COST Action IS0803 2009, Work Group 4
Documents, Techniques and Technologies
Manchester, 15-16 May 2009
Convenor: Sarah Green
University of Manchester, Social Anthropology
sarah.green@manchester.ac.uk
+44 (0)161 275 3989; +44 (0)797 329 1882
The Summary Report on this meeting is now available here.
Working papers from WG4 (Documents, Techniques and Technologies) are now available here .
Passports and passing: everyday encounters with borders
The most visible part of political borders for most people is at the crossing points, where an array of official procedures are used to both mark and control them: the paperwork, the guards, the techniques of surveillance, the pace and difficulty of being processed vary enormously from one place to the next, and from one period to the next. Such procedures certainly characterize borders; one might even argue that in practical terms at least, the borders are their bureaucratic procedures, marking in often highly theatrical ways the difference between one side and the other.
During the height of the Cold War, the differences between the opposing sides were regularly symbolized by the ease or difficulty with which borders could be crossed, and the severity of the procedures and controls involved. In recent years, while the Schengen countries have continued to expand, erasing border bureaucracies in their path (at least for some), the range of procedures and technologies used for identifying and inspecting some people and things as they travel have increased exponentially. Still, smuggling of people and things continues, a practice probably as old as the drawing of the first line in the sand.
Whether and how peopl e are tracked, traced, logged, inspected, photographed, classified, detained and processed while travelling matters; it matters on all kinds of levels, from the most intimate and personal to the most excessively public and impersonal. It continues to matter even when people are not anywhere near physical borders. The requirements of border bureaucracies usually persist wherever people are located. For many, difficulties in being able to pass haunts their lives, whether or not their paperwork is in order; that highlights the range of informal as well as formal borders that weave through territories, relations and impressions about whether people belong, or whether they mean well, or whether they might be up to something.
This first Work Group will focus both on the nature of the relationship between borders and these bureaucratic techniques and technologies, and on the way in which these ‘bordering’ techniques become a part of people’s everyday lives.
Participant: Dr Anna M. Agathangelou
Director
Global Change Institute
Cyprus
Email: agathangelou@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Impossible Missions: Deadly Nationalisms and Other Such Kinds of Humanist Projects
This paper examines the enclave and the refugee camp as a re-terittorialized zone of violence in Europe. Taking the Cypriot enclave and refugee camps (at different moments in the history of Cyprus) as re-territorialized zones, the paper engages with the different legal, photographic, historical and graffiti discourses that constitute these spaces as “exceptional.” These sites, I argue, embody intense relations and processes of (un) belonging, marked with (neo) colonial logics beyond the Cypriot communities that register different temporalities. Given the vital connections among the separated Cypriot populations, the project attempts to place the Cypriot (Greek and Turkish) enclave and refugee subject in a much larger context and considers post-national projects of belonging which have emerged and/or re-emerged since the Republic of Cyprus entry into the European Union. The reading of these two zones relies on a series of interviews made with Cypriots, interspersed with photographs and graffiti on the walls of Cyprus. More so, this project ultimately engages with understandings of time and space, including the articulation of cosmologies that disrupt the dominant linear narratives of history that promise the impossible through deadly missions.
Participant: Ms Carna Brkovic
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: carna.brkovic@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
I would like to do a review of anthropological literature that problematizes travel documents. The review would present how the technology of travel documents – issuing various kinds of official papers, approving or rejecting citizenship and visa claims and appeals, transforming one kind of documents into another, etc. –points to new forms of governmentality. It would also present ways in which travel documents, as official papers ascribed to individuals, can become very personal. In other words, I would like to do a review of analyses that trace how documents are being produced and maintained on multiple levels. These analyses show how novel logics of categorization of persons and organizations of space become part of the lived experiences; furthermore, they accentuate that lived experiences are not necessarily always a “mirror reflection” of these new logics, but rather their counterparts.
Participant: Ms Vanja ?elebi?i?
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: vaniasplace@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Attending as a Manchester-based Action Member. Will make a contribution to the project’s Wiki on behalf of WG4.
