amselle, jean loup. anthropology-and-historicity

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http://www.jstor.org Anthropology and Historicity Author(s): Jean-Loup Amselle Source: History and Theory, Vol. 32, No. 4, Beiheft 32: History Making in Africa, (Dec., 1993), pp. 12-31 Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505630 Accessed: 24/04/2008 09:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Page 1: Amselle, Jean Loup. Anthropology-And-Historicity

http://www.jstor.org

Anthropology and HistoricityAuthor(s): Jean-Loup AmselleSource: History and Theory, Vol. 32, No. 4, Beiheft 32: History Making in Africa, (Dec., 1993),pp. 12-31Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505630Accessed: 24/04/2008 09:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Page 2: Amselle, Jean Loup. Anthropology-And-Historicity

ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORICITY

JEAN-LOUP AMSELLE

ABSTRACT

This article tries to assess the component of French anthropology influenced by the Marxist paradigm, while also showing the links of Marxism to functionalism. With the collapse of the Marxist problematic one must establish a new anthropology that gives greater attention to history in "primitive" societies. It is also necessary to rethink some of the central problems confronting anthropology: in particular, to reevaluate the links between anthropology and development; to locate constructivism in the discipline; to measure the extent of phenomena of reappropriation in exotic societies; and to examine the aptness of binary oppositions such as "state" versus "stateless societies," and "indi- vidual" versus "community." By thus questioning some of the central images of anthro- pology, one is led to pose the problem of "primordial syncretism," that is, the diffusion of institutions spreading from a common cultural ground or background, as well as the problem of the links between universalism and culturalism. At the end of this itin- erary, and by taking the example of the pair "people of power" versus "people of the earth," it is argued that the prevalence of the phenomena of reappropriation in exotic societies is explained by the universality of certain values.

I. INTRODUCTION

Within the different trends that have driven the history of anthropology- evolutionism, diffusionism, culturalism, functionalism, or structuralism-the question of the historicity of "primitive" societies has served as a reference point, whether positive or negative. To a great extent anthropology has been founded on a rejection of history and this rejection has been consistently main- tained since the beginnings of the discipline. As I belong to a generation marked by the independence of Africa and by the advent of the Third World on the international stage, I have naturally been inclined to assert the historicity of African societies and to see them as capable of responding to an outside envi- ronment.

This is why I owe my first debt to Georges Balandier whose ideas, as Emmanuel Terray has observed,' corresponded with my generation's consciousness of the Third World; but I did not truly begin to work in the field of anthropology until 1965 when Claude Meillassoux included me in his research team on the

1. EmmanuelTerray, "Presentation ," inAfriqueplurielle, Afriqueactuelle, hommagel aGeorges Balandier (Paris, 1986), 9-11.

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORICITY 13

Systemes economiques africains. He suggested that I begin research on colonial slavery, a realm which was to represent one of the major lines of his intellectual career.2 Having thus become involved in the examination of travel accounts devoted to Africa, I became passionately interested in the multiple bonds that societies form with each other. Thus I decided to dedicate myself to the study of long-distance trade, situating myself on the margins of an anthropological profession which, since Malinowski, had favored the concept of closed and single totalities. I preferred, by contrast, to analyze what might be called "net- works of societies."

Having chosen Mali as my region, I decided to study a trading community from a historical and anthropological perspective. I chose the Kooroko commu- nity because it seemed relatively well defined sociologically; I was therefore free to study it over a long period, beginning with its roots in precolonial times. However, my ambition was not only ethnographic -in that, I did not escape my generation - but I also hoped to formulate a Marxist theory of long-distance trade. At that period, Marxism represented, as Jean-Paul Sartre said, the unsur- passable truth of our time. It is impossible to think of the reception of Marxism in France in the 1960s without thinking of Maurice Godelier and Louis Al- thusser. I took the seminar of Godelier, who was then assembling the texts that were to be published under the title Rationalite'et irrationalite'en economie (1966). The study called "Objets et methodes de I'anthropologie economique" fascinated me especially for its innovations. Both this study and the "Essai d'interpretation du phenomene economique dans les societies traditionnelles d'autosubsistance" by Meillassoux3 appeared to provide the key to the func- tioning of primitive societies and the means to reconcile science and political commitment, logos and praxis.

