Avec ou sans papier, avec ou sans argent, avec ou sans logement, en transit ou plus ou moins installés dans un espace d’accueil, les migrants doivent manger. Et cette question de la subsistance du corps met en avant la matérialité des frontières, à la fois comme espace de séparation et de tolérance, espace de dangers lorsque la vie est en jeu ou de rencontres transnationales.

Cette journée d’étude abordera la nourriture comme paradigme de recherche essentiel aux études migratoires, capable de présenter très concrètement des espaces et des comportements entre rupture et continuité. Elle reliera goûts, cultures et économie sachant que ce que les migrants choisissent de manger met en évidence les habitudes culturelles et des contraintes fortes. Elle fait également découvrir différentes façons d’habiter et conduit à identifier les pouvoirs et les normes associés aux processus d’intégration.

La question du manger sera ici abordée comme une matrice pour donner corps à la notion de frontière dans son épaisseur et sa temporalité : front, place forte, gardée, surveillée, la frontière est ce lieu où des habitudes se perdent et se gagnent, à la fois fermé et poreux, c’est un espace qui se franchit, se dépasse, et aplanit les différences.

L’association des deux termes « alimentation » et « frontière » interrogera l’effacement, le remplacement, la perte imposés aux populations en mouvement qui mangent vite, mal ou autre. Mais elle identifiera aussi la créativité inhérente à l’interculturalité.

Cette journée montrera que l’entrée par l’alimentation accompagne évolution des études migratoires elles-mêmes en donnant une voix au savoir expérientiel qui accompagne le passage des lignes entre les cultures. Elle montrera que les choix alimentaires des migrants, même limités, rendent compte de leur capacité à rester acteurs de leur migration.

 

 

With or without papers, money, or accommodation, in transit or, more or less settled in a new place, the migrants must eat. And such a link to the subsistence of the body highlights the materiality of the borders, as a space of separation and tolerance, a space of dangers where life is at stake or of transnational encounters.

This study day will approach food as an essential research paradigm for migration studies, presenting very concretely places and behaviors, that are both mixing rupture and continuity. It will link tastes, cultures and economics as migrants’ food choices highlight cultural habits as well as strong constraints. It reveals different ways of living while pointing out the powers and norms associated with any integration processes.

The idea of “eating” will be addressed here as a matrix of the notion of border itself, in its thickness and its temporality: frontal line, stronghold, guarded and monitored, the border is where habits are lost and gained. Both enclosed and porous, it is a space that can be crossed over, passed along, while levelling many differences.

Associating both terms “food” and “border” will question the deletion, replacement, and loss imposed on populations who, as they move, eat quickly, poorly, or differently. But it will also identify the creativity that comes with interculturality.

This study day will present food as a starting point for exploring the field of migration studies, as a place dedicated to an experiential knowledge that steps over the lines between cultures. It will show how the migrants’ food choices – whatever limited – are an essential part of their agentivity.

 

Programme

10h – 10h30 : accueil /café

10h30 – 11h : introduction

11h – 12h30 : échange participatif – des recherches « avec » l’alimentation pour recueillir des données sur les frontières passées ou indépassables en situation de migration.

• Chercheurs : Guillaume Etienne, Megan Carney, Genevieve Guetemme, Nathalie Mondain, Ahed Zarzour.
• Association : Olivet Solidarité, Mémoires Plurielles

12h30-13h30 – pause / repas libre

13h30-15h : table-ronde avec des publics migrants et leurs hôtes : histoires de frontières alimentaires

15h -15h30 : Megan Carney (University of Arizona) “Food and social dynamics in border zones” – « Dynamiques alimentaires et sociales dans les zones frontalières »

15h30 – 16h30 : discussion

16h30-17h : synthèse par Nathalie Mondain (university of Ottawa )

 

Study day – CITERES / IEHCA – 2 April 2024 (Tours) – Food & Borders

 

Knowing and understanding the migrants is essential to secure their well-being and promote learning. In that matter, food is an essential concern for asylum seekers, young migrants, seasonal agricultural workers, refugees, etc.). It is sometimes the reasons for their departure – as this passage from a novel by Djaïli Amadou Amal indicates :

 

The village was further emptied of its youngest and strongest population, who left in search of a better life or just enough to survive. They have abandoned the fields to their parents, wives and young children who do not have the strength to cultivate them. But, if they had the strength, they would not be able to influence climate change. Even with a lot of willpower, we couldn’t make the rain fall. The climate is more and more arid, the land more and more dry, impoverished, exhausted. And too many mouths to feed! Everyone goes to town, further and further, for longer and longer. [1]

 

But food is also at the heart of the logistics of the migrant’s journey, as feeding yourself, with or without paper, with or without money, during a journey that can last months, sometimes years, is not easy. And for those who “arrive”, food remains a crucial issue as it is quite simply one of the most fundamental needs, which affect the body, the integrity, and the survival of everyone.

