Episode 61 - Sari Nauman

What Early Modern History Can Offer Refugee Studies

Theme: Migration & Displacement

Published: 29 November 2024

Summary
This SCAS Talks episode features Sari Nauman, Associate Professor of History, discussing her research on refugees and internally displaced persons in early modern Europe. She challenges the rigid definitions of "refugee," advocating for a more nuanced understanding that acknowledges the fluidity of identity and the historical context. Her research analyzes petitions written by Baltic refugees during the Great Northern War, revealing how they self-identified and how authorities perceived them. Sari Nauman emphasizes the need for flexible concepts that adapt to changing circumstances and considers the implications of her work for contemporary discussions on displacement and migration. The episode highlights the benefits of interdisciplinary approaches in understanding complex historical phenomena.

Keywords
Migration, displacement, internally displaced persons, early modern history, historical concepts

Suggested Link/s
SCAS page: Sari Nauman
Personal website: https://www.gu.se/en/about/find-staff/sarinauman External link, opens in new window.

Transcript of the Episode

Sari Nauman 00:09
If we can come closer to an answer and not perhaps define the refugee better, I'm not sure that there is a better definition. I'm sure that there are quite a lot of definitions, actually, and that we should be open to using different definitions in different settings. And also let those definitions, you know, bleed into each other and affect each other. If we can do that, I think that history can also show us, can help us understand what is going on today and also see that what is going on today is only just our perspective. Something else will happen in 10 years, in 20 years or 100 years, and we need to be open and use concepts that are open to those changes.

Natalie von der Lehr 00:50
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode I talk to sari Nauman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Gothenburg. Sorry Nauman is a Pro Futura Scientia fellow, and is in residence at SCAS during this academic year, 2024/2025. Her research explores concepts such as trust, security and hospitality, to understand how communities and individual manage situation of intense uncertainty. As a Pro Futura Scientia fellow, she will critically assess available analytical frameworks for translating early modern refugeedom into present day understanding in her project "Outsiders within - internally displaced persons in early modern Europe". And this is the first episode in our theme "Migration and Displacement". Very welcome to SCAS Talks and the studio, Sari.

Sari Nauman 01:48
Thank you. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:51
Nice to have you here. Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Sari Nauman 01:55
Absolutely. Well, I'm a historian at trade, but I come from a broad background, interdisciplinary background. So I've been studying political science, I've been studying psychology, sociology, anthropology, a lot of different disciplines, and I think that that defines me as a scholar, and that's also how I find my concepts. I read literature very broadly, as you mentioned, I focus on uncertainty, and that's really a topic that makes me find new research topics easily. I can say that I have too many ideas.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:26
And there's a lot of uncertainty in the world.

Sari Nauman 02:28
There is a lot of uncertainty, unfortunately, perhaps, but it's also, I think - uncertainty is also a motive for change. It's also something that makes us act. So there's also something good in that sentiment.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:39
What is your research about?

Sari Nauman 02:41
The current research project is about refugees and internally displaced persons in early modernity, right? So, I look at a main case study focusing on refugees within the Baltics, during the Great Northern war, that'searly 18th century. And a lot of people were on the move across the Baltics due to Russian armies conquering Swedish Baltic possessions. That is Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and Karelia, and also Finland. So I look at these movements and see how people positioned themselves during them. What did they term themselves, how did they think about themselves, what they were doing, what they were experiencing, and how were they received by Swedish authorities, and how did Swedish authorities then also think about why they received them. Were they doing that because it was morally right? Were they doing it because they were obliged to, or was it something, something else?

Natalie von der Lehr 03:32
And how come you got into this topic? To start with?

