“Land of Open Graves”: Chapters 1-3
1) What is ‘prevention through deterrence’?
-”a strategy that largely relies on rugged and desolate terrain to impede the flow of people from the south” (5)
-”placing heightened security in and around the downtown port of entry in El Paso, would force undocumented migrants to attempt crossings in more rural areas that were easier for law enforcement to monitor...this initial strategy...was soon adopted as a part of a new federal project.” (31)
-”made immigration less visible [to the U.S. public] and created a scenario in which the policing of undoc. people occurred in areas with few witnesses.”
likely increased the chances of undoc. migrants being victims of physical violence by border agents
2) Describe the author’s ‘four-field’ approach and method.
-”ethnography, archeology, forensic science, and linguistics”
-”intended to challenge the preconceived notions about what a holistic anthropology can look like and hot it can be deployed in politically hostile terrain”
wide-scope of methods/feild makes “employment” not only more flexible, and therefore more adept at responding to “political hostility,” but also more sound as research in and of itself.
3) What does the author mean by the phrase ‘modern border industrial complex’?
-network or assemblage of private and government entitites, who work together, to deter immigrants from entering the country
-modern meaning: “this book abruptly starts in 1993, the year that the policy later coined ‘Prevention Through Deterrence’ was first deployed.” (5)
also “everything changed, though, after the passage of...NAFTA in 1994.” (6)
4) Describe the undocumented migrant project. Why was it created?
-started with archeological methods, and then branched out from there,
mostly focused on use of technology and the “economic system that undergirds clandestine migration” (11)
-”few scholars or journalists had attempted to write carefully about the physical movement involved in unauthorized migration” (11)
5) How does the author utilize ‘structural violence’ and ‘sideways glances’?
[separate post]
1) How does the author utilize Agamben’s theory of the ‘state of exception’?
-”the process whereby sovereign authorities declare emergencies in order to suspend the legal protections afforded to individuals while simultaneously unleashing the power of the state upon them” (27)
-points out a contradiction in the application of state force
-originally applied to concentration camps
-Does being subject to “spaces of exception,” make those people “subaltern” relative to those not in those spaces?
2) How does the author utilize the theoretical notion of ‘bare life’?
-If the definition of “bare life” is “individuals whose deaths are of little consequence,” is it also fitting to describe them as subaltern in a U.S context? If they are usually “do the jobs that most people are unwilling or don;t want to do,” then how disposable are they? Is it the scale of impoverished migrants, mostly informed by a exported, Disneyfied culture of what America beholds for them. (64)
3) How is the desert considered a ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victimizer’?
-US Dep’t of Homeland Security Pamphlet which was posted inside migrant shelter read “‘The next time you try to cross the border without documents you could end up a victim of the desert’...wording of the pamphlet personified the sert as a perpetrator of violence targeting migrants” (29)
-”providing this federal agency with plausible deniability regarding blame for any victims the desert may claim” (30)
- Tucson police chief declaring that “the desert does not discriminate” (43)
1) How does the author use the theoretical notions of the ‘hybrid colectif’ and ‘actants’?
-”agency is an emergent property crated by the interaction of many heterogeneous componets known as actants, sources of action that may be human or nonhuman”
-”people or objects don’t act in isolation, but instead have complex relationships at different moments across time and space that sometimes create things or make things happen” (39)
-”’agency as performative’” (39)
-cartesian division between Border Patrol, desert/natural environment, and migrants
2) How does the author describe the ‘Sonoran hybrid collectif’ through the ‘semifictionalized ethnography’ of the migrant journey in this chapter?
-semi ethnofiction defined as “‘restructuring of events occurring within one or more ethnographic investigations into a single narrative” (43-44)
-as a political tool which is used by humans but also acts back upon humans, although it does so politically
3) How does the author ‘contaminate’ prevention through deterrence?
-using semifictionalized ethnography which supports his claim about PTD: “PTD should thus be thought of as a perpetual motion machine started by the Border Patrol and powered by other politically implicated actants” (61)
-showing how Border Patrol has “intentionally set the stage so that other actants can do most of the brutal work” (61)
1) How does the author use the notion of ‘multispecies ethnography’ to demonstrate the elements of the ‘intimate connection’ he is attempting to describe in the desert?
-multispecies ethnography means focus on animals’ role
-”lives and deaths of humans and nonhumans are closely intertwined and jointly shaped by cultural, economic, and political forces.” (64)
-tries to “complicate the concept of biopolitics” (64)
-compares the desert to a slaughterhouse, as both are “‘zones of confinement’” which conceal processes of violence (done to both labor and animals)
2) How does the author use Mdembe’s theoretical notion of ‘necropolitics’ and ‘necroviolence’?
-criticizes biopower for being too general
-tries to take Foucault’s concept of biopower and “account for the specific ways that death and the right to kill (or let live) are exercised in contemporary forms of political power” (66)
-”increasingly, the political is masked as war, security, or the battle against terror” (66)
-necropolitics can be defined as “killing in the name of sovereignty” (66-67)
-”’the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in power and the capacity to dictate who may live and die’” (67)
-desert and selective policing of border used as primary tool which results in this necropolitics
-”necroviolence: violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses that is perceived to be offensive,sacrilegious, or inhumane by the perpetrator, the victim (and her or his cultural group), or both.” (69)
-n.v. different from n.p. because n.v. is focused on treatment post-mortem, even though n.v is still a “deeply political act,” which suggests overlap of meanings in the author's’ context (71)
-during war, nv. is “practically a cultural universal” (69)
-because n.v. often erases the physical body, it often “allows the perpetrators of violence plausible deniability” (71)
-n.v. has a deep history in colonial projects worldwide (69-71)
3) What are the elements of a ‘desert taphonomy’ and the cathartes aura?
-taphonomy defined as “the science of the postmortem process” (72)
-”taphonomy is a social process” (73)
-turkey vultures are cathartes aura (75)
-”this constant physical movement and destruction of body parts and personal effects suggest that with enough time, a person left to rot on the ground can disappear completely” (81)
-”the vultures eating flesh and ripping clothes represent the final stage of ‘deterrence’ that emerges from this hybrid collectif” (84)
4) How does the author describe ‘necroviolence’ in relation to the ‘deathscapes’ of the desert?
-”nature sanitizes the killing floor” (83)
-describing necroviolence to the desert, makes violence visible that is often hidden, and how this necroviolence has political motivations and results, making it a part of a larger necropolitics (84)