Dialect Anthropol (2008) 32:211–215 DOI 10.1007/s10624-008-9072-7

Reply: solidarity Thinking through solidarity and difference: anthropology, migrants, alterity Winnie Lem

Published online: 14 January 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

In April of 2003, on a lonely road where apples grow in south-eastern France, Guilhermino Armando Dos Santos, a seasonal worker from Portugal, was run over by a car and killed while heading home. Le Monde Diplomatique reported that earlier in the day, four men had been drinking in a nearby village bar. Allegedly, one of them said: ‘‘The Portuguese, they breathe too much of our air. I’d like to kill them.’’ These men were charged with murder. (‘‘France: Apples of Discord’’, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2003, p. 15). In the same month, the Guardian Weekly printed an excerpt from Abd Samad Moussaoui’s 2003 biography of his brother, Zacarias, who was convicted in 2006 of launching the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City. The excerpt in the newspaper focused on the humiliations suffered by the Moussaoui siblings, who grew up on a housing estate near Narbonne in the southern province of Languedoc. Samad wrote that being cast as ‘‘Arab’’ had often caught the young Moussaoui boys by surprise, as they were born in France, did not speak Arabic, and were non-practising Muslims. Although the Moussaoui children considered themselves French, they endured racial taunts, slurs, and violent assaults and all the other petty, day to day aggravations (or what Samad called ‘‘aggros’’) of being seen as ‘‘visibly’’ different from other French children (Guardian Weekend April 19th, 2003). A month later, supporters of Le Pen’s National Front rallied on May Day. They paraded down the rue de Rivoli in Paris, chanting ‘‘La France aux franc¸ais! Immigre´s dehors!’’ (France for the French! Immigrants out!) (Le Monde May 10, 2003). These items appeared in the European Press just as Luc Ferry, France’s minister of education, initiated a new school program aimed at eliminating racism. The press reported that workshops were held, lectures were delivered, and

W. Lem (&) International Development Studies, Trent University, Peterborough K9J 7B8, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

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simulations of racist incidents, discussion groups, and seminars were organised to tackle the problem. The media coverage illustrates how nation, ethnicity, race and racism are at the forefront of the European public imagination at a time when Europe is in the grip of neo-liberal transformation. Nation, ethnicity, race and racism are tropes that are also prominent in the anthropological and academic imagination. This is manifested in the expansion of university curricula devoted to the problematics of nationalism and racism. The increased attention to nation, ethnicity and race in various fora occurred over the course of the post-1975 decades, a period of time in which the attenuation of borders and the rule of the state in favour of the rule of the market promoted competition for scarce (national) resources, generated unemployment, and aggravated divisions among the working class by inflaming xenophobia and racism. Such processes and preoccupations have consequences. The growing concern with questions of nationalism and ethnicity means that questions of class and processes of class formation under capitalism have been pushed to the margins of scholarly debate. Culture has occluded class in anthropology, and the discipline has embraced a more benign politics of culture. Against the backdrop of resurgent European racism and right-wing politics, I would like to reflect on the role of anthropology and the preoccupation of anthropologists with culture and cultural difference. I argue that questions of solidarity have become more important even as solidarity itself is defined more narrowly. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in southern France and Paris, I suggest that the anthropological focus on difference both reflects and reinforces simplistic divisions of nation, race, and ethnicity, and in so doing, passes up the opportunity to examine the break down of other potential solidarities between peoples and nations. The focus on difference arises from a paradox that lies at the heart of our discipline. On the one hand, anthropology is a discipline that is based on humanistic principles and promotes intercultural understanding, tolerance and universalism. On the other hand, part of the disciplinary project is to define cultural boundaries in terms of difference and the particular qualities of people or peoples. In what follows, I explore the consequences of this paradox. The re-emergence of race as a salient idea in France is deeply troubling. It forms part of a moral panic that is provoked and sponsored by (but not confined to) neonationalists, and that centers on immigration. Much current research on immigrants in Europe, including my own research in Languedoc, focuses on the social and political implications of this moral panic, which projects the threat of ever increasing ‘‘waves’’ of migrants flooding the shores of advanced capitalist countries. Languedoc is the region where the Moussaoui brothers grew up, and it is close to where dos Santos worked and lived before his murder. The parents of the Moussaoui brothers were part of a North African migrant population that settled in the south of France. Some migrants worked as domestics and agricultural labourers in the farms of the region, and they came into daily contact with employers who referred to themselves as franc¸ais de souche (literally, the French of stock). Yet Franco-Arab and Franco-European inhabitants of Languedoc maintained completely separate social worlds, and the franc¸ais de souche struggled to maintain social boundaries and to rationalise the separation between themselves and the immigrants by pointing

