Newswise — When civil war broke out in the West African country of Sierra Leone in 1991, it sent thousands of Sierra Leoneans fleeing to peace and asylum abroad. Meanwhile, thousands more who had come to the United States in previous years found themselves unable to return to their families and culture in Sierra Leone.
A book by University of Arkansas anthropologist JoAnn D'Alisera explores how the displaced people sought and found their identity and a sense of community in their adopted land.
"An Imagined Geography," published in March by the University of Pennsylvania Press, challenges the long-held anthropological paradigm that communities are bound and defined by geography.
D'Alisera was studying the Susu people and Islam in northwest Sierra Leone when the civil war broke out. Danger forced her to depart and to rethink her field of research.
When she returned to the States, D'Alisera began studying Sierra Leonean Muslims who had come to the United States in previous years. She saw three separate waves of immigration by the Sierra Leoneans. The first wave was after 1965, when immigration law changed from a country-by-country quota to an overall annual quota of 170,000 immigrants. Many Sierra Leoneans came to the United States for education and then returned home to help build their nation, which had just become independent in 1961.
By the 1970s, Sierra Leone had become one of the poorest nations in the world. This led to a second wave of immigration, this time of economic refugees. They came to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s to make money to survive and then return home.
The 1990s brought the civil war and a new wave of civil war refugees fleeing for their safety. As the civil war escalated, travel between Sierra Leone and the United States became more difficult and was impossible at the height of the war in the mid-1990s. Many of the Sierra Leoneans who had entered the United States in the first two waves found themselves stuck there.
"These people went from being transnational to being in exile, and then back to being transnational (after the war ended)," D'Alisera said. "They were profoundly touched by the war, because they were away from their families and their culture."
Over the years, the Sierra Leoneans had moved into cities all over the United States, particularly on the East Coast. D'Alisera focused on those in the greater Washington, D.C., area. Her book shows how the immigrants maintained an intense sense of community through weddings, rituals and travel, even while they were spread throughout the United States and the world and could not return to their homeland.
"Communities don't have to be bound geographically," she said.
D'Alisera examined the Sierra Leoneans' ties to their homeland and how the people interacted with a diverse, multicultural, increasingly global Muslim community that also was seeking its own identity. She found that Sierra Leonean Muslim communities in the United States were primarily virtual communities, transcending geographic boundaries with the help of phone calls and the Internet. They were tied to each other by a similar sense of intense homesickness for a nation they couldn't return to.
The Sierra Leonean Muslims found an intense sense of community with the other Sierra Leonean Muslims living miles away in other parts of the United States. Their ties to each other and their homeland brought them together in ways that might not have occurred in their own country.
"Some of them had been here for 25 or 30 years and still talked about going home, and some had given up hope that they would ever return," D'Alisera said. "But they all longed for home."
D'Alisera observed that the need for Sierra Leonean Muslims to affiliate in their adopted country with other Sierra Leonean Muslims manifests itself in their religious practices as well as how they live their daily lives.
"It impacts their lives in how they identify themselves " the kinds of foods they cook, the way they dress, how they raise their children," D'Alisera said.
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