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Abstract

This article studies the affects retained, carried, and effected by documents, as they are produced, exchanged, transformed, and transacted among their users. I study the interactions which Turkish-Cypriots (in Britain and on either side of the border in Cyprus) forge with documents, especially those used for identity verification and travel. For those who juggle documents manufactured by several complexes of law and statecraft (including the `illegal' Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), documents generate differential and politically charged affectivities. Bringing anthropological literature on law, policy, and bureaucracy, as well as Actor Network Theory, into dialogue with psychoanalytic work on affect, this article charts a new terrain for the study of affect (in the domain of documents as objects) and explores emotive dimensions previously unattended by scholars of bureaucracy.

Keywords

affect borders bureaucracy documentary practices law the state

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Make-believe papers,legal forms and the counterfeit

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