-ground were challenging to penetrate.

8.3 Power / loss and the cusp of ethnographic authority Securing organisational backing enabled access to conduct fieldwork with the resettling Bhutanese community. However, this access remained under regular contestation and through a variety of strategies some of the informants sought ways to control the ethnographer’s fieldwork interactions through shifting alliances (Kondo 1986: 80). An ethnographer inherently occupies an awkward terrain, having one’s presence accepted yet not granted full membership, due to distance and difference, as well as temporality of presence. This was apparent, for example, in the nature of being hosted by the service provider like a ‘visitor’ from another organisation. However, for a non-white ethnographer these dynamics are additionally inflected by affective disjunctures arising from colonial imagination due to ‘incompatibilities’ between the non-white ethnographer’s social capital and the refugees’ positioning in the ambiguous zone of routine resettlement provision. The perception of an usurper not belonging to the centre was therefore easily deployed to effect circumstances in which what had previously taken the character of the ‘centre’ became transformed into a place of suspicion and hostility (Espin 1995: 174).

These challenges of fieldwork dynamics at times led to an inversion of power that persists through to the process of communicating one’s ethnographic findings, because multiple positions inhabited by each, the researcher, the subjects and the reader, all impact on ethnography. Yet the process of writing an ethnography necessitates the emphasising and explication of some aspects at the cost of others. The effects of gatekeeping and strategic positioning in the field had impact on the nature of the encounters that challenge a

218 normative approach to ethnographic authority. However, choosing the writing strategy of the vulnerable observer is not aimed at a re-authorising of the ethnographer through telling and confession; much rather, it is a form of writing that scrutinises the conditions and relations of production, be they methodological limitations or power relations of location and position (Skeggs 2004: 131). This kind of writing builds on a feminist understanding “that thought is not a matter of theory, but rather a way of being” (Braidotti 1991: 280), and consequently is about how one practices it, how one exercises the ethical imagination as a black ethnographer in relaying experiences that are constitutive to that position in society.

This thesis is written with considerations of intersubjectivity, fantasy and desire. Such mindfulness has resulted in an exposition of fieldwork encounters in a specific, yet different form, which means that a “different set of problems and predicaments arise which would never surface in response to more detached writing” (Behar 1996: 16).

The next chapter is the conclusion to this thesis, which draws together the main strands and themes, building on fieldwork interpretations and this meta-discussion chapter. The first part of the conclusion reiterates the main themes and provides synopses highlighting the main findings. The second part comprises a thesis summary, highlighting key outcomes of the research and discusses both, the limitations and future research possibilities emerging from this thesis.

219

CHAPTER 9 – CONCLUSION

220 9 Conclusion This thesis has presented interpretations of encounters and the experience in the field researching the early resettlement of Bhutanese refugees in Australia. After overcoming initial challenges with access to the community, the extended period of fieldwork took place with the support of a service provider organisation. In addition, the process of obtaining access to the field provided ample data about conducting research with refugees. The data for this thesis was collected using ethnographic methods, including participant observation and interview techniques, and comprise interviews and observations with Bhutanese refugees resettling in Australia, two long-term Australian residents of Bhutanese background, as well as staff members and volunteers of service provider organisations. The specific position of the ethnographer within the resettlement sphere brought its own set of dynamics determining the analytical trajectory recorded in this thesis. Findings have been presented in chapters 5, 6 and 7 and further elaborated through theorisation of ethnography from the interstices in a meta-discussion in Chapter 8, where the material is refracted through a more explicitly intersubjective lens.

9.1 Fieldwork findings The fieldwork data and meta-discussion have elicited how through an ontology of (un)certainty the dynamics of social interactions, relationships and networks between the Bhutanese refugees and service providers have shaped the ways in which both groups construct their relationship to Australia. Seeking to render intelligible the complex, interactive constellations of fieldwork observations, rather than to separate out predefined analytical categories, these complex dynamics are explored through three broad themes:

i. The ambiguous zone ii. The disciplining of opportunities iii. Alternate polarisations manifesting from the non-white ethnographer’s presence

To a degree, these themes recapitulate a swift and superficial categorisation as the refugees, the service providers and the ethnographer. However, relations between the groups are fluid, co-constructed and the influence they have on one another is fluid and context dependent. Therefore, the underlying energies flow between all sets of social relationships constituting these three groupings, albeit with differing degrees of influence.

