Paper Kinship: Law, Power and Resistance in an Ethnographic Scene with Foreign Migrants

Abstract

This paper starts from an “ethnographic scene” with foreign migrants in a lawyer’s office to discuss the role that migratory documents play on kinship in the transnational movement. By doing this, it highlights how the state and the Law discipline these relations and how migrants themselves, using the legal logic of documentary production, elaborate themselves as persons, in resistance to state power. Based on this experience, named here as paper kinship, a re-elaboration of the concept of document is proposed, encompassing both the bureaucratic agency and that of the subjects of documentation.