Mm-hmm

... all of a sudden are welcomed in.

And it's not just something that happens at the level of the state.

To me, what really struck me was that it was a moment where, you know, thousands, thousands of people who had, in some cases, never had anything to do with this kind of work went to the streets and volunteered their time, energy, money, resources, uh, and really kind of took part in this kind of extraordinary, um, summer and fall of welcome, where refugees in this, in this particular instance were encountered with contact, welcome, like I said before, and hospitality being the key word.

And I was very interested at the time, uh, of how that would play out because it seemed precisely to go against so much of what we'd come to expect with the kind of Islamophobia and xenophobia-

Yeah, mm-hmm.

I mean, I didn't have any of these kind of personal investments, uh, the way that is now sometimes expected in anthropology, where, you know, the idea is you either come from the community itself or you have these kind of long-term investments, and I didn't.

And, you know, part of the answer that I'll give is that it was an attempt also to respond to a certain kind of politics in the discipline that I was already very aware of when I was in Delhi that determined who gets to study whom.