China Sajadian (Vassar College), “Debts of Displacement: The Paradoxes of Patronage in a Syrian Refugee Farmworker Camp” (Agrarian Studies Colloquium)

China Sajadian, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College, will present the next Agrarian Studies paper of the Spring 2025 semester. For these seminars, participants send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium. Meetings are held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101, on Fridays 11am–1pm Eastern. Please contact agrarian.studies@yale.edu to receive the meeting information and the password to download the paper from the Agrarian Studies website.

 

Bridging migration studies, agrarian studies, and economic anthropology, China Sajadian’s research broadly examines links between histories of displacement and contemporary conflicts over land and labor in the Middle East. Her current book project, Debts of Displacement, is based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian and Lebanese agriculturalists at the Lebanese-Syrian border. In contrast to the conventional idea of refugee exile as one linked to an originary event of traumatic uprooting by war or disaster, Debts of Displacement argues that Syrian farmworkers’ displacement is part of a much longer history of how debt configures agrarian labor mobility: a multi-generational and ongoing predicament rooted in uneven agrarian development, crises of household provisioning, and gendered labor obligations on both sides of the border. By examining the distinctly agrarian conditions of Syrian farmworkers’ displacement from a feminist perspective, her research challenges the distinction between “involuntary” refugees and “voluntary” labor migrants, as well as the idea of a refugee crisis itself.