The taste of freedom: commensality, liminality, and return amongst Afghan transnational migrants in the UK and Pakistan

In: The journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Band 20, Heft 3, S. 466-485

Abstract

This study follows UK Afghan migrants on a return visit to Northwest Pakistan. Combining theorizations of mobility, liminality, and commensality, it takes the picnic trip (chakar) as a little‐explored cultural lens through which to analyse symbolic formations of freedom, the shaping of Pakhtun transnational labour, and social hierarchies constituted through migration and return. As potent imaginary sites of remembering and forgetting, chakar map destinations left and not‐yet arrived at, routes of flight and return, and the burden of multi‐levelled constellations of political and economic insecurity on refugees living between the UK and Pakistan. The article argues that chakar are at once therapeutic and reproductive of ways in which personal and systemic realities combine features of hierarchy, exploitation, and patriarchy. They sustain participants in a tension between desires to preserve the hierarchies they conceal, and desires for more freedom. These contradictory experiences are usefully analysed through the emblematic arc of the 'round trip'.