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to the North Africans’ cultural practices, understandings, and patterns of sociability. Although youth in schools and sports centers often broke the boundaries, most village associations, such as local theatre groups, reinforced them. These conditions challenge the basic solidarity that anthropologists would like to establish between researchers and research subjects. Anthropologists typically write with fondness about the people they study. We attempt to understand the world from the perspective of our research subjects, and this supposedly builds sympathy for local understanding and solidarity with indigenous informants or members of the working-class with whom we work. Anthropological literature leads us to believe that to do otherwise is to act in bad faith. Who could disagree? Our method of participant observation relies heavily on the ability to build personal relationships in the field. Yet our methods can pose personal problems, especially in situations like the one I encountered in Languedoc. Surviving as an anthropologist often requires that we ignore overt pronouncements of racial intolerance among our research subjects. Yet ignoring racism often leads to an uncomfortable sense of collusion with those prejudices. This problem of silent collusion with racial prejudices is especially complicated for those researchers positioned in the discipline as ‘‘minority’’ anthropologists— those described by Abu Lughod (1991) as ‘‘halfies,’’ This is particularly true when we see the discipline of anthropology as a forum for left political praxis. Indeed, when new forms of left politics emerged in Europe in the early 1980s, anthropological fieldwork was alluring to me.1 However, engaging in fieldwork as a ‘‘halfie’’ among a ‘‘native’’ population of white Europeans posed challenges to the construction and maintenance of solidarity even on a personal basis. Amongst the many ‘‘petty, day to day aggros’’, to use Samad Moussaoiu’s words, of living as a minority among majority Europeans informants was the aggro of continual negotiation of my own national identity. The local autochtonous population continually conflated national identity with race and ethnicity, and despite my efforts to situate myself in terms of nation and culture as Canadian, I was regularly re-situated racially as ‘‘La Chinoise’’ (the Chinese woman). This process of resituation and re-positioning resembled the way that Zacarias Moussaoui was cast as a Muslim Arab, even though he identified as French. My experience of re-situation was a valuable anthropological lesson, because it reminded me of how powerful the idea of difference is in the popular imagination. It also reminded me of why the idea of difference is such a powerful trope in our discipline. Yet the same processes can exert themselves in even more subtle, and perhaps more challenging ways. After pulling up ethnographic stakes in Languedoc and starting a new research programme on Franco-Chinese migrants in Paris, I now work as a ‘‘native’’ anthropologist in the eyes of both the majority of my colleagues and the non-Franco-Chinese I encounter during research. Within anthropology, such a move conforms to the practice of many minority anthropologists who choose to work among people with whom they share what appears to be a cultural or phenotypical affinity. It is an attempt to make difference work for the minority anthropologist. For me, the change meant that the notoriously reticent immigrants in 1

See Tiryakian and Rogowski (1985) and Coulin and Morin (1979).