221 The everyday resettlement interactions are enacted in a heterotopic space that is imbued with an autonomous ambiguity despite IHSS performance reporting requirements. However, the new HSS procedure, which replaced IHSS in late 2011 after the conclusion of fieldwork with the service provider organisation, has modified several aspects of the programme and introduced a more rigorous project management approach with new, specific reporting criteria. In this ambiguous zone of resettlement, refugees are inducted to living in Australia and inculcated to practice certain aesthetics of circulated ideologies, truncated images and come to form strategies of survival. There is a certain invisible somatic violence that manifests through contained opportunities, such as evidenced through the vignette about Wijaya in Chapter 6. Their emplacement into society could effectively be described as an accelerated apprenticeship (Fassin 2013: 7-8).

The way the non-white ethnographer was variously positioned in the field elucidated ‘race’ as a form of intersubjectivity blurring boundaries of the multiply-constituted self. The social capital inherent in a university affiliation came to embody a central role for the researcher. The Bhutanese had shown great anticipation for the research in their early and brief encounter with the ethnographer, who had visited to explain the research. Moreover, a senior and respected service provider well known in the region came forward to promote the research, which added further symbolic capital. It is in this light, I was invited to the housewarming party hosted by the Bhutanese woman.

It is in this context I was articulating an act of acknowledgement towards the Bhutanese community and the senior female service provider. A part of this acknowledgement was perceived as an external recognition and validation of her leadership and vision, and highlighted between us a shared position in the centre. It was during this exchange that the older white male service provider proceeded to unsettle the felicitation and restore his naturally assumed position at the apex. By constituting a particular identity to the ethnographer through an act of corporeal inference, he attempted to mask the ethnographer’s social capital to effect its displacement. This same corporeal inference was in turn mobilised to demonstrate a lack of knowledge that would be inherent to this social capital in order to validate the effected corporeal identity.

Simultaneously, it is possible that the non-white ethnographer through her social capital is constitutive of a mutuality of violence. The service providers are looked up to as the

222 experts and those with authoritative knowledge. The presence of the ethnographer, however, has the potential to unsettle their locus of control.

As previously argued, the insertion of the non-white ethnographer has highlighted subtle mechanics operative in the routine resettlement space; that is, practices of containment on the one hand, and on the other the Bhutanese captured these dynamics to create for themselves strategic possibilities. Therefore, to simply offer a fleeting self-reflexive gesture or considering the ethnographer in isolation, denuded of the context of field site relations, would clearly be insufficient.

9.1.1 Disciplining opportunities – Subjectification Contingent on a mythologised Australian ‘fair go’ that was articulated frequently during resettlement, the significance of relationships comes to play an integral role in the resettling experience. Fieldwork highlights how in the process of preparation for seeking employment or education the Bhutanese’ opportunities are disciplined through practices of containment. These are imbued with a lack of recognition for skill and lived experience placing great emphasis on Australian experience, creating an unattainable paradox.

This insertion into a modus of social ordering based on individual responsibility and self- government guided by liberal notions of ‘freedom’ and market rationalities have unintended consequences that are disparate ways and claims of becoming Australian. However, the extension of aid donor patronage into the resettlement environment has demonstrated certain performative expectations of the refugees by ‘donors’, which some are more adept at working with than others. Moreover, many Bhutanese express a ‘fawning humility’ (Scheper-Hughes 1992: 98) to Australia and exercise agency in creative ways to affect vulnerability and public genuflection, while creatively subverting an aesthetics inflected by an expected deference, as evident in leveraging the ethnographer’s presence to subtly interject critique. However, the relationship between the Bhutanese refugees and service providers engenders a reciprocal dependency with performative expectations that curtails the Bhutanese’ possibility to voice critical reflections and thus occludes some crucial aspects of their resettlement experience from the service providers’ gaze. There were numerous instances of this in the fieldwork. Rashmi shared her deepest hopes and aspirations of postgraduate education and subsequent career possibilities with me to the complete astonishment of the case worker

