Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in lower criminal courts and in one unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office in Santiago, Chile, I explore the way in which criminal offenses considered flagrant are treated by the Chilean criminal justice system. Citing the literature on legal technicalities, I describe how flagrant criminal offenses are constructed through practices that make it possible for the actors involved to avoid directly referring to the alleged facts. From their identification on the streets by police officers to their reassignment to a different unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office or their adjudication at a criminal court, flagrant criminal offenses are defined by a specific way of approaching the alleged facts, which is translated into specific organizational and documentary practices. The role of these practices contrasts with the apparently marginal role that the detention in flagrante delicto plays in the mechanics of criminal law. As a technicality, the flagrant character of a criminal offense conveys certain epistemological assumptions about how to determine what happened and what exactly constitutes the criminal offense. More specifically, it conveys assumptions about what cannot, for the moment, be known and that can, therefore, be ignored throughout the bureaucratic and judicial process.
Recent scholarly work in the social sciences has engaged with the concept of hospitality in order to explore immigration dynamics, especially in relation to the situation of asylum-seekers. As an ambivalent concept, it captures the tension between, on the one hand, the act of hosting and welcoming foreigners and, on the other, controlling their entry. In this article, I reflect on the relevance of this concept for the study of the bureaucratic process of selecting qualified immigrants in Quebec, which aims to identify those future ‘skilled’ immigrants who would be most likely to integrate, both culturally and economically. These migrants, far from being unwanted, constitute the core of the federal and provincial immigration policies and the main mechanism through which a foreigner could obtain permanent residency in Canada. Through a fictional narrative based on my fieldwork with permanent residents living in Montreal, I show how the immigration selection system works in practice. Applied to the case of selected immigrants, the concept of hospitality forces us to distinguish practices from national discourses.
I reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile became a question of bureaucratic knowledge and official documents. Through the analysis of COVID-19 permits, the tool implemented by the Chilean government in order to manage mobility in zones under lockdown, I focus on two features of documents: their denotational properties and their performative marginality. I argue that COVID-19 permits in Chile functioned as an “anti-document.” While they did not establish stable and meaningful connections with individuals’ daily lives, they produced a series of considerable effects on them, the most tangible of these effects probably being the detention and criminal prosecution of individuals caught on the street without the appropriate permit. In contrast with how documents participate in socio-legal configurations – being a means to an end – COVID-19 permits were central to the implementation of the confinement policy.
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