• 1 Łukasz Skąpski, Klincz. Nowa architektura granic europejskich (trzy modele z dziewięciu składającyc (...)

2In 2020, an exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, as part of an ongoing series. Initially, it depicted post-war reconstruction efforts, but its later version, “Monumentomania,” turned its attention to monuments. Visitors were especially drawn to one installation that most closely resembled the essence of a monument – a structure demanding remembrance and continual reflection. This piece was a model of barbed-wire fences, evoking harrowing images from Second World War and the Holocaust – people pressed up against wire barriers. The exhibition was held in the newly designed, brightly lit modernist Zodiak pavilion (initially shown at the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin). This meticulously crafted model, created with precision akin to a top architectural studio, depicted objects that are never admired – barbed-wire fences or, in their modern form, razor-wire fences with barriers, supports, lattices, and rods.1 These fences have increasingly lined Europe’s borders in recent years to block the flow of refugees, primarily from the Middle East and Africa. Within a few months, such a fence was constructed along Poland's border with Belarus. Thus, the work created by Łukasz Skąpski and aptly titled Stalemate: The New Architecture of European Borders is a miniature model of the currently erected barbed-wire fences. These contemporary barriers, in miniature, clearly represented a new form of technology aimed at sealing off Europe’s internal territories and isolating them from the influx of refugees – determined arrivals from the Global South. It captures a troubling aspect of early twenty-first-century migration: the rise of newly engineered, technically advanced, professionally built razor-wire barriers. These are fences, metal walls, and wire fortifications equipped with lighting, motion sensors, and cameras.

• 2 Maciej Ząbek, Uchodźcy w Afryce. Etnografia przemocy i cierpienia [Refugees in Africa. Ethnography (...)

4The work of Polish ethnologist and Africanist Maciej Ząbek on exile and refugees in Africa2 stands out as an exception, vividly revealing this distant, largely invisible world that had, until recently, been mostly forgotten. Against the backdrop of earlier works that predate the deaths at the closed borders in Poland and Lithuania amid the influx of people fleeing war-torn Syria and the Middle East (by sea or further overland via Serbia and Hungary), Ząbek’s work stands out as the only such multifaceted and deeply layered ethnographies of suffering, escape, and violence. It provides a comprehensive picture of these harsh realities, from which the high-tech installations of the twenty-first century in Łukasz Skąpski’s models effectively separate the people of Europe from those in Africa. The book is a series of stories recounting the recurring experiences of refugees – more tales of escape and suffering-laden journeys than of life stories. These are accounts from refugees, escapees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and migrants moving in search of work, water, land, or even the hope of relative safety.

• 3 Sébastien Bachelet, “‘Wasting Mbeng’: Adventure and Trust Among Sub-Saharan Migrants in Morocco,” E (...)
• 4 Amade M’charek, “Harraga: Burning Borders, Navigating Colonialism,” The Sociological Review 68 (2) (...)

5Barbed and razor wire appear repeatedly throughout the book in various contexts. Even on the back cover, we see the serene face of the ethnologist, with a line of barbed wire visible in the background. Two detailed studies expand this image and provide some insight into the anthropology of flight and refuge: Sebastien Bachelet’s3 work on overcoming barriers in the Spanish enclaves in Africa, and Amade M’charek’s4 exploration of the significance of sea-crossing attempts in southern Tunisia.

• 5 Ząbek, Uchodźcy w Afryce, 74. If not stated oth­erwise, all quotations from Polish are translated b (...)

7African refugees today, he writes, are not the same kind of political refugees as those who fled wartime Poland or France during Second World War, who often carried with them “a certain sense of ideological and personal honor.” “They [African refugees – T. R.] do not have a sense of pride in having resisted authority. Their displacement arises primarily from an accumulation of suffering – family, administrative, and material hardships – and the hope for a better life.”5 African states also long debated whether they should accept refugees at all, as the movement of millions of people often represented a threat from their perspective, with the looming risk of losing control. African countries to which hundreds of thousands flee from hunger, such as Sudan, began implementing refugee control policies as early as the 1960s. Later, under UN (UNHCR) influence, they established a strict refugee regime with a support system that ultimately provided inadequate material assistance. What Ząbek makes clear from the outset is, above all, the continuity and enduring nature of displacement in Africa – the near permanence of refugee routes, expulsions, and escapes, and their lasting presence on the continent over at least the past several decades.

• 6 Ibid., 22.

9In examining the origins of African displacement, a brutal logic of violence and cruelty is starkly revealed, evident, for example, in Sudan’s civil war. This logic surfaces in an “ethnography of suffering” – stories of refugees that are intensified through their collection, interconnection, and accumulation. These are the stories of people encountered by the ethnographer in camps on semi-desert peripheries, in urban refugee registration centers in Sudan, and in Kenya. Ząbek follows the works of scholars like Liisa Malkki, John Davis, and Barbara Harrell-Bond into “zones of suffering,” where it becomes increasingly clear that ethnography is nearly impossible, both ethically and emotionally. This challenge is heightened by the setting, where such suffering is revealed under the authority of UN camps, with layers of control and protection. It mirrors the experience of hundreds of aid workers moving in air-conditioned vehicles with UNHCR logos to air-conditioned, secure offices standing just beside rows of refugee tents. The author thus writes about conversations in camps in Kenya, for which he obtained official permissions from UNHCR, but these interactions were far from the kind of research where one lives among and shares daily life with people. “The research I was conducting at that time did not adhere to the principles of ethnographic study.” “Twice a day, I was driven from the UNHCR base to the refugee camp in a four-wheel-drive vehicle equipped with a satellite radio, wearing a bulletproof vest and accompanied by armed police.”6

• 7 From the publisher’s note on the cover of Olga Stanisławska’s book, where it mentions Graham Greene (...)
• 8 Ząbek, Uchodźcy w Afryce, 143–144.

11Thus, when an independent South Sudan finally emerges after years of conflict, it carries with it a history of prolonged suffering that continues to generate tensions and strife. At the very roots of this nation’s story are the recurring, severe droughts in the Sahel, which have simultaneously turned people into “environmental refugees.” Waves of drought and the collapse of entire herds continually pushed people from Ethiopia into Sudan, which was negotiating refugee policies with the UNHCR and OAU, pressured to enforce controls by international institutions and NGOs (a term sometimes read in African parlance as neocolonial missions: “No Good Organizations”). The droughts in the Sahel also displaced Arab herders from Chad, who then migrated into Sudan’s Darfur region, effectively invading local farmers’ lands, armed with firearms, as mounted “janjaweed” warriors on horseback. In response, the attacked farmers organized their own new wave of violence: self-defense militias, also armed, sometimes with Kalashnikov rifles. Against this backdrop, patterns of violence and brutality emerge, exposing the vast landscape of Africa’s suffering – a “heart-shaped” continent7 where, over the past five decades, tens of millions have died in wars with the highest toll worldwide. “Violence,” writes Ząbek, “in the broadest sense of the word, is the use of force, coercion, assault, but also the acts of shaming, defiling, desecrating, exerting influence over another person’s thoughts, behavior, and physical condition.” “Violence and cruelty,” the author continues, “are widespread practices in Eritrea, systematic in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and constantly present in Guinea, Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon, Togo, and Congo-Brazzaville.”8 Refugees from Eritrea, for instance, are escaping mandatory military service that can extend beyond six years, where they are frequently beaten, humiliated, and subjected to torture. If they flee abroad and are deported back, they face the threat of execution. These cycles of violence include, in turn, arrest, and beating by police and security forces, imprisonment marked by sanctioned violence, and, more broadly, the experience of being subject to the local legal system.

• 9 Agnieszka Dauksza, Klub Auschwitz i inne kluby. Rwane opowieści przeżywców [Auschwitz Club and othe (...)
• 10 Gerhard Riemann and Fritz Schütze, “‘Trajektoria’ jako podstawowa koncepcja teoretyczna w analizach (...)

