The “migrant crisis” has reactivated a desire to welcome in many citizens. While these initiatives alone cannot constitute a response to the challenges posed by migration, anthropologist M. Agier seeks to draw from them the principles of a hospitality policy that is up to the challenges.
Among the many works and reflections raised by what is commonly called the migrant crisis, the latest work by Mr. Agier, anthropologist, director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and research director at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, stands out for its ability to combine two approaches that are too often separated: theoretical and conceptual questioning on the one hand, empirical field research on the other.
The work focuses on the function that hospitality fulfills, whatever the contexts in which it is deployed: it is, the author emphasizes, a answer to a problem very specific, that posed by the arrival of the stranger, who, because of the surprise and discomfort that he can cause, always risks being assimilated to an intruder and therefore rejected. Mr. Agier’s thinking consists of holding together, thanks to the notion of hospitality, the two faces that characterize the stranger: the fact that his presence is always, to varying degrees, a test (for himself, but also, this is the point of view mainly adopted here, for the community where he arrives), and that it is nevertheless possible to integrate him to a certain extent, to make a place for him. The approach adopted is clear: to draw, from the vast repertoire of known hospitality practices, the elements intended to re-establish a hospitality specific to our time and adapted to the problems that our societies encounter today.
Hospitality Today
The problem under consideration is presented in the first pages in the form of a diagnosis: the policies of closure of European states implemented to respond to the ‘migrant crisis’, in which the author prefers to see a ‘crisis of nation states in the face of mobility’ (p. 10), have led many citizens or associations, by contrast, to welcome foreigners by their own means, in a more or less improvised and essentially reactive form, to counterbalance the policy implemented. However, this return of private hospitality is more of a symptom than a solution: it signals the dissatisfaction of a part of the population with the policies implemented and the unease of contemporary states in the face of international circulation. However, given the scale of the phenomenon of migration, it cannot represent a satisfactory solution. It would rather be “an old concept (which) returns, but in a hollow, negative, question mark or protest” (p. 15), thus underlining the absence of any policy of hospitality, yet essential in our time, and of which Mr. Agier attempts to outline the possible contours.
“Making the stranger my guest”
One of the main qualities of the work is that it does not fall into an aestheticization of the notion of hospitality (its “sacralization”, writes M. Agier, p. 30), which often gives rise to very abstract developments, such as those of Derrida emphasizing the unbridgeable gap between the Law of hospitality, necessarily unconditional, and its practical implementation which supposes at least a delimitation of the space of the home and therefore always betrays this ideal; the author is keen on the contrary to go beyond the surface consensus aroused by the notion to consider the tensions and concrete problems posed not by hospitality in generalbut by the actual practices in which it is translated. It therefore starts from the hospitality relationshiprather than its concept. It is not a question of sticking to a catalogue of recorded practices of hospitality, and it is in this that the starting point adopted, consisting of seeing in hospitality the answer to a problem (how to make the stranger my guest and not my enemy), proves to be particularly valuable: it allows us to maintain the need of hospitality that is imposed as a duty in the current context. This approach makes possible a fruitful questioning from Derrida’s ethics, which anchors it once again in the soil of practice: “what to do with this conception of unconditional hospitality, what place to give it in a social and political anthropology of hospitality?” (p. 29).
The anthropologist and hospitality, yesterday and today
Halfway between the conceptual and empirical approaches, the author uses his own field studies and various anthropological works to identify the “elementary forms” of hospitality (p. 30). We can summarize its main features as follows: hospitality does indeed have a sacred dimension, as Derrida argued, because it is similar to a gift. However, it is not disinterested, insofar as the one who grants it derives a certain social prestige from it (Bourdieu, Pitt-Rivers); finally, it is a relationship that is both reciprocal, where everyone has rights and duties, and asymmetrical, which is often demonstrated by the assimilation of the host received to a child (Pitt-Rivers, Gotman). Moreover, and this is where we find contemporary issues in the background, hospitality is always limited in time, in that it ends with the departure or on the contrary the inclusion of the stranger, and that it always supposes making the stranger familiar (it is also primarily aimed at family members, in the broad sense). The expansion of its beneficiaries, beyond family members, will therefore be done through intermediaries who serve as a link between the host who receives and the one who is received: various associations, religious communities, etc. We are a long way here from the abstract figure of the perfectly anonymous and unknown stranger: the hospitality that is addressed to this latter figure is only one of the last historical avatars of the practice, the one that is taken care of by the Church and then by the State. We then find ourselves back at the initial problem: this public and state hospitality having disappeared, how can I make the stranger who comes my host here and now?
