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 GLOBAL ETHICS SERIES
S e r i e s E d i t o r : C h r i s t i e n va n d e n A n k e r

AFTER DEPORTATION
ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES

EDITED BY

SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI
 Global Ethics

Series Editor
Christien van den Anker
Department of Politics
University of the West of England
Bristol, UK
Global Ethics as a field builds on traditions of ethical reflection about
(global) society and discusses ethical approaches to global issues. These
include but are not limited to issues highlighted by the process of glo-
balisation (in the widest sense) and increasing multiculturalism. They
also engage with migration, the environment, poverty and inequality,
peace and conflict, human rights, global citizenship, social movements,
and global governance. Despite fluid boundaries between fields, Global
Ethics can be clearly marked out by its multidisciplinary approach, its
interest in a strong link between theory, policy and practice and its inclu-
sion of a range of work from strictly normative to more empirical. Books
in this series provide a specific normative approach, a taxonomy, or an
ethical position on a specific issue in Global Ethics through empirical
work. They explicitly engage with Global Ethics as a field and position
themselves in regard to existing debates even when outlining more local
approaches or issues. The Global Ethics series has been designed to reach
beyond a liberal cosmopolitan agenda and engage with contextualism as
well as structural analyses of injustice in current global politics and its
disciplining discourses.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15010
 Shahram Khosravi
Editor

After Deportation
Ethnographic Perspectives
Editor
Shahram Khosravi
Department of Social Anthropology
Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden

Global Ethics
ISBN 978-3-319-57266-6 ISBN 978-3-319-57267-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57267-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944109

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Carleen van den Anker

Cover design: Jenny Vong

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to the contributors for sharing their work in

this book. I am also grateful to Christien van den Anker for her gen-
erosity and intellectual engagement. I thank my editor Anne Schult at
Palgrave Macmillan who helped me as I made the final push to get this
book done. Thank you the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social
Research for financial support.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Shahram Khosravi

2 Fieldnotes from Cape Verde: On Deported Youth,

Research Methods, and Social Change 15
Ines Hasselberg

3 Starting Again: Life After Deportation from the UK 37

Sarah Turnbull

4 Helping Women Prepare for Removal: The Case of

Jamaica 63
Alice Gerlach

5 Back from “the Other Side”: The Post-deportee Life of

Nigerian Migrant Sex Workers 81
Sine Plambech

6 Paying to Go: Deportability as Development 105

Michael Collyer

vii
viii Contents

7 Deportees Lost at “Home”: Post-deportation Outcomes

in Afghanistan 127
Nassim Majidi

8 “My Whole Life is in the USA:” Dominican Deportees’

Experiences of Isolation, Precarity, and Resilience 149
Tanya Golash-Boza and Yajaira Ceciliano Navarro

9 Making It as a Deportee: Transnational Survival in the

Dominican Republic 169
Evin Rodkey

10 Post-Deportation Movements: Forms and Conditions of

the Struggle Amongst Self-Organising Expelled Migrants
in Mali and Togo 187
Clara Lecadet

11 Ripples Across the Pacific: Cycles of Risk and Exclusion

Following Criminal Deportation to Samoa 205
Leanne Weber and Rebecca Powell

12 “Non-admitted”: Migration-Related Detention of

Forcibly Returned Citizens in Cameroon 231
Maybritt Jill Alpes

13 Afterword. Deportation: The Last Word? 253

Nicholas De Genova

Index 267
 Editor and Contributors

About the Editor

Shahram Khosravi is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm

University in Sweden and the author of Young and Defiant in Tehran,
University of Pennsylvania Press (2008); The Illegal Traveler: An Auto-
Ethnography of Borders, Palgrave (2010); and Precarious Lives: Waiting
and Hope in Iran, University of Pennsylvania Press (2017). He has been
an active writer in the Swedish press and has also written fiction.

Contributors

Maybritt Jill Alpes works as Senior Policy Officer on deportations at

Amnesty Netherlands, and as a researcher at the University of Utrecht on
the EU Turkey deal. She is the author of Abroad at any cost: Brokering
High-risk migration and illegality in West Africa and has been publish-
ing in international journals, such as Africa, Social and Legal Studies,
POLAR, and Identities, on topics spanning from exploitative labour
migration, the intersection of migration control and social protection, to
marriage migration, and the work of migration brokers, consulate offices,
and airport staff.
Michael Collyer is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex,
UK. His most recent book is Migration, Routledge (2017, with Michael
Samers). During the 2012/2013 academic year he held a Fulbright

ix
x Editor and Contributors

scholarship in the Department of Geography at the University of

Washington, Seattle. He has held other visiting positions at Universities
in Egypt, France, Morocco, New Zealand and Sri Lanka. He is on the
steering committee of Sanctuary on Sea, Brighton’s City of Sanctuary
group, an umbrella organisation for refugee and migrant commu-
nity support groups in the city. At the national level he is an academic
member of the Independent Advisory Group on Country of Origin
Information, part of the office of the UK’s Chief Inspector of Borders
and Immigration. He is also a member of the UK Department for
International Development’s External Reference Group on Migration.
Internationally, he regularly undertakes research or analytical work in
collaboration with the UNHCR, IOM, various sections of the European
Union and International NGOs amongst other organisations.
Nicholas De Genova is currently on sabbatical in Chicago. Most
recently, he held a permanent appointment as Reader in Urban
Geography and Director of the Spatial Politics research group at King’s
College London. He previously held teaching appointments at Stanford,
Columbia, and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as visiting pro-
fessorships or research positions at the Universities of Amsterdam, Bern,
Chicago, and Warwick. He is the author of Working the Boundaries:
Race, Space, and “llegality” in Mexican Chicago (2005), co-author of
Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and
Citizenship (2003), editor of Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians
Remaking the United States (2006), and co-editor of The Deportation
Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (2010). He
has also edited a new book on The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of
Migration, Tactics of Bordering, Duke University Press (in press, August
2017).
Alice Gerlach received her B.Sc. Arts (Social Ecology/Psychology) at
the University of Tasmania. She is working towards her collaboratively
funded ESRC-HMIP DPhil at the Centre for Criminology, University of
Oxford. Alice is a member of the Border Criminologies Group, and has a
background in the detention estate, including immigration removal cen-
tres, working as a researcher for HM Inspectorate of Prisons in the UK.
Tanya Golash-Boza is a Professor of Sociology at the University
of California, Merced. She has published five books and 35 articles
and book chapters. Her latest book Deported: Immigrant Policing,
 Editor and Contributors xi

Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism (NYU 2016) was awarded the
Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award from the Latino/a
Studies Section of the American Sociological Association.
Ines Hasselberg is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for
Criminology, University of Oxford, UK. She has conducted extensive
research on deportation, punishment, prisons, family life, and migrant
surveillance. She is the author of Enduring Uncertainty. Deportation,
Punishment and Everyday Life, Berghahn (2016) and co-editor of
Deportation, Anxiety, Justice: New Ethnographic Perspectives, Routledge
(2016).
Clara Lecadet is a researcher at the French National Committee for
Scientific Research and a member of the Institut Interdisciplinaire
d’Anthropologie du Contemporain at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her research focuses on the emergence of
expelled migrants’ protest movements in Mali and other African coun-
tries, and on the various forms of organisation used by expelled migrants
during the post-deportation period. She co-edited with Michel Agier Un
monde de camps, La Découverte (2014) and is the author of the book
Le manifeste des expulsés. Errance, survie et politique au Mali, Presses
Universitaires François Rabelais (2016). She is currently working with
Jean-Frédéric de Hasque on an edited volume entitled Après les camps.
Traces, mémoires et mutations des camps de réfugiés, Acemeia, coll.
Anthropologies prospective (forthcoming).
Nassim Majidi is an Affiliate Researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre for
International Studies (CERI) and Research Associate at the African
Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of the
Witwatersrand, South Africa, specialising in return migration. She
teaches a graduate course on Refugees and Migration as part of Sciences
Po Lille’s Conflict and Development Programme. Nassim is the
Co-Founder and Co-Director of Samuel Hall, a think-tank of the Global
South, where she leads evidence-based research and policy development
on migration. Her cross-cutting skills have led her to interview refugees,
migrants and returnees in border areas, conflict settings, countries of ori-
gin and transit. She has developed strategic programmes, national poli-
cies on migration, and monitoring reviews that have had a lasting impact.
Nassim was nominated in 2015 by the Norwegian Refugee Council
for the Nansen Refugee Award for her work on behalf of Afghanistan’s
xii Editor and Contributors

