Giving time

Full text

5
Giving time
‘The humanitarian dismantling operation is over.’
Just a few days after the clearances of the final northern section
of La Lande, as the hundreds of coaches were still completing
their task of moving displaced people from Calais to centres
across France, on Tuesday 8 November 2016, the day of the
national election in the United States, some lines from Félix
Guattari’s 1989 book Les trois ecologies came to mind. It was in
that section where, discussing the limits of the boundaries of
93
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

western categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, the Guattari draws
a comparison between Donald Trump and a species of algae:
More than ever nature cannot be separated from culture.
We must learn to think through the interactions between
ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the baseline universes
of social and individual life ‘transversally’. Just as mutant
and monstrous algae invade the Venetian Lagoon, so
our television screens are saturated with a population of
‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social
ecology, men like Donald Trump have the freedom to
proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over
entire neighbourhoods of New York, Atlantic City, etc.,
to ‘redevelop’ them by raising the rents, thereby driving
out tens of thousands of poor families most of whom are
condemned to becoming ‘homeless’, the equivalent of
the dead fish of environmental ecology. (Guattari, 1989:
34, our translation)
Three decades on this toxic algae spreads out at a new hemispheric
scale across each of Guattari’s trio of Ecologies – humanity,
society, environment. New mobilisation events expand the
racial ideologies of the urban clearances of gentrification at a
continental scale. ‘It’s you and your #FuckingWall’, as Vicente
Fox Quesada, former President of Mexico, put it on 26 January
2017.1
How to study this new adverse political ecology? And how
to resist it? The immediate fears were about how it was starving
what lay beneath it of oxygen and light, smothering dead info-
zones that misrepresent the world with the spurious bloom of
fake news. On 19 November 2016 the Oxford English dictionary
chose ‘post-truth’ as its ‘Word of the Year’. The New York Times
maintained a list of ‘Trump’s outright lies’ for more than a year.2
On Earth Day 2017, the first anniversary of the Paris Agreement,
the March for Science brought more than a million people out
94
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

onto the streets of six hundred cities worldwide. A March for
Truth followed in June 2017, again seeking to reclaim reality as
a means of critique, as if in hope of pulling back the curtain on
the conjuring of solid truths from thin air. Some even accused
the academic abstractions of epistemological relativism, social
constructionism, identity liberalism and so on of mystifications
that now find themselves complicit with Trumpian unreality.3
As if we could fight fictions with nothing but facts. As if the task
were, in the words of Marshall Berman’s famous definition of
modernism, for ‘men and women to become subjects as well as
objects of modernization, to get a grip on the world’ (Berman,
1988: 5). But the process of changing the world itself, or at least
some western chunk of it, has been under way for a few hundred
years in the form of western colonialism. Philippe Pignarre and
Isabelle Stengers call it ‘capitalist sorcery’; ‘if capitalism were to
be put in danger by denunciation,’ they observe, ‘it would have
collapsed long ago’ (2009: 10).
Those speaking out about climate change come up quickly
against not just denial but against those very agencies that can
change, are changing the weather. To resist the changing of fact,
rather than mere fiction, we must return to description.
If the Contemporary Archaeology of this book – environmental,
temporal, visual – is an exercise in ‘transversal’ thinking, then
it is not how Félix Guattari imagined it, Rather than ‘running
perpendicular to the points first perceived’ it excavates a new
temporal elasticity of environments, images and things as
political forms (cf. Dubois, 2016: 164). In paying attention to
the prospect of that #FuckingWall, our ability to fight falsehood
with fact depends on the degree to which we believe that the
political imagination has the ability not just to misinterpret the
world, but to enact its nature in new ways. Chandra Mukerji
identified this impulse in 17th-century Versailles, where the
transformation of nature in the gardens was not just a reflection
of, but an integral strategy within, the creation of the territorial
state. Such transformations – ‘experiments in building and war
95
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

