Based on ethnographic research at one of the largest transit hubs in the world-Paris's Gare du Nord railway station-this article examines how the practices of West African migrants transform the French urban environment. I argue that migrants create social ties outside of kin and village networks by rerouting and combining the channels of two types of infrastructures: French transportation systems and West African systems of exchange and obligation. While this infrastructural practice relies on a shared cultural repertoire, it also helps create new channels that circumvent the pathways for social becoming prescribed by either the French state or their home communities. The Gare du Nord as a social environment shapes these practices but is also reshaped by them, a process I illuminate by examining how the station becomes an African hub: not an enclave of "Little Africa" but rather a node of communication and exchange. This process sheds light on how strategies for creating relations across difference and through infrastructure form transnational communities in urban spaces.
Résumé La gare du Nord : topographies parisiennes d’échanges À la gare du Nord se croisent de manière parfois explosive des populations diverses, des trajectoires, des pratiques et des représentations hétérogènes. L’auteur compare les aménagements de la gare, de 1864 et d’aujourd’hui, pour montrer comment le passage du modèle de contrôles spatiaux d’exclusion à celui d’espace ouvert fondé sur l’idée de la transparence a engendré des nouvelles pratiques de contrôle et de surveillance. Puis sont examinés les rapports entre la vision des urbanistes d’un « pôle d’échanges » et les pratiques des échanges qui existent dans la gare. Cet article met en évidence comment ces pratiques d’échange sont fondamentales dans la production et la performance des frontières sociales, dans cette nouvelle configuration de la prétendue démocratisation de l’espace public parisien.
Anthropological focus on public sphere debates can have the unintended consequence of reaffirming ideological oppositions ('secularism versus Islam') while ignoring other processes of difference production. In this article, I examine how French school employees build a logic of cultural otherness in an arena of uncertain social reproduction. Contrary to analyses of the French public sphere that emphasize the ideology of secular universalism, I argue that this dominant ideology has little purchase in the thick of social relations in a peripheral school. Faced with neoliberal transformations and diminishing resources, teachers draw instead on diverse discourses that have the effect of producing cultural difference. Through this process, immigrant-origin students are presented as incommensurable with Frenchness, and Frenchness becomes rooted in family structure and territory. This case illustrates how state actors confront the contradictions that inhabit universal citizenship and reconfigure the project of Republican schooling.
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