13The stories – articulated in conversations with a “white,” “bearded” European, a protected official, and at the same time, a patient listener – carry a situational gesture of framing one’s life as an experience of persecution, of recalling trauma and violence. This echoes the accounts of witnesses and survivors of Nazi camps, the “survivors,” as Agnieszka Dauksza wrote, with their “fragmented narratives.”9 The biographical method, along with the biographical material itself, encompassing experiences of pain and survival, is far from uniform. It contains layers of past and present obscurities, moments of chaotic, tangled narration – a “trajectory of suffering” in which, as Fritz Schütze and Gerhard Riemann10 demonstrated, the individual is driven by external forces that are perceived as misfortunes. In his book, Ząbek frequently juxtaposes not so much the biographies as the experiences of the journeys taken by fleeing travelers, which unfold as treks filled with random suffering and accidental death. From Ethiopia to Sudan, Egypt, and then to Europe; from Gambia to Senegal, then onward to Mali, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco, and from there to Europe. From Chad to Darfur, to Sudan and Libya, and then to Italy.

• 11 Ząbek, Uchodźcy w Afryce, 277.
• 12 This is the famous story of Taddele, who in the 1970s made his way from Ethiopia to Sudan, then to (...)

14Refugees carry their forged or “weak” passports, often unaccepted by border guards and police, who may recognize their status or deny it, depending on the political climate, military actions, or the possibility of accepting a bribe. Along the way, they encounter both those who help and those who deceive, bringing death. In the Maghreb countries, especially, the dark skin of people from South Sudan often invites violence, as it does for people from West Africa, like in the stories of migrants from Gambia or Senegal. “The ‘white’ Arabs, or generally people from northern cities like Tripoli, immediately recognize the ‘black’ people from the South and treat them with cruelty,” explained Masane, recounting his journey. “If the police catch you, they can throw you in prison – no trial, nothing. If you don’t pay, they’ll beat you like an animal, hitting you on the head. [...] They give you two days to pay. If you don’t have money, they make you call your relatives, beating you so that your family understands they have to pay.”11 At the same time, strangers also offer help: they give money, and buy food – like roasted corn cobs – as they are aware of the refugees' difficult fate. In the account of an Ethiopian man, recorded in his memoirs, Sudanese people they met along the way warned them that the desert was terrifying and that they might die there. “His wife cried for us,” he wrote, “but we told him that once we had made the decision, we couldn’t turn back. If we returned to Ethiopia, we would all be killed, and the situation in Sudan was going from bad to worse.”12

• 13 Bachelet, “‘Wasting Mbeng’.”

17As a result, many refugees often opt for the land route. They first settle in Moroccan cities, typically in neglected, trash-filled suburbs, living in terrible conditions as they prepare for the “crossing” into Europe (to Ceuta and Melilla). The ethnographer Sebastien Bachelet spent months with such groups of young migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, in his case – from Cameroon.13 He lived, among other places, in the suburbs of Rabat, the capital of Morocco, where he accompanied them as they prepared for the “jump” to Europe. They stayed in a dilapidated, overcrowded building with cramped rooms and no running water. The place was occupied by Cameroonians who gathered there to finally undertake mbeng, the “journey to Europe.”

• 14 Ibid., 857.

18This paints a complete picture of the struggle to reach Europe, to make the “jump” (referred to as “jumping borders,” sauter les frontières) across to the other side. It is a process that requires time and careful preparation. In the suburbs, in cramped, illegally constructed buildings, and along the way in forest camps in northern Morocco, the struggle to succeed – to make it across to the other side – unfolds. As Bachelet’s interviewees explain, the key is not so much in knowing how and where to cross but in “building the right mindset” or “developing the proper mentality.”14 They climb the walls in groups, at multiple spots simultaneously, to make it harder for the guards to bring them down. However, whom one meets during the preparations is crucial, as, in these conditions, people rely on each other for safety. They protect one another from bandits and the Arab city guards, who often expel migrating “black” individuals from the city, even taking them out to the desert.