I have not been philosophically trained, but I have always been intensely interested in philosophy and philosophers, and I have a lively admiration for Althusser's works and his school. I devoured the two volumes of Lire le Capital (1965) and most particularly the study "Sur les concepts fondamentaux du materialisme historique" by Etienne Balibar. And yet, without rewriting history, I must admit that from that period onward I had a certain reservation about this project for rehabilitating and renewing Marxism. My fundamental empiricism prevented me from fully subscribing to the fine combinative substantialism of the master of the Rue d'Ulm and his disciples. I did not know all that Althusser's thinking owed to Spinoza, but a certain anti-essentialism raised doubts about a theory that seemed incapable of explaining social change.

Upon my return from Mali in 1969 it was within this Marxist problematic - this episteme as they then said - that I attempted to organize my material from the field. Terray's book, Le marxisme devant les societe's primitives (1969), had just been added to this theoretical panoply. But the analysis of the object I

2. Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l'esclavage (Paris, 1986). 3. Meillassoux, "Essai d'interpretation du phdnomene 6conomique dans les societes traditio-

nelles d'autosubsistance," Cahiers detudes africaines 4 (1960), 38-77.

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14 JEAN-LOUP AMSELLE

had chosen to study -bringing societies in close contact through long-distance trade -proved resistant to the Marxist treatment to which I wanted to subject it. Marxism shares with conventional sociology its constant practice of always putting either the "mode of production" or "society" in first place. I, however, had chosen to analyze relationships between societies -an approach that does not belong to the usual realm of study of sociology or anthropology. Only structuralism - I will return to this point -claimed to give an account of pro- found regularities that transcended cultural differences, even if it constructed a purely hypothetical closeness as it compared societies which, in most cases, were not effectively linked to one another.4

In 1972, I defended my doctoral thesis, which was published in 1977 as Les negociants de la savage.5 The theory of the origin of profit in commercial capitalism, which constitutes its core, now seems a bit outmoded to me in light of the political and economic evolution of the past few years, even if this theory still has its partisans. This book was the origin of a series of research studies on the historicity of primitive societies6 and on the impact of outside domination on African societies, notably through monetary migrations.7 Even if this last work still finds a favorable echo today8 it seems to me that it stresses imperialist domination too much and does not grant enough importance to the integration of precolonial African societies into greater totalities such as comprehensive economic or political networks.

It was to escape from the thesis of imperialist domination and from the problematic of the "mode of production" rigidly conceived that I was trying to define the dilemmas to which a frozen conception of Marxism was leading.9 The stress on the relationship of forces, on conjunctures, and on the production of social relationships - to the detriment of reproduction - undoubtedly owed more to Balandier, Touraine, and Castoriadis than to Marx. It is within this problematic that I still situate my research today.

I am not the only anthropologist who has hesitated between Balandier and Levi-Strauss.10 Throughout the course of my studies, I have been fascinated by the fine analyses of Levi-Strauss, which corresponded perfectly with some of the interpretations Marx, Althusser, and Godelier were giving us. What particularly attracted me were Les structures eilementaires de la parents' and

4. Even for societies that probably have a common origin, a structural analysis -that is to say, a transformational one - is not without difficulties as long as exact historical linkages have not been established between each unity. See N. Thomas, Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), 109-111 on the neo-evolutionist presupposi- tions of the structuralist comparativism of Sahlins.

5. Jean-Loup Amselle, Les negociants de la savane (Paris, 1977). 6. Amselle, "Sur l'objet de l'anthropologie," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 56 (1974),

91-114. 7. Les Migrations africaines, ed. Jean-Loup Amselle (Paris, 1976). 8. F. Dureau, Migration et urbanisation, le cas de la C6te d'Ivoire (Paris, 1987); C. Quiminal,

Gens d'ici, gens d'ailleurs (Paris, 1991). 9. Amselle, "Le fetichisme de la soci&t6," L'Homme et la societte 51-54 (1979), 163-177. 10. Terray, "Presentation."