Participant: Dr Katja Franko Aas
Institute of Criminology and Sociology of Law
University of Oslo
Norway
Email: katja.franko@jus.uio.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The ‘interoperable body’: identity and social sorting at the European border The aim of this paper is, first, to empirically examine the emerging network of EU’s databases relating to borders and crime control, primarily, the Schengen Information System and the creation of a common Visa Information System (VIS) as well as the proposed entry/exit system (resembling the US VISIT program) and proposals to facilitate border crossing for ‘bona fide’ travellers. A vital aspect of the emerging systems is the focus on biometric identifiers. According to some estimates, VIS will become the world's largest biometric database with 70 million sets of fingerprints and biometric photographs. The paper theoretically explores the growing reliance on ICTs for identification and automated recognition of individuals with particular focus on surveillance of the body, which is through the expansive use of biometrics and DNA gradually becoming a major source of identification. The paper investigates the social consequences of increasing reliance on technology for our understanding of human subjectivity. What are the implications and social costs of the fact that socially contextualised aspects of identity, based on speech and face-to-face interaction, are giving way to technological tokens of identification? What are the consequences for citizenship? Are European borders increasingly governed through the notions of ’biological citizenship’ (Novas and Rose 2000), or what might be termed ‘techno-citizenship’?
Participant: Prof Sarah Green
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: sarah.green@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Work Group Convenor
Participant: Mr Jan Grill
Migrationonline, Multikulturní centrum Praha
Czech Republic
Email: jg334@st-andrews.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Slovakian Roma living in Slovak-Ukrainian borderlands and labour migrating to the UK, I shall address two interconnected processes related to everyday encounters with borders. First, I shall look at various technologies controlling persons crossing borders – looking at Slovakian Roma movement across Slovak-Ukrainian borders for cheaper goods (and smuggling), as well as Roma migrating to the UK (within EU space). These involves encounters with representatives of the states both through direct border guard or through impersonal agents of the system (Home Office, Worker Registration Scheme) I shall address discourses and practices of border guards with regards to special (and more suspicious) ‘category’ of Roma/Gypsies crossing the borders and the experiences of Roma migrants themselves. Secondly, I am interested in cultural biographies and movement of things across the borders. More specifically, I shall explore smuggling of Ukrainian cigarettes to Slovakia and then to United Kingdom (sending by post and/or smuggling in person). The presentation shall focus on various strategies of circumventing the border controls and cultural explanations of success/failure.
Participant: Dr Renata Jambresic-Kirin
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
Croatia
Email: renata@ief.hr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
My contribution to the discussion on everyday encounters with borders is an attempt to explore symbolic, cultural and economic regulation of “free” circulation of books and other intellectual goods via the largest online shop – Amazon.com – for the citizens in Eastern peripheries, i.e. in non-Schengen countries. The research will take into account the experience of users, mostly colleagues from the academic community, and the taxative legislation according to which the citizens of the countries belonging to “Eastern Europe and Rest of World” have to pay considerably higher delivery rates than the citizens of the EU. Theoretical approach to this symbolic displacement from the European continent will deal with transnational, neo-imperial and bureaucratic “invisible” technologies of small-scale discrimination the citizens of Eastern peripheries are daily faced with, hence fear and anxiety caused by Schengen regimes, which persists even when they are not near physical borders.
Participant: Dr Stef Jansen
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: Stef.jansen@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Documenting entrapment: everyday geopolitics of mobility regulation in the EU's 'immediate outside' State borders are increasingly constituted away from border barriers and checkpoints, for example, through the documentary technologies of the consular process of visa applications. In Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, this produces specific forms of humiliating entrapment through documentary requirements that constitute what I call the EU's shrinking 'immediate outside'. Ethnographically embedding bodily experiences in visa queues within people's engagements with changing Eurocentric spatiotemporal rankings, I refract this entrapment against the privileges of certain foreigners (such as me) and against people's own remembered cross-border mobility with the 'red' Yugoslav passport. In that way, my presentation is an explorative attempt to critically elaborate on two dominant tendencies in current social scientific approaches to borders, drawing attention to dimensions of mobility regulation across borders that I believe are often obscured by them. Firstly, with regard to the dominant emphasis on mutuality in the construction of otherness, inspired by certain strands of postcolonial studies, I argue this should not lead us to disregard notions of (spatiotemporal) hierarchical ranking. Secondly, with regard to their focus on the form of technologies of bodily discipline and subjectification, inspired by Foucaultian thought, I call for acknowledging the importance of what I call everyday geopolitical affect.
