The Organic Ethnologist of Algeriani Migration

justify⁷⁶">Adelmalek Sayad passed away two years ago at this writing, leaving behind him one of the most original and fertile contributions to the anthropology¹ of immigration of the past century. Throughout his voluminous and varied³ writings ?close to a hundred publications, including eight books spanning the destruction of Algeria's traditional peasantry at the hands of French colonialism, the dynamics⁴ of migration² chains from Kabylia to France, the impact of decolonization on the reception of Algerian workers in Marseilles, the odyssey⁵ of those workers and their children through the layers and institutions of French society, the social uses and political abuses of "immigrant culture," and the everyday life of Algerian slums on the Parisian periphery⁶ during the fifties, all informed by an acute awareness⁷ of the political-economic roots and import of human transhumance1- the Algerian sociologist⁸ both elaborated and demonstrated the potency¹⁰ of three pivotal principles for the study of migration. The first is the simple but fundamental proposition, whose implications remain to be fully¹¹ drawn¹² out by scholars and policy makers¹³ alike, that before he or she becomes an immigrant, the migrant is always first an emigrant¹⁴, and that the sociology of migration must therefore imperatively¹⁵ start, not from the concerns and cleavages of the receiving society, but from the sending communities, their history, structure, and contradictions. The common contraction¹⁶ of the emigration-immigration doublet to its second component¹⁷ mutilates the phenomenon and entraps¹⁸ the study of migrants into an artificial problematic of "lack" and deficiency explained away by ritualized references, now to their lower class composition and substandard conditions of living, now to the peculiarities²⁰ of the culture they have brought with them.2Resisting such ethnocentric imposition, the sociology of migration must take as its object not the "problems" that migrants pose for the advanced societies which attract them, in matters of employment, housing, schooling²¹ and health, but the dynamic "relationship between the system of dispositions²² of emigrants²³ and the ensemble²⁴ of mechanisms²⁵ to which they are subjected owing to this emigration" (Sayad 1These books are respectively (in English titles): The Uprooting²⁶: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964), Algerian Immigration in France (Gillette and Sayad 1976), The Social Uses of the Culture of Immigrants (Sayad 1978), Towards a Sociology of Immigration (Sayad and Fassa 1982), Migrating - A History of Marseilles: The Shock of Decolonization (Temime, Jordi and Sayad 1991), Immigration, or the Paradoxes²⁷ of Otherness (Sayad 1991), and An Algerian Nanterre, Land of Slums (Sayad with Dupuy 1995). The culmination²⁸ and quintessence of Sayad's five decades of incessant²⁹ research is Double Absence: From the Illusions of the Emigrant to the Suffering of the Immigrant (Sayad 1999). 2A rare and remarkable³⁰ exception to this pattern, deserving of a wide readership for its multi-level, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach, is Massey, Durand and Alarcon (1987). Recent work on "transnational communities" has fostered a belated if limited recognition of the double-sidedness and dual³¹ determinacy of migration (see the special issue of Ethnic³² and Racial Studies on the topic edited by Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt 1999, and Portes 1999). Which necessitates³³ that one reconstitutes the complete trajectory³⁴ of the individuals, households and groups involved in the peregrination³⁵ under examination, in order to uncover the full system of determinants that first triggered exile and later continued, under new guises³⁶, to govern the differentiated³⁷ paths they followed. Recognizing that "immigration here and emigration there are the two indisassociable sides of the same reality, which cannot be explained the one without the other" (Sayad 1999a: 15) enables Sayad to revoke³⁸, both empirically and theoretically, the canonical⁴⁰ opposition⁴¹ between "labor⁹ migration" and "settlement migration." The former always contains the latter in nuce and always eventuates in it: the individual departure of wage-seeking men gradually saps the "work of prevention and preservation⁴³" whereby the group seeks to maintain moral control over its members, and sooner or later the latter "abandons itself to family migration," which further accelerates the erosion of group boundaries.3Relinking emigration and immigration points also to the second pillar-proposition anchoring Abdelmalek Sayad's work: that migration is the product and expression of an historical relation of inter-national domination, at once material and symbolic⁴⁴. Immigration is a "relation from state to state" but one that is "denied as such in everyday reality" no less than in the political field (Sayad 1991: 267), so that its management may fall within the sovereign province of the receiving society alone, of its laws, administrative⁴⁵ rules and bureaucratic⁴⁶ dictates⁴⁷, and be treated as the "domestic" issue which it is not. Sayad (1979) shows, in the paradigmatic