The Organic Ethnologist of Algerian Migration

Abstract

One of the most original contributions to the anthropology of immigration of the past century, the work of the late Adelmalek Sayad demonstrates the potency of three principles for the study of peregrination. The first insists that, before becoming an immigrant, the migrant is first an e-migrant and that the sociology of migration must therefore start, not from the receiving society, but from the structure and contradictions of the sending communities. The second takes seriously the fact that migration is the product of a historical relation of inter-national domination, at once material and symbolic, a repressed relation of state to state which every migrant unwittingly recapitulates in her personal strategies and experiences. The third recognizes that, like other processes of group (un)making, migration requires collective dissimulation and social duplicity. A corollary of these principles is that the sociology of migration must be reflexive and include a social history of the lay and scholarly discourses that swirl about it in the societies involved. Sayad elaborated these propositions because he was more than a scholar of migration: he was the phenomenon itself. The ethnographic sensibility and rigor that animate his work were rooted in his active solidarity with Kabyle migrants; they enabled him to dismantle prefabricated representations of immigration and to use the migrant, as social hybrid devoid of legitimate place, in the manner of a flesh-and-blood analyser of the collective unconscious and to pose anew the question of the relationship between citizen, state, and nation.