Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe, by Apostolos Andrikopoulos (The University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Reviewed by Elsemieke van Osch, KU Leuven

Argonauts of West Africa starts with an intimate description of the Greek Eleni and her Nigerian husband Joshua in their apartment in Amsterdam, as they discuss a mutual friend’s brother and his opportunities for moving across borders with someone else’s identity documents, a practice Nigerian migrants call ori olori (p.1). It describes the involvement of friends and kin, and their financial resources as well as networks, in negotiating access to documents and mobility. This introductory vignette is exemplary in demonstrating the most valuable contribution of the book: describing the complex articulations between (performed) kinship and stringent migration regimes, from a uniquely close ethnographic perspective.

Andrikopoulos provides detailed insight in the everyday lives of West African migrants and their intimate others, both in their lives in Amsterdam, as well as across multiple borders. Starting from fieldwork in both a fast-food restaurant, and an African church, the author presents in-depth descriptions of his participants’ navigations to enter and legally reside in Europe. Building on recent work by Horton on “bureaucratic inscriptions” (2020), Andrikopoulos approaches the interplay between kinship and migration through the prism of documents: as the material, tangible artefacts of the state that are at the centre of his participants’ struggle to access to mobility, legal status and employment. The lens of kinship is brought into this by taking a specific focus on the complex social relations of trust and reciprocity that evolve around these material artefacts.

Evident by its playful alteration of Malinowski’s work – Argonauts of the Western Pacific – the book seeks to enrich classical theorizations of exchange and kinship in anthropology. The central argument claims that, to circumvent restrictive migration policies, border controls and inequalities they generate, migrants mobilize and produce new forms of kinship – most notably siblinghood and marriage – that are characterised by reciprocity, trust and solidarity. In doing so, the book challenges long-held assumptions in anthropological literature on kinship: namely that the modern state-system and the capitalist market would render (traditional) kinship irrelevant.

The book is built around an Introduction (chapter 1), four empirical chapters (chapters 2-5) and a Conclusion. While the empirical chapters cover a broad parcel of themes and ethnographic foci (e.g. counterfeit travel documents, “borrowing” of ID cards, marriages in context of legal precarity), the various themes are aptly brought together in the Introduction, where the author guides us through his argument and frames the different chapters within historical debates of anthropology of kinship, as well as contemporary scholarship on citizenship and mobility.

Chapter 2 (on cross-border mobility) and 3 (on identity loan for employment) elaborate the concept of “unauthorized identity craft” to describe the ways in which migrants craft “multiple and intersecting relations with persons, objects, states, and their institutions” (p.6) to access identity documents that come to be assessed as “legitimate” by state agents. This deconstructive approach underlines the truly performative understanding of documents – e.g. how authenticity is not a ‘quality’, but made through a set of interactions – as well as destabilizes hegemonic, state-centred categories of “authentic” versus  “fraud” documents. Andrikopoulos claims that, in a contexts of power imbalance between document owners and lenders, migrants draw upon moral codes of siblinghood (e.g. trust, reciprocity), which they affirm in register (e.g. “my brother”). These relationalities must, according to the author, be understood as new forms of kinship.

While chapter 2 and 3 looked at the relationalities in terms of siblinghood, chapter 4 and 5 shift focus to marriages. the author brings an extremely meaningful contribution to scholarly literature on the politics of marriage migration: by presenting nuanced life stories that testify how love, sex and instrumentalism (e.g. “getting papers”) become conflated in affective relationships forged in a context of inequalities, he dismisses the binary opposition between marriages based on “love” versus “sham marriages” in which migration politics are grounded. Through a rejection of the normative ideal of marriage as only genuine in the absence of instrumental motives, (p.151), the author complexifies the relationalities that emerge as people live with the effects of tightened border controls and decreased opportunities for legal status.

By taking a particular place as its analytical starting point, namely the “black neighbourhood” (p.26) Bijlmer in Amsterdam, the book makes two contributions to previous scholarship. Firstly, the book traces how structural changes in migration policies over time produce very real social practices in this particular place. The author describes how the tightening of family reunification through marriage with Dutch citizens, led to fewer marriages and fewer forms of exchange between West Africans and Dutch Afro-Caribbeans in Amsterdam. At the same time, the expansion of the EU implied that new groups of Eastern and Southern European migrants (e.g. Polish, Greek) settled there, which negatively affected the labour market position of West African with “borrowed” documents. Simultaneously, this forged new forms of interactions, including intimate relationships that opened opportunities for legalization through marriage with these new EU-citizens. Yet, I wonder whether these changing relationalities should be conceptualized as kinship, which brings me to the second point.

Secondly, while most scholarship on new kinning processes in migratory contexts have focussed on changing transnational kin relations, Andrikopoulos brings a fresh perspective on “new kinning processes” in migration, by focussing on new relationalities emerging in proximity, where people develop a sense of solidarity through similar experiences of (civic) exclusion. Yet, I do wonder whether these extremely variable practices of care, exchange and socialization could be considered “kinship-by-doing” (Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak, 2020). Does this not make the concept too broad, too all-encompassing – including all possible relationalities – that it loses its analytical value? Where does kinship end? What makes kinship specific? Although I find it a convincing argument that relationalities take on new forms and articulate new meanings in light of the inequalities and challenges posed by repressive migration politics, these questions merit further reflection.

Lastly, at various instances throughout the book, the reader is swiftly invited to a glimpse of the positionality of the ethnographer and the complex webs of relations and reciprocities surrounding him. Nevertheless, I would have appreciated more elaboration on the ethics of intimate research in a context of legal precarity, as well as on disclosing forms of struggle and resistance, that already are so limited for those confronting stringent mobility regimes. A more reflexive approach might do better justice to the ethnographic intimacies described in the book.

Overall, I consider the book a relevant, accessible piece of work for sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of migration. I appreciate how Andrikopoulos provides us with a glimpse of the everyday lives of West African migrants, to argue that people find new, innovative ways to establish meaningful relations in a context of borders and civic inequalities.

References

Andrikopoulos, A., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2020). “Migration, Mobility and the Dynamics of Kinship: New Barriers, New Assemblages. Ethnography,” 21(3), 299-318. Horton, S. 2020. “Introduction. Paper Trails: Migrants, Bureaucratic Inscription, and Legal Recognition.” In Paper Trails: Migrants, Documents, and Legal Insecurity, edited by S. Horton and J. Heyman, 1–30. Durham: Duke University Press.