The treatment of exiles is the great moral question and a major political issue of our time

Interview with Didier Fassin

Anthropologist, sociologist and physician Didier Fassin examines the value of humanlife and its unequal treatment in the contemporary world. He has carried out numerous investigations on three continents, focusing on health, justice, punishment and exile.
Invited in 2019 to the Collège de France's annual Public Health Chair, created in partnership with the national agency Santé publique France, this year he becomes holder of the Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies Chair.

You originally trained as a doctor. How did you come to study anthropology and the living conditions of Ecuadorian peasants, South African city-dwellers and French prisoners ?

Didier Fassin :As a young doctor, I had the opportunity to work in India, where I discovered two things that played a decisive role in the rest of my career :firstly, extreme poverty, which opened my eyes to social inequalities ; andsecondly, cultural differences, which led me to think about the question of otherness. But I remained frustrated with my clinical practice. As the only doctor in an institution dedicated to treating indigent patients, I treated them, but once they were better, they were put back out on the street. This is what first drew me to public health, a discipline which acts upstream of disease to prevent it, so as not to have to cure it, and which I practiced in Tunisia, developing screening and prevention programs for what was the leading cause of death among young people : heart disease due to rheumatic fever.
But neither clinical medicine nor public health allowed us to understand people's experience, who they were, what they did, and the mechanisms that produced disparities in life and death. In the social sciences, what fascinated me - and still does - was the in-depth understanding of individual histories and very different social worlds, from Indian women in rural Ecuador to AIDS sufferers in the townships of South Africa, from police officers in an anti-crime squad to inmates in a prison in France. Each time, I try to understand who they are, how they think, how they act and justify their actions, and the social environments in which they live.

A recurring theme in your work is human life. You approach it in its political, economic, moral and historical dimensions. What have you learned from studying life in these multiple dimensions ?

This theme is at the crossroads of my two professions. Doctors are interested in biological life, in the body and its dysfunctions ; anthropologists, in biographical life, in people's histories and the stories they tell. The thinking behind my work, particularly in the book La Vie. Mode d'emploi critique, lies at the intersection of the two, in order to understand life as a biological fact and a biographical event. This is what the philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem expressed through the two participles of the verb vivre : le vivant et le vécu.
What seems to me to be the most remarkable moral and political contradiction of contemporary societies concerns precisely this tension between the biological and the biographical. On the one hand, life, in the sense of being alive, is the most precious asset not only of individuals, but of society as a whole, particularly, but not only, in Western societies. Considerable resources are spent on protecting and prolonging it. But on the other hand, lives, in the sense of living, are evaluated according to status, wealth and nationality, with differences in life expectancy in France of thirteen years at birth between the poorest five percent and the wealthiest five percent.
Caricaturally, in the United States, some may defend life in the elementary form of the embryo and fetus, while showing indifference to the lives of members of ethno-racial minorities who are shot dead by law enforcement or exiles who seek asylum from mortal danger in their homeland. It's as if we were establishing a difference between life, in the singular, as an abstract reality, and lives, in the plural, as a concrete fact.
This contradiction was highlighted by the Covid pandemic. On the one hand, governments were able to halt almost all human activities, particularly economic ones, and to suspend a number of rights and freedoms, sometimes within the framework of states of emergency, for a single reason: to preserve life at all costs, essentially that of the elderly. But on the other hand, the infection flagrantly revealed inequalities in the face of disease and death, with the death rate of blacks and Indians in the USA three times higher than that of white people, while in the Île-de-France region, the excess of deaths in poor towns was also three times higher than in rich towns. A double unveiling, : the extreme value placed on human life and the huge disparities in its actual distribution.

Should we consider that the progressive vision of human life has been a form of regression ?

No, but the progress made, marked by an increase in average life expectancy - which is to be welcomed - has been very unevenly distributed. What's more, by focusing solely on the quantitative, i.e. biological, dimension of life expectancy, we run the risk of neglecting the qualitative, i.e. biographical, dimension of a good life. We need to look at disparities in the quantity of life, but also in the quality of life, which is not just about living in good health, which is what epidemiologists and economists are interested in, but also about living in dignified conditions, enjoying the consideration of society, fulfilling oneself as a person. This is what I tried to show in my opening lecture " The inequality of life ".
Today's debate on pensions focuses precisely on this question. What is at stake, with the increase in the retirement age and the number of years of service required for a full pension, is the injustice of imposing the same rules on everyone, regardless of working conditions and the average number of years left to live, according to social category and profession, with just a few marginal accommodations. The budgetary responses to these demands, which are disputed by most experts, fail to take account of this demand for fairness, which is also what philosopher Axel Honneth calls " a demand for recognition ".

