Social Anthropology

Imposture at the border

Law and the construction of identities among undocumented migrants

In 1963, Chairman Mao made a national hero of an ordinary soldier named Lei Feng, said to have been inspired by collectivism to do countless selfless deeds. Sceptical observers inside and outside China disparage the persistent Lei Feng legend, judging it to be a laughably fraudulent construct of the Communist Party. We take this contrast as an opportunity to examine the cultural politics of authentication and fakery. We show that critics of the Chinese regime take the propagation of ‘inauthentic’ evidence to be indicative of a government based on illegitimate tactics, or of a credulous population. Meanwhile, research participants in China, who consider Lei Feng stories and artefacts to intermingle evidential and pedagogical representation, justify the state's curation of the legend for societal good. Second, we contrast Chinese and western discussions about a Lei Feng‐related trick that a western news agency is said to have played on China on April Fool's Day. Examining the different framings of this story – that of satire, practical joke, fake news and rumour – we argue that how the fake is decoded depends on what political ends it serves, which include the ideological legacy of the Cold War as well as contemporary USA–China competition.

European nation states have introduced several forms of bordering and technologies of control, partly in order to deter non‐Western migrants from arriving and to encourage irregular migrants to leave. The bordering practices of the European nation states have now both been dispersed into third countries and come to include frontline bureaucrats within the nation states, including social workers and healthcare staff. Without much public debate, healthcare and social welfare policies have become part of migration management policies. In the following, I explore new ways of understanding the relationship between borders, healthcare and the management of migrants in the welfare state of Norway. The article draws on fieldwork with migrants who have been irregularised after their asylum applications were rejected. I introduce the concept of ‘intimate borders’ to call attention to how irregular migrants are managed in the encounters between migrants and frontline bureaucrats such as healthcare workers. In these encounters, the legal status of the person becomes an ordering mode, and the potential disease to be treated becomes a subordinate object of concern. Everyday bordering practices are contingent not only on legal regulations and public discourses, but also on migrants’ habituation to and enactment of bordering practices.

Neutral evaluators or testimonial connoisseurs? Valuing and evaluating reconciliation in post‐genocide Rwanda

Kenner, Alison 2018. Breathtaking: asthma care in a time of climate change. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 238 pp. Pb.: US$24.95. ISBN: 9781517902872.

This article is about money doubling in Makeni, northern Sierra Leone. It elaborates on ordinary people’s difficulties to participate personally in a visibly growing economy and monetarised social environment. For this purpose, it takes the ethnographic case of literal money doubling: young men’s promises to physically double investors’ cash using original currency paper and chemicals. Although and because this investment opportunity retrospectively turned out to be a ‘fake’ promise, I argue that it made perfect sense in and of Makeni’s contemporary socio‐economic landscape. It epitomised a variety of practices that outwardly and alluringly promised a prosperous future and more equal redistribution of wealth, yet retrospectively proved disappointing. Money doublers assimilated local people’s aspirations and disappointments to make their performances convincing. Displaying their knowledge of the secrets to quick and sustainable wealth production, they combined narratives of what people already knew about their own failure and fellow citizens’ success with visions of future progress. Therefore, money doubling offers a powerful and multifaceted lens for illuminating patterns and transformations in Makeni’s contemporary economic, moral, social and political environment in which local people and researchers struggled to make out the truth about beneficial practices and actors.

This article analyses the online dating activities of Ghanaian young men and women. Finding online friends and lovers who reside in the USA or Europe is considered a fruitful tactic to deal with the often harsh conditions of everyday life in Accra. The first part of the article focuses on the connections between online and offline relationships in specific communities called or ‘stranger quarters’. The second part looks into the intricacies of online love relationships and how these upset or transform existing gender categories, gender roles and relations in the communities. The way in which young women take part in the online world is reminiscent of some of the characteristics of the popular figure of the trickster. Online trickery has affected offline mechanisms of redistribution and has thereby altered the moral economy within the communities, whereby friends straddle between principles of loyalty and trust towards one another while making personal fame and fortune. The article concludes with a discussion of tricking practices, the meanings and moralities of deception, and how research on fraudsters and tricksters touches on some of the ethical dilemmas inherent to the discipline of anthropology.

Mohr, Sebastian 2018. Being a sperm donor: masculinity, sexuality, and biosociality in Denmark. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. 185 pp. Hb.: US$120.00/£85.00. ISBN: 9781785339462.

Veber, Hanne and Pirjo Virtanen (eds.) 2017. Creating dialogues. Indigenous perceptions and changing forms of leadership in Amazonia. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. 336 pp. Hb.: US$104.00. ISBN: 9781607325581.