Assemblages of sovereignty and anti-sovereign effects on the Irish border

Abstract

Based on fi eldwork undertaken in [2004][2005], I analyze how the Irish border has been constructed, represented, challenged, and imagined by both the state and borderlanders as a means to discuss processes of constructing sovereignty. I focus on the concept of "assemblage" to integrate and highlight the tensions and contradictions between diff erent levels of analysis: the juridical, the academic representation of the border, and the memories and practices of borderlanders. I argue that sovereignty, rather than a claim to be taken at face value by states, is the emergent property of the combination of a variety of forces, forms, and practices involved in the making of borders, and that its very enactment also produces anti-sovereign eff ects.

Race and Process: Certifying IberianPigs and Invisibilising Humans

“…This folk distinction between the domestic and wild varieties, as though they were different species, can also be found in older zoological literature. In 1914, the Spanish zoologist (or more specifically mammologist) Angel Cabrera published his catalogue of Spanish mammals (Cabrera, 1914). In this work jabalíes and cerdos are separated according to the former being wild, the latter domesticated (and therefore in different sections of the book).…”