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORICITY 1 5

Anthropologie structurale which seemed to be the anthropological counterpart for Marx's works in economics. But from my first contact with field research, I was struck by the historicity of Malian societies. Buffeted by history, inserted into vast state formations that endlessly rose and fell, invaded by Islam- Malian societies, and especially the Peul, Bambara, and Malinke ethnic groups, did not seem fit for a structural analysis. I then felt that Balandier was right in always stressing the profound dynamism of African societies and the deter- mining character of the colonial situation.1I

Armed with this resource, I embarked upon my second research project, a study of the Wasolon and the surrounding regions. There too, not one of the societies I studied in the field seemed to correspond to what we had been taught in our classes at the university. We had been told about the Dogon, the Nuer, and the Tallensi; about stateless societies and state societies; about polytheism and Islam; about oral and written cultures. Yet to me none of these catego- ries and none of these binary oppositions seemed to account for the social and historical fluidity of the region I investigated. Instead of ethnic groups closed in upon themselves, instead of political systems and an understanding of the world that were clearly demarcated, I found myself faced with hybrid systems and with crossbred forms of logic (logiques mitissess), as I called -them in my last book. For me, as for some colleagues, the shock was severe, for one had to think "against the grain" and to find other paradigms, an uncomfortable predicament since the university favors the reproduction of prevalent models or, at best, controlled departures from them. This search for new interpretative models was accompanied by a renewed questioning of a certain anthropology, which was defined either by the excessive valuation of the most "primitive" societies or, inversely, by a fanatic denigration of them.

In the 1970s French anthropology underwent a certain change of direction with the appearance of two works, La Paix blanche by Robert Jaulin (1970) and La Socijte contre l'Etat by Pierre Clastres (1974). These two books appeared during the worldwide distribution of the works by Carlos Castaneda who had picked up again on certain major themes of the ethnology of colonial adminis- trators, namely the attempt at "metamorphosis" and at passing over to "the other side.""2 It is in connection with these works that a group of anthropologists, of which I was one, gathered around Meillassoux and produced a collective work, Le Sauvage a la mode, published in 1979. Conceived at the height of the Marxist triumph, this work concealed a certain number of ambiguities. Against an anthropology it perceived as mundane, "trendy," or "ideological," it tried to oppose a "scientific" anthropology, relying on the elucidation of the relation- ships of production and class structures. Rather than placing this book under the sign of Marxism, it would have been preferable to bring to light the presuppo- sitions of the authors we criticized. Especially by deepening the objections made

11. Georges Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l'Afrique noire (Paris, 1955). 12. Jacques Berque, "Cent vingt-cinq ans de sociologie maghrebine," Annales (January-

March 1956).

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to Levi-Strauss by Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu,'3 a more firmly based criticism might have been produced. Indeed, if our criticism has often been badly received, it is because it challenged certain fundamental postulates of anthropology, namely the existence of cold, primitive societies - societies without writing, without leaders, and without power. It is exactly on the exis- tence of this separated domain that the legitimacy of our discipline rests.

Marxism could not do much to counter the perverse effects of this problem- atic. For Marxism, like all sociological theories, is based on a radical opposition between "precapitalist societies" and "capitalist societies," and this is why in certain Marxist analyses, for example those concerning hunter-gatherer socie- ties, one can find points in common with precisely the works this book meant to criticize. Far from constituting a sharp break with the rejected anthropology, the very fact of isolating hunter-gatherer societies or segmentary societies and of elaborating "modes of production" for them actually reinforced the deficien- cies of that anthropology. Emphasis should rather have been placed on the dependence of hunter-gatherer or segmentary societies on an exterior environ- ment, but that would have radically questioned Marxist "discontinuism," to which most of the contributors to this work adhered.

What lesson can be drawn, then, from this attempt to overturn anthropology? Rather than opposing the relationships of production to the supposed intention- ality of a society ("society against the state"), it would undoubtedly have been preferable to reason in terms of historicity and of encompassing networks. Yet this undertaking did awaken some echoes among Americanist anthropologists (Descola),'4 who thereafter gave more emphasis to the immersion of Native American societies in vast totalities, including the precolonial states of the region. If Americanists are now involved in a deconstruction of ethnicity analo- gous to that of the Africanists, they owe it no doubt partly to ventures such as Le Sauvage a la mode.

