Documenting Impossible Realities

Ethnography, Memory, and the As If

Susan Bibler Coutin, Barbara Yngvesson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781501768880, 9781501768828
• eBook ISBN: 9781501768873
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: “What Lies Back of the Work”
• 1. Counterfeiting Reality: Legal Fictions and the Construction of Everyday Belongings
• 2. Fieldsight: Multivalent Ways of Seeing in Ethnography and Law
• 3. Schrödinger’s Cat: The “Missing Middle,” Discredited Histories, and Measurement Problems
• 4. The Search for a “Back”: Archivists of Memory
• 5. Beyond “Spooky Action at a Distance”: An Ethnography of the Future
• Notes
• References
• Index