ABSTRACT

All of this book is concerned with the various kinds and stages of the journeys entailed in becoming displaced, and this chapter is the first of four that explore significant moments along the way. In particular, using the lens of ‘separation’ – the first phase in Turner’s and van Gennep’s understandings of rites of passage – Chapter 2 explores an object’s becoming displaced. Separation is fundamental to making displacement what it is; it entails a cleavage of something from the milieu with and within which it is familiar. As the chapter explores through two very different collections in the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum and via some artefacts that were important in the royal court of pre-colonial Burma, separation may involve particular, formalised and physical, ritual and/or exchange processes and forces that ensure detachment from the norms of day-to-day existence. Some displaced things, such as artefacts collected specifically for a museum, left their former place because somebody expressly intended to move them to where they now find themselves; others now rest wherever they are as an apparent result of serendipity. In addition, and as an examination of Karenni frog drums illustrates, their paths may be myriad not only in length, risk and the boundaries and terrain to be crossed, but in their retellings and from different perspectives. Displacement emerges not as an immutable fissure in individual and communal histories, but as a series of powerful moments that are simultaneously potentially transformative and connectible with ongoing social experience.