And the border seems to crystallise this “essential” approach to food insofar as it is a space where vital needs perhaps become more pressing. It is a critical space where paths are decided, reoriented, stopped… Our hypothesis is that hunger and satiety there, are felt very acutely. (I specify that our approach of borders is not of the dematerialised space, that was dreamed of by the liberals of the 1990s,[2]  but a tense « place of contact »[3] that the migrants inhabit: the anthropologist Michel Agier, evokes the “frontier men”, [4] generated by a political context which favours what he calls the “encampment of the world”. [5]

 

Such encampment has become the technical solution to reduce migration, although it is producing more and more places of exclusion. Without being visionary, I see it as something towards which the global system tends if no modification takes place in the system of Nation-States. Nation-States will become more and more the places of the official, rights, privileges, opposed to a kind of waste, a world formed by all the marginal spaces. The share of the population that finds itself in rather extraterritorial contexts, falling under another law, another standard, will become more significant. [6]

 

Migrants are directly confronted with this “encampment” which confines their administrative, cultural, but also material life – particularly food – to the space-time of the border, with its controls and strong constraints.

 

We therefore propose to approach both food and migration in connection with the notion of borders to:

1) understand the food that comes with forced mobility

2) present a way of living – within the borders

3) identify the powers and standards that allow, or do not allow integration.

 

As an example, we may recall a scene from the film No Comment (2008) by Nathalie Loubèyre.

It is set on a border (Calais) and with human beings (migrants) that are eating, sleeping and chatting in the sun or the rain, depending on food distributions by local charities, submitted to police incursions and trying desperately to cross the Channel.[7]

Here I need to point out that Loubèyre is one of the first filmmakers to take an interest (in 2008) in the lives of migrants at the borders of Europe. And her film – No Comment – takes place without any comment (as said in the title), with no voice-over, or any technical or logistical data. It stands apart from the usual (quantified) media representations (interpretations). It focuses on the migrants’ faces, hands, feet, describes the camp’s life, the fatigue, the worries – it presents the border as the space “an edge, a limit, […] an “in-between space”, where the history of the ‘foreigner’[8] is being rewritten today,” as Agier writes. It is a space out-of-the-places.[9]

 

The film shows ways of eating that relate to the previous entries in
giving information on:

1) The migrants’ food

a. food that sustains the body

b. food that is assigned, marginal, extraterritorial and sometimes illegal: uncertain, quickly eaten, alone and together, cold ? Not especially related to personal tastes, cultural habits, dietary balance, and not always in sufficient quantities,…

 

2) The migrants’ habitat “inside a border”: outside, away from city centres,
with constant police checks – in a space of exclusion,

 

From now on, no matter where you find yourself, you will not be able to expand or flourish. Because the place here and now will always send you back to your impossibility of being. No matter the country, no matter the city, here and now means constraints and failure, here and now is the very image of your helplessness and of what you have lost, of what you are not any more.[10]

 

Abandoning the classic documentary means such as the voice-over and interview, Loubeyre’s offers a narrative to the ones who are not given a voice and allows them to present:

– Their disaster, absence of visibility

– Their resilience by accepting food and habitat linked with disappearance and survival

 

3) The powers and norms that allow, or do not allow, integration in Europe where migrants are treated on the grounds of their foreignness. Etienne Tassin speaks of:

 

Political crime […] committed to migrants in the name of democracy, in Europe under the cover of a political Union whose greatness will have been to free States from sovereigntist fixation and to deploy beyond national borders the appearance of free political actors.[11]

 

4) Finally, cinema draws attention to the way in which artists presenteating at the border: as a way to question the unspeakable.

 

I therefore suggest here, through a description of everyone professional experience with food, to visualise:

1) the bodies and livelihoods of migrants

2) the border as a space of separation and tolerance, of dangers or transnational encounters

3) food on the move (what to eat, what not to eat, where and when to eat, etc.) (rice-chicken, vegetables, bread, breakfasts, etc. Here/elsewhere?)

4) mobility and habitats, precarious, nomadic…

5) A research methodology that draws on food (and art – i.e. cinema or …) as an essential paradigm for migration studies, that is giving voice to the experiential knowledge that accompanies the crossing of lines between cultures. We may see food as a practical entry to represent spaces and behaviours, connect
tastes, cultures and economies with creativity and interculturality.

 

The idea is to reflect on living human matter, marked by transnational life, often linked with initial trauma, amplified by the difficulties of exile.

 

This will make it possible to address what Homi Bhabha calls a “third space” (Bhabha, 1994), where surrounding cultures converge to form a composite entity: a space which transgresses and celebrates the border and which finds an important echo in the practices contemporary literary and artistic (visual, and performing arts, among others).