Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine, by Catherine Besteman

Abstract

Somali Studies is very fortunate to have been blessed with a cultural anthropologist of the calibre of Catherine Besteman. A keen cultural anthropologist with one eye to explore and the other to examine a complicated case at hand without losing one to the other, Besteman is one of the very few nuanced non-Somali scholars examining Somali society, and is invariably to the point and brilliant in her incisive analysis and insights into the transition (and transformation) of Somali society. Besteman is also an exciting ethnographer who always offers original research findings, this because of her extensive fieldwork in the Bantu/Jareer Somali community in the United States and Somalia. She did fieldwork in southern Somalia in an early period of her academic life as a young, enthusiastic and interesting anthropologist. Unlike some others (in Somali Studies) who have not had direct field research exposure, Besteman lived and stayed in a small farming village on the banks of Bu’aale in Jubbada Dhexe (the Middle Jubba) region, to collect ethnographic data for her doctoral project. The culmination is two significant single-authored books and one co-edited book, as well as numerous essays, academic articles, and book chapters.