Constructing victims, creating value

Ethnographic notes on questionnaires in an intergovernmental agency

Abstract

The article aims to investigate the humanitarian in relation to the partial transformation of the mechanisms of value production, including the dynamics of the materialization of the economy. It proposes the classic anthropological operation to look at the world in a grain of sand: from a questionnaire used by data collectors working for an anonymous intergovernmental agency, the proposal aims to highlight the real functioning of an abundant evidence-based process anthropological literature: the creation of the figure of the refugee/ migrant comes with suffering. The questionnaire aimed to collect data about some aspects of the reified “migrants’ journey”. The article deals with this aspect and process of the ideological production of the naturality of the borders and of the current global government of the moving body. Discussing the most recent reflection of the debate on the subject, the final part of the article attempts to articulate a connection with the recent process of the transformation of capitalist value.