case of France and Algeria in the post-colonial and post-Fordist era after the flow of "migrant laborers⁴⁹" has been officially stopped, that the "negotiations⁵⁰" between countries that lead to international conventions and regulations concerning immigration are "bilateral⁵¹ transactions" in name only since the dominant⁵² economic power and former colonial ruler is in a structural⁵³ position to impose unilaterally the terms, goals, and means of these agreements.4But there is more: every migrant carries this repressed relation of power between states within himself or herself and unwittingly recapitulates⁵⁴ and reenacts it in her personal strategies and experiences. Thus the most fleeting⁵⁵ encounter between an Algerian worker and his French boss in Lyon - or a Surinamese-born child and his schoolteacher in Rotterdam, a Jamaican mother and her social worker in London, an Ethiopian elderly and his landlord in Naples - is fraught⁵⁶ with the whole baggage of past intercourse⁵⁷ between the imperial metropole and its erstwhile colony. The relation of the emigrant to his homeland is likewise invisibly over-determined⁵⁸ by decades of conflictual and asymmetric⁵⁹ relations between the two countries he links: the "suspicion of treason, even of apostasy⁶⁰" that enshrouds him there (Sayad 1999a: 171) finds its root in the fact that emigration has shaken the very foundations of the social order, on the one hand, by corroding⁶¹ the established frontiers between groups in the sending society and, on the other, by affording the migrant and his kin⁴² an accelerated path of mobility⁶² but in an allochtonous hierarchy⁶³, one devoid⁶⁴ of legitimacy⁶⁵ in the moral and cultural codes of the originating community.53Sayad (1999a: 422-424) points out that, however virulent⁶⁶ they may be in the society of immigration, the reactions of protest and opposition to migration are initially⁶⁷ even stronger among the emigrating community, so strong indeed that they often make nativist and xenophobic resistance to foreigners in the receiving country superfluous⁶⁸. 4The same is true, mutatis mutandis , for the United States with Mexico and the Caribbean, or Germany with Turkey, Spain with Morocco, Japan with Korea, etc. 5This explains why public accusations⁶⁹ against emigration typically "aim primarily and more violently at the emigrated female population and, more precisely⁷⁰, at the bodies of women," perceived as the ultimate repository and vector of the values of the group (Sayad 1984). 3A third proposition animates⁷¹ Sayad's tireless inquiries⁷²: like other key processes of group making and unmaking, migration has for requisite⁷³ collective dissimulation⁷⁴ and social duplicity. Emigration, and later immigration, operates in the way it does only to the extent that it continually mystifies and misrecognizes itself for what it is - or, to put it more precisely, the magical denegation (Verneinung) of the objective reality of migration is part and parcel of its full objectivity, its "double truth." Thus, throughout the twentieth century, the French authorities, Algerian society, and the migrants themselves colluded in concocting⁷⁵ a triple lie that allowed all three to justify to themselves the trek⁷⁷ of millions of peasants from the Maghrib to the hexagon: that migration was provisional and transitory, that it was determined solely⁷⁸ by the quest for labor ("I came here to work so I drown myself in work," intones a Kabyle factory hand), and that it was politically neutral and without civic⁷⁹ consequence on either side of the Mediterranean⁸⁰ (Sayad 1991: 17-18). All three of these beliefs were glaringly and continually disputed, if not refuted, by social reality, yet none of the parties to the Algerian migration was willing to face that reality. Emigration is never an "export of raw labor power and nothing more" (Sayad 1999a: 20) because, as a "total social fact" in Marcel Mauss's (1990) sense of the term, it disrupts the whole array of institutions that make up the originating society. Conversely, at the other end, immigrant workers are but exceptionally "birds of passage," to recall Michael Piore's (1977) well-known book, for they too are changed in and by migration: they become irrevocably distanced and dis-located from their originating milieu⁸¹, losing a place in their native circle of honor without securing one in their new setting; they acquire this false and disjointed "double-consciousness"6that is source of both succor⁸² and pain; they are consumed by doubt, guilt⁸³ and self-accusation, worn down by an "unjust and uncertain" battle with their own children, these "sociological bastards⁸⁴" who personify the horrifying⁸⁵ impossibility of the "return home" (Sayad 1988). A retired⁸⁶ Algerian laborer⁴⁸ settled in a working-class banlieue of Paris puts it pithily⁸⁷: France, I'm gonna tell you, is a low-life woman, like a whore. Without you know it, she encircles you, she takes to seducing⁸⁸ you until you've fallen for her and then she sucks your blood, she makes you wait on her hand and foot. (...) She is a sorceress. She has taken so many men with her... she has a way of keeping you a prisoner. Yes, she is a prison, a prison from which you cannot get out, a prison for life.