Sari Nauman 03:35
Well, I started thinking about the idea when I was finishing my PhD, which was about the use of political oaths in the Swedish Empire during early modernity. And I felt that, well, this was during 2015/2016 and it was exactly at the same time as the crisis in Syria happened, and people were migrating and fleeing across the world, right? And a lot of these refugees came to Sweden, I was thinking about, how can history play a part in this? What is history in these refugee movements? Because Sweden was also, and I think many countries were the same, treating this as if it was a one time happening, right? This has never happened before. We have to solve the situation once, and then we're done with it. So it was very no history less how they viewed the situation. And I was thinking that I've heard about these refugees in Sweden during the early 18th century. What about them? This was, of course, not the first time Sweden received refugees. So I was wanting to see, what are the contingencies, what are the iterations? How do these perceptions of refugees change over time and due to political circumstances? So that's what got me into it. But when I then started presenting this project at different conferences, different seminars, I always got the same question, right? So I was, I was talking about these refugees and how they came from Latvia or Estonia to Sweden, and I was talking about the Swedish empire. But then, always someone in the audience had their hand up and asked, well, are they then really refugees, because they were moving within an empire? And that question has struck me always as at the same time very simple, but at the same time very, very complex, because we don't actually know what we talk about when we talk about refugees and history, it is something completely different, because the world was completely different, right? States were different. There were many types of states, not just, you know, the nation state that we tend to think about today. So I was wanting to see, okay, how does a change in context, change how we see refugees, how we conceptualize them? That was basically, you know, what started the project,

Natalie von der Lehr 05:38
And you have been doing this ever since.

Sari Nauman 05:41
Which is, I mean, quite a while now, but I've started only at the case study of the Swedish refugees then, or moving in within the Swedish empire. So I've done some localized studies, see how they were received in Stockholm, how they were received here in Uppsala, where we are right now, and also how the king and theauthorities, how they talked about receiving them, how they articulated their responsibilities towards these people. So what I'm doing for this project is actually situating that case study within a broader perspective, looking at how other refugees across the world also situated themselves, how they use this noun "refugee", and what it meant to them. And how can we also relate the noun "refugee" to other nouns that were used presently during this period. So, for example, "stranger" and "exile". And I'm also interested in taking the concept of internally displaced persons, or IDPs, as they are usually called, can we use that concept analytically in history? It is not something that they themselves use, of course, in the source material, it is something that we could place as an aspect to just to understand them better. Would that actually be a more correct term for us to use than refugee? And if so, why and what does that entail for how we understand them and their plights?

Natalie von der Lehr 06:55
You already mentioned the word concepts, so I mean, you're looking through an historical lens at refugees and internal displacement, even though maybe it wasn't called that at the time. So what are your thoughts on that - is there, like a definition or you mentioned concepts - how should we think about this terms and this phenomenon?

Sari Nauman 07:15
That is a very complex question, and also it is an interdisciplinary question, a transdisciplinary question, because today, when we talk about the concept of refugee, we tend to look at the UN definition, the United Nations definition in 1951 which is someone who flees due to acute danger and persecution, but also moves across country borders. And of course, country borders is a complex concept for the early modernity, because borders were somewhat, you know, in flux for the first but also they were not necessarily defined asin, you know, the outer reach of an empire. An empire also had a lot of borders within them, and these different regions that those borders created, they had different jurisdictions, different languages and different cultures in many ways. So the search for what a refugee is also led me to a search for what territory is and what sovereignty is and what borders are. How can we understand all these concepts and how they intermingle, how the how they react towards each other in another setting? And I think, I think if we can come closer to an answer and not perhaps define the refugee better, I'm not sure that there is a better definition. I'm sure that there are quite a lot of definitions, actually, and that we should be open to using different definitions in different settings, and also let those definitions, you know, bleed into each other and affect each other. If we can do that, I think that history can also show us, can help us understand what is going on today and also see that what is going on today is only just our perspective. Something else will happen in 10 years, in 20 years or 100 years, and we need to be open and use concepts that are open to those changes.

Natalie von der Lehr 08:52
And then maybe we can act in a better way when the next refugee crisis comes.

Sari Nauman 08:57
I think so. I mean, even though better is always a hard word to use in the settings right , because what is better now might not be the best way to react in 20 years. So I think that this openness and the flexibility that we need that should also be incorporated into the concepts we should use, vaguer concepts, or more, you know, less defined concepts. I think that would help us.

Natalie von der Lehr 09:18
So maybe react in a different way would be a better.

Sari Nauman 09:21
Different way, yes exactly, or more apt to the circumstances or something like that, yeah.

Natalie von der Lehr 09:27
But let's go back to your research then. Do you have any examples for us? So our listeners get, like, a taste of what you're looking at, or who you're looking at, what kind of persons?

