Waiting as a site of subject formation: examining collective prayers by Ethiopian asylum seekers in Germany

Abstract

In this article I look at collective payers by Ethiopian asylum seekers to explore how religious narratives are mobilized to deal with temporal angst in the context of waiting. I posit that waiting is a site of multifaceted struggles in which subjectivities are constituted, in response to both the violence waiting imposes and the anticipated freedom it carries with it. Asylum seekers confront life in waiting in various ways until they attain what they wait for and ‘settle’ in the host country. To settle is imagined as living in Europe as independent and self-reliant workers who could generate their own income which is contingent on waiting for the acceptance of their applications for asylum. Whether people attain what they wait for or not, their subjectivities are formed through a certain idea of themselves, an understanding of their situation and their practices, all of which are located within histories and structures of power relations. My analysis draws on ethnographic data generated from fieldwork conducted in 2016–2017 among Oromo asylum seekers in the city of Nuremberg, Germany.