Michel Agier

Humanity as an Identity and Its Political Effects (A Note on Camps and Humanitarian Government)

Agier offers an assessment of contemporary humanitarianism and appeals to humanity that juxtaposes a survey of camps with ethnographic reportage. According to Agier, contemporary humanitarianism must be understood as a new and unprecedented form of government that nevertheless leaves room for unsuspected political action.

DISTÚRBIOS IDENTITÁRIOS EM TEMPOS DE GLOBALIZAÇÃO

This article deals firstly with the state of the question of identity in current anthropology and, secondly, it develops a reflection on contemporary cultural processes. The relationships between place and identity, place and culture and culture and identity are theoretically and empirically examined. It is observed that cultural creations are, at present, more concerned with the problem of identity then they were previously, as well as being strongly influenced by the accelerated globalization of local situations. There is now room for a critique of global dominations and the responses they bring about - a critique which may enable a reflection on the possible forms of resistance (local, political, artistic, etc.) to these dominations.

Refugiados diante da nova ordem mundial

The meaning and function of humanitarian interventions have changed as an outcome of a new scenario: war in urban spaces with increased involvement of civilians and new tensions between north and south (in particular Europe and Africa) about international migration. More and more humanitarian action tries to control and to confine displaced people, refugees, asylum claimers and all that people designated as clandestine. These people are regarded as victim and devoid of any social ties. However, as clandestine or as inhabitants of champs, the refugees work out responses and initiatives to the confinement. The target is often humanitarian organizations supported by ONU or governments. The humanitarian language is in this way recycled and politicized by its subjects.

Epistemological decentring: At the root of a contemporary and situational anthropology

To what extent can anthropology still help us to understand the world around us at a time when this world is characterized by processes of political and economic multipolarity, and the decolonization of knowledge? The political questioning of cultural decentring is an opportunity for anthropology to build a new epistemological conception of decentring. Against and beyond cultural relativism, ethnicism or ontological perspectivism, the issue is knowing how to decentre in any situation, ‘here and now’, from oneself as much as from each ‘we’, searching for tangible and intangible limits, and making those borders places of observation and understanding of increasingly more cosmopolitan social and cultural lives. I develop and propose this new conception in three stages. The first contextual stage highlights the importance of border situations and the necessity to account for them in order to tackle globalization as an observable social fact, beyond and against frozen representations of Others’ cultures and identities. The second stage explores the possibility of a post-culturalist decentring. In this reflection I turn to philosophy, from Rousseau to Foucault and Agamben, to find cues for an epistemological conception of decentring. In the last part I emphasize the understanding of situations, and rehabilitate reflexive ethnography and the situational inductive approach as the foundations of contemporary anthropology.

Afterword: What Contemporary Camps Tell Us about the World to Come

Abstract: As a first part of this article, in order to attempt a genealogical reading of the current literature on camps, I outline three arguments which are central to the issues tackled by researchers these last decades, and which are the main themes of the controversies surrounding discourses and practices about camps: a securitarian argument, a humanitarian argument, and an identity-based argument which first caught the attention of anthropologists when this new research highlighted issues such as the loss of identity or the anchoring of relationships and subjectivities. In the second part of the article, I draw the main practical and theoretical challenges for the future of encampments: camps as part of a marginal borderland at global scale, as the locus of an absolute and unknown “Other”, and as places of new forms of urbanity.

Frontières de l'exil. Vers une altérité biopolitique

Cet article vise a decrire et comprendre un processus en cours, qui associe la formation d’espaces de mise a l’ecart – des hors-lieux – et une nouvelle figure de l’etranger, defini selon une alterite non pas d’abord culturelle ou ethnique mais biopolitique, celle de l’etranger absolu. On cherche aussi a comprendre ce qui s’invente comme mondes a venir dans ces lieux-frontieres et ces situations-limites.

NOVA COSMÓPOLIS: AS FRONTEIRAS COMO OBJETOS DE CONFLITO NO MUNDO CONTEMPORÂNEO

Globalization did not suppress the borders; it transforms them, dislocates them, and dissociates them from one another. Some economic activities, for instance, do not have the same scope or extent of the political activities or of those of the communications. The frontiers are multiplied, enlarged, and so become more fragile and uncertain. The present moment of the globalization process brings us two questions in relation to the possibility of living in a global scale. On one hand, a growing number of borders are transformed into walls, more migrants die in oceans, deserts, mountains, trying to cross closed borders. On another hand, the philosophical and political question of cosmopolitism returns to the agenda in a different context from that of the Enlightenment, but that formulates, concretely, the same questions. From the ethnographies of “borders-men” and “borders-places” (Borderlands), the article proposes thinking a new cosmopolis, considered as a world in movement which anticipates the trivial and everyday form of cosmopolitism. In the anthropological sphere, such is a new situation in which culture and sociability are defined in more and more constant border situations.