Accumulating Place: Multiplicities of Movements and Attachments Among Palestinian Refugees From Syria

Abstract

When the Syrian Civil War led to the depopulation of the Yarmouk Palestinian Refugee Camp in Damascus, members of the camp's Palestinian refugee community suddenly found themselves facing further rounds of enforced movement. Prompted by this renewed displacement, this article explores how, following a rupture with place, refugees build attachments to new places of refuge and considers what happens when such a rupture is not a single event in the past but an ongoing and repeated process. Drawing on ethnographic research with former Yarmouk residents living in Lebanon, Jordan, Europe, and the United States, I argue that attachments to place emerge through material and immaterial accumulations that arise amid refugees' necessary daily practices of dwelling—a process I term accumulating place. That is, the need to get by in new places requires the accumulation of identity documents, permits, apartments, furnishings, languages, social ties, and beyond. It is through these varied accumulations that attachments to new places of refuge emerge. In exploring the experiences of Yarmouk's former residents, I situate these refugees' contemporary accumulations within the broader history of Palestinian displacement, demonstrating that, for iteratively displaced refugees, attachments to place include but expand beyond the binary of homeland and host country.