Brinham 159 3 Methodology 3.1 State-Issued Documents in Social Science Research In this section, a description of the way in which qualitative social science research approaches state-issued documents as both material objects of law and as anthropological objects is given. State-issued identity documents in statelessness studies are most frequently referred to as evidence or proof of whether a state recognizes individuals as citizens or not.20 Securing access to the correct state-issued identity documents for individuals, through various means, forms a cornerstone for approaches to preventing and reducing statelessness. Commonly, the producers of documents claim that their products represent realities or facts that exist in the world outside of the processes that produce them.21 However, identity documents are not simply neutral records or purveyors of externally available facts about individuals, such as citizenship status, gender, or ethnicity. Documents are crucial tools for states to build and maintain power by establishing a monopoly on the control over freedom of movement and access to rights and benefits.22 States embrace particular populations while also excluding or ‘Othering’ in ways that produce noncitizens. State-issued categories and associated documents and registration processes do not merely describe or represent particular identities, they also bring identities into being.23 In some cases, they also push identities out of being, reify them, or destroy them.24 Some literature, influenced by anthropological and sociological thought, views documents not only as the instruments of state power, but also as the interface between state power and individual subjectivities. Encounters between humans and state-issued documents can provide important insights into citizenship practices, the production of statelessness, and the nature of the state. Studies that view documents as both material objects of law and governance and as anthropological objects have analyzed state-formation and identities in Northern Cyprus, for Tibetan refugees in India, and in disaster situations in Pakistan.25 Within this body of work, documents are not only evidence of citizenship but are also artefacts and mediators between individual subjects and the world.26 Sadiq notes that identity and citizenship documents carry affect.27 For example, beyond the details recorded on them, they can carry notions such as belonging and loyalty. Hull identifies multiple broad and interlinked approaches to how humans encounter bureaucratic documents within contemporary literature, including those that emphasize affect or emotion relating to the moments of encounter with documents, and those that emphasize signs or describe ‘the way documents link to people, place, things, times, norms, and forms of sociality’.28 These research approaches can add depth and richness to the study of citizenship. Encounters with documents and experiences of documentation processes are particularly prominent aspects of Rohingya oral histories, narratives, and analyses pertaining to the past forty years of their persecution in Myanmar. Oral histories relating to state authorities and documents describe perilous encounters which may result in physical harm, the symbolic destruction of one’s group identity, and sometimes death. 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 Lindsey Kingston, ‘Worthy of Rights: Statelessness as a Cause and Symptom of Marginalization’ in Tendayi Bloom and Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2018). Colin Hoag, ‘Assembling Partial Perspectives: Thoughts on the Anthropology of Bureaucracy’ (2011) 34 PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 81. James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press 1998); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge University Press 2000); Kamal Sadiq, ‘Limits of Legal Citizenship: Narratives from South and Southeast Asia’ in Benjamin N Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens (eds), Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Duke University Press 2017). Scott (n 22); F K Lehman, ‘Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems’ in Peter Kunstadter (ed), Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations (Princeton University Press 1967) vol 1; E R Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Berg 1973); Matthew S Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (University of California Press 2012). Timothy Longman, ‘Identity Cards, Ethnic Self-Perception, and Genocide in Rwanda’ in Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity (Princeton University Press 2001); Robert M Hayden, ‘Imagined Communities and Real Victims: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia’ (1996) 23 American Ethnologist 783. Hull (n 23); Fiona McConnell, ‘Governments‐in‐Exile: Statehood, Statelessness and the Reconfiguration of Territory and Sovereignty’ (2009) 3 Geography Compass 1902; Vasudha Chhotray and Fiona McConnell, ‘Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas’ (2018) 26 Contemporary South Asia 111; Malavika Reddy, ‘Identity Paper/Work/s and the Unmaking of Legal Status in Mae Sot, Thailand’ (2015) 2 Asian Journal of Law and Society 251; Yael Navaro-Yashin, ‘Make-believe papers, legal forms and the counterfeit: Affective interactions between documents and people in Britain and Cyprus’ (2007) 7 Anthropological Theory 79. Sadiq (n 22); Matthew S Hull, ‘Documents and Bureaucracy’ (2012) 41 Annual Review of Anthropology 251. Sadiq (n 22). Matthew S Hull, ‘Documents and Bureaucracy’ (2012) 41 Annual Review of Anthropology p 255.