Displaced Sense: Displacement, Religion and Sense-making

Abstract

Whether formally categorized as refugees or not, displaced migrants experience varying degrees of vulnerability in relation to where they find themselves displaced. The internally displaced furthermore squat invisibly and outside the boundaries of the legal framework and incentive structures accorded to those classified as ‘refugee’. They are thus arguably, by and large, left to source sustaining solutions for themselves.
This article works through the theoretical prism of sense-making theory and works through the notion of crisis as a ‘cosmology episode’ (see Weick 1993). For Weick, a ‘cosmological episode’ occurs when people are suddenly and profoundly plunged into an awareness that the universe is no longer a rational and orderly system and experience themselves as being in a state of crisis. Crisis sense-making is in turn understood as a social process and a communicative phenomenon present in individuals’ interaction with their (disrupted) and sometimes violent life-world, which in the instance of the internally displaced, is also one of disorder, crisis and discontinuity.
The article probes how internally displaced persons (IDPs) in one Zimbabwe settlement cope with the materialities of their disrupted lives through their personal scaffold of religious beliefs and behaviours. Using narrative inquiry with a sample community of five women and five men in Caledonia settlement in Zimbabwe, the article sheds light on how these individuals use their religious beliefs to cohere some semblance of order out of crisis typified by the structural violence of deprivation, poverty and dislocation. Findings suggest that, in the absence of security and a known and ordered future, the internally displaced in Caledonia settlement make sense of their present reality and their precarious future within their settlement through the matrix of their beliefs, and exhibit resilience, trust and faith.

Keywords: religion, prayer, sense-making, God, displaced, resilience