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The paper is devoted to the double-sided mimicry that the state and NGOs perform while taking care of orphans with disabilities in post-Soviet Russia. Focusing on the cases of mirroring, it aims to rethink the idea of a state-like institution and the very nature of belonging to the state.

Paper Abstract:

Reflecting on the state vs civil society dichotomy, many researchers have emphasized that civil society is not separable from the state and often produces the same powerful effects (e.g. Aretxaga 2003). The Russian example of NGOs that focused their work on helping orphans with disabilities only confirms it: due to economic and political crises, many of them decided to become "public service providers,” and started to receive state funding. However, this mimetic process is only part of the reality. Simultaneously, the Russian state has passed several laws in recent years that aimed to transform the system of orphanages and children’s homes for the disabled within the broader shift toward "traditional values" (An, Kulmala 2021). Unlike other authors who concurred that these changes did not tackle the fundamental aspects of the system (e.g. Shpakovskaya et al. 2019), I want to claim the opposite. The orphanages were compelled to change significantly, mimicking the family care and refurbished image of the institution, that was requested by the state but was unclear to the workers, and was difficult for them to agree upon. Using field materials that I collected in one NGO and one orphanage for children with intellectual disabilities and focusing on this double-sided mimicry, I propose to investigate the very idea of a state-like institution and the very nature of belonging to the state; and examine the make-believe activity (Navaro-Yashin 2007) that both of them perform contesting the right to take care of orphans with disabilities.

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This article will explore how the collaged states of Lebanon and North Cyprus manifest a potent spectral presence in the everyday. We will focus on the desire for being feared versus fearing others and the ambiguous boundary between il/legality and in/visibility.

Paper Abstract:

I recall Kantorovitch's theory that the spectral incarnation of the police functions as the state's enduring embodiment as we pass through a checkpoint on the outskirts of North Lebanon. Uttering "Ya3tik al 3afye ya watan," to the military officer which translates to "May God give you health watan," reverberates through us, watan translating into the nation in Arabic. This article will explore how the collaged states of Lebanon and North Cyprus manifest a potent spectral presence in the everyday. We will look into how we can catch a glimpse of the spectral presence of the Lebanese state when a generator light flashes yellow, resulting in the jubilant phrase "this is the state" when energy is delivered by the national grid. We will question the states' position as excess that subvert reasonable functionality and analyse excess as fantasy, which encompasses several forms such as the desire for being feared versus fearing others and the ambiguous boundary between il/legality and in/visibility (Aretxaga 2003). We will also explore performative discourses that question these collaged states’ presence as delineated by Berlant (2011a), the tense relationship between the state and its citizens becomes most palpable when the existence and legitimacy of the state are questioned or denied. We intentionally refer to Lebanon and North Cyprus as collaged states as we argue that the interstices striking through their “imperfect” statehood can form a disjunctive temporality to catch a glimpse of how the fetish of power intrudes into the present through different forms and stories.

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Decades of anthropological critique revealed oppressive tendencies inherent to the state form. An uncannily parallel critique of the state has been developed by illiberal actors, who operate at the political fringes of established democratic states. Comparing both I ask: who is the mad one?

Paper Abstract:

Starting with Begoña Aretxaga's observation that the state can drive people mad, I reflect on my doctoral research on "Sovereign Citizens" in Germany. The ill-defined shorthand “Sovereign Citizen” describes amorphous and heterogenous actors in different countries that argue that the state they live in is not a state, but a corporate entity that exploits the population under the guise of enshrining rights.

Similarly, anthropologists have understood the state as an ideological, rather than material object: as a “collective illusion” or “social fantasy” (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001). In this frame, Sovereign Citizens appear as attentive analysts, both in challenging the performative generation of “stateness” (ibid.) in their outright refusal to recognize state authority, and in copying genres of stateness in their enactment of counter-states. While this behaviour appears mad in light of the very real coercive power of the state, it is partially a response to the madness discussed by Aretxaga, the one the state provokes in citizens. Some observers have thus asked who the mad one is: the Sovereign Citizen, who pretends he can step outside of the state, or the citizen who just accepts the state – its current form, its laws – without question?

