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Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below
Stories of smuggling as acts of resistance and decolonization.
'This conceptually vivid book refreshes our vision' - Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political, and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive, and deeply sociopolitical.
By tracing the illegalized movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions about how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories, and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis, and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
'This conceptually vivid book refreshes our vision' - Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political, and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive, and deeply sociopolitical.
By tracing the illegalized movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions about how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories, and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis, and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
- GenresNonfictionAnthropology
216 pages, Paperback
Published July 20, 2022
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About the author
Mahmoud Keshavarz
2 booksMahmoud Keshavarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University, Sweden.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 14, 2023
"Through anti-smuggling laws, both smuggler and the smuggled are objectified and reified as figures, not real people caught up in the very ruling relations nation-states and global capital organise. As such, they are rendered as legitimate targets for the most extreme forms of state violence."
What an amazing collection of essays looking at borders, from those on the border. Such a variety of formats, places and topics covered and a phenomenal afterword by Nandita Sharma.
What an amazing collection of essays looking at borders, from those on the border. Such a variety of formats, places and topics covered and a phenomenal afterword by Nandita Sharma.
December 3, 2023
Some excellent essays and accounts in here of smuggling, interspersed with some unhelpful postmodernism. My favourite bit was a line about commodities carrying meaning, with social implications of push-up bras for bodily expectations, then revealing all the bras are also filled with meth
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews