Saana Hansen: The Price of Suffering? Monetary Compensation Claims for the Danish State’s Postcolonial Child Displacement in Greenland
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 48: 2.
This article explores how the cost of harm and suffering are measured and monetized in contemporary compensation claims for postcolonial child removals from Greenland to Denmark. I ask how painful past experiences can be translated into legal compensation claims and which forms of harm remain uncounted and, therefore, economically worthless. I draw on ethnographic material from two monetary reparation cases in the context of child displacement from Greenland to Denmark during the postcolonial modernity period. While monetary claims can mobilize payments to individuals for nonpecuniary damages employing a human rights framework and case law, doing so focuses on eventful, clear-cut moments where human rights are breached, silencing other lived experiences and the complex production of harm. However, I argue that the state might prioritize compensation precisely because of these limitations and out-of-court settlements to avoid public and international attention. Although money can never fully compensate for what has been lost, the compensation process can provide to claimants their first official recognition and concrete words to talk about the previously unspoken past.
Saana Hansen: Economies of care and the politics of death among Zimbabwean returnees from South Africa
Anthropology Southern Africa, 47:4, 359-373.
This article explores how Zimbabwe’s prolonged politico-economic crisis and large-scale migration to South Africa have impacted care practices surrounding transnational death. Focusing on the repatriation of dying and deceased injivas (low-income migrants from Matabeleland), it examines how return migrants and their social networks seek to maintain social continuity amid economic and legal challenges, highlighting the importance of injivas returning home before they die, and the ways that the economic cost of dying is managed. Furthermore, while much has been written about African burial rituals and state involvement, this article demonstrates how intimate death-related care intertwines with economic realities, state documentation, cross-border practices and the political economies of migration. Specifically, I investigate how injivas, their kin, peers and authorities manage issues of “(un) documentedness” and ambiguous legal identities for safe passage to the afterlife, with frontline state agents, such as immigration officers, balancing formal procedures with local moral understanding of belonging and care.
Sofía Ugarte: Cuidar y Ser Responsable. Maternidad migrante y políticas reproductivas en Chile.
In: Maternidades: Desafíos actuales de género, familia y fertilidad, edited by Martina Yopo Díaz (Fondo de Cultura Económica).
Para mujeres haitianas que viven y trabajan en Santiago, estar embarazadas de un bebé con derecho a la nacionalidad chilena implica el reconocimiento institucional de sus cuerpos maternos y la transformación de quiénes son y cómo se cuidan a sí mismas y a otros como migrantes, trabajadoras y madres en Chile. Este capítulo utiliza material etnográfico para examinar cómo la legitimación moral del cuerpo embarazado genera nuevas formas de agencia entre trabajadoras migrantes racializadas que se convierten en madres. El argumento central del capítulo es que la encarnación (embodiment) de discursos institucionales de responsabilidad y autocuidado (self-care) transforma las subjetividades de mujeres migrantes embarazadas como madres trabajadoras, en la medida que éstas buscan reconciliar las contradicciones que conlleva ser parte de la economía global y de la reproducción de la nación. Las experiencias de maternidad migrante muestran cómo las políticas de género y reproducción sexual permiten la aparición de formas de ser y de cuidar que exponen las discordancias inherentes al crear vidas y realizar la vida misma. Por medio del análisis de las trayectorias de vida y subjetividades migrantes, el capítulo aterriza los significados del cuidado y la reproducción social para contribuir a la comprensión de las desigualdades en torno al trabajo reproductivo y cuidados que realizan mujeres racializadas en Chile.
Petra Ezzeddine and Zuzana Uhde: Borderscapes of Care in Europe. The Case of Czech Live-in Care Workers in Germany.
This chapter presents an analysis of the lived experiences of Czech cross-border care workers who work in Germany in live-in care for seniors. It uses the analytical lens of borderscapes of care, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, the borderscapes of care became a microcosm of the social reproductive contradictions of capitalism. The chapter analyses how the cross-border care market is reflected in the lived experiences of live-in care workers and how their experiences have been affected by pandemic restrictions since early 2020. The authors articulate the care workers’ lived critique as an analytical translation of their interpretation of the negative aspects of 24-hour live-in care work, wherein a link is made between the micro dynamic of social relations in their clients’ homes, the mezzo dynamic of states’ social and labour policies and the macro dynamic of the symbolic and economic inequalities between states that are embedded in global economic structures.
Special Issue: Documents, State Affects, and Imaginings at Times of Bureaucratic Impasse.
= The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 43 (1), edited by Rosa Sansone and Letizia Bonanno.
Drawing on scholarly discussions on bureaucracy and the anthropology of the state as a relational setting, alongside scholarship that positions affect as central to understanding the political realm, this special issue examines the state as a simultaneous focal point of affective and imaginative investment. We do so by looking at how a variety of documents – whether produced, concealed, kept on hold, discarded, recycled, demanded, missed, lost, found, or circulated within and beyond public and private bureaucracies – both crystallise and evoke (non)citizens’ imaginings of the state and affective investments in it. Expanding their ethnographic scope beyond state bureaucracies, the articles in this special issue offer ethnographically nuanced accounts of how the non-linear workings of private and public bureaucracies – and their ambiguous relations to the state and their fragmented temporalities – create political, affective, temporal and imaginative reorientations in both bureaucrats and (non)citizens vis-à-vis states. We show how affects and imaginings of the state typically emerge from ‘bureaucratic impasses’: temporary stalemates in which both users and bureaucrats strive to understand and interpret, adjust and attune to bureaucratic rules and demands.
Contributions by CaSt members: