Study on the Organic Ethnologist of Algerian Immigration

Adelmalek Sayad passed away two years ago at this writing, leaving behind him one of the most original and fertile contributions to the anthropology of immigration of the past century. Throughout his voluminous and varied writings close to a hundred publications, including eight books spanning the destruction of Algeria's traditional peasantry at the hands of French colonialism, the dynamics of migration chains from Kabylia to France, the impact of decolonization on the reception of Algerian workers in Marseilles, the odyssey of those workers and their children through the layers and institutions of French society, the social uses and political abuses of "immigrant culture," and the everyday life of Algerian slums on the Parisian periphery during the fifties, all informed by an acute awareness of the political-economic roots and import of human transhumance1- the Algerian sociologist both elaborated and demonstrated the potency of three pivotal principles for the study of migration. The first is the simple but fundamental proposition, whose implications remain to be fully drawn out by scholars and policy makers alike, that before he or she becomes an immigrant, the migrant is always first an emigrant, and that the sociology of migration must therefore imperatively start, not from the concerns and cleavages of the receiving society, but from the sending communities, their history, structure, and contradictions. The common contraction of the emigration-immigration doublet to its second component mutilates the phenomenon and entraps the study of migrants into an artificial problematic of "lack" and deficiency explained away by ritualized references, now to their lower class composition and substandard conditions of living, now to the peculiarities of the culture they have brought with them.2Resisting such ethnocentric imposition, the sociology of migration must take as its object not the "problems" that migrants pose for the advanced societies which attract them, in matters of employment, housing, schooling and health, but the dynamic "relationship between the system of dispositions of emigrants and the ensemble of mechanisms to which they are subjected owing to this emigration" (Sayad 1These books are respectively (in English titles): The Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964), Algerian Immigration in France (Gillette and Sayad 1976), The Social Uses of the Culture of Immigrants (Sayad 1978), Towards a Sociology of Immigration (Sayad and Fassa 1982), Migrating - A History of Marseilles: The Shock of Decolonization (Temime, Jordi and Sayad 1991), Immigration, or the Paradoxes of Otherness (Sayad 1991), and An Algerian Nanterre, Land of Slums (Sayad with Dupuy 1995). The culmination and quintessence of Sayad's five decades of incessant research is Double Absence: From the Illusions of the Emigrant to the Suffering of the Immigrant (Sayad 1999). 2A rare and remarkable exception to this pattern, deserving of a wide readership for its multi-level, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach, is Massey, Durand and Alarcon (1987). Recent work on "transnational communities" has fostered a belated if limited recognition of the double-sidedness and dual determinacy of migration (see the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies on the topic edited by Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt 1999, and Portes 1999).

This is a curse. (...) Now I have no more reason to return [to my home village in Algeria]. I have nothing left to do there. It no longer interests me. Everything has changed. Things no longer have the same meaning. You no longer know why you are here in France, of what use you are. There is no more order. (cited in Sayad 1991: 126-127, 137) A corollary of these three analytic principles is that the sociology of migration must be reflexive, turned back onto its own conditions of possibility and affectivity. It must include a social history not only of the double-sided fact of emigration-immigration but also of the lay and scholarly discourses that swirl about this fact in the two societies involved. For the collective perception of migration, its symbolic elaboration and its political construction (of which social science partakes every time it takes over the presuppositions of the official viewpoint) are an integral constituent of its objective reality. Sayad inspects the loaded semantics that have governed the framing of the question of North African entry into France since World War II, 6Here the writings of Sayad evoke strongly those of W.E.B. DuBois. Compare, for instance, his discussion of the "sociological doubling-up" of the emigrant, who "bears within himself, as a product of his history, in the manner of the colonized, a two-fold and contradictory system of references" in his brilliant essay "The Illegitimate Children" (Sayad 1977) and DuBois's (1903) classic analysis of the "two-ness" or "double-consciousness" of African Americans in the United States in The Souls of Black Folks.