Be-longing

This dissertation is a study about belonging among the Fatanis who are caught between two places, namely Makkah and Jawi. Using historical and ethnographic data collected during two years of transnational fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Malaysia, this dissertation shows that belonging is constituted as much by ideas of community, namely home and the homeland, as it is by lived experience as well as practical and cultural factors. Its central argument is that belonging is unstable, often incomplete, and always contingent owing to the dynamic quality of social life. Belonging is a condition that is volatile. It is not something that can be retained perpetually. A person might experience comfort from belonging someplace at a particular moment, while yearning to be somewhere else simultaneously. Thus, longing often accompanies belonging.