Waiting For Elsewhere: Place, Temporality And Myanmar Migrants In Thailand

Abstract

The central argument of this dissertation upholds that the experience of time cannot be understood independently of the experience of place, in other words, that the experience of time is inextricable from the experience of place. I argue that migrants experience Thailand foremost as a non-place. The difficulty they have in molding place according to their own wishes, results in an increased desire to formulate flexible orientations in and towards time. Migrants increasingly live oriented towards the future and the present becomes a tool for envisioning and working towards the life-to-be. The future, however, is not only a temporal condition. Embedded in the waiting process is the realization that the future will only fulfill its promise if it is going to be lived elsewhere. The return to a place with room for personal histories, meaningful identity-formation processes and lasting relations is necessarily a move through time and space.