Abstract
This brief essay reflects on a collection of anthropological investigations of security and surveillance practices in South Asia and the Middle East. The articles in the collection highlight what looking at security matters reveals about families, migration, borderland experiences, and ethnographic fieldwork. The afterword considers the intellectual and ethical importance of the ethnographic sensitivity to and analytic engagement with the uncertainties and ambiguities that are at the center of these practices. Individually and collectively, the articles in this collection offer new tools for thinking about the effects of living in securitized worlds and underscore the value of looking from perhaps unexpected vantage points to understand an arguably global condition.
