Marriage and belonging among South Sudanese Acholi refugees in New Zealand

Abstract

This article describes refugee-background South Sudanese Acholi attempts to (re)produce customary marriages in New Zealand. The cross-cutting debt obligations and transactions involved in these marriages need the involvement of transnational social networks. Beyond these networks, however, customary marriages are important to ethnic identification, with the transactions involved generating and maintaining feelings of “belonging.” Such feelings are largely absent from most refugees’ wider resettlement experiences. Analysis of transformations within resettlement-based marriage customs demonstrates how individual and collective belonging is developed and negotiated amid the tensions of resettlement, with differences of opinion over these transformations involved highlighting the contested nature of belonging.