Documenting Impossible Realities Ethnography, Memory, and the As If

Documenting Impossible Realities explores the limitations of conventional accounts through which belonging is documented, focusing on the experiences of adoptees, deportees, migrants, and other exilic populations. Susan Bibler Coutin and Barbara Yngvesson speak to the current historical moment in which the dichotomy between an "above ground" inhabited by dominant groups and an "underground" to which unauthorized immigrants, political exiles, and transnational adoptees are relegated cannot be sustained. This dichotomy was made possible by the illusion that some people do not belong, that some forms of kin are not real, or that certain ways of knowing do not count. To examine accounts that challenge such illusions, Coutin and Yngvesson focus on the spaces between groups, where difference is constituted and where the potential for new forms of relationship may be realized. By juxtaposing and moving between entangled realities and modes of expression, Documenting Impossible Realities conveys the emotional experience of oscillating between being here and gone, legitimate and treated as counterfeit.

Susan Bibler Coutin is Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Exiled Home, Nations of Emigrants, and Legalizing Moves.

Barbara Yngvesson is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. She is the author of Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects and Belonging in an Adopted World.