‘L’étranger qui vient – Repenser l’hospitalité’ by Michel Agier

Context
Michel Agier is a French ethnologist and anthropologist, Director of Research at the

Institut of research for development (IRD) and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). His research focuses on the relationship between human globalisation, the conditions and places of exile, and the formation of new urban contexts. He wrote “L’étranger qui vient – Repenser l’hospitalité” in 2018 after massive one-off arrivals of migrants in 2015, by the agreements between Europe and Turkey in March 2016 or between Italy and Libya to keep migrants away, or when refugees have been pushed out of the country before they have even had a chance to demand asylum.

Book review
In the introduction, Michel Agier describes how hospitality was born as a response to

a world of uncertainties in which a migrant is seen as a disturber and a trespasser. Each person has its own conception of hospitality, but its decision to receive a stranger into their homes are frequently politized by the state laws or the cosmopolitanism.

In the first chapter of this book “make the stranger my guest”, Michel Agier first portrays the hospitality as something which can be conditional or unconditional and cites the conditions of the unconditionality he was referring to by opposing few authors such as Derrida or Florence Dupont. Following this comparison, he displays an anthropologic and historical analysis of the elementary forms which can take hospitality. In an anthropologic point of view, he puts back in perspective different manners which hospitality was tackled through Greek Antiquity, Western Africa and Inuit people. Indeed, those people all showed unsimilar ways to address hospitality throughout hosting a stranger, adopting a child or even welcoming in the name of gods. This world of built relationships between hosts and guests was then put in a historical perspective to describe hospitality in the present time which is the subject of the next chapter.

“Hospitality tested by the present” is the title of the second chapter. It depicts a series of examples in which migration and hospitality are reflected on in contemporary times. Currently, the relationship between host and guest has evolved into a threefold relationship between the guest, the host and the State, playing an intermediate role regulating the two others. Several cities, organizing themselves as shelters for ‘outsiders’ and as a first entrance into the city and legitimacy, are challenging the limits imposed by the state. Unfortunately, and because of the inefficient role of the nation state, those develop into ghettos in which migrants build their daily life. On the one hand, often repressed by the use of violence or lawful arguments, the will to host becomes a political choice and an individual claim by those

who dare to go against laws. On the other hand, migrant communities grow bigger to vindicate their belonging into those ghettos as they do not receive the right aid.

The third chapter (“The need of cosmopolitics”) consists of a reflection about cosmopolitanism and looks from further to analyze the world in its globality. Our world has become interconnected and is more and more globalized whether that be with shared point of views or interculturality. This should allow anyone to own the world as they are pleased to above any cultural differences and inequalities as people are now certain that there is no escape from this planet Earth. This chapter proposes a philosophical perspective on the universal hospitality expected from a globalized world that does not occur since a difference of scale exists between the laws and views of a nation state (cosmopolitics) and a cosmopolitan world. From an anthropologist point of view developed in the last part of this chapter, the cosmopolitanism has become the material form of universalism in which they can study multicultural interactions and the common grounds they can come across. That leads Michel Agier to wonder what really makes someone to be considered as a stranger.

So, for the final chapter of the book called “Becoming stranger”, the notion of migrant is declined in four smaller notions mentioned in the introduction. Throughout the story of a Greek person, Stavros, the author shows how the stranger is differently considered according to his state on his journey. Firstly, a migrant is thought like an “outsider” because of its exteriority to the world. He represents the mobility and the “outsides” of it. Then comes the “foreigner” who is in line with degrees of foreignness to a social order, the authority who governs, or to a community. He or she is not ultimately recognized in any of those and his or her citizenship is incomplete, thus is seen as an observer of the society. That ends with the “stranger”, the migrant whose culture is not integrated in the society. This type of migrant learns, adjusts, interprets new manners of habits and thoughts which make him or her a hybrid of the society he or she evolves in. In sum, those three representations of migration are linked to first geography, then socio-politics, and finally culture. However, Agier imagines as if the migrant does not belong in either of those, therefore, he becomes a fictional “alien” with nocultural belonging, no right and no visibility. The degree of those notions is variable and fluid depending on the situation of a migrant.

The author concludes with a brief reminder that the issue of hospitality is currently highly discussed and debated. Hospitality was born in an asymmetrical relationship of exchanges where the guest’s status is always at stake. Finally, he suggests that only a right to hospitality in a cosmopolitan frame would be able to answer to discretionary migration policy impasses.

Opinion

In my opinion, this book written in philosophical and anthropological perspectives is

helping to develop our reflections on how to consider migrants and how to proceed with being an aid to them. It helps us wonder about the meaning of our role and place in the globalized world. Also, the general writing of this essay is positive, and it is easy to dream of an utopist world where people could host strangers. I particularly enjoyed the fourth chapter in which migrants are incorporated in a different hierarchy from those we usually read about through alien, outsider, foreigner, stranger instead of illegal migrant, asylum seekers, migrants and so on. Nevertheless, the vocabulary and the concepts used in this essay are difficult to read and understand as some are extremely philosophical.