Sari Nauman 09:35
Absolutely. One of our main source materials is petitions written by these refugees, and they will continue tocall them refugees, because that's also what they call themselves during this period. So they wrote petitions to various authorities, asking for help. And you know, all matters, some of them asked for money, for food or some place to live. Some of them asked for work. Some of them had tips to the king on how he should move his armies and stuff like that. But, but most of them were asking for help in various ways, and two of those refugees, which really has caught my eye were Helena Jakobsdotter and Elizabeth Nilsdotter. So they came from Livonia, and then they had to flee when Russian armies conquered Livonia. And they fled first to Estonia, stopping in Reval and they're getting to meet the Swedish authorities there, who wrote them a letter saying that they could pass to Sweden. And this was in 1708, so they went then from Reval to Stockholm, where they arrived, and then wrote another petition to the king, or the royal majesty. And the thing that caught my eye with these refugees were partly because they have this beautiful language in their petitions. They really explain what they've been through and how their flight, their arduous flight, and then the various, you know, things that happened to them during this flight, which were really horrible, right? And they also, you can see in their letters, that they are very much destitute. They have no money. They have no friends. The daughter is blind, so she cannot work, and the mother, she's 70 years old, so she's also too old for work. 70 years old during early 1800s of course, is quite a lot. So they're very, you know, they're really poor refugees. And they also state that themselves, we are poor refugees. We are destitute strangers, they call themselves. But the thing is also then that they come to Sweden. And they were two of about 30,000 people who came to Sweden during this time, during about a decade, but they spoke Swedish, and they also had very Swedish sounding names. I mean, if you change the matrinymikons that they have to patronymikons, they could easily be names today as well. So they are one of the cases. They are both refugees and they are internally displaced persons. They seem to be both. They are refugees because they felt foreign. They didn't recognize themselves in Sweden. They knew no one. They didn't actually even know how the system worked, because Livonia had a different judiciary system. They were not even represented in the Swedish parliament. Of course, women were not anyway, but still, you see what I mean. So they were very much refugees, but they were also internally displaced persons, and they came here because of that position. The king had urged all his subjects in these territories to flee. But maybe the most interesting thing about them is that they are actually also the very first source we have of the word refugee in the Swedish language, which is "flykting". So as far as we know, they are the ones who used it first. It's not presented as a new concept in the petitions. So it was probably in use, you know, orally before that, but in written sources, it's the first very occasion, so 1708. And that also signals something to me, that the refugee as a position, as something that identified a person, that happened during this period. It has not been there in Sweden before. You could flee, of course, but then you fled, and after you had fled, you had fled. But refugee was something that you became and that you stayed. You were a refugee even in Swede., I have some some petitions written 10, 20 years after the war, and they still call themselves refugees. So it very much became something that they identified themselves with. And that I think speaks also to today's situation. I mean, there's very much discussion about who is a refugee and when is a person, when does a person become a refugee? But there's not so much discussion about when does people cease to be refugees, and how can we help them with that transition? So there's a lot to go into. I mean, from these two women.

Natalie von der Lehr 13:24
That's very interesting. And especially this, also that you get an actual term, or that you have the source for the actual term.

Sari Nauman 13:32
Yeah but I think it's, I mean, it has to signal something important. And we have, I mean, traces in Europe of this term refugee. It surfaces the first time during the late 1500s, and that's when Catholics flee from the Netherlands. And then during the 17th century, we see the term used again and again, frequently more towards the end, we see it used for religious refugees crossing various borders. I mean both within empires and beyond empires, and within Europe and beyond Europe. So we see this term used, but it's very much locked to the religious refugees. And so far, what I've found is that these refugees moving within the Baltic countries, I mean, they were not really fitting into that picture. So they were taking a concept that was usedin the German countries, for example, like "Flüchtling", they were taking that concept, translating it into Swedish and but signaling something different. So they wanted to carry connotations, I guess, right? The religious refugees were well received in many countries. They were also seen as people who had networks, who could work, had ambitions, right? They wanted something better, and they could bring a lot to the government, to the authorities who received them. And the Baltic and Finnish refugees also needed those connotations to be able to be well received. So they took this term and they used them for themselves and then so I think they also, they sort of changed the term so that we can see here how the term moves across history and what happens to it. They fill it with different connotations, right? All of a sudden, it's no longer just religious refugees who are refugees. Refugees can signal simply a person who flees persecution or war, and that's more what we see today, right? Today, we see refugee as someone who flees war. Mostly, that's what we tend to think of when we think of refugees.

