In her essay As we exist, subtitled in the English version A postcolonial autobiography, Kaoutar Harchi (1) exposes the ambivalence she experienced throughout her childhood and youth as the daughter of Moroccan migrants in France.
“Our presence”, one of the first chapters of the book, reflects on the “bourgeois privilege, the white privilege” (p. 25) that constitutes the certitude of never being chased away from the country, a guarantee of which her family was deprived. Yet, later in the book, Harchi delves into the feeling of “intrusion”, and indeed of “aggression”, that overwhelmed her when a teacher summoned her, whom she dubbed “her little Arab”, to talk in front of the class about “[her] origins, [her] culture, [her] religion, to speak, as well, a few words of [her] mother tongue” (p. 78).
Harchi’s remark made apparent the complex interplay between the structural violence involved in the act of othering and identity assignation on the one hand, and, on the other, the inequality of rights and prospects based on one’s origins, class, religion, or physical appearance.
Harchi’s touching and powerful story speaks for the necessity to at the same time reject what Michael Jackson (2) calls “identity thinking”, the comprehension of human existence and social relations in terms of solidified and embodied categories, while also acknowledging how the intersecting effects of nationality, gender, class, religion, ethnicity, or origin shape the possibilities of leading our life, with the ability to make decisions and choices for ourselves.
As Harchi’s book illustrates, this two-fold imperative is particularly insistent when it comes to studying existences impacted by migration. The complex regimes of (im)mobilities at work in today’s world, as well as the existences of the people rejected outside of the ‘majority’ population in the places they inhabit, remain powerfully bounded by political powers, social hierarchies, and economic inequalities. Hence, how can we, as ethnographers, evade the pitfalls of identity thinking and not circumscribe our understanding of coexistence in categorial understandings without, at the same time, euphemising the power of state orders, (im)mobility regimes, and longstanding social hierarchies.
To answer this question, our project proposes an ethnography of the everyday as a conceptual approach to address both the need to consider existences beyond essentialised categories and the imperative of doing justice to the inequalities shaping the lives of those deprived of political or legal rights, or more generally subjected to experiences, policies, and practices of racialised othering and marginalisation as exemplified in Harchi’s memoirs. Inspired by the conceptualization of the everyday proposed by Xavier Guillaume and Jef Huysmans (3), as well as current developments in existential anthropology, we suggest that the everyday as an analytical lens enables withdrawing from identity thinking to give prominence to the exploration of the in-between that both joins people together and separates them from one another.
This analytical move intends to bring attention to the fluidity and ambivalence of the relationships making up people’s lifeworlds, while at the same time revealing the connection between the experiential and structural dimensions at work in the way power manifest itself in these relationships. Focusing on the in-between avoids isolating migrants as a category removed from the rest of the society to instead expose the entanglements between differently positioned existences, without exceptionalizing and essentialising specific categories.
Far from being simply synonym of mundane, the everyday opens an analytical framework that reconnects people’s experiences and subjectivities with the analysis of the power dynamics that informs the socio-economic and political contexts in which they unfold. It does so by performing a double analytical operation outlined by Guillaume and Huysmans: reintroducing the emplaced, dense entanglements of lives while also fostering a fleeting and multiple understanding of temporality. Attentive to the dynamics shaping structural inequalities, this double analytical movement exposes the spatio-temporal and relational operations of power that shape people’s lives differently without grounding our understanding into fixed categories and relationships.
One episode experienced during my fieldwork in Marseille provides a good example of how the lens of the everyday potentially opens up multiple lines of analysis without locking up the protagonists nor events into univocal positions and meanings.
While sitting in a crowded coach, I noticed unrest right across the narrow alley separating me from a couple of elderly people, probably in their 70s. Conversing quietly together in Arabic, they were peeking at another lady right in front of them. Their eyes were expressing a sense of restlessness or even anxiety. Following their looks, I discovered a woman whose age was difficult to guess. Her face betrayed evident signs of drinking abuse and her deplorable state clearly indicated dire living condition. A shopping bag rested on the floor next to her, and she kept on her knees two plastic bottles of mineral water as well as four packs of what looked like ready-made soup. Looking straight at the couple in front of her, she grumbled something undecipherable but clearly addressed at them. With shaky hand movements, the woman carefully teared one pack of soup open before unexpectedly throwing the liquid at the veiled lady. Fortunately, she missed her target. The soup splashed on the floor. Still, the couple immediately moved away, retreating to the end of the coach.
People, including myself were stunned. Like a few other passengers, I couldn’t help and scolded the woman for her behavior. Obviously, she could not care less. My attention then moved to the couple. I turned around and asked them if they were ok. They nodded and the old man lamented: “Look how she is. There is nothing to be done with someone like her.” It was certainly true. In a way, the miserable state of the assailant lessened the violence of her behaviour. The xenophobic motive of her act, however, seemed obvious. It became impossible to ignore when, after a few minutes, another lady boarded the train and took a seat where the elderly couple used to be. When she realized liquid was all over the floor, the newcomer – a white, middle-class woman – look straight at the lady with the packs of soup on her lap. Noticing the fear in her eyes, the woman moaned: “For you, it’s fine. I won’t toss soup at you”.
The episode, however, was not over yet. Two stops later down the lane, I saw two young, dark-skinned security agents in their mid-twenties waiting on the platform. They wore purple vests of Marseille’s public transportation company. They came in and immediately approached the unruly lady. After inquiring politely about her whereabouts, they asked her to follow them out of the train. After a few seconds, the woman painfully stood up. Walking with great difficulties, she slowly waddled away with all her things, closely shepherded by the young guards.
This incident, beyond its almost surrealistic nature, captures the empirical density of the everyday. Arguably, reading the story in the light of its undisputable racist nature would duly shed light on France’s long-lasting history of discrimination and prejudiced inscribed in a colonial past and a post-colonial enduring present. Physical aggressions like the one I witnessed are in fact concrete consequences of the pervasiveness of current public debates accusing Muslims of representing a threat to the unity of the nation and its proclaimed universal republicanism. Still, this approach, as meaningful as it is, would also bear the risk of bypassing the complex, ambivalent, and unstable nature of the event.
Indeed, the episode was fully inscribed in one exact moment and location. Yet at the same time, positionalities like emotions were continuously shifting. First conveying an image of social and economic vulnerability, the lady became the culprit of a vicious aggression. But ultimately, her dominant position was overturned once more with the intervention of the guards. Differences and identities were not stable either. As exemplified by the young security agents, power was not firmly associated with skin colour, nor status.
In that sense, understanding what happened necessitates to pay attention to intricate entanglements ranging from the intersubjective to the structural. Importantly, it also requires accounting for a temporal horizon at the same time fleeting, yet societally enduring, recurring and persistent.
Neither the woman who threw the soup, the elderly couple, the security nor myself are reducible to simple identity categorizations, and doing so won’t help us understand the complexity of everyday coexistence. In our project, we propose an analytical descent into the richness, ambivalence, and complex temporal ramifications of the ordinary, as a way to expose how socio-economic and political domination un/do people’s rights to exist without essentializing them.
Notes
(1) Harchi, K., 2021. Comme nous existons. Actes Sud.
(2) Jackson, M., 2019. Critique of identity thinking. Berghahn Books.
(3) Guillaume, X. and Huysmans, J., 2019. The concept of ‘the everyday’: Ephemeral politics and the abundance of life. Cooperation and Conflict, 54 (2), 278–296.
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Text by Bruno Lefort, bruno.lefort@oulu.fi
The fieldwork blog posts introduce little snippets of the ethnographic research that our team members conduct in different parts of France and Finland.