Recognition in liminality

With emphasis on naming conventions, this article examines on-the-ground bureaucracy and its impacts on the lives of undocumented migrant children who attend state schools in Thailand. Names of migrants from Myanmar do not typically include a family name. As a result, when their children are placed in the Thai documentary system, which was designed for individuals with a first name and a last name, schools add Thai phrases literally meaning "without a surname" after each child's proper name. This study demonstrates that a particular form of liminal subjectivity is forged through school-based socialization into bureaucratic culture and institutional routines of official naming. While the anthropological concept of "liminality" is typically understood as temporary phases of transition, school practices give rise to a prolonged state of in-betweenness and constitute the children's political being in a negative form. The name "Without-A-Surname" denotes via negation, pointing to the quality of stateless state-belonging. This label becomes indexical of the ambivalent state of migrancy, which marks migrant schoolchildren as state subjects whose pending status lies between that of insider and outsider. School-level bureaucracy, therefore, defers a postliminal state-namely, the children's full incorporation into the Thai state and society

Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

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