• 15 Ibid., 854.

19This closeness in cooperation builds trust among them and, moreover, helps them endure the harshest conditions. Two Cameroonians whom Bachelet met, along with two others, lived for months in the Cameroonian ghetto – a crowded building locally referred to as “the Embassy” (l’Ambassade). It is there that plans and preparations take shape as entire groups ready themselves to cross the razor-wire fences. In this “Little Cameroon,” people gather their strength, preparing for what seems impossible – overcoming fences lined with barbed and razor wire, with barriers in between that tear at their hands and bodies. They also prepare themselves for pain, for enduring physical suffering, for experiencing what they call “the shock” (le choc). This jump, as the Cameroonians say, cannot be done alone; it requires finding the right people who help build the mental strength needed to reach the goal, to “achieve the goal,” as they put it, and, at the same time, to “conquer oneself.” This does not change the fact that these relationships are fragile, just as life on the refugee journey is unstable. “Life is hard in Morocco,” where they try to work illegally on construction sites and in markets, only to be cheated, intimidated, denied wages, and sometimes even beaten. These temporary bonds also eventually break down; they are fragile, and the worst thing is causing someone to lose their chance, to fail in mbeng. Suspicion and accusations may target those who disrupt cooperation, but this is unrelated to the right to an individual attempt, known as pontiac. It is understood that such a solo crossing can succeed with the proper mental focus. Thus, it is not uncommon for everyone to know that someone is going solo; by morning, they vanish with their zodiac, a one-person inflatable raft. What truly angers migrants, however, is disrupting the focus, breaking mbeng. A properly prepared mindset is like a concentrated force of unbreakable will to overcome the barriers – that is why people with a “good mentality” gather together. The jump is the moment that determines whether they will live, or reclaim their lives; this is the purpose of the entire psychological journey they undergo. When Sebastien Bachelet attended an impromptu gathering at l’Ambassade, he met a young man from Cameroon with whom he spoke at length about the crossings. After a while, however, the Cameroonian began shouting, accusing him of being a spy for the border guards. “But it doesn’t matter; we’re ready!” he yelled. “We can eat your fences!”15

• 16 Ząbek, Uchodźcy w Afryce, 110–114.

20In Gambia and Senegal, the journey to Europe is almost a cultural archetype – a path to follow, a challenge that defies fate. This journey, known as backway in Gambia, as Ząbek points out,16 is seen as a test of strength, much like the traditional hunt for dangerous animals. This repeated, and highly desired path to success – to Europe – becomes a recurring pattern, where not migrating or not attempting the “jump” is perceived as a “weakness,” a lesser way of life. In the opposite direction, from Europe to Africa, come photos of happy refugees posing against the background of beautiful buildings, well-kept cities, and (often not their own) cars. There are also photos, as Ząbek describes, of joyful brothers after the jump, wearing torn, blood-stained clothes but already in UN camps and undergoing refugee procedures. Earlier, they had not only trained to climb makeshift ladders and ropes twisted from rags but had also carefully burned all their documents and passports to ensure nothing could be found on them. Only a few make it across, but there are stories of Africans being guided and supported by their families living in France, of finding stable jobs – for example, as truck drivers. Most, however, end up working and living on the streets or in forced labor on plantations, many surviving day to day. Many who send their earnings back to relatives or parents in Africa are deceived, only learning of the betrayal years later when they return. However, stories of success and bravery on the journey continue to circulate, inspiring a desire for competition and status within the social structure. They inspire people to cultivate a “strong mentality,” to “test their will,” and to attempt the magical jump – something that, from a systemic and logical perspective, is entirely impossible.

• 17 Maaike Vledder, Agency in the Border Trap: Humanitarian Power in the Moria Camp, MA Thesis under th (...)
• 18 Ząbek, Uchodźcy w Afryce, 336.
• 19 Vledder, Agency in the Border, 30–33, 50–53.
• 20 Ibid., 6.