Natalie von der Lehr 15:16
And also, you said that these religious refugees were seen as something positive, people who wanted to work, people who wanted to create a better life for themselves and so on. But nowadays, there's also a negative association to the term refugee. When, when does that start to happen? Or can you see some sort of transition there, or the difference in your material?

Sari Nauman 15:37
I think it's too early for me to say definitely when that changes and why. We start to see during the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s there's a slow shift towards refugees, no longer being a particular kind of person, a particular kind of individual, but someone who, instead, is part of a larger collective, not necessarily bound to a specific situation or specific context. But they are, you know, compared to each other in another way. We have examples from the Swedish parliament from the late 18th century, when they talk about perhaps receiving refugees during that period, and they were looking back at the Huguenots, and because Sweden did not receive many Huguenots. The Huguenots, they mostly fled from France to the whole Roman Empire to the British Empire or the Netherlands. Sweden didn't receive many, and they were regretting that in the 18th century, because they felt that okay, those who received the Huguenots, they really gained because the Huguenots, they were connected. They had trade networks, and they knew how to narrate their flight. So we start to see how different kinds of refugees are compared to other kinds of refugees, and how it's beginning to become this bigger concept that people can use more freely. Think that is something that I can see, but perhaps not yet. What you were asking about, no.

Natalie von der Lehr 16:52
So you mentioned how people start to identify themselves as refugees. How is the connection to identity? Do you see anything?

Sari Nauman 17:01
Identity is one of those concepts that I struggle with, because history is often connected to identity and to identity politics, right? The mis-use of history. We can see it everywhere, in newspapers and the media, but also by politicians. So history is used for identity politics. But I think that history's true purpose. If you want to say true in this sentence, but perhaps you do, history's true purpose would be not to form identities, but to disrupt them. I think that's what history really is about. It's about telling us that what we think is has happened has not really happened as we think it has. And that is the case for refugees, for example. Their history is very much able to disrupt our own senses of selves. For example, when I've talked to scholars, it becomes very much obvious that almost all cultures around the world have a history of being refugees. We tend to look at refugees as the others in the West, right? We see them as coming to us, but we were also refugees once, and who knows, maybe we will be refugees again, so to de-center the situation around "the others", and instead acknowledge that refugees is a temporary position that anyone can be in, and it's something that will most likely happen to any culture across the world sometime, if we'll see that as a temporary thing, refugeedom, rather than something that is absolute and forever placed by the others, thenwe can also start, you know, to disrupt the histories that we have tended to think about and write new ones perhaps.

Natalie von der Lehr 18:33
We're talking already a lot about connections to our times. Is there anything more where you can see potential implications of your research for the discussion around the internal displacements happening in our times right now?

Sari Nauman 18:48
Yeah, I think one of the main issues that I've come across is that many people today, scholars today of internally displaced persons, also have a problem with the concept. Because internal displacement, the difference should be, then that refugees flee across borders, whereas internally displaced persons stay within borders. But that is not a very clear cut definition, which one realizes when we look at, for example, Israel and Palestine, where is actually the border, and when is one a refugee, when is one an internal displaced person? And who gets to decide what is what? And we have also many peoples who, you know, live within one nation state, but don't really belong to that nation state, feel that they are outside of it, or otherwise that nation state defines them as outsiders. So we have a lot of peoples today across the world that are very much between these definitions, and therefore between health, they can't really reach any organization. And I think that what history can teach us then would be that these concepts maybe are not mutually exclusive. Maybe there are actually, there should be borderline cases which belong to both of them, both of the concepts, depending on how you look at them and depending on your perspective and what you want to achieve with the definitions. And then we go back to what I what I said in the beginning, that these definitions, we tend to think of them as definite and, you know, exact, but they're very much not. There are so many border cases, and there's so many, so many situations where we would be better served with vaguer concepts.

Natalie von der Lehr 20:28
You mentioned in the beginning, your project is interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? For example, what other disciplines do you need in your research and so on, and what else is coming in there so you are able to solve the puzzle.

