Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman
to community, mobility, and ties to elsewhere. Adventurers at the Gare du Nord delve into French urban life—at the center, not on the sidelines—because they believe that full experience abroad is what will allow for self-realization and for the reproduction of their agrarian communities. The notion of settlement as a goal does not make sense to them; meaningful integration instead ought to create opportunities for mobility and personal growth. They are not simply “economic migrants”; they are also explorers seeking knowledge in faraway lands.
What if, adventurers ask, integration did not entail settlement? Could there be a more just model of integration based on a more mobile worldview? Instead of thinking through migration from the endpoint of settlement, we might instead see it through what Catherine Besteman calls “emplacement”—the many ways that migrants experience and engage with places where they live. Emplacement here is a form of belonging that diverges from the official paths of assimilation offered by state programs and laws.65 Through emplacement, migrants form communities and make their mark on their dwelling places, which can also become important loci of political claim-making.66 Unlike neighborhoods and immigrant dormitories, emplacement at the Gare du Nord has a direct connection with mobility. Emplacement in this context engages with transportation infrastructure—the channels and pathways that meet at the station. By staying put and practicing emplacement in a space meant for circulation, adventurers also challenge the prevailing logic of how the station is managed and policed. They dwell there, create networks, and try to produce value, but they do not settle. This dwelling-in-motion is rich in narrative: adventure stories are told and retold at the station, and become circulating tales that provoke debate and discussion over how migrants in France ought to act, work, and respond to hardship. By tracing adventurer strategies and pathways at the Gare du Nord, I examine how migrants make emplacement and mutual belonging through a public space designed for transience and anonymity.67
MOBILITY AND FIELDWORK
My work with adventurers like Lassana and many of his friends whom I met during the years I spent researching pushed me to look beyond the media spectacles surrounding the station in the 2000s and to consider the longer history of the Gare du Nord. To understand their lives and what drew them to the station, I had to understand this complex space that hundreds of thousands of people passed through each day, a space whose history as France’s largest international train station offered a crucial window into ways that ideas about racial and cultural difference had been built into French public spaces.
Carrying out an ethnography of a major transportation hub has some methodological challenges, and I experimented with approaches from urban studies, anthropology, cultural history, and geography. I needed some guiding lights of my own as I joined adventurers at the station. The corpus of urban anthropologist Setha Low offered a multifaceted approach to doing ethnography in complex public spaces, and Low illustrates how to balance political economic critique without losing the texture of lived experience and emotional attachments.68
Paul Stoller’s ethnography of West African traders, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City has provided a model of what the transnational ethnography of migrant experience in urban space can contribute to our understanding of global economic transformations. Focusing on the trajectories of a small number of migrants reveals, as Stoller puts it, “how macrosociological forces twist and turn the economic and emotional lives of real people.”69 I build on Stoller’s approach by examining the longer history of the Gare du Nord, seeing this site as a prism reflecting not only the migrant experience but also state projects of ordering and policing difference. The station itself offers the methodological object from which I have built this ethnography outward to answer the question: What does migration, urban space, and integration look like from the view from the tracks, from the perspective of the Gare du Nord?
The second inspiration is Lassana himself, his story, and his commitment to this project. I have tried to do justice to his story and analysis, in the process documenting how an adventurer confronts the precarious realities of contemporary migration while negotiating his own coming of age. This approach recalls the life history method, well established in African studies, that privileges narrative depth in order to show how individuals imagine and build their worlds under a set of historical conditions and constraints.70 The innovative work on life course by anthropologists Jennifer Cole and George Meiu (among others) offers a framework to consider the continued importance of social and kin relations in changing conditions.71 In following Lassana’s adventure, I also take my methodological cue from West African modes of imagining life pathways, where aspirations for living a dignified life in tough circumstances lead to the invention of new strategies.72
Adventure Capital is based on eighteen months of intensive fieldwork in Paris between 2009 and 2011, as well as several visits between 2012 and 2018 that allowed me to follow up with the people I worked with and track changes at the station. As Peter Redfield observed, ethnographers often have more in common with Claude Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur than with the engineer: fieldwork unfolds through improvisation with available materials rather than via engineered design.73 “The subway corridors,” Marc Augé suggests in In the Metro, “ought to provide a good ‘turf’ for the apprentice ethnologist,” but only if she dispenses with classical methods of interview and survey, and instead is able to observe, follow, and listen.74 I followed these improvisational approaches as I traced the many threads that led to and from the station, going where they took me instead of defining a particular (national or ethnic) group in advance. Ethnographers can learn from adventurers, as I did. I became an apprentice to the Gare du Nord method—learning to use encounters across difference to build networks and create value in a transit hub. They taught me to observe people, to discern what encounters were worthwhile, and to make new channels connecting places, displacing commonsense ways of seeing the world. They stress the importance of knowing the past from several angles, and were invested in uncovering the history of the Gare du Nord. To this end, I examined tribunal records and blueprints from the Paris Municipal Archives, North Railway Company correspondence and meeting minutes from the National Labor Archives, and blueprints and directives from Haussmann-led Paris in the National Archives.
I spent most of my fieldwork hanging out around the station and talking to a changing group of about thirty-five West African men who ranged in age from nineteen to thirty-two, and who strolled, talked, sat, and observed together in the front square and in cafés around the neighborhood. Most of these men had been in France between three and twelve years, and about half of them were undocumented, while most of the others had recently obtained resident permits. The majority came from the western Kayes region of Mali and its adjoining areas across the borders in Senegal and Mauritania, while a few others came from Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea. They spoke a mix of French, Pulaar, and several Mande languages (Soninke, Jula, Bamanakan, and Khassonke) among themselves. Almost all identified as practicing Muslims and, with the exception of the Ivoirians, they had attended Qur’anic schools and did not speak French when they arrived. They worked in subcontracted and temporary labor jobs in construction, cleaning, and food service. In the summer of 2010, I spent two months as an SNCF intern on the high-speed lines, and accompanied railway police on their patrols, offering another perspective of what it meant to see through the lens of the Gare du Nord, and to understand how adventurers were represented and imagined by station workers.
A few caveats: The population of a major city passes through the Gare du Nord each day, and this book does not attempt to offer a picture of its totality. I made the choice to seek in-depth knowledge in order to offer the “thick description” that distinguishes meaningful ethnography, even in our “multi-sited” age of mobility.75 Most of the subjects in this book are West African men, in part because French policies and policing have a particular impact on them.76 Like the adventurers documented here, West African women are also struggling to make their own pathways toward integration—just not through the Gare du Nord.77 I also sought to explore the way that West Africans adventurers see and create a world in the station. This called for time and resources to explore all facets of their lives, including in some cases going back to their villages and meeting their families. It was after I returned from Mali and Senegal that I began to understand what was happening at the station.
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