filed asylum claims at Allodhapon and police presented them with “pink cards,” the identity documents to which asylum seekers were entitled as long as their claims remained in limbo.1 Allodhapon was thus a central apparatus in the bureaucratic machinery of asylum in Greece; it was also the place where new applicants came face-to-face with the regulatory authority of the state through encounters with the police.
In this chapter I approach the roz karta [ρόζ κάρτα] (pink card) as an entry point into the multiple forms of limbo that characterize asylum seeking in Greece. I follow the pink card’s “career” (Brenneis 2007) or life from its bureaucratic production at Allodhapon, through its circulation in the talk and everyday survival practices of asylum seekers, to its final disappearance at the end of the asylum process. Throughout, I consider how the document also acquired various “lives”—diverse meanings and uses—through the engagements of police, bureaucrats, and asylum seekers. Finally, I consider how the document as a thing-in-itself had an important role in governing both persons and regulatory technologies, and how its materiality enabled and foreclosed various legal, political, and social futures. The many lives of this document highlight the indeterminate relationship between bureaucracy, governance, and subjectivity in the assignment of limbo status.
The Governance of “Things”
Not unlike the U.S. “green card,” the denotation of the pink card through its color was overtly straightforward and yet appropriate. Its pinkness first announced its presence, but you might also have noticed its fragility or makeshift quality. Some cards were wrinkled and torn at the edges; others had been laminated, covered with protective tape, or inserted in plastic sleeves. Cards displayed a photograph of the bearer and the written marks of rushed hands in blue, black, and red inks. Some asylum seekers kept their pink cards casually in their back pockets; others took them gingerly out of wallets or folders, where they had been carefully placed among other documents. Asylum applicants were required to have this document with them at all times, in the event that police stopped them and ask for khartia [χαρτιά] (papers), or taftotita [ταυτότητα] (identification). But unlike passports or credit cards, pink cards were not made to last. The traces of travels, labors, and bureaucracies were rendered tactile on this paper through smudges of dirt and moisture, in creases and folds and crinkled edges. Newly minted cards were sturdier and brighter, while those that had withstood multiple renewals were often wilted like fading roses, washed out through everyday handling by the bearer, police, and lawyers.
In this chapter, I show that through its association with the ambiguities of limbo, this document served to make asylum seekers illegible to both the state and themselves. Recent ethnographic scholarship has shown that “governmentality” (Foucault 2009 [2004]) and subjectivity are mutually and dialogically constituted (Coutin 2000; Coutin and Yngvesson 2006; Fassin and Rechtman 2010; Ong 1999). Despite the fluid interplay between governance and subject formation, however, documents are most often characterized as regulatory technologies that render both citizens and aliens visible or legible to state power (Scott 1998; see also Cohn 1987; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Dirks 2001; Mamdani 1996; Torpey 2000). The passport, for instance, brings citizens into the state’s “embrace” (Torpey 2000) with accompanying rights and obligations. Legally present aliens may be marked as such through residence permits or visas, which inscribe a bureaucratic visibility that entails certain benefits as well as exclusions (Malkki 1995a). Those who are undocumented may be “non-existent” within the legal body of the nation-state (Coutin 2000) yet hypervisible (and vulnerable) to the state’s regulatory gaze (Feldman 2011). While documents are, indeed, deeply enmeshed in these politics of legibility and visibility, the effects of such regulatory projects are unpredictable. I show that the pink card, as a technology of regulation, also facilitated highly variable reconfigurations of regulatory activities, as police, bureaucrats, and asylum seekers engaged with and made use of the document.
I also suggest that these many indeterminacies of documenting limbo in Greece expose holes integral to the process of governance itself. Foucault (1991: 93) characterizes the “art of governance” as “the right manner of disposing things so as to lead to an end which is ‘convenient’ to each of the things to be governed.” Describing “things” as “men in their relations, their links” (93), he asserts that governance has multiple teleologies: “a plurality of specific aims … a whole series of specific finalities, then, which become the objective of government as such” (95). Foucault suggests that this plurality of relationships and “things,” which elsewhere he defines as a dispositif (apparatus) (1980 [1977]), has gradually become incorporated into the political formation of the state and its “downward” (1991: 91) mechanisms of regulation. By considering how the pink card figured in a particular project of governance, and the nexus of relationships that in turn “governed” the document, I highlight multidirectional, indeterminate forms of governance that unfold within and alongside the regulatory work of the state.
Origin Stories
The man tells me he was apprehended in Samos, when he came from Turkey in a small boat, and he was detained for three months. A UNHCR committee came a few times—people with lots of different nationalities. A lawyer also visited a few times … and asked if he had any particular requests or demands, and a guy from Algeria translated.
I ask if he applied for asylum there.
He answers that the lawyer had asked if anyone wanted to apply for asylum in Greece. But he did not understand what asylum was. Five men from Africa said they wanted to apply for asylum and they were taken away, but something must have gone wrong, because they were returned, and remained all together. When he was released he was given a deportation letter that was good for 30 days. He came to Athens. A lawyer helped him get “a paper valid for one month,” and he paid 50 euros. Four days after the expiration of his deportation order, he was stopped by the police and detained again for three months. He was then released with another deportation order. When he was released people he knew told him that he must go to “Allodhapon” to get a pink card.
How did he get the pink card, I ask.
He went to a private office near “Allodhapon” which helped him fill in the application. He waited in the queue. A translator asked him his name, and why he came to Greece. He explained that he came to find a job. They took his fingerprints. He got another appointment, and he went to collect his pink card. When the first card expired, he went to renew it, and they took it and gave him this paper (he shows me a rejection of his asylum claim). At that point he came to the ARS, where they helped him file an appeal, and he got his pink card back. (Cabot fieldnotes, March 7, 2008)
On a routine morning at the ARS, I met with a Syrian client, a middle-aged, wiry man with a trim gray mustache, whose direct delivery style sparked the interpreter, Omar, to describe him as a “very matter of fact man,” which is evident in the no-frills summary of our meeting reproduced in my fieldnotes. (This was, of course, a few years before the refugee crisis in Syria incited in 2011.) Despite the significant time he had spent in detention, he recounted his experiences succinctly but in detail, and with a face seemingly clear of emotion. He had entered Greece at an Aegean island border, Samos, but he had received a pink card only many months later, when he came to Athens. His account underscores the circuitous, far-flung, and often shrouded bureaucratic web in which the pink card was entangled.
This loosely articulated web of bureaucracy and policing procedures is, in turn, enmeshed in broader maps of this man’s movements in Greece, encompassing border and transit sites, detention facilities, and police stations. He acquired a pink card not upon his initial entry, but after multiple detentions, and after he had received a number of different documents. In his account, these bureaucratic processes are often obscured or mediated by the corollary presence of other state and nonstate actors: the “guy from Algeria,” the lawyer on Samos, the lawyer in Athens, the “private office” near the police (also very likely a lawyer or notary), the ARS, and the police interpreter. The pink card
