SETH M. HOLMES
University of California, Berkeley, and Humboldt-Universit¨at zu Berlin
HEIDE CASTA ˜NEDA
University of South Florida and Freie Universit¨at Berlin
Representing the “European refugee
crisis” in Germany and beyond:
Deservingness and difference, life and death
A B S T R A C T
The European refugee crisis has gained worldwide
attention with daily media coverage both in and
outside Germany. Representations of refugees in
media and political discourse in relation to Germany
participate in a Gramscian “war of position” over
symbols, policies, and, ultimately, social and
material resources, with potentially fatal
consequences. These representations shift blame
from historical, political-economic structures to the
displaced people themselves. They demarcate the
“deserving” refugee from the “undeserving” migrant
and play into fear of cultural, religious, and ethnic
difference in the midst of increasing anxiety and
precarity for many in Europe. Comparative
perspectives suggest that anthropology can play an
important role in analyzing these phenomena,
highlighting sites of contestation, imagining
alternatives, and working toward them. [refugee,
media, immigration, crisis, Germany, Europe]
I
n the first nine months of 2015, more than 487,000 people arrived
on Europe’s Mediterranean shores, twice the number for all of 2014
(Banulescu-Bogdan and Fratzke 2015). Many of them were Syrians
fleeing their country’s civil war, which began in 2011; since then, almost
429,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in Europe (UNHCR
2015). The “crisis,” as it came to be represented and experienced, was not
a new phenomenon in the summer of 2015. In addition, large numbers
of refugees from across the world have entered western Europe at various
times in its history (Baldwin-Edwards 2006, 2008; Fortune, October
15, 2015). According to some estimates, however, there are 1 million more
refugees yet to come, leading the European Commission to call this the
“largest global humanitarian crisis” of our time (ECHO 2015, 1). And German
chancellor Angela Merkel has asserted that the contemporary crisis
will define this decade (UK Guardian, August 15, 2015).
Thoroughly examining the current crisis, together with its historical
and ongoing violent production, is beyond the scope of any single article.
And while the specifics of the multisided war in and outside Syria
are centrally important, we focus here on the simultaneous and related
struggle over meaning, legitimization, and power in representations
of the refugee crisis, specifically through the lens of Germany. In
doing so, we employ concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci (1971) in
the Prison Notebooks, where he defines a “war of position”—on a continuum
and in contrast with an all-out military “war of maneuver”—
as the ongoing struggle over symbols that legitimize and transform
political-economic structures. According to Gramsci, then, hegemony is
always incomplete, contested, and agonistic. Media reports, political statements,
and popular discourse on the refugee crisis engaged in such
a war of position over symbols, legitimizing and—at times—resisting
the political-economic dynamics that inflected the many ways people
in Europe responded to the people arriving at their borders. Far from
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 1–13, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12259
American Ethnologist Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
reducing the crisis to mere text or discourse, we seek to
understand how representations engage with the violent
political, economic, and material realities of primary importance
in the production of and response to this crisis. In
this instance, we analyze representations as simultaneous
symbolic, social, political, and legal categories of inclusion
and exclusion with potentially fatal consequences. These
categories, at times, form a “lexicon of terror” (Feitlowitz
1998) as boats of refugees are turned back to sea (Klepp
2013), refugee centers are set on fire (Agence France-Presse,
August 26, 2015), politicians are violently attacked for
supporting refugees (Agence France-Presse, October 19,
2015), and Syrian refugees are imagined as connected to the
violent November 2015 attacks in Paris (Reuters, November
16, 2015).
These current events are framed and experienced as
a crisis (Kehr 2015), entering the daily media, capturing
worldwide political attention, and producing diverse and
contradictory discourses and responses.1
While the construction
of events as a crisis can lead to repression and
intensification of vertical politics (Kallius, Monterescu,
and Rajaram 2016), we focus on these phenomena as
crisis in the sense conceptualized by Gramsci—that is, as
a moment in the war of position and war of maneuver
when hegemony and the architecture of a social world
are at stake, with future structural and symbolic realities
unknown. He writes of crisis as a moment of openness in
which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (1971,
276). By analyzing representations of the European refugee
crisis through the particular lens of Germany, in the midst
of shifting material, social, political, and symbolic ground,
we aim to inspire further work on how displaced people
are framed and how various actors respond to them. The
discursive frames used in the media and in political and
popular narratives can help us learn a great deal about
how the responsibility for suffering is shifted; how fears
of cultural, ethnic, and religious difference are mobilized;
and how boundaries of social categories are made and
unmade (Latour 2007), sorting people into undeserving
trespassers versus those who deserve rights and care from
the state. This crisis highlights an unknown future for
Germany, with its tendencies toward both xenophobia and
Willkommenskultur (culture of welcome), as well as for
Europe more generally, in terms of internal relations and
contradictory orientations toward the outside world.
How displaced people are framed reveals a great deal
about anxieties in Europe regarding diversity and change
within a paradigm of limited good (Foster 1965) informed
by debt, austerity, and neoliberal disassembling of social
systems. Media reports and political statements project
these anxieties onto displaced people by morally delineating
the deserving refugee from the undeserving migrant
while casting both groups as outsiders threatening the wellbeing
of an imagined homogenous Europe. While many of
the tragedies in this crisis directly result from policies that
have sought to selectively control and restrict migration
to Europe for the past quarter century (Hess et al. 2015),
the discourse of deservingness displaces responsibility
from historical political and economic policies supported
by powerful actors in Europe and the United States and
instead locates it in displaced people themselves. Yet such
discourses are also sites of contestation, with numerous
actors and grassroots organizations resisting these dichotomies.