Disentangling the (dis-)similarities of both views, I ask how apt anthropology is at recognizing the difference between plausible and implausible post-liberal critiques of state. Often enmeshed in the far-right, the parallels between Sovereign Citizens’ and anthropological theories about the state are uncanny, raising the question if after all, the mad one is the anthropologist.

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I aim analyze, through the lens of temporality, how anticipation can be understood as a temporal practice when inspectors of SEF are controlling the foreign citizens at the Portuguese airport border. The consequence is the production of contingency conveniences, meaning different forms of access.

Paper Abstract:

This communication is about state's borders and its government. It aims to reflect on how, in contemporary times, the Portuguese state, through the practices of its inspectors, governs the European external border and the mobility of the travelers across it. It follows my ethnographic fieldwork, carried out at an airport in Portugal, where from June 2021 to April 2022, I followed the daily lives of the Portuguese Immigration and Borders Service (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras - SEF) inspectors in the various groups, shifts and functions. The intention is to analyze, through the lens of temporality, how anticipation can be doubly understood as a temporal practice when controlling the foreign citizens at the Portuguese airport border: on the one hand, it is produced through contingency conveniences of logistical, organizational, and personal nature, and on the other, produces different access speeds to the national territory. While mobilizing these two temporal dimensions, the inspectors reorganized spatial and situational frameworks, complicating ideas of action and non-action in their encounter with the travelers. While the rules inspectors enforce are vague, the situations in which they apply it are for most of the time unstable and unpredictable as there are different organization levels to depend on: they own personal agenda, the institution itself, and the airport dynamics.

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Studying the state where it is an outsider reveals similarities to other powerful agencies like ghost and gods. How did the nation state break the bounds that Zomian communities successfully placed on all sources of sovereignty—divine or terrestrial? Can the chains that once bound it be reforged?

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In the Blang Mountains along the China-Myanmar border, the nation state is a recent arrival. It was only in the 1950s that the People’s Republic began attempting to transform these Zomian uplands from exterior to interior. This paper will investigate what we can learn about the state from people who “retain some degree of autonomy” (Graeber 2004, 65) from the “strange intimacy between the state and the people” (Aretxaga 2003, 403). My Blang friends and interlocutors have a long history of keeping various powerful others at bay. Ghosts that enter the village, causing trouble, are given food and riches, and dispatched out of the village. The local mountain god cannot be dispatched, so the village routinely invites him to enter a tree in a grove away from the village to receive gifts in exchange for land and prosperity. Until 1953, the local Tai king claimed a role much akin to a god. As owner of the land, he demanded tribute and corvée labour. In reality, the kingdom acted more like a ghost in the mountains, occasionally sending officials who under the threat of violence were given food and gifts and dispatched back into the valleys. The nation state is a different kind of god. It provides prosperity and care, at the threat of violence, but it does not want gifts in return. It wants to possess people, to make them citizens and it accepts no other gods—all relations must go through the state. Can the nation state be exorcised?

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Paper Short Abstract:

By investigating the so-called Rafael Braga’s case, I excavate how the truth-making of the trial sustains racist fantasies, thus solidifying otherwise unreal proofs to invariably condemn black impoverished people in Brazil.

Paper Abstract:

What can turn disinfectant and sanitary water into Molotov cocktails that, yet unserviceable, were enough to send a person to prison for five years? Was it an equivalent fiction as that which later would imprison this same individual for eleven years for supposedly being found carrying a few grams of drugs? I investigate the legal papers of the so-called Rafael Braga’s case to excavate how the trial truth-making sustains racist fantasies, thus solidifying otherwise unreal proofs to invariably condemn black impoverished people in Brazil. Condemned for carrying ‘incendiary artefacts’ during a massive demonstration, Braga, then a homeless person, had never taken part in any protest and had in his hands no more than cleaning materials. Released on parole, he was condemned again, this time for ‘drug trafficking’ after being framed with a minimal amount of drugs in the favela where he had gone back to live. Zooming into Braga’s successive trials, I show how ‘crimes’ forged by police officers through violence, counterfeit materials and false testimonies were certified by the at once sterilised and sensationalist judicial prose of the prosecutor and the judge, the trial’s protagonists whose mimetic accusatory writing relegates defence and defendant to figurant roles, preventing their version to emerge or in any case to have any effect. Police violence translates into the law, while the accused, calcified as a prisoner, has his voice discredited and only heard as an irrational offence to the law itself.

