1st Edition
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia
264 Pages
by
Routledge
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities examines how legality and other sources of authority intersect in the regulation of human mobility. The book focuses on the ethnographic exploration of the experiences and views of mobile subjects in the vast and rapidly changing continent of Asia. The contributors analyze tensions between the letter of the law and social legitimation, territorial... Read more
List of Tables, Maps, Figures and Photographs, Acknowledgements, Introduction Mobile Practices and Regimes of Permissiveness 1 Illegality Rules Chinese Migrant Workers Caught Up in the Illegal but Licit Operations of Labour Migration Regimes, 2 Contesting the State of Exception in the Afghan-Pakistani Marchlands, 3 ‘Looking for a Life’ Rohingya Refugee Migration in the Post-Imperial Age 4 Smuggling Cultures in the Indonesia-Singapore Borderlands, 5 Trade, Transnationalism and Ethnic Infighting Borders of Authority in Northeast Borneo, 6 Bamboo Baskets and Barricades Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh border, 7 Moving between Kerala and Dubai Women Domestic Workers, State Actors and the Misrecognition of Problems, 8 Emigration of Female Domestic Workers from Kerala Gender, State Policy and the Politics of Movement, 9 Mainland Chinese Migrants in Taiwan, 1895-1945 The Drawbacks of Being Legal, 10 ‘Playing Edge Ball’ Transnational Migration Brokerage in China, Epilogue Irregular Mobilities and Disjunctive Moralities, About the Editors and Contributors, Bibliography, Index.
Biography
Barak Kalir is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He is Co-Director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, and Director of the Master Programme in Contemporary Asian Studies. Malini Sur received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2012 and is a fellow at the University of Toronto in Fall 2012.
By foregrounding the negotiations that lie at the intersection of competing political and social authorities, this volume radically transforms conventional meanings of sovereignty. By separating legality from order, rules from rule, legitimacy from power, and, illegality from crime, we encounter gendered and national state effects that take shape in startling and counter-intuitive ways. The complex relation of human movement to subjectivity becomes the common axis for fine-grained empirical essays that range across Asia, from the Persian Gulf to India, from Israel to China. -- Itty Abraham, National University of Singapore
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities is a must-read volume exploring the subtle connections among human mobility, uneven state regulations, and complex transnational practices that enrich and challenge relationships and identities in ways rarely imagined. -- David Kyle, Executive Director of the Gifford Center for Population Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Davis
By foregrounding the negotiations that lie at the intersection of competing political and social authorities, this volume radically transforms conventional meanings of sovereignty. By separating legality from order, rules from rule, legitimacy from power, and, illegality from crime, we encounter gendered and national state effects that take shape in startling and counter-intuitive ways. The complex relation of human movement to subjectivity becomes the common axis for fine-grained empirical essays that range across Asia, from the Persian Gulf to India, from Israel to China. - Itty Abraham, National University of Singapore
