Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I read Afghan crossings into Europe as bricolage in Lévi-Strauss's structural sense: craft exercised with signs whose meanings administrative power fixed in advance. I argue that crossing is the management of one's own readability in the breakdowns of the apparatus, at unequal cost across bodies.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I read the border-crossings of precarious Afghan travellers as a form of practical bricolage, recovering the structural sense Claude Lévi-Strauss gave the term against the resourcefulness register in migration scholarship. From Lévi-Strauss's perspective, the bricoleur works with a stock that is closed at the moment of the task, and its elements arrive pre-constrained by their prior uses. At the border, however, that pre-constraint has an author. The meanings sedimented in a passport or a fingerprint are laid down by administrative power rather than by diffuse prior use. For this reason, the engineer/bricoleur pair, untenable as a description of two intellects, returns here as a relation of positions. On one side stands a regime that performs transparent categories and purpose-built instruments; on the other, a crosser who must treat the performance as true while making do, by necessity rather than inclination, with whatever signs remain workable. Drawing on life-history interviews with Afghans whose trajectories ran from Iran into the European asylum system, I argue that bricolage at the border is the management of one's own readability at the points where the regime stops to read. The craft works in the gaps and breakdowns of the apparatus, and it takes its shape from the irreversible acts the system imposes. Crossings fail even when well assembled, and success have its own bodily and psychic costs, so my account resists celebration. The materials of readability, finally, are unequally distributed across bodies, and the body's visible surface is the hardest to rework.