223 who had accompanied me to the interview. Afterwards she was both astonished at the audacious expectations and rather indifferent towards Rashmi’s hopes. Similarly, a lengthy performative disclaimer of criticism against service providers preceded Anil’s circumlocutious suggestion that Australians in general could be more open to people of refugee backgrounds who want to productively contribute to Australia. Accordingly, Thilin, the declared caseworker’s favourite Bhutanese, furtively voiced gentle criticism of his experience with an Australian employer and yet drew immediate reprobation for it.

The mechanics of disciplining opportunities are operationalised mainly through ‘unknowing’ and embodiment to maintain ontological consensus that sustains relationships of dominance and guidance. This limiting choices draws with strong emphasis on the mythical Australian fairness and a ‘fair-go’ egalitarianism (Kapferer 1996; Hage 1998; Stratton 1998; Hage 2002; Kapferer 2012) that would be unavailable to them in Bhutan; consequently, some expressions of individual choice are less acceptable than others. The impact of this specific form of ‘guidance’ directs the Bhutanese’ ideas, hopes and aspirations into containable opportunities, while concurrently shaping the Bhutanese refugees’ ideas of what it means to become ‘Australian’. As a consequence of the allied ‘compassionate condescension’ existential realities find expression of their past experiences curtailed and ensuing social interactions imbued with cultural and affective disjunctures. Nevertheless, a number of Bhutanese developed various strategies in order to maximise or optimise options; although, some were better at accumulating social markers of success or wealth than others, and this ability frequently correlated with lower social status within the Bhutanese community or lower levels of educational attainment. Navigating these spaces reveals an entanglement between different rationalities. These findings are corroborative of observation at a different trauma counselling organisation, as well. While the information brochures dotted throughout the place also made similar references to equality and opportunity in Australia, from the head of this local office to the receptionist, excluding but one facilitator, all staff members present at the time were first- and second-generation migrants from one European country. Therefore, the projections of Australia and their reflection in the reality of the lived experience are incongruent and on closer reflection belie the image of fairness and equality.

224 9.1.2 White mythologies and colonial imagination in the making of the ambiguous zone The self-making of service providers is tied in with a national imaginary of a progressive, “Western” nation prioritising ‘human rights’, as well as a link of shared heritage back to Europe or to Britain. These tentative linkages are deployed through a fetishising of the service providers’ whiteness and Australianness to refract an imaginary particular to a colonial-laden Europeanism. What emerges from the interactions is a specific logic of nationalist ideology, which exerts control over everyday encounters and existential realities through an embodiment of this imaginary special status between the self and an idealised image of the national spatial background (Hage 1998: 39). However, the (re)making of self of the service providers and volunteers is simultaneously co-dependent on refugees resettling in their care; thus, the governing becomes contingent on the governed. By affecting moral superiority, the service providers embed a mythologised fantasy of the nation; yet by fetishising Australian gender equality, its precarity and the affective complicity slip their attention. These dynamics are enhanced and made visible in the intimate space of the ambiguous zone of resettlement. Hence, the analysis foregrounds the linkages between personal fantasies and social imaginaries of research participants, while refracting them through social, economic and political lenses, because “fantasy, like meaning, has a history and one that is too often neglected” (Moore 2011: 61).

