TY - JOUR

T1 - Tangier heat

T2 - On migrant vulnerability and social thermology

AU - Richter, Line

AU - Vigh, Henrik

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - This article investigates a particular moment of political tension and intimidation of sub-Saharan migrants in Northern Morocco. Drawing on insights gained from collective fieldwork in Tangier, as well as from individual, longstanding ethnographic engagements with migrants from Guinea-Bissau and Mali, it describes the way West African migrants are policed, used as political capital and made the unwilling pawns of large-scale geopolitical negotiations. Targeted and intimidated as part of a diplomatic performance related to the bilateral dealings between Morocco and the European Union, their hardship is orchestrated to communicate the Moroccan state’s control of migration flows into the EU. The article clarifies the existential and social consequences of such staged persecution among migrants and elucidates how it is made sense of and managed through vernacular notions of ‘heat’, a metaphor for nonviable existence. As we shall see, such metaphors provide a window to a larger ‘social thermological’ register prevalent in making sense of precarious circumstance in both social life, social science and politics.

AB - This article investigates a particular moment of political tension and intimidation of sub-Saharan migrants in Northern Morocco. Drawing on insights gained from collective fieldwork in Tangier, as well as from individual, longstanding ethnographic engagements with migrants from Guinea-Bissau and Mali, it describes the way West African migrants are policed, used as political capital and made the unwilling pawns of large-scale geopolitical negotiations. Targeted and intimidated as part of a diplomatic performance related to the bilateral dealings between Morocco and the European Union, their hardship is orchestrated to communicate the Moroccan state’s control of migration flows into the EU. The article clarifies the existential and social consequences of such staged persecution among migrants and elucidates how it is made sense of and managed through vernacular notions of ‘heat’, a metaphor for nonviable existence. As we shall see, such metaphors provide a window to a larger ‘social thermological’ register prevalent in making sense of precarious circumstance in both social life, social science and politics.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - hot spots

KW - West Africa

KW - North Africa

KW - migration

KW - ethnographic criminology

KW - social thermology

U2 - 10.1177/14661381211069669

DO - 10.1177/14661381211069669

M3 - Journal article

JO - Ethnography

JF - Ethnography

SN - 1466-1381

ER -