In this article, I interrogate the process how evidence is established in asylum procedure by engaging with anthropological and socio-legal literature on evidence and credibility assessments. Drawing on ethnomethodology, I analyse asylum interviews and show in what ways evidence can be understood as the result of an asymmetrical co-construction. As a result of this procedure, the individual applicant disappears and a ‘case’ is established.
Anthropologists who write country of origin reports based on such ‘case material’ for tribunals and courts can highlight the asymmetries in evidence-making and question the very categorisations through which the state operates. The article contributes to ongoing debates on the role of anthropologists and their knowledge as experts in court.
Before all other forms of membership, we are “all members of the human family”, as the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has specified. Thus, the international legal concept of crimes against humanity is crucial because all war crimes are predicated on the fact that those committing these atrocities are enabled once they succeed in establishing difference that makes us forget our human commonality.
We cannot but make do with what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has called the imaginary order – the way in which we try to relate to others by looking for similarities and differences, mainly in order to acknowledge ourselves. We need the ‘other‘ to sustain ourselves as the I(ndividual) we imagine ourselves to be.
The imaginary order is the order of world-making in the sense of Hannah Arendt (1959) for whom the world is not ‘out there‘, but rather that which arises between people in discourse, as I will develop in an upcoming presentation. We have to keep engaging with others, irrespective of the fact that we will never really understand each other entirely. But we are obliged to keep trying. There is no other way.
“For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse … We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it, we learn to be human” (Hannah Arendt, 1959, 24-25)
Human commonality is already there from the beginning, transcending all dichotomies, whereas difference is something we can only ever bring about consciously. What we have in common and what makes us human is that we are split by language, as Lacan argued. If we acknowledge this, we might be able to include the other not as an opposite ‘they’ but as part of our own unconscious: we are always other to ourselves first.
UN Photo In 1950, on the second anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, students at the UN International Nursery School in New York viewed a poster of the historic document.
2024 has been the deadliest year for migrants trying to cross the Channel in small boats to reach the UK, with 69 deaths reported (Refugee Council 2025). British politicians have been referring to the circumstances under which people migrate to the UK as “the small boat crisis“ and subsequently made a “small boat deal“ with countries such as Ruanda, to which they wanted to ship people to.
I recently bought a small booklet filled with Walter Benjamin’s short stories. Tales out of loneliness is its subtitle. In it, there is a 1-page story entitled How the Boat was Invented and Why It Is Called ‘Boat‘. It follows a similar pattern as Benjamin’s short story on Why the elephant is called ‘elephant‘ that immediately precedes the story about the boat.
The storyteller. Tales out of loneliness. Walter Benjamin. Verso Books 2023.
Here’s how Boat’s story goes:
Before all the other people, there lived one person and he was called Boat. He was the first person, as before him there was only an angel who transformed himself into a person, but that is another story.
So the man called Boat wanted to go on the water — you should know that back then there was a lot more water than today. He tied himself to some planks with ropes, a long plank along the belly, that was the keel. And he took a pointed cap of planks, which was, when he lay in the water, at the front — that was the prow. And he stretched out a leg behind him and navigated with it.
In this manner he lay on the water and navigated and rowed with his arms and moved very easily through the water with his plank cap, because it was pointed. Yes, that is how it was: the man Boat, the first man, made himself into a boat, with which one could travel on water.
And therefore — of course that is quite obvious — because he himself was called Boat, he named what he had made ‘boat‘. And that is why the boat is called ‘boat‘.
(Walter Benjamin, 26 September 1933; published posthumously)
The “small boats crisis” is Boat’s crisis, the crisis of man. This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Because they do not know why the elephant is called ‘elephant‘ either.
Philosophy saves lives.
Paper boat made out of a book page (photo by: Maddy Freddie, pexels.com).
This winter term, I will be spending some time with my anthropology colleagues at Paris-Nanterre as part of the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie comparative (LESC), part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).
One part of my research stay is devoted to working on my current project: “Towards an anthropology of statelessness”. I will be speaking at the Department’s Colloquium in December (see plan below). I will also be teaching a course in legal anthropology … more about this one later.
The colloquium is free and open to the public, everyone is welcome.
If you are a recent graduate (MA-/MPhil-degree holder) with an interest in pursuing a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology under my supervision, please consider applying for a PhD position at the newly established Graduate School “Post-Euroentric Europe. Narratives of a World-Province in Transformation” at the University of Konstanz.
Together with 10 other professors we have worked hard in the last years to realize an ambitious and highly relevant programme that is aimed at decentring and questioning narratives about Europe.
“Where is Europe?” we might be tempted to ask. “And is it even one place?” (Attali 1994). Is Europe to be found in the minds and hearts of the refugees detained in camps on its southern border, for whom it is place of longing, even as it denies them entry or sets up hurdles in their way? How and to what extent do “soft” cultural factors in the form of collective narratives and imaginations solidify into “hard” institutional realities, which in turn have a reflexive effect on the availability of narrative resources?
