Agier - Borderlands towards an anthropology of the cosmopolitan condition

Michel Agier

Translated by David Fernbach

polity

First published in French as La condition cosmopolite: Lanthropologie lpreuve du pige identitaire, (c) ditions La Dcouverte, Paris, 2013
This English edition (c) Polity Press, 2016

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ISBN: 978-0-7456-9683-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Agier, Michel, 1953
Title: Borderlands : towards an anthropology of the cosmopolitan condition / Michel Agier.
Other titles: Condition cosmopolite. English
Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048690 (print) | LCCN 2016010176 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745696799 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0745696791 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745696805 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 0745696805 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745696829 (mobi) | ISBN 9780745696836 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Cosmopolitanism. | Multiculturalism. | Globalization. | Group identity.
Classification: LCC JZ1308 .A3813 2016 (print) | LCC JZ1308 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/2--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048690

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It was night.

The ninth night.

We came to a mountain pass.

The trafficker shouted: Stop a moment! Look back.

We all stopped. We all looked back.

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 ran 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 imaginaire, 2005

Frontires was the working title for the first 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 frontires do occupy the greater part of the book, and it is this that I wanted to restore by putting border back in the title 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 mind in speaking of the movement of migrants, of life in border spaces, and of the relationships that are formed there. The condition I discuss here is that of ordinary or banal cosmopolitism, in a sense quite close to that of the banal nationalism that Michael Billig has written about in relation to the everyday practices and little signs that exhibit the belonging of individuals to a nation. Ordinary cosmopolitism is made up of the everyday arrangements made by those women and men who are in the labyrinth of the foreigner (Alfred Schtzs expression) without yet having managed to emerge from it, who settle in the border situation, 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 displacement may well be in the process of living an experience far more universal than it might appear, beyond the categories, classes and nationalities that are involved today. Even if they find themselves on the margin, they enable us to anticipate a way of being-in-the-world that globalization is tending to generalize. In this conception, cosmopolitism is not the monopoly of a globalized elite. On the contrary, it is the experience of the roughness of the world by all those who, by taste, necessity or compulsion, by desire or by habit, are led to live in several places almost simultaneously and, in the absence of ubiquity, to live increasingly in mobility, even in an in-between.

I have also taken advantage of this new edition to bring clarifications, further research and bibliographic data, and new lines of argument that I felt were lacking in the initial version. And finally, I have reorganized the whole book around two topics that may be read either successively or in parallel: decentring the world and the decentred subject.

I am deeply grateful to Rmy Toulouse, Franois Gze and John Thompson for their editorial advice, as well as to Marc Abls, Rigas Arvanitis, tienne Balibar, Mamadou Diouf, Michel Naepels and tienne Tassin for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the text. And finally I thank Patricia Birman (State University of Rio de Janeiro), Jos 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 I found both the time and the context to write this new version and discuss certain developments of it.

Since the late 1990s, migrants originating 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 some 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 lorries 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. Some shouts, sometimes laughter, as this inevitably becomes almost a game. Certain drivers, annoyed by this daily exercise, sadistically play at accelerating and braking to make the climbers fall 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 metres 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 side on the exercise bikes and treadmills are a dozen people pedalling or running on the spot while placidly watching the young Afghans in their chase behind the lorries. In their field of vision they also have the port, the ships and the sea in the distance and very likely the police car stationed on the roadside as well.