Abstract
Michel Agier’s Borderlands first appeared in French in 2013 under the title La Condition cosmopolite: L’anthropologie à l’epreuve du piège identitaire (La Découvertee, 2013), and in 2015 the book was translated into both Portuguese and Spanish. 1 The book is a far-reaching exploration of the problem of the border and some of its possible meanings for the analysis of contemporary societies. It applies the classical tools of anthropological and ethnographical research to reflect on the formation of the ‘banal’ experiences of cosmopolitanism in different parts of the world. The book will probably be criticized by classical ethnographers who do not see the point of generalizations; and it will probably also be criticized by ‘generalists’ who will say that neither the empirical nor the theoretical bases for the argument put forward by Agier are strong enough to hold together the structure he wants to sustain. Why I dismiss those criticisms and applaud the book is because Borderlands shows how one can break down the walls imposed on our way of thinking and interpreting contemporary societies. Borderlands shows that we would be better off not following the orthodox rules established in the social sciences to fully address the problems of contemporary societies. It is possible (and I would say also indispensable) to establish, in Agier’s prose, a ‘global ethnography’ of border situations. A reflection on borders rightly asks for located social thought. In light of the specific problems that we face, new methods, theories, and perspectives could be brought together for a reinterpretation of the world that we are living in.
The book advocates a ‘situational’ anthropology of the border, understood by Agier not as a physical entity that splits worlds or something that creates the idea of an insider and an outsider. Quite the opposite; it is a ritual fully inscribed in spatial and temporal experiences that are themselves the source of the social relations created at the border. What the border displays is both a division and a relationship. Its action is double, external and internal; it is both a threshold and an act of institution: to institute one’s own place, whether social or sacred, involves separating this from an environment – nature, city or society – which makes it possible to inscribe a given collective, a ‘group’ or ‘community’ of humans in the social world with which, thanks to the border created, a relationship to others can be established and thus exist. (p. 18)
The book is divided into two parts: Part I, ‘Decentring the World’, and Part II, ‘The Decentred Subject’. In the first part, the author develops an analysis of how a situational anthropology of the border and in the border is required to interpret the contemporary global world. The borderlands are studied as spatial, temporal, and as a social field of dispute in which a form of ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ has been formed. It is in light of the discussion of the border as a situation in which human relations are created and ritualized that the author contests the idea of human identity as what emerges from an autochthonous belonging. Displacement is a mark of human history and it is a mistake to treat immigrants in contemporary society as a problem. Despite the increase in ‘security’ measures and the growth in the construction of walls since the fall of the Berlin Wall, immigrants use their own lives as a manifestation of their political global claim, as shown in the aphorism: ‘A politics of life against the politics of indifference’. This politics ‘symbolises alterity and mobility with an insistence, even obstinacy, vis-à-vis a world that sees them as a problem, and thereby also sees itself likewise’ (p. 39). The building of walls represents the idea of the ‘other’ as a problem for ‘us’, without a broader discussion about what ‘us’ and the ‘other’ mean in each context. That is why Agier works very precisely with the hypothesis ‘that the wall is to the border what identity is to alterity’, which means that the existence of one represents the negation of the other.
To better explain the politics of life that immigrants put in practice, the author develops the now well-known idea of the cosmopolitanism of everyday life into the idea of ‘banal cosmopolitanism’. The border is held as a liminal space, the lacuna between the place of origin and the desired place of destiny. The modes of existence established in border zones become themselves the place where cosmopolitan political life is established. A new European phenomenon, which can be attributed to the lack of a democratization of the politics of immigration, is that ‘the movement itself becomes the end of the road’ (p. 62). What is important to highlight though is that the waiting zones are themselves a culmination of many historical trajectories that could not be brought together otherwise. They are themselves the space of formation of new subjectivities embedded by previous experiences reshaped by the way life flows in different borders. The author presents ethnographical vignettes encapsulating subjects who live as wandering figures who have experienced the life at the border. The anthropology of the border shows how in different situations, one would find very different answers to the questions of how we became a foreigner and how we cease to be so (p. 74). This gives us the basis of the argument about ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ as the way that the politics of life is expressed in the contemporary world. The displaced subjects are constantly facing different visions of the world, and, by their movement, they create for themselves other possible worlds that otherwise would not be possible. The banal cosmopolitanism emerges out of political practice, not from previous theoretical or philosophical projects.
