Finishing this book has taken a long time. I have never felt that I was the ‘right’ person to write it and there are many things that I would have done differently had I known before (when I first began my research in 2008) what I know now. With my personal roots, relationships and responsibilities far away from the location of this study, I have often felt inadequately equipped as a researcher and writer; my narrative is limited by this social and geographic dislocation. I have also been regularly frustrated by the limitations of the academic register for telling this story. This book is not the History but a history: my invariably inadequate rendition of a complex and multi-faceted past. It is a history that could be written in a different way by somebody with different linguistic capabilities, or by somebody more deeply embedded in the locality. I have had funding and time for research, an academic training and access to historical documents – on top of an embarassment of social and economic privileges – but the local experiences of this history are understood most deeply by the people of Sada and Ilinge.
Preface
In: Survival in the 'Dumping Grounds'
Author:
Laura Evans
Laura Evans
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