Shifting vulnerabilities: gender and reproductive care on the migrant trail to Europe.

The reproductive care of pregnant migrants entering the European Union via its Mediterranean borders represents an under-examined topic, despite a growing scholarly emphasis on female migrants and the gendered aspects of migration in the past three decades. This article uses ethnographic data gathered in Greece, Italy, and Spain to examine pregnant migrants' experiences of crossing, first reception, and reproductive care. We discuss our findings through the conceptual lens of vulnerability, which we understand as a shifting and relational condition attributed to, or dynamically endorsed by, migrant patients within given social contexts and encounters. We focus on two principal aspects of migrant women's experiences. First, we shed light on their profiles, their journeys to Europe via the three main Mediterranean routes, and the conditions of first reception. Through ethnographic vignettes we examine the diverse ways in which pregnant migrants become vulnerable within these contexts. Second, we turn to the reproductive healthcare they receive in EU borderlands. We explore how declinations of ideas of vulnerability shape the medical encounter between healthcare professionals and migrant women and how vulnerability is dynamically used or contested by migrant patients to engage in meaningful social relations in unpredictable and unstable borderlands.

Narratives of the Invisible: Autobiography, Kinship, and Alterity in Native Amazonia.

Shamanic knowledge is based on an ambiguous commensality with invisible others. As a result, shamans oscillate constantly between spheres of intimacy, both visible and invisible. A place of power and transformation, the spirit world is rarely described by native interlocutors in an objective, detached way; rather, they depict it in terms of events and experiences. Instead of examining the formal qualities of accounts of the spirit world through analyses of ritual performance and shamanic quests, we focus on life histories as autobiographical accounts in order to explore what they reveal about the relationship between personal history (and indigenous historicity) and the spirit world. We introduce the term 'double reflexivity' to refer to processes by which narratives about the self are produced through relationships with alterity.

Securitization, alterity, and the state Human (in)security on an Amazonian frontier.

Focusing on the region surrounding the Maroni River, which forms the border between Suriname and French Guiana, we examine how relations between different state and non-state social groups are articulated in terms of security. The region is characterised by multiple "borders" and frontiers of various kinds, the state boundary having the features of an interface or contact zone. Several key collectivities meet in this border zone: native Amazonians, tribal Maroon peoples, migrant Brazilian gold prospectors, and metropolitan French state functionaries. We explore the relationships between these different sets of actors and describe how their mutual encounters center on discourses of human and state security, thus challenging the commonly held view of the region as a stateless zone and showing that the "human security" of citizens from the perspective of the state may compete with locally salient ideas or experiences of well-being.

The Wealth of the Body: Trade Relations, Objects, and Personhood in Northeastern Amazonia.

This article is an analysis of trade among the Trio (Suriname), and their relationship with objects and persons in their quest for manufactured goods. Based on data mostly collected in the Trio village of Tëpu in southern Suriname, it discusses trade from the point of view of Amerindian sociality, with regard to the nature of the interpersonal relations involved. I examine trade through the prism of an Amerindian understanding of personhood, the body and materiality, and show how these relationships tend to be fabricated over a lifetime, eventually becoming an integral and material part of the actors involved. This is manifested in the way Trio social space is constructed and inhabited as an extension of the body, and how objects acquired through trade come to elicit narratives of past exploits and travels to distant spheres of alterity. [Brazil, Guyana, indigenous people, social anthropology, Surinam].