The Asylum Center as “Just Another Local Institution”: Co-residency and the Everyday Practice of Neighborliness Among Asylum Seekers and Locals in the Danish Town of Jelling

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskriftTidsskriftartikelfagfællebedømt

  • Birgitte Romme Larsen
This article investigates everyday practices of co-residency and ‘institutional neighbourliness’ amongst asylum seekers and local inhabitants in the small Danish town of Jelling. Where asylum centres in Denmark are sometimes faced with local opposition and are often isolated from nearby settlements, the centre in Jelling provides a different local migratory scenario. Being Denmark’s oldest asylum centre, it has for 25 years been located in the centre of town, where asylum seekers and local inhabitants share residential and institutional public space. This unique local circumstance invites an ethnographic exploration of how over time and outside of an urban, cosmopolitan setting processes of multiethnic co-residency are shaped, interacted, and narrated, through everyday physical meetings in public space. The article shows how local cultural history proves paramount for understanding the present-day migratory encounter and outcome in Jelling in its complexity, including the mundane neighbourly routines and pragmatic workings through which the institutions of ‘the local community’ and ‘the asylum centre’ have spatially and socially merged. Today the asylum centre has become “just another local institution”. The article thus argues that it is necessary to understand the ways in which situated migratory encounters tie in with pre-existing local self-understandings and modes of pragmatism, outside of dominant national discursive positions such as humanitarianism or xenophobia.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftJEECA Journal for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis
Vol/bind JEECA Supplement
Udgave nummer1
Sider (fra-til)73-91
Antal sider19
ISSN2511-2473
StatusUdgivet - 2019

ID: 188969118