Narratives of Fear: An Anthropologist’s Research with Asylum Seekers

At the age of 27, Valentina Ramia received an urgent call from a friend in Ecuador, where she was born, to join a newly formed government. With her master’s degree in public policy analysis and management, Ramia left her work at a think tank in New York to return home and assist with governing in the new administration. The year was 2007.

In her role as an under secretary, Ramia was put in charge of social policy in a newly formed department, and asked to help resolve a crisis in the prison system. Working with the prisoners’ unions and other experts, she began to assess the crisis, which included financial, legal, and humanitarian challenges. In less than a year, Ramia and her compañeros worked to establish Ecuador’s first department of justice, including a badly needed public defense system.

When she returned to the United States, Ramia also returned to academia to continue the type of work she had engaged in in her home country. “Academia was the only way I could keep on working in something political, this time not in the government, but thinking and doing politics as much as I could,” she said.

As an anthropologist trained at the New School for Social Research and Stanford University, Ramia applies the skills she developed in Ecuador to her current work with asylum seekers. “I realized that the work that I had done with the prisoners’ union was basically ethnographic: going to talk to people, getting immersed in their lives, and observing closely what they said they needed,” she said.

Ramia described ethnography as the study of people and the way they interpret the world. At Wesleyan, as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies, Ramia is compiling narratives of asylum seekers from Latin America whose experiences she has translated from Spanish to English for lawyers and other experts. Specifically, she helps decode their experience of fear of persecution, which asylum seekers are required by immigration law to demonstrate.

“In the work that I do, understanding how fear is interpreted in immigration law, I pay attention to how asylum seekers and immigration lawyers talk about fear and report their understanding of this emotion,” said Ramia, “and how they make sense of something that the law has already defined for them.”

While fear might seem like a simple concept, in law it can be complex. As a signatory of the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention, “the United States has created different metrics to evaluate the credibility of fear—reasonable fear, subjective fear, objective fear, and well-founded fear,” she said. “And the questions that I used to understand how that works [are]: How are people creating these narratives of fear and testimony in court? How is it that an emotion is made into a legal object?”

For a book project, Ramia has gathered different presentations of fear. She poured over transcripts from interviews with asylum seekers and lawyers to document the details of each case, from start to finish. “In each chapter, I talk about how fear has been made into something legible and legal,” she said.

For example, as an interpreter, Ramia facilitates and observes exchanges between lawyers, judges, psychologists, and psychiatrists who are trying to confirm the credibility of an individual’s fear through their narrative. Is the account chronological? Does written testimony correlate with oral testimony? Individual stories don’t always fit an expected linear narrative if, for example, an asylum seeker cannot provide specific dates of events. Or, if a person’s fear is beyond what is considered “normal” and not expressed cohesively, their fear might be interpreted as pathological rather than reasonable.

Each asylum seeker’s story must additionally fit a complex specific legal group, she said. For example, women fleeing gender violence must mirror a category like “married woman from Guatemala unable to leave a relationship”—a legal concept that Ramia called a “legal fiction,” or made-up term that U.S. immigration law has used to justify the exclusion of non-white people. If our immigration system was founded on racialized fictions, she explained, the United States is now using gender categories to close its doors to millions of Latin Americans.

Part of her work is observing how experiences of trauma and violence are represented in legal language. “It’s interesting to see not only how an experience of fear is translated into another language, but also into a legal narrative that does not represent the storytelling of a lived experience, and that has to fit these very fragmented portions of immigration law,” said Ramia.

As an anthropologist, Ramia’s role is not to draw conclusions about the asylum cases or define what “true fear” is. “My inquiry is rather about how fear is interpreted in immigration law, what counts as fearful, and how the assessment of that fear determines legal personhood or who is worthy of asylum.”

The answers to these weighty questions are likely to change with the new administration. While immigration policy might shift, over the next two and a half years of her fellowship, Ramia will continue to collaborate with experts in psychology, psychiatry, and law to translate an intangible emotion—fear—into immigration law that has historically been based on exclusion.

Her job, she said, “is to interpret how these fields are relying on certain evaluations and measurements of fear to validate certain stories of who’s allowed to be a citizen.”