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viduals with whom one feels genuinely at home when introduced to a farmer from Kabylia or B閍rn, or entering the abode of a Berber-speaking manual worker from S閠if or the Parisian Red Belt. The uncommon combination of discretion and dignity he displayed, the sensitivity and modesty he invested in every exchange with his informants can be readily detected in the adroitness with which he accounts for their words, the sensitivity with which he pries into the causes and the reasons behind their actions. His active solidarity with the most dispossessed was the basis of an exceptional epistemological lucidity that allowed Abdelmalek Sayad to dismantle a good many prefabricated representations about immigration - such as the economistic problematic of its "costs and benefits," which journalists and policy-makers periodically invoke, with the diligent help of economists, so as better to mask the specifically political dimension and springs of the phenomenon - and to uncover and confront head-on the most complex issues - such as the orchestrated lies of collective bad faith that fuel migration streams or the existential roots of the "migration malaise" that afflicts the immigrant worker even after he has been medically cured of occupational illness8- just as he would enter an unknown household to find himself immediately greeted with respect, trust, and affection. It allowed him to find the right words, and the right tone, to speak of and to experiences as contradictory and chaotic as the social conditions of which they were the product and to anatomize them by mobilizing with equal perspicacity the intellectual resources of traditional Kabyle culture, rethought through ethnological works (as 7Sayad describes his early intellectual and political experiences as well as his intellectual training in Arfaoui (1996); read also Sayad (1995). 8Cf., respectively, Sayad (1977, 1986, 1981a, 1981b) and his vivisection of exile as a fall into social darkness in "El Ghorba" (Sayad 2000, in this issue). 5With the notion of el ghorba or the opposition between thaymats and thaddjjaddith), and the conceptual arsenal elaborated by the research team at the Centre de sociologie europ閑nne of which he was, from its very inception, an active and influential member. In the hands of so skilled an analyst, the immigrant functions in the manner of a live, flesh-and-blood analyzer of the most obscure regions of the social unconscious. Sayad ultimately shows us how, like Socrates according to Plato, the immigrant is atopos, a quaint hybrid devoid of place, dis-placed, in the twofold sense of incongruous and inopportune, trapped in that "mongrel" sector of social space betwixt and between social being and nonbeing. Neither citizen nor foreigner, neither on the side of the Same nor on that of the Other, he exists only by default in the sending community and by excess in the receiving society, and he generates recurrent recrimination and ressentiment in both (Sayad 1984 and 1988). Out-of-place in the two social systems which define his (non)existence, the migrant forces us, through the obdurate social vexation and mental embarrassment he causes, to rethink root and branch the question of the legitimate foundations of citizenship and of the relationship between citizen, state, and nation. For the physical and moral suffering endured by the e-migrant reveals to the ethnographer who follows his slow and painful metamorphosis into the im-migrant everything that native (i.e., nata