displaced population. Nassim holds a B.A., in Government from Cornell

University, a Summa Cum Laude Masters in International Affairs and
Development Studies, and a PhD in International Relations from
Sciences Po Paris.
Yajaira Ceciliano Navarro graduated with a master’s degree in Labour
Psychology from the University of Costa Rica. She worked at Academic
Latin American Faculty (FLACSO) in Costa Rica, from 2003–2015,
where she was involved in various Latin and Central American projects,
linked to social integration, immigration, education, youth, and gender.
She has published on gender, social dialogue, and youth. She is currently
a graduate student in Sociology at the University of California, Merced,
working on understanding labour reintegration of deportees from the
USA to nations in Latin America.
Sine Plambech is a social anthropologist and postdoctoral Research
Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) and
formerly Research Fellow at Columbia University in New York, USA.
Recipient of the Danish Research Council’s prestigious Elite Research
Sapere Aude Award in 2016, she conducts fieldwork in Nigeria and
Thailand on the topic of human trafficking, sex work migration, and
marriage migration to the European Union.
Rebecca Powell is the Managing-Director of the Border Crossing
Observatory at Monash University in Australia. She also works as a
researcher on a number of the border crossing research projects hosted
by the Observatory. She is currently completing a PhD by publications
titled ‘I still call Australia home’: The deportation of convicted non-citizens
from Australia and the impact of policy and practice from a criminological
perspective.
Evin Rodkey is Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at Casper
College in Casper, Wyoming, USA. Prior to coming to Casper College
in 2015 he taught broadly as an adjunct instructor in the Chicago area,
where he completed a doctorate in anthropology at the University of
Illinois at Chicago.
Sarah Turnbull is a Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law,
Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Before joining Birkbeck, she was
a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Criminology, University
of Oxford, where she undertook a study of immigration detention and
 Editor and Contributors xiii

deportation in the United Kingdom. Sarah is the author of Parole in

Canada: Gender and Diversity in the Federal System, UBC Press (2016)
and has published in journals such as Punishment & Society, Criminology
& Criminal Justice, British Journal of Criminology, and Canadian
Journal of Law & Society.
Leanne Weber is Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the
School of Social Sciences at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
She researches border control using criminological and human rights
frameworks. Her books include The Routledge International Handbook
on Criminology and Human Rights, 2016 (with Fishwick and Marmo),
Policing Non-Citizens, 2013 (Routledge) and Globalization and Borders:
Death at the Global Frontier, 2011 (Palgrave, with Pickering).
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Shahram Khosravi

Throughout my fieldwork among people who have been deported to

Afghanistan, a term coming back in conversations has been bi sarneveshti,
which literally means lacking destiny, or condition of destinylessness.
The term expresses a feeling of uncertainty, suspension, and purpose-
lessness, many experience after deportation. The term “destiny” coming
from Latin is the root of the term “destination.” For many deportees the
sense of lacking destiny is intertwined with lacking destination. A feeling
of being lost is recurrent in the testimonies by deportees throughout all
chapters in this book.
This book is about what happens to people after deportation.
Deportation studies have increased drastically since the early 2000s;
almost a decade after migration had been increasingly criminalised.
Deportation studies started to grow at the same time as migration
regimes increasingly adopted an approach based on “penality,” i.e.,
physical sanctions targeting non-nationals, manifested in detention and
deportation, producing a general condition of “migrant illegality” and
“deportability” (De Genova 2002).
Although there has been a growing literature on detention and depor-
tation, academic research on what happens after deportation is scarce.

S. Khosravi (*)
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. Khosravi (ed.), After Deportation, Global Ethics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57267-3_1
2 S. Khosravi

The limits of deportation studies have often coincided with the national
borders of the deporting countries. There is a risk that lack of atten-
tion towards what happens after deportation would naturalise and rein-
force the idea of nation-states,—what has been called “methodological
nationalism.” The body of literature—at least published in English—on
what happens after deportation is small but nascent (e.g., Boehm 2016;
Collyer 2012; Coutin 2016; Galvin 2015; Golash-Boza 2015; Hiemstra
2012; Schuster and Majidi 2013). This edited volume, covering geo-
graphical variety and with significant theoretical and empirical findings,
aims to contribute to this new, but growing, research field.

Spatial and Temporal Stretching of Abandonment

Natalie Peutz’s (2006) call for an anthropology of removal has been
a call for approaching deportation not as a simple and single reloca-
tion of a person from deporting country to the country of citizenship
but rather as a process that spans long periods of time and geographical
areas. Deportation involves a variety of people and institutions, depor-
tees, their families and communities (Hasselberg this volume), and a set
of economic relations (Walters 2016). Rather than a divided process in
pre- and post-deportation, we see a spatial and temporal stretching of
expulsion, from the condition of deportability in the host country to the
“estranged citizenship” in the country of origin. The experience of many
deportees is “double abandonment” (Lecadet 2013), expelled from one
country and outcast in another. Like the condition of undocumented-
ness, social abandonment after deportation produces a “certain form of
spatial and temporal distribution of possibilities” (Keshavarz 2016, p.
263). Deportation engenders an abject social status, a position in the
society, formed by practices that continue long after the forced removal.
Deportation and its outcomes, thus, stretch over several countries and
over a longer period. Financial hardship, facing discrimination in the
labour and housing market, stigmatisation, lack of access to social ser-
vices and sometimes even protection, and cultural estrangement are usual
difficulties with which deportees struggle.
The degree of success in becoming socially embedded in society after
deportation (Ruben et al. 2009) depends on intersections of several fac-
tors, such as class, gender, age, and ethnicity. Social groups who gener-
ally experience a high degree of discrimination, such as ethnic minorities
(see Khosravi 2016) and women (see de Regt and Tafesse 2015), face
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

many more challenges to reach a state of embeddedness after deporta-

tion than other groups. Similarly, age is of significance as well. Younger
deportees, who have spent their formative years in the country they were
deported from, have more difficulty to establish networks and to find
their place in the society. Not unusually, those who grew up in the host
country do not even master the language, assumed to be their “mother
tongue.” Furthermore, a gap between their education prior to deporta-
tion and the education system in the country they are deported to pre-
vents them from moving forward. Likewise, skills they have obtained are
not always relevant and educational certificates, if available at all, are not
always translatable or recognised and, therefore, may not be useful after
deportation (RSN 2016).
Furthermore, as chapters in this volume show, deportation gener-
ally affects both the deportees and the receiving communities negatively.
Remittances, i.e., the source of livelihood for many poor families, vanish.
Moreover, deportees find themselves in societies that are already struggling
with high rates of unemployment, social insecurity, political instability, and,
in some cases, with internal displacement. This may have been part of the
context in which they or their family decided to leave in the first place.
Part of the condition of “estranged citizenship” is disrecognition of
deportees’ citizenship. In some cases deportees have even difficulties
to obtain ID cards in the countries they are citizens of. For instance,
the majority of young Afghans deported from European countries to
Afghanistan were born and grew up in Iran or Pakistan. Subsequently,
it is not unusual that they are denied Afghan national ID cards, para-
doxically, by the same state that let them be deported to Afghanistan as
Afghan nationals. In other cases, the authorities stamp signs on ID cards
of deportees, which consequently would lead to easily identifying them
and thereby excluding them from labour and housing markets.
Furthermore, the hyper-visibility of deportees, tattoos, foreign
clothing styles and body movements, accents, or their signed ID cards
make them easy targets of police harassment. As several of the chap-
ters in this volume show (e.g., Weber and Powell; Rodkey) deportees
are often scapegoats for worsening crime and other social problems
(see Kanstroom 2012). Deportees are a stigmatised group because they
are seen as criminal, failed in the migratory project (Plambech this vol-
ume) and “culturally contaminated” (Hasselberg this volume; RSN
2016; Schuster and Majidi 2013). Post-deportation stigma is gendered.
4 S. Khosravi

Labelling and stigmatisation of women is documented in several chap-

ters. However, men also experience a gendered stigma while unable to
be provider for their families (Golash-Boza 2013; Turnbull this volume).
With marked bodies, deportees find themselves isolated in the commu-
nity supposed to be their “home.” They hide themselves or try to pass
as non-deportees for instance by “keeping up appearances” (Gerlach this
volume). The condition of social abandonment is experienced by being
regarded as both “failed citizen” and “failed migrant” before and after
deportation.
Deportees in their country of citizenship are turned into denizens
with limited access to their citizenship rights. As several chapters in this
volume show, while stigmatised as deportee, people’s rights can be sus-
pended, rejected, delayed, and denied. They are left vulnerable not only
to the violence of the state, but also to the violence of ordinary citi-
zens. Individuals may be in even more danger after the deportation than
before, particularly in countries where seeking asylum or, as Alpes (this
volume) shows, “none-admissibility” in the Global North is itself a pun-
ishable offence. This is how the condition of post-deportation character-
ised by fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and insecurity, resembles the condition
of undocumentedness prior to the deportation.

