Living displacement: The loss and making of place in Colombia (New Ethnographies)

By: Mateja Celestina

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Synopsis: Focusing on two cases of resettlement in rural Cundinamarca, Colombia, this book examines how displaced campesinos make sense of their displacement and how displacement shapes their everyday lives. It is based on a ten-month fieldwork employing ethnographic methods working, living and sharing with the displaced and their host. The book calls for a longer time-frame analysis of the phenomenon of displacement, which considers people’s lives both pre- and post- physical relocation. It examines how violence and terror altered people’s sense of place and set off displacement process before they actually moved. It analyses the challenges the displaced are facing in their subsequent place-making endeavours, including the negotiation of social relations, consequences of categorization, engagement with the physical land, and memories of violence to challenge the notion that displacement starts with uprooting and terminates with resettlement or return.