The ethnographic crime scene: Tracing the violence within market relations on the Thai-Myanmar border

Abstract

In a world of proliferating displacement crises and restricted mobility pathways, low-wage labor migration has become, for many, a more feasible refuge than formal asylum. The refugee-as-displaced-migrant has thus become emblematic of our time. But how do contemporary displacement crises, and violent ones at that, shape the predicament of the migrant-refugee in countries of arrival? And how might the particularities of the displaced migrant's vulnerable condition be read as clues, both to violence committed abroad and to the profitable leveraging of said violence in countries of arrival? In this article, I engage these questions through an investigation into how displacement-inducing violence lingers, as traces, in the lives of Myanmar migrant-refugees in Thailand. Unfreedom, I find, is internal to ostensibly free market relations. Advancing this claim, I turn to a growing anthropology of borders to grasp the nation's geopolitical perimeter as a social relation that border crossers cannot easily discard—a relation that conditions social life, even at sites far from a given country's territorial margins. I show, in sum, how employers and other regulatory actors in countries of arrival internalize, across borders, displacement-inducing violence perpetrated elsewhere.