Article

Anthropological Theory
11(4) 375–395
If ethnography is more ! The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499611429904

observation, then ant.sagepub.com

relations are more than

connections: The case for
nonlocal ethnography in a
world of apparatuses
Gregory Feldman
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Abstract
Efforts to theorize globalization remain limited by an ethnographic data set obtained
primarily through direct sensory experience. This article argues that such empiricism
persists because the difference between connections and relations as methodological
constructs remains blurred. Their conflation precludes a fuller view of how apparatuses
organize global processes. Apparatuses decompose direct social connections and
replace them with shifting constellations of indirect social relations. Unlike connections,
relations are mediated by abstract third agents and have an arbitrary relationship in/to
space and time. This weakens participant-observation’s ability to capture an apparatus’s
operations. As a remedy, the article suggests ‘nonlocal’ ethnography, which examines
how disconnected actors utilize an apparatus’s mediating agents – e.g. statistical calcula-
tions, probabilities estimates, high-scale moral narratives, and interpretative paradigms –
to channel the global circulation of migrants. The argument for the apparatus’s theoretical
value and nonlocal ethnography’s methodological value is illustrated through an illegal
migration journey from Senegal to Italy.

Keywords
apparatus, globalization, mediation, migration, nonlocal ethnography

Corresponding author:
Gregory Feldman, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Email: gregfeldman7@gmail.com
376 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

It is clear that ever since Homo sapiens first appeared, there have been apparatuses;
but we could say that today there is not even a single instant in which the life of
individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus. (Giorgio
Agamben 2009: 15)

Unfortunately it is in the nature of academic quarrels that methodological problems

are likely to overshadow more fundamental issues. (Hannah Arendt 2006: 53)

The empiricist anxiety

Anthropologists have long agreed that doing ethnography is more than doing
participant-observation. We readily turn to archives, interviews, statistics, media
coverage, and a host of other sources of information when ‘being there’ is logisti-
cally challenged or as supplements to further elicit the proverbial native’s view-
point. Furthermore, contemporary ethnography does not simply transcend the
local, but rather it shows how place is composed of processes that link a multitude
of locales around the globe. This feat requires more than participant-observation.
Most tellingly, socio-cultural anthropologists universally describe themselves as
‘ethnographers’ not ‘participant-observers’.
However, if we take for granted that ethnography is more than participant-
observation, then why have we needed so many reminders over the decades?
Forty years ago, Laura Nader (1972: 306–7) argued against the grain that if we
are to address the most important contemporary problems, then we might have to
‘study up’ and ‘shuffle around the value placed on participant-observation that
leads us to forget that there are other methods more useful’. Wallman cautioned
in 1982 that the discipline should not be reduced to its principle field method (cited
in Amit 1999: 15). In the 1990s, Willis argued that anthropologists are plagued by
the problem of ‘empiricism’, or the belief that ‘reality is indeed simply written on its
surface’ and that ‘all you need to know to understand about the field is in some way
in the field’ (Willis 1997: 184 cited in Shore 2006: 43). Gusterson (1997: 115–16)
noted that participant-observation does not travel well up the social structure and
suggested ‘polymorphous engagement’ to deal with informants located in restricted
workspaces as nuclear weapons laboratories. This involves meeting them ‘across a
number of dispersed sites, not just in local communities, and sometimes in virtual
form; and it means collecting data eclectically from a disparate array of sources in
many different ways’. Drawing on Stocking, Kuklick, and Vincent, Gupta and
Ferguson (1997: 7) remind us that the dominance of localized participant-observa-
tion owes more to Malinowski’s skills in institutionalizing an academic discipline
than to the merits inherent to this method itself.
The turn of the century did not dispel the anxiety but only drew more heavy-
weights into the ring. For example, Gavin Smith (2006: 621) argues that anthro-
pologists must develop methods that will expose the material conditions of
capitalist reproduction, which are not immediately available to personal,
Feldman 377

subjective experience. Given the state’s lack of geographic and institutional fixity,
Trouillot (2001: 135) cautions that ethnographies of the state must not reduce ‘the
object of study to the object of observation . . . [lest it reduce] matters of method-
ology to matters of research techniques and mistakenly assumes all empirical stud-
ies to be necessarily empiricist in one form or another’. Jean and John Comaroff
assert that ‘any knowledge derived at first-hand by proximity to natives has an a
priori privilege’ and continues to shape anthropology’s analytical vision (2003:
153). As such, anthropology’s response to globalization and its constituent
power regimes ‘has been conservative’ and dogged by a ‘hidebound empiricism’
(pp. 154, 155). They add that ‘anthropology has, for the most part, remained
unrelentingly positivist in spirit’ (p. 153). Most recently, much of the engaging
conversations between Rabinow, Marcus, Faubion, and Rees in Designs for an
Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008) contemplate where, with whom to, and
how to interact with informants in ethnographic research.
Others remain less bothered by the empiricist character of ethnography in a
global world, and seek a stronger corollary to earlier forms of ethnographic
fieldwork. Ortner (2010) sees field research in Hollywood as a matter of getting
inside executive locations, and then accepts ‘interface ethnography’ as the next
best solution when access is denied. Reminding us that anthropology is not
ethnography, Ingold (2008: 69) nevertheless asserts that ‘The objective of eth-
nography is to describe the lives of people other than ourselves, with an
accuracy and sensitivity honed by detailed observation and prolonged first-
hand experience.’ Borneman and Hammoudi (2009: 16; see also Falzon 2009:
1) contend that philosophy holds greater influence than ethnography on
anthropology in their assessment of fieldwork and representation ever since
the 1986 publications of Writing Culture and Anthropology as Cultural
Critique. They reaffirm the in situ character of localized ethnographic field-
work, describing it as ‘the registering of sensory impressions in a (temporal)
process of mutual subject-discovery and critique, an engagement with persons,
groups, and scenes that takes into account the dynamics of our interactions as
well as the differences between our location and those of our interlocutors’
(Borneman and Hammoudi 2009: 19).
An escape route between the rock of globalization and hard place of empiricism
begins with Forsey’s (2010) astute point that, contrary to what anthropologists say
about their fieldwork, they do more ‘participant-listening’ than ‘participant-
observing’. The point extends beyond a preference for a particular sensory mode
of reception. It spotlights the limited opportunities for immersing oneself first-hand
in a social situation and appreciates the more frequent practice of hearing about it
second-hand. Participant-listening responds not only to the problem of ethno-
graphic access but also to the decomposition of ethnographic location. While
this latter problem has been well identified, the persistent empiricist anxiety sig-
nifies that we still lack a clear, satisfying methodological formulation of how we
should adapt to it. Therefore, the task, as Rabinow (Rabinow and Marcus 2008:
53) puts it, is to ‘detect the implicit and under-recognized changes in the
378 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