As Jacques Derrida (2001) notes, state interests
and local ethics of hospitality are always in tension. On the
one hand, states limit the right to residence; on the other
hand, local communities may respond with hospitality
to newcomers and offer refuge. Derrida points to this
contradictory logic not to suggest that political action is
impossible, but instead to foster it: in such a crisis, we may
simply not yet recognize the possibilities for new forms of
inclusion as well as novel horizontal solidarities (see also
Kallius, Monterescu, and Rajaram 2016).
We conclude this article by asking the following:
What can anthropology contribute regarding the European
refugee crisis? What particular perspective on these
events can comparative perspective, social theory, and
ethnographic methods provide that media representations
cannot, and how can they help us understand the
media representation themselves? In a moment of crisis
that brings into relief unknown futures, how can we, as
anthropologists, participate in imagining alternatives to
contemporary sociopolitical structures and values as well
as to the dominant “communicable cartographies” (Briggs
2005; 2007) in which we are also imbricated? Charles L.
Briggs has developed this concept to indicate how narratives
project certain subject positions that have differential
access to the production of those narratives themselves.
We use this concept to analyze current media and political
discourse in the refugee crisis as well as to consider the
political implications of ethnography.
Anthropology can establish important links between
human experience and macro–political-economic structures,
contextualizing both in historical perspective and
challenging the marking of people through tropes of deservingness
and difference. In addition, ethnographic work
can highlight limits to abstract tropes of “the refugee” and
“the migrant,” suggesting that more carefully contextualized
work is required to trace the political subjectivities
of diverse displaced communities—and the social groups
responding to them—through time and space. At the same
time, anthropologists may challenge power hierarchies
in the production and circulation of representations,
including within our own writing. Analyzing the current
crisis requires us simultaneously to consider the subject
positions afforded displaced people, the audience, and the
anthropologist as author within the communicable models
not only of media representations but also of ethnography
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itself (Briggs 2005, 2007). In a sense, the current crisis highlights
openness and unknown futures not only for Germany
and Europe but also, on a different level, for anthropology,
its identities, and its future modes of engagement with
the world. Here, we hope to explore how simultaneous
reflexive engagement with current events and social theory
might allow anthropology to reimagine its own contributions
to political possibilities, emboldening and perhaps
even moving beyond our tried and true specialties of
contextualization and complexification.
Europe, Germany, Syria, and media
representations of the crisis
While there is clearly no unified “Europe” in relation to
the refugee crisis, some important patterns emerge. Media
reports on the response to the crisis touch on many aspects,
including the fairness of the quota system for distributing
refugees among various countries and the question of
which countries should take more or fewer refugees and
which should or should not propose quotas for others.
Reflected in all this are struggles in the war of position to
define “Europe” as well as to establish who will have access
to the various forms of capital associated with this definition.
Here, we focus particularly on representations of the
crisis in relation to Germany. Exercising often controversial
leadership as Europe’s largest economy, Germany played
an especially important role in responding to the crisis
in the summer and fall of 2015, occupying an important
political and rhetorical position within media narratives.
While countries such as Israel and most of the Gulf states
have uniformly turned away refugees, and others such as
Hungary have answered with direct violence, Germany
has responded with an ambivalent hospitality that is
uniquely nuanced and conditioned by memories (and
some present-day realities) of xenophobia and fascism.
As would be suggested by Gramsci’s conceptualization
of hegemony and the war of position, there is also no
unified Germany in response to the crisis. Some within
Merkel’s own political party have criticized her response
as “too generous” and warned that the crisis is turning
into a “national catastrophe” (Frankfurter Rundschau,
October 15, 2015). In response, she famously stated, “We
will make it!” (Wir schaffen das!) and “If we now have to
start apologizing for showing a friendly face to emergency
situations, then this is not my country” (Wenn wir jetzt
anfangen m¨ussen, uns zu entschuldigen daf¨ur, dass wir in
Notsituationen ein freundliches Gesicht zeigen, dann ist das
nicht mein Land; Spiegel Online, September 16, 2015). On
the subway in the nation’s capital, one can hear people
discussing whether Germany has done enough in response
to the crisis through the course of a regular day. Simultaneously,
as officials debate and enact policies to receive some
people and turn away others, xenophobic groups stage
demonstrations calling for refugees to be kept out (Agence
France-Presse, October 19, 2015), while throughout the
country there are many offers of hospitality to those arriving
from local organizations and neighborhood associations
(e.g., www.moabit-hilft.de). We consider these realities as
anthropologists variously involved in participant observation
and observant participation (Sufrin 2015) in the
refugee crisis in Germany. Our analysis of the sorting and
othering of people occurs in comparative perspective with
our ongoing work with migrants in Germany (Casta˜neda)
as well as with undocumented Latin American im/migrants
and refugees in the United States (Casta˜neda and
Holmes).2
During the spring and early summer of 2015, German
officials repeatedly emphasized the EU policy that refugees
must claim asylum in the first country of entry—in this
case, most often, Greece and Italy. Various German civic
groups responded with calls for more compassion, drawing
attention to the deaths of those trying to enter the European
Union and to the fact that the points of entry are some
of the poorest EU member states. For example, one group
called the Center for Political Beauty held a large-scale
“burial of refugee bodies” on the lawn of the Reichstag
in Berlin, complete with shovels, dirt mounds, and small,
white crosses (see Figures 1 and 2). This group produces its
own accounts of the crisis in its actions and on its website
(PoliticalBeauty.de), challenging dominant communicable
models in which state officials and journalists are the
primary subjects who can speak the truth.
