Working Mis/Understandings: The Tangled Relationship between Kinship, Franco-Malagasy Binational Marriages, and the French State

Cole, Jennifer

doi:10.14506/ca29.3.05

Cited by 44 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Much of the work of this past year examined the practices that make possible a sense of shared qualities across collective subjects. From issues of citizenship contorted by contestations around ethnicity, immigration, and displacement (Byrd 2014;Oka 2014;Shneiderman 2014;Thiranagama 2014) and revised understandings of relatedness across borders, through ancestral homes, and via fictive kin terms (Bovensiepen 2014;Cole 2014a;Nakassis 2014) to renegotiations of race and indigenous recognition within settler colonial contexts (Ives 2014a; Jacobsen-Bia 2014; Merlan 2014;Sturm 2014;Wroblewski 2014) and science as authority in ethnic belonging (Tamarkin 2014), as well as practice through which reflexive identity might be assembled (Droney 2014), articles this past year show the myriad ways a sense of communal immediacy might be built, be contested, or fail. Here too of note is a Current Anthropology special issue on Christianity, showcasing a variety of situations in which Christianity becomes the idiom through which immediacy across groups is expressed and contested (Robbins 2014).…”

Section: Immediacymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology

Hankins

2015

American Anthropologist

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In this essay, I trace the operations of a moral optimism and a skepticism that lie, uneasily, at the foundation of sociocultural anthropology. As other authors of year-in-review pieces have noted, anthropology is motivated by a moral optimism pointing toward the possibilities of an ethically and politically better life. Equally as fundamental, I argue, is a rigorous skepticism interrogating the shifting conditions that give life to anthropology's possibility. Here, I follow the productive tension between these two stances through the sociocultural anthropology of 2014, loosely grouping that work under the rubrics of "ends," "immediacy," "ecology," and "refusal." Throughout, I make a push for increased attention to our ethic of skepticism as means of tempering the discipline's moral optimism. [optimism, skepticism, immediacy, connection, year in review, sociocultural anthropology] RESUMENEn este ensayo, delineo las operaciones de un optimismo moral y un escepticismo que yacen, incómodamente, en la fundación de la antropología sociocultural. Como otros autores de los artyículos del año en revisión lo han notado, la antropología está motivada por un optimismo moral señalando hacia las posibilidades de una vidaética y políticamente mejor. Igualmente fundamental, argumento, es un escepticismo riguroso interrogando las condiciones cambiantes que dan vida a la posibilidad de la antropología. Aquí, sigo la tensión productiva entre estas dos posiciones a través de la antropología cultural del 2014, agrupando en líneas generales ese trabajo bajo las rúbricas de "fines", "inmediatez", "ecología", y "rechazo". A lo largo, presiono por una atención creciente a nuestraética de escepticismo, como un medio de temperar el optimismo moral de la disciplina. [optimismo, escepticismo, inmediatez, conexión, año en revisión, antropología sociocultural] ON SKEPTICISM AND OPTIMISMIn this essay, I review work in U.S. sociocultural anthropology from 2014. At the same time, I argue for attention to a skepticism that lies at the heart of our discipline, frequently overshadowed by the equally longstanding moral optimism that fuels our discipline's forward tilt. Michel de Montaigne begins his 16th-century essay "On the Cannibals" by questioning the chauvinistic tendency for anyone to call "barbarous anything he is not accustomed to" (1991:231). He argues, in counterpoint, for seeing the barbarism of the "we": "Those 'savages' are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit we

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Section: Immediacymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology

Hankins

2015

American Anthropologist

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“…By building on accounts of migrants’ encounters with the French state and bureaucracy, which often highlight their dispossession and racialized exclusion (Fassin ), I add another layer to the understanding of France's current situation, rooted in an ethnography of one migrant group's attachment to place and providing insight into how migration regulations are engrained in their experiences and strategies (cf. Cole ).…”

Section: Conclusion: Emplacement As Entitlementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fixed abodes: Urban emplacement, bureaucratic requirements, and the politics of belonging among West African migrants in Paris

Mbodj-Pouye

2016

American Ethnologist

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International audienceFoyers, housing facilities for male migrants, are well-known institutions of postcolonial France and critical nodes in West African migratory networks. A nationwide plan to renovate the foyers presents distinct challenges to the arrangements established by the generations of migrants who live in them, arrangements that have long sustained the social reproduction of transnational migration. In response, residents foreground their long-established presence in Paris to stake claims in the renovation process. Their stories of urban dwelling are punctuated by postal addresses, bureaucratic tokens of identification that play a pivotal role both in migrants’ historical imagination and in the administrative modes of granting residency rights. The foyers are sites of emplacement, albeit fragile, and spaces from which West African migrants contest their political exclusion in present-day Franc

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“…These representations have emerged in a period where marriage migration and family reunification are one of the few remaining legal avenues for transcontinental migration to France (Cole, 2014). Since March 2007, all women seeking to migrate as the spouses of French citizens need to pass an interview at the Embassy of their country of origin.…”

Section: Marriage Interviews: Securing Borders Through Suspicions Of mentioning

confidence: 99%