Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition

195 Pages·2016·14.12 MB·English

by  Michel Agier

Borderlands
Towards an Anthropology of the
Cosmopolitan Condition
Michel Agier
Translated by David Fernbach
First published in French as La condition cosmopolite: L'a11thropologie à l'épreuve du
piège idel1titaire, (c) Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2013
This English edition (c) Polity Press, 2016
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9679-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Agier, Michel, 1953-
Title: Borderlands : towards an anthropology of the cosmopolitan condition 1
Michel Agier.
Other tides: Condition cosmopolite. English
Description: Malden, MA : Polit y Press, 2016.1 Includes bibliographical references and
index.
ldentifiers: LCCN 2015048690 (print) 1 LCCN 2016010176 (ebook) 1 ISBN
9780745696799 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1 ISBN 0745696791 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1
ISBN 9780745696805 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1 ISBN 0745696805 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1I SBN
9780745696829 (mobi) 1 ISBN 9780745696836 (epub)
Subjecrs: LCSH: Cosmopolitanism. 1M ulticulturalism. 1 Globalization. 1 Group identity.
Classification: LCC ]Z1308 .A3813 2016 (print) 1 LCC JZ1308 (ebook) 1 DDC
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C NTENTS
Preface to the English Edition Vlll
Introduction: The Migrant, the Border and the World 1
Blocked at the border 2
Indifference and solidarities 3
Borders and walls 5
Borderlands and their inhabitants: a banal cosmopolitism 6
Part 1 Ve1centrulg
1 Forms the Border 15
la ....' ''::'.."11-.....· ,,,
The border as centre of reflection 16
Temporal, social and spatial dimensions of the border
ritual 18
Community and locality: the border as social 19
An anthropology offin the border 23
2 as 37
War at the borders 37
Is the world a problem? Cosmopolitical reality and
realpolitik 39
Violence at the border: the outside of the nation 46
Walls of war 53
v
CONTENTS
3 Border Dwellers Borderlands: Studies of Banal
Cosmopolitism 58
The border dwellers: figures and places of relative
foreignness 59
Being-in-the-·world on the border: a new COslTIopolitan
condition 71
Part II Decentred
vM'UI .... '. ....
83
A critical moment: the conten1porary turn in anthropology 84
The end of the 'great divide' 87
Decentring reconceived 95
A contemporary and situational anthropology 101
Race: 106
Civilization as hyper-border: mirrors of Africa 107
The migration of spirits: mobilities and identity-based
cultures 116
Race and racism: how can one be black? 125
Escaping the identity trap 134
An anthropology of the subject 137
decentred subject: three situational analyses 146
Moments the 153
an
Notes 158
Index 177
VI
He walks on the wind. And, in the wind,
he knows himself. No four walls hem in the wind. And the wind is a
compass
for the Horth in a foreign land.
He says: I come from that place. I come from here,
and I am neither here nor there.
I have two names that come together but pull apart.
I have two languages, but I have forgotten which is
the language of my dreams.
Mahmoud Darwish, 'CouHterpoint (Homage to Edward Said)', 2007
It was night.
The ninth night.
We came to a mountain pass.
The trafficker shouted: 'Stop a moment! Look baclc'
We aIl stopped. We alllooked baclc
'This is your last look at your land.'
The land, beneath the whiteness of the snow, had become invisible in
the darkness.
Only the traces of our steps.
Everyone cried. Then we l'an to the border.
On the other side was an expanse covered with snow, white as a sheet
of paper.
Not a footprint.
Not a word.
And its margins lost in the dark night.
Atiq Rahimi, 'The Ninth Night', Le Retour 2005
CE 0
ENGLIS ED
Frontières was the working tide for thefirst French edition of this
book, written between 2010 and 2012 and published in 2013. Only
at the last moment was it changed to La Condition cosmopolite,
from a desire to spell out the perspective of my reflections here. Yet
lrontières do occupy the greater part of the book, and it is this that 1
wanted to restore by putting 'border' back in the tide for the second
edition (and the present English edition), which is a much revised
and modified version of the original essay. At the same time, the
discussion aroused by the original publication has led me to clarify
what cosmopolitan 'condition' we have in rnind in speaking of the
movement of migrants, of life in border spaces, and of the relation
ships that are forn1ed there. The condition 1 discuss here is that of
ordinary or 'banal' cosrnopolitism, in a sense quite close to that of
'banal nationalism' that Michael Billig has written about in relation
to the everyday practices and litde signs that exhibit the belonging of
individuals to a nation.l Ordinary cosmopolitism is n1ade up of the
everyday arrangements 111ade by those women and Inen who are in
the 'labyrinth of the foreigner' (Alfred Schütz's expression) without
yet having managed to emerge from it, who settle in the border situa
tion, have to deal with other languages, ways of acting, thinking and
governing, and adapt and transform themselves by this obligatory
exercise. This led me to describe border situations and borderlands
more generally, and to exhibit the paradox of the wall, which is at the
same time an imitation and a negation of the border.
Persons in displacelnent may weIl be in the process of living an
more univers al than it might appear, beyond the cat
egories, classes and nationalities that are involved today. Even if they
find themselves 'on the margin', they enable us to anticipate a way of
V 111
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
being-in-the-world that globalization is tending to generalize. In this
conception, cosmopolitism is Hot the monopoly of a globalized elite.
On the contrary, it is the experience of the roughness of the world
by aIl those who, by taste, necessity or cOlnpulsion, by des ire or by
habit, are led 1'0 live in several places almost simultaneously and, in
the absence of ubiquity, to live increasingly in mobility, even in an
in-between.
1 have also taken advantage of this new edition to bring clarifi
cations, further research and bibliographie data, and new lines of
argument that 1 felt were lacking in the initial version. And finaIly,
1 have reorganized the whole book around two topics that may be
read either successively or in paraIlel: 'decentring the world' and 'the
decentred subject'.
1 am deeply grateful 1'0 Rémy Toulouse, François Cèze and John
Thompson for their editorial advice, as weIl as to Marc Abélès, Rigas
Arvanitis, Étienne Balibar, Mamadou Diouf, Michel Naepels and
Étienne Tassin for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions
of the text. And finally 1 thank Patricia Birman (State University of
Rio de Janeiro), José Sergio Leite Lopes (Colegio Brasileiro de Altos
Estudos/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and Bruno Calvalcanti
(Federal University of Alagoas) for their welcome in Rio and Maceio
between September and December 2014, where 1 found both the time
and the context to write this new version and discuss certain develop
ments of it.
IX