The main ideas that came forth from this work, the historicity of primitive societies on the one hand and the existence of encompassing networks on the other, however, recalled one of the major themes of Balandier's book, that of the opposition between internal and external dynamism. As the deconstruction of ethnicity was launched, researchers had available to them works by another precursor, Paul Mercier, whose analyses ran counter to certain received ideas of anthropology. A student of the Somba of northern Benin, Mercier had realized that the classical definition of ethnicity could not be applied to this group."5 Drawing upon the Anglo-Saxon tradition and especially the works of Max Gluckman and Siegfried Nadel, Mercier stressed the historicity of ethnicity

13. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967); Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites (Paris, 1987).

14. P. Descola, "La chefferie amrrindienne dans F'anthropologie politique," Revue francaise de science politique 38 (1988), 818-827.

15. Paul Mercier, Tradition, changement, histoire, les "Somba" du Dahomey septentrional (Paris, 1968).

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORICITY 1.7

by shedding light on a radical difference between the ethnicity of precolonial and colonial periods.

Armed with this theoretical arsenal, this small group of researchers plunged into the work of dismantling the notion of the ethnic group. Some ethnologists in the early 1980s were exasperated by the journalistic failing, then and now, of recounting an event in Africa in terms of "tribal conflict" or "ethnic struggle." If in journalistic fiction the Arab world is the realm of fundamentalism and that of India the world of caste, then Africa is par excellence the chosen land of ethnic antagonisms. Think, for example, of the media treatment and the political utilization of conflicts in Liberia, Ruanda, and South Africa. These researchers, then, did not want to deny that ethnicities existed in Africa, but to show that present ethnicities, to which social players think they belong, are products of history. Thus constructivist was placed in the foreground at the expense of primordialism. By showing that one could not assign one single meaning to a given ethnicity, the relativity of ethnic memberships was empha- sized without denying individuals the right to claim the identity of their choice, The result of this long collective effort, begun in the early 1980s, was published in 1985 in a collection entitled Au coeur de l'ethnie.16 This book became the object of discussions rendered more passionate by misunderstanding. Ap- pearing right after the demise of the regionalist movements of the 1970s, it ran head on into some of the facts of the ready-made thinking of the era, notably that of the leftist-ecological movement. But beyond violating the sensitivity of the 1970s, it also undermined the foundations of an anthropology in danger of losing its privileged framework of analysis, the ethnic group. If the ethnic group does not exist, the anthropologists implicitly said, what do we have left to study? There was no question of making the anthropological object disap- pear, but simply of casting it in a new light. It seemed obvious that postwar French anthropology, dominated by structuralism, had granted the name of the group being studied-the ethnonym -the status of stable referent, while sociolinguistics and pragmatism, launched at the expense of structural linguist tics, stressed the sociohistoric fluidity of this same referent.

The focus on "networks of societies"; the precolonial African "world economy" and "colonial spaces"; the distinction between "encompassing" and "encompassed societies"; and the display of the performative character of the ethnonyms were used together to sketch out an anthropology different from the one that was then stage front in France. The contributors to Au coeur de l'ethnie thus seemed to be drifting from their specialty and drawing nearer to history. Perhaps they gave the impression of abandoning the necessity of struc- ture for the benefit of the contingency of the event. However, this is, I believe, a false debate. I, for one, have not renounced all nomological preoccupations, or attempts to discover regularities or identify systems, even if the available schemes do not always satisfy me.

16. Au coeur de l'ethnie, ethnies, tribalisme et Etat en Afrique, ed. Jean-Loup Amselle and E. M'Bokolo (Paris, 1985).

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Rather than conceiving of ethnicities as closed universes, side by side, of political systems as neatly separated entities, of religious conceptions as clearly defined worlds, or of types of economy as distinct regimes, I choose to study the interrelationships, the overlaps, the intertwinings among them. In this regard, Meillassoux17 used the notion of ensemble symlectique, but in contrast with him I do not see in this phenomenon the simple effect of the domination of an economic system-slavery-but rather a characteristic of the totality of West African societies. Thereby I join the positions of Ronald Cohen and Igor Kopytoff,8 who each stressed "center-periphery" relationships and the "frontier" as matrices of African political formations.

II. ANTHROPOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT

In the French tradition, and to a lesser extent in the Anglo-Saxon, it is not always good form for an anthropologist to become involved in development. This situation is undoubtedly linked to the quasi-exclusive domination over French anthropology by structuralism on the one hand, and by the school of Griaule on the other. The emphasis these schools placed on structures and on the study of cosmogonies respectively has discredited all preoccupation with the history of exotic societies. While in an earlier period Durkheim had used the works of Hanoteau and Letourneux, while Mauss had read and commented upon those of Delafosse and Montagne, and while Delafosse in turn had partici- pated in the creation of the Institut d'Ethnologie and the Institut International Africain, by the 1950s the communication between university ethnologists and colonial administrative ethnologists had been broken. The divorce between practitioners of development and anthropologists dates back to this period, as does the emergence of an autonomous field of academic anthropology. From an epistemological and archeological (in the Foucauldian sense) perspective, it is interesting to show how, from its very beginnings, ethnology was indissociable from a development project. The binary oppositions ethnos versus polls, seg- mentary societies versus state society, or community versus society, seem to reflect an implicit value judgment about the best form of social life. By partici- pating in evaluations of development projects and by mingling with experts, anthropologists may rediscover the very essence of ethnology.

Research within the framework of projects and "intermittent attention" to the views of expert colleagues constitute a precious resource for ethnologists. The "development" perspective forces one to grant greater importance to eco- nornic and social-regional history, aspects too often lacking in ethnological monographs. Anthropological studies most frequently are reduced to the de- scription of a few villages, taken out of their context, and compared to units

17. Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l'esclavage. 18. "State Foundations: A Controlled Comparison," in Origins of the State, ed. Ronald Cohen

and Elman Service (Philadelphia, 1978), 141-160; The African Frontier, ed. Igor Kopytoff (Bloomington, Ind., 1987).

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORICITY 19

of the same type hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. In contrast, re- search done with development in mind constrains the anthropologist to give precise answers to questions about the totality of a given region and the web of the different societies within it.

This rehabilitation of research centered on development ought not to make one forget that the ethnology of the development experts compares badly with that of the colonial administrators. While the latter were in the region for long periods, the modern experts are often satisfied with "instant anthropology," which generally is no more than an interview with a few farmers. This weakness in participatory observation, linked to the essentially macroscopic perspective of the experts, generally is increased twofold by a complete lack of knowledge of regional history, even if some of them are by conviction inclined to overesti- mate the impact of colonialization. In this context, anthropologists therefore have an important role to play, especially if they have the chance to intervene in a development operation in the region they are already studying. Of course researchers, by their mere presence, cannot modify the course of events. Moti- vated by scientific considerations, they must limit their participation to under- standing the transformations that affect their field. Indeed, if development activities have heuristic value, it is because they concern the totality of present- day Africa. In this regard, two villages, one on the edge of a development project and the other located in its vicinity, will experience on the whole the same evolution. Anthropologists therefore have much to learn about the phe- nomena of development, and their intervention poses no problems of legitimacy as far as it occurs in their own area. On the other hand, "ethnographic au- thority"'9 ceases when the researcher participates in development projects out- side his or her zone of inquiry. Thus two cases have to be distinguished. In the same cultural area the anthropologist is justified in intervening, for, apart from some micro-differences revealed by ethnography, profound similarities exist that give a familiar feeling to an entire region. For example, in the totality of the Sudanese-Sahelian zone of West Africa, one can identify some grand common characteristics, such as the presence of Islam; the role of warfare, slavery, and commerce; or the opposition between people of power and people of the earth.20 In a milieu close to their area of study, anthropologists will thus quickly identify those elements that resonate with those they normally encounter. For this reason, a delocalization of the knowledge of the anthropolo- gist is positive: by resituating the village or the district into a larger whole, one escapes from ethnological fetishism and one grasps more firmly the relative distinctiveness of one's object of research.

However, outside of the cultural area under study, one's "ethnographic au- thority" is no longer valid. The anthropologist's work is then equivalent to that of an expert, that is, it is superficial. Anthropology can only suffer by

19. James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority," in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 21-54.

