The Morally Fraught Harga

Migration Blame Games in a Tunisian Border Town

in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Author:
Valentina Zagaria London School of Economics and Political Science

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2019.370205
Keywords:
accusations; irregularized migration; jealousy; social death; Tunisia; women; youth
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Abstract

The Tunisian coastal town of Zarzis is known for its generations of male emigrants to France and for initiating post-revolutionary harga – the ‘burning’ of the border via undocumented sea crossings to ‘Europe’. Despite migration being central to life in Zarzis, the harga is fraught with anxieties and moral accusations. While older generations accuse younger ones of chasing after easy money and causing jealousies, thereby fuelling the harga, young men reckon that risking the crossing is a matter of escaping social death. Men of all ages also agree that the harga is often women's fault. This article explores how the desire of making a living in Europe is evaluated in a departure town, and what the accusations and negative emotions it conjures up might reveal about people's understandings of their economic and moral lives in times of political and social change.

Contributor Notes

Valentina Zagaria is a Ph.D. candidate at the Anthropology Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on border deaths in the Mediterranean, and the ways in which the inhabitants of its shores in Italy and Tunisia live with the European Union's border. For her thesis she carried out two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the south-eastern Tunisian town of Zarzis, exploring questions of migration, responsibility, dignity and absence.

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Cover The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
17
Keywords:
accusations; irregularized migration; jealousy; social death; Tunisia; women; youth
Print Publication Date:
01 Sep 2019
Online Publication Date:
01 Sep 2019
Copyright:
© The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 2019

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