organization of fieldwork and method and make these changes explicit. That would
be one quite big step toward changing the norms and forms [of anthropology].’
Why the perennial anxiety about empiricism? This article argues that anthro-
pology has not made a decisive epistemological distinction between ethnography
and participant-observation because it has not clearly distinguished between ‘con-
nections’ and ‘relations’ as methodological constructs. It then pursues a two-fold
argument: (1) that an effective prism through which to comprehend global pro-
cesses is the ‘apparatus’ and (2) that ‘nonlocal’ ethnography is an effective meth-
odology to examine it empirically. The apparatus organizes social relations
between disconnected actors through abstract, mediating agents that replace
direct social connections. Nonlocal ethnography reveals the apparatus’s specificity,
contingent possibilities, and counter-intuitive logics, thus delivering the virtues of
participant-observation without the limits of empiricism. I demonstrate these
points by showing how specific actors channel an illegal migration journey from
Africa to European Union (EU). The article then describes some key modes
through which the migration apparatus activates and proliferates without central
coordination, without tight networks among its technicians, and without a detailed
master plan, all of which render it an evasive object of empiricist field research. It
concludes by arguing that the ethnographer’s displacement and an eye for histor-
ical contingency remain the central goals of ethnographic research, but these do not
necessarily require the supremacy of localized participant-observation.

The conflation of relations and connections

The empiricist anxiety expresses the contradiction between the ethnographic imper-
ative of ‘being there’ and the obliteration of a place as a bounded methodological
construct (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 4). The ready response to it has been the
mapping of connections between geographically separated people, usually through
various forms of Marcus’s (1995) multi-sited ethnography. As it is usually oper-
ationalized, the approach is simple enough: if we once traced circulations in local
villages, or even around a local archipelago as with the Kula ring, we now follow
the object, the story, the person, etc., through a string of sequential connections
around the globe. Like participant-observation, multi-sited ethnography ‘is
designed around the chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtaposition of loca-
tions in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal presence’ (Marcus
1995: 105, emphasis added). Invaluable in illuminating social connections not con-
fined to singular places, multi-sited ethnography remains committed to the empir-
icist conviction that knowledge obtained from direct sensory experience premises
the most insightful conclusions. To be sure, Marcus (Rabinow and Marcus 2008:
70) notes that his now commonplace multi-sited ethnography should do more than
connect dots across disparate locations when he asks: ‘[If] multi-sitedness desig-
nates a kind of path of movement in fieldwork, [then] where does the path come
from?’ I argue that the path emerges through a subject’s interaction with an
Feldman 379

apparatus, but the latter’s lack of geographic fixity makes it an evasive object of
study through participant-observation alone.
Much important ethnographic work on globalization focuses on connections
that can be traced through multi-sited ethnography. Just a cursory glance at the
anthropological literature on transnationalism shows, for example, the capacity of
global networks to project neoconservative agendas (Glick Schiller 2005) or to
squander billions of dollars resulting in the disenfranchisement of millions of
people (Wedel 1998). However, the production of vast, global inequality takes
more than particular social networks. Handfuls of individuals are not easily capa-
ble of orchestrating large-scale social exclusion on an ongoing basis. Such exclusion
demands the ubiquity and banality of certain discourses of social order that legit-
imize the work of particular networks (cf. Chalfin 2010; Feldman 2011a: 12–13;
Ferguson 1994; Goldman 2005). Ongoing structural marginalization requires
specific configurations of social relations that one cannot identify by merely point-
ing to them.
Why the preference for connections over relations and what are its consequences?
The question is best answered by reminding ourselves of the difference between
them even if they are often mixed together. The difference is primarily that con-
nections involve direct, immediate contact between people while relations involve
indirect, mediated contact. People historically have been linked through direct
social connections, characterized by their tangibility, corporeality, and locality:
the exchange of tangible goods; rituals and rites of passage involving social and
bodily contact; visible acts of obeisance to elders; and public torture as a specta-
cular display of ancient, sovereign power. Participant-observation is well suited to
examining connections, because these occur in discernible moments in space-time.
It is logical, then, that multi-sited ethnography has been so well received. It empha-
sizes the experience of local immersion while acknowledging the local’s disaggre-
gation into the global.
However, the global is not just local writ large. It is more than a web of direct
connections multiplied for the world stage. Instead, globalization involves qualita-
tively different forms of organizing society that likewise require different method-
ologies to apprehend it. As Marx explained long ago, relations refer to a larger
social constellation in which people are both linked through abstract, mediating
agents and alienated from each other (i.e. disconnected) through their objectifica-
tion. These agents may be money signifying exchange value, but they can also be
things like policy representations of the public; abstract social norms against which
we measure ourselves and our relevance to others; or mathematical formulas that
objectify populations in the course of public administration. Relations are neither
fixed in space nor necessarily continuous in time, but rather artificially and
abstractly mediated across space and through time. The mediating agent does
not simply attenuate or stagger the relationship between actors/objects in space-
time but rather creates an arbitrary relationship between them, thus breaking the
link between space-time. If mediating agents relate two elements or people on one
occasion, then this fact sets no precedent for such a pairing again. Social relations,
380 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

