Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología

Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol | eISSN 2011-4273 | ISSN 1900-5407

Embodying (In)Security. The Use of the Police and the “Politics of Presence” on the Northern Frontier of Chile

No. 29 (2017-09-01)
  • Angel Aedo
https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda29.2017.04

Abstract

This article explores a set of relationships located at the crossroads between the critical anthropology of security and the anthropology of borders, with reference to two key aspects. On the one hand, it focuses on a border region of South America whose characteristics provide a historical and ethnographic case study of the experiences deriving from the securitization of state borders and the erection of social boundaries. On the other, it focuses on life at the borders, particularly the emergence of idiosyncratic forms of life there, which, given their paradoxical situation in the social order, are treated both as vulnerable to “danger” and a source of “danger”. The article is divided into the three sections. The first discusses the overlapping of a border zone and its underlying police presence. The second speaks of the ambivalence and reversibility of the notion of “security” embodied by the contrast between policemen and poor migrants in the border city of Arica. Finally, the article addresses what I tentatively call “the politics of presence” in order to describe and analyze the process in which the clash between the public visibility of the police and efforts to establish a political voice for the migrants questions the conventional meaning of security and the effective reach of civic action.

Keywords: border, politics of presence, ethnography, police, migrants, northern Chile

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