Participant: Dr Margarita Karamihova
Ethnographic Institute with Museum
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Bulgaria
Email: karamihova_m@abv.bg
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Discussant
Participant: Dr Mila Maeva
Ethnographic Institute with Museum
Bulgarian Academy of Science
Bulgaria
Email: mila_maeva@yahoo.co.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
After the fall of the communist regime in 1989 Bulgaria was in the poor condition. The economic and social crisis influenced on the Bulgarians citizens. Many of them have looked for work outside the country. United Kingdom is one of the desired places for emigration. The paper is focused on the problems of visa requirement and work permits that are necessary for Bulgarian emigrants. The study stresses on different legal or illegal ways to receive emigrant document to live and work to UK. The basic material of the research is from fieldwork researches among Bulgarians and Turks, emigrants in United Kingdom conducted in Britain and Bulgaria in 2007-2009 periods. I will try to present Bulgarians and Turks from different social groups, age and sex who live in the capital, small town and village. I will compare the data with information in British and Bulgarian media and Internet. In the proceeding of the paper realization will be used the classic ethnological methods: face-to-face interview, autobiographical stories of respondents, observation of everyday life and behaviour and estimate of the relationships in the community’s boundaries. An inquiry will be made to give a general picture of this ethnical group. The interpretation of the fieldwork results will be present only through respondents` point of view. The author’s opinion and explanation will be maximally reduced. The final scholar results of the research will be interpreted in accordance with the modern ethnic boundaries, identity and nation concept.
Participant: Dr Basia Nikiforova
Culture, Philosophy and Arts Research Institute
Lithuania
Email: bnikiforova@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Bordering Techniques and Procedures in the Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian Borderland
Within the limits of territorial aspect of concept of border it is considered as geographical and politic-administrative categories. Unlike social both cultural and administrative borders the state have exclusively territorial character. Separating and connecting communities, territorial borders carry out "barrier", "walls", "fence" and "bridge" functions. According to A.Sadowski exists some parameters of the borderland analysis. The first – a space on which two or more numbers ethnocultural groups historically co-exist (an ethnocultural borderland is a phenomenon more stabile, than an interstate borderland), the second - concept of a borderland linked with several ethnocultural groups, the third - special type of the inhabitant who is defined by an accessory to several cultures. We investigate categories a border zone (transitive area in which sphere borders) and borderland (the territory located near to border and allocated by geographical, legal and administrative criteria). The border zone as territorially-geographical phenomenon will analyze through places of the steady intercultural contacts (Lithuanian-Polish). We will analyze what kind of official procedures are used to both mark and control people on the case of Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland, where don’t exist border (Lithuanian-Polish) and where it is exist and start to be more powerful (the Lithuanian-Belarusian and Polish-Belarusian). In the last case we will show how bordering techniques become a trouble part of people’s everyday lives.
Key words: borderland, border zone, functions of border, bordering techniques and procedure.
Participant: Ms Elena Nikiforova
Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies
Norway
Email: elenik@bk.ru
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Passports and International Mobility: the case of ‘Baltic Russians’ By the criterion of citizenship, the Russian- speaking population of the Baltic States is mostly distributed between three large segments: citizens of the Baltic States, citizens of Russia and non-citizens (‘aliens’). Since different passports open different borders, the opportunities for international mobility for the members of these groups remarkably differ. In this paper, I aim to trace the dynamic changes in the complex legislative environment that have been shaping the windows of personal mobility opportunities of the Baltic Russians since the early 1990s. The analysis will address a range of policies employed at national and local scales. It will tackle the relevant policies of the Russian Federation (citizenship and visa policy, and the policy towards ‘compatriots abroad’); it will also consider the position of the European Union towards the non-EU citizens living in the Baltic States (predominantly in Estonia and Latvia). A particular attention will be given to the analysis of the locally applied instruments that ensured crossborder (Estonia-Russia) mobility for the population of border regions. As for research materials, this paper will utilize the relevant policy documents and interviews collected during my fieldwork in the Estonian-Russian borderlands.
