The Refugee Body: Reconstructing the Body in the Context of Extreme Social Change

The sociology of the body has tended to look at the "glamorized body", whether in sport, fashion or popular cultural activities such as body building. Missing from these studies is a concern with the suffering body in the context of drastic and unchosen social change and displacement, and how individuals who experience such traumatic changes re-imagine and re-create their body images. This paper looks at one such case: the refugee body. Two principle issues are raised. On the one hand the experience of the body in situations of deprivation, crowding, forced contact with strangers, mixing of religions, boredom, and often hunger and physical insecurity. On the other, strategies of reconstruction of the body image in these conditions and/or when undergoing resettlement, being "stuck" indefinately in camps, or whenattempting to create new forms of community in another country or upon repatriation: bodies in fact seeking for meaning and new identities in radically transformed or "spoilt" social contexts.  The paper is both ethnographic and has practical implications for post-trauma and post-conflict situations by bringing to light forms of the suffering body that rarely appear in the sociological literature, but which have major intersections with issues such as recovery from real physical hard (including torture)and loss of home, and for issues rarely touched on in refugee studies such as sexuality and the ageing body in displacement situations. The paper will in theoretical terms bring together aspects of the sociology of the body, medical sociology and the sociology of development i a new configuration.