Sari Nauman 20:43
Well, first of all, I mean, forced migration studies is a very cross disciplinary field. You can draw from almost, you know, any field, at least in the humanities and the social sciences, whatever rocks your boat, basically. But for me personally, I'm clearly a historian by trade, because I'm drawn to the historical periods, I'm intrigued by situations in which I feel very foreign, which I do in history, right? If I look at the 18th century, I feel that I can sort of understand them, but not quite, and that that gets me going. So I would like to, you know, see if I if I can explain what happens better to myself and to others, right? But I need also refugee studies today. They do amazing work conceptually. Historians are not so good at going into these concepts.We really need to learn from refugee scholars today and how to problematize them. How to, you know, make these concepts work for us instead of the reverse. So I learn from them, but I am also a political scientist in my background, so, so I'm also very much looking at, how are the authorities reacting towards this? How is the interaction between authorities and subjects, for my periods, or those citizens today, or non citizens, perhaps, or paperless migrants. So what is the reaction towards them? What is the interrelation between them? And I also look at sociology and anthropology to understand, I mean, what is identity, what is belonging? How can we visualize that and conceptualize it for an earlier period? And I should finally mention also translation studies, which I've just recently gotten into, because I feel sometimes that what we are doing as historians is we're actually translating. We're translating one context for another. We're translating one language for another, and try to make people today understand what they were saying earlier, right? So there is something to translation studies that really, to me, explains better what an historian does than many other disciplines, if that makes sense.

Natalie von der Lehr 22:41
So talking about interdisciplinarity, that of course brings us to SCAS, which is an inter- and multidisciplinary environment, and you're here right now in residence. What are your experience so far of this environment?

Sari Nauman 22:53
Well, so far it's been overwhelmingly positive. The setting is one thing, it's a beautiful setting. And we're alsogetting, I mean, we get so much for free from those who work here. They provide us with spaces to workand everything that we need. But the main thing is the fellows that are drawn here because they come fromall over the world. They come from all different disciplines, and have so much in common still. And I've talked to Christina Garsten about this. If there's a thought, when they are, you know, selecting the fellows, if they're actually selected to fit each other. And there's not, there's just, you know, we find these connections due to curiosity. I think so when you are in this environment, you feed that curiosity, which is really excellent. And I think also, we have, you know, seminars, and we have discussions and writing groups, and that also, it sort of forces us to interact and to learn from each other, not just when we talk to each other, but also learning from each other's writings, which is really helpful. And I'm, you know, one month in, and I I've really learned so much.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:53
You also, as I presented in the beginning, you're a Pro Futura Scientia fellow. What does that mean for your career as a researcher?

Sari Nauman 24:01
Well, first of all, I think it brings me the security - we were talking about how I'm studying uncertainty and unsecurity - but this brings me the security to know that I can actually go into this topic, even though it's, you know, explorative to say the least. I'm not sure what I will find. I'm not sure what my deliverables would be. So many funding agents would hesitate to fund this project, but as a Pro Futura fellow I, I get to really go into it and be explorative and be curious and also presented to these various disciplines so so that we can understand each other. So how do, for example, anthropologists feel about my portrayal of these individuals fleeing across the Baltics as internally displaced persons and refugees simultaneously. They are belonging to the Swedish Empire, but still not belonging and how do I need to conceptualize these phenomena for me and others to understand what is actually going on? That's the most important thing. I think it also, I mean, it's really something that will allow me to to grow as a scholar, I would think. So it's partly the network, but it's mostly the time and the ability to, you know, focus on a widely explorative topic for quite some time.

Natalie von der Lehr 25:18
Thank you for joining me here in the studio and our listeners of course.

Sari Nauman 25:19
Thank you. I'm very glad to have been there to talk to you, Natalie.

Natalie von der Lehr 25:21
Thank you. And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, I have talked to Sari Nauman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Gothenburg. Sari Nauman is a Pro Futura Scientia fellow, and is in residence at SCAS during this academic year, 2024/2025. We have talked about internally displaced persons in early modern history and the need for more vague concepts to explore internal displacement and migration through the lens of history. And this was the first episode in our theme "Migration and Displacement". SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the collegium. We are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we are very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on podbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Sari Nauman once again for talking to me, and thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai