The Liminal Life of the Expat

As a field of study, anthropology is still relatively new. Though theories concerning human nature and the structure of our societies date back to at least the Greeks, it wasn’t until the mid-19th century—aided and abetted, no doubt, by Charles Darwin’s dismantling of all preconceived ideas of our origins—that the “science of humans” as we know it today started to form. Since then, the discipline has changed radically as it has expanded into new sectors (linguistic, medical) and distanced itself from its initial uneasy coziness with Western colonialism. But one early artifact of anthropological study—a definition of culture proposed by Edward Burnett Tylor—still has a ring of truth to it: “that complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits by man as a member of society.”

It is the idea of a “complex whole” that characterizes the Turkish writer Ayşegül Savaş’s latest novel, appropriately titled The Anthropologists. The book follows a young married couple, Asya and Manu, as they drift through an unnamed city, mingle with their fellow expatriates, attend apartment showings, and otherwise indulge in dreams about the arc of their futures. It is a novel that takes as its subject the texture, routines, and rituals of a particular lifestyle—itinerant and youthful, or at least untethered by children—and serves as sort of a field guide to its participants: those who live “without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place.” As such, Savaş has written a book that reads like a fictional ethnography. It has the qualities of an empirical study, the only difference being that the subjects of this study are made-up characters.

The type of person Savaş trains her eye on is a wholly contemporary phenomenon, similar on a surface level to the expatriates found in a Henry James novel and yet more hyperconnected and widespread, thanks to the addition of technology—the phones that allow for instant conversation with someone back home or the reliable Wi-Fi connection that makes remote work possible. You see them scattered around the world, congregating in certain cities—Lisbon, Berlin, Mexico City—looking slightly out of place, their lingua franca a vaguely off-kilter English no matter the language spoken in their adopted country. They are a new class of people made possible by globalization: those who are stateless by choice.

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Like those of their compatriots, Asya’s and Manu’s lives are defined by transience and a shared sense of rootlessness. Each comes from a different culture and country, speaks a different language with their parents, and went to school in a place that was not their native land. They have an air of loneliness, as though standing forlorn on the other side of a window, furtively peering in. Watching others is, in fact, the reason they’re in this city: Asya, a filmmaker, has received a grant to create a documentary, and she spends her days in a local park, filming the passersby and occasionally stopping to ask them questions.

One of the book’s strengths lies in Savaş’s ability to capture the experience of life as an outsider in a new place while simultaneously revealing absolutely no details that would more firmly situate Asya and Manu in a particular location or even year. The city in which they find themselves could be New York, Paris, or somewhere else entirely—and any geographical clues are scrubbed of identifying details. The park where Asya films is “north of where we lived,” with a “different atmosphere to the rest of the city—more relaxed, perhaps, more welcoming.” Her one “native friend,” as Asya refers to her, is a young woman who works as a server in a café, has family located in a town just outside the city’s limits, and who possesses a name that betrays very little by way of origin: Lena.

Occasionally, Asya, Manu, and another expatriate friend, a man named Ravi, spy a famous documentary filmmaker, “a patron saint of dreamers and sidekicks” known to the reader only as the Great Dame, eating breakfast at a café in their neighborhood, but although one of her movies sounds as though it might resemble the work of Agnès Varda, the biographical details given (three marriages and three divorces) don’t add up. At one point, Asya watches a film that follows a young woman “trying to figure out what to do with her life,” mumbling to herself and “doing little dances”—could this be Frances Ha? These instances accumulate, but they never amount to anything concrete. The result is pleasantly discombobulating, a deliberate anonymity that feels at once strikingly accurate to the experience of loneliness in a foreign city and yet also slippery, like a memory that escapes as soon as it is approached.

This feeling of ambiguity brings to mind another concept found in cultural anthropology: that of the liminal. Liminality, as defined by anthropologists such as Victor Turner, is the experience of the in-between and the undefined, the transitional stage that accompanies a rite of passage. A similar sense of liminality is for Asya a source of anxiety: She worries about her and Manu’s insubstantial interactions with the city’s inhabitants, living as the couple do “behind [their] curtain, at a remove from the world.” In their day-to-day, they lack “many routines and [don’t] mind the disruption of order.” (Manu’s background and job at a nonprofit “on the other side of the city” are occasionally mentioned, but the novel mostly takes Asya’s perspective.) Their entire lives feel suspended in a moment of transition—though which stage of life they’re leaving, and which they will be entering next, remains unclear to Asya for most of the novel.

The experience of the expatriate, Savaş suggests, may indeed be one of constant liminality. Untethered from the demands and traditions of her home country, Asya begins to feel that her and Manu’s life is “unreal.” Often, she pictures an “imaginary anthropologist” observing her so as to “make it seem otherwise” and legitimize her fluid schedule. For Asya, nothing in her daily existence feels particularly concrete, and so reality and fiction easily blur together into one daydream.  

It is this blurring that gives Savaş’s novel its particular flavor of academic inquiry. An ethnography isn’t so fundamentally different from a novel, after all. Both use real-life observations to draw a conclusion about human nature or society. The French anthropologist and novelist Marc Augé pointed this out in his 2011 book, No Fixed Abode, translated by Chris Turner. His work, Augé writes in the preface, is “neither academic study nor a novel,” but a blending of the two: an “ethnofiction” that accurately portrays reality by following a character invented by the author out of details observed from everyday life.

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The characters of No Fixed Abode are also transient, members of the French working poor who spend their days lingering in cafés and walking the streets of Paris without a place to sleep at night. They exist on the margins of their city in a different way from the middle-class expatriates of The Anthropologists, but their world is also defined by its liminality, or, as Augé terms it in another work of his, the “non-place.” The train station, the airport, and the hotel are all examples of non-places, the semi-anonymous spaces that we exist in for short periods of time, and that otherwise tend to slide right past our notice. For the characters of The Anthropologists, their unnamed city is a non-place, somewhere temporary for them to wait without even realizing it. “All this time,” Asya thinks in a moment of revelation, “we were waiting. For the news of some momentous change; that we were being summoned to serve in real life; that the time for playing games was over.” But that waiting is, in fact, life itself.

Savaş approaches her novel with a keen awareness of the reality through which it crafts and filters its make-believe. In literature, such trends as autofiction have made a convincing case for constructing fiction out of the factual and the true. But The Anthropologists suggests that the inverse might be possible too.