Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations

Isin, Engin F.

doi:10.17645/si.v6i1.1304

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Finally, approaches that position transnationally mobile populations alongside citizens and other sedentary groups (Çaǧlar and Schiller ; Isin ), rather than assuming that migrants and refugees constitute distinct categories of people, are particularly promising in de‐exceptionalizing cross‐border displacement. By examining sites of shared need and struggle, where diverse populations strive for livable and even flourishing lives, researchers can attend to circumstances that may transect, as well as distinguish, mobile and less mobile groups (Anderson ; Dahinden ).…”

Section: Ways Forward?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The business of anthropology and the European refugee regime

Cabot

2019

American Ethnologist

115

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Metaphors of flooding and “flows” are often applied in the public sphere to the phenomena of displacement and migration, but there are also “waves” and “tides” of humanitarian actors, “voluntourists,” and researchers now focused on refugees. Humanitarian, security, and anthropological interventions in the European “refugee crisis” of 2015–16 often operate according to a shared logic of urgency and crisis. Key problems and pitfalls in current anthropological trends in the study of displacement on Europe's doorstep are linked to the business dimensions of anthropological work. The business of anthropology reinforces the European refugee regime, which makes border crossers into targets of policing, intervention, and study. [crisis, refugees, displacement, anthropology, Greece, Europe]

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Section: Ways Forward?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The business of anthropology and the European refugee regime

Cabot

2019

American Ethnologist

115

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“…But both express a proclivity to think of people as if they were in need of native soil and fixed roots like trees. Treating the inside as the norm and being outside as exceptional (Walker, 1993), they take also settlement to be the norm against which nomadism is to be contrasted (Isin, 2018; Scott, 2017). Perhaps this is why some scholars caution that versions of migration theory fall prey to ‘methodological nationalism’, assuming nationalist belonging as an ‘invisible background for research’ (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002, p. 302); or that some versions of citizenship theory reduce belonging to formal citizenship and reduce agency to action mediated through representative politics (Isin & Nielsen, 2008).…”

Section: On Not Being Precise About Saudade (And Mobility!)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Engin Isin (2018) has argued that the assumption that persons form ‘peoples’ and live as ‘a people’ is problematic. Mobile persons might refuse settling and still relate to states in such unique ways that it makes little sense to group them as wholes.…”

Section: Categorically Stuckmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Strangers, outsiders and aliens have been ‘Other’ to ‘Citizens’, but their ways of being political were very different and subject to change (Isin, 2002). As Isin (2018, p. 121) reminds us, ‘barbarians included various peoples whose relationships to states were always in flux’. Such peoples, as he puts it, playing with binary thinking, ‘came in and out of various barbarian positions’ (p. 121).…”

Section: Categorically Stuckmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Moving on with saudade: On bordered countries and vague terms

Magalhães

2020

The Sociological Review

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This article is about how people moving along state borders – I call them wayfarers – refuse the assumption that they ought to live either a sedentary or a nomadic lifestyle inside or outside states, whether as citizens or as Others. In particular, it looks at how the term saudade helps mobile people to manage friction without falling back into such binaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines saudade as a desire ‘for something’ and describes it as a characteristic of the ‘Portuguese or Brazilian’ people. Here, we shall attend however to the saudade evoked by Venezuelans and Warao (defined by the same dictionary as ‘members of a South American Indian people inhabiting Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela’). This article patterns a contrast between two ways of evoking the term in comments about movement made by my informants: the first, Precise Saudade, asks for precision about that of which people feel saudade. The second way of evoking the term, Vague Saudade, is, as its name suggests, more comfortable with being vague. The argument put forward by this article is that scholarly and policy texts on ‘migrants’, ‘nomads’ and ‘refugees’ need to make more room for Vague Saudade when translating the talk of wayfarers. It may be tempting to dismiss vagueness as showing ambiguity and imprecision. Yet, as the stories that follow are meant to highlight, Vague Saudade can be useful to wayfarers in several ways: to engage in care, to protect others, to protect themselves and to engage in conversations about alternative worlds. To grant monopoly to Precise Saudade, it is argued, risks hindering wayfarers’ ability to do these things. I find this is relevant to how we translate wayfarers, and I suggest it is also germane to how we translate in research.

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“…For states, the dominant commonality is that the people are within their territory and thus under their control (Scott 1998). Historically, this determination has been based on the conception of the people as an immobile, sedentary, and enclosed body politic within a territory (Isin 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

Peopling Europe through Data Practices: Introduction to the Special Issue

Cakici

Ruppert

Scheel

2019

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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Politically, Europe has been unable to address itself to a constituted polity and people as more than an agglomeration of nation-states. From the resurgence of nationalisms to the crisis of the single currency and the unprecedented decision of a member state to leave the European Union (EU), core questions about the future of Europe have been rearticulated: Who are the people of Europe? Is there a European identity? What does it mean to say, “I am European?” Where does Europe begin and end? and Who can legitimately claim to be a part of a “European” people? The special issue (SI) seeks to contest dominant framings of the question “Who are the people of Europe?” as only a matter of government policies, electoral campaigns, or parliamentary debates. Instead, the contributions start from the assumption that answers to this question exist in data practices where people are addressed, framed, known, and governed as European. The central argument of this SI is that it is through data practices that the EU seeks to simultaneously constitute its population as a knowable, governable entity, and as a distinct form of peoplehood where common personhood is more important than differences.

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Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations

Cited by 19 publications

References 7 publications

The business of anthropology and the European refugee regime

The business of anthropology and the European refugee regime

Moving on with saudade: On bordered countries and vague terms

Peopling Europe through Data Practices: Introduction to the Special Issue

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