that transformed a landmass into a new kind of political resource’
– take a dierent form in France under the new border regimes
(Mukerji, 1997: 3).
The #FuckingWall threatens to render the Brandt Line in
concrete sheets, steel posts, razor wire and security ocers,
and thereby to use a weapon forged from $70 billion dollars4
to score the underdevelopment of the Global South into
sand, gravel, shale, clay and rock along the Rio Grande and
across the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, from San Diego
to Brownsville. What branch of naturalism could grasp the
virulent, photosynthetic reach of this extended phenotype,
which is so much more than the naturalisation of ideology, of
inequality, of prejudice, of the failed ideology of ‘race’ resorting
to the reshaping of geography itself? How to provincialise
this degenerate Boreal savagery that moves across so many
plateaux: human and environmental, real and fake, artefactual
and ideological? Let us repeat how it erects not fortifications
against hostile armies but environments built against non-state
actors of Global South, humans armed just with cell phones,
rucksacks, and their own bodies. This conflict about the relative
humanity of places and bodies recalls that old Victorian terror
of the crowd – and, more precisely, the fear of besiegement
through ‘reverse colonisation’ (Hage, 2016: 39).
At the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Texas,
environmental protests reveal untruths not as a bloom that
obscures how the world really is, but an instant patina across
how it is being disfigured. What type of sociocultural algology
is required to cope with this change in the West’s regime of
materials, of environment, and of the visual? The production of
illegal humanity through ‘borderwork’ involves a bifurcation of
existential modes; a change in regimes of possibility. To reveal it we
need the inverse of an inventory of untruths. If the ideological
has collapsed into the ecological, any purely sociological talk
of ‘cosmopolitics’ misses how those impulses that are changing
96
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

the climate can be extended to change human geography in a
range of other ways.
By paying attention to this very material world-making,
this book represents a kind of afterword or update to Reviel
Netz’s study of Barbed Wire (2004), described by the author
as ‘an ecology of modernity’, where the reader is led through
how one technology shifted between dierent situations, from
the cattle ranches of the southern Great Plains in 1874 to
the British enclosures of the Boer War, to the concentration
camp on the soil of Europe, with victims ranging from herded
animals at first and natural environments to human beings. This
frontier technology is returning to the Texas border, but with an
outcome that remains uncertain apart from our sense of natures
transformed in the name of the inhuman. We might sketch a
new seriation of dehumanisation by documenting the evolving
forms and species of disaster capitalism, the nomenclatures of
immigration enforcement, the construction of what is meant
to appear to be unmoveable. Lucien Febvre would surely have
called it naturalization. These constructions are as much made
by sheer neglect or inaction, or silence or erasure – just as with
the denial of climate change and the ascription of illegality or
nonhumanity to non-western people – as they are through the
new scale of monumentality wrought through the infrastructure
of borders.
The ecocidal algae that has wrapped itself around the United
States reaches out across the Atlantic Ocean, across the Global
North. Climate change is surely a tiny chunk of a new ecological
(post)colonialism that alters the earth not by default or as an
epiphenomenon but through design and violent inaction. If the
nonhuman is being transformed in the name of the inhuman,
then this means that we are witnesses to alterations not just in the
stories that are told but in modes of existence. Pushing Guattari’s
‘transversal’ thinking to its limit, our fieldwork might build not
taxonomies of organisms or typologies of forms of shelter but
seriations of the dierent (post)colonial worlds that are being
97
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

forged; new descriptions of environmental regimes built for the
uneven distribution of pasts, presents and futures.
*
This book has oered a small exercise in such seriation at
Britain’s own #FuckingWall, at Calais, France. In doing so
it aims to combine insights around the prospect of a Visual
Archaeology (Hicks, 2019a, 2019b) while contributing to
the ongoing emergence of Contemporary Archaeology, and
thus to take particular inspiration from Shannon Dawdy’s
‘profane archaeology’ of the politics of ‘patina’ after Hurricane
Katrina (2016; Hicks, 2016b), Rachael Kiddey’s participatory
archaeologies of homelessness (2017; cf. Kiddey, 2019), Laura
McAtackney’s Archaeology of the Troubles in Northern Ireland
(2014), and Jason de León’s (2015) account of crossings along the
US–Mexican border. As de León shows with his account of the
‘Prevention through Deterrence’ policy and the Migrant Death
98
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

