Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition – Michel Agier

Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition – Michel Agier

Author: Michel Agier

Publisher: Polity Press

Print Length: 208 pages

Genre: Non-Fiction / Anthropology, Non-Fiction / Cultural Studies, Non-Fiction / Politics & Political Science, Non-Fiction / Race Studies, Non-Fiction / Social Science

Topic: Borders, Civilization, Cosmopolitanism, Culture & Society, Identity, Migrants, Politics & Power, Race, Racism & Anti-Racism, Solidarity, Violence & Mass Violence

The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world. But what do we know about the border places – these liminal zones between countries and continents – that have become the focus of so much attention and anxiety today, and what do we know about the individuals who occupy these places?

In this timely book, anthropologist Michel Agier addresses these questions and examines the character of the borderlands that emerge on the margins of nation-states. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork, he shows that borders, far from disappearing, have acquired a new kind of centrality in our societies, becoming reference points for the growing numbers of people who do not find a place in the countries they wish to reach. They have become the site for a new kind of subject, the border dweller, who is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, enclosed on the one hand and excluded on the other, and who is obliged to learn, under harsh conditions, the ways of the world and of other people. In this respect, the lives of migrants, even in the uncertainties or dangers of the borderlands, tell us something about the condition in which everyone is increasingly living today, a ‘cosmopolitan condition’ in which the experience of the unfamiliar is more common and the relation between self and other is in constant renewal.

Preface to the English Edition

 

Introduction: The Migrant, the Border and the World

  • Blocked at the border
  • Indifference and solidarities
  • Borders and walls
  • Borderlands and their inhabitants: a banal cosmopolisim

Part I Decentring the World

1. The Elementary Forms of the Border

  • The border as centre of reflection
  • Temporal, social and spatial dimensions of the border ritual
  • Community and locality: the border as social fact
  • An anthropology of/in the border

2. The World as ‘Problem’

  • War at the borders
  • Is the world a problem? Cosmpolitical reality and realpolitik
  • Violence at the border: the outside of the nation Walls of war

3. Border Dwellers and Borderlands: Studies of Banal Cosmopolitism

  • The border dwellers: figures and places of relative foreigners
  • Being-in-the-world on the border: a new cosmpolitan condition

 

Part II The Decentred Subject

4. Questions of Method: Decentring Reconsidered Today

  • A critical moment: the contemporary turn in anthropology
  • The end of the ‘great divide’
  • Decentring reconceived
  • A contemporary and situational anthropology

5. Civilization, Culture, Race: Three Explorations in Identity

  • Civilization as hyper-border: mirrors of Africa
  • The migration of spirits: mobilities and identity-based cultures
  • Race and racism: how can one be black
  • Escaping the identity trap

6. Logics and Politics of the Subject

  • An anthropology of the subject
  • The decentred subject: three situational analyses
  • Moments and politics of the other-subject

 

Conclusion: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition

Notes

Index

Michel Agier is a French ethnologist and anthropologist, Director of Research at the Institut de recherche pour le développement, Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and head of the Policy Department at the Institut Convergences Migrations. His research focuses on the relationships between human globalization, the conditions and places of exile, and the formation of new urban contexts. Michel Agier is involved in associations and fights for the opening of borders to migrants. Director of the Centre d’Études Africaines (UMR 194 EHESS-IRD) from 2004 to 2010, he joined the Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain (IIAC) in 2013. He was coordinator of the ASILES program (ANR) from 2005 to 2009. Since 2013, he has headed the “Paysage Global de Camps” project within the ANR’s MobGlob program. In 2012-2013, Michel Agier and a team of doctoral and post-doctoral students working with him set up the Atelier d’Anthropologie Contemporaine (LAC), now part of the IIAC.

Source: https://www.fondation-croix-rouge.fr/en/recherches-soutenues/anthropology-of-displacement-and-work-on-the-conditions-and-places-of-exile/

More from Michel Agier in this library, click here.