Utrecht Universiteit
2022/2023
202100016 Politieke Antropologie: Macht, Politiek en de Staat
Literatuur Samenvatting
- Nummers na zinnen refereren naar paginanummers
- Schuingedrukte zinnen zijn directe quotes vanuit literatuur
Literature week 1
Humphris, Rachel. 2019. Home-Land: Romanian Roma, Domestic Spaces and the State.
Global Migration and Social Change. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. Introductie en
hoofdstuk 1, pp. 1-40.
INTRODUCTION
Book explores how new migrant families became known as ‘Romanian Roma’ and how they
made a home in the UK ‘without access to anything’ (2)
Most importantly for this book, this lens had implications for the space where interactions
with local state actors took place. Local state actors undertook home visits because these had
become the established response to engage with families identified as ‘Roma’. In particular,
this book focuses on how migrants’ life chances rested on frontline workers’ judgements of
‘good motherhood’ from within migrants’ own homes (Humphris, 3).
These visits were crucial because they were often the only site where families could
negotiate their legal statuses
High stake encounters between Romanian Roma mothers and frontline service providers
because welfare requirements and immigration controls have become entwined in the UK
- Migrants face ‘internal borders’
Book builds on queer and gender scholars
- Line between us and them is most fundamentally drawn in intimate sphere
Role of Brexit for migrants and rules surrounding immigration
Families in the book are identified as Romanian Roma by local state actors (4)
- However, some use different categories to describe themselves
Romanian Roma did not have a community organization where they could receive support in
Luton (5)
Impeded ability to organize and work together as in identifiable community group due to:
- Avoidance of others
- Limited communication between different families
, - Awareness of historical devaluing of the imposed identification of Roma/Gypsy
- Some are illiterate or low literate
- Complicated legal statuses
Further particularity of Roma migrants, they do not have a home-land (6)
Existence of Roma children is difficult in legal sphere (7, 8)
Home visits could be dangerous for mothers because they opened the possibility that their
child could be assessed as ‘unsafe’. However, home visits also provided mothers with the
opportunity to gain information about their legal statuses and the regulations that governed
their residency in the UK (Humphris, 8).
Home visits are often only contact with state actors
One of the main concerns of this book is to pay close attention to everyday experiences to
reveal how assumptions based on race and gender differences led to, and played out in,
home encounters, what this meant for migrants’ everyday lives, and how Romanian Roma
were able to make a home, and feel at home, under these conditions (Humphris, 8).
Meaning and experience of home has been increasingly researched in different disciplines
The concept of home is unquestionably linked to identity, memory, structures of feeling,
space, scales and intensities of affiliation, and material objects. However, the emphasis on
the way that people make their homes can overshadow the ways that places also shape
people, particularly in situations of unequal power. Feelings of home are mediated by feelings
of control over physical space and this is structured beyond immediate social relationships
(Humphris, 9).
Issue of being in control is central to feeling at home
- Dichotomy hospitality and hostility
This can be linked to debates surrounding migration, belonging and citizenship
- Citizenship as political belonging (10)
My focus and aim in this book is to explore how the nation-state is reproduced within the
geographical home space, and the consequences this has for state theory (Humphris, 10).
Anthropological starting point sees the state not as a homogeneous entity, but as something
that emerges through everyday processes and is embedded in everyday lives
- State as discursive construction
This book focusses on interactions within the home (11)
- Thus are characterized by intimacy and relations of power and hierarchy
- Significance of the home encounter
,This book brings together the literature on street-level bureaucracy, relational encounters
and racialized motherhood through the notion of intimate state encounter to fill these gaps
(Humphris, 12).
The governance of intimacy through uncertainty runs throughout the book. The main
argument is that the governance of marginality takes place through intimate state
encounters creating spaces of indeterminacy, uncertainty and confusion. Such confusion
allows frontline workers to maintain a coherent moral standpoint while enacting painful acts
of exclusion, and thus also maintain their belief in the liberal promise of the state that
provides protection to those who need it. Crucially, governance through uncertainty allows
sentiment to overtake rights, depoliticising and pacifying those on the edges (Humphris, 12).
To make this argument, two concepts are used:
- Belonging and care
The aim of this book is to show how the politics of belonging and legal rights are made up in
relations to other forms of social membership and practices of belonging within the home
(Humphris, 13).
Book opens up new questions about citizenship, migration and belonging (16)
- Right to belong has come to rest on the judgement of everyday routines in the
domestic space
- Links everyday actions in the home to the ethical and political value systems with
which migrants are judged to belong
Book also reflects on the governance of intimacy and term ‘intimate state encounters’ (17)
Book can help readers to consider meanings of home, how to make and feel at home. And
also how marginalization operates to constrict the spaces of home.
CHAPTER 1 – HOME TRUTHS: FIELDWORK, WRITING AND ANTHOPOLOGY’S ‘HOME
ENCOUNTER’
Talking about uniqueness of ethnographic fieldwork (20)
- Only one perspective of the situation
- Use of different techniques
Use of term ‘encounter’ to explain social phenomena (21)
- One of the things from this book, home encounters
Notion of encounter helps to explain participation and positionality during fieldwork (22)
- Researcher occupied many different positions, some chosen and some not
Throughout the 14 months I lived with families I observed a large variety of encounters with
a number of frontline workers. These encounters took place most frequently between new
migrant mothers and female service providers within mothers’ domestic spaces (Humphris,
23)
, Mothering emerged as the most important site through which new migrants could negotiate
their legal rights in the UK (Humphris, 23).
Drawing from this, the encounter as a methodology can be seen as a way to start from the
negotiations and actions between migrants and others, rather than from an institutional
perspective and an endeavor to undertake an intersectional perspective (Humphris, 24).
Use of movement in certain spaces and in the movement to different spaces
Reflection on the colonial encounter and position of anthropologist to make knowledge (25)
Issue of methodology regarding Humphris position during interactions between migrants and
frontline workers (26)
- For example being seen as British thus participating in translating things
Explaining why Luton was chosen as the site of research (27-29)
Humphris moved from different families in Luton, staying in each family for a couple months
(31)
- Cristina and Dan Georgeta and Rosvan Violeta and her children
- Situation was different in every family (32)
Role of Humphris changed according to the perception of others and also in context with the
same person (33)
First intention of research was to explore how migrants made place including their
interactions with frontline workers, later this evolved into more focus on female domestic
routines (34)
- Home encounters between Romanian Roma mothers and (mostly female) frontline
workers
Field of inquiry was on the policies and practices that were enacted on and through frontline
workers and migrants (35)
From the outset, the aim of the research, that of exploring how migrants negotiate to make
place in a rapidly changing urban location, continuously generated novel situations that
required me to reflect ethically on my role and research (Humphris, 36).
Difficulty of informed consent (37)
- Use of various tactics to make research process clear to participants
Koster, Martijn. 2021. Political anthropology. In: The SAGE Handbook of Cultural
Anthropology, edited by L. Pedersen & L. Cliggett, 330-347. London: SAGE.
Anthropologists have studied politics and the political. Main contribution to the field lies in
the study of things related to power and inequality (330)