Mapping programme, the natural environment itself has been
enlisted in channelling people to make a crossing so dangerous
that it becomes ‘a killing machine that simultaneously uses and
hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert’ (De Leon,
2015: 3). As with the naturalised violence of the Texas desert, so
with the Mediterranean crossing in which some 17,589 people
were killed during the years 2014 to 2018.5 And so too at the
English Channel, where, as we argued above, the naturalisation
of the border began in the 1560s, hand in hand the birth of the
British Empire. The enrolment of the sea itself in border security
entered a new phase with the oshore border arrangements of
the Le Touquet Protocol.
This naturalised violence constitutes much more than the
familiar claims in the Frankfurt School tradition, that unequal
structures of power relations could be hidden or ‘naturalised’
through the built environment (Leone, 1984, Hicks, 2005). It
weaponises places and documents in a global project of human
classification and containment that bears many of the hallmarks
of the warped project of the Victorian ethnographic museums.
To resist this process, a rearmed commitment to our common
humanity is essential (Agier, 2013b), but is not sucient.
Beyond the assertion of cosmopolitanism our challenge is to
fight against the classificatory construction of dierent modes
of existence in the present global moment of borderwork on
its own terms – through a reimagining of the comparative
project of anthropology, repurposing the discipline that has
been closest to the ongoing colonial project. Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro has described such an anti-imperialist and ecological
political action as the definition of (post)colonial anthropology
around ‘one cardinal value: working to create the conditions
for the conceptual, I mean ontological, self-determination of
people’ (de Castro, 2003: 2). A reimagining of the (post)colonial
moment as one not of worldviews, but of words, not of the
‘multiculturalism’ of the intellectual crisis of representation but a
multinaturalism born of a ‘crisis of nature’, in which resistance,
99
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

like knowledge, must not merely take up a position but must
build a perspective (de Castro, 2014).
*
La Lande witnessed the building of a counter-perspective, and it
is unfinished. As a process rather than a crisis, La Lande witnessed
the co-production of this perspective across boundaries in the
name of anti-racism and through endurance in the face of
impermanence, destruction and violence. Thus, among so many
other things, La Lande was a comparative project that resisted
the classifications of borderwork.
Through its ongoing remnants we can compare political
ecologies of borderwork, between what stands at Calais and the
prospect of that American #FuckingWall. Let us use what we
have reassembled from La Lande to juxtapose these two border
controls. On the one hand there are proposed changes to the
14th Amendment on birthright citizenship, and on the other the
100
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

removal of jus soli in the British Nationality Act 1981. There is
Donald Trump’s dehumanising language that describes ‘illegal
immigrants’ that ‘pour into and infest our country’6 and there
are UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s words during the
media circus around La Lande in summer 2015:
‘You have got a swarm of people coming across the
Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come
to Britain because Britain has got jobs, it’s got a growing
economy, it’s an incredible place to live… But we need
to protect our borders by working hand in glove with our
neighbours, the French, and that is exactly what we are
doing.’ (David Cameron, 30 July 2015)7
There are campaigns against family separation on the Mexican
border and many reports of family border separations at Calais.
There is the phasing out of the Obama policy of ‘deferred action
for childhood arrivals’ and there is the October 2018 ruling that
the British government acted unlawfully in not giving reasons
to children refused entry to Britain from Calais under the Dubs
arrangement.8 There is the suspension of entry to the United
States for citizens of seven countries in the Middle East and the
Horn of Africa, five of which are former British mandates or
protectorates: Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. And there
are thousands of Sudanese, Eritreans and Afghans risking their
lives to cross the Channel to claim asylum in Britain. There
are mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the
US and there was a report, in July 2018, from the House of
Commons Home Aairs Select Committee into the Windrush
Scandal that warned that ‘the problems which aected the
Windrush generation and their children will happen again,
for another group of people’ (HASC, 2018: 33). There was
widespread condemnation of the use of teargas against asylum
seekers in the US in November 2018, and there is the routine
use of tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets by the CRS
101
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

