The Organic Ethnologist of Algeriani Migration
出处：论文网
时间：2007-01-06
This is a curse. (...) Now I have no more reason to return [to my home village in Algeria]. I have nothing left to do there. It no longer interests me. Everything has changed. Things no longer have the same meaning. You no longer know why you are here in France, of what use you are. There is no more order. (cited in Sayad 1991: 126-127, 137) A corollary of these three analytic principles is that the sociology of migration must be reflexive, turned back onto its own conditions of possibility and effectivity. It must include a social history not only of the double-sided fact of emigration-immigration but also of the lay and scholarly discourses that swirl about this fact in the two societies involved. For the collective perception of migration, its symbolic elaboration and its political construction (of which social science partakes every time it takes over the presuppositions of the official viewpoint) are an integral constituent of its objective reality. Sayad inspects the loaded semantics that have governed the framing of the question of North African entry into France since World War II, 6Here the writings of Sayad evoke strongly those of W.E.B. DuBois. Compare, for instance, his discussion of the "sociological doubling-up" of the emigrant, who "bears within himself, as a product of his history, in the manner of the colonized, a two-fold and contradictory system of references" in his brilliant essay "The Illegitimate Children" (Sayad 1977) and DuBois's (1903) classic analysis of the "two-ness" or "double-consciousness" of African Americans in the United States in The Souls of Black Folks. 4From "adaptation" (to the requirements of industrial labor) and "assimilation" (to the Republican national culture) to "insertion" and "integration" (into the social fabric and institutions of the society of settlement), to reveal that discourses on immigration are always performative discourses which help effect the wondrous social alchemy whereby a "foreigner" is made into a "national" (Sayad 1987 and 1994). All this Sayad knew or discovered because he was more than a scholar of immigration: he was the phenomenon itself. As a native son of the province of Sidi A颿h, in the Little Kabylia mountains, who had risen to the rank of primary school teacher before receiving his training in philosophy, psychology and sociology at the universities of Algiers and Paris during the war of national liberation and who then became a Research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the brute facts of imperial oppression, chain migration, community dislocation and fractured acculturation were constantly with him because they were within him: they were his entrails, his eyes, his soul.7Yet he faced them with a moral intrepidity and an intellectual deftness that astonish the reader who knew him, his history, and that of his people - on both sides of the Mediterranean - and that cannot but impress even those who do not. For forty-some years, Sayad was present in the field, in his home village of Kabylia, in the military "relocation settlements" of the Ouarsenis and Collo regions, in the slums of Constantine and the bazaars of Algiers, and later still in the social housing estates of Saint-Denis, Nanterre, and Villeurbanne. There, he displayed all these personal virtues of which textbooks of methodology say nothing but which all too often decide the depth and justness of ethnographic work, in listening, observing, recording, transcribing and transmitting the words he elicited and welcomed, with a sympathy devoid of pathos, a complicity shorn of naivet? a comprehension stripped of complacency and condescension. A frail, soft-spoken and self-effacing person, Sayad was among this very small group of individuals with whom one feels genuinely at home when introduced to a farmer from Kabylia or B閍rn, or entering the abode of a Berber-speaking manual worker from S閠if or the Parisian Red Belt. The uncommon combination of discretion and dignity he displayed, the sensitivity and modesty he invested in every exchange with his informants can be readily detected in the adroitness with which he accounts for their words, the sensitivity with which he pries into the causes and the reasons behind their actions. His active solidarity with the most dispossessed was the basis of an exceptional epistemological lucidity that allowed Abdelmalek Sayad to dismantle a good many prefabricated representations about immigration - such as the economistic problematic of its "costs and benefits," which journalists and policy-makers periodically invoke, with the diligent help of economists, so as better to mask the specifically political dimension and springs of the phenomenon - and to uncover and confront head-on the most complex issues - such as the orchestrated lies of collective bad faith that fuel migration streams or the existential roots of the "migration malaise" that afflicts the immigrant worker even after he has been medically cured of occupational illness8- just as he would enter an unknown household to find himself immediately greeted with respect, trust, and affection. It allowed him to find the right words, and the right tone, to speak of and to experiences as contradictory and chaotic as the social conditions of which they were the product and to anatomize them by mobilizing with equal perspicacity the intellectual resources of traditional Kabyle culture, rethought through ethnological works (as 7Sayad describes his early intellectual and political experiences as well as his intellectual training in Arfaoui (1996); read also Sayad (1995). 8Cf., respectively, Sayad (1977, 1986, 1981a, 1981b) and his vivisection of exile as a fall into social darkness in "El Ghorba" (Sayad 2000, in this issue). 5With the notion of el ghorba or the opposition between thaymats and thaddjjaddith), and the conceptual arsenal elaborated by the research team at the Centre de sociologie europ閑nne of which he was, from its very inception, an active and influential member. In the hands of so skilled an analyst, the immigrant functions in the manner of a live, flesh-and-blood analyzer of the most obscure regions of the social unconscious. Sayad ultimately shows us how, like Socrates according to Plato, the immigrant is atopos, a quaint hybrid devoid of place, dis-placed, in the twofold sense of incongruous and inopportune, trapped in that "mongrel" sector of social space betwixt and between social being and nonbeing. Neither citizen nor foreigner, neither on the side of the Same nor on that of the Other, he exists only by default in the sending community and by excess in the receiving society, and he generates recurrent recrimination and ressentiment in both (Sayad 1984 and 1988). Out-of-place in the two social systems which define his (non)existence, the migrant forces us, through the obdurate social vexation and mental embarrassment he causes, to rethink root and branch the question of the legitimate foundations of citizenship and of the relationship between citizen, state, and nation. For the physical and moral suffering endured by the e-migrant reveals to the ethnographer who follows his slow and painful metamorphosis into the im-migrant everything that native (i.e., natal) embededness in a definite nation and state buries into the deepest recesses of the organism, in a state of quasi-nature, beyond the reach of consciousness and ratiocination, starting with the viscerally felt equation most societies establish between nationality and membership in the citizenry. Through experiences (in the sense of Erlebnis) which are, for she who knows how to dissect and decipher them, so many experimentations (in the sense of Erfahrung), he enables us to discover those "statified" (閠atis閟) minds and bodies, as Thomas Bernard calls them (Bourdieu 1994, Sayad 1999b), which a highly peculiar history has endowed us with and which all too often prevent us from recognizing and respecting all the manifold forms of the human condition. As the organic ethnologist of Algerian migration, the witness-analyst of the silent drama of the mass exodus of the Berber peasants of Kabylia into the industrial underbelly of their former colonial overlord, Abdelmalek Sayad gives us an exemplary figure of the sociologist as "public scribe," who records and broadcasts, with anthropological acuity and poetic grace, the voice of those most cruelly dispossessed of it by the crushing weight of imperial subordination and class domination, without ever instituting himself as a spokesperson, without ever using these given words to give lessons, except lessons in ethnographic integrity, scientific rigor, and civic courage.