On July 16, 2015, Merkel addressed a group of teenagers
in the northern city of Rostock in a talk titled “Good Life in
Germany.” One of the teenagers, a Palestinian girl named
Reem, explained in fluent German that she and her family
were threatened with deportation. She said, “I have goals
like everyone else. I want to go to university like them.” She
added, “It’s very unpleasant to see how others can enjoy
life, and I can’t myself.” Merkel responded that there were
“thousands and thousands” of refugees like her and that
Germany “just can’t manage” to help them all. According to
reports, Merkel stopped midsentence and whispered, “Oh
Gott,” as Reem began to cry. The chancellor walked over
to the girl and tried to console her, stroking her shoulder
and telling her she had “done a good job” (Das has du doch
prima gemacht; Connolly 2015). The incident caught international
attention, trending on Twitter with the hashtag
#MerkelStreichelt (Merkel Strokes) as many people mocked
her awkward response.
In August, Merkel announced that Germany would admit
Syrian refugees even if they did not claim asylum in the
first EU country they entered, thereby changing direction
and suspending the key EU procedure known as the Dublin
Regulation (Vox, August 28, 2015). The interaction between
Merkel and Reem and the social media responses to it further
challenged state-authority communicable models and
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Figure 1. The Center for Political Beauty, an artistic and activist group in Berlin, stages a mock burial of refugees in front of the Reichstag, June 2015.
(Jennifer Burrell)
seem to have, thus, contributed to this significant change
in discourse and policy (Die Tageszeitung, October 18,
2015).3
Reports of a surge of refugees to Germany followed
this announcement, further influencing public opinion
and overwhelming local sites of reception, as witnessed by
Casta˜neda in the state of Hessen in early August. By October,
Germany had admitted more refugees in the 2015 crisis
than any other country in Europe—though Sweden and
Turkey showed comparable hospitality. Some see Germany
as having significant responsibility within the European
Union, given its relative wealth and its recent, widely
publicized leadership role supporting austerity measures
in the Greek debt crisis. In 2015, Germany celebrated World
Refugee Day for this first time, and German president
Joachim Gauck argued that Germany had a “moral duty”
to provide safe refuge because Germans were refugees
themselves after World War II.
These events are in line with the complex conversation
about immigration and multiculturalism in contemporary
German society produced within the historical legacy of
the 20th century. While restrictive immigration policies are
generally well received, there has been occasional public
resistance to their implementation, especially in the case of
individuals and families framed as “deserving” (Casta˜neda
2010). In general, Syrian families are seen as deserving
because they are understood to have been forced to flee
by the ongoing civil war and the involvement in this war
of its international protagonists, especially the United
States and Russia. In some ways, then, the realities clash
with ongoing anti-immigrant rhetoric, which penetrates
German society and is strongly reflected in the country’s
contemporary policies on immigration and “integration.”
Especially important here are contemporary anti-Muslim
movements such as Patriotic Europeans against the Islamicization
of the Occident (PEGIDA), founded in Dresden
in 2014, and how people, including major political parties,
have taken up and acted on such rhetoric (Deutsche
Welle 2015). Anti-immigrant sentiment has coalesced
with neoliberal policies ever since the mid-1990s, leading
Germany to dismantle and defund many of its refugee
reception centers, thus contributing to the experience of
crisis (Fullerton 2001; International Business Times, April 9,
2014). More common is the rhetoric of integration, which
positions immigrants as having the responsibility to adapt
to German society, both culturally and bureaucratically,
though in ways that can never be complete (cf. Blommaert
and Verschueren 1998; Casta˜neda 2012). These dynamics
reflect Germany’s historical struggle between xenophobic
tendencies and liberal aspirations (Lehr 2015). Previously,
Germany had a strong, constitutionally embedded right
to asylum—it was the only nation to formalize it in such
a way—and this right held an important place in political
life and in the consciousness of postwar society. But
amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment, the German
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Figure 2. Participants in the mock burial of refugees staged by the Center for Political Beauty hold tombstone signs in front of the Reichstag, Berlin, June
2015. (Jennifer Burrell)
legislature amended Article 16 of the Constitution in
December 1992, severely restricting this previously unqualified
right.
While Germany occupies an important position in
the European response to the refugee crisis, many other
countries have contributed to the massive displacement,
including the United States, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
Russia, and Iran. Media reports indicate that the United
States has supported Syrian rebels through CIA and Pentagon
trainings and launched airstrikes against the regime
of Bashar al-Assad, while Russia has provided arms to the
regime and directly attacked rebels (Al Jazeera America,
October 14, 2015; BBC News, October 9, 2015). At the
same time, other groups in the area—ISIS, Hezbollah, and
Kurdish alliances—have both received support and been
directly attacked from multiple sources. Meanwhile, the
European Union has imposed economic and diplomatic
sanctions on Syria in response to violence in recent years,
increasing the vulnerability of many in the country.4
Clearly,
this displacement is complicated by the roles played by
multiple powerful actors within and far beyond the country’s
borders. Moreover, Syrians are not the only ones
displaced; people from many other countries are arriving in
Europe for diverse reasons as witnessed by both authors in
different areas of Germany. Below, we briefly consider how
and why these different groups receive different amounts
and types of political and media attention.
