Dialect Anthropol (2008) 32:211–215

DOI 10.1007/s10624-008-9072-7

Reply: solidarity
Thinking through solidarity and difference: anthropology,
migrants, alterity

Winnie Lem

Published online: 14 January 2009

Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

In April of 2003, on a lonely road where apples grow in south-eastern France,

Guilhermino Armando Dos Santos, a seasonal worker from Portugal, was run over
by a car and killed while heading home. Le Monde Diplomatique reported that
earlier in the day, four men had been drinking in a nearby village bar. Allegedly,
one of them said: ‘‘The Portuguese, they breathe too much of our air. I’d like to kill
them.’’ These men were charged with murder. (‘‘France: Apples of Discord’’, Le
Monde Diplomatique, April 2003, p. 15).
In the same month, the Guardian Weekly printed an excerpt from Abd Samad
Moussaoui’s 2003 biography of his brother, Zacarias, who was convicted in 2006 of
launching the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City.
The excerpt in the newspaper focused on the humiliations suffered by the
Moussaoui siblings, who grew up on a housing estate near Narbonne in the southern
province of Languedoc. Samad wrote that being cast as ‘‘Arab’’ had often caught the
young Moussaoui boys by surprise, as they were born in France, did not speak
Arabic, and were non-practising Muslims. Although the Moussaoui children
considered themselves French, they endured racial taunts, slurs, and violent assaults
and all the other petty, day to day aggravations (or what Samad called ‘‘aggros’’) of
being seen as ‘‘visibly’’ different from other French children (Guardian Weekend
April 19th, 2003).
A month later, supporters of Le Pen’s National Front rallied on May Day. They
paraded down the rue de Rivoli in Paris, chanting ‘‘La France aux français!
Immigrés dehors!’’ (France for the French! Immigrants out!) (Le Monde May 10,
2003). These items appeared in the European Press just as Luc Ferry, France’s
minister of education, initiated a new school program aimed at eliminating racism.
The press reported that workshops were held, lectures were delivered, and

W. Lem (&)
International Development Studies, Trent University, Peterborough K9J 7B8, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]

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simulations of racist incidents, discussion groups, and seminars were organised to

tackle the problem.
The media coverage illustrates how nation, ethnicity, race and racism are at the
forefront of the European public imagination at a time when Europe is in the grip of
neo-liberal transformation. Nation, ethnicity, race and racism are tropes that are also
prominent in the anthropological and academic imagination. This is manifested in
the expansion of university curricula devoted to the problematics of nationalism and
racism. The increased attention to nation, ethnicity and race in various fora occurred
over the course of the post-1975 decades, a period of time in which the attenuation
of borders and the rule of the state in favour of the rule of the market promoted
competition for scarce (national) resources, generated unemployment, and aggra-
vated divisions among the working class by inflaming xenophobia and racism.
Such processes and preoccupations have consequences. The growing concern
with questions of nationalism and ethnicity means that questions of class and
processes of class formation under capitalism have been pushed to the margins of
scholarly debate. Culture has occluded class in anthropology, and the discipline has
embraced a more benign politics of culture.
Against the backdrop of resurgent European racism and right-wing politics, I
would like to reflect on the role of anthropology and the preoccupation of
anthropologists with culture and cultural difference. I argue that questions of
solidarity have become more important even as solidarity itself is defined more
narrowly. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in southern France and Paris, I
suggest that the anthropological focus on difference both reflects and reinforces
simplistic divisions of nation, race, and ethnicity, and in so doing, passes up the
opportunity to examine the break down of other potential solidarities between
peoples and nations. The focus on difference arises from a paradox that lies at the
heart of our discipline. On the one hand, anthropology is a discipline that is based on
humanistic principles and promotes intercultural understanding, tolerance and
universalism. On the other hand, part of the disciplinary project is to define cultural
boundaries in terms of difference and the particular qualities of people or peoples. In
what follows, I explore the consequences of this paradox.
The re-emergence of race as a salient idea in France is deeply troubling. It forms
part of a moral panic that is provoked and sponsored by (but not confined to) neo-
nationalists, and that centers on immigration. Much current research on immigrants
in Europe, including my own research in Languedoc, focuses on the social and
political implications of this moral panic, which projects the threat of ever
increasing ‘‘waves’’ of migrants flooding the shores of advanced capitalist countries.
Languedoc is the region where the Moussaoui brothers grew up, and it is close to
where dos Santos worked and lived before his murder. The parents of the Moussaoui
brothers were part of a North African migrant population that settled in the south of
France. Some migrants worked as domestics and agricultural labourers in the farms
of the region, and they came into daily contact with employers who referred to
themselves as français de souche (literally, the French of stock). Yet Franco-Arab
and Franco-European inhabitants of Languedoc maintained completely separate
social worlds, and the français de souche struggled to maintain social boundaries
and to rationalise the separation between themselves and the immigrants by pointing

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to the North Africans’ cultural practices, understandings, and patterns of sociability.

