What does it mean for Kyrgyzstani migrant workers in contemporary Russia to be legally legible to the state when informal agencies market fictive residency documents and “clean fake” work permits? Examining the uncertainty around being authentically documented provides insight into a mode of governance in urban Russia that thrives less on rendering subjects legible than on working the space of ambiguity between life and law. This dynamic has significant social consequences for the way certain bodies come to be scrutinized as particularly untrustworthy, particularly liable to fakery, and, thus, particularly legitimate targets for document checks, fines, and threats of deportation. The ambiguity with which migrants are forced to live highlights the need to explore how documentary regimes, structures of feeling, and racializing practices coincide.

Drawing on ethnographic and survey data, Madeleine Reeves explores the meanings and impact of large-scale seasonal labor migration to Russia on a group of four kin-related villages in southern Kyrgyzstan. Although remittances have come to figure centrally in domestic budgets of migrant families, it is to questions of political economy that we must turn to understand the shift away from small-scale farming toward migrant work. Reeves examines a range of factors mediating decisions to migrate, including the role of social networks and sibling hierarchies; the emergence of growing economic differentials between migrant and nonmigrant households, and the growing importance for young men of a period of work “in town” (shaarda) in proving their eligibility for marriage. Although patterns of economic activity in southern Kyrgyzstan have changed dramatically in recent years, Reeves argues that new forms of engagement in distant labor markets are also being used to sustain patterns of ritual gifting and expressions of ethnic and religious identity that are imagined and articulated precisely as expressions of social continuity.

Introductioǹ`M ight it turn out'', asks Michael Taussig in The Nervous System, that``not the Being nor the ideologies of the centre, but the fantasies of the marginated concerning the secret of the centre are what is most politically important to the State idea and hence State fetishism?'' (1992, page 32). This paper draws on ethnographic research from a mountainous region of post-Soviet Central Asian borderland to explore how a particular dimension of that``state idea''öof the state as properly`integral'öcame to matter and be mattered by border villagers at a time of political crisis. (1) Through this analysis I seek to bring the critical interrogation of`territorial integrity' that has emerged in recent geographical scholarship into conversation with an anthropological literature on the state. Two broad claims underlie this approach. The first is the need to bring an ethnographic optic öfocused on what people do as well as what they sayöto discussions of territoriality within political geography. Whilst the tendency to treat state spatiality as a given has rightly been interrogated in recent critical scholarship, less attention has been paid to the ways in which normative ideas of state territoriality circulate in everyday life, animating the claims and actions, fears and fantasies of ordinary peopleöincluding in sometimes violently performative ways. The second claim concerns the eclipse of`territory' from contemporary anthropological writing on politics. Territory has remained undertheorised in political anthropology, I suggest, in part because of a tendency to equate globalisation with deterritorialisation'. Proportionately greater attention has accordingly been dedicated

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