Parsing moral deservingness: “Migrant” versus
“refugee”
The words “migrant” and “refugee” are intermittently
distinguished and conflated in political, popular, and media
discourse. At times, the phrase “migrant crisis” subtly
delegitimizes calls for protection (BBC News 2015), whereas
the phrase “refugee crisis” reinforces them (Deutsche Welle
2015). Simultaneously, political and media statements may
alternate in the same account between these two phrases
when describing the same people (as the news reports
cited here do). Though these categories are distinguished
by different symbolic and legal framings, they are often
blurred, adding to the confusion regarding what is actually
possible legally and practically.
Across many historical and geographic contexts,
the discursive framings of the causes of displacement—
particularly those involving the overlapping dichotomies
of “voluntary”/“forced,” “(im)migrant”/“refugee,” and
“economic”/“political”—have shaped how states and other
actors have responded to displaced people (Gonzales 2013;
Holmes 2013; Yarris and Casta˜neda 2014). International
conventions establish refugees as involuntarily displaced
by political circumstances, including war and violence (as
well as natural and anthropogenic disasters); they are thus
framed as deserving. In this case, deservingness participates
in the war of position as a conditional attribution
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enabling a moral demarcation (as opposed to a strictly
legal one) between people who are understood as worthy of
the international community’s physical, economic, social,
and health aid and those who are not (Huschke 2014;
Willen 2012; Willen and Cook, forthcoming). Immigrants
or migrants, as opposed to refugees, tend to be portrayed
in popular, political, and academic discourse as economic
opportunists, voluntarily leaving their home communities
in search of a better life. Because they are viewed as having
made a free and autonomous choice to cross borders, they
are often positioned as unworthy of social, economic, and
political rights.
The discursive category “refugee” confers legitimacy
on subjects who make claims on host states for social rights
and services and responsibility on host states to protect
those who fall in this category. The definition of refugee,
along with the responsibilities of second- and third-party
governments to provide protection and resettlement assistance,
is codified in the 1951 United Nations Convention
of the Status of Refugees. Yet how states respond to asylum
seekers always reflects geopolitical interests that reinscribe
ideas about which groups deserve support and at which
historical moments (Coutin 2011). Miriam Ticktin (2011)
and Didier Fassin (2005) show that, at times, immigration
and refugee policies prioritize morally legitimate biological
or health differences in delineating deservingness.
Although it is one of the oldest social institutions, asylum
remains a precarious construct in which questions of
legitimacy—and of “truth”—continually shift (Fassin 2013).
However, the distinctions between political and economic
as well as involuntary and voluntary deserve to be
questioned. Individuals, families, and communities have
been driven out of their homes by economic desperation
that is politically produced—that is, they have been forcibly
displaced by material factors other than war and temporally
limited natural disasters, but nevertheless produced by political
forces. Indeed, the idea of the “voluntary” economic
migrant elides the realities of structural violence and postcolonial
economic inequalities that push people to migrate
in order to survive (e.g., Holmes 2011, 2013). In media and
political discourse about the crisis, relatively little attention
was paid to the historical, social, economic, or even political
determinants of immigration and refugeeism, including
the Syrian civil war itself. A violence continuum frame
(Bourdieu 2000; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003),
however, reminds us that the political-economic realities
of structural violence can produce and exacerbate political
violence or resistance, while various discursive frames
may engage in the symbolic violence of legitimization
and thereby help perpetuate these phenomena. One man
in his early 30s living in one of the Berlin refugee camps
who had previously been a dentist in Syria explained to a
group including Holmes that he fled because of the war, the
interruptions of electricity and other services to his family’s
household, and the threat of conscription. These reasons,
including the shutting off of vital services in the midst of
war and EU economic sanctions, demonstrate how difficult
it is to separate the political from the economic. The two
are interproductive and interpenetrating, with economic
policies (such as sanctions) occurring in response to and
exacerbating political changes and political violence.
Simultaneously, political changes produce and occur in
response to economic phenomena (for example, EU antiimmigrant
policies in the context of EU-imposed austerity).
The parsing of deservingness operates on many levels
and in many forms. In September, images of three-year-old
Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach reverberated
across the globe, stirring public outrage and affecting
politics as far away as Canada during its federal election
(CNN.com, October 10, 2015). While much of the media
coverage of this and other images indicated that refugees
needed more support from Europe and beyond, some
deliberated over whether the boy and his family were really
deserving refugees (Lee 2015). Images of suffering, like
those of Kurdi, engage in emotional and political work, producing
sympathy and empathy, as well as fear and othering,
here as in other contexts (Comaroff and Comaroff 2007;
Kleinman and Kleinman 1996).5
Subsequently, the parsing
of deservingness colors other realms, including commercial
transactions. For example, a German company that produces
razor wire—which is significantly more dangerous
than barbed wire—refused to send an order to Hungary in
September, where it would be used to deter refugees from
crossing the border. “The refugees are anything but criminals,”
the company’s owners argued. “They’re harmless
people who are running for their lives” (Asche 2015).
Simultaneously, displaced people are far from homogenous.
Syrian asylum applicants range from illiterate
working-class people to English-speaking professionals.
