Recognition in liminality: Migrant schooling, bureaucracy, and the surname “Without‐A‐Surname”

Abstract With emphasis on naming conventions, this article examines on‐the‐ground bureaucracy and its impacts on the lives of undocumented migrant children who attend state schools in Thailand. Names of migrants from Myanmar do not typically include a family name. As a result, when their children are placed in the Thai documentary system, which was designed for individuals with a first name and a last name, schools add Thai phrases literally meaning “without a surname” after each child's proper name. This study demonstrates that a particular form of liminal subjectivity is forged through school‐based socialization into bureaucratic culture and institutional routines of official naming. While the anthropological concept of “liminality” is typically understood as temporary phases of transition, school practices give rise to a prolonged state of in‐betweenness and constitute the children's political being in a negative form. The name “Without‐A‐Surname” denotes via negation, pointing to the quality of stateless state‐belonging. This label becomes indexical of the ambivalent state of migrancy, which marks migrant schoolchildren as state subjects whose pending status lies between that of insider and outsider. School‐level bureaucracy, therefore, defers a postliminal state—namely, the children's full incorporation into the Thai state and society.