as the scaffolding of global mass society, are thus not easily discernible in space-
time and therefore less conducive to participant-observation than connections.1
Following this line, I suggest that the concept of the apparatus offers analytical
purchase in grasping how unconnected actors are nevertheless related in social
constellations. Rabinow (2003: 50–51, 54) describes the apparatus as a device of
population control and economic management composed of otherwise disparate
elements. These elements coalesce in particular historical conjunctures usually iden-
tified as ‘crises’. Foucault explains that its elements are ‘resolutely heterogeneous’
incorporating ‘discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, policy deci-
sions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, moral and philosophic
propositions’ (Foucault cited in Rabinow 2003: 51; see also Collier et al. 2004). The
apparatus is essentially the network that holds these elements together (cited in
Rabinow 2003: 52). Crisis galvanizes the apparatus as technicians respond to events
that deviate from normative expectations outlined in policy mandates. The identi-
fication of ‘crisis’ is therefore the condition of possibility for an apparatus
(DeGenova and Peutz 2010; Feldman 2005; Inda 2006, Mancina 2011). The appa-
ratus mediates relations between disconnected actors, ranging from technicians, to
policy officials, to scientific authorities, and, in this case, migrants trying to enter
the European Union. The apparatus does not work through top-down rule but
rather through abstract logics, mathematical reasoning, and vague policy prescrip-
tions from which these individuals draw their authority to respond to particular
crises.
What methodological approach can help illuminate an apparatus? I suggest
‘nonlocal ethnography’, which addresses how people are specifically related when
they are not connected in a global configuration of power. (Feldman 2011a: xi–xii).
It responds to two contemporary modes of organizing global processes. First, it
addresses a global, neoliberal capitalism that Foucault (2008: 301–2) describes as
‘the spontaneous synthesis of egoisms over the whole surface of the globe’. He
describes the situation as ‘nonlocal’ since ‘There is no localization, no territoriality,
no particular grouping in the total space of the market.’ With the phrase ‘sponta-
neous synthesis of egoisms’, Foucault describes the power of convergence among a
multitude of actors who are separated in space-time and share no particular, local
traditions to inform their future interaction. Instead, the synthesis transpires
through ubiquitous and generic policy standards, norms, logics, and moral narra-
tives that disparate actors can activate as the policy object enters their respective
policy domains. Through such abstract idioms of understanding, disconnected tech-
nicians jointly regulate the object’s movement across space (be it a migrant, a capital
investment, a commodity, etc.). Since this synthesis does not require tight, mappable,
elite networks, it creates an ever-shifting constellation of relations between discon-
nected actors that is not easily approached as a localized phenomenon.
Second, it clarifies how certain actors manage, channel, and regulate global
circulations of people and objects. While anthropology has made prolific use of
Foucault’s ideas on discipline, his thinking on security, and its associated concept
of the apparatus, remains under-utilized. Disciplinary power, for Foucault (2007),
Feldman 381

works through a negative feedback mechanism that creates homeostasis in a closed

territory. The deviant is detained, quarantined, or restricted and the requisite spa-
tial control allows for medicalized, moralized, or legalized social technologies to
induce the individual to internalize passive and productive norms. In contrast,
security confronts the unpredicted arrival of foreign objects onto sovereign terri-
tory and so the spatial dimension of security is open-ended (2007: 20). Security
amounts to the management of indefinite series of mobile elements: carts, travelers,
thieves, disease, tourists, migrants, criminals, terrorists, etc. If statistics is the sci-
ence used to regulate the state’s internal elements, then probabilities is the science
with which the state tries to manage that which originates from outside its field of
surveillance. Security is not a negative project of restriction, per se, but rather a
selective project of appropriating pre-existing global circulations. A security appa-
ratus is thus not antithetical to globalization, but rather it channels, structures, and
rationalizes global processes according to the state’s ever-shifting needs, norms,
and values. These efforts of appropriation operate through situated practices, but
these are highly decentralized and disaggregated in space-time. Logically, the
state’s disciplinary practices are far more amenable to participant-observation
than security practices, which may explain anthropology’s reluctance to grapple
with it.
The following illustration of a particular migration journey and many situated
efforts to regulate it is a composite story drawn from multiple research methods.
Central among them is participant-observation with a wide range of migration
policymakers, security officials, technical experts, and others working in migra-
tion-related international organizations. I draw equally on participant-listening,
interviews, media reports, video analysis, and documentary sources. I derive the
baseline of the migrant Billy’s journey from the story he himself tells to the BBC
(2004a, 2004b). Some aspects of my illustration are fictionalized though remain
true to form. All events factually occurred though not necessarily in the exact
narrative presented below. I justify this mode of presentation with Geertz’s
(1973: 15) point that fiction is inherent in anthropological writing when understood
from its original Latin term fictio,  which means ‘to fashion’ or ‘to make’, not to tell
falsehoods. He points out that ‘anthropological writings are themselves interpre-
tations and second and third order ones to boot’ (p. 15). Geertz, of course, did not
grant the anthropologist license to invent ethnographic accounts. Instead, he urges
that a compelling one ‘does not rest on its author’s ability to capture primitive facts
in faraway places . . . but . . . to clarify what goes on in such places’ (1973: 16).
Drawing on Ricoeur, he thus distinguishes the ‘saying’ from the ‘said’, which is
to distinguish a literal representation of an event or speech act from its more lasting
social significance implicit in the fleeting moment of its occurrence. Geertz (1973:
19–20) explains that the ethnographer should not copy raw social discourse, to
which the s/he has marginal access at best, but rather ‘only that small part of it
which our informants can lead us into understanding’. It is reasonable and
re-invigorating to conclude that Geertz, who gave us ‘thick description’, well
knew the limits that empiricism imposes on ethnography.
382 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

We must reconcile these methodological issues to ethnographically approach an

apparatus, which is both an ephemeral and imminent part of the world. It does not
function on the basis of a stable link between time and space and so a sufficiently
comprehensive picture of it requires this alternative mode of investigation and
representation. Many aspects of the journey remain in the background such as
the sophisticated smuggling networks, the collusions between governments and
businesses with interests in Senegal and Europe, and the neo-nationalist impact
on European migration policy. Nevertheless, the following illustration demon-
strates, if only partially, the modes through which illegal migrants are produced
and channelled in a specific, though global, field of human relations.

