In the spirit of Nazi litterateur Hans Johst, I feel impelled to say, “When I hear the words ‘Deleuze’ and ‘Guattari,’ I reach for my gun.” “Nomadology” and “rhizomatic” engender very similar feelings as well.
I found this article useful primarily as a reminder of why I would never have dreamt of going into anthropology. I could find in it nothing but the most banal of conclusions dressed up with pretentious language and irrelevant references.
In fact, if the author were not so blinded by the rhetorical style of her field, she might have managed to say a few interesting things; she came at least within a stone’s throw of addressing important ideas relating to refugees.
Refugees (those who are not “internally displaced,” but have actually crossed a border) are subjected to an odd multiple displacement. First, they have left their “place,” and insofar as their actual home and home community has meaning to them they are displaced not just physically but emotionally. Second, they are living in a different country, where their legal status is sometimes clearly categorized and sometimes extremely unclear but is almost never the same as that of a native citizen of the country.
This second displacement is a highly nontrivial one, with huge ramifications in their daily lives, and it is based on a division (into nation-states that exercise control over ingress and egress, and nationalities for individuals, which give them the right to be certain places and not others), though it has been thoroughly naturalized by the practices of the last 50 to 150 years (depending on which part of the world), is not just an artificial construct but one whose construction one could see as a well-defined process with clear points of demarcation created by specific policies.
Orwell wrote about this construction penetratingly in one of his columns for the left-wing weekly Tribune (12 May 1944, http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440512.html).
Taking aim at the then-conventional wisdom about the “disappearance of frontiers” and ever-increasing intercourse between nations, he said,
“Take simply the instance of travel. In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.
In our own time, however, travel has been becoming steadily more difficult.”
…
“All the countries of the New World did their best to keep the immigrant out unless he brought considerable sums of money with him. Japanese and Chinese immigration into the Americas had been completely stopped. Europe’s Jews had to stay and be slaughtered because there was nowhere for them to go, whereas in the case of the Czarist pogroms forty years earlier they had been able to flee in all directions. How, in the face of all this, anyone can say that modern methods of travel promote intercommunication between different countries defeats me.”
As he pointed out, it was not only the rise of borders and the policing of same that cut people off from one another; inventions that supposedly further communication can do the same:
“It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If anything, it does the opposite.”
National media like the radio help to create national ways of thinking and viewing the world, which then helps to divide people by nationality.
Admittedly, Orwell was among the most brilliant political writers in English; still, the fact that he could say more of use, and more clearly, about this issue in a couple of paragraphs than Malkki could in her whole article is telling.
Analogizing from the highly constructed nature of this second displacement, it is worth probing the constructedness of the first. Are notions of traditional “place” in part a construct imposed on “primitive” refugees by, among others, sophisticated Western academics? I know very little more about that question than I did before I read the article.
The contrast she draws between Hutu refugees living in a camp and those living in Kigoma township suggests the obvious point that refugees construct their own sense of identity and can do it differently based on different circumstances. One wonders whether the primary difference between the racialized and (eventually) triumphalist construction she claims to find in the camp refugees and the cosmopolitanism and “hybridity” of the town refugees is simply that living in a refugee camp is in general much like living in hell. Palestinian militance began in the refugee camps as well, but, even though there is wide variation, the constructed Palestinian narrative certainly doesn’t divide into some neat dichotomy like the one that, one can’t help suspecting, Malkki very conveniently finds in the case she has looked at.
Her criticism of the glorification of indigenism and the “re-sacralization of place” (as far as I can tell, this means nothing at all) and the pathologization of displacement is useful and interesting, although hardly startling or revelatory; it’s easy enough to find academics writing things that are extremely stupid and then criticize them. If she had developed a critique of these ideas more systematically, it might have been helpful.
Finally, it’s interesting to discover a point of contact between Ronald Reagan and Deleuze and Guattari. His statement that trees cause 80% of all pollution , while not quite of the same scope as blaming trees for all the violence of human civilization, must still be highly congenial to them.