in the ways described above for years, funded by the British
government. The US was also condemned for incarcerating
refugee children in June 2018, just as the French government
was adopting one of its most restrictive immigration policies
(adopted September 2018) that makes it possible to detain
families with children in administrative detention for up to
three months. And there is the important documentation of
how the Sonoma Desert serves to kill migrants seeking to cross
the border, while in winter 2015–16 the bodies of Shadi Omar
Kataf and Mouaz Al Balkhi washed up 500 miles apart after
they tried to swim the Channel from Calais to Dover (Fjellberg
and Christiansen, 2016), and in winter 2018–19 hundreds of
displaced Iranians began trying to cross in small boats. This is
not an ‘extended case study’. With each comparison we see the
importance of moving beyond the time-frame created by the
language of crisis and emergency, and even the humanitarian
language of ‘saving’ and ‘rescuing’ at sea, which served only to
bring the ideas of rescue and capture, caring and controlling,
closer together (Pallister-Wilkins, 2017) – more ‘catastrophe’
than crisis (Stengers, 2013).
*
102
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

Calais continues to be a key (post)colonial site in changing
technologies of borderwork and exclusion. At the time of
writing (January 2018) the outcome of Brexit is still uncertain.
There are reports of dredgers working in Ramsgate, but Calais
still handles 17% of all UK trade with the world (Corporate
Watch, 2018: 126) and the Channel Tunnel reportedly ‘facilitates
26% of UK–EU trade’.9 It is the largest European passenger
port, carrying 30million passengers via Eurostar and ferries
in 2017, plus some 3.5million trucks and 4million cars and
vans. To accommodate the politics of this trac in people and
goods, this re-shaped environment of naturalised borders, we do
not need the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’. Our account of
cosmopolitics seeks to recentre humanity through a decentring
of conventional accounts of the human. We are sceptical of any
posthuman impulse towards ‘ghosts and monsters’ – ‘unsettling
Anthropos from its presumed centre stage in the Anthropocene
by highlighting the webs of histories and bodies from which all
life, including human life, emerges’ (Swanson et al., 2017: m3)
103
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

– that does not place humanism and humanity at its heart. The
academic literature that has emerged under the banner of the
‘Anthropocene’ is of limited use in studying how the materials,
environments, practices and ecologies of humanitarianism have
been co-opted by militarist colonialism. The term ‘Necrocene’
might be closer to what is needed to capture some of how
La Lande was a time and place that testifies to new controls
over living and dying, new cartographies of discrimination, an
ongoing (post)colonial situation not just of ‘life among capitalist
ruins’ (Tsing, 2015) but of ongoing ruination (Stoler, 2008). But
any assertation of new temporal ages, whether Anthropocene or
Cthulucene (Haraway, 2016), would bring with them a return
to the same progressive and linear time philosophies that fuelled
the racist ideology of the savage slot.
Instead, let us try to discern and to trace how, at Calais and
elsewhere, a militarist (post)colonialism is building new kinds
of time-zone – incising lines between futures and pasts, in
which alterity is, in the name of ‘deterrence’, rendered as an
everlasting present. The temporal stasis that comes from the
physical blockage arising from seeking asylum through irregular
passage becomes the abhorrent condition of impermanence
as abjection. Time is weaponised, as it was once before
through Victorian savagery. But this now operates through the
withdrawal of duration and the ongoing (post)colonial process of
the imposition of dierent ages across dierent hemispheres. In
these new geopolitics La Lande juxtaposed the infrastructure of
transport and stoppage, and became a site of utopian resistance
by starting to build new permanences, and thus new times
and places – which will be partially reassembled, with the aim
of remembering the near-present, at the Pitt Rivers Museum
during 2019.
*
104
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

