La mémoire des objets, la force des « choses reliques » : savoirs locaux et symptômes dans un contexte migratoire

The care migrants take in keeping certain objects to protect themselves against the dangers of travel or the risk of being blocked at borders has often been described in the literature. This singular “armouring” (the wearing of amulets, gris-gris, etc.) might be seen as one strategy for neutralising what I provisionally refer to as “pathologies of citizenship and the nation-state” (which include refoulement, border violence, administrative detention and racial profiling). Here, I question a particular aspect of the relationship between “objects” (or better, “things”) and African migration: the role played by these objects and traditional remedies in the face of “the crisis of presence” (Ernesto De Martino) in the migratory context. My analysis of the story of an asylum seeker from Mali also led me to tackle another theme: his symptoms, I discovered, masked one of the most complex forms of geomancy in the Mande tradition. This “immaterial” object (laturu), which expresses a divination technique that is recalled in these places of abandonment and exclusion, enabled me to discover a genuine cultural memory entrusted to a few images and scraps of paper. In another case, that of another immigrant from Mali, the threatening percep- tion of an ordinary object leads us to consider the ambivalent value of these “things”, which defy all efforts at classification. In the context of migration, the ethnography of this knowledge and of these relics and fragments encrusted with knowledge and history reveals a “resumption of initiative” (Balandier) in unexpected forms.