Neoliberal Deportation
As several scholars have argued, deportation has become a crucial strat-
egy for contemporary neoliberal capitalism (Andrijasevic and Walters
2010; De Genova 2002; Golash-Boza 2015). Deportation has been inte-
grated into the neoliberal policies of social abandonment, that expose
vulnerable groups to multiple expulsions from communities, the labour
market, the housing market, the spheres of security, the health care sys-
tem, the education system, and state protection. Without reducing
deportation merely to the logic of neoliberalism, however, making visible
that deportation is an instrument of neoliberalism, provides a perspective
that helps us to clearly understand the current regime of deportation (see
Andrijasevic and Walter 2010).
As the essays in this collection show, deportation means the with-
drawal of the state, as provider of services and protection, both in the
host country and the country of citizenship, while at the same time a
moralising and “responsibilising” project aims to turn deportees into
responsible, risk-taking, entrepreneurial, and ethical subjects. One
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

deportation technique is to make deportees believe that they have con-

trol over their lives before and after deportation.
The deportee is regarded simultaneously both as a child unable to
understand what is in his or her interest and as an adult responsible for
his or her deeds and choices (Khosravi 2009). The adjective “voluntary”
in relation to return/deportation shows the contradiction very well. As
Andrijasevic and Walters (2010, p. 993) show, “voluntary” seems to
designate in reality an absence of viable options rather than a deliberate
choice. This self-governing aspect of deportation is a salient feature of
neoliberalism (Golash-Boza 2015). The neoliberal moralising and edu-
cative feature of deportation can be seen in the etymology of the word
deport, derived from Old French, and have same root as deportment
meaning “to behave, to carry or conduct oneself well.” The pedagogi-
cal aspect of deportation is shown in several chapters. For instance Sine
Plambech (this volume) demonstrates how women in her field study,
in order to get financial assistance from the Assisted Voluntary Return
and Reintegration (AVRR) programme, attempt to perform “the good
deportee”, i.e., an entrepreneurial subject who is capable of self-man-
agement and self-development—the ideal neoliberal subject. Likewise,
for Dominican deportees, a letter of good conduct (carta de buena con-
ducta) is a prerequisite for gaining access to the labour market (Golash-
Boza and Ceciliano this volume).
Neoliberal economic rationalisation has become increasingly incor-
porated in deportation logic, for instance through using economic
incentives to turn a failed asylum seeker in the host country into a
prospective business owner in the country of citizenship. Moreover,
“management” of deportation has been conducted more and more
in collaboration between governments, private companies, Non-
Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and development agencies
(Collyer this volume).
The observations made in this book are in line with Golash-Boza’s
argument (2015) that the emergence of the age of deportation is a
consequence of the neoliberal cycle of global capitalism. She sees mass
deportation as a part of the policy of controlling the surplus labour,
interconnected with outsourcing, the privatisation of society, and with-
drawal of the state. The neoliberal turn goes hand in hand with a sys-
tem of global Apartheid that intends to sustain the class-based and
racialised separation between those with the right to free mobility and
those exposed to forced immobility. One function of deportation is to
6 S. Khosravi

keep two worlds separated from each other. One cosmopolitan, a world
of surplus rights of mobility, and the other one a world of checkpoints,
borders, queues, gates, detentions, and removal.
The condition of deportability renders migrant workers to be a “dis-
tinctly disposable commodity” and creates a flexible and docile labour
force (De Genova 2002). Deportation as a form of mobility control
of workers is crucial for maintaining the wage gap between the Global
North and the Global South. Deportation intends to immobilise work-
ers and thereby sustains wage differences. There is a direct link between
outsourcing to countries with low wages and restriction of mobility of
the people of those countries (Jones 2016). Deportation preserves and
reproduces social inequalities and global injustices. Deportation aims
to maintain the unequal access to resources, and thereby upholds the
unequal distribution of wealth. For example, Bangladesh, providing one
of the lowest-wage labour forces for global capitalism, with 20 million
workers in the transnational garment corporations alone, is also one of
the countries with the lowest mobility opportunities. Bangladeshi citi-
zens can only travel to 37 countries (other poor countries in the Global
South) without a visa while German passport holders can travel to more
than 170 countries without a visa.
Recently several deportation scholars have paid attention to the rela-
tionship between mass deportation and outsourcing and offshoring
(Golash-Boza 2015; Rodkey 2016). Mass deportation provides a flexible
and culturally suitable labour force that is bilingual and has the “right”
cultural capital, for transnational corporations. Rodkey (this volume)
demonstrates that deportees grown up in the USA who speak English
fluently and are familiar with American society make the optimal work-
force for American companies moving to the Dominican Republic in
search for cheap-wage labour. Deportees are spatially expelled from the
Global North, to be included in the capitalist system outsourced to the
Global South. Thus rather than merely being excluded, deportees are,
in Giorgio Agamben’s meaning, abandoned, i.e., “exposed and threat-
ened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become
undistinguished. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who
has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order” (Agamben
1998, p. 28). This is the sovereign abandonment, an inclusive exclusion.
Ethnographies in several of the chapters in this volume demonstrate this
logic of inclusive exclusion at work in deportation regimes.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Deportees’ Time
Deportation is not only the removal of a person spatially but also tem-
porally. Many have spent a long time in the host country before being
deported. They, particularly long-term residents, have worked, built net-
works, paid taxes, and spent time to become accustomed with language
and culture. The time they invested to accumulate these forms of social
capital is lost in a large extent. As Lauran Martin (2015) puts it: depor-
tees are dispossessed of their time they had before removal. The Afghan
men in Majidi’s chapter have left behind unpaid salaries (work time) in
Iran. In Hasselberg’s chapter, young Americans have left their youth
behind and in Turnbull’s chapter, deportees have left their children. By
being spatially removed, they are also robbed of an amount of time.
The socio-political conditions of post-deportation generates its
own temporality. That many, particularly long-term residents, experi-
ence post-deportee life as exile (Coutin 2016) or diaspora (Kanstroom
2012) reveals the fact that life is experienced by deportees as fragmented,
interrupted, and scattered in the same way exile and diaspora are usu-
ally experienced in the form of a broken link between time and place.
Lacking a place, either within the family or in the society (a job, house,
one’s own family, a secure future) makes deportees experience time as
broken and the life cycle as interrupted.
One feature of becoming “estranged citizen” after deportation is a
sense of “not being in-time with others” or a sense of non-simultaneity
that emerges from the lack of “the sense that others are doing at the
same time things that are meaningfully related to your own experience”
(Boyarin 1994, p. 17). Similar to the original diasporic groups, a tactic
for deportees to resynchronise themselves is by maintaining links and
ties to the host country where they had spent a long time before depor-
tation. Through cultural ties, celebrating national festivals, practicing
the language, activating personal networks, and maintaining a transna-
tional parenting role, deportees counter the rejection they face through
deportation (Coutin 2016, p. 160). As shown in ethnographies by con-
tributors in this book deportees construct a transnational grammar of
simultaneity (see Zilberg 2004).
Lacking a place and a position easily becomes an experience of what
Victor Turner (1969) calls liminality, a transitory stage between two
social positions, between two stages of life. For deportees, liminality is
not only a stage of transition but rather of “stuckedness” (Hage 2009),
8 S. Khosravi

caught in a position of betwixt and between structures. Accordingly, the

individual’s liminal status is socially and structurally ambiguous. The loss
of social status and role in society results in social invisibility, which, in
turn, generates vulnerability. Furthermore inhabitants of the liminality,
such as deportees, are seen as dangerous or polluting because of their
very unclassifiability (Douglas 1966). When liminality is turned into
a protracted waiting, the very structure of social life is temporarily sus-
pended. Echeverri Zuluaga uses suspension to refer to “the interruption
of social ties … as well as to a temporal slowing manifest in the absence
of plans in the present, plans deferred to the future, prolonged waiting,
and the inability to improve one’s life condition” (Echeverri Zuluaga
2015, p. 593). It is not unusual for deportees to use terms such as “dead
time” or “a time of death” when talking about their lives. Others use
terms such as chaos and confusion (Boehm 2016), boredom (Hasselberg
this volume) or “being lost” (Majidi this volume) to express the existen-
tial precariousness they find themselves in.
The deportees’ time is characterised by waithood, either in pre-depor-
tation detention or afterward in the country they are deported to. They
are constantly waiting for something to happen, for decisions and assis-
tance coming from others, from the authorities, NGOs, family members
back in the country they are deported from, a chance to remigrate. The
dependence on decisions of others leads to a patronising relationship,
which means that the deportee has to surrender to the authority of oth-
ers, such as NGOs or international organisations.
For young people deportation means postponement of future plans
and a disruption in the linear stages of the life cycle from adolescence to
social adulthood. The consequence of protracted unemployment, irregu-
lar employment and housing, and the dependence on others is that the
time of being “adolescent” has become longer. Youth seems to be no
longer a transitional stage but an indefinite position of not becoming or in
words of young Afghan deportees “not arriving” (be jaiye naresidan)—
referring to not making achievements in life. Ja in Dari means place and
location, but also position and stable social status. When goals of migra-
tion are not achieved and when one fails in establishing new life after
deportation, a feeling of incompleteness is engendered.
However, several chapters in this volume demonstrate that, despite
suspension, deportees are engaged in ceaseless attempts to improve
their situation, networking, political mobilisation (Lecadet this volume),
starting a business, and planning for remigration. Not unusually, while
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

