A ‘tactical’ use of collective history: the construction and certification of truth in life accounts for Sri Lankan Tamil asylum application in France

Abstract

This article focuses on how Sri Lankan Tamils construct their life histories for asylum applications in France. The construction of the truth in application documents is a crucial issue in citizenship requests and state-building: it determines who the asylum seekers are, and whether they will be integrated into the state or not. It is a citizen-making process, through which the state constructs its population and redefines its borders. This research has been carried out in a bureau drafting life narratives for asylum applications. It describes how the experience of persecution is transformed into an institutionalized biography through the work of a ‘public writer’. In particular, it shows that while the bureaucratic procedure follows the logic of ‘singularization’, a ‘tactical’ use of collective history plays a relevant role in the writing of these accounts: to give more credibility to theirs statements, asylum seekers use shared history to compose individual histories. Analysing the stakes and the various standpoints of the asylum demand, I will argue that the construction of truth, like the citizenship request itself, is not a simple matter of adapting to state laws and regulations, but is rather the fruit of the interaction between several actors with different interests.