Tim Wu: American Lawbreaking (2007)

An essay about the laws we are allowed to break in America and why.

With illustrations by Alex Eben Meyer
Publisher Slate.com
via Marcell Mars

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Aradhana Sharma, Akhil Gupta (eds.): The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (2005)

This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of “the state”.

– Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the “state”.
– Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.
– Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.

Publisher Blackwell Publishing, 2006
ISBN 1405114681, 9781405114684
424 pages

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Vahida Ramujkic (ed.): Schengen with Ease (2006) [English, Serbian, Spanish]

‘Extra-comunitarios’, or citizens of non-European countries, have the ‘extra’ bureaucratic task of changing their status, to one that will allow them to move and work ‘freely’ within the European Union. The length and complexity of this process can vary depending on the type of ‘extra-comunitario’ in question. Almost everyone agrees that bureaucracy is the most boring thing on the world. Time spent in waiting rooms and lines is not considered as a part of living, but an interference, daily life put on hold, with the hope that, when it’s all over, it will be possible to take up ‘real’ life again as though nothing had ever happened. It is wasted, meaningless time that has to be erased as soon as the new status is achieved – in the case that process was successful.

“Schengen with ease” is a compilation of material from a variety of official and non-official sources, brought together to explain how daily practices are affected by the application of the EU Foreign Legislation and the Schengen Agreement in the territory of the European Union.

Adopting the Assimil method (Alphonse Chérel, Paris, 1929) this book provides a systematic study of all the bureaucratic steps a “non-EU” citizen might face while trying to obtain EU status. All the required steps are taught through lessons similar to those found in foreign language skill books, comparing the administrative language of European immigration legislation to an unknown language that has to be mastered in order to assimilate in a new environment and receive a determined status.

By organizing the structure of each lesson into Narration, Grammar and Exercise, different approaches to this legal-bureaucratic situation are given.While in Narrative one is exposed laic-experiential relation to the law, law as it is experienced by those who have to fulfill it (that recollects some 30 personal experiences that run through the book and could be followed in independent way), Grammar puts together the legal-normative approximation, law as it is written (information recollected from legal sources from different EU countries and administrative levels). Finally Exercise mix up of different bureaucratic forms that have to be completed, press cuttings, and parts of original documents…

Schengen sin esfuerzo / Schengen with ease
Beograd / Barcelona / Bruxelles, June 2006
ISBN: 0-9550664-8-4
365 pages

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