“It’s All About Naming Things Right”: The Paradox of Web Truths in the Belgian Asylum-Seeking Procedure

Abstract

The chapter deals with the process of identity (mis)recognition that has led to the rejection of an asylum seeking application. Spotti addresses discrepancies between the story narrated by the asylum seeking applicant and the type of factual knowledge sought by the officials judging the truthfulness of his identity claim, as well as between official naming practices and the locally based naming of things used by the applicant. The case documented here, demonstrative of a politics of suspicion, also serves the metonymic function of laying bare some of the torn ligaments around the bones of globalization. It encapsulates how migratory experiences are registered into administrative prescriptive accounts of how one should prove his own identity.