Hospitality is indeed flourishing again in a form that is at once individual, associative and municipal, but always trying and problematic for its actors, because “current practices highlight the efforts to compensate for the disappearance of the social frameworks that have long framed it” (p. 57). The analysis of the initiatives listed in the 2e chapter highlights the attempts to codify this emerging – or rather re-emerging – practice. The observation is clear: these initiatives, whatever their form and motivation, remain insufficient to “respond effectively to the place taken by migrations in the world” (p. 67). Certainly, communal hospitality offers a promising path, as an intermediate level between individuals and the State, but it remains embryonic, insofar as it comes into conflict with the current political structure centered on the State; however, it should not be neglected insofar as, while the world-state is inconceivable, the world-city is indeed: it opens a possible path for a renewed cosmopolitanism.
This notion of cosmopolitanism, today just as hackneyed as hospitality, is also thought of as the answer to a problem specific to each era; ours would be that of unequal access to mobility, which explains why, among the thinkers discussed, namely Simmel, Park and Kant, it is the latter who attracts the most attention of Mr. Agier. His ambition is however to rethink the right of visit by emancipating it from the Kantian framework which remained centered on States, whose local anchoring is a major obstacle. Emphasizing that Kantian cosmopolitan law, as a right of visit, has become a reality for a part of humanity, he identifies as a problem for our time the question of its political translation, consisting precisely in determining its status in relation to the State: the whole difficulty, despite the flowering of initiatives and demands on the question of migrations, is that “there is no place in the national systems of thought and action to give meaning and effectiveness to these movements” (p. 97). Leaving the state framework, he launches into the search for the places of emergence of the “cosmopolitan condition, in the sense of a lived, daily and ordinary experience” (p. 104).
Rethinking the figures of the foreigner
The book then analyzes this experience made ordinary by globalization and the generalization of exchanges and movements, of which the migrant, because he experiences the crossing of borders, would represent “the advanced point of an ordinary world in formation” (p. 107); for this reason, his journey offers a field to the anthropologist. Michel Agier draws from it four figures of the foreigner, or rather four ways of “becoming foreign” (title of the last chapter): by arriving from elsewhere (the outsider); when crossing a border (the foreigner); by leaving what is familiar to us (the stranger) ; and by being radically different (the alien). Two antithetical observations are necessary: on the one hand, we are all foreigners, to some degree, according to one or other of these four cursors; on the other hand, States have constituted migrants as aliensin figures of radical strangeness that only provoke rejection. This figure is identified by Mr. Agier as the specter that gives rise to current border policies. Conversely, making this specter disappear would require integrating it along the axis of the first three categories: freeing up circulation, facilitating belonging, increasing knowledge and recognition of cultures. Indeed, while the first three categories defined can be included in the relationship of hospitality, the last one, which nevertheless predominates in current political practices and representations, cannot, which explains the closure of States and the need to found a policy hospitality for our times.
This typology of the figures of the foreigner is a notable contribution of the work; one could even say that, more than hospitality, what the author “rethinks”, as the title announces, is the foreigner, emphasizing the “axial place” (p. 12) that he occupies today and is led to occupy more and more. On the question of the refoundation of hospitality, the reflection remains more programmatic than developed: it rigorously identifies the problem and the challenges that our era has to face, that is to say, making the foreigner a host to avoid making him a alien or an enemy, but only outlines possible responses, such as the idea, mentioned in the conclusion, of understanding hospitality as a right rather than a duty, to make it an enforceable right and avoid it being reduced as it is today to a “favor” (p. 141), a point that is indeed common to state policies of closure and militant initiatives for reception. The diagnostic and programmatic objective is more than achieved; it remains to be hoped that a new work will soon come to deploy the response paths outlined by the author.