Although youth in schools and sports centers often broke the boundaries, most
village associations, such as local theatre groups, reinforced them.
These conditions challenge the basic solidarity that anthropologists would like to
establish between researchers and research subjects. Anthropologists typically write
with fondness about the people they study. We attempt to understand the world from
the perspective of our research subjects, and this supposedly builds sympathy for
local understanding and solidarity with indigenous informants or members of the
working-class with whom we work. Anthropological literature leads us to believe
that to do otherwise is to act in bad faith. Who could disagree? Our method of
participant observation relies heavily on the ability to build personal relationships in
the field. Yet our methods can pose personal problems, especially in situations like
the one I encountered in Languedoc. Surviving as an anthropologist often requires
that we ignore overt pronouncements of racial intolerance among our research
subjects. Yet ignoring racism often leads to an uncomfortable sense of collusion
with those prejudices.
This problem of silent collusion with racial prejudices is especially complicated
for those researchers positioned in the discipline as ‘‘minority’’ anthropologists—
those described by Abu Lughod (1991) as ‘‘halfies,’’ This is particularly true when
we see the discipline of anthropology as a forum for left political praxis. Indeed,
when new forms of left politics emerged in Europe in the early 1980s,
anthropological fieldwork was alluring to me.1 However, engaging in fieldwork
as a ‘‘halfie’’ among a ‘‘native’’ population of white Europeans posed challenges to
the construction and maintenance of solidarity even on a personal basis. Amongst
the many ‘‘petty, day to day aggros’’, to use Samad Moussaoiu’s words, of living as
a minority among majority Europeans informants was the aggro of continual
negotiation of my own national identity. The local autochtonous population
continually conflated national identity with race and ethnicity, and despite my
efforts to situate myself in terms of nation and culture as Canadian, I was regularly
re-situated racially as ‘‘La Chinoise’’ (the Chinese woman). This process of re-
situation and re-positioning resembled the way that Zacarias Moussaoui was cast as
a Muslim Arab, even though he identified as French. My experience of re-situation
was a valuable anthropological lesson, because it reminded me of how powerful the
idea of difference is in the popular imagination. It also reminded me of why the idea
of difference is such a powerful trope in our discipline.
Yet the same processes can exert themselves in even more subtle, and perhaps
more challenging ways. After pulling up ethnographic stakes in Languedoc and
starting a new research programme on Franco-Chinese migrants in Paris, I now
work as a ‘‘native’’ anthropologist in the eyes of both the majority of my colleagues
and the non-Franco-Chinese I encounter during research. Within anthropology, such
a move conforms to the practice of many minority anthropologists who choose to
work among people with whom they share what appears to be a cultural or
phenotypical affinity. It is an attempt to make difference work for the minority
anthropologist. For me, the change meant that the notoriously reticent immigrants in