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France’s Asian immigrant community were not at all reticent with me during fieldwork interviews and conversations.2 Yet how being Asian ‘‘worked’’ in this case is more complex than one might think. Many people spoke to me because they were curious about how I was both like them and different from them. I came from distant shores (Canada) and in both class and status, I was again different. One informant admitted that his curiosity about me was piqued because he rarely met a Chinese man, much less a woman, so thoroughly integrated into the dominant society and culture of the West. He noted that although immigrants participate to various degrees in the French economy, racism and discrimination keep them culturally and socially marginal. My work on migration is thematically consonant with much anthropological work on the subject as it aims in general to explore the causes and consequences of exclusion and racism in the context of Europe. It tackles issues of neo-nationalisms and the significance of ethnic communities and economies that are emerging within the political and economic regimes that are being formed by the doctrines of neoliberalism. As I have argued elsewhere, such regimes contribute to the rise of racism and of racist political parties (Lem 2008). My work conforms to a tradition of anthropological practice that promotes cross-cultural understanding and tolerance, exposes racism, and works towards its defeat. However, I emerged from these two very different field sites questioning anthropology’s ability to challenge racism because of what I identified earlier as the paradox at the heart of our discipline. This ‘‘paradox of alterity’’—to coin a phrase—puts our desire to understand (and value) difference at odds with our desire to eliminate racism. The ‘‘paradox of alterity’’ helps me understand my discomfort at declaring myself to be an anthropologist to European and franc¸ais de souche informants. This discomfort is reinforced when I observe informants puzzling through the fact that an anthropologist is studying them and constructing them as ‘‘other’’. It is further reinforced because an anthropologist categorised as ‘‘other’’ by the franc¸ais de souche is studying them.3 According to my Languedoc informants, anthropologists study the exotic. This view also prevails among my Parisian informants. One Chinese informant, for example, commented rather caustically that my work will render him into a museum specimen. My informants in both Languedoc and Paris associate anthropology and anthropologists with the study of exotic people in strange, distant places. It is commonly known that anthropologists study ‘‘primitive’’ people and this common knowledge reinforces the widespread belief that the savage is the raison d’eˆtre of anthropology Trouillot 1991. Thus, to be studied by an anthropologist, is, ipso facto, to be exotic, unusual, primitive, and savage—or put more neutrally, ‘‘different.’’ And, as the young Moussaoui brothers found, being defined as different is a curse, especially in a context in which neo-nationalism is gathering force. For Dos Santos, (the migrant worker slain in south-eastern France) difference marked the distinction between life and death. If, as anthropologists, we 2

See for example, Introduction in Benton and Pieke (1998) eds, and personal communication.

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Asad (2000) notes that the presence particularly of Muslims or ‘‘others’’ within France’s borders produces a great degree of anxiety about the idea of Europe. In the case of my fieldwork, where Europeans seem to be constructed as ‘‘other’’ by an ‘‘other,’’ so to speak, the anxiety is multiplied.

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can explain the historical and political processes that undergird Franco-Europeans racism, our disciplinary preoccupation with difference may indeed be worthwhile. But at this particular juncture, when neo-nationalism and cultural racism are fuelling anti-immigration sentiment in Europe and elsewhere, the most important question is whether our work and our focus on difference inadvertently bolsters the programmes of Jean Marie Le Pen, Jorge Haider and the late Pym Fortuyn. How can an anthropologist convey to the French public that cultural difference is not important, when it is so consequential within our discipline, and when we have spent so many decades identifying, elevating, and valuing it? Over the past few years, the European media has constantly defined immigration and the failure of immigrants to integrate into French society as a crisis, one that national and supranational polities must confront. Yet the question of how anthropologists should confront economic and cultural integration, politically as well as intellectually, remains unresolved. As Abu Lughod (1991) reminds us, ‘‘culture’’ operates in anthropological discourse to enforce separations and also hierarchy. In other words, it focuses on difference and given this focus, I ask whether anthropologists in their work provide the raw material for those committed to political projects that exclude, expel and eliminate. Does a focus on difference in these troubling times undermine solidarity rather than build it? Finally, I ask anthropologists to reflect on the invidious tropes of nation, race, and ethnicity and on their own role in reproducing the tensions of our times. Acknowledgement This contribution benefited from the interventions of Donna Young, Anne Meneley, Kirk Dombrowski, Lesley Gill and Sharryn Kasmir. I thank them all.

References Asad, Talal. 2000. Muslims and European identity: Can Europe represent Islam? In Cultural encounters, representing otherness, ed. Hallam Elizabeth, and Brian Street, 11–28. London: Routledge. Abu Lughod, Lila. 1991. Writing against culture. In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, ed. G. Fox Richard, 137–162. Santa Fe: School of Research Press. Benton, Gregor, and Frank Pieke (eds.). 1998. The Chinese in Europe. Houndsmill: MacMillan Press. Coulin, C., and F. Morin. 1979. Occitan ethnicity and politics. Critique of Anthropology 4: 105–122. Lem, Winnie. 2008. Migrants, mobilization and citizenship in contemporary France. Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology (Special Issue, Migrants, Mobility and Mobilization, Barber, Pauline Gardiner and Lem, Winnie co-eds.), 51:57–72. Moussaoui, Abd. 2003. Zacarias, my brother: The making of a tserrorist. New York: Seven Stories Press. Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness. In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, ed. G.Fox Richard, 17–44. Santa Fe: School of Research Press. Tiryakian, E., and R. Rogowski (eds.). 1985. New nationalisms of the developed West. Boston: Allen and Unwin.

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