Presentation:
Michel Agier, born in 1953, first conducted urban anthropology research in Lomé (Togo) in the Hausa foreigners’ and traders’ neighbourhood. He then went on to study ethnic and racial relations in Brazil and Colombia. In Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, his research led him to examine the new African imaginary performed in the ‘Afro’ carnival ritual. In Colombia, in the Pacific region and in Cali, where he first investigated other cultural performances, he came face to face with the reality of internal war and forced displacement. Since the 2000s, this has led him to investigate and coordinate collective research on this theme elsewhere in the world. Returning to Africa and then Europe, his research has focused on refugees and migrants on the urban fringes and in camps. From these fields, he has constructed a critical theory of the humanitarian governance of margins and encampments, as well as of ordinary cosmopolitanism. In his seminar as director of studies at the EHESS and in his writings, he revisits concepts such as frontier, foreigner and decentring.
Major books :
L’invention de la ville. Banlieues, townships, invasions et favelas, Éditions des Archives contemporaines, 1999.
Anthropologie du carnaval. La ville, la fête et l’Afrique à Bahia, Parenthèses/IRD, 2000.
On the Margins of the World, 2008.
Managing the Undesirables. Refugee Camp and Humanitarian Government, 2010.
Borderlands, 2016.
Anthropologie de la ville, PUF, 2015.
Les migrants et nous. Éloge de Babel, CNRS-éditions, 2016 (nouvelle édition 2023).
The Strangers as my Guest. A Critical Anthropology of Hospitality, 2020.
La sagesse de l’ethnologue, PUF, Quadrige, 2019 (1e édition 2004).
Babels. Enquêtes sur la condition migrante (dir., with Stefan Le Courant), Seuil/Points, 2022.