20. Siegfried F. Nadel, Byzance noire (Paris, 1971).

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withdrawing into the warm comfort of its traditional object of research. It should, instead, reintegrate the developmentalist logic which gave birth to an- thropology and from which it should never have been separated. Every science, like every identity, is constructed, and as such it attempts to forget its origins and to propagate the idea that it was born fully armed with the attributes that confer legitimacy upon it. Yet the birth of all the scientific, and of course humanistic, disciplines is linked to eminently practical concerns which, far from discrediting them, should guarantee their legitimacy. By returning to the practical preoccupations that accompanied its emergence, and by understanding the history of its separation from these concerns, anthropology will make a new leap forward and escape the criticisms directed against it. By returning to the practical ethnology of the colonial administrators, anthropology will per- haps also address one of the major challenges of our era: the opposition between human rights and cultural relativism.

This plea for research that is not cut off from development corresponds to one of my main preoccupations, that of rejecting an ethnological reason that splits up sociocultural continue and proceeds by comparative straddling.2' Eth- nology, in fact, supposes a lodestar by which one can judge the whole of past and present societies, just as it supposes an implicit value judgment about certain societies deemed to have remained backward.

Thus against ethnology I oppose anthropology, that science of humankind rather than of societies. But unlike the structuralists, I judge it impossible to grasp the activity of humankind from a limited series of unconscious structures. At its root, structuralism postulates that societies make certain choices within a restricted number of possible combinations. But the idea that different human societies possess a kind of free will collides with the fact that the planet's cultures, far from being simply juxtaposed in space, are inserted in multiple hierarchies. In this regard, one should reevaluate one of the central postulates of anthro- pology: cultural relativism. By simply comparing Western society to a contem- porary "primitive" society or to a society that has disappeared, it is impossible to overcome the comparativist aporia, since the approach proceeds by arbitrarily juxtaposing societies distant from one another in time and space. Only by taking account of a regional sub-group - the cultures of Sudanese-Sahelian West Af- rica, for example can one compare these societies and rank them in a hier- archy. 1 can legitimately compare the Peul, Bambara, Malinke, Senufo, and Minyanka cultures, because they are historically linked, but it is very difficult to compare, even from the angle of their differences, the French and Bambara cultures since they never had any interaction before colonialization. The refusal to compare French culture and Bambara culture under the pretext that they have no common value scale is devoid of any basis, and it is only by arbitrarily setting apart one element or another (excision) from the core of a given group

21. Jean-Loup Amselle, Logiques metisses. Anthopologie de l'identite en Afrique et ailleurs (Paris, 1990).

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORICITY 21

(such as Soninke society) that one circumscribes the space within which partisans of human rights and defenders of respect for cultures clash.

The analysis of the relationship between human rights and cultural relativism is at the very root of the thematics of identity. By studying colonial ventures after the Age of Enlightenment and by demonstrating their concern to respect indigenous cultures, sometimes to the point of inventing them, one is led to favor a constructivist approach to identity.22

ILL. CONSTRUCTIVISM

If French sociology is the heir of Rousseau (The Social Contract), it was also shaped by the reactionary theories of Maistre and Bonald, who felt a nostalgia for the Middle Ages and valorized the "community"' at the expense of the "society."23 This problematic of the "community" was born in Germany in the heart of the Romantic reaction (Herder, Fichte, T6nnies), but it also developed in France in authors such as Fustel de Coulanges and Durkheirn. Durkheim was particularly obsessed with social bonding, doubtless from a concern to substitute a form of republican cohesion for the mechanical solidarity of the Ancien Regime and the anomie of the market. This approach consists of empha- sizing, in an organicist perspective inspired by Spencer, the "collective con- science"' as well as, in a general way, the monism and the monadism of so- cial objects.