9.1.2.1 Fantasies, imaginaries and radical mobility The desire to transcend refugee status for many refugees is linked to an imaginary of social mobility only possible in the ‘first world’, and yet the resettling Bhutanese refugees encounter unexpected resistance in their entanglement with the host country. These existential realities of resettlement created initially bewilderment among Bhutanese refugees, because their fantasised relationship in relation to a representation of Australia and Australianness encountered matrices of a different dynamic (Moore 2011: 77). Instead of a clean break with past difficulties, the social category of refugee is harnessed into the construction of an imagined service provider self as patron and protector in the pursuit of a virtuous personhood, and thus reified in the ambiguous zone of resettlement. Here, the service providers’ claims to a bourgeoisieness effect new contradictions in the mutual constitution of difference making of an imaginary white Australia, while

225 transforming their quotidian, anonymous lives to acquire a new lease vis-à-vis the power of their role as professional benefactors. The narrativisation, enactment and performance serve to demonstrate the strong link to those in their care, and yet become a site to perform a moral superiority in their contemporary social lives. These performances also serve to orient practices towards constructing the ‘true’ imaginary nation through a “spatial- affective aspiration” (Hage 1998: 42, original emphasis). Such an imaginary concept of the nation constructs the other as an “object of spatial exclusion” that functions in conjunction with essentialisation to determine who has acquired and is able to display not only the necessary composition of cultural capital, but also the ‘right’ way of its acquisition in order to engender membership in the centre (Skeggs 2004: 19).

In this context, whereas the service providers co-opt the mobility of the Bhutanese as a rationale for the hierarchical organisation of the ambiguous zone, the ethnographer’s presence transforms the recognition of each other’s mobility into a transient surface mirroring a desired future. Beyond the incommensurate scales and facets of mobility between the Bhutanese and service providers, the ethnographer’s presence in the field mutates through a sanctioned hyper-mobility the simple binary to this hierarchy in the ambiguous zone by introducing an ambivalence that is dynamically updated. The variable positing of the ethnographer thus blurs boundaries and complicates the seemingly neat separations within the ambiguous zone, unveiling of the possibility of a critical lens to the encounter in the ambiguous zone. In the process, the ethnographer’s radical mobility sediments indelible traces into the ethnographic material.

9.1.3 A reconfiguration of the research field The primary strands of this thesis summarised above led to a culmination in efforts to curtail fieldwork, most noticeably by Maggie, the Bhutanese ‘favourite’ and the organisation’s ‘super’ case worker for the Bhutanese. This became notably evident following the housewarming party that featured in Chapter 6. William had set in motion a train of events that would culminate in the reconfiguration of the research field. The positioning of the bodies in the room reflected the hierarchies between the Bhutanese and the service providers. It is in this context, Anil strategically attempted to capture an empowerment of leadership for his community within the parameters of the ambiguous zone, in a way that would not challenge its mechanisms of control, while directing it

226 towards the non-white ethnographer William had just labelled as an ‘interloper’. The gendered nature of hierarchy within the Bhutanese community became apparent through the actions of the teenage girls whose obvious surprise and excitement about the possibility of exercising one’s agency as a female that became evident.

Subsequently, Maggie embarked on a politics of negotiating and renegotiating access to the field, leveraging ethics as a central feature of her gestures and utterances of caring towards the Bhutanese refugees, simultaneously emphasising an ostensibly self-evident and unchallengeable benevolence. In effect, this demonstrated how these representations were able to be effective, because they were not recognised as ‘symbols’, but as vital realities that consequently cannot be interrogated. However, the experience in the field revealed ruptures in the naturalised silences (Goldstein 2003: 120) and exposed the lives of the Bhutanese and the service providers as imbricated rather than neatly separated. Some Bhutanese took events as an opportunity to practice much emphasised Australian privacy ‘rights’. Deploying creative moves, which involved Maggie or volunteers, strategic hierarchies were negotiated by performing a distancing from the research. These competing negotiations created possibilities for the Bhutanese to generate an increased sense of empowerment within the ambiguous zone. A different strategy entailed the re- enactment of their ‘old’ caste-hierarchies to the service providers in attempts to project stature within the community and thus as someone who could productively mediate to further resettlement service provision objectives. This reconfiguration of the field had consequences beyond a change to relationship dynamics in the field; it also impinges on ethnographic authority in the writing of the thesis.

