Other pain: an afterword

It is striking how any anthropological engagement with migration bears the echo of core existential fault lines in the discipline: universalism versus cultural relativism, phenomenology versus structuralism, radical solidarity versus conceptual analysis, colonial historiography versus indigenous cosmography, anthropologies of the dark versus anthropologies of the good. Few anthropologists of migration would classify their work in terms of impermeable theoretical camps. However, it is true, as this special issue captures, that the analytics of ‘suffering’ seems to have a peculiar kind of pull in migration research, despite the fact that it tends to crystalize rather than blur classic anthropological fault lines.