In October 2015, the central receiving area for refugees
in Berlin was processing hundreds of people a day from
many countries, including Syria, Iran, Iraq, Albania, Eritrea,
Somalia, and others. During a recent visit by Holmes, a
young volunteer stated under her breath that “they aren’t
really refugees,” motioning toward an Albanian family. She
then explained that they “do not really need help” because
they are not from Syria. This reflected the rhetoric of the
Kretschmer Deal made in October, in which Germany
declared that asylum would not be granted to people from
countries it had declared safe. The delineation of deserving
versus undeserving also came out in a recent conversation
between anthropologists and Syrian refugees in Berlin. A
young Syrian asylum applicant living in one of the refugee
camps on the outskirts of Berlin said in fluent English that
“Germany must differentiate between humanitarian and
economic refugees,” explaining that he and his friends
were highly educated engineers and health care professionals
who fled the civil war and that “refugees who are
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professionals or students deserve extra support and permission
to work and study in these hard times.” The parsing
of moral deservingness occurs on many levels and interrelates
with class, race, and nationality, here seen active
within the diversity of refugees themselves.6
Demarcating the population: Hospitality versus
xenophobia
In the midst of the refugee crisis, much of Europe has been
caught between two responses: compassionate pragmatism
versus fear of cultural, ethnic, and religious difference.
The othering of those considered different applies to both
immigrants and refugees and has increasingly manifested
in securitization responses.
Biopower, Michel Foucault’s (1977, 1985) conception of
a particular form of security that is meant to ensure life at
the level of the body and the population, forms a central axis
in this war of position. Protecting life, in Foucault’s formulation,
necessitates a sorting of those who deserve to be “let to
die,” so that those understood to make up “the population”
can be “made to live” (1977, 1985). He specifies that “race”
as a sociocultural and economic formation comes into existence
to mark those whose bodies represent a sort of threat,
such that their death is understood to enhance the life of the
population (1977, 1985). More recently, Fassin (2007) argues
that the “politics of life” composes a means by which radical
inequality underlies a transaction in human lives, with
certain lives marked to be saved and others not. This aspect
of the war of position has potentially fatal consequences
as ships belonging to Frontex, the EU border patrol, turn
away boats of people from Africa and the Middle East
arriving near Europe’s Mediterranean shores to unknown
and precarious fates (Klepp 2013). On the flip side are the
refugees themselves, some of whose goals may be simply to
live, participating very differently in this politics of life.
The fear of being overwhelmed by difference runs
through much of the discourse surrounding the current
crisis. Metaphors invoking invasion include those of “open
doors” or “open windows” that need to be secured or closed
(Reuters 2015). Reflecting this projected threat, authorities
restricted the German-Austrian border for the first time
since Austria joined the “border-free” Schengen Area in
the mid-1990s following reports of up to 1,800 refugees
entering Germany daily from this point (BBC News 2015).
These actions throw into question the political and material
architecture of a border-free Europe—specifically the 26
countries making up the Schengen Area. Metaphors of
water—such as “flood,” “tide,” and “flow”—frequently
emerge in descriptions of the arrival of displaced people
and connote a fear that the unspecified European
mainstream could be “overwhelmed” or “inundated,” and
“drown” as a consequence (Hage 2016). Media (and UN)
depictions of Syrian refugees explained that the arrivals in
2015 were just the “tip of the iceberg” and that the “largest
tide” was yet to come (Kirka 2015). Those who are different
are overtly and subtly portrayed as a threat to the life of
“Europeans” and “Europe.” These metaphors are common
in relation to transnational displacement in other contexts.
For example, scholars have shown how metaphors of water
have been used in the United States to “produce fears about
the population growth of Latinos in American society,
which in turn positions them as a possible threat to the
‘nation’ . . . as conceived in demographic and racial terms”
(Chavez 2001, 173; see also Santa Ana 2002).
As securitization paradigms increase, the “criminal”/
“terrorist” has emerged as another figure along the refugee–
migrant spectrum. European and US politicians have
described Syrian refugees as “infiltrated with Muslim
extremists” and as a potential “ISIS Trojan horse” (UK Daily
Mail, October 11, 2015; US News and World Report, October
2, 2015; Politics.co.uk, September 4, 2015). These fears
seemed realized as news reports indicated—but were later
refuted—that the passport of a Syrian refugee was found on
or near the body of a dead suicide bomber in the November
13, 2015, attacks in Paris. Markus S¨oder, finance minister
for the German state of Bavaria, consequently stated that
“Paris changes everything” (UK Guardian, November 16,
2015). The trope of the criminal or terrorist has been seen
in other contexts of displacement, with Latin Americans
entering the United States painted not only as migrants
seeking opportunity and refugees fleeing gang and military
violence, but also as criminals (Stephen, forthcoming) and
potential terrorists carrying weapons of mass destruction
(Sianews.com, October 31, 2004).
Difference along cultural, ethnic, and religious lines
is the primary means for marking those who are deemed
a threat in current media and political representations.
Recent statements by the prime minister of Hungary
indicate that he must protect Europe (implied to be homogenously
Christian) from the influx of Muslim refugees
(UK Guardian, September 3, 2015). Indeed, several European
leaders have indicated that Christian refugees are
more welcome than their Muslim counterparts (Ynetnews,
September 7, 2015), and this rhetoric only increased after
the attacks in Paris. On a related note, the UK Independence
Party leader recently stated that the refugee crisis
is a “conspiracy to make Europe more multicultural,”
with “multicultural” framed as a threat (Ross 2015). These
statements imply that Europe is homogenously white and
Christian, erasing long-existing ethnic, cultural, and religious
diversity (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998). Perhaps
not surprisingly, the refugee crisis, reflected through anxieties
about austerity and limited good, has also played into
the recent moves to the political Right across Europe (UK
Independent, September 25, 2015). Inflammatory narratives
portraying refugees as a threat have been instrumental in
pitching the working class against the middle class in
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American Ethnologist Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
several countries and have been spread especially powerfully
in the tabloid media (Crone 2015). At the same time,
Merkel, acting with Germany’s complicated 20th-century
history in the background, has challenged other European
leaders to receive refugees (UK Express, September 21,
2015). And some commentators frame this moment as an
opportunity for the European Union to “evolve” beyond
a constrained definition of cultural and religious identity
that leads to border control and fighting over quotas
(Nougayr`ede 2015).
