Surveillance, pastoral power and embodied infrastructures of care among migrant filipinos in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Surveillance features routinely in discussions of migration in terms of boundary crossing and border policing; that is, of how states and state-like entities seek to limit and control movement, often at a distance. What is less frequently examined is how migrants who are excluded from care by forms of selective non-surveillance have to rely on their own informal social networks, referred to here as embodied infrastructures, to provide both care and the forms of watching that enable that care. Drawing together Foucault’s (2009) notion of pastoral power and Simone’s (2004) notion of ‘people as infrastructure’, I explore ethnographically the way that surveillance features in and is gendered by migrant Filipino practices of care in Saudi Arabia, an overlooked but vital part of the way that people create ‘platforms for living’, as well as enact social control and normative conformity, in sometimes precarious situations.