Closely related are the works of Halbwachs and numerous other French sociologists, who tend to make of every social group a given "already there," a given to which they assign a conscience or a memory. In France, this sociological naturalism has been reinforced by Hegelian Marxism, which quite naturally transplanted itself into this Durkheimian problematic. Indeed, both in Hegel and in Marx, groups first exist "in themselves," then at a later stage acquire a consciousness of themselves. This objectivist sociology cannot be conceived of independently from a philosophy of history: a teleology is necessary in order to construct a sociology, and the existence of social classes cannot be postulated apart from an "end of history" when these classes will be abolished. This socio- logical eschatology is not without epistemological consequences. First, a critique of it can equally be directed to a concept such as "nation" or any other collective term which, by the very fact of being used, makes the group it designates exist (the performative character of social objects). As such, nationalism, like 46classism," is merely a strategy of accrediting a social group: class struggle often consists purely and simply of having the existence of the different classes recognized.24

Contrary to sociological objectivism are constructivism and methodological individualism. If there are no groups in themselves, then there are only con-

22. Ibid. 23. Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition [19661 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993). 24. Bogumil Jewsiewicki, "Triomphe ou fin de 1'Occident en Afrique," Cahiers d'etudes afri-

caines 114 (1989), 289-291.

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structed groups, each group consisting of the conglomeration of a collection of individuals who succeed in forming an alliance to have their existence recog- nized. Here we recognize Sartre's approach25 and his sociohistorical itinerary that makes the group pass from seriality to fusion, to organization, to institu- tion.26 Under the influence of Sartre's ideas, I grant a preponderant place to rarity and to exteriority in the constitution of groups, but with this difference: I believe that the rarity in question is not of a material order but of symbols available for constituting social groups.

The strategy of constituting groups is therefore essentially political, so that their existence cannot be analyzed independently from the discourses uttered by their representatives. One could go so far as to maintain that the life of groups is inseparable from the discourse of their representatives. It is also wrong to separate the sphere of representation from that of "social reality": different social groups only perpetuate themselves inasmuch as they have suc- ceeded in emerging onto the political field. This political strategy of recognition and accreditation utilizes the methods of production of truth current in the scientific domain: notably the "hardening of facts." In this sense, the famous Machiavellian maxim, "to govern is to make [them] believe," is equally true in sociology and history. The lot of the French working class is indissolubly linked to that of its representatives, and the slow death of the PCF (Parti Communiste Francais) and of the CGT (Confederation Generale des Tra- vailleurs) doubtlessly means the end of their constituents.28 Thus the approach of the sociologists who investigate the disappearance of the working class in terms of the techno-economic changes, such as the crisis in Fordism, is ulti- mately pointless: the identity sign is mostly arbitrary, it is the result of the application of an "onomastic emblem" to a collection of individuals.29 Conse- quently, the whole genius of sociologists is to arrive at having the models which they make of social reality recognized30 and, from that point of view, their talent is not very different from that of politicians: in both cases, one anticipates the expectations of social actors.

Thus there seems to be a conjunction between sociology and anthropology which, in their respective domains, try to emphasize the social construction of identities. The history of the social sciences of the past two decades could therefore be analyzed as the passage from sociologism and objectivism to indi- vidualism, interactionism, and phenomenology. Within this new paradigm, one trains one's sights on the individual and, particularly, on the outside individual who creates the group. As we already noted, this change of perspective also

25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris, 1960). 26. Emmanuel Terray, "Marxisme annees 60," Les Temps Modernes 531-533 (1990), 86-98. 27. Luc Boltanski, Les cadres (Paris, 1982). 28. Philippe Corcuff, "Le categories, le professionnel et la classe: usages contemporains de

formes historiques," Geneses 3 (1991), 55-72. 29. Jacques Berque, "Qu'est-ce qu'une 'tribu' nord-africaine?" in Maghreb, Histoire et societes

(Paris, 1974), 22-34. 30. Bourdieu, Choses dites.

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has to be related to the decline of structural linguistics and to the rise of sociolin- guistics and pragmatics (Austin, Benveniste, Searle). In this new space, identity becomes the result of a "negotiation" among all the players participating in the definition of social bonds. The social contract is no longer defined once and for all, but becomes the "agreement on the very object of the disagreement." Yet, constructivism and interactionism are themselves not safe from all communitary presuppositions. In the classical work of constructivist thinking, The Social Construction of Reality,31 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann thus put forth a way of thinking from which the imputation of community is not absent. Similarly, one of the theoreticians who has interactionism most in view, John Gumperz32 is not free of every ethnicist or culturalist presupposition.