Until late 2015, much of the discussion of refugees
and irregular immigrants in Europe had focused on people
from various parts of Africa, and developed within an even
more explicit securitization paradigm (Baldwin-Edwards
2006, 2008). The recurring catastrophes in the Mediterranean
involving the deaths of people on boats from Africa
attempting to reach Italian islands made headlines earlier
in the summer (UK Guardian, June 2, 2015). Though many
African refugees continue to arrive in Europe, as witnessed
in Berlin by Holmes, this ongoing phenomenon is no longer
represented in popular accounts of the crisis. Syrians and
other Middle Eastern refugees affected by ISIS’s recent
advances, as well as by US, Russian, and other foreign
violent interventions, have displaced the discussion of
African refugees. On the scale of deserving immigrants,
Syrians appear to trump Africans, even though many of the
latter are coming from areas similarly affected by conflict
and economic precarity. This hierarchy of deservingness
reflects arrangements of race that are interpenetrated by
US and European political-economic interests.
Within these political and media engagements with a
fear of difference, there is a wealth of suspicion of deceit.
To use Lynn Stephen’s (forthcoming) term, refugees and
migrants are marked as “pre-emptive suspects,” always
already untrustworthy. For instance, a spokesman from
the German Ministry of the Interior stated that “practically
a third of asylum seekers coming to Europe have forged
Syrian passports and IDs to make naturalization easier”
(RT.com 2015). Comparative anthropological perspective
shows similar suspicions of displaced people in other
contexts. Roma across Europe, for example, have been
viewed as “bogus” refugees and faced accusations of posing
as other groups to gain legitimacy and receive resources
(Casta˜neda 2014; Kallius, Monterescu, and Rajaram 2016).
These characterizations echo media and political representations
of Latin American migrants in the United
States, often portraying them as “cheating the system”
(Chavez 2001; Holmes 2013; Quesada 2011; Stephen,
forthcoming).
Discourses of suspicion highlight the tensions, inconsistencies,
and ironies inherent in how these frames are
defined, categorized, and managed. Ethnographic linkages
between human experience and macro–political-economic
phenomena might turn these suspicions on their heads.
Anthropological research in other contexts has suggested
that many of the neoliberal economic and military policies
provoking displacement itself are suspect and deceptive,
while migrants and refugees are doing their best within
the social, economic, and political systems within which
they are positioned (Cartwright and Manderson 2011;
Casta˜neda 2014; Holmes 2013; Quesada 2011).
At the same time, “solidarity,” “responsibility,” and
“Willkommenskultur” (culture of welcome) are central
themes in the German response to the crisis, especially in
the German-language press. There has been no shortage
of cases of compassionate pragmatism, with newly formed
neighborhood organizations or existing groups shifting
their missions to provide support, regardless of official
government aid or recognition. This points to ongoing
struggles over representations of refugees and actions to
be taken; here, the delineations at work in the politics of
life are contested. Refugees have been cheered on as they
arrive at train stations in Germany after being rejected and
violently attacked in other countries, for example Hungary
(CNN.com, September 16, 2015). This warm welcome—
with bottles of water, fresh clothing, and chocolates for
the children—has been broadcast widely in the international
press (UK Guardian, July 16, 2015). Other state and
grassroots efforts have followed, with myriad volunteers
providing aid in various forms, including health care,
translation services, bureaucratic registration, and housing
(Bochow, forthcoming), and bars throwing “solidarity
parties” to raise funds for refugee services in the capital
and elsewhere (see Figure 3). The German constitution has
been translated into Arabic to “aid integration” (RT.com,
September 30, 2015), German newspapers have issued
special supplements in Arabic to welcome refugees to
the country (International Business Times, September 9,
2015), and small towns have put on welcome celebrations
(UK Mirror, September 1, 2015). News stories have shown
Syrians passing out roses to their German hosts as tokens
of appreciation (Huffpost Video, September 10, 2015).
Nonetheless, the moral economy of gratitude (Rivkin-Fish
2011) is complex and contradictory. For instance, some
volunteers in the central receiving area of Berlin explained
to a group including Holmes that the refugees arriving now
are not thankful enough and are too demanding compared
to those who arrived one year ago.
As in many other contexts, such forms of human
mobility are almost always understood as a “problem” that
needs to be solved. On the one hand, the subject positions
that are offered to displaced people in these narratives are
those of the deserving refugee and the undeserving immigrant,
both always being other, potentially threatening,
and suspicious. On the other hand, the subject position of
hero is open only to those positioned as European or North
American, primarily leaders in the state or civil society.
Interestingly, one aspect of the media coverage of the 2015
8
Representing the “European refugee crisis” American Ethnologist
Figure 3. Jacky Oh Weinhaus (right), a drag performer, deejays during a
solidarity party for refugees at SchwuZ, a gay bar in Berlin, August 2015.
