Читать книгу The Stranger as My Guest - Michel Agier - Страница 5

This essay is the result of various encounters. I would like to thank Patrick Boucheron and Alain Prochiantz for inviting me to take part in the symposium ‘Migrations, asile, exil’ (‘Migration, Asylum, Exile’) held at the Collège de France in November 2016, where my ideas on the social form and the politics of hospitality began to take shape. Cyrille Hanappe and the whole team at Actes & Cité invited me to participate in their project on ‘La Ville accueillante’ (‘The Welcoming City’) organised by PUCA (Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture) and by Ville de Grand-Synthe, thereby allowing me to discover the practical issues around municipal hospitality. My thanks to the whole team. Alain Policar offered me the opportunity to explore cosmopolitanism, in the company of a range of philosophers, for an issue (201) of the journal Raison Présente for 2017 and for a symposium on the same subject, ‘Cosmopolitisme ou barbarie?’ (‘Cosmopolitanism or Barbarity?’) (Cevipof/Sciences Po, June 2018): I am deeply grateful to him. Reflections on the theme of becoming a stranger and cinematographic representations of the subject were presented at the Festival des 3 Continents/Cinémas d’Afrique, d’Amérique Latine et d’Asie (Nantes, October 2017). My thanks go in particular to Claire Allouche, the programme planner, and to Jêrôme Baron, the artistic director, for their invitation.

This essay is based on discussions held in the context of the Babels research programme (Agence nationale de la recherche, 2016–19): our focus was on what has been referred to as ‘the migration crisis’, and we drew on research conducted in the field, largely open workshops, and short essays published by Éditions du passage clandestine in the series ‘Bibliothèque des frontières’, which I codirect with Stefan Le Courant. I would like to thank the forty or so researchers, students, and representatives from the voluntary sector who together made up the Babels collective from which I drew the inspiration and the enthusiasm for this book. Finally, it was in the context of my course ‘Anthropologies de l’hospitalité’ (‘Anthropologies of Hospitality’), held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales during the years 2016/17 and 2017/18, that the overall concept for this book gradually emerged. I thank the many people who participated in such a lively manner, and to my colleagues who brought us their own insight.

Finally, I would like to thank Bruno Auerbach at Éditions du Seuil for his attentive and perceptive reading of the French manuscript.