as Lassana’s friend Dembele put it, “When you’re an aventurier, you’re nobody.” An almost identical proverb exists in Soninke: Tunwa nta danben tu, a na len siren ya tu, which Soninke linguist Abdoulaye Sow translates as “Our identity can be ignored in foreign lands, but not our courage.”63 Migrants leave their home and go into a new world where the status they grew up with (their lineage-based identity/dignity) means very little; what matters is their own hard work. This is why, as Whitehouse points out, they can take jobs that would otherwise be shameful. The proverb is a poetic concentration of the adventurer’s liminal logic, and of the notion that when they leave en aventure they leave the constraints of village structures behind. But their activities at the Gare du Nord suggest that they do seek both dignity and respect—not only jobs and material resources—through their time there. They hope to recover the masculine status and dignity denied by the police, their legal status, and their jobs. In this context, they suggest a new version of the proverb: Exile that lasts for decades may yet know dignity, if you have courage.
DWELLING IN MOTION
Most West African adventurers in France do not end up at the Gare du Nord, and given its reputation for attracting criminals and delinquents, many even look down at their brethren who do. Those who invest in the station are seeking a pathway to success and social relationships outside the scripts of French assimilation and kin expectations. By focusing their efforts on the Gare du Nord, they cultivate an alternative version of integration into French public space. They sought to meet passengers coming from afar on high-speed trains and to form friendships with other adventurers. As in the social clubs (grins) of urban West Africa, they were not brothers but equals who met to chat and drink tea, sometimes developing strong social obligations of solidarity.64 Lassana and his peers even developed a particular way of interacting with the police. Their practices—whether economic, social, romantic, or a combination of all of those—involved making connections across the station’s many social boundaries, and their strategies stressed the importance of building horizontal networks and relationships more than they focused on gaining the rights of citizenship from the French state.
Those horizontal relationships and networks suggest that integration (contrary to French rhetoric on the subject) is not opposed 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