not seeing any “future” in the place they were forcibly removed to and
where the prospect of a better life will not be actualised, they seek it else-
where and in remigration. As several studies and several chapters in this
volume show, it is common among deportees to express a desire to remi-
grate, which is an attempt to “achieve goals thwarted by deportation”
(Schuster and Majidi 2013). Remigration is a way to resist the petrifying
immobility imposed on them by deportation. As Nicholas De Genova
writes in the Afterword (this volume), we see “the autonomy of depor-
tation,” as an autonomy and subjectivity of the deported against their
predicament of deportation. A United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) report shows that up to 80 percent of the people
forcibly removed to Kabul attempt to remigrate within a short period
(Gladwell and Elwyn 2012). Remigration is an attempt to reclaim the
time they had spent elsewhere, and to reclaim a future they had invested
in in the country from which they have been deported. They are stuck
between on the one side a powerful transnational apparatus that forci-
bly expels them from the Global North and on the other side the cir-
cumstances and the forces that push them towards emigration from the
Global South. Mobility, imagined or real, is a strategy to cope with the
oppressive condition of deportation and post-deportation. The situation
many deportees find themselves in is diasporic, constantly on the move
without arriving, a diaspora of deportees.

The Age of Deportspora

Spatial and temporal stretching of abandonment from pre- to post-
deportation turns deportees into members of what Peter Nyers (2003)
has termed deportspora, an “abject diaspora,” whose members are aban-
doned people, pushed into “transnational corridors of expulsion.” For
those stuck in the post-deportation predicament, the relationship with
geography is not expressed only in the standard question “Where are you
from?” but also in “Where are you deported from?” This hints at the sense
of belonging both to the country of citizenship and to the country they
are deported from. As Golash-Boza (2013) shows, maintaining transna-
tional ties to their former host country is of significance for deportees to
cope with hardships and a reminder of who one once was and what one
once had. A deportee has relationships to the country she is deported
from, in the same way an exile has ties with her “homeland.” A depor-
tee is in a legal relationship with the state that deported her through
10 S. Khosravi

re-entry ban. Moreover there are other kinds of relationship, for instance
deportees who have served in the US army receive their retirement pays
(Golash-Boza and Ceciliano this volume) or through outsourcing com-
panies that hire them.
Deportspora offers a sort of cosmopolitanism, a social imaginary, with
which deportees, challenge, resist, and survive the removal. Like other
diasporas, members of deportspora have fragmented and hybrid, trans-
national lives. They are a type of forced cosmopolitan subjects, not by
choice, by class, or by ethnic privileges but forcibly by the deportation
regime. They speak at least two languages and have a double cultural
capital, namely one from the host country and the other one from the
country of origin. They are the embodiment of forced transnationality
(Zilberg 2004). However, deportees, stuck in the transnational corri-
dor of expulsion, non-citizens in one country and estranged citizen in
another, are deprived of the promises and possibilities of transnational-
ism and cosmopolitanism, free mobility and flexible citizenship (Boehm
2016, p. 115). Unlike diasporic ideas of multiple belonging, deport-
sporic experiences render spatial and temporal stretching of abandon-
ment and inflexible non-citizenship.

Terminology
Part of the methodological nationalism deportation studies suffer from,
is the language used by scholars. Representation and terminology are
part of a methodology yet also constitute an epistemological problem
with ethical and political implications (De Genova 2002, p. 423), using
the same terminology politicians and bureaucrats use uncritically; social
scientists take nationalist discourses for granted. A national-based terri-
torialisation of imaginary and of the analytical focus (Wimmer and Glick-
Schiller 2002, p. 307) in this field has resulted in recycling of misleading
terms such as home, homeland, country of origin, or reintegration.
A term used in post-deportation studies is “reintegration”. The pre-
fix re indicates the idea that deportees go back to the society they had
been integrated in before they migrated. However, ethnographies in this
volume show that this often is not the case. Another term, uncritically
and frequently used, is the notion of home, which is based on an ideol-
ogy which naturalises the nation-state system and is built on the uncriti-
cal link between individuals and territory that makes border crossing
pathological (Malkki 1992, p. 34) and “uprootedness” an “unnatural”
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

mode of being. Deportation supposedly would restore the “broken” link

between “nativity” and nationality. As the following chapters show, for
many migrants deportation hardly means “going back home” to a place
of safety and belonging—a place from where many migrants had left or
escaped from due to various reasons.
This approach towards deportation as returning home both moralises
and depoliticises. It moralises because it reproduces (home-based) fam-
ily values. Deportation is often described as home-coming, back to the
family. As Golash-Boza and Ceciliano (this volume) show, deportees
to the Dominican Republic are held in the police station, and are only
released to family members, and are not permitted to leave the police sta-
tion until a family member comes for them. In her essay, Majidi (this vol-
ume) states that a part of the “assistance” young Afghans would receive
is to be escorted back to their families. A similar involuntary return to
one’s family is also observed among Ugandan deportees (Ahumuza
Onyoin 2017). Forced family reunification becomes more brutal in cases
of minors or women who had escaped patriarchal oppression (e.g., see
Ahumuza Onyoin 2017). The familyism promoted by deportation is
somehow contradictory since the family split in the host country due to
deportation is neglected. The paradox in the logic behind deportation
is while on the one hand it emphasises family values and reunification
in the country of citizenship, on the other hand, it causes separation of
families in the country from which one is deported.
The vocabulary used in this field also depoliticises deportation, by
neglecting the power relation between deporting country and the coun-
try one is deported to, as well as the conflicts and struggles within the
country one is sent to. Through presenting deportation as homecom-
ing, the brutality embedded in deportation is masked and thereby depo-
liticised. The neoliberal approach attempts to depoliticise deportation
through naturalising the notion of home(land) and presenting the family
as the most optimal and normal place to return to. It also aims to indi-
vidualise and personalise the difficulties deportees struggle with and aims
to foster responsible, prudent, entrepreneurial subjects.

Conclusion
Through providing ethnography of the life of post-deportation, the
empirically-rich essays in this volume aim to challenge conventional
knowledge about deportation as “going back home”, or ideas about
12 S. Khosravi

so-called “reintegration”. Furthermore, they shed new light on hid-

den aspects of post-deportation. How do migrants narrate their life
after deportation? What is the impact of deportations on the local soci-
ety? What are the gendered aspects of post-deportation life? How does
age affect post-deportation life and aspiration for remigration? How do
deportees resist and challenge the immobilisation imposed on them by
deportation? How do they reclaim the time dispossessed from them?
As the studies in this volume show, deportation rarely means return-
ing home, to a place of safety and belonging. Rather, it often means the
forced return to a situation worse than the situation prior to the initial
departure: politically, financially, and socially. Deportation, thus, con-
tributes to the perpetuation of the unequal global distribution of mobil-
ity, spatially and socially. The following chapters demonstrate that we
should not look at deportation as a discrete event, but investigate how
the condition of protracted, multiple, and ceaseless abandonment before,
during, and after deportation constitutes normality in the daily lives of
deportees (Galvin 2015) and are absorbed into the cycle of individu-
als’ life and the history of communities (e.g., Schuster and Majidi 2013,
p. 235).
The essays collected in this book contribute to a more multifaceted
picture of what happens to people after deportation. Yet, they also add
novel theoretical and empirical aspects and approaches to the field.
Studying the various aspects of post-deportation contribute to fur-
ther knowledge on how deportation is related to broader processes of
social exclusion and marginalisation. These empirical-based essays create
a space for discussing complicated questions of deportation and the life
after deportation in the society. They also raise questions and issues for
further research, for example, into the approaches available to deporta-
tion studies once methodological nationalism is abandoned. The justi-
fying myths of deportation as just, natural, freely chosen or in the best
interests of the deportee, their family and community need to be fur-
ther explored, as the research brought together in this volume already
exposes deportation as a tool for neoliberal policies to control wage
inequalities.