‘It seems that walls have become “racist”’, barked an opinion
piece in The Telegraph in September 2016.10 This came the
day after Immigration Minister Robert Goodwill had told the
House of Commons Home Aairs Committee that, ‘We are
going to start building this big, new wall very soon. We’ve
done the fence, now we are doing a wall.’ The month after the
announcement of this latest Great Wall of Calais (of course since
superseded by even greater projects), the October demolition of
the northern section of La Lande took place. The next week, the
world woke up to the election of Donald Trump as President
of the United States.
The return of populist far right movements goes hand in
hand with this new borderwork. There is doubtless an ongoing
experimentation within ‘the large-scale segregations that are
being established on a planetary scale’ (Agier, 2002b: 320). But
if anthropology relies upon its old tools of social construction,
situational-functionalism or reflexivity, it will adopt the
parochial, hyperconstructivist, and ethno-Eurocentric position,
105
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

as Michel Agier has, that ‘No human has ever been “indigenous”
[autochtonien]’ (Agier, 2013b: 47).
Thus, unlike all identity-based beliefs in the indigeneity
[l’autochtonie] of humans, ancient or contemporary, as a
principle or a universal model of identity and as a natural
framework of existence, we must instead admit that every
em-placement has been preceded and will be followed by
a dis-placement… and so forth. The history of identities is
a succession of migrations, accidents and accommodation
– and, in the end, an ever-arbitrary relationship between
a being in motion and an indefinite place ‘on the surface
of the earth’ at the end of an encounter that can only a
posteriori be given the air of evidence and primary truth.
Yet it is in the name of this primary ‘truth’ that ‘identity
essentialism’ has imposed itself as the illusion of our time,
a fake relief from distress in the face of the rapid changes
in the world seen in recent decades, in the face of this
major change called globalisation, and which has imposed
itself as a reality as the mark of a new modernity after
the Cold War, causing this strong widespread sensation
of uncertainty about the boundaries of places and
people. Nevertheless, no human has ever been ‘indigenous’
[autochtonien], and all borders have always been unstable.
All the histories of settlement studied by ethnologists
show this: it is the ‘already here’ [déja là] who can, when
newcomers arrive, transform from a relativist and strategic
point of view into an ‘always here’ [toujours là] to those
who follow, at the cost of an operation that freezes and
essentializes a being in motion, of an operation which
today would be called ‘freeze frame’ and which then fixes
the identity of space [l’espace] in an arbitrary manner. The
invention of origin myths is part of this relative anteriority,
but they themselves are not fixed in time. They can go
through several versions depending on the moment or
106
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

the precise place where they are told, or according to the
strategies and conflicts that drive them – until forming
what historian and anthropologist Marcel Detienne calls
mythidéologies. (Agier, 2013b: 47–8; our translation, our
emphasis)
Let us assess this position not from the cross-Channel position
that led David Cameron, during the Brexit campaign, to warn
of the ‘Jungle’ moving to Folkestone because the Le Touquet
agreement would break down,11 but from the perspective that
we built to compare La Lande with Texas.
To reduce the identities of Indigenous people to essentialism
and myth by deploying social constructivism in the name
of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is to shine a light on the current
status of anthropology in mainstream academic Refugee
Studies. Doubtless there is a political urgency for a European
anthropology of borders that shows the boundary to be a
construction, and thus to fight the far right appropriation of
the language of Indigeneity. But understanding Calais as a (post)
colonial space should also remind us of the planetary context –
the importance of anthropologies around the world accepting
that Indigenous is not just a culturally fabricated category or
identity ‘choice’, but a set of localised attempts to resist settler
colonialism on its own terms. It is against the violence of
borderwork, not human dwelling and locality, that anthropology,
a discipline with a unique conception of the diversity of human
worlds, needs to fight. We must not erase the ongoing trac
between early 20th-century colonial and European racial
ideologies and practices. As one of us wrote in the week of the
October demolitions at La Lande, ‘Britain has never needed
Anthropology more than it does today [as] Anthropology resists
the dehumanisation of others by expanding our conception of
“the humanities”’ (Hicks, 2016c). Anthropology can not only
relativize and historicise borderwork, but can also resist it and
Fascist nativism too internationally, without making universal
107
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