1
See Tiryakian and Rogowski (1985) and Coulin and Morin (1979).

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France’s Asian immigrant community were not at all reticent with me during
fieldwork interviews and conversations.2 Yet how being Asian ‘‘worked’’ in this
case is more complex than one might think. Many people spoke to me because they
were curious about how I was both like them and different from them. I came from
distant shores (Canada) and in both class and status, I was again different. One
informant admitted that his curiosity about me was piqued because he rarely met a
Chinese man, much less a woman, so thoroughly integrated into the dominant
society and culture of the West. He noted that although immigrants participate to
various degrees in the French economy, racism and discrimination keep them
culturally and socially marginal.
My work on migration is thematically consonant with much anthropological
work on the subject as it aims in general to explore the causes and consequences of
exclusion and racism in the context of Europe. It tackles issues of neo-nationalisms
and the significance of ethnic communities and economies that are emerging within
the political and economic regimes that are being formed by the doctrines of neo-
liberalism. As I have argued elsewhere, such regimes contribute to the rise of racism
and of racist political parties (Lem 2008). My work conforms to a tradition of
anthropological practice that promotes cross-cultural understanding and tolerance,
exposes racism, and works towards its defeat. However, I emerged from these two
very different field sites questioning anthropology’s ability to challenge racism
because of what I identified earlier as the paradox at the heart of our discipline. This
‘‘paradox of alterity’’—to coin a phrase—puts our desire to understand (and value)
difference at odds with our desire to eliminate racism.
The ‘‘paradox of alterity’’ helps me understand my discomfort at declaring
myself to be an anthropologist to European and français de souche informants. This
discomfort is reinforced when I observe informants puzzling through the fact that an
anthropologist is studying them and constructing them as ‘‘other’’. It is further
reinforced because an anthropologist categorised as ‘‘other’’ by the français de
souche is studying them.3 According to my Languedoc informants, anthropologists
study the exotic. This view also prevails among my Parisian informants. One
Chinese informant, for example, commented rather caustically that my work will
render him into a museum specimen. My informants in both Languedoc and Paris
associate anthropology and anthropologists with the study of exotic people in
strange, distant places. It is commonly known that anthropologists study ‘‘prim-
itive’’ people and this common knowledge reinforces the widespread belief that the
savage is the raison d’être of anthropology Trouillot 1991. Thus, to be studied by an
anthropologist, is, ipso facto, to be exotic, unusual, primitive, and savage—or put
more neutrally, ‘‘different.’’ And, as the young Moussaoui brothers found, being
defined as different is a curse, especially in a context in which neo-nationalism is
gathering force. For Dos Santos, (the migrant worker slain in south-eastern France)
difference marked the distinction between life and death. If, as anthropologists, we

2
See for example, Introduction in Benton and Pieke (1998) eds, and personal communication.
3
Asad (2000) notes that the presence particularly of Muslims or ‘‘others’’ within France’s borders
produces a great degree of anxiety about the idea of Europe. In the case of my fieldwork, where
Europeans seem to be constructed as ‘‘other’’ by an ‘‘other,’’ so to speak, the anxiety is multiplied.

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can explain the historical and political processes that undergird Franco-Europeans
racism, our disciplinary preoccupation with difference may indeed be worthwhile.
But at this particular juncture, when neo-nationalism and cultural racism are fuelling
anti-immigration sentiment in Europe and elsewhere, the most important question is
whether our work and our focus on difference inadvertently bolsters the
programmes of Jean Marie Le Pen, Jorge Haider and the late Pym Fortuyn. How
can an anthropologist convey to the French public that cultural difference is not
important, when it is so consequential within our discipline, and when we have
spent so many decades identifying, elevating, and valuing it?
Over the past few years, the European media has constantly defined immigration
and the failure of immigrants to integrate into French society as a crisis, one that
national and supranational polities must confront. Yet the question of how
anthropologists should confront economic and cultural integration, politically as
well as intellectually, remains unresolved. As Abu Lughod (1991) reminds us,
‘‘culture’’ operates in anthropological discourse to enforce separations and also
hierarchy. In other words, it focuses on difference and given this focus, I ask
whether anthropologists in their work provide the raw material for those committed
to political projects that exclude, expel and eliminate. Does a focus on difference in
these troubling times undermine solidarity rather than build it? Finally, I ask
anthropologists to reflect on the invidious tropes of nation, race, and ethnicity and
on their own role in reproducing the tensions of our times.

Acknowledgement This contribution benefited from the interventions of Donna Young, Anne Meneley,
Kirk Dombrowski, Lesley Gill and Sharryn Kasmir. I thank them all.

References

Asad, Talal. 2000. Muslims and European identity: Can Europe represent Islam? In Cultural encounters,
representing otherness, ed. Hallam Elizabeth, and Brian Street, 11–28. London: Routledge.
Abu Lughod, Lila. 1991. Writing against culture. In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present,
ed. G. Fox Richard, 137–162. Santa Fe: School of Research Press.
Benton, Gregor, and Frank Pieke (eds.). 1998. The Chinese in Europe. Houndsmill: MacMillan Press.
Coulin, C., and F. Morin. 1979. Occitan ethnicity and politics. Critique of Anthropology 4: 105–122.
Lem, Winnie. 2008. Migrants, mobilization and citizenship in contemporary France. Focaal: European
Journal of Anthropology (Special Issue, Migrants, Mobility and Mobilization, Barber, Pauline
Gardiner and Lem, Winnie co-eds.), 51:57–72.
Moussaoui, Abd. 2003. Zacarias, my brother: The making of a tserrorist. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness. In
Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, ed. G.Fox Richard, 17–44. Santa Fe: School of
Research Press.
Tiryakian, E., and R. Rogowski (eds.). 1985. New nationalisms of the developed West. Boston: Allen and
Unwin.

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