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 CHAPTER 2

Fieldnotes from Cape Verde: On Deported

Youth, Research Methods,
and Social Change

Ines Hasselberg

Introduction
In this chapter, I address pertinent issues regarding post-deportation
studies, with respect to methods, positionality, and social change. In par-
ticular, I ask what can we make of the elements that consistently appear
in post-deportation studies? I will do so by drawing on deportation data
gathered in 2008 during a brief field visit to Cape Verde. This chapter
has afforded me the opportunity to dig back my field diary and interview
transcripts and reflect on what the data gathered so long ago may sug-
gest and where it may fit in the existing literature. The data presented
here were collected for a project that never took off. Not because it was
uninteresting or unviable—quite the contrary, but on account of change

I. Hasselberg—The paper was written when the author was working in

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

I. Hasselberg (*)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Research in Anthropology, University
of Minho, Braga, Portugal

© The Author(s) 2018 15

S. Khosravi (ed.), After Deportation, Global Ethics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57267-3_2
16 I. Hasselberg

on my personal circumstances. Yet, the days spent in Cape Verde, the

people that I met and the stories they told me have remained with me.
I will start the chapter by overviewing some ethical and methodological
concerns over deportation studies. I will then provide a narrative of my
time in Cape Verde conducting field research on deportation. Here, I
will also present data collected and reflect on its insights and limitations.
I will close the chapter by raising some questions for further considera-
tion and discussion.

Overview
Ten years ago, Natalie Peutz called on anthropologists to pay attention
to the practices of forced removal quickly becoming normalised tools
of border control across the world. She made a call for an anthropology
of removal, that is, an anthropology that would “make its contribution
to the endless but vital interrogation of the ‘natural’ order of things”
(Peutz 2006, p. 231). In her seminal article, she argued that deportation
is not a simple event that (forcibly) relocates one individual from one
country to another. Drawing on her research among Somali deportees,
she revealed how deportation is in fact a process that spans over long
periods of time and geographical areas—what later Heike Drotbohm
and I have termed as “deportation corridor” (Drotbohm and Hasselberg
2015). Deportation is not limited to the encounter between the
deported person and the deporting nation-state. Rather it involves a vari-
ety of people and institutions, from deportees, their families, and com-
munities to civil servants, border agents, immigration lawyers and judges,
prison and immigration detention staff, bureaucrats, civil society organi-
sations, security personnel, activists, and the media. Subsequent studies
have provided further evidence to this (Drotbohm 2011; Hasselberg
2016; Kalir 2015; Fischer 2015; Coutin 2015).
Peutz’s call has not gone unnoticed. The past decade has seen a rise
in ethnographic studies of deportation from a variety of perspectives
and located at different moments and places of the deportation corri-
dor. Yet, there are a rather limited number of methodological accounts
of studies of deportation in general and post-deportation in particular.
This is surprising given that deportation research often appears as an
ethical and methodological minefield. Peutz herself warned about pos-
sible difficulties. To start with, she argues, and whether the focus is on
those deported following a criminal conviction or an illegal stay, social
 2 FIELDNOTES FROM CAPE VERDE: ON DEPORTED YOUTH … 17

scientists should be aware that in constituting deportability as a self-

limiting field of knowledge, they may be (even if unwillingly) reinforc-
ing the criminality and illegality that was enforced upon their subjects
by a nation-state (Peutz 2006; see also De Genova 2002). Furthermore,
deportation is a sensitive matter, where issues of trust, vulnerability, and
do-no-harm are particularly poignant. Not only deportees are likely to
have been interrogated numerous times on account of their deportation,
but also deportation may entail matters of criminal conviction, illegal
stay, family relations, stigma, resistance, destitution, and lost hope.
As a non-spatially-bounded social phenomenon, deportation presents
other challenges. Deportees are removed elsewhere, taken away from
the (deporting) countries they have called home. Experiencing deport-
ability in the host country also often renders foreign nationals immobile
and invisible, with deportable migrants frequently developing strategies
of active invisibility (see Talavera et al. 2010; Willen 2007) in an effort to
avoid the authorities. Furthermore, the increasing use of administrative
detention and the criminalisation of immigration offences results in an
ever-growing number of foreign nationals under penal or administrative
incarceration—sites that are difficult for researchers to access (Bosworth
et al. 2016). Once removed to their country of origin, deportees may be
spread over large geographical areas, which may translate into difficulties
in identifying and locating people to participate in the study. Social scien-
tists studying deportation may very easily find themselves with nothing to
observe and no one immediately available to talk to (Hasselberg 2016).
In post-deportation studies in particular, multi-sited ethnography
(Marcus 1995) is increasingly used to enable a better understanding of the
experience of removal for individuals, families, and communities between
and across nations. Heike Drotbohm’s (2015) study of deportation of
Cape Verdean citizens from the USA is testament that the post-depor-
tation is not confined geographically to the countries that receive the
deportees. In visiting the US families of those deported, her study shows
how the forced removal of an individual leaves an absence in their fam-
ily and community. An absence that is made present by changing family
power relations and social inequalities produced by deportation (see also
Drotbohm 2011; Golash-Boza 2014, 2016; Schuster and Majidi 2013;
Gerlach this volume). Multi-sited research is however highly demanding
on time and resources and thus not always a feasible option (see Candea
2007). I have argued elsewhere that in the context of deportation, eth-
nographic research often demands a creative use of a combination of
Another random document with
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 indistinguishable. They are also commonly taken to
be unities. § 5. Perceptual space and time cannot be
ultimately real, because they involve reference to the
here and now of a finite experience; conceptual
space and time cannot be ultimately real, because
they contain no principle of internal distinction, and
are thus not individual. § 6. The attempt to take
space and time as real leads to the difficulty about
qualities and relations, and so to the indefinite
regress. § 7. Space and time contain no principle of
unity; there may be many space and time orders in
the Absolute which have no spatial or temporal
connection with each other. § 8. The antinomies of
the infinite divisibility and extent of space and time
arise from the indefinite regress involved in the
scheme of qualities and relations, and are insoluble
so long as the space and time construction is taken
for Reality. § 9. The space and time order is an
imperfect phenomenal manifestation of the logical
relation between the inner purposive lives of finite
individuals. Time is an inevitable aspect of finite
experience. How space and time are transcended in
the Absolute experience we cannot say

CHAPTER V
SOME CONDITIONS OF EVOLUTION

§ 1. The concept of 'evolution an attempt to interpret 265

natural processes in terms of individual growth. § 2.
Evolution means change culminating in an end which
is the result of the process and is qualitatively new.
The concept is thus teleological. § 3. Evolution, being
teleological, is essentially either progress or
degeneration. If it is more than illusion, there must be
real ends in the physical order. And ends can only be
real as subjective interests of sentient beings which
 are actualised by the process of change. § 4. Thus
all evolution must take place within an individual
subject. § 5. Further, the subject of evolution must be
a finite individual. All attempts to make “evolution” a
property of the whole of Reality lead to the infinite
regress. § 6. The distinction between progressive
evolution and degeneration has an “objective” basis
in the metaphysical distinction between higher and
lower degrees of individuality. § 7. In the evolutionary
process, old individuals disappear and fresh ones
originate. Hence evolution is incompatible with the
view that Reality consists of a plurality of ultimately
independent finite individuals

CHAPTER VI
THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE

§ 1. Scientific description may be contrasted with 279

philosophical or teleological interpretation, but the
contrast is not absolute. § 2. The primary end of all
scientific description is intercommunication with a
view to active co-operation. Hence all such
description is necessarily restricted to objects
capable of being experienced in the same way by a
plurality of individuals. § 3. A second end of scientific
description is the economising of intellectual labour
by the creation of general rules for dealing with
typical situations in the environment. In the course of
evolution this object becomes partially independent
of the former. § 4. From the interest in formulating
general rules arise the three fundamental postulates
of physical science, the postulates of Uniformity,
Mechanical Law, and Causal Determination. § 5. The
mechanical view of physical Nature determined by
these three postulates is systematically carried out
only in the abstract science of Mechanics; hence the
 logical completion of the descriptive process would
mean the reduction of all descriptive science to
Mechanics. That the chemical, biological, and
psychological sciences contain elements which
cannot be reduced to mechanical terms, is due to the
fact that their descriptions are inspired by æsthetic
and historical as well as by primarily “scientific”
interests. § 6. The analysis of such leading concepts
of mechanical Physics as the Conservation of Mass
and of Energy shows them to have only relative
validity

BOOK IV
RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY—THE INTERPRETATION OF LIFE

CHAPTER I
THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

§ 1. The various sciences which deal with the 294

interpretation of human life all avail themselves of the
fundamental categories of Psychology. Hence we
must ask how the concepts of Psychology are related
to actual experience. § 2. Psychology is a body of
abstract descriptive formulæ, not a direct transcript of
the individual processes of real life. It presupposes
the previous construction of the physical order. § 3.
The psychological conception of conscious life as a
succession of “mental states” or “images” is a
transformation of actual experience devised primarily
to account for the experience of other subjects, and
subsequently extended to my own. The
transformation is effected by the hypothesis of
“introjection.” §§ 4, 5. The logical justification of the
psychological transformation of facts is twofold. The
psychological scheme serves partly to fill up the gaps
in our theories of physiological Mechanism, and also,
 in respect of the teleological categories of
Psychology, to describe the course of human
conduct in a form capable of ethical and historical
appreciation. Psychology may legitimately employ
both mechanical and teleological categories. § 6. The
objections sometimes brought against the possibility
of (a) psychological, (b) teleological description are
untenable

CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEM OF SOUL AND BODY

§ 1. The problem of psychophysical connection has to do 313

with the correlation of scientific abstractions, not of
given facts of experience. § 2. The “consciousness”
of Psychology is thus not the same thing as the finite
individual subject of experience, and Reality must not
be said to consist of “minds” in the psychologist’s
sense. Again, we must not assume a priori that there
can be only one working hypothesis of
psychophysical connection. § 3. The possible
hypotheses may be reduced to three,
Epiphenomenalism, Parallelism, and Interaction. § 4.
Epiphenomenalism is legitimate as a methodological
principle in Physiology; it is untenable as a basis for
Psychology because it implies the reduction of
psychical facts to mechanical law. § 5. Parallelism.
The arguments for Parallelism as necessarily valid to
Psychophysics because of its congruity with the
postulates of mechanical Physics, are fallacious. We
cannot assume that Psychology must necessarily
conform to these postulates. § 6. As a working
hypothesis Parallelism is available for many
purposes, but breaks down when we attempt to apply
it to the case of the initiation of fresh purposive
reactions. A teleological and a mechanical series
 cannot ultimately be “parallel.” § 7. We are thus
thrown back on the hypothesis of Interaction as the
only one which affords a consistent scheme for the
correlation of Physiology and Psychology. We have,
however, to remember that what the hypothesis
correlates is scientific symbols, not actual facts. The
actuality represented by both sets of symbols is the
same thing, though the psychological symbolism
affords a wider and more adequate representation of
it than the physiological

CHAPTER III
THE PLACE OF THE “SELF” IN REALITY

§ 1. The “self” is (1) a teleological concept, (2) implies a 334

contrasted not-self (where this contrast is absent
from an experience there is no genuine sense of
self); (3) but the limits which divide self and not-self
are not fixed but fluctuating. The not-self is not a
merely external limit, but consists of discordant
elements within the individual, which are extruded
from it by a mental construction. (4) The self is a
product of development, and has its being in the
time-series. (5) The self is never given complete in a
moment of actual experience, but is an ideal
construction; probably self-hood implies some
degree of intellectual development. § 2. The Absolute
or Infinite Individual, being free from all internal
discord, can have no not-self, and therefore cannot
properly be called a self. § 3. Still less can it be a
person. § 4. In a society of selves we have a more
genuinely self-determined individual than in the
single self. Hence it would be nearer the truth to think
of the Absolute as a Society, though no finite whole
adequately expresses the Absolute’s full nature. We
must remember, however, (a) that probably the
 individuals in the Absolute are not all in direct
relation, and (b) that in thinking of it as a Society we
are not denying its real individuality. § 5. The self is
not in its own nature imperishable; as to the
particular problem of its continuance after death, no
decision can be arrived at on grounds of
Metaphysics. Neither the negative presumption
drawn from our inability to understand the conditions
of continuance, nor the lack of empirical evidence, is
conclusive; on the other hand, there is not sufficient
metaphysical reason for taking immortality as certain

CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF MORAL FREEDOM

§ 1. The metaphysical problem of free will has been 359

historically created by extra-ethical difficulties,
especially by theological considerations in the early
Christian era, and by the influence of mechanical
scientific conceptions in the modern world. §§ 2, 3.
The analysis of our moral experience shows that true
“freedom” means teleological determination. Hence
to be “free” and to “will” are ultimately the same thing.
Freedom or “self-determination” is genuine but
limited, and is capable of variations of degree. § 4.
Determinism and Indeterminism both arise from the
false assumption that the mechanical postulate of
causal determination by antecedents is an ultimate
fact. The question then arises whether mental events
are an exception to the supposed principle. § 5.
Determinism. The determinist arguments stated. § 6.
They rest partly upon the false assumption that
mechanical determination is the one and only
principle of rational connection between facts; § 7.
Partly upon fallacious theories of the actual
procedure of the mental sciences. Fallacious nature
 of the argument that complete knowledge of
character and circumstances would enable us to
predict human conduct. The assumed data are such
as, from their own nature, could not be known before
the event. § 8. Indeterminism. The psychical facts to
which the indeterminist appeals do not warrant his
conclusion, which is, moreover, metaphysically
absurd, as involving the denial of rational connection.
§ 9. Both doctrines agree in the initial error of
confounding teleological unity with causal
determination

CHAPTER V
SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND
RELIGION

§ 1. If Reality is a harmonious system, it must somehow 381

make provision for the gratification of our ethical,
religious, and æsthetic interests. § 2. But we cannot
assume that ethical and religious postulates are
necessarily true in the forms in which our practical
interests lead us to make them. § 3. Thus, while
morality would become impossible unless on the
whole there is coincidence between virtue and
happiness, and unless social progress is a genuine
fact, “perfect virtue,” “perfect happiness,” “infinite
progress” are logically self-contradictory concepts. §
4. But this does not impair the practical usefulness of
our ethical ideals. § 5. In religion we conceive of the
ideal of perfection as already existing in individual
form. Hence ultimately no part of the temporal order
can be an adequate object of religious devotion. § 6.
This leads to the Problem of Evil. “God” cannot be a
finite being within the Absolute, because, if so, God
must contain evil and imperfection as part of His
nature, and is thus not the already existing realisation
 of the ideal. § 7. This difficulty disappears when we
identify “God” with the Absolute, because in the
Absolute evil can be seen to be mere illusory
appearance. It may, however, be true that religious
feeling, to be practically efficient, may need to
imagine its object in an ultimately incorrect
anthropomorphic form. § 8. The existence, within the
Absolute, of finite “divine” personalities, can neither
be affirmed nor denied on grounds of general
Metaphysics. § 9. Proofs of the “being of God.” The
principle of the “ontological” and “cosmological”
proofs can be defended against the criticism of Hume
and Kant only if we identify God with the Absolute.
The “physicotheological proof” could only establish
the reality of finite superhuman intelligences, and its
force depends purely upon empirical considerations
of evidence

CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION

§ 1. Can our Absolute Experience be properly called the 408

“union of Thought and Will”? The Absolute is
certainly the final realisation of our intellectual and
our practical ideals. But (1) it includes aspects, such
as, e.g., æsthetic feeling, pleasure, and pain, which
are neither Thought nor Will. (2) And it cannot
possess either Thought or Will as such. Both
Thought and Will, in their own nature, presuppose a
Reality which transcends mere Thought and mere
Will. § 2. Our conclusion may in a sense be said to
involve an element of Agnosticism, and again of
Mysticism. But it is only agnostic in holding that we
do not know the precise nature of the Absolute
Experience. It implies no distrust of the validity of
knowledge, so far as it goes, and bases its
 apparently agnostic result on the witness of
knowledge itself. Similarly, it is mystical in
transcending, not in refusing to recognise, the
constructions of understanding and will. § 3.
Metaphysics adds nothing to our information, and
yields no fresh springs of action. It is finally only
justified by the persistency of the impulse to
speculate on the nature of things as a whole

Index 417

ELEMENTS OF METAPHYSICS
 BOOK I
GENERAL NOTIONS
 CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF THE METAPHYSICIAN
§ 1. The generality and simplicity of the metaphysical problem make it difficult to
define the study. § 2. Problem is suggested by the presence of contradictions
in ordinary experience. § 3. By making a distinction between reality and
appearance the sciences remove some of these contradictions, but
themselves lead to further difficulties of the same sort; hence the need for
systematic inquiry into the meaning of the distinction between the real and the
apparent, and the general character of reality as such. § 4. Metaphysics, as
an inquiry into the ultimate meaning of “reality,” is akin to poetry and religion,
but differs from them in its scientific character, from the mathematical and
experimental sciences in its method, from common scepticism in the critical
nature of its methods as well as in its positive purpose. § 5. The study is
difficult (a) because of the generality of its problems, (b) and because we
cannot employ diagrams or physical experiments. § 6. The objection that
Metaphysics is an impossibility may be shown in all its forms to rest upon self-
contradictory assumptions of a metaphysical kind. § 7. The minor objections
that, if possible, the science is superfluous, or at least stationary, may be met
with equal ease. § 8. Metaphysics is partly akin to the mystical tendency, but
differs from mysticism in virtue of its positive interest in the world of
appearances, as well as by its scientific method. § 9. It agrees with logic in the
generality of its scope, but differs in being concerned with the real, whereas
logic is primarily concerned with the inferrible. §10. The problems of the so-
called Theory of Knowledge are really metaphysical.