statements about Indigenous rights far beyond Europe, or erasing
the violence of replacement of those already emplaced.12 Indeed,
Indigenous activists and scholars, especially in North America,
have led the critiques of changelessness or authenticity, instead
foregrounding the ongoing violence of settler colonialism, of
which the #FuckingWall is another incarnation.
A comparative view reveals also how effects of Agier’s
universalism go even further, beyond the consequences for
Indigenous people who have suered at the hands of settler
colonialism across the Global South, to also impact at Calais those
who continue to suer that other form of ongoing European
colonialism, which we are calling here militarist colonialism. To
acknowledge Indigeneity as a social scientist is to accept how
imperialist ideologies of land and environment can be reclaimed
as a form of resistance, as an integral part of human groups. Agier
critiques humanitarianism at Calais, but in doing so resurrects an
old anthropological conception of personhood where humanity
is not bound up with environments and material conditions and
time – an approach dicult to disentangle from those prejudices
through which displaced people are reduced to just people in
the ideology what Agamben (1998) calls ‘bare life’.
We share with Agier a concern with how what Aimé
Césaire (1955: 88) called ‘pseudo-humanisme’ finds its way into
humanitarian militarism at places like the ‘Jungles’. We see
the same diminished humanity in posthuman tendencies in
‘dark heritage’, ‘ruin porn’ and the ‘archaeographic’ – those
dehumanising trends that have characterised some the most
flaneuristic, scholastic, and voyeuristic accounts of La Lande
and other sites of (post)colonial violence, and directly against
which this book and exhibit aim to build new forms of Visual
Archaeology (cf. McFadyen and Hicks, 2019). In this text we
have been advocating for an archaeological anthropology that
turns away from any conception of ‘posthumanism’ and takes
seriously the layered environments, times and documents of
borderwork at La Lande in order to resist the violence of the
108
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

border regime on more human terms. To fail to do so would be
to extend the dispossession of people that was resisted through
the creation of La Lande as place, duration and visual culture.
*
This is part of a much wider and more pressing question for
comparative anthropology – one expressed by Marshall Sahlins,
in his foreword to the English translation of Philippe Descola’s
Par-delà nature et culture, which reflected on a time at which
‘many thought anthropology was losing its focus, parallel to the
disruptive eects of global capitalism on the cultural integrity
of the peoples it traditionally studied’:
As I listened to an anthropological lecture recently on
customs ocers in Ghana, the thought flashed across my
mind that we used to study customs in Ghana. (Sahlins,
2013: xi–xii)
109
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

To ask those bigger, comparative questions is to speak up for
humanity’s dierent modes of existence, ways of living and
thinking, or ‘ontologies’ to use the jargon, and in doing so to
alert ourselves to how global borderwork is seeking to make
the lines between such dierent worlds – but drawn on their
own terms – permanent. The present moment is not a Scramble
from Africa but a Scramble to Borderwork. This moment demands
a more-than-human analysis of changing western technologies
of classification. Britain was never a nation of shopkeepers, but
its present challenge is the threat and the prospect of a nation
of customs ocers, from university lecturers to landlords. We
might learn from how La Lande improvised one method for
resistance: building a space of comparison, creating things to
last from the condition of precarity, and thus making a space of
appearance for the means, contingencies and horrors through
which the nation state is built and rebuilt – central among which
is borderwork as a technology of ‘race’. In this book and exhibit,
we aim now to bear witness to that space of appearance and
comparison, through a form of Visual Archaeology.
*
110
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

