Crossing borders, changing identities? Travel documents, money and personhood

ir/relevance of race seminar with Apostolos Andrikopoulos

Lecture

This talk will question what it means to be a citizen as a person and the way the state establishes its relation with its subjects - in particular, how documentation affects processes of kinship.

Kinship and citizenship

In social theory, kinship and citizenship have been theorized as the main political institutions of traditional and modern societies, respectively. In societies organized on the basis of kinship and exchange, persons have been seen as embedded in webs of social relations. In contractual societies, the welfare state and impersonal economic transactions presumably generate autonomous and independent individuals. 

The Western individual

Although the consideration of personhood in non-western stateless societies has been based on ethnographic studies of everyday life, the notion of the Western individual is grounded in the study of discourses and ideals. In the last few decades, anthropologists shifted the regional focus of the study of kinship and started doing fieldwork in the west. Paradoxically, these studies generally do not pay close attention to the role of the state and the market in the constitution of kinship and personhood.

Identity documents and personhood

The talk will analyze how the relation between an identity document and a person is established especially during border crossings when personhood and state membership is controlled and contested by immigration authorities.

About the lecturer

Apostolos Andrikopoulos is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His dissertation examines how legally unauthorised West African migrants use, or even make, kinship to access resources that they are  excluded from (international mobility, registered employment, citizenship). He has done multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, Ghana and Greece.

About the Seminar Series 

In this seminar series the relevance and irrelevance of race is being discussed as an object and concept of research in order to explore ways to talk about race without naturalizing differences. The series goes beyond a standard definition of race, one that  is allegedly relevant everywhere, and situates race in specific practices of research.

In addition the series gives room to the various different versions of race that can be found in the European context and explores when and how populations, religions, and  cultures become naturalized and racialized. Scholars from different (inter)disciplinary fields (such as genetics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, history, political sciences, science and technology studies) are invited to address the issue of race  through a paper presentation. The seminar is held every six weeks at the University of Amsterdam. Webpage Seminar Series

Published by  AISSR