Page - 139 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Peter Burke | Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings 139 And so, people who have been living sixty years on a street will remember when it was all Eng- lish speakers, and suddenly they see that they live in a foreign country, the foreign country has arrived and surrounds them. Refugee camps of enormous size exist in Lebanon and Turkey, similar in size to the ones in Africa, along the Chad-Sudan border, that we tend to forget. Is packing refugees together into camps a rather new phenomenon? I haven’t indeed come across anything like that from before the twentieth century. I don’t think governments felt they had had any responsibility for who came into the country, in an age when people didn’t need passports. So, the newcomers were free, but then of course nobody was going to help them and they had to make a new life on their own. The first government intervention I know is when in the United States it was decided they would look at everybody on Ellis Island2 before they let them through. There is nothing like that here in the UK. Like so many things passports were thought of as being temporary but became permanent. The term “displaced” persons was invented shortly after 19333 and became commonly used shortly after 1945. Previous waves of “migrants” were not called that. For centuries refugees have thought that their situation was just temporary, in that sense they are in denial. After a few years they realise that they do not have much chance of going back, but still they do not like being called “refugees”. Some say, “I am not a refugee, I am an exile”, some say, “I am not an exile, I am an emigrant”. Was this terminology imposed by the host nations? Yes, in more recent times. The term “refugee” was coined in the late seventeenth century in English and French, by the people themselves, because they were taking refuge. But now, it is true, it is official organisations that create the vocabulary. However, within the group there can be differences. There was a rather good television series about Asians in Britain, made by an Asian director.4 He staged a conflict between generations in which the father says “we’re Pakistanis”, and the sons say “we’re not Pakistanis, we’re British, we were born here”. So he feels one thing and they feel the other inside the same family, and they use a different vocabulary because of this. We were talking about scales as a matter of perception and representation of migratory movements. Compared to the overall forced mobility in the Near East and Central Africa, but a small percentage makes it to Western Europe. Not a few “experts” try to appease anxious citizens by saying that only the best would get trough to us. 2 Ellis Island NJ in function 1892-1954; after 1924 a detention and deportation processing station. 3 Although the term is ascribed to E. Kulischer in 1943, a List of Displaced German Scholars was published in Lon- don in 1936 already. 4 Goodness Gracious Me, on BBC Two, 1998 to 2001.