A very topical analysis of 'borderlands' between states where migrants and refugees arrive and get stuck in camps The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world. Contents Introduction: The Migrant, the Border and the World Blocked at the border Indifference and solidarities Borders and walls Borderlands and their inhabitants: a banal cosmopolitism Part I: Decentring the World Chapter 1. The Elementary Forms of the Border The border as centre of reflection Temporal, social and spatial dimensions of the border ritual Community and locality: the border as social fact The sacred space in Salvador de Bahia The symbolic construction of the border An anthropology of/in the border Founding, naming, limiting Borderlands as uncertain places: Tocqueville at Saginaw Interval time: carnivals and deceleration Everything that the border is the place of Borders and identity Border situations and liminality Chapter 2. The World as Problem War at the borders Is the world a problem? Cosmopolitical reality and realpolitik Economic globalization and the weakening of nation-states Landscapes, routes and networks: the shape of the world Violence at the border: the outside of the nation The border police , or what remains of nation-states The fiction of national indigeneity and its naturalization Expulsions trace the boundary of national identity Humanitarian spaces as partial delocalization of sovereignty Walls of war Colonial war, war on migrants Questions about the desire for walls Chapter 3. Border Dwellers and Borderlands: Studies of banal cosmopolitism The border dwellers: figures and places of relative foreignness Wandering as adventure and the border encampment Becoming a pariah and living in a camp Four métèques , and the squat as border The foreigner in his labyrinth, or the tiers-instruit Being-in-the-world on the border: a new cosmopolitan condition An ordinary cosmopolitism Part Two: The Decentred Subject Chapter 4. Questions of Method: Decentring Reconsidered Today A critical moment: the contemporary turn in anthropology The end of the Great Divide From ethnic group to ethnic identities Identity-based essentialisms and ontologies Decentring reconceived Beyond cultural decentring The construction of epistemological decentring Political decentring. The question of the other-as-subject A contemporary and situational anthropology WYSIWYG: what you see is what there is The contribution of situational anthropology Chapter 5. Civilization, Culture, Race: Three Explorations in Identity Civilization as hyper-border: mirrors of Africa The 1950s: One civilization accused by another! 1980s and 1990s: deconstructions, reinventions A global and diffuse African presence The migration of spirits: mobilities and identity-based cultures The devil, the priest and black culture (Colombian Pacific) The Tunda as urban monster (Charco Azul, Cali) Borders and temporalities of identity-based cultures Race and racism: how can one be black? Republic and racial thought in France Brazil: from racial democracy to multicultural nation Citizenship without identity Escaping the identity trap Chapter 6. Logics and Politics of the Subject An anthropology of the subject From person to individual: ethnology and sociology From subjectification to subjects: anthropology and philosophy The subject in situation: an ethnographic proposal The decentred subject: three situational analyses The ritual subject, or the subject as duplication of self and world The aesthetic subject, or the care of self and the subject as author The political subject, or the subject as a demand for citizenship Moments and politics of the other-subject Conclusion: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition Notes Index