21When we view ethnographic research conducted among sub-Saharan refugees as a kind of encounter with an extreme experience, almost impossible to convey, it still reveals a range of realities and diverse stories of suffering and violence. In numerous accounts from conversations in UNHCR camps in Central Africa, it becomes clear that the role of the “official” or the “bearded white man” elicits narratives of complaint, lament, or uncontrollable, painful memories of escape and survival. These stories often accumulate and intensify the portrayal of violence. These experiences repeatedly emerge in successive narratives, not only tied to stories of fleeing war zones, such as in South Sudan or Eritrea but also to the violence present in large African cities that function as refugee camps. Ząbek, like other authors – such as Maaike Vledder in her work on the camp known as Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos17 – illustrates that these camps are essentially vast systems of detention and segregation for hundreds of thousands of people. They are mechanisms for controlling and monitoring how refugees live, how they build shelter, how they eat, how they and their homes look like. The materials, coverings, tarps for tents, bags of flour and rice – everything refugees receive for survival – are controlled by humanitarian workers and marked with the logo of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Manuals for humanitarian staff even recommend sudden headcount of camp residents, preferably at night or early in the morning (such recommendations can be found in training guides for the global humanitarian network Oxfam).18 The Kenyan camps Kakuma and Dadaab, as described in Ząbek’s work, are essentially city-states for refugees from South Sudan and Somalia. They are organized into distinct quarters for different ethnic and national groups, each governed by its own strict rules. The food portions distributed there – a ration of flour and a small amount of oil – barely allow for biological survival, with both symbolic and real violence woven into the fabric of daily life. Despite this, refugees try to endure by seasoning their rations, bartering with local farmers and other groups in the camp, and sometimes even growing small gardens. Even a domesticated and familiarized space is under constant surveillance. On Lesbos, in the massive Moria camp for refugees from Syria, the Middle East, and Africa, ethnographer Maaike Vledder observed how people, after painstakingly adapting to their environment – such as by planting herb gardens to prepare traditional dishes – were forcibly relocated to other areas, how they have additional groups crammed into their already crowded tents, creating unbearable overcrowding.19 In contrast, the camp staff buildings are usually separate, offering large, modern, air-conditioned spaces that stand in stark contrast to the vast expanses of makeshift homes constructed from sticks and canvas. Also, Maciej Ząbek illustrates how this symbolic, exclusionary violence is widely felt and gradually recognized. When white, air-conditioned, four-wheel-drive vehicles marked with UNHCR logos – equipped with satellite antennas and carrying staff to offices – speed down the camp’s pathways, they are often met with flying stones and hostile shouts. Similarly, in the Moria camp, the frustration and anger of refugees, driven by relentless overcrowding and the harsh system of surveillance and headcount, often turned into protests and acts of aggression. In September 2020, a fire broke out in the overcrowded camp on Lesbos, and as the destruction unfolded, cries of euphoria and destructive joy were heard from the camp’s own residents. As Maaike Vledder recounts, they shouted while striking plastic bottles: “Azadi, azadi, azadi, azadi! No camp, freedom! No camp, freedom! Azadi, azadi, azadi, azadi!”20 – “No camp!” “Freedom!” The word azadi in Farsi also carries the same meaning: freedom.

• 21 These are local, tribal laws, and the deliberations of the elders often conclude with rulings such (...)

23Elders’ courts, essentially a form of tribal councils, operate in large African refugee camps within the sectors of specific ethnic groups. These courts can impose brutal corporal punishment for violations of customary norms, such as abortion, alcohol consumption, intimate relationships, relationships with Christians, or apostasy.21

• 22 Such sudden displacement of people from their encampments in cities, often in the middle of the nig (...)