While it has long been customary to regard “Europe” and “modernity” as more or less synonymous, only recently has there been a systematic examination of the fact that the European continent was and is permeated by political-cultural demarcations and asyn-chronicities, even within its own borders. Increased attention to non-European traditions or those marginalized in Europe’s dominant self-narrative not only guides a redefinition of Europe’s position in world affairs; it also requires us to diversify notions of Europe from within.
The work of our graduate program aims to contribute to the historical and contemporary demonopolization of the concept of Europe in local contexts, which has been tightly restricted to dominant traditions in the West-Central European area.
Within this interdisciplinary Graduate School, I am particularly interested in supervising anthropological PhD projects with a focus on statelessnessin Europe or its border regions or on one of the various European independence movements (e.g. in Catalonia, Bretagne, Basque Country, Scotland, Celtic Nationalism, One Tirol, … ). Other topics are possible, too, as long as they fit the programme and are based on ethnographic field research and lie within the field of political and legal anthropology.
Make sure you read the entire research programme carefully before preparing your application! If you have questions, contact me under my uni-konstanz email-address.The deadline is already 30 June 2024!
In contemporary Britain, it is no longer only migrants who are being targeted by the government, but those who fend for them just as well.
In “‘Illegal’ migration and the Othering of activist lawyers in the UK“, I argue that human rights solicitors, who pride themselves in fending for their marginalized clients, have become targets of state officials who began to call them “activist lawyers” in 2020. The current populist atmosphere in British politics regarding the topic of “illegal migration” not only others those who seek asylum, but also their immigration lawyers and NGO workers who are committed to supporting their clients in their asylum claims. Those lawyers who began to publicly reclaim the term “activist lawyers”, a term initially hurled at them as a slur, effectively managed to strip the state’s vocabulary of its negative attributes. What makes the term “activist lawyers” and the way it is being handled by im/migration and human rights lawyers particularly interesting is that it is no longer exclusionary words about others that lawyers are dealing with here, but words about themselves.
Through this reversal, lawyers brought the former slur in line with their profession’s ethical stance as well as their own personal biographies. The podcast and platform “Activist Lawyer”, hosted by the human rights solicitor Sarah Henry, has been covering this development since 2020 and features many interesting audio formats as well as texts. Make sure you visit “Activist Lawyer – and read my full text here.
Two new publications came out this month — one on my last research with ethno-religious minorities in urban Yangon in Myanmar, the other based on long-term fieldwork in Central Asia, in rural Kyrgyzstan.
In “Legal Pluralism in Central Asia“, published for an edited volume on the Central Asian World by Routledge, I put forward the argument of a rhetorical emergence of legal pluralism, combining literature from legal and linguistic anthropology. I argue that “we should understand legal pluralism not as the precondition that allows for cases to be dealt with and adjudicated in a plural legal manner; rather, it should be considered a possible outcome whose rhetorical emergence empirically varies from case to case. Depending on the situation, legal pluralism does not define the set-up of a case from the beginning, but rather becomes created intersubjectively in situ by the disputing parties involved in the case” (410). I conclude with a caution: “As anthropologists, we should refrain from advocating legal pluralism in such contexts [where claims about ‘custom’ are competitive rather than descriptive] as a more “culture- friendly” or encompassing way to deal with questions of order, sanctioning or indeed harmony, since “Plurality may actually reinforce structures of inequality as the plurality of forums available decreases the binding power of any law” (418, von Benda- Beckmann et al., 2009, p. 12).
In “Community as a category of empire“, published for History and Anthropology, I argue that ‘community’ is a category that is inextricably bound up with the historical development of the British empire. It was in this context that modern social theory took root, including, eventually, publications on community in anthropology and sociology that profoundly influenced nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought and that continue to shape everyday understandings of the category within and beyond academia. I first elaborate what type of work the category ‘community’ was intended to do in the British empire. I then introduce two key figures who were responsible for designing, distributing and implementing two contrasting imperial theories of community. Subsequently, I sketch the migratory history of the category following the ancestors of today’s so-called ‘Burmese Indians’ across the Bay of Bengal from India to Burma. The final part of the article presents the repercussions ‘community’ has in contemporary Myanmar, drawing on recent legislation around ‘race and religion’ as well as my own ethnographic data from religious processions of ethno-religious minorities who find themselves in a subaltern position vis-à-vis the Buddhist majority population and an ethnonationalist state.
This is a peer-reviewed journal article that developed out of two years of Cartel work within the Lacan Circle of Australia (Melbourne). I presented the topic in 2021 and worked on this publication in which I combine psychoanalytical theory with an anthropological outlook on contemporary politics.