9.1.4 Intersubjective race and the ethical imagination While the meta-concepts power and agency cannot account for everything in social life, persuasive writing that draws inspiration from Foucault’s powerful theories while simultaneously investigating that which escapes the determinations of power can provide deeper insights than a focus on the active subject (Moore 2007: 45). Accordingly, this thesis has argued that embodiment, fantasy and desire are central factors shaping fieldwork relations, whether those directly between ethnographer and informants, or observed interactions among informants. Because the relation between self and other is set up in fantasy, the circulation of multiple identifications and positions individuals can

227 inhabit, as well as the social imaginaries and relays of power operational in these existential realities, have strong bearing on the relation to bodies and their interactions in the social world. The relational nature of subjectification requires the recognition of the self and the other to be fantasised, social and affective (Moore 2011: 76). Considering the above argument shows that subjectification, its forms of identification, fantasies and social imaginaries are necessarily historically contingent, that is the history informing these processes produces the conditions in which they take place and thus impinges differently on the possibilities for different individuals or groups (Skeggs 2004: 13). Investigating how difference is constructed in the case of this thesis’ material, what the mechanisms of practice are, and how it is inscribed and corporeally mapped constitutively evidences colonial imagination.93 This corporeal mapping is in turn linked to salvation and compassionate care (Ticktin 2011), and manifests in the hierarchically ordered ambiguous zone as compassionate condescension. This thesis has demonstrated that the alternative refractive index of the non-white ethnographer illuminates interesting articulations of social signifiers drawn from colonial imagination and thus builds on the concept of ethical imagination (Moore 2011: 15) by problematising the imagined relationships in the refugee resettlement context in Australia. Simultaneously, the interpellation of binary relations between service providers and refugees highlights undercurrents of friction in locally arising “zones of awkward engagement” (Tsing 2005: xi).

9.2 Summary In this thesis I have demonstrated the critical role of social relationships with Australian service providers and volunteers to the resettlement experience. For the Bhutanese, support from positive relations has been central to developing and nurturing a sense of self in the making of a start to independent living in Australia. However, the efficacy of such support has been inflected by two-fold tensions with the refugees’ ability to exercise the available options through adequate ‘urban skills’, as well as the tensions between settlement expectations and the existential realities of hierarchies in the ambiguous zone. Adequate urban skills is an attempt to encompass a range of aptitudes, which include the

93 I use colonial imagination to denote “the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices [...] and traces of power’s presence” (Gordon 1997: 25). For a more detailed definition, please refer to footnote 24. 228 ability to navigate life in Australia, but more importantly the preparedness and ability to perform in those limited roles available in the low-skill wage labour market. The service providers’ overall approach, framed though compassionate condescension and their expectations that the Bhutanese perform gratitude, created impediments to the Bhutanese aspirations of what to them were important factors of successful resettlement, namely opportunities for employment and education. These opportunities would make their experiences meaningful and allow them to contribute to Australian society.

The literature on migration to Australia demonstrates that the Bhutanese are a new community to arrive in Australia, which also means there is a lack of knowledge about this community and their resettlement experiences. Extant research has largely focussed on immigrants and refugees from Europe and Asian countries other than Bhutan, and has also taken a different approach in focussing on the later stages of resettlement and integration. This thesis, therefore, provides insights that are novel in two separate aspects: firstly, this is the first doctoral research on the community of Bhutanese refugees resettling in Australia; and secondly, the fieldwork conducted for this thesis accompanies refugees at very early stages of resettlement, starting from within the first week of arrival.

