traveller an auto ethnography of borders

'Illegal' Traveller

An Auto-Ethnography of Borders

• © 2010
• Shahram Khosravi 0

Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden

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Part of the book series: Global Ethics (GLOETH)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

Shahram Khosravi

Accustomed Soil

Border guards and border people, the community of displacement, the invisible border, homelessness, the right to have rights, back matter.

• ethnography

About this book

"Shahram Khosravi's new book, 'Illegal' Traveller is really powerful and rich. One of the gems for me is the way the author clarifies the networks of migration from several perspectives. There are so many facets: the loneliness of making one's way alone and defenseless except for trying to keep one's wits; the political economies of the networks of smuggling at the lower levels; the human rights indignities of being stateless and vulnerable to rape, violence, extortion, and disappointment; and the ways in which small time smugglers also are liable to bankruptcy and inability always to calculate the margins. Also of course, the descriptions of the author's family as mid level khans with open houses both in Isfahan and Bakhtiari country, and the alienation of being Bakhtiari in Isfahan. Also the descriptions of Defense Colony in Delhi (the American Institute of Indian Studies has a house there) and the Topkapi area of Istanbul, places I have inhabited as well, albeit under very different circumstances. The minority experiences with the resonances that are invoked from Kafka, Benjamin, and the comparative references from the southern border of the U.S. (migrants from Mexico and Central America) as well as the borders around Fortress Europe make the book a cartography of the contemporary world, one that is only gradually being taken seriously by analysts as something quite other than an aberration."

- Michael M. J. Fischer, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities, Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies

"The little-seen and personal perspective that is presented in Illegal traveller not only offers new empirical insights on human smuggling as a process, but also addresses the emotional aspects of the process of 'illegal' migration which hardly ever emerge in academic writing...Illegal traveller with its particular perspective on smugglers, which goes beyond state-defined categories of who and what is defined tobe criminal, is a welcome contribution to the debate about 'illegal' migration from a side of the story that is too often ignored, but in need of telling."

- Ilse van Liempt, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Urban Geography at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

'A moving, original and profound meditation on borders and illegality [...] Combining analysis with personal anecdotes and biographical vignettes [...] Khosravi combines intellectual distance with irony, wit and passion and never loses his ability to relate the particular to the general.' - Matt Carr, Race & Class

'Illegal Traveller is a very welcome addition to the literature on migration and it can be recommended to all whose interests go beyond traditional approaches.' - Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

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Book Title : 'Illegal' Traveller

Book Subtitle : An Auto-Ethnography of Borders

Authors : Shahram Khosravi

Series Title : Global Ethics

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281325

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan London

eBook Packages : Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies Collection , Political Science and International Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2010

Hardcover ISBN : 978-0-230-23079-8 Published: 14 April 2010

Softcover ISBN : 978-0-230-33674-2 Published: 14 April 2010

eBook ISBN : 978-0-230-28132-5 Published: 14 April 2010

Series ISSN : 2947-8847

Series E-ISSN : 2947-8855

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : X, 150

Topics : International Relations , Development Studies , Political Sociology , Ethnography , Anthropology , Social Structure, Social Inequality

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'Illegal' Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders

Shahram khosravi.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published April 14, 2010

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'Illegal' Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders

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Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders

New directions in exploring the migration industries: introduction to special issue, beyond the border: clandestine migration journeys, re-routing migration geographies: migrants, trajectories and mobility regimes, migration, vehicles, and politics three theses on viapolitics, the practice of everyday life, homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, on the move: mobility in the modern western world, refugees and exile: from "refugee studies" to the national order of things, related papers (5), migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life, border as method, or, the multiplication of labor, ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography, the origins of totalitarianism.

The ‘illegal’ traveller

An auto‐ethnography of borders*.

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Borders of nation‐states have come to be a natural order in human lives. They are not only edges of a state but also seen as an essential reference of national identity. Based on a capitalist‐oriented and racial discriminating way of thinking, borders regulate movements of people. In an era of global inequality of mobility rights, freedom of mobility for some is only possible through systematic exclusion of others. This paper is an auto‐ethnography of borders and ‘illegal’ travelling. Based on personal experiences of a long journey across many borders in Asia and Europe, I attempt to explore how the contemporary border regime operates. The paper focuses on the rituals and performances of border crossing. This is a narrative of the late 20th century through the eyes of an ‘illegal’ migrant.

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Etnográfica

Revista do Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia

Início Números vol. 17 (1) Recensões Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Trave...

Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders

Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 160 pages, ISBN: 978-0-230-23079-8.

Texto integral

1 To say that Khosravi’s “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders is a book about border crossing is an understatement. This is a book about sensory and embodied experiences of borders from different standpoints, where current debates on the regulation of human mobility are approached through the author’s own.

2 Auto-ethnographies have often been criticised for being too emotional and unscientific, but in fact the value of an auto-ethnography is indeed in its ability to convey to the reader the emotional experiences of the author who is simultaneously the ethnographer and his own research participant, if you will. This book is not a biography and it is certainly not to be taken as a novel. It is an ethnography in its true meaning. Ethnographic data is presented, rich empirical insights are provided, pertinent questions are raised, analysis is discussed and points are argued. In his introduction, Khosravi advocates the usefulness of auto-ethnography to “explore abstract concepts of policy and law and translate them into cultural terms grounded in everyday life” (p. 5). I contend that the author has managed to do so successfully by relating his own border narrative, and those of his informants, to the relevant academic literature, particularly in a discussion of the regulation of human mobility through the nation-state system.

