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Paper short abstract:

Based on the ethnography of an asylum seekers’ reception centre, this proposal suggests that what defines the camp form is not its spatial features but the state of infrastructural uncertainty that characterizes everyday life in asylum.

Paper long abstract:

Starting from an ethnographic vignette where an atypical use of the term camp appears, this paper aims to reflect on what defines the “camp form” (Rahola, 2006, p. 20) beyond its obvious spatial characteristics and where else its metamorphoses (Agamben, 1998) can be found. Such metamorphoses may assume different shapes (a house, a squat, a boat), take on different institutional statuses and still carry the ultimate feature of the camp: an indefinite state of suspension or infrastructural uncertainty. Such uncertainty translates into legal (transient administrative labels with their correspondent differential access to services and rights), spatial (regimes of forced mobility/immobility), temporal (lack of perspectives, waiting, stuckedness) and material terms (provisions policies designed to create dependence). It permeates the regime of state hospitality for asylum seekers, being hospitality understood here as a practice of sovereignty and control over the stranger and an expression of the moral superiority of the host, to whom the guest holds a subordinate position and a deep indebtedness. Ethnography reveals that, even when state hospitality takes the more humane appearance of private shelter apartments, as in the case study presented here, it still works as a “technology of care and control” (Malkki, 1992, p. 34). Therefore, it confirms the notion that the camp is “more than a structure or a physical space; it constitutes a set of methods” (Rozakou, 2012, p. 568). This proposal hypothesises that the production and maintenance of a state of infrastructural uncertainty in aid recipients are pivotal to the camp as a method.