Billy’s odyssey
The fishing industry in Senegal suffered a devastating blow after its government
signed a series of 17 agreements with the EU. These agreements allowed EU
trawlers to fish in Senegalese waters while setting tight quotas on Senegalese
fish exports back to EU markets. The 2002–2006 agreement guaranteed Senegal
$15 million in annual compensation for the loss market share, but the denuncia-
tions from Senegalese fishing associations, local environmental organizations, and
the Senegalese government suggested that this figure was too little too late. The new
economic difficulties led to increased unemployment and increased attempts at
illegal entries into the EU (Ndiaye 2007: 9). One of those taking the chance was
45-year-old nurse Mamadou Saliou Diallo from the Senegalese capital, Dakar. He
lost much of his clientele and so his income. ‘Billy’, as he goes by, calculated that
his monthly salary of $130 could not support his wife, Idiatou, and their children.
Like any parent, all he wanted was to give his children a better start in life than he
had. He decided that working in Europe was the best way to achieve that goal.
Making the journey overland was both cheaper than flying and, according to
rumor, required no visa. He thought that he would reach Spain in a week.
Billy later reflected, ‘Little did I know how wrong that was’ (BBC 2004a).
Billy left Dakar after paying a man $1300 to deliver him to Europe. With $90 in
his pocket, he first traveled by train 650 miles east to Bamako, the capital of Mali.
His contact there was never found. Billy met other migrants in Bamako who told
stories of Algerian police shooting travelers on sight for fear of Islamic radicals and
tales of armed robbers taking everything in a migrant’s possession and leaving
them for dead in the desert. Terrified and a stranger in Mali, Billy phoned home
for reassurance. His mother begged him to come back, but his father had a dream
that all would end well. Billy then flew 500 miles northeast to Timbuktu with eight
others, where they joined seven more migrants from West Africa. The 15 of them
traveled by night in a lorry 200 miles east to Gao, which was the last staging point
before the journey northward across the Sahara. Thousands of migrants had con-
gregated to there make the necessary arrangements.
Billy first appeared on the EU’s radar screen in Gao. More specifically, he
appeared as a statistical estimate of West Africans entering Mali on the I-MAP,
Feldman 383

or web-based interactive Migration Map. The I-MAP is an online clearinghouse of

migration policy information from countries in Europe, the Middle East, and
North Africa. Many well known international organizations use it too. The
I-MAP is the joint creation of Europol, Frontex, and European Migration
Policy Organization. The Odysseus Academic Network verifies the uploaded infor-
mation (an EU funded academic consortium focusing on policy-relevant current
events). Its Programme Manager explained that the I-MAP ‘can provide briefing
notes. If countries use the I-MAP for policy positions, then this helps in creating
agreements between countries. It will probably bring the positions of the countries
much closer. . . . It’s a tool at the service of states. We are here to sell the service.’
The restricted version of the I-MAP features a wide range of information including
migration statistics for participating member states, detention policies, migration-
related laws, migration-related development programs, border security policies,
airport information, as well as information about where migrants are going, how
far they travel, the methods they use to get there, etc. The publicly accessible
version identifies clandestine routes into such groups as the Central
Mediterranean Route, West African Route, East Mediterranean Route, etc.
These are color-coded to distinguish major and minor land and sea routes.
One border official’s joke seemed apposite when he referred to the I-MAP as the
‘crystal ball’.
A few days after Billy entered Mali, a bureaucrat working in ‘CIGEM’, an
EU-funded migration information centre in Bamako, uploaded information
about an influx of West Africans. Their arrival into a land-locked country
most likely reflects Frontex’s success of Operation Hera. Hera was a joint sea
patrol that pushed migrants back to the West African coast as they sailed toward
Spain’s Canary Islands. This emigration was publicly labeled as a security and a
humanitarian crisis. One Frontex official offered me a humanitarian justification
for the operation: ‘some people are thrown overboard because others think they
are witches and do voodoo. The more we can get people back to shore, the more
lives we save, the better . . . The smugglers can be murderers.’ As a result, more
migrants began trying their luck with the overland route through the Sahara
Desert. An analyst based in Frontex headquarters in Warsaw reported to his
senior officials what the crystal ball now told him about Mali. They, in turn,
requested that the European Space Agency refocus their satellites over northwest
Africa. This task is easily handled as the Cold War infrastructure so valuable in
tracking Soviet armament has been repurposed for border control. The 2010 EU
budget alone allocated E50 million to readapt military surveillance capacity to
routine border patrol (Hayes 2010). Arguably nothing changed from the opera-
tor’s standpoint. One former US defense official now an industry consultant
explained: ‘If you look at it from the system perspective it is the same thing.
The tracking doesn’t matter if it is a migrant, a MiG [i.e. Soviet fighter jet],
or a terrorist.’ As such, Frontex would be prepared to track Billy through-
out his journey and rapidly respond once he launched himself into the
Mediterranean Sea.
384 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

