Book review: Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition

Abstract

Michel Agier's Borderlands first appeared in French in 2013 under the title La Condition cosmopolite: L'anthropologie a`l'epreuve du pie`ge identitaire (La Découvertee, 2013), and in 2015 the book was translated into both Portuguese and Spanish. 1 The book is a farreaching exploration of the problem of the border and some of its possible meanings for the analysis of contemporary societies. It applies the classical tools of anthropological and ethnographical research to reflect on the formation of the 'banal' experiences of cosmopolitanism in different parts of the world. The book will probably be criticized by classical ethnographers who do not see the point of generalizations; and it will probably also be criticized by 'generalists' who will say that neither the empirical nor the theoretical bases for the argument put forward by Agier are strong enough to hold together the structure he wants to sustain. Why I dismiss those criticisms and applaud the book is because Borderlands shows how one can break down the walls imposed on our way of thinking and interpreting contemporary societies. Borderlands shows that we would be better off not following the orthodox rules established in the social sciences to fully address the problems of contemporary societies. It is possible (and I would say also indispensable) to establish, in Agier's prose, a 'global ethnography' of border situations. A reflection on borders rightly asks for located social thought. In light of the specific problems that we face, new methods, theories, and perspectives could be brought together for a reinterpretation of the world that we are living in.The book advocates a 'situational' anthropology of the border, understood by Agier not as a physical entity that splits worlds or something that creates the idea of an insider and an outsider. Quite the opposite; it is a ritual fully inscribed in spatial and temporal experiences that are themselves the source of the social relations created at the border.What the border displays is both a division and a relationship. Its action is double, external and internal; it is both a threshold and an act of institution: to institute one's own place,