This article reflects on key analytical concepts used in the anthropology of migration in the light of the author's own ethnographic work on Lebanese migrants in a number of international locations. It first examines the notion of multi-sited ethnography and argues that in the study of migrants sharing a unifying culture across a number of global locations, multi-sitedness is less helpful than a notion of a single geographically discontinuous site. The article also examines the excessive usage of the notion of 'imagined community' in diasporic research. It argues that there is often very little empirical evidence of 'community' presented in the literature that uses the concept. Finally, the article examines the uncritical assumption often made that the study of migration is the study of 'mobility'. It argues that migrants do not really spend that much time 'moving' in the sense assumed by the notion of 'mobility'.
This article begins by defining the specificity of critical anthropological thought and the way it can articulate with radical politics. It shows how the anthropology of Eduardo Vivieros de Castro offers a paradigmatic example of an anthropology that is both critical and radical, highlighting both the critical and political nature of Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism and his concept of multinaturalism. It shows how this concept can offer a political and critical perspective that forms a basis for the unification of the concerns of both 'primitivist' and 'modernist' anthropology.
The prevalence of a culture of ‘tolerance’ towards ethnic minorities in the West in the face of the practices of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe and of other more general practices of intolerance and extermination in parts of the Third World has led to a popular as well as a sometimes academic conception of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ nationalisms essentialised into two radically different kinds of nationalism. In this paper I offer a critique of such a differentiation based on an examination of various practices of dealing with otherness in the process of nation building, particularly in Lebanon and Australia. I argue that practices of nation building, ranging from the promotion of ethnic cultures to mass ethnic killings, are guided by national imaginaries which, despite their empirical variety, are basically structured in the same way. This means, first, that such differences are better understood as the historical or contextual privileging of specific nationalist problematics grounded in this common national imaginary. Second, it means that within the nationalist imaginary that guides them there is a space in which, in given circumstances, the practitioners of valorisation and tolerance can turn into practitioners of mass killings and vice versa without them turning into a radically different kind of nationalists. Far from being specific to an ‘Eastern’ nationalism, the logic of extermination is inherent to any form of nation building today.
The sentiment of being “surrounded by barbarians” was once specific to settler‐colonial societies. But as the European refugee crisis made headlines in 2015, it became evident that this sentiment is gaining widespread currency in the Western world. Three developments lie behind its extension: first, the resurgence in the militarized Western appropriation of world resources and its colonial imaginary; second, the crisis in the order of the national borders that has regulated the exploitation of land, resources, and labor in the neocolonial era; and third, the ecological crisis, which equally manifests itself as a crisis in the order of the borders of domestication that defined the modern exploitation of nature. Analyzing the intersection of these social processes offers us important insights into some of the dominant dynamics of Western culture today. [settler colonialism, primitive accumulation, refugee crisis, national borders, ecological crisis, Agamben]
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