Repercussions from the Eglise Saint-Bernard

摘要

On 23 August last year, riot police raided Saint Bernard's church in the Goutte d'Or district of Paris, and evicted more than 200 undocumented workers, many of them Malians, who were seeking sanctuary and some of them on hunger strike. (A fair proportion of them actually had residence rights but lacked the documentation to prove it.) It was no doubt this drama which stimulated a table ronde entitled 'Republiques et cou-tumes' organized in Paris on 4 June by Catherine Quiminal for the Association Francaise des Anthropo-logues (AFA), and focused primarily on the issue of undocumented workers or sans papiers in France. Emmanuel Terray was the senior speaker, and he contended that this issue, far from being marginal, was at the heart of today's political economy.