De-migrating our researches, is it necessary?

Abstract

Focusing on studies on international migrations, this article questions the practice of anthropology at ‘home’ and encounters with the Other. Are we, as anthropologists, controlling and supervising pre-marked groups, such as migrants and foreign-born people? Given the signi cant number of analyses that focus on the cultural difference between the immigrant and ‘we’, how do they apply the concept of culture, which is key in Anthropology? Instead of studying the othering processes affecting people born abroad, are we, with our ethnographic practice, establishing such processes and therefore contributing to making them invisible? This leads to the need to question the possibility or even the desirability of demigrantizing our studies (i.e. stop taking ‘the migrant’ as a social category without studying the processes of differentiation this group is already subjected to).