22
Driven by experiences of racism, frustrated by the inability to communicate21, and
troubled by a deep sense of alienation and disillusionment, the African migrants I spoke
with sought solace and control by any means necessary. To achieve this they employed a
myriad practices and what can be described as adaptive cognitive schemata, including the
narrative phenomenon described above. The migrants I met were not victims of errant
emergence or contextual consequence, they must be thought of as creative individuals
capable of exercising a degree of agency. Desperation and penury can be crushing but
can also spur hope and ingenuity. While some migrants suffer from hunger and violence,
are incapacitated by illness, or self-destruct by becoming addicted to alcohol, drugs,
gambling, or any other means of slow suicide22, the rest involve themselves in flourishing
social networks and powerful, albeit informal and sometimes illegal, economies.
Here it is useful to examine the synergy between individual agents and the
undocumented migrant community, or the subjective agent and the collective (Biehl et al.
2007:17). The collective can be thought of as a matrix of intersubjective relationships
between individuals who have been socialized through communication and violence to
reciprocally recognize one another as a community. Jigo and his fellow undocumented
migrants share a number of key personal historical elements in terms of social space,
habitus, experiences of violence and narrative (Bourdieu 1977; 1998; Foucault 1977). On
the streets, these commonalities facilitate similar subjective production of knowledge,
communication between individuals, and ultimately, understanding within the group.
This mutual understanding leads to consensus, which in turn engenders a collective
rationality rooted in communication-based practical reason. This is the foundation of a
21 Very few undocumented migrants arrive in Greece knowing the language. However, even those who
pick it up are often ignored, silenced, and otherwise unable to communicate with local people.
22 This too might be seen to represent a form of escape or “moving on”.