The analysis has been abstract. The life it describes is not. This is the personal account of the institutional forces that have shaped the specific life that the analysis has been trying to make visible.
The Specific Life
The institutional forces that this blog has spent five years analysing are not abstract to the person whose life they have shaped. The immigration system whose architecture this blog has described is the system that determined when Ruth and I could live in the same country, that shaped the years of long-distance marriage that the process imposed, and that defined the specific conditions under which the family we are building became possible. The federal government's institutional design, which this blog has analysed at length, is the institution within which I spent fourteen years building a career — and the institutional conditions of that career, its opportunities and its constraints, its specific rules and its specific informal norms, are the institutional material from which this blog was built.
The institutions that have most shaped the specific life I am living — the educational institutions that provided the analytical framework, the federal government that provided the institutional context, the immigration system that managed the process of family formation across borders, and the Nairobi institutional landscape that is shaping the current phase of the life — are not background conditions of that life. They are, in significant measure, the infrastructure through which the specific opportunities and the specific constraints of the life have been determined. This is the personal confirmation of the analytical claim that institutions shape everything: not everything in the abstract, but the specific choices available to the specific person whose life is being lived within the institutional landscape that the institutions of their time and place have constructed.
The life the institutions shape is the life that the analysis has been trying to make legible. The institutional analysis that does not connect to specific lives — that stays at the level of structural description without returning to the human experience that the structural description is supposed to illuminate — has not completed its analytical obligation. This blog has tried to complete it, imperfectly, by maintaining the connection between the structural analysis and the specific human experience that the structure shapes.
Discussion