You've been interested in moral issues and the discourses that justify societies' acceptance of good and evil. What prompted you to ask yourself these questions, which have been repeatedly addressed by philosophers ?

Philosophers have been thinking about morality for over two thousand years, and this thinking has been enriched and diversified over the last century. Jurists are also interested in morality, and codify it through principles and laws. Generally speaking, both think in normative terms. They ask what a good life is, on what basis an action can be said to be good or bad, just or unjust, and may even prescribe rules based on their analysis.
Historians, anthropologists and sociologists ask not how things should be, but how they actually are. To do this, they study societies, groups, institutions and individuals, and seek to understand how they concretely assess what is moral and what is not, and how they apply this assessment to their actions.
To give an example, on the question of retribution and punishment, philosophers and jurists ask, among other things, how one justifies punishing someone who has committed an offence. Some, heirs to Immanuel Kant, say that a criminal act should be punished simply for what it is, and if possible in a manner equivalent to the offence : in this case, the judge applies a scale of quantum of penalties. Others, inspired by Jeremy Bentham, assert that punishment should only be meted out insofar as the effects produced are beneficial to society : in this case, the judge asks whether or not the punishment reduces the risk of recidivism. Historians are more likely to ask how the response to an offence has evolved over time ; anthropologists, what are the ways of punishing in different societies ; sociologists, to what extent the justification for punishment varies according to the social class of the person to be punished. Their work is therefore descriptive, analytical and critical.
Another important distinction between philosophy and the social sciences, at least as I see them, is that I believe there is no such thing as morality per se. It may well exist in a doctrine or a catechism, but in society, moral questions emerge, often in connection with political issues - hence the title of my chair. The reality of penal practice - what an offence is, how it should be punished, to whom it should be applied - is based on moral presuppositions, but also depends on the political context.
This explains the punitive moment that France has been going through for several decades, and which is becoming even stronger today when most European countries are moving in the opposite direction. It therefore seems to me essential to study moral and political issues together. And to do so from a critical perspective, as I have been doing with a team of a dozen young researchers in a project supported by the European Research Council.

Your opening lecture at the Collège de France will focus on the social sciences in times of crisis. How can we think about crises, given that we are currently experiencing several (environmental, health, economic) ?

Greek etymology teaches us that the noun krisis has given us both " crisis " and " critique ". Indeed, historian Reinhart Koselleck has linked the crisis of the Ancien Régime to the emergence of critical thinking in the Enlightenment, with both terms taking on the meanings we know today. I therefore believe that the role of the social sciences at a time of crisis is precisely to assert their critical knowledge, including by questioning what we mean by " crisis ".
For example, what explains why certain situations are described as crises when they are not based on any objective element, such as the supposed migrant crisis that we continue to hear about in Europe even though the statistics contradict it ? Conversely, we are faced with critical situations that do not give rise to the evocation of a crisis, as in the case of prison inflation in France or the United States. To claim this critical knowledge, then, is to ask why the term " crisis " is used or not in discourse, and what actions follow from it.

Your lecture this year will focus on the question of exiles and borders. How can anthropology help us deal with this sensitive subject ?

The title of the lecture is " The trials of the border ". I believe that the treatment of exiles is the great moral question and a major political issue of our time. My lectures seek to shed light on this by showing how borders have been transformed in recent decades, extended, reinforced, externalized, internalized, and how exiles, many of whom flee all manner of threats at home, find themselves trapped in hostile policies that expose their lives and reduce them to degrading conditions in Europe, the USA, the Maghreb and the Middle East.
It hasn't always been this way. The case of asylum seekers is revealing. More than nine out of ten were granted refugee status by the end of the 1970s. At the time, the boat people in the China Sea were viewed with solicitude. A quarter of a century later, the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons granted asylum less than one in ten times. The thousands of men and women drowning in the Mediterranean every year no longer received the same attention. To understand this evolution, I proposed the concept of moral economy, i.e. the production, circulation and appropriation of values and emotions. With regard to asylum seekers, in the space of a few decades, French society has moved from a moral economy of compassion to a moral economy of suspicion.
The lecture is based on a survey conducted over the past five years with Anne-Claire Defossez on the border between Italy and France, where we have met exiles, volunteers, police officers and representatives of the public authorities. Ethnography is indeed an integral part of all my research. But I'm broadening my perspective to consider other regions of the world. Basically, the question is whether it is morally acceptable and politically defensible to treat in a hostile and often undignified manner people from countries of the South, with which our history, often colonial or imperial, is nevertheless linked.

Interview by Emmanuelle Picaud