CTIO : THE GRANT,
AND THE RLD
Since the late 1990s, migrants ongmating in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Sudan or Eritrea, more recently joined by
young Palestinians from Lebanon, have found their way to the port
of Patras - a small Greek town on the shore of the Ionian Sea, and
the point of departure of cargo boats for Venice, Ancona and Bari in
Italy. What the migrants are after here is a crossing to Europe. This is
what I saw one February day in 2009, a few metres from the border
control.
A group of sorne twenty Afghans are walking along the edge of
the road outside the port. They are waiting, as they do every day,
for the lorries moving slowly towards the port, to be loaded into
the holds of ships that take them and their goods to Italy. When one
of these arrives the young people start running, a couple of
them try to open the rear doors of the lorry and, if they manage to
do so, hold the doors open while still running as one or two others
hurriedly try to climb up. Sorne shouts, sometimes laughter, as this
inevitably becomes aimost a game. Certain drivers, annoyed by this
daiIy exercise, sadistically play at accelerating and braking to make
the climbers faH off. Stationed on the roadside is a police car, in which
four policemen continue to chat as they observe the young people
running a few Inetres away. Finally, on the other side of the road
beyond a patch of grass, there is a prestige apartment block whose
entire ground floor is occupied by a plate-glass window. Behind the
glass you can see a fitness centre, its various apparatuses positioned so
that while using them you can see what is happening outside. Side by
on exercise bikes treadn1il1s are a dozen pedalling
or running on the spot while placidly watching the young Afghans in
their behind the lorries. In their field of vision they also have the
1