Billy and his fellow travelers bought bread and tinned sardines for the desert
journey and carried water in the inner tubes of car tires. During the first afternoon,
their driver showed them the graves of seven people who died of thirst after their
lorry broke down. Billy developed diarrhea, probably from his own water supply,
but he kept drinking it for fear of suffering the same fate. They traveled in the back
of the lorry during the windy, cold nights and rested underneath it for shade during
the hot days. They could hardly sleep, however, as sand blew into their eyes, ears,
and throats. Seven days after they left Gao, the group had moved 900 miles north-
west to Tindouf, Algeria. Police spotted them crossing the border in the dead of
night. Their group would have normally evaded detection, but the police recently
received a Frontex shipment of night vision goggles, heat sensors, and infra-red
cameras. Frontex agreed to provide this equipment to the Algerian Interior
Ministry in exchange for greater cooperation in accepting their citizens detained
as illegal migrants in the EU for return. Explained a senior Frontex official to me,
‘Yes, not every country in the EU neighborhood has acceptable human rights
records, but with these agreements we can begin to bring them into the fold. We
don’t want to marginalize them as that will guarantee human rights violations.’
Leaving aside his debatable point, this situation further complicated Billy’s life.
The police beat Billy and his colleagues and arrested their driver, who held their
papers and money. Luckily, a fellow Nigerian traveler gave five dollars each to his
colleagues that he hid in his shoe. They then bought trinkets to resell so that they
could earn enough money to continue their journey, though four of them gave up
in Tindouf. The remaining 11 traveled with a smuggler over Morocco’s Atlas
mountains, reaching a village two days later. From there, they took a bus to
Casablanca some 500 miles north. Billy had not washed since he had left
Bamako one month earlier. His body was covered in fleas. ‘It was terrible’, Billy
recalled, ‘we looked like mad men.’ In Casablanca, he and some of the others
worked at building sites to earn money but could only afford one meal of rice
and fish per day. He called home to have Idiatou sell the family television set and to
borrow money from friends and relatives. She wired $700 to him from Dakar. For
$600 a Moroccan guide agreed to take him to Europe, first traveling northeast
along the Atlantic coast 200 miles to Tangier where he first saw ‘the lights of the
Spanish mainland twinkling on the other side’ (BBC 2004a). Though they hadn’t
reached Europe yet, the smuggler left to meet the next group of migrants whose
location he just learned via a coded text message on his cell phone. He recently
switched his professional niche from smuggling drugs to migrants as the latter now
earns him more money thanks to greater restrictions on legal immigration
to Europe.
From Tangier, Billy and his fellow travelers made two clandestine attempts to
enter Ceuta, the Spanish exclave in Morocco (BBC 2004b). They first dressed in
black and tried to enter through a tunnel. However, the police spotted them and
beat them with their rifle butts. Billy lost a front tooth. A week later, they headed to
the coast and boarded three small, motorized boats. They lay down on the floors
to avoid the searchlights except for the fairest skinned among them. They needed to
Feldman 385

steer the boats. Billy and his colleagues entered what might be called an aquatic
‘limes’. This term derives from the ancient Roman concept of a border zone loosely
identified by amorphous natural features like a marsh, bog, or forest, and then
strictly demarcated by rock fortifications. The Roman Empire used these fortifica-
tions to repel invading Germanic barbarians from the North and hostile tribes
from the East. In the modern EU, LIMES is an acronym standing for ‘Land
and Sea Integrated Monitoring for European Security’, a program designed to
tighten the amorphous border of the Mediterranean Sea. It uses advanced satellite
surveillance provided by the European Maritime Security Services (MARISS),
which is a division of the European Space Agency. MARISS boasts that it can
spot ‘infrastructure and changes related to illegal trafficking such as boat building
facilities, new mustering and embarkation facilities, storage facilities or the buildup
of people in sensitive areas close to the coast or to national borders’ (MARISS
2007: 3).
Of the three boats, the first drifted out of sight never to be heard from again. The
remaining two kept due course for Ceuta. While MARISS operators found their
direction suspicious, their movements resembled those of local fishing boats. As
such, they opted not to call in the Spanish patrol boats as the uncertainty could not
justify the cost of the patrol’s deployment. An hour later, however, one of the boats
lost motor power, causing it to sputter in a zigzag pattern, a clear deviation from
normal boating patterns as confirmed by data from the Spanish Fisheries Service.
As the patrol boats moved toward the deviant vessel, Billy’s boat continued to
Ceuta. While the patrol was occupied with the other boat, Billy’s group, unbe-
knownst to them, had entered Spanish national water. When the patrol finally
honed in on them they decided to jump into the sea. This move obliges the
patrol to rescue them as a humanitarian measure under international law. Since
the rescue occurred in national waters, Billy and his colleagues had the right to
claim asylum in that country. Billy argued that he was a refugee from Rwanda,
knowing that he would be denied if he admitted that he was Senegalese. The
adjudicator who interviewed Billy used the ‘circle strategy’: first ask easy questions
to outline the claimant’s life back home; then ask follow up questions to see if the
claimant really could have been subject to political persecution as defined under the
Geneva Convention. The adjudicator had doubts as a suspiciously high number of
claimants say they are Rwandan, particularly Tutsi or moderate Hutu. Billy got
lucky when the adjudicator asked him the names of towns in northern Rwanda to
determine if he knew the local geography. He rattled off village names that he
learned from a fellow journeyman lost on the first boat. Billy somehow won a
favorable ruling. A Belgian adjudicator once explained to me that ‘Sometimes
people really make a specific impression on you. Sometimes the stories really get
personal. It makes you wonder.’
Three weeks later he was given a residency permit and put on a boat for the
Spanish mainland. In the process of succeeding in his immediate goal – simply
getting to the European Union – Billy gave fodder to the argument now made by
many European migration officials, particularly those working in the front lines of
386 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