Participant: Dr Madeleine Reeves
Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: madeleine.reeves@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
‘Clean fake’: authenticity, imitation and affect in documentary regimes
My proposed contribution to the work group on ‘passports and passing’ is a conceptual paper on the materiality of a particular kind of documents used to regulate internal movement within the state (the propiska, lit. ‘written through’). Specifically, I am interested in exploring the mimetic relation that emerges between so called ‘clean’ (notionally authentic) documents and ‘fakes’; how these categories merge in practice, and the kinds of affective relations that such documents elicit. The paper draws upon the experience of Kyrgyz seasonal migrants working as informal and largely undocumented labourers in construction brigades in urban Russia. Many Kyrgyz migrants in Moscow get by with propiski that are technically ‘fake’ since they indicate a fictive (and often non-existent) address as the migrant’s place of temporary residence. These documents are generally efficacious, however, since they are issued through official channels (sold, informally, by local policemen) and usually bear ‘authentic’ stamps. Such ‘clean fake’ registrations [chistie fal’shivye] are popularly distinguished from those ‘unambiguous fakes’ that are sold in railway stations and markets for a much smaller fee. The paper examines the ‘clean fake’ both as a strategy of survival within a draconian system for registering temporary residence in the city, and as an ethnographic point of entry for thinking about authenticity and imitation in documentary regimes. The paper is envisaged less a summary of finished research than a ‘thought piece’ aimed at developing some of the questions that I will explore during forthcoming fieldwork concerning the blurred boundaries between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ presence in the state. My hope is that it will help to engage discussion within the work group about what passports and other such documents to regulate movement within and across a state’s borders do – that is, a conversation not just about the role of documentary systems as regimes of governmental control or stately envisoning, but about the materiality of documents themselves and the kind of subjectivity they produce: about the emotion with which such documents become invested; about the kind of social relations that they serve to mediate; about how their ‘thing-ness’ (new or old, clean or well thumbed, many-stamped or empty, correctly filled out or not, ‘authentic’ or ‘fake’) becomes socially consequential.
Participant: Dr Ljupco S Risteski
Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology
University St. Cyril and Methodius
FYR Macedonia
Email: risteski@ukim.edu.mk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
"BULGARIAN PASSPORTS" – A POSSIBILITY FOR A WIDER MOBILITY OF MACEDONIANS AND/OR MANIPULATING STRATEGY OF MACEDONIAN IDENTITY
After the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the creation of independent countries, one of the biggest frustrations is that citizens are not allowed to travel freely through Europe and other countries in the world. This problem is a current issue in the countries which are not still part of the European community, such as Macedonia (and additionally Serbia, Croatia, and Turkey).Therefore, Macedonian citizens' mobility is very limited, given the difficult and often expensive process of obtaining a travel visa. After the entry of Bulgaria to the European Union and the subsequent freedom of its citizens able to travel visa-free through Europe, an interesting phenomenon has developed in Macedonia due to its special historical relationship with Bulgaria. Many Macedonians have forfeited their Macedonian citizenship in favor of Bulgarian, and therefore EU, citizenship. This can be viewed as a positive development, as it allows Macedonians to travel and work in Bulgaria and Europe, and escape the difficult economic situation in Macedonia. However, there is a very negative aspect to this phenomenon, in that many Macedonians view this as an official way for Bulgaria to continue its policy of establishing the Bulgarian ethnicity of Macedonians.. Thus, all applicants for visas must write a statement which confirms their Bulgarian roots, and their parents as well. These statements are troubling, as they seek to erase Macedonian national identity and replace it with Bulgarian.
