5With the notion of el ghorba or the opposition between thaymats and thaddjjaddith), and the conceptual arsenal elaborated by the research team at the Centre de sociologie europ閑nne of which he was, from its very inception, an active and influential member. In the hands of so skilled an analyst, the immigrant functions in the manner of a live, flesh-and-blood analyzer of the most obscure regions of the social unconscious. Sayad ultimately shows us how, like Socrates according to Plato, the immigrant is atopos, a quaint hybrid devoid of place, dis-placed, in the twofold sense of incongruous and inopportune, trapped in that "mongrel" sector of social space betwixt and between social being and nonbeing. Neither citizen nor foreigner, neither on the side of the Same nor on that of the Other, he exists only by default in the sending community and by excess in the receiving society, and he generates recurrent recrimination and ressentiment in both (Sayad 1984 and 1988). Out-of-place in the two social systems which define his (non)existence, the migrant forces us, through the obdurate social vexation and mental embarrassment he causes, to rethink root and branch the question of the legitimate foundations of citizenship and of the relationship between citizen, state, and nation. For the physical and moral suffering endured by the e-migrant reveals to the ethnographer who follows his slow and painful metamorphosis into the im-migrant everything that native (i.e., natal) embededness in a definite nation and state buries into the deepest recesses of the organism, in a state of quasi-nature, beyond the reach of consciousness and ratiocination, starting with the viscerally felt equation most societies establish between nationality and membership in the citizenry. Through experiences (in the sense of Erlebnis) which are, for she who knows how to dissect and decipher them, so many experimentations (in the sense of Erfahrung), he enables us to discover those "statified" (閠atis閟) minds and bodies, as Thomas Bernard calls them (Bourdieu 1994, Sayad 1999b), which a highly peculiar history has endowed us with and which all too often prevent us from recognizing and respecting all the manifold forms of the human condition. As the organic ethnologist of Algerian migration, the witness-analyst of the silent drama of the mass exodus of the Berber peasants of Kabylia into the industrial underbelly of their former colonial overlord, Abdelmalek Sayad gives us an exemplary figure of the sociologist as "public scribe," who records and broadcasts, with anthropological acuity and poetic grace, the voice of those most cruelly dispossessed of it by the crushing weight of imperial subordination and class domination, without ever instituting himself as a spokesperson, without ever using these given words to give lessons, except lessons in ethnographic integrity, scientific rigor, and civic courage.
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