The taste of freedom: commensality, liminality, and return amongst A fghan transnational migrants in the UK and P akistan

This study follows UK A fghan migrants on a return visit to N orthwest P akistan. Combining theorizations of mobility, liminality, and commensality, it takes the picnic trip ( chakar ) as a little‐explored cultural lens through which to analyse symbolic formations of freedom, the shaping of P akhtun transnational labour, and social hierarchies constituted through migration and return. As potent imaginary sites of remembering and forgetting, chakar map destinations left and not‐yet arrived at, routes of flight and return, and the burden of multi‐levelled constellations of political and economic insecurity on refugees living between the UK and P akistan. The article argues that chakar are at once therapeutic and reproductive of ways in which personal and systemic realities combine features of hierarchy, exploitation, and patriarchy. They sustain participants in a tension between desires to preserve the hierarchies they conceal, and desires for more freedom. These contradictory experiences are usefully analysed through the emblematic arc of the ‘round trip’.