"Um campo de refugiados sem cercas": etnografia de um aparato de governo de populações refugiadas

Abstract

Through an ethnographic study with input in the Centro de Acolhida para Refugiados (CAR), assistance program coordinated by Caritas Arquidiocesana de São Paulo Catholic non-governmental organization, attached to the Caritas Internationalis network, that develops and finances projects for humanitarian and social development around the world this research sought to access the mesh of relations established by the government apparatus of refugee populations in Brazil. Connected to organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner (UNHCR), the Comitê Nacional para Refugiados (CONARE) and other NGOs and civil society organizations, the work of care for refugees and refuge applicants in the CAR is part of a broader management device, which involves, in addition to humanitarian assistance, also simultaneous actions of care, management and control that permeate this specific population. Rather than address the refuge itself, from the category of refugee posted by the juridical normative, I tried to understand the process of subjectivation operated by the ethnographed apparatus and how this creates a certain target group of knowledge, which should receive particular care: a population that needs to be managed. So a general theme that runs through the work are the operatory ways of a government mechanism, here termed the eye of the state, and how it produces, and integrates the power relations composite that is the refugee subject. Above all, it s about, how this mechanism makes these subjects visible, turning them liable to be governed as they become the center of a social and political issue. Thus, analyzing this particular mechanism of government, I sought to describe how these subjects are produced and categorized as refugees and, at the same time, as subjects of rights that may become full citizens whose human dignity still need to be rescued by the apparatus described, as vulnerable subjects and, at the same time, as subject with political demands. From the polysemy of this subject, as evidenced through the ethnography, is established, finally, a refuge social issue , recent in Brazil, which also entails a renewed notion of an universal citizenship , driven by managers and institutions caught up in this government device. In describing this process of subjectivation, so I tried to understand how it to compose a subject graspable to the eye of the state, from the analysis of the mesh of relationships that these subjects have to establish with the several organizations with which they come in contact when apply for refuge the refugee camp without fences .