Key outcomes from this research are:

i. While mostly communicated in subtle or indirect means, there is a perception among resettling Bhutanese refugees who participated in fieldwork for this thesis that too frequently their resettlement needs appear to have been pre-determined by service provision and other support organisations. There appears a need for more effective consultation and liaison with the community regarding resettlement services, programmes and activities, as well as their underlying policies. ii. The high levels of autonomy of the service providers had both positive and negative effects. One apparent effect is the institution of a hierarchically structured ambiguous zone that supported an informal economy between (some) service providers and the Bhutanese with shared – yet uneven – benefits. This organisation of the ambiguous zone resulted in a limiting of choices (disciplining opportunities) and restrained the ability of voicing critical reflections on the part of the Bhutanese refugees. As a consequence, significant gaps in understanding arose between the service providers and refugees, which led to feelings of

229 alienation and disempowerment for some of the resettling Bhutanese, while others radically changed their aspirations. However, these gaps do not appear to have been captured in the IHSS monitoring requirements. Therefore, improved monitoring of resettlement94 and stronger consultation with the resettling community would likely enhance the resettlement experience. iii. The fieldwork also provided insights into how the changes to the implementation of resettlement through a competitive tender process can affect relations in the community of resettlement practitioners. The necessity to compete for tenders potentially overshadows the needs of the refugees, as was manifest in two aspects of the fieldwork. Firstly, there was a discernible pressure to move resettling refugees through the system, which in some cases did not work in favour of those receiving services, such as one female refugee seeking protection for herself and her infant from domestic violence, who despite complex case support struggled making her needs and perspectives heard with the service provider organisation. Secondly, the competition between service provider organisations manifested tangibly in the oblique challenge to a senior female member of the incumbent IHSS provider at the time by a senior male figure from a competitor service provider organisation that had been relegated to providing some IHSS services as a subcontractor rather than the tender holder. There is a risk of turning the intimate process of resettlement into a political project among service provider organisations.

9.3 Limitations and future research possibilities In addition to the themes elaborated in this thesis, there are a range of other observations that would lend themselves to interesting investigations in their own right. They have not featured more strongly in this thesis for various reasons, to name a few: there are early indicators of developments that will take time to manifest in fullness or may not manifest at all, which is at this stage difficult to predict; or there are additional forms of

94 It is noted that the Humanitarian Settlement Strategy (HSS), which is the successor to the IHSS policy, has incorporated additional and more clearly formulated monitoring requirements following the Richmond (2011) review. However, these changes had not yet been implement at the time of my fieldwork; hence, I am unable to comment on their effects. 230 theorisation, such as approaches using psychoanalysis that are beyond the scope of the thesis.

9.3.1 Gaps in the research Some of the gaps not fully explored in the research presented in this thesis are related to how the community structure of the Bhutanese is changing. Chapter 5, for example, alluded to markers of pre-eminence that are in flux, be they related to socio-economic signifiers, religious leadership, or old caste hierarchies. There is also an emergent shift in the circulation of people within the community. These changing community dynamics also receive additional impetus from a number of sources outside the community, such as local and federal government, social institutions or third-sector organisations, who provide an opportunity to build a platform for a Bhutanese multicultural Australian identity. This was evident in a NGO actively promoting and logistically supporting the formation of a Bhutanese community association. Another area not explored in great detail concerns the gendered nature of relations, both within the Bhutanese community and between the community and service providers, some of the dynamics of which were indicated in Chapter 6, for example.

9.3.2 Future research The gaps in the thesis simultaneously highlight particular areas that would lend themselves to further research. However, as this thesis is concerned with the early phase of resettlement, the long-term trajectories of the Bhutanese’ resettlement could also fruitfully be explored in future research projects. The thesis has shown that for the Bhutanese, identification with Australian society is important. They are seeking identification with Australia, which they construe as becoming fully productive members contingent on transcending refugee status. Future research on this area could explore the different forms and modalities of identification the Bhutanese have established, which may include the development and assertion of a multicultural (community) identity, the performance of caste hierarchies and their routes to employment. Among further areas of interest are the tensions already emergent in the fieldwork and the long-term manifestations of change as a result of migration to Australia. These investigations could centre on shifting gender-based identifications, as well as tensions between generations,

231 fractured not only along age-related lines, or perhaps along those, who led households in Bhutan compared to the younger generations, who spent a significant part of their lives in the camps, but also along those of cultural adaptation.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

233 10 Bibliography

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252 11 Appendix A

Map of Bhutan

Source: Wikipedia, public domain image

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bhutan_CIA_WFB_2010_map.png"

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