Performing Nostalgia: Migration Culture and Creativity in South Albania by Eckehard Pistrick (review)

256 policing migrants, intrepid journalists becoming illegal migrants). They also expose imperfections in this humanitarian border, inducing further fortification, and, thus, further illegality. I am often asked why Spain retains control over the troublesome, expensive enclaves. Many answers can be given, but Chapters 5 and 6 suggest that the industry has turned the enclaves into cages for those who think they finally reached Europe. Again, the business of detaining migrants develops around a range of interests, from NGOs (in need of funding), to the Spanish government (sees the migrant camps as proof of its generosity), to journalists and academics (the captive migrant is the perfect subject for research) to the Church (eager to purify its elite image through charity). The rules of detention also turn migrants into guests completely dependent on Spanish hospitality, creating resentment (guests, Pitt-Rivers teaches us, cannot claim belonging or make any demands) that often erupts into protest. This confirms them as ungrateful guests forcing the hands of their hosts, parasites who could/should be incarcerated or deported. The enclaves as geopolitical spaces and hospitality as discourse work in tandem to keep the migrant close, but forever at a distance! In Chapter 7 we go back to Senegal to follow a group of European activists protesting against the European border-regime. It should not surprise that, failing to locate a valid target, they turned the deportees they wished to defend into living banners for their cause. The book concludes by meditating on the notion of the absurd, while dreaming about the dismantlement of an industry that has squandered resources (in times of recession) to futilely stop people moving in an interconnected world. Tucked away in an appendix is a brilliant methodological essay discussing the problem of how anthropology can study our increasingly globalised field-sites. Taking issue with multi-sited research, he instead proposes the concept of an ‘extended field-site’, designed to examine a network of relations and flows (site) across multiple geographical settings (locale). It is easy to see why this book has won a number of awards. Andersson’s main point, that the ‘illegal migrant’ is produced through the convergence of a gamut of interested actors, refreshingly complicates our existing models that see ‘the State’ as the main ideological force (un)making the stranger. This allows a more sophisticated treatment of ‘racism’, which features not as a blatant hostile ideology, but as a series of subtle assumptions that slide into play to solve the industry’s contradictions (e.g. identifying illegal migrants before they become so). We are also afforded a more satisfying view of the border as a diffused regime, forcing us to ask whether we are seeing a new type of colonialism centred on humanitarian discourse. As Fassin has recently argued, anthropologists looking at humanitarianism have fallen in two camps: those seeking to expose new forms of suffering, and others concerned with how representations of suffering can mobilise political reaction. Andersson bridges this gap not through theory, but with good, thick ethnography. His versatile writing allows him to trace the workings of an economy dealing in the right to alleviate, inflict and represent suffering, without forgetting that this suffering is very real. This he does by capturing, say, the deadly rush of the border crossing, the maddening boredom of detention, or the paranoia that comes from being hunted across Africa. Andersson is reflexively aware that the Illegality Industry also takes its toll on those who profit from it: border guards desperately rescuing drowning travellers, NGOs struggling to control migrants’ frustrations, anthropologists drawing the suspicions of the authorities. This monograph shows what the craft of ethnography can do in the hands of a master. In conclusion, it must be said that this book’s strengths are also its weaknesses. Those expecting the lengthy theoretical expositions typical of postdevelopment texts will be disappointed: Andersson only briskly dialogues with other authors. In displacing ‘the State’, furthermore, the monograph ignores the ‘Nations’ they govern, which are proving decisive in shaping the ‘illegal migrant’. Dismantling the illegality industry, moreover, might be unrealistic given the manifold interests bound to it. Finally, while Andersson does not solve the problem of how to bound the ‘extended-research site’, his...