border control: that the Geneva Convention’s protocol on refugees no longer

works. They contend that rather than protect genuine victims of political persecu-
tion, it now protects ‘economic migrants in disguise who abuse the generosity of the
refugee system’. In Spain, Billy worked in the fields for a month to earn enough
money to travel to Brescia, Italy. He became ‘illegal’ once he exited Spain. When he
finally arrived in this northern Italian town, he could not locate the cousin he was
supposed to meet there. He ended up living for a year with 15 other migrants in the
filthy crawl space of a single room flat. Billy sold African trinkets and jewelry to
make a living. Eventually a friend gave him his biometric residence documents as
they looked similar and Billy got a factory job making agricultural tools. He began
sending remittances back home, perhaps through Western Union for a
commission.
Four years later, Italian police inspected this company’s premises on suspicion
that they had been employing illegal migrants. Billy’s work permit was run through
the Visa Information System. Police officers, border guards, immigration officials,
intelligence officials, security officials, vehicle registration authorities, judicial
authorities, and customs officials have an astonishing 125,000 access points to
the system, a figure that only includes the 15 pre-2004 EU member states
(Council of the European Union 2003: 11). While his face superficially resembles
his friend’s, the match was not close enough to defeat the algorithm. A mathemat-
ical formula determined that the measurement between the tip of Billy’s nose and
the center of his chin deviated with statistical significance from the same measure-
ment stored in the document’s RFID chip. This deviation suggested to the police
that the work permit did not belong to Billy. While his body did actual work for the
Italian economy, the virtual information about his body was deemed sufficiently
abnormal to locate him outside the border of legality. One consultant succinctly
explained the irony to me by noting that biometrics has ‘shifted the emphasis from
habeas corpus to ‘‘habeas cognos’’. Your existence used to be proved because you
had a body. But today you only exist if you have information [about your body].’
Billy was transferred to a detention centre to await return to Senegal. After 45 days
in detention, where he was allowed two hours a day to walk outside in an interior
courtyard, Billy was flown back to Senegal on chartered jet along other Senegalese
who were detained in Italy, France, and Germany.
The sadness of Billy’s situation is not lost on European Commission officials.
These individuals are not racists, xenophobes, or neo-nationalists. Instead, they are
liberals endorsing such familiar values as freedom, dignity, happiness, and oppor-
tunity for all. Yet, it can be difficult to force these abstract values in line with the
immediate needs of people in Billy’s situation. And, rather awkward to hear EC
officials try to do so. In 2008 Dr Frank Paul, who heads the EC’s work on Large-
scale IT systems and biometrics, exemplified the agonistic reasoning necessary to
square this proverbial circle:

You have all seen those terrible pictures of people drowning in the Mediterranean
trying to reach . . . Lampedusa and then in the Atlantic as well to the Canary
Feldman 387

Islands, etc. These are absolute tragedies. We have to do everything to stop it. And
one of the ideas is the need to develop a very sophisticated maritime surveillance
system that will allow us not only to detect those movements as early as possible
but also before actually people really . . . um . . . get to the Mediterranean, have more
intelligence on their whereabouts. Today as we speak there are an estimated 250,000
people . . . 250,000 . . . who are hanging out in Libya basically just waiting for passage
to Europe. And we know more or less about their whereabouts but we would like to
have more information, more intelligence about what exactly they’re planning, when
they’re planning to go to Europe, how do they do this, when do they
embark . . . uh . . . and . . . uh . . . by doing that and having that information we would
be able to intervene much earlier and then not only with idea of building . . . ah . . . an
absolute fortress around Europe because this is not our intention, but it is simply to
save lives and make sure that these people don’t drown and direct them to legal ways
of emigrating.

Paul is trying to morally justify the traumatic effects of Europe’s narrowly

defined legal migration channels. The state – in the form of cooperation among
EU member states – innocently strives to save lives of people who have made ‘bad
choices’, in a neoliberal register, or who are passive victims of invisible evil-doers
such as smugglers travelling incognito. As such, the invocation of the maritime
surveillance system is justified as a humanitarian measure to protect, rather patron-
izingly, individuals from themselves, invoking a neocolonial register. Paul, qua EC
official, must avoid two things: (1) portraying the migrant as an evil doer which
would invite pushback; and (2) acknowledging the structural inequalities at work,
because these could lead to a moral justification for illegal migration. Perhaps Paul
regrets this contradiction, but, willfully or not, glosses over it.
Many officials are noticeably dismayed by the legacies of colonialism, the labor
demands of capitalism, and the racism that lurks inside the concept of the nation
itself. One veteran EC official, an early pioneer in the EU’s efforts to harmonize
migration management, pointed out to me at a Metropolis Conference, an annual
international gathering of migration policy academics and officials:

In the long term, we may be desperate to get the people we need [even though] the
public doesn’t want Africans looking after their mothers. People want Christians,
Filipinos, Brazilians, etc. There will be global competition for these people. On the
other hand, we don’t want to be seen as exploiting the sending countries so we [need
to] get our development agenda working properly. We have to go back to a partner-
ship without it being a colonial practice.

With a wry, ironic smile, she turned to me and said: ‘We have a responsibility.
The key continent we need to work on is Africa. We contributed to the problems it
is facing. Africa has always been Europe’s problem.’
High-level European officials place much rhetorical hope in circular migration
programs. One such program negotiated between Spain and Morocco hires
388 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

Moroccans for six-month seasonal employment as a planter and harvester of fruit

and berries in Spain (Touahri 2007). The employee has the possibility to work
again next year if she returns home prior to the expiration of her visa. Only
women with families, preferably women from the countryside, are eligible to par-
ticipate because it is believed that they will return home to take care of their chil-
dren. The cost of policing visa-overstayers should not wipe out the savings from
rotating in cheap labor. The explicit goals of circular migration are to plug in labor
gaps resulting from the aging of the EU workforce, often called the ‘demographic
crisis,’ and to ‘cut off the root causes of migration’ by supporting ‘co-development’
in which circular migrants gain skills and capital to invest in the creation of small
businesses, agricultural enterprises, and civil society organizations back in their
home countries. Lower level officials remain skeptical. One project leader with a
Madrid-based international organization sighed, ‘To be honest . . . there are a
couple of terms in the migration world that I don’t understand: circular migration;
migration and development; global approach to migration.’ Nevertheless, circular
migration programs function as a compromise between the two main antagonists in
the EU migration policy debates. They satisfy neoliberals (representing the eco-
nomic right) because they attract labor at the lowest possible cost and they appease
neonationalists (representing the nationalist right) because labor migrants do not
permanently settle (Feldman 2011a: 150).