(Seth Holmes)
crisis that differs from past media work on immigrants
and refugees is the focus on technology and business
entrepreneurs as the solution. For example, in August 2015,
with the support of venture capitalists, a company called
Startupboat brought together leaders from technology,
health care, and business intelligence in what they called
a “Startupboat Adventure” to address the problem of immigrants
on the Greek island of Samos. The solution they
developed and want to “roll out” and “scale up” is a website,
First-Contact.org, which provides information for refugees
to aid in their integration. Their efforts have been lauded
for helping to “solve” the problem (Forbes, September 9,
2015), while others have criticized such a technological
response through satire.7
This kind of techno-optimism
and technological solutionism (Morozov 2014) frames
entrepreneurs, business leaders, and corporations as the
heroes who arrive on the scene to solve the problem that
pre-existed them. This heroic subject position obscures
the imbrication of such powerful actors in international
capitalism in many of the political-economic asymmetries
that produce displacement in the first place.
Conclusion: Displacement, ethnography,
and engagement
Ethnography’s potential to link individual human experience
with macrolevel social, political, and economic
structures can challenge both abstract theoretical and
common media and political frameworks within which
refugees are understood (Harrell-Bond and Voutira 1992;
King and Wood 2001).
Much recent anthropological scholarship on refugees
has drawn on Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) conception of “bare
life.” For Agamben, the refugee is removed from the political
realm and exists in opposition to those persons within
“a particular mode of life” or “qualified life.” The refugee
is the figure within a regime simplified to biopolitics who
is deprived of social, political, and economic rights.8
But
as the comparative ethnographic work we have examined
clarifies, refugees are multiple and diverse, differentially
involved in making political and symbolic claims. Refugees,
then, are not simply “bare life” removed from the realm of
the political, but rather political actors whose subjectivities
are shaped by the uneven social and symbolic environments
in which they simultaneously are positioned and
position themselves (Williams 2014). They actively engage
in a politics of life (Fassin 2007). The responses to them
are similarly diverse and, at times, contradictory. Ongoing
ethnographic engagement with displaced persons and
their sites of reception confronts theory that works with
the abstracted figure of “the refugee” and instead suggests
that more responsible scholarly interventions can be made
through carefully contextualized work alongside and by the
diverse people who have been displaced.
As anthropologists with research, personal, and activist
experience in Europe, the United States, and Latin America,
we have attempted to draw attention to how the discursive
framings of this crisis reflect regimes of power as well
as fears and imaginations regarding the unknown future
of Europe. These frames often elide the responsibility of
structures, institutions, and individuals—many of which
are located in “receiving” areas such as the United States
and Europe—within unequal and violent political and
economic regimes. Meanwhile, these narratives reframe
responsibility and choice at the level of the individual, dichotomously
sorting deserving refugees from undeserving
migrants. To return to Foucault, we understand media and
political frames as demarcating “the population,” whose
life must be protected from the Other, who is portrayed
as a threat to be turned away. Alongside Gramsci, however,
we analyze these frames as neither all-powerful nor
unquestioned but rather resisted and contested in official
and grassroots discourse and practice, playing a role in the
shifting war of position over symbols and their meanings.
An ethnographic, comparative perspective encourages
us to question the discursive framing of such crises, from
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American Ethnologist Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016
how this metaphor can be mobilized to further repression
and exclusion (Kallius, Monterescu, and Rajaram 2016)
to how the crisis as experience can highlight political and
symbolic stakes with unknown futures. If displacement
operates on a continuum between “force” and “will,”
one role of ethnography is to probe this range in particular
social, historical, and cultural locations (Yarris and
Casta˜neda 2014). This linkage, then, reframes the question
of responsibility and leads us to confront in our work (and
beyond) the actors and systems responsible for inequality,
displacement, and suffering. For example, the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership, a proposed “free” trade
agreement between the United States and the Europe
Union being discussed among political and corporate
leaders at the time of this writing, promises to produce
further precarity for many.9
Proposals such as these, which
advance neoliberal, corporate power and decrease political,
social, and economic protections, must be challenged. The
prominent role of US political and business interests in displacing
precarious people through such trade agreements,
as well as through military involvement in the Syrian civil
war, suggest that the United States should engage more
responsibly in an ethic of hospitality. But as of the fall of
2015, it has taken in only 1,800 Syrian refugees (New York
Daily News, September 5, 2015).
These events, framed and experienced as crisis, bring
into relief the unknown future of Germany in relation to
displaced persons and ethnic and religious diversity itself.
This is underscored by contradictory announcements
from the Interior Ministry suggesting that Syrians would
enjoy only limited ”subsidiary protection” in Germany
and by the issuance of semi-denials of asylum status (UK
Guardian, November 6, 2015). The events discussed here
spotlight the relations between European countries and
their border-free agreements as well as relations between
the European Union and the neoliberal policies that create
and exacerbate inequality and displacement in the first
place. On another level, crises like this call for anthropologists
to take an open stance on the future, imaginatively
engaging social theory, ethnographic methods, and current
events to understand what is happening and to figure out
how to respond.
In this article, we have begun analyzing the war of
position in Germany in relation to the European refugee
crisis, with a special focus on deservingness, difference,
biopolitics, and their routinely fatal consequences. As
the structural and symbolic ground of the Middle East
and Europe shifts, it will be necessary to further analyze
discourse, its communicable cartographies, and resultant
political action. At the same time, we must question and
seek to disrupt dominant communicable models and
power hierarchies within our own work.