Part II, ‘The Decentred Subject’, further develops the argument against static, temporal and spatial social theories, by showing how they fail to explain the formation of subjectivities in border situations. Agier connects debates about identity as manifested in controversies about culture, race and civilizations with the proposal of looking at the border as a ‘social fact’ (p. 23) – a spatial temporal existence that makes possible the creation of new social relations not exactly previous defined. These relations themselves challenge what has been previously defined as crystallized identities or cultural determinations. It inscribes in a new situation what has been previously constituted. Agier advances Marc Augé’s anthropology of the contemporary world by decentring anthropological methods and theories. This part of the book is very much a debate between an anthropological quest for the equilibrium between the ontology inscribed in the idea of ‘being-in-itself’ and the cosmology of ‘being-in-the-world’. Outlining the limitations of the quest for a conceptual equilibrium between those ideas, Agier defines anthropology in the border sense as the process of fully taking globalization into account. This situational anthropology demands attention be directed at the disorders created on the ‘edge’ of things.
On this basis, I feel compelled to criticize the book for its lack of reference to the work of Walter Mignolo. I doubt Agier is unacquainted with the work of the Argentinean semiotician who has done extensive work on cosmopolitanism, decolonial thought, and who has advanced the proposal of ‘border thinking’, first presented by Gloria Anzaldúa in her 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera. Mignolo has claimed that borders would be for the twenty-first century what frontiers were for the nineteenth century. But more than simply becoming a central issue for social thought, border thinking represents a change in perspective: it refers to the possibility of decentring the world itself. It is based on the affirmation of the ‘I Am Where I Do’ which leads us in a different direction to the Cartesian ‘I Think Therefore I Am’. Mignolo’s argument is based on extensive work on the connection between geo-history, the establishment of modern frontiers, and modern epistemology. He shows how the Eurocentric systems of knowledge and power have overshadowed the relation between geo-history and epistemology. It is not the aim of this review to fully revisit a contribution that does not appear in the book, and I am not making a naïve claim for the observation of everything that has been said before on borders. The point is about the recognition of ‘border thinking’ as a dialogue that is the basis of Agier’s argument. I cannot see any acceptable reason for the absence of a dialogue with this approach in the development of an anthropology of the border situation that deals with the challenges brought about by the post-colonial world. Border thinking shares with Agier’s proposal the idea of bringing alive the materiality and corporeal experiences developed in border situations. A further commonality is the issue of the political decentring and the quest for the ‘other’ not as an object, but as a subject who is also an expression of the epistemological shifts that take place in specific situations.
In the absence of a traditional privileged anthropological place that is located outside the ‘observer’ world, in anthropology, the change in perspective refers to the necessity to abandon the search for the relativization of an ethnological identitarian culture to the uneven structuration of situations that are transitory but powerful. While it would be unhelpful to present the second Part of Borderlands as weaker than the first, my second critique also relates to an argument developed in Part II. The discussion about ‘the decentred subject’ probably should have focused less on the problematization of the idea of identity through the dismantling of the categories of culture, race and civilizations. It is so because by now, social thought and anthropology have already shown the limitation of these categories and thus the author appears to have little new to contribute here. There are few social scientists and anthropologists in the contemporary world who would use those categories to explain societal phenomena in the same way that was common up to the end of the twentieth century. For instance, if we take the mainstream North American debates about civilization, there are reasons to believe that they are very much ‘warlike’ (p. 107). But this idea of civilization has been criticized and revised to form a new understanding of it as a manifestation of social imaginaries and interpretation, for instance, in the work of Johann Arnason. This linear link between civilization and identity has already been questioned and problematized. The same can be said about the link between identity, culture and race. For critical thinkers trying to overcome linear categories of the social to interpret the contemporary world, it is quite obvious that ‘the local/global relationship is the “basis and precondition” for the cultural dynamic observed in a given place’ (p. 125).
Agier’s primary contribution to debates about subject formation comes in the final chapter of the book where he moves further in the development of the politics of the subject. The subject emerges out of the tension of pre-assigned categories in a given situation. As a concept, ‘the subject’ can be considered as harbouring the potential for a radical decentring of the anthropologically established ways of regarding persona: individual and communal. This original contribution to the discussion about subject formation is well formulated in the following passage: This figure of the subject ‘who imposes himself’ and, by this irruption, ‘challenges our habitual ways of thinking’, forces on us a decentring: this is the subject who speaks out, seizing speech, initiative or space, directing us to the analysis of a situation and a moment, rather than that of a social structure or a biopolitical apparatus that produce and freeze identity assignments. (p. 146)