25They receive no support and exist as if outside the system. While they may seek work and help in the city, they are simultaneously stripped of their possessions and deceived by the authorities. Often, they are ordered to deposit their belongings in the desert and construct settlements from tarps and poles, only to be forcibly relocated overnight as their settlements are then bulldozed. Many are left nearly abandoned in the desert, where, deprived of warm clothing and shelter, they fall ill or even die from the cold.22

• 23 Die Brücke/The Bridge, Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, accessed January 20, 2023, https://politic (...)

27Moreover, as M’charek demonstrates, harraga is also a way of “expanding” the living space, as more family members often follow later. At the same time, it is terrifyingly dangerous: people from Tunisia’s southern coast almost daily collect objects, clothing, and shoes washed ashore by the waves. In one of her works, the author describes how a local resident collects and stores these items to raise awareness about what is happening around them and at sea. “Burning” borders, however, is essentially an act of expansion and extension, reflecting the aspirations and hopes for a better, successful life among those fleeing along Africa’s migration routes. In this context, on yet another level, the activist efforts in the Mediterranean Sea, along with critical and activist art responding to the horrific and unnecessary deaths at sea, become more comprehensible. In this instance, a project reflecting such a reaction – both critical and deliberately masquerading as a real initiative – was created by the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty).23 A few years ago, they presented a deceptively plausible and seemingly straightforward proposal in the form of a video illustrating the construction of a bridge connecting the coast of Tunisia with Sicily. The project's utility is announced with the accompaniment of triumphant music in a promo-like animated video, complete with EU and Austrian government funding logos, emphasizing its undeniable contribution to improving safety. Subsequent scenes showcase a system of a thousand rescue rafts anchored between Italy and Africa, equipped with communication systems, food, and water. This project, much like the “Europe, this way” inscription on the boulder by the sea, clearly amplifies the deadly risks of crossing into Europe, “burning” its borders, or, as in Morocco, attempting the “jump” over razor and wire fences that seem impossible to breach.

• 24 The “Jump,” as a mechanism transferred from a different world – the world of migrants, is at the co (...)
• 25 Magdalena Bojanowska, “Uczepili się płetwy sterowej tankowca i przedostali na Wyspy Kanaryjskie. Pł (...)

28Escape routes from the southern Sahara, the Sahel belt, the Nuba Mountains, Darfur, and West African countries have followed similar paths for decades. They are less an extraordinary reaction, like the refugee movements from the time of European wars. These migration routes are far from safe, and traversing them demands immense determination, often referred to in Rabat as “mental preparation” for the journey. It introduces entirely new meanings to the refugee journey, framing it more as a native, perpetual trap shaped by the surrounding environment and the powerful ideals of the backway endeavor, which one can at best attempt to escape through a “magic gate” (to borrow and amplify the words of Czesław Miłosz). Even the sign pointing toward Europe on the seashore, as described by M’charek, symbolizes this jump – one that effectively defies the logic of a world that could otherwise be seen as predictable. In Tunisia, the presence of this fake “grassroots” road sign is particularly significant. In the surrounding area, on the impoverished southern coast, the phrase “living beyond the road signs” is a synonym for ultimate exclusion and entrapment in an overcrowded, impoverished province. This “jump” into another world is thus always abrupt, demanding, and innovative, to borrow a term from a completely different context.24 It astonishes with its audacity, though it offers nothing resembling a happy ending. It is a reckless initiative, like the daring acts of groups of people climbing fences in Ceuta and Melilla, so that at least some might have a chance to make it through. At one point, Ząbek describes an incident at an airport in Eritrea, where a taxi driver, having been persuaded earlier, discreetly drives two men to a departing plane. They hide in the cargo hold but die after takeoff, thousands of kilometers above the ground. On another occasion, as recorded in various reports,25 three Nigerians in the port of Lagos clung to the underwater blade of a merchant ship and, likely taking refuge in the hold at times, traveled over the open sea for more than 4,000 kilometers, eventually reaching the port of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. This time, the daring individuals miraculously survived; severely dehydrated and hypothermic, they were taken to hospitals, though it remains unclear whether they stayed in Spain afterward.

• 26 See. e.g., an anthropological study of the development of humanitarian enterprises in Poland during (...)

