“They Don’t Love Me Anymore”: A Deeper Look at Family-Related Anxiety for Nepali Bhutanese Refugees in Northeast Ohio

Abstract

Through a large-scale mixed methods study, Marnie Watson shows how resettlement policies of dispersal disrupt the ecosystems of families that define themselves beyond the nuclear unit privileged in Western perspectives. She shows how refugee-background families from Bhutan resettling to the United States face a complex set of stressors related both to the specific political and economic circumstances that led to them becoming refugees in the first place and to the experience of resettlement itself, titling them a series of fractures that such families experience. She connects this with problem drinking that Nepali Bhutanese as well as resettlement workers identify as an issue faced by many in the community. Her ethnography was conducted from 2016 to 2018 and included surveys with 200 individuals and in-depth interviewing with 100 participants, in addition to participatory methods. Drawing on practice theory and Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, she discusses the need to understand the issue of problem drinking in the context of the many fractures that families have experienced, and some refugee-background individuals’ coping mechanism as they try to make sense of shifting family structures, gender norms, and intergenerational roles.

Department(s)

Sociology, Anthropology and Gerontology

Document Type

Article

DOI

10.4324/9781003130239-11

Publication Date

1-1-2022

Journal Title

Refugee Resettlement in the United States Loss Transition and Resilience in A Post 9 11 World

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