One example of the myriad potential responses of anthropologists
could be seen during the crisis in Berlin. Here,
a group of anthropology faculty and students are engaging
in an ongoing, open conversation with displaced Syrians
in a nearby refugee camp. Anthropologists and Syrian
refugees have begun ethnographic experiments of verbal
and musical dialogue, weekly socializing in a neighborhood
caf´e, dialogical courses in the department of anthropology
involving Syrian refugees and university students, activism
to push the university to admit Syrian refugees, and collaborative
writing and publishing to participate in the war of
position more actively together. In addition, many of the
faculty and students volunteer regularly in housing, health
care, registration, and other services for refugees. These
efforts have complemented other forms of horizontal political
solidarity that have emerged (Kallius, Monterescu, and
Rajaram 2016). In these ways, anthropologists are involved
as scholars, writers, speakers, listeners, friends, colleagues,
teachers, students, activists, translators, and volunteers.
An awareness of the political-economic and symbolic
contexts that produce the experiences of refugees and
migrants may offer alternative possibilities for meaning
making and, subsequently, for response. While this possibility
for engaging in social and political change through our
work may be minimal at times and fraught with possibilities
for misperception, self-interest, and symbolic violence
(Fassin 2015; Hankins 2015; Trouillot 2004), the theoretical
and ethnographic tools of anthropology allow us to critique
received understandings and engage in current events
(Hansen, Holmes, and Lindemann 2013a, 2013b; Kehr 2015;
Martin et al. 2013). Our analysis paves the way for research
that further explores and pushes against the line dividing
“the population” and the deserving on the one hand from,
on the other, the different and underserving in the current
crisis. Yet even if the demarcating line is successfully moved,
the social, political, and economic system will inevitably
allow some to die so that others may live. It is necessary,
then, for us as anthropologists to engage with displaced and
other structurally vulnerable people in critical, dialogical,
bold, reflexive, and humble solidarity in order to imagine
and work toward less violent futures for being alive.
Notes
Acknowledgments. We want to thank Niko Besnier, Pablo
Morales, Julie Neithercutt, and the American Ethnologist staff for
supporting anthropological engagement with current events. We
are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful
feedback. For constructive and critical feedback, we are grateful
to Fred Cooper, Andreas Eckert, Christopher Gerteis, Felicitas
Hentschke, J¨urgen Kocha, J¨urgen Schmidt, Thaddeus Sunseri,
and the IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History at
the Humboldt-Universit¨at zu Berlin, as well as Mustafa Abdalla,
Hansj¨org Dilger, Jieun Kim, Nasima Selim, and the Medical
Anthropology Group of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
of the Freie Universit¨at Berlin. For critical conversations
on transnational migration and anthropological engagement,
we are grateful to Philippe Bourgois, Charles Briggs, Jennifer
Burrell, Joseph Hankins, Laurie Hart, Chris Hoeckley, Cheri Larsen
10
Representing the “European refugee crisis” American Ethnologist
Hoeckley, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Lynn Stephen. We are
inspired by the ongoing theoretical, activist, and practical labor of
the Engaged Anthropology Network in Berlin working in dialogue
with refugees in the area. Any mistakes are our own.
1. Recognizing the importance of ethnographically tracing how
events are framed, encapsulated, and produced for the media, we
acknowledge that such “mediatization” (Briggs 2011) fieldwork is
beyond the scope of this paper.
2. On another level, our understanding of (b)ordering practices
is informed by our own experiences at the time of this writing, as
Casta˜neda is conducting fieldwork with Mexican migration agents
concerned with the movement of Central Americans—many of
whom have legitimate asylum claims—en route to the United
States, and Holmes is being deported from Germany due to technicalities
of the Schengen Area policies within the discretionary
power of immigration authorities.
3. See also Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa’s (2015) work on
how people use social media to contest dominant paradigms in
other contexts.
4. European Union External Action, “The EU’s Relations with
Syria,” http://eeas.europa.eu/syria/, accessed October 20, 2015.
5. Indeed, images of suffering, security, and difference proliferated
during the current crisis (e.g., David Maurice Smith/Oculi
and Bryan Schatz, “21 Photos That Capture the Heartbreak of
Europe’s Refugee Crisis,” Mother Jones, September 25, 2015,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/photoessayeuropean-refugee-crisis-serbia-hungary-syria,
accessed October
21, 2015). These images are part of the war of position.
6. In German-language media and popular representations,
distinct semantics are at play that, at times, differentiate deservingness.
For example, the official and most commonly used word
for refugee is “Fl¨uchtling,” which means “one who is fleeing,” with
a diminutive suffix often used in the names of plants or animals
but sometimes also for people, especially children. More recently,
some are using the construction “Gefl¨uchtete,” meaning “one who
has fled,” to emphasize the active, completed event of fleeing and
to avoid any subtle pejorative connotations of the diminutive suffix
(e.g., Gala 2015 and Stefanowitsch 2012).
7. See the Startupboat project at https://www.hawk-e.com, accessed
November 1, 2015. For an example of satire, see the Center
for Political Beauty’s website, http://www.politicalbeauty.com,
accessed November 10, 2015.
8. Nonetheless, as Agamben emphasizes, these forms of
exclusion are always also fundamentally inclusive.
9. For example, a UK trade minister recently acknowledged that
the government would consider dismantling and privatizing the
National Health Service, because the TTIP requires opening public
services to US companies (UK Independent, October 12, 2015).
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Seth M. Holmes
IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History
Humboldt-Universit¨at zu Berlin
Georgenstrasse 23
10117 Berlin
Germany
sethmholmes@berkeley.edu
Heide Casta˜neda
Department of Anthropology
University of South Florida
4202 East Fowler Avenue, SOC 107
Tampa, FL 33620-8100
hcastaneda@usf.edu
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