| Summary/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.
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