In this article I explore the psychoanalytical underpinnings of the recent purchase of the original manuscript of Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom by the French state from the perspective of Jacques Lacan’s concept of perversion. I argue that in declaring de Sade’s book national heritage, the French state has tried to empty the text of its transgressive characteristics and reduced it to a fetish object. By placing the textual artefact inside the National Library of France, where it remains inaccessible, it has installed this object at the centre of the State in an effort to prop itself up while at the same time trying to veil a void. While this case is spectacular, we can abstract from it a distinguishing characteristic of the 21st century: the installation of fetish objects in an increasingly deserted symbolic order as well as the reappearance of the Name-of-the-Father in the imaginary order where the State acts as if it was the progenitor. This article aims to demonstrate the usefulness of Lacan’s teaching on perversion for a critical psychoanalysis that is “in the world”.
Jacques Lacan wrote “On Kant with Sade” in 1963; six years after the French state dropped a ban on Marquis de Sade’s book “120 Days of Sodom” (1904). Since 2021, the book is part of France’s “national heritage”.
I am currently beginning new work in a Cartel on “Brave Waste World” that is devoted to studying Lacan’s teachings in regard to the concepts of waste, the exiled and the world. The topic of my Cartel contribution is “Waste of the world. On statelessness.”
Informal book launch in good company — while missing many from Myanmar
I wanted to celebrate the publication of my monograph: 10 years in the making if I count from the first days of fieldwork in 2012-2013. Good anthropological monographs take time and they are never the result of one indiviual only, even though writing can be a solitary process, particularly towards the end. I wanted to use the occasion of having over 200 Myanmar specialists gathering in one place, to say “Thank you” publicly to all the important people who could not be present in Zurich, but also to those who were able to share a glass of wine with me that day.
Great PhDs to be: Carolin Hirsch, Nickey Diamond, Benedict Mette-Starke, Sarah Riebel (plus book and me)
I set out by thanking my Muslim and Hindu interlocutors in Myanmar — there can neither be an anthropology nor an ethnography without the people ‘in’ (paraphrasing Tim Ingold). I owe them everything and I am glad that there will be an open access version of my book coming out towards the end of this year that will allow at least some of my interlocutors to download the book in Myanmar — I cannot bring it to them at the moment; not so much because it would be dangerous for me (it might be), but because I simply cannot take the risk of putting them into danger once I have left the country or their houses …
I then thanked my four research assistants — my KRA (Kachin Research Army) — and I explained to the audience of Burma/Myanmar experts that I profited enormously from them having conversations with my interlocutors about what it means to be a member of a minority in a majority Buddhist country. Listening in — as I am currently developing also in another context — is a methodologically fruitful approach to conduct fieldwork or carry out digital ethnography where fieldwork is not possible, because it decenters the anthropologist. What I am interested in mostly is “free-flowing talk” where my interlocutors do not try to guess what it is I want from them (in terms of what they might be expected to tell me), but where I can simply follow them having conversations with one another. Since all of my research assistants were Christian Kachin women, it was not religion they shared with my interlocutors (who were Muslims and Hindus), but the experience of being ‘slotted in’ as members of ‘communities’.
I also thanked my colleagues in Myanmar who had been professors of Anthropology at the University of Yangon prior to the attempted military coup in February 2021. Thanks to them, my PhD students received research visa, thanks to them, I had the opportunity of teaching and learning from young anthropology students, and thanks to them I learned a lot about the history of the discipline in Myanmar and about the history of the University of Yangon. I truly hope that one day they will be able to return to their professional jobs — which they cherished a lot, and to their students whom they loved.
None of these people could be with my family, my PhD students, and the other Myanmar scholars that day.
Thanking those who were there
I was happy to be surrounded by many friends, who had helped in different ways to bring this book to fruition: many of my colleagues had read draft chapters, some had written reviews or are going to write them. Alicia Turner gave some introductory words — she knows the book very well as she has written the most constructive and helpful review that made the final product so much better!
The managing editor of NIAS Press, Gerald Jackson, had come from Copenhagen to Zurich with his research assistant Julia Heinle and with a lot of amazing books on Southeast Asia and on Myanmar in tow. He took my book project on board and steered it smoothly through the production process in not even two years from the submission date!
Gerald Jackson and Julia Heinle (both NIAS Press) with the book and me.
My PhD students who are working on Myanmar, were all present, too. We discussed my material just as much as we discussed theirs. They all completed long-term ethnographic fieldwork in or on Myanmar and I can’t wait to see their own books!
And — last but not least — my family — who accompanied me from 2012 onwards and carried out their own research projects in Yangon: on the politics of cultural heritage in one case and on what it means to go to a local school in Chinatown in Yangon in the other case.
Thank you to everyone who was there that evening — be it in spirit or in the flesh — I am very grateful for the support I have received in the last decade. I hope the book will be useful to many.
judith beyer 