Smugglers, migrants, and demons

Abstract

A B S T R A C THaitian sea migration and US maritime policing have emerged in tandem since the 1980s. During this time, many Haitians have begun to assume that migration voyages succeed only because of ritual exchanges-in particular, transactions between migrants and sea-traversing, other-than-human beings. These ritual payments, along with other activities of border crossing and control, have placed ships, routes, and offshore detention centers in an interconnected constellation that spans the northern Caribbean. These cosmographically deep spatial configurations exceed concepts like "region" or "sociocultural area." Cosmographic depth, while not unique to these spaces, is made visible in the array of entities, forces, and moral sensibilities that compose them. Seeing cosmographically highlights this depth, which is often rendered inconsequential by dominant bureaucratic registers of border securitization.

The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019

“…Yet, this fabrication does not proceed uncontested. The state surfaces as a contested arena in diffuse sites, such as through the production of “indigenous” wine terroir as an instrument of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine (Monterescu and Handel 2019), weekly street parties as celebratory departures from the state socialist temporality of la lucha in Santiago de Cuba (Garth 2019), the speculative politics of land restitution in post‐conflict Colombia (Morris 2019), the ritual negotiation of transnational maritime crossings with “other‐than‐human entities” by Haitian migrants (Kahn 2019), satirical billboards that compel ostensibly dysfunctional Bosnian politicians toward greater public accountability (Kurtović 2019), collective memories of state violence in Kurdistan as a subversion of the state's narrative monopoly on legitimate violence (Günay 2019), the “spectral fiction” of a Somali maritime sovereignty abrogated by US and German counter‐piracy ventures in Somali territorial waters (Dua 2019, 98), and the uneven distribution of augmented‐reality Pokémon GO in‐game items and events that virtually project a “unified Jerusalem without a Palestinian presence” (Meneley 2019, 139; emphasis in original). Perspectives of this sort remind us that the coherence of the state cannot be taken for granted, as its territorial hegemony is either secured or disrupted by ritual, vernacular, or performance.…”