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This paper reconsiders the state identity using the case of the Republic of Sakha, Russia. The paper argues that the state identity does not require some internationally recognised institutes when it is compensated with other means and ideas about sovereignty.

Paper Abstract:

The Republic of Sakha is one of the 22 ethnic republics of the Russian Federation. It declared its sovereignty in 1991 and is the biggest territorial unit inside the Russian Federation. This paper examines two parallel policies applied in Sakha – the attempt of Moscow to centrally control the region, and the attempt of the republic to maintain its version of sovereignty. Then the failures of the centre to exercise unconditional control over the region are analysed to support the argument that the failure is caused by the federal policy, which appoints a person loyal to Moscow as the head of the region and grants them almost unlimited freedom to pursue their goals.

As a result, the republic has turned to an ethnocracy where one clan controls all key positions. In order to control the population, the heads of the republic have always used national identity, reinforcing the idea of a state within the state. The policy of expressing regional patriotism and identity has been successful in manipulating the loyalty of the population. Meanwhile, the head of the republic has gained control over federal institutions like police or security service by using different economic and political means. Political narratives, national myths, and a monopoly of power have made the republic a quasi-state. This case demonstrates that state identity does not require instruments like foreign policy when it is compensated with other means and ideas about sovereignty.

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The state mediates its will to hegemony through terrorizing the body but in order to deprive human beings of a common world (Arendt). Beyond using the body as proof of pain, how can we use the sensorial attention focused on terror’s will to deprive its subjects of a common world?

Paper Abstract:

This paper takes Aretxaga’s research on state violence as a place of departure for the question about the rationality of state terror, of its productive work of reproducing conditions of paranoid cycles of violence as the will to “occupy” the affective energy of its targeted subjects. I use ethnographic observations during fieldwork in Jerusalem (2015) to work through the collective meanings of torture against Palestinian citizens as they crystallize in an artistic performance of the bodymind targeted by the maddening tactic of the state apparatus. My main argument as I bring in the Palestinian act of witnessing state terror is to offer the suggestion that the use of violence by the state targets the body in its capacity to unfurl the sensorial threads that ground us in the world and so allow us to weave a world one gesture at a time. But then, I also want to suggest that art, and in particular theater here as an embodied practice of presence-in-the-world, makes possible a lucid labour of witnessing the will of the state to break the creative relation between the senses and words, between one being and another (Rancière). My focus is on the operative work of witnessing the state deploying its will to terror as we are guided by the tactic of the actor using his body not as the surface of inscription and proof of pain but as the premise to induce an intercorporeal space for learning together how to respond to terror.

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Focusing on the daily politics towards organizing a popular referendum of independence in the Basque Country, the paper looks forward to contributing to reflect on the current state of the Anthropologies of the State and the relationships between state desire, prefigurative politics and sovereignty.

Paper Abstract:

After the formal ending of the armed conflict and the disbanding of ETA in 2018, the topic of Basque Independence has become a political fulcrum both to stigmatize all nationalisms and to favour new legal peaceful expressions of the rights to self-determination. By speaking of such rights, nationalist political parties and pro-independence social movements claim about the need of democratizing the Spanish state-kingdom institutions. Focusing on the daily politics devoted to organizing a popular referendum of independence based upon the ‘right to decide’, the paper looks forward to contributing to the anthropological study of the State and political activism. It departs from a brief discussion of tactics in political anthropology. Secondly, it examines how political engagement with sovereignty is currently experienced in the Basque Country. Third, it offers an argument on ‘Democractics’ as counter-intuitive heuristic to setting up alternative meanings of democracy and statehood. The paper is based on a long-term ethnography of contemporary grass-root mobilizations and the daily experience of the state in people's lives, driving them mad in encounters and material effects. It belongs to a wider project that aims to produce new anthropological insights about the relationships between state desire, prefigurative politics, and sovereignty by shedding light onto the banalization of ethnic/identity politics and political violence.