Summary of SEAA Reads, session 14 from October 18, 2025
Passport Entanglements - Protection, care, and precarious migrations. Nicole Constable, 2022 (University of California Press)
During the fall session hosted by Nan Kim, there were eight social scientists --including host and also the featured author-- on the Zoom meeting online, among which were researchers on Foreign Domestic Workers (FDW) and migration matters. Our small grouped allowed us to begin with brief self-introductions at the onset of the first hour before doing so even more briefly in the final 45 minutes when Nicole Constable beamed in at the end of today's "No Kings" marches around the country.
Since some participants had already shared initial impressions about the book during the round of self-introductions, the starter question was about Constable's writing voice: weaving in the nature of her relationship to the interviewees on the government/administrator side and the FDW side. She made clear the limitations and sometimes delicate middle ground she had to walk and acknowledged how the final synthesis on the printed page was shaped by ideas and perspectives originating in those she worked with. The metaphor of weaving a tapestry [p.20 Ethnographic Entanglements] richly illustrated how the public (publication) facing side looks tidy and complete, but the underside has many loose ends and sometimes bears little resemblance to the smoothed and finished side. The interweaving of participant-observing, or FDW and government officers and documentary hurdles, and the interweaving of local and global currents and hazards all fit into the lives presented on the pages of the book.
Responses around the online meeting room included the notion of precarity (appearing also in the book's subtitle) applying to the FDW in the book, some of whom the author has long-running relationships with, but also the position of ethnography moving back and forth between interviewees. She includes some of the privileges but also blind spots for herself as outsider and, usually, spectator to unfolding events. Some of those on Zoom recognized these same feelings of being on the 'wrong' side when interviewing the powerful; of wondering if they would decline the consulate officer's offer to co-author the analysis; of running into obstacles that were uncomfortable but in the end prove to be important turning points in one's scholarly path (Constable's metaphor of "knots" in the weaving project that require care and determination to unravel).
Another question from the session host prompted us to notice the chapters and recurring arguments about binary, either/or, thinking and seeing of the FDW problems situated in the Hong Kong cultural landscape of 2020-2021. Care vs. control, migrant vs. citizen, real vs. fake, ethnographer vs. interlocutor, and so on. In each case, the best account of matters weaves both ends of the paired words into something more complex and nuanced. The wider ocean of Post-modernism resonates here, too: authors no longer claiming authoritative and final analysis, black and white conclusions, and absolute certainties. And yet these poles do matter; they are reproduced (use of documents and checkboxes, categories and records, technologies of control/care). As local residents have fewer children and therefore labor supply, the practice of inviting FDW becomes ever more prominent: householders and FDW have a mutual dependence, pay and benefits and documentation are in constant tension.
Another concept stirring reactions for book club participants was the "event" (high stakes/big consequence) versus "non-event" (uneventful, low consequence) distinction that is often murky or arises without warning. One person spoke from experience in Taiwan where activists on behalf of FDW help to calculate the risk of (over)staying versus returning to the country of origin. Examples of piracy, identity "theft" (lending/borrowing), and collusion between insurers and government agencies complicates the decisions that FDW live with.
Around 9 p.m. Nicole Constable joined the online session, having been participant-observer in the nation-wide “No Kings” protests of October 18, and was asked about seeing the 2022 book from the perspective of 2025. Clearly, entanglements with government goes on still. A recent talk she did with grad students showed how much they valued the "entanglements" organizing principle - not just between interviewees and the terrain they occupy and build their dreams out of, but also entanglements that develop knots and connections and intersections across time and around wide-ranging geographic spaces, too. In hindsight, she herself has grown to value even more the aesthetic way of seeing life not as smoothed out, but filled with interwoven parts, unraveling parts, and occasional (inconvenient, seemingly impossible to dislodge) knots. She also contrasted the FDW case of real (government issued) but fake (underlying identity details) passports to a colleague working with passports that are fake (not produced by government agencies) but real (underlying identity information). About future projects at this stage in her anthropological life, Constable spoke of a writers' group for memoirs - not centering on self alone, but instead shining a light on the shaping powers, lessons, and relationships with others in the field and on campus that result in one's own life as lived out.
Considering the entanglements of passports among FDW, the entanglements of ethnographer and people on all sides of the subject in the field, the entanglements of FDW and government workers and household employers (e.g. mutual dependence; chances for exploitation/coercion), and the entanglements of global forces and local conditions, this book stirred many thoughts among readers. And, in the closing words of the author, no matter one's seniority, crisis points (or "knots" in the fabric we weave) are potentially of great value and not something to shy away from. With patience and commitment and sometimes luck, any self-doubts or questions of "should I be the one to take this subject on" can lead to valuable thinking and writing and teaching - not just on paper, but of one's own (professional and personal) growth, and even in the eyes of people in the field and on campus one works with.
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