Border enclaves

Dr. Laia Soto Bermant is a social anthropologist and Kone Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki

• Introduction1 Mystery of Africa, history of Spain2 The people without history3 The border spectacle4 Children of the street5 The end of a frontier economy6 The criminal underworldConclusionReferences

‘In the hands of a gifted ethnographer such as Laia Soto Bermant, stories about a place such as Melilla challenge so many of the taken for granted presuppositions of scholarship on borders, on being European or North African, on religious co-habitation, on the spaces in between. To read this book is to be transported into a nest of contradictions that ever so satisfyingly reveal how fragile and thus transformable modern-day social classification can be.’ – Ilana Gershon, Rice University, USA‘Written with compassion and precision, Soto-Bermant demonstrates the power of ethnography to untangle the complex co-production of African and European state-projects and border regimes. Centred on the voices and experiences of those who inhabit, pass through and govern the political and economic cross-roads that is Melilla, the work traces the constitution and tense equilibrium of divergent national imaginaries and religious identities. Complicating mass-media depictions of humanitarian crisis by revealing the scope and subtleties of bureaucratic violence pursued in the name of national integration, Soto-Bermant’s exceptional study is of value to anthropology, political science, geography, migration studies and humanitarian practice.’ – Brenda Chalfin, University of Florida, USA