29In the journeys and experiences of refugees amidst the vast web of African conflicts, it is difficult to find any trace of positive logic. The escape routes depicted in Ząbek’s book are marked by inertia and decades-long continuity – patterns of violence and flight that seem to have no end. Survival is the key to understanding the journey and the attempts to break through to a neighboring refugee camp, a neighboring country, and ultimately across the “sea” of the Sahara to the coast, and from there to Europe. The huge gap between the goals of aid and humanitarian policies and the actual conditions of life and survival evokes ambivalent feelings, including resentment toward non-governmental and humanitarian organizations.26 In the book on the ethnography of violence and suffering, there is a distinct critique of the humanitarian aid system – a critique that, at times, is difficult to disagree with.

• 27 Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (New York: (...)
• 28 Anna Hoss, “Nagie życie. Co różni pomoc od przemocy” [review of Ząbek, Uchodźcy w Afryce], Etnograf (...)
• 29 See Ząbek, Uchodźcy w Afryce, 446–449.

30It is a powerful critique of “dead aid,” much like the arguments in Dambisa Moyo’s book27 – a condemnation of the humanitarian care camp system, which operates like capitalist enterprises competing with each other. These camps employ sophisticated techniques of control and segregation, enforce exploitative management systems, and “cut costs” in areas where other care providers struggle to intervene. Anna Hoss expanded on this point in her review of Maciej Ząbek’s book,28 noting that even more critical perspectives on the humanitarian aid system emerge alongside such pointed interpretations. It is portrayed as a vast “humanitarian industry” and criticized for excluding the existence of suffering from the modern world, failing to recognize it as an inherent aspect of the social and lived world. In the author’s interpretation, it represents a vision rooted in modern or Enlightenment-era pretensions.29

• 30 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia Universi (...)
• 31 Narmala Halstead, “Experiencing the Ethnographic Present: Knowing through ‘Crisis’,” in Knowing How (...)

31This final statement, however, provokes in me an anthropological objection, as it leans toward a certain extremity, which seems to obscure the level of reflection and ethical debate that has been shaped within contemporary anthropology and post-war ethical discourse, grounded in the knowledge of the Holocaust and the two World Wars. This does not, however, alter the broader picture of suffering, violence, and the “jump,” “the ethnography of violence and suffering” present in the book and in subsequent ethnographies of escape, the conscious determination in Bachelet’s work, the burning of borders, and the systemic order of violence explored by M’charek. At the same time, this ethnography of escape routes – tragic for many yet still frequently traveled from Africa’s conflict zones – and the conflicts themselves starkly challenge the very possibility of creating a definitive account of zones of suffering and violence. These zones emerge regularly in specific locations, shifting politically and historically yet retaining continuity. It requires a different perspective and, in a sense, undermines anthropology’s task of documenting the world of actions, desires, relationships, political ambitions, and social conditions. What remains is merely a description and a kind of testimony, but at times it takes the form of an “ethnographic present,” that is, a timeless, ahistorical testimony, an atemporal depiction of socio-cultural systems. It is a record that, by employing the formula of an ahistorical present (or in a “safely” distant past), pushes aside what is happening in the here and now. It de facto separates the described world from political, social, or embodied experience. It ceases to be coeval and loses its agency and connection to the anthropologist who writes and observes.30 Surprisingly, this “present tense” proves adequate here, as it allows for description only. Moreover, it can also serve as an effective tool elsewhere and a form of continuous, transformative reflection, as demonstrated by Narmala Halstead.31 Furthermore, such an approach can be employed as a way to extend the experience of “presentness” within the research field. In this case, the closure of experiences is tied to their continuity and repetitiveness, their almost fearless nature. It takes the form of a “stalemate,” as depicted in Łukasz Skąpski’s project – a model of thoroughly modern, technologically advanced fences constructed with barbed and razor wire. This, then, is an anthropology that at times struggles to incorporate elements of change and political agency, uncovered and almost advocated by contemporary ethnographies.