ASA Globalog

By Ruben Andersson

In a migrant shelter run by a feisty Italian priest outside the muggy border town of Tapachula in southern Mexico, I was once put up in a room with two east African refugees, whose case was pending approval; they had been stuck there for months. When heading back towards Mexico after a trip to Guatemala a week later, the highway police entered our bus at night and beckoned me outside, their torchlight flickering over the pages of my passport. At the border, I was asked whether I was Polish – at this time, a trickle of eastern Europeans were said to be moving through, alongside the central Americans heading north towards the United States. 

A strange geography is springing up across the world, of disjointed territories created and re-created by the migrants that flow through them and defined by the barriers that shoot up around them – the wall at the US-Mexico border, the EU-patrolled waters off Senegal and Mauritania, the fences of Melilla and Ceuta in northern Morocco.

What I want to get at with my anecdote above is, I guess, the patchy, paradoxical and intensely personal nature of today’s movements through this fragmented landscape. Researchers and journalists get entangled in the web of border controls and misidentifications; African asylum seekers languish in nondescript Latin American border towns; south Asians brave the overland route through west Africa to Europe. Meanwhile, policing measures are converging across the world, as are migrants’ techniques for evading these measures; and through it all move the coyotes, NGO workers, anthropologists and others who feed off the migration circuit.

The risk is, perhaps, that migration research follows this trend and becomes increasingly disjointed and split up into specialised fields – helped along by both methodological nationalism and its regional equivalent, as not just governments but blocs such as the EU set research priorities. More cross-pollination across ‘regions’ is needed - especially when it comes to research on the two main trails into the rich West: between northwest Africa and Europe and Latin America and the US. Transnational activist platforms can help foment such a global perspective – the upcoming world social forum on migrations in Madrid, for one, is sure to bring together perspectives from the two sides of the Atlantic.

Fragmentation can also be combated by integrating the work of researchers, activists, artists and journalists. This means exploring new modes of intervention, as well as experimenting with styles of presentation beyond the ring-fenced academic essay, activist pamphlet, artwork or journalistic feature story. Some of this is already being done, of course, but the possibilities are endless – online documentaries and diaries created in collaboration among migrants, researchers and artists; multimedia installations; and writing in the borderlands of social science, reportage and fiction.

To capture the paradoxes of today’s migrations, which seem to pound against the walls of our reality, we might similarly need to break through the conventions that have defined so much research, activism, art and journalism concerned with migration. The key to this enterprise must be the energy, creativity and determination of migrants themselves – and anthropology would do well to follow their lead. This means more fieldwork ‘on the move’ rather than in pre-defined places; a global, inter-regional perspective to combat myopia; and a healthy dose of stylistic and methodological promiscuity to get round the limits of research and dissemination. As the borders of the rich West are solidifying into barriers and walls, both people on the move and the anthropologists who research their movements might have to become as fluid as water: somewhere, we can at least hope, a crack might open and something will trickle through.