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 analytic⁸⁹ 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 discourses⁹⁰ that swirl⁹¹ 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 constituent⁹² 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 evoke³⁹ 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 colonized⁹³, a two-fold and contradictory⁹⁴ 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 "integration⁹⁶" (into the social fabric⁹⁷ and institutions of the society of settlement), to reveal that discourses on immigration are always performative discourses which help effect the wondrous⁹⁸ 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, in the Little Kabylia mountains, who had risen to the rank of primary school teacher before receiving his training in philosophy, psychology⁹⁹ 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 brute¹⁰⁰ 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 intrepidity¹⁰¹ and an intellectual deftness¹⁰² 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 bazaars¹⁰³ of Algiers, and later still in the social housing estates of Saint-Denis, Nanterre, and Villeurbanne. There, he displayed all these personal virtues¹⁰⁴ of which textbooks of methodology say nothing but which all too often decide the depth and justness of ethnographic work, in listening, observing, recording¹⁰⁵, transcribing¹⁰⁶ and transmitting the words he elicited¹⁰⁷ and welcomed, with a sympathy devoid of pathos¹⁰⁸, a complicity shorn of naivet? a comprehension stripped of complacency and condescension¹⁰⁹. A frail¹¹⁰, 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 Berlin, or entering the abode¹¹¹ of a Berber-speaking manual worker from  the Parisian Red Belt. The uncommon¹¹² combination of discretion¹¹³ and dignity he displayed, the sensitivity and modesty¹¹⁴ he invested in every exchange with his informants can be readily detected in the adroitness¹¹⁵ with which he accounts for their words, the sensitivity with which he pries¹¹⁶ into the causes and the reasons behind their actions. His active solidarity¹¹⁷ with the most dispossessed was the basis of an exceptional epistemological lucidity¹¹⁸ that allowed Abdelmalek Sayad to dismantle¹¹⁹ a good many prefabricated representations about immigration - such as the economistic problematic of its "costs and benefits," which journalists and policy-makers periodically invoke¹²⁰, with the diligent¹²¹ help of economists¹²², 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 afflicts¹²³ 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 chaotic¹²⁴ as the social conditions of which they were the product and to anatomize them by mobilizing with equal perspicacity¹²⁵ 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 arsenal¹²⁶ elaborated by the research team at the Centre de sociologie of which he was, from its very inception¹²⁷, an active and influential¹²⁸ member. In the hands of so skilled an analyst¹²⁹, 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 quaint¹³⁰ hybrid¹³¹ devoid of place, dis-placed, in the twofold sense of incongruous and inopportune, trapped in that "mongrel" sector¹³² 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 obdurate¹³³ social vexation and mental embarrassment¹³⁴ he causes, to rethink root and branch the question of the legitimate⁹⁵ foundations of citizenship¹³⁵ 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 recesses¹³⁶ of the organism, in a state of quasi-nature, beyond the reach of consciousness and ratiocination¹³⁷, 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 dissect¹³⁸ and decipher them, so many experimentations¹³⁹ (in the sense of Erfahrung), he enables us to discover those "statified" minds and bodies, as Thomas Bernard calls them (Bourdieu 1994, Sayad 1999b), which a highly peculiar¹⁹ 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 exodus¹⁴⁰ 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 anthropological¹⁴¹ acuity¹⁴² and poetic¹⁴³ 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 rigor¹⁴⁴, and civic courage.