Perle Møhl

Anthropologist Perle Mohl lived in a rural French community for nearly two years, studying the everyday mechanisms of coexistence and the continual negotiation of individual and social identities as expressed in discourse - talking, stories, silence and action. What begins as an examination of the enigma between a "culture of silence" and a rich circulation of knowledge evolves into a reflection on the politics of coexistence and the paradoxical relationship between autonomy and interdependence.

Coexistence and Communication in a Rural Community in Central France

Village Voices

Karen Fog Olwig

Kristina Grünenberg

Anja Simonsen

Since the 1990s, biometric border control has attained key importance throughout Europe. Employing digital images of, for example, fingerprints, DNA, bones, faces or irises, biometric technologies use bodies to identify, categorize and regulate individuals’ cross-border movements. Based on innovative collaborative fieldwork, this book examines how biometrics are developed, put to use and negotiated in key European border sites. It analyses the disparate ways in which the technologies are applied, perceived and experienced by border control agents and others managing the cross-border flow of people, by scientists and developers engaged in making the technologies, and by migrants and non-government organizations attempting to manoeuvre in the complicated and often-unpredictable systems of technological control. Biometric technologies are promoted by national and supranational authorities and industry as scientifically exact and neutral methods of identification and verification, and as an infallible solution to security threats. The ethnographic case studies in this volume demonstrate, however, that the technologies are, in fact, characterized by considerable ambiguity and uncertainty and subject to substantial subjective interpretation, translation and brokering with different implications for migrants, border guards, researchers and other actors engaged in the border world.

Perle Møhl

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