The mediating and proliferating apparatus

Saskia Sassen (2008) well summarizes the structural situation in which Billy’s odys-
sey transpired. Northern restructuring programs, channeled through the World
Bank, IMF, and WTO, have devastated Southern households, governments, and
businesses causing greater immigration and dependence on remittances.
Simultaneously, population decline and liberal economic restructuring in the
Northern countries has created a demand for low wage jobs. Thus both the
number of Northern low-end impermanent jobs and of cash-deprived Southern
laborers to fill them has grown. This situation makes it ‘rather surprising to see
our powerful states reorient large parts of their state apparatus so as to control,
detect, stop, detain, and deport basically vulnerable and powerless migrants’
(2008). However, structures do not float in the air, but rather materialize through
the specific practices of disconnected actors like migrants, sea captains, satellite
operators, smugglers, crafty employers, etc. Billy’s journey transpired through an
‘apparatus’ composed of such assorted elements as satellite systems, detention cen-
ters, quantitative analyses, visual representations of political space, moral narra-
tives, etc. The question becomes how the apparatus establishes a network between
these elements and actors in a ‘spontaneous synthesis of egoisms.’ Three modes of
operation stand out, though there are several more.
First, rather than command or direct from above, an apparatus interacts with
people and integrates into their daily routines through easy to use templates. The
I-MAP provides a visual language to standardize a policy outlook and draw people
Feldman 389

into its constant improvement. This happens not through external imposition, but
rather sheer convenience: log on, click an icon, and down load the relevant infor-
mation. Technicians easily upload information; academics double check accuracy;
and web designers create a simplified cartoon-like visual interface. Geographically
disconnected officials easily relate to each other through a shared representation of
ongoing migration journeys, a representation that will proliferate as more people
log on. No need for physical proximity as IT systems spread the word with much
greater efficiency and distance. Another example is the EU’s Asylum and Migration
Glossary: A Tool for Better Comparability. This online glossary provides common
definitions of asylum and migration policy terms, which are then used, for example,
to formulate policy queries and policy research for EU member states (European
Migration Network 2010: 5). These tools do not solve your immediate policy prob-
lems – that is too top-down – but rather they standardize a perspective on problem
identification and policy conceptualization. These are tools to make tools.
Importantly, they convert otherwise passive technicians into active agents who
nevertheless employ the same policy outlook despite their lack of contact with
each other.
Second, there is the hyper-objectification of the migrant, which, beyond objec-
tification, is achieved virtually through reasoning conducted and communicated
through cyber-space. It is far easier to manage people as two-dimensional quanti-
tative objects rather than three-dimensional qualitative subjects. Recall that Billy
was apprehended in Italy through a simple algorithmic equation based on his facial
scan. No one made an empathetic, authentic, and personal decision about him.
Likewise, a deviant boating pattern led to his apprehension in the sea. Even his
refugee claim, an event that solicits personal stories, came down to an objective test
on the names of Rwandan towns matched against the objective criteria of the
Geneva Convention. This objective information circulates at hyper-speed across
the apparatus giving it a powerful effect of fusion. For example, the biometrics
involved were obtained in Africa, transmitted to Rome, stored in a database in
Strasbourg, backed up in Austria, and instantly downloaded in Brescia.
Third, these policy domains are pervaded by what Heyman (2000) calls
‘high-scale morality’, or sentiments and ideas applied to large numbers of peoples
dispersed in vast geographic space in order to establish moral coherence among
them. Examples include such phrases commonly heard in EU migration policy
circles as ‘a migration policy that works for everyone’, ‘humanitarian approaches
to border control’, and ‘enabling migrants to help themselves’. These phrases are
vacuous yet are applicable across policy domains because they are easy to use,
require no abstract thinking, and are sufficiently vague to fit any situations. The
effect, of course, is not to create a moral world, but to shut out alternative moral
positions. When EU officials proclaim that circular migration and co-development
‘empower local migrants’, migrants from Mali respond by saying that the
EU wants ‘migration a la carte’ (No-Racism 2008) and ‘Kleenex workers’
(Anrys 2008) whom they can dispose of after one use. However, these tropes
allow the speaker, usually a liberal from the global North, to do two important
390 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

things: (a) feel that s/he is doing the best thing for the migrant at a personal level;
and (b) ignore the structural circumstances that caused the person’s migration
journey from the start.
These features – templates, hyper-objectified subjectivities, and high-scale mor-
alisms – are all generic and abstract, which makes them easily applicable to differ-
ent situations and easily transferable across different migration policy domains.
Following Bowker and Star (1999: 13), they function as ‘boundary objects’, or
vaguely defined devices that organize and integrate otherwise unrelated contexts,
or policy domains in this case. This feature allows them to pull together the oth-
erwise disparate elements of an apparatus and facilitate its proliferation into new
policy domains. Unlike Orwell’s world of 1984, however, the apparatus is not
centralized, closed, or immutable. It dynamically responds to the creative choices
of migrants’ themselves. It did not control Billy in a totalitarian way, but rather it
interacted with him as he crossed various geographic boundaries and legal statuses.
He signaled his presence to it whenever he deviated from a norm. It then narrowed
down his choices for safe movement, forced him to climb further out on a limb, and
caught up with him in northern Italy. It edged him out of narrowly defined legal
spaces and into vast ill-defined geographic spaces. This mode of interaction sub-
stitutes for top-down control and makes the apparatus difficult to resist. Resistance
works best when there is a clear, centralized authority figure against whom to push
back. Instead, the apparatus is only managed by an open-ended set of discon-
nected, dispensable technicians.