The cosmopolitics of Calais today are (post)colonial in nature,
at a time at which Britain’s fantasies about its imperial past are
increasingly wild and self-delusional, in plans for Mayflower
2020 and beyond. Today, the environment of ‘deterrence’ for
those humans forced daily to risk their lives to cross from the
white clis of the Côte d’Opale is more hostile than ever.
Anthropology has a key role to play in showing, comparing
and thus problematising the place of material, built and
natural environments in the production of alterity through
national borders (cf. Latour, 2017). As an anti-racist discipline,
anthropology has a responsibility to continue to make visible
the inhuman treatment of displaced people on European soil
and at its walls, what Dimitris Dalakoglou describes as ‘the
manifestation of Europe’s most ugly and discriminatory spatiality
– the preservation at all costs of its border security’ (2016: 180).
In the 20th century Britain was a key driver of globalisation,
and many scholars – from Eric Williams to Edward Said – have
shown the importance of the global connections of the British
111
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

Empire to British history, from the Industrial Revolution to the
English country house. In our present (post)colonial moment it
is the old technology of the estate wall, now wrought in steel and
razor wire, that appears to be emerging as the signature artefact,
archaeologically speaking, of the geopolitics of the nation state. If
the British withdrawal from Calais, and thus from Europe, in 1564
heralded the beginning of empire, its return to this place in the
21st century bears witness to the ongoing ‘ruin(n)ation’ wrought
by the British Empire through the ideology of the nation state.
*
112
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

What will the Pitt Rivers exhibit achieve? A recalibration
of border time maybe – one that builds against it, rather
reconstructs. Contemporary Archaeology is a method for
transformation rather than represention. We certainly hope
to create a space of duration that expands the resistance, the
making visible of the human conditions of borderwork, that
was begun at La Lande. As an exercise in Visual Archaeology,
we aim to shine a light on Calais as the key (post)colonial
borderzone of Britain, and a place of experimentation in new
forms of borderwork in a world of wall-building (McAtackney
and McGuire, 2019). In the process, the project has reconnected
people, friends, communities and objects. We are aware that ‘the
very aspirational quality of the politics of humanity that lends
it appeal often immunizes it from critical inquiry’ (Moyn et al.,
2010), but we hope to bring an anthropological perspective that
embraces the risk, as highlighted by Bernardot (2008: 30), of
‘confusing science and activism’.
La Lande has already produced many hybrid scholarly-activist
works written by people who spent time creating this place,
many of which are cited here (King, 2016: 3), and there are
doubtless more to come. It was a watershed for the politics of
visibility. We hope to put the idea of an archaeology of the near
past into practice in a manner that ‘gives time’ in the way that
the many displaced people, volunteers and activists did at La
Lande in 2015 and 2016.
In doing so, the exhibit and this book are about the present
and the near future. They recall the ongoing situation at the
borders of Britain and Europe – the many ongoing ‘Jungles’,
across environmental hostility, temporal violence and visual politics.
As we write, today on, 7 January 2019, 26 months on from the
demolition of the northern section of the Calais ‘Jungle’, Stella
Creasy MP has had to remind the House of Commons what
Help Refugees and others have been saying for months: that
‘There are 1,500 people sleeping rough tonight around Dunkirk
and Calais, 250 of them children and unaccompanied minors …
113
GIVING TIME
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC

There have been 972 human rights abuses reported in Calais,
244 of them involving police violence … The French police
are pouring bleach into the tents.’13
As collaborative endeavours the book and exhibit protest
the ongoing failure of the duty of care for those seeking
asylum through irregular travel across the UK national border
in France. They protest the racist (post)colonial structures of
exclusion, segregation and classification that underlie it, and
they bear witness to the border as an ongoing (post)colonial
technology. They seek to reimagine and repurpose the museum
and anthropological archaeology as tools for visual politics.
Who knows what the prospects for the humanities and social
sciences are, given the contemporary predicament of an
undecolonised curriculum where whole sub-disciplines like
Classics are grounded in the exclusion of the non-western from
the definition of ‘civilisation’ and the British Museum hardens it
parochial, aristocratic position on universality? Could giving time
be part of anthropology’s (post)colonial restitution? At Calais and
beyond there can be no more urgent task for Archaeology today
than to excavate and advocate for the undocumented present.
114
LANDE: THE CALAIS ‘JUNGLE’ AND BEYOND
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 03/01/23 12:31 AM UTC