A reminder of the upcoming ANTH colloquium, presented by Sandra Evers, 11:30 – 13:00 ANSO 205
Longing and Belonging in Real Time: How Chagossian Children in Mauritius See Themselves and the Chagos Islands
The original inhabitants of the Chagos islands in the Western Indian Ocean were deported from their archipelago to the Seychelles and Mauritius during the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for a U.S. military base. This paper is based on a study of a group of those Chagossians who settled in the poorer quarters of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. The research focussed on Chagossian children enrolled in the final years of primary school and discusses the impact of Mauritian education policies and practices on these pupils. The central query traces how gendered processes of marginalisation take shape in primary schools under the influence of a broader stereotype held by Mauritians that Chagossians are destined for a life in the margins of their society. Within this context, the challenges faced by Chagossian girls are discussed through their agency, interdependencies, coping strategies. This analysis is intertwined with their views on the historical fate of the Chagossians, their understandings of family history and imagined life in Chagos.
Sandra J.T.M. Evers is associate professor and senior researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, VU University Amsterdam. She specialises in South West Indian Ocean studies, with a particular focus on Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles. Dr Evers’ principal areas of research cover migration, slavery, memory and cognition, identity construction, frontier societies within the context of globalisation, natural resource management, poverty and sustainable development.