§ 1. It is always difficult, in treating of any branch of knowledge, to

put before the beginner a correct preliminary notion of the nature and
scope of the study to which he is to be introduced, but the difficulty is
exceptionally great in the case of the body of investigations
traditionally known as Metaphysics.[1] The questions which the
science seeks to answer are, indeed, in principle of the simplest and
most familiar kind, but it is their very simplicity and familiarity which
constitute the chief difficulty of the subject. We are naturally slow to
admit that there is anything we do not understand in terms and ideas
which we are constantly using, not only in the special sciences, but
in our non-systematised everyday thought and language about the
course of the world. Hence, when the metaphysician begins to ask
troublesome questions about the meaning and validity of these
common and familiar notions, ordinary practical men, and even
intelligent students of the special sciences, are apt to complain that
he is wasting his time by raising idle and uncalled-for difficulties
about the self-evident. Consequently the writer on Metaphysics is
almost inevitably compelled to begin by rebutting the natural and
current prejudice which regards his science as non-existent and its
problems as illusory. The full vindication of metaphysical inquiry from
this charge of futility can only be furnished by such a systematic
examination of the actual problems of the study as will be attempted,
in outline, in the succeeding chapters of this work. All that can be
done in an Introduction is to present such a general description of
the kind of questions to be subsequently discussed, and their
relation to the more special problems of the various sciences, as
may incline the reader to give an impartial hearing to what is to
follow.
§ 2. The course of our ordinary experience, as well as our
education in the rudiments of the sciences, has made us all familiar
with the distinction between what really is or exists and what merely
appears to be. There is no opposition more thoroughly enshrined in
the language and literature of civilised races than the contrast of
seeming with reality, of substance with show. We come upon it alike
in our study of the processes of nature and our experience of human
character and purpose. Thus we contrast the seeming stability of the
earth with its real motion, the seeming continuity and sameness of a
lump of solid matter with the real discontinuity and variety of its
chemical constituents, the seeming friendliness of the hypocritical
self-seeker with his real indifference to our welfare. In all these cases
the motive which leads us to make the distinction is the same,
namely, the necessity to escape from the admission of a
contradiction in experience. So long as our various direct
perceptions are not felt to conflict with one another, we readily
accept them all as equally real and valid, and no question arises as
to their relative truth or falsehood. Were all our perceptions of this
kind, there would be no need for the correction, by subsequent
reflection, of our first immediate impressions about the nature of
ourselves and the world; error would be a term of no meaning for us,
and science would have no existence. But when two immediate
perceptions, both apparently equally authenticated by our senses,
stand in direct conflict with one another,[2] we cannot, without doing
violence to the fundamental law of rational thinking, regard both as
equally and in the same sense true. Unless we abandon once for all
the attempt to reconcile the course of our experience with the
demand of our intellect for consistency in thinking, we are driven to
make a momentous distinction. We have to recognise that things are
not always what they seem to be; what appears to us is, sometimes
at any rate, not real, and what really is does not always appear. Of
our two conflicting perceptions, only one at best can be a correct
representation of the real course of things; one of them at least, and
possibly both, must be mere seeming or appearance, and we are
thus cast upon the problem which every science tries, in its own
sphere and its own way, to solve: what part of our conceptions about
the world gives us reality and what part only appearance?[3] It is
because of the importance of these puzzles of immediate perception
as stimulating to such scientific reflection that Plato and Aristotle
called philosophy the child of Wonder, and it is because the
processes of change present them in a peculiarly striking form that
the problem of change has always been a central one in
Metaphysics.
§ 3. The attempt to harmonise by reflection the contradictions
which beset immediate perception in all its forms is one which is not
confined to a single science; the common task of all sciences is to
say what, in some special department and for special purposes,
must be taken as reality and what as mere appearance, and, by
degrading the contradictory to the level of appearance, to satisfy the
instinctive demand of our intellect for coherency and consistency of
thought. But the development of scientific reflection itself in its turn,
while it solves some of our difficulties, is constantly giving rise to
fresh perplexities of a higher order. Our scientific principles
themselves frequently seem to present us with contradictions of a
peculiarly distressing kind. Thus we find ourselves forced in some of
our geometrical reasonings to treat a curve as absolutely continuous,
in others to regard it as made up of a number of points. Or, again, we
are alternately compelled to regard the particles of matter as inert
and only capable of being moved by impact from without, and yet
again as endowed with indwelling “central forces.” Both the opposing
views, in such a case, clearly cannot be ultimately true, and we are
therefore compelled either to give up the effort to think consistently,
or to face the question, Is either view ultimately true, and if so,
which? Again, the principles of one branch of study may appear to
contradict those of another. For instance, the absolute determination
of every movement by a series of antecedent movements which we
assume as a principle in our mechanical science, appears, at least,
to conflict with the freedom of human choice and reality of human
purpose which are fundamental facts for the moralist and the
historian; and we have thus once more to ask, which of the two,
mechanical necessity or intelligent freedom, is the reality and which
the mere appearance? Finally, the results of our scientific reflection
sometimes seem to be in violent disagreement with our deepest and
most characteristic aspirations and purposes, and we cannot avoid
the question, which of the two have the better title to credit as
witnesses to the inmost nature of reality?
In all these cases of perplexity there are, short of the refusal to
think about our difficulties at all, only two courses open to us. We
may answer the question at haphazard and as it suits our
momentary caprice, or we may try to answer it on an intelligible
principle. If we choose the second course, then clearly before we
formulate our principle we must undertake a systematic and impartial
inquiry as to what we really mean by the familiar distinction between
“seems” and “is,” that is to say, a scientific inquiry into the general
characteristics by which reality or real being is distinguished from
mere appearance, not in some one special sphere of study, but
universally. Now, such an inquiry into the general character of reality,
as opposed to more or less unreal appearance, is precisely what is
meant by Metaphysics. Metaphysics sets itself, more systematically
and universally than any other science, to ask what, after all, is
meant by being real, and to what degree our various scientific and
non-scientific theories about the world are in harmony with the
universal characteristics of real existence. Hence Metaphysics has
been called “an attempt to become aware of and to doubt all
preconceptions”; and again, “an unusually resolute effort to think
consistently.” As we cannot, so long as we allow ourselves to think at
all, avoid asking these questions as to what “is” and what only
“seems,” it is clear that the attempt to dispense with metaphysical
speculation altogether would be futile. We have really no choice
whether we shall form metaphysical hypotheses or not, only the
choice whether we shall do so consciously and in accord with some
intelligible principle, or unconsciously and at random.
§ 4. Our preliminary account of the general character of the
metaphysician’s problem will enable us to distinguish Metaphysics
from some other closely related forms of human thought, and to give
it at least a provisional place in the general scheme of knowledge.
(a) Clearly, Metaphysics, as an inquiry into the meaning of reality, will
have some affinity with religion as well as with imaginative literature,
both of which aim at getting behind mere appearances and
interpreting the reality which lies beneath them. In one important
respect its relation to both is closer than that of any other department
of knowledge,—inasmuch as it, like them, is directly concerned with
ultimate reality, whereas the special sciences deal each with some
one particular aspect of things, and avowedly leave all ultimate
questions on one side. Where it differs from both is in its spirit and
method. Unlike religion and imaginative literature, Metaphysics deals
with the ultimate problems of existence in a purely scientific spirit; its
object is intellectual satisfaction, and its method is not one of appeal
to immediate intuition or unanalysed feeling, but of the critical and
systematic analysis of our conceptions. Thus it clearly belongs, in
virtue of its spirit and method, to the realm of science. (b) Yet it
differs widely in method from the other types of science with which
most of us are more familiar. It differs from the mathematical
sciences in being non-quantitative and non-numerical in its methods.
For we cannot employ the numerical and quantitative methods of
Mathematics except on things and processes which admit of
measurement, or, at least, of enumeration, and it is for Metaphysics
itself, in the course of its investigations, to decide whether what is
ultimately real, or any part of it, is numerical or quantitative, and if so,
in what sense. It differs, again, from the experimental sciences in
that, like Logic and Ethics, it does nothing to increase the stock of
our knowledge of particular facts or events, but merely discusses the
way in which facts or events are to be interpreted if we wish to think
consistently. Its question is not what in detail we must regard as the
reality of any special set of processes, but what are the general
conditions to which all reality, as such, conforms. (Just in the same
way, it will be remembered, Logic does not discuss the worth of the
evidence for particular scientific theories, but the general conditions
to which evidence must conform if it is to prove its conclusion.)
Hence Aristotle correctly called Metaphysics a science of being quà
being, ὄντα ᾖ ὄντα, (as opposed, for instance, to Mathematics, which
only studies existence in so far as it is quantitative or numerical).
