Waiting Games: Taming Chance among Afghans in Greece

Sarah Bittel and Alessandro Monsutti

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2022, vol. 24, issue 3, 460-478

Abstract: This paper offers a contribution to the understanding of migration beyond its spatial dimension to include the multiple temporalities that are entailed. We rely on empirical material collected among young Afghan men in Greece to explore how they conceptualize and make sense of waiting in their own terms by proposing an ethnographic depiction of card and online games. We argue that card and online games are a way for our interlocutors to express some level of agency. With their play, they create and reinforce social ties, respectively, creating and reinforcing a support network that persists over time and beyond geographical dispersion. Therefore, they transform waiting into an experience through which they may assert their personal autonomy and group belonging and reinvest meaning into their everyday life. They eventually develop some ability to manage the uncertainty that dominates their lives, present and future.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/19448953.2021.2015660

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