An excerpt from an essay by Michel Agier on camps and enclosures for displaced peoples and the development of ‘termporary permancence’.
“…one aspect that specifically mobilizes the skills of the ethnologist: more than the analysis of the content, extent or depth of current social and cultural changes, it is the prospect of how long that now seems to determine the reality of these facts–which are a priori nothing more than simple facts: what I am seeing with my own eyes, what is happening here and now. Will it exist, persist, or even be reproduced? Will it acquire a little patina of age so that we can make a description of it, and come up with two or three logical sequences that might serve as possible social rules? What persists as positive construction, not just as repetition, inside precarious spaces that might at first be seen as just a form of waiting? This question is aimed in particular at those emerging forms whose primary feature is space, and which therefore impose their reality as an obvious fact, albeit on the outskirts of the ordinary social world and for no specified length of time: the remodelling of border areas by installing walls and more or less closed spaces that are used for transit, detention, or basically as “screening vestibules;” the deployment of different types of camps in more or less sensitive or troubled areas of the world; the preponderent role of organizations from the “international community” in the local management of undesirable populations (refugees, the internally displaced, undocumented foreigners) who are isolated from the rest.”
(The Camps of the 21st Century: Corridors, Screening Vestibules and Borders of Internal Exile, Michel Agier in Native Land Stop Eject Eds. Raymond Depardon & Paul Virilio)