3 The book is divided into nine main sections, encompassing an introduction, seven chapters and a coda. It further contains an appendix detailing the destinations of the migrants we come to know throughout the book, i. e. Khosravi’s co-travellers, and a preface that marks the issues to be dealt with through the description of two separate events: the author’s own step into illegality at the Iran/Afghanistan border, and the suicide of an Iranian asylum seeker in a Swedish detention centre about 20 years later. Thus the book commences. Chapter 1, “Accustomed soil”, sets the stage for the author’s own migration experience and journey into illegality. Here Khosravi is an Iranian young man, driven into a clandestine existence (to avoid certain death at war) much before he decided to flee the country. In this chapter the author highlights elements of choice in contexts of “forced” migration, refusing analyses that portray migrants as destitute of agency.

4 The following two chapters discuss issues of migrant illegality. Chapter 2, “Border guards and border people”, explores the author’s attempts to exit Iran and his life as an illegal migrant in Pakistan, in transit to the West. His personal narrative is intertwined with reflections on the border, sacrifice, and the dehumanisation of border crossers. It is in Pakistan that Khosravi has his first asylum interview hearing prompting him to discuss matters of rights: while the law was available to him and others in similar circumstances, it was not accessible to them. From this chapter on the reader is introduced to, and gets acquainted with, the people who formed part of his journey: a series of individuals from varying backgrounds and positions who challenge stereotypical impersonations of the drug dealer, the human smuggler, the border guard, and the undocumented migrant. Chapter 3, “The community of displacement”, addresses the perils and dangers of fleeing to the West. These are coupled with the generosity and hospitality of many strangers the author encounters along his way – the importance of social networks and religion in the migration process are noted. Here Khosravi discusses too the arbitrariness of the illegal journey; how often the end destination, the routes, and experiences of border crossing are the result more of chance rather than choice. It is upon arrival in Sweden that Khosravi is made to feel shame over his illegality. The author ends the chapter emphasising how intensely the border can be felt. He becomes an asylum seeker subjected to questioning and surveillance.

5 In Chapter 4, “The invisible border”, the author’s standpoint changes once again, this time from “asylum seeker” into “refugee”. Here the issues of hospitality are grounded in a discussion of the invisible borders – the borders of the mind, elusive, unreachable, impossible to cross. The author’s account of his own experience and that of his informants as refugees and asylum seekers in Sweden reveals how invisible borders work to prevent the “unwanted” from belonging. Even if they have been formally included, the “unwanted migrant” is forever a guest, a stranger in the domain of his host.

6 In Chapter 5, “Homelessness”, Khosravi returns to Iran to visit his family. His encounter with a young undocumented Afghan couple in his hometown makes him question the conceptualisation of the host/guest divide and its powerful rootedness in citizenship. Feeling alienated (not at home in Iran, not at home in Sweden) Khosravi discusses homelessness as a paradigm and a lifestyle suggesting that “only when home has vanished and humanity is no longer territorialised, only then, there will be a chance for humanity” (p. 96). The following chapter, “We borders”, takes further the discussion of the border. When returning to Sweden after travelling abroad, Khosravi, now a Swedish citizen, is constantly the subject of racial profiling at the border, pressured to “live up to his passport”. Borders are everywhere, the author contends when discussing the process of making borders of people: the unwanted are not just excluded at the border but are themselves “forced to be border” (p. 99). Again here the law is available but not accessible, and the reader becomes engaged in a discussion of the law as grounded in a world organised through nation-states thus excluding those who fall outside it. This discussion is taken further in Chapter 7, “Right to have rights”. Taking Derrida, Kant and Benhabib as key points of reference, hospitality is again questioned, and is presented as conditional. It is provided only for those who deserve, the “good productive migrants”. He describes migrants’ experiences as those of “hostile hospitality”.

7 Overall, when exploring how policies and the law are lived and experienced, Khosravi engages in an important field of study within anthropology and migration studies that does not divorce the migration experience from that of settlement, underlining how the experience of border crossing does not end when the final destination is reached, but that the border is in fact more pervasive and intrusive than that. The book successfully conveys to the reader not only what it means to be “illegal” but how it feels to be one. Most importantly, Khosravi does so without essentialising the “illegal migrant” – the diversity and multitude of situations and experiences of migrant illegality is present throughout the book. The fact that the book is written in the first voice only makes it the more powerful and engaging.

Para citar este artigo

Referência do documento impresso.

Ines Hasselberg , « Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders » ,  Etnográfica , vol. 17 (1) | 2013, 207-209.

Referência eletrónica

Ines Hasselberg , « Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders » ,  Etnográfica [Online], vol. 17 (1) | 2013, posto online no dia 13 março 2013 , consultado o 27 abril 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etnografica/2630; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.2630

Ines Hasselberg

University of Sussex, UK [email protected]

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