Again, as an attempt to discover and get rid of baseless
preconceptions about reality, Metaphysics may, in a sense, be said
to be “sceptical.” But it differs profoundly from vulgar scepticism both
in its method and in its moral purpose. The method of vulgar
scepticism is dogmatic,—it takes it for granted without inquiry that
two perceptions or two speculative principles which conflict with one
another must be equally false. Because such contradictions can be
detected in all fields of knowledge and speculation, the sceptic
dogmatically assumes that there is no means of getting behind these
contradictory appearances to a coherent reality. For the
metaphysician, on the contrary, the assumption that the puzzles of
experience are insoluble and the contradictions in our knowledge
irreconcilable is itself just one of those preconceptions which it is the
business of his study to investigate and test. Until after critical
examination, he refuses to pronounce which of the conflicting views
is true, or, supposing both false, whether one may not be nearer the
truth than the other. If he does not assume that truth can be got and
reality known by our human faculties, he does at any rate assume
that it is worth our while to make the attempt, and that nothing but
the issue can decide as to its chances of success. Again, the
metaphysician differs from the sceptic in respect of moral purpose.
Both in a sense preach the duty of a “suspense of judgment” in the
face of ultimate problems. The difference is that the sceptic treats
“suspense,” and the accompanying mental indolence, as an end in
itself; the metaphysician regards it as a mere preliminary to his final
object, the attainment of determinate truth.
§ 5. We can now see some of the reasons which make the
science of Metaphysics a peculiarly difficult branch of study. It is
difficult, in the first place, from the very simplicity and generality of its
problems. There is a general conviction that every science, if it is to
be anything more than a body of disputes about mere words, must
deal with some definite subject-matter, and it is not easy to say
precisely what is the subject dealt with by the metaphysician. In a
certain sense this difficulty can only be met by admitting it; it is true,
as we have already seen, that Metaphysics deals in some way with
everything; thus it is quite right to say that you cannot specify any
particular class of objects as its exclusive subject-matter. This must
not, however, be understood to mean that Metaphysics is another
name for the whole body of the sciences. What it does mean is that
precisely because the distinction between the real and the apparent
affects every department of our knowledge and enters into every one
of the special sciences, the general problem as to the meaning of
this distinction and the principle on which it rests cannot be dealt with
by any one special science, but must form the subject of an
independent inquiry. The parallel with Logic may perhaps help to
make this point clearer. It is just because the principles of reasoning
and the rules of evidence are, in the last resort, the same for all the
sciences, that they have to be made themselves the subject of a
separate investigation. Logic, like Metaphysics, deals with
everything, not in the sense of being another name for the whole of
our knowledge, but in the sense that it, unlike the special sciences,
attacks a problem which confronts us in every exercise of our
thought. The question of the difference between the two sciences will
be discussed in a later section of this chapter.
There are two other minor sources of difficulty, arising out of the
universality of the metaphysical problem, which ought perhaps to be
mentioned, as they present a serious obstacle to the study of
Metaphysics by minds of a certain stamp. In Metaphysics we have
no such helps to the imagination as the figures and diagrams which
are so useful in many branches of Mathematics; and again, we are,
by the nature of the problem, entirely cut off from the aid of physical
experiment. All our results have to be reached by the unassisted
efforts of thought in the strictest sense of the word, that is, by the
rigid and systematic mental analysis of conceptions. Thus
Metaphysics stands alone among the sciences, or alone with Logic,
in the demand it makes on the student’s capacity for sheer hard
continuous thought This may help to explain why men who are
capable of excellent work in the domain of mathematical or
experimental science sometimes prove incompetent in Metaphysics;
and again, why eminent metaphysical ability does not always make
its possessor a sound judge of the results and methods of the other
sciences.
§ 6. It is now time to consider one or two objections which are very
commonly urged against the prosecution of metaphysical studies. It
is often asserted, either that (1) such a science is, in its very nature,
an impossibility; or (2) that, if possible, it is useless and superfluous,
since the other sciences together with the body of our practical
experience give us all the truth we need; or, again, (3) that at any
rate the science is essentially unprogressive, and that all that can be
said about its problems has been said long ago. Now, if any of these
popular objections are really sound, it must clearly be a waste of
time to study Metaphysics, and we are therefore bound to discuss
their force before we proceed any further.
(1) To the objection that a science of Metaphysics is, from the
nature of the case, impossible, it would be in principle correct to
reply that, as the proverb says, “You never can tell till you try,” and
that few, if any, of those who urge this objection most loudly have
ever seriously made the trial. If any one thinks the task not worth his
while, he is not called on to attempt it; but his opinion gives him no
special claim to sit in judgment on those who think differently of the
matter. Still, the anti-metaphysical prejudice is so common, and
appears in so many different forms, that it is necessary to exhibit its
groundlessness rather more in detail.
(a) It is sometimes maintained that Metaphysics is an impossibility
because the metaphysician’s problems, in their own nature, admit of
no solution. To a meaningless question, of course, there can be no
intelligible answer, and it is occasionally asserted, and often
insinuated, that the questions of Metaphysics are of this kind. But to
call the metaphysician’s question a senseless one is as much as to
say that there is no meaning in the distinction, which we are all
constantly making, between the real and the apparent. If there is any
meaning at all in the distinction, it is clearly a necessary as well as a
proper question precisely by what marks the one may be
distinguished from the other. Our right to raise this question can in
fairness only be challenged by an opponent who is prepared to
maintain that the contradictions which lead us to make the distinction
may themselves be the ultimate truth about things. Now, whether this
view is defensible or not, it is clearly not one which we have the right
to assume without examination as self-evident; it is itself a
metaphysical theory of first principles, and would have to be
defended, if at all, by an elaborate metaphysical analysis of the
meaning of the concepts “truth” and “reality.” Again, the objection, if
valid, would tell as much against experimental and mathematical
science as against Metaphysics. If the self-contradictory can be true,
there is no rational ground for preferring a coherent scientific theory
of the world to the wildest dreams of superstition or insanity. Thus we
have no escape from the following dilemma. Either there is no
rational foundation at all for the distinction between reality and
appearance, and then all science is an illusion, or there is a rational
foundation for it, and then we are logically bound to inquire into the
principle of the distinction, and thus to face the problems of
Metaphysics.[4]
(b) What is essentially the same objection is sometimes put in the
following form. Metaphysics, it is said, can have no place in the
scheme of human knowledge, because all intelligible questions
which we can ask about reality must fall within the province of one or
other of the “sciences.” There are no facts with which some one or
other of the sciences does not deal, and there is therefore no room
for a series of “metaphysical” inquiries over and above those
inquiries which constitute the various sciences. Where there are
facts to investigate and intelligible questions to be put, we are, it is
contended, in the domain of “science”; where there are none, there
can be no knowledge. Plausible as this argument can be made to
appear, it is easy to see that it is fallacious. From the point of view of
pure Logic it manifestly contains a flagrant fallacy of petitio principii.
For it simply assumes that there is no “science,” in the most
universal acceptation of the term—i.e. no body of reasoned truth—
besides those experimental sciences which have for their object the
accumulation and systematisation of facts, and this is the very point
at issue between the metaphysician and his critics. What the
metaphysician asserts is not that there are facts with which the
various special branches of experimental science cannot deal, but
that there are questions which can be and ought to be raised about
the facts with which they do deal other than those which
experimental inquiry can solve. Leaving it entirely to the special
sciences to tell us what in particular are the true facts about any
given part of the world’s course, he contends that we still have to ask
the more general question, what we mean by “real” and “fact,” and
how in general the “real” is to be distinguished from the unreal. To
denounce the raising of this question as an attempt to exclude
certain events and processes from the “province of science,” is
simply to misrepresent the issue at stake. Incidentally it may be
added, the objection reveals a serious misunderstanding of the true
principle of distinction between different sciences. The various
sciences differ primarily, not as dealing with different parts of the
world of reality, but as dealing with the whole of it so far as it can be
brought under different aspects. They are different, not because they
deal with different sets of facts, but because they look at the facts
from different points of view. Thus it would be quite wrong to
suppose that the difference between, e.g., Physics, Physiology, and
Psychology, is primarily that each studies a different group of facts.
The facts studied may in great part be the same; it is the point of
view from which they are regarded by which each of the three
sciences is distinguished from the others. Thus every voluntary
movement may be looked at either as a link in a series of
displacements of mass-particles (Physics), as a combination of
muscular contractions initiated from a centre in the cortex of the
brain (Physiology), or as a step to the satisfaction of a felt want
(Psychology). So Metaphysics does not profess to deal with a certain
group of facts lying outside the province of the “sciences,” but to deal
with the same facts which form that province from a point of view