Nonlocal ethnography and the virtues of

participant-observation
The point in scoping out an apparatus is not to generate a complex exegesis for its
own sake. Instead, it is to answer directly the question of how global processes are
organized. The apparatus does this work by mediating social relations indirectly
through a variety of abstract mechanisms that encourage order, docility, and pro-
ductivity. It breaks down direct social connections by reducing the ability of one
individual to make a personal decision about another; to fathom what others
experience; and to craft one’s own representation of others. As personal connec-
tions formed though particular, localized experiences are discouraged, so the par-
ticularities of place are diminished and along with them the methodological value
of empiricism as an approach to global processes. Differences between places start
to show family resemblances, which the apparatus can assimilate while it prolifer-
ates. The nonlocal character of the apparatus needs a nonlocal ethnographic meth-
odology, which, rather than abandon participant-observation, retains its virtues
without succumbing to its implicit empiricism. This move justifies a range of meth-
ods capable of delivering of two participant-observation’s particular epistemolog-
ical virtues: (1) displacing the ethnographer in order to break down pre-existing
biases for better reception of alternative ideas, values, practices, etc., and of (2)
Feldman 391

showing the importance of historical contingency in either reproducing or altering

the status quo (Feldman 2011a: 195-196; 2011b: 46).
First, following Clifford (1997: 218), ethnography is one manifestation of a long
tradition of Western travel practices that have been understood as ‘more or less
voluntary practices of leaving familiar ground in search of difference, wisdom,
power, adventure, an altered perspective’. On the one hand, his point reveals eth-
nography’s empiricist assumptions: learning through direct personal experience
and immersion in cultural difference. On the other, and this more broadly, it
shows the importance of developing critical perspectives on one’s social reality
through removal from it. He also argues that ‘travel needs to be rethought in
different traditions and historical predicaments’ (p. 218). We can therefore ask if
the necessary displacement be achieved solely through entry into an ostensibly alien
cultural setting. On the grounds that it does not, nonlocal ethnography uses dis-
placement to generate any research (or personal) practice that dislodges the
assumptions, discourses, and rationales that the researcher would otherwise take
for granted. Displacement – the removal from familiarity – is more than crossing
geographically demarcated cultural boundaries. It includes any experience in which
discourse – the taken for granted assumptions that establish norms and deviations –
is interrogated, problematized, or, in a word, ‘situated’. Ironically, to displace is to
situate.
Second, participant-observation foregrounds the importance of historical con-
tingency in human affairs, because ‘being there’ can show the ethnographer what is
actually happening in contested moments. It reveals that social relations appearing
in static form (e.g. the state) are only achieved through ongoing struggle, conflict,
and violence. This perspective renders ethnography a genealogical methodology in
the Nietzschean vein that sees history as the ‘story of petty malice, of violently
imposed interpretations, of vicious intentions, of high sounding stories masking the
lowest motives’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 108). It shows how moments of rup-
ture, conflict, and discord result in power inequalities concealed through different
political technologies. Such contingencies are inherent in the apparatus’s processes
of subjectification. Per Agamben (2009: 14), subjects (i.e. subject-positions) result
from the tension between living beings (qua substances) and apparatuses (qua
historically produced artifices externalized from their human manufacturers).2 A
dynamism composes it that cannot be learned from a blueprint or organizational
diagram. Many ethnographic methods can account for change through time at
local, national, or global contexts. In fact, deep immersion might obscure views
of other domains and modes in which conflict is performed, revealed, or concealed.
Given how frequently we now hear words like ‘security’, ‘threat’, or ‘crisis’, we
should take the concept of the apparatus quite seriously. Its analytical purchase
extends far beyond migration to include the management of anything that circu-
lates globally. However, getting at these matters ethnographically entails a more
sophisticated, and less empiricist, understanding of how people are related to each
other in an estranged world of systematic disconnection. This will widen and
deepen anthropological insights into globalization by showing the historically
392 Anthropological Theory 11(4)

contingent ways that elements scattered around the earth are pulled together to
give global processes their shape, direction, and character.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank a number of people for making the ethnographic research possible.
Most of them, however, must remain anonymous whether they appear in the article or not.
The work was supported by a Standard Research Grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council [grant file 410-2006-0109]. The final article benefited from
presentations at the Balsillie School for International Affairs (Wilfrid Laurier University),
the University of Western Ontario, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University.
Helpful feedback also came from Joe Heyman and Dan Hiebert’s graduate geography class
‘International Migration and Settlement’ at the University of British Columbia.

Notes
1. Eric Wolf uses the terms ‘relations’ and ‘connections’ to demonstrate a similar point. In
the introduction to Europe and the People without History he argues ‘that the world of
humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes’, which get
obscured when scholars rely on ontologies like the ‘nation’, ‘society’ and ‘culture’ (1982:
3). His remedy is to understand these names as ‘bundles of relationships’, which in his
study of the colonial origins of global capitalism, necessarily rely on such agents as
commodity value to indirectly mediate relations between capitalist and laborer. It is
worth noting that Marxist anthropologists have been less troubled with empiricism
given their emphasis on relationality.
2. However, Agamben’s deeper point on this matter deserves mention. Apparatuses are
inherent to human social (re)production, as opposed to animal, and so are not unique to
modernity per se. Rather, they have long conditioned the struggle between the individ-
ual qua substance and the surrounding historical artifice. The difference, according to
Agamben (2009: 20–21), is that prior to modernity this struggle resulted in a new sub-
jectivity with a positive social status while in the current phase of capitalism it results in
the individual’s constant desubjectification by which he means depoliticization. Hence,
he can also argue that ‘The Right and Left, which today alternate in the management of
power, have for this reason very little to do with the political sphere in which they
originated. They are simply the names of two poles . . . of the same governmental
machine’ (2009: 22).

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Gregory Feldman is the author of The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and
Policymaking in the European Union (2011, Stanford University Press). He has also
published extensively on the role of European Union officials in Estonia’s policy to
integrate Soviet-era Russian-speakers. He cofounded the Interest Group for the
Anthropology of Public Policy and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.
He has taught geography, anthropology, and international studies at the University
of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He is also Associate Editor for
Wiley-Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.