Participant: Dr Eleni Sideri
History, Archeology and Social Anthropology
University of Thessaly
Greece
Email: eliej73@yahoo.gr; elsideri@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Between motion and stillness: debating and crossing the borders of Europeaness
Since 1990s diaspora became a prominent term through which we re-visit the relation of the local to the global, the national to the transnational. But how does this passage from one to another become possible in reality? Getting a visa for Greece for the Greek-Georgians is a full time job and a lucrative business for different social groups both in Georgia and Greece, involving grassroots organizations, translation bureaus, transport companies, diplomatic services, family networks in both countries even cemeteries. These legal and illegal networks involved in the process of border crossing draw out attention to the ways categories of political membership are constructed and attained both from above and below. Different citizenship regimes are involved, alluding, as my paper will argue, to old histories of belonging, as well as complicated negotiations and procedures of “legalizing” identity. My paper will postulate that these procedures do not concern only a European periphery, but Europe as a whole and its political and cultural policies of inclusion and exclusion.
Key words: border crossing, diaspora, citizenship, European migration and integration policies
Participant: Dr May-Len Skilbrei
Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies
Norway
Email: mls@fafo.no
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Border problems
The Norwegian-Russian border has been conceptualized differently at different times in history. Even though the possible military threat is now given little attention, Russians are construed as representing new forms of threats. At the same time, the ideals in the Barents cooperation of openness and communication are being operationalized into policies. The latest case of this is when the Foreign minister of Norway suggested the introduction of a “border pass“. This is meant to be a special pass for inhabitants of the border region, making it possible to move freely between the countries. The police in Northern Norway fears that the new openness will lead to the wrong kind of people permeating the border; Russian men involved in organized crime and women selling sex. These fears have to be seen in light of the history of Russian migration to Norway and how it has been met. Political ambitions for cooperation in the High North and assumptions about possible threats from Russia live side by side. The border is discursively produced in very different ways, and the proposed techniques to represent the different versions are conflicting. In this paper, I will explore different ways of representing the border in both politics and popular culture.
Participant: Dr Sevasti Trubeta
Institute of East European Studies, Department of Culture and History
Free University of Berlin
Germany
Email: sev.trubeta@freenet.de; sev.trubeta@gmx.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Detention places for migrants: “straddled borders” or “empty places”?
My contribution refers to socially discriminatory function of borders and its spatial expression in the case of human mobility. Taking into consideration the globally networked mechanisms of control over human mobility I will address the establishment of detentions places for migrants from following perspectives: different chances to cross borders; as a radical epiphenomenon of segregation of wealth and poverty in distinct territorial zones. In particular, I will discuss the function (or/and perception) of these places as “empty places” or “straddled borders”.
Proposal for literature review
Participant: Ms LarissaVetters
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Germany
Email: larissavetters@web.de
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Creating Borders from Within - The politics of residence registration and population statistics in post-war
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Based on ethnographic material pertaining to residence registration procedures in
Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the paper argues for an analytic shift away from techniques of border control and a focus on everyday bureaucratic procedures (such as residence registration and the collection of statistical/demographic information) within the territory of the state. Looking at the ways in which a population is administratively tied to a specific territory (more or less successfully) highlights that national borders are created as much from within as through practices taking place at the actual line of separation between one (nation-)state and the other. Moreover, through paying attention to administrative acts far removed from national borders, it becomes possible to conceptualize the multi-stranded links between external and internal border-making practices which can result in the appearance of concrete politico-administrative borders as well as in more immaterial forms of socio-cultural border construction. Mostar, being the site of violent ethno- national border drawings in the 90es and then being incorporated in a complex and nested politico- administrative system which constitutes the newly established multi-ethnic state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a field well suited to analyze such processes.
Participant: Dr Eftihia Voutira
University of Macedonia
Greece
Email: voutira@uom.gr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Overseers, Overstayers and clandestine migrant survival strategies in Greece
One of the most recent and well-documented national study on clandestine migrants in Greece finds that 205,000 such movers were present in Greece in 2007. Statistical documentation of clandestine migration remains fraught with difficulties particularly since normal bureaucratic state practices include documentation based on multiple arrests of the same person. This paper reviews recent literature on clandestine migration in Greece and maps out the basic survival strategies used by clandestine migrants, which include a range covering the spectrum from maintenance of ‘invisibility’ vis-à-vis state authorities to acquiring legal status through variable routes (e.g. divorce, marriage, asylum application, naturalization processes, regularization procedures)