Furthermore, it is to be feared that an individualist and phenomenological drift may result from the aporias of postmodernism. In the wake of George Marcus and Michael Fischer33 an entire North-American current, in a tradition marked by cultural relativism, is emphasizing anthropology as "text," that is to say that the vision of populations studied by the ethnologist is the sum of the number of views brought to bear upon them.34 This current tends to sanction the idea that the totality of descriptions elaborated by anthropologists regarding a given society are all equally "true" and that the great works of anthropology (The Nuer by Evans-Pritchard, Dieu d'eau by Griaule, and so on) are of greater value because of their authors' talent rather than because of their read-out of the subject matter. This relativist conception of anthropology may be criticized, like all relativist conceptions, by turning the relativist argument against its authors: relativism is, in fact, but one of the points of view it is possible to have regarding a given society. The agreement or even the disagreement of anthropologists about the structures of this or that society clearly shows that an object exists -if not a "reality" -about which observers argue. Whether this object is constructed or contested takes nothing from the materiality of its existence. The representation is not less real than the reality which it is meant to represent and that is why all the paradigms of "invention" and of "creation"9 are, in a sense, nothing but the reverse of the objectivism they claim to denounce.

I also found myself to be in opposition to any form of postmodernism. I have no intention of formulating a philosophical interrogation on the impossibility of reaching reality, but I do intend to propose a new paradigm. The venture of re-elaboration which I have undertaken simply aims to grasp sociologically, historically, and geographically the meaning of words by carrying out a sort of onomastic simulation. But the absence of a fixed link between the term and

31. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y., 1966).

32. John Gumperz, Engager la conversation (Paris, 1989). 33. George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chi-

cago, 1986). 34. Cf. Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986); Clifford,

The Predicament of Culture; Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Cambridge, Eng., 1988).

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its referent does not mean that groups do not exist. In the work of disassembling the notion of the ethnic group some were willing to see an attempt at negating the existence of groups. On the contrary, the construction of groups, far from being proof of their non-facticity, in fact strengthens their existence. One need only note what is presently happening in Africa to be convinced of this. For example, in Liberia, confrontations between ethnic groups often hide conflicts of another origin, notably religious ones. The deconstruction of ethnicities, of peoples or of nations, does not aim to deny their existence, but simply to demonstrate their relativity and, consequently, to question a fundamentalism that in its different transformations-ethnic, cultural, or religious-is one of the most dangerous phenomena of our era.

IV. "REAPPROPRIATION"

Linked to this constructivist problematic is the question of "reappropriation," defined as the phenomenon of feedback of "etic" statements upon social actors themselves. The term thus concerns the production of local identities from what V. Y. Mudimbe calls the "colonial library."35 From this perspective, indigenous peoples' perceptions of themselves are affected by the feedback of colonial and postcolonial ethnological texts on their consciousness. In a general fashion, this "reappropriation" is inscribed in the greater realm of relationships between literacy and orality. Indeed, in the "oral" cultures, the diffusion of literacy authenticates the claims of social agents and sanctifies social relationships in some way. Here one will recognize the analysis of Jack Goody36 as well as its limitations. In West African societies, influenced by writing for centuries, and especially by an Arabic literature transmitting representations from the Old Testament, how can one be certain that the materials gathered in the field by the ethnologist do not bear traces of concepts imported before the colonial conquest? The schema that opposes people of power to people of the earth, for example, is presented by anthropologists as a cultural trait characteristic of numerous societies of the West African savanna (Bambara, Mossi, Gur- mance, and so on). But this trait may be conceived as the product of the incorpo- ration of the totality of these political formations into a common cultural area that includes North Africa. The recurring use of divination is doubtless ex- plained on the same principle.

Two consequences spring from these reflections. First, the emphasis on ethnic specificity and the comparativism it induces obliterate this phenomenon of incorporation. Second, the facts of reappropriation and reworking of ideas, to which historians draw the attention of other social scientists, and which are beginning to ruffle the self-assurance of anthropologists, may be assimilated to an encounter between an "already there" included in a grouping that goes far beyond the local society under study with an imported literature. In the

35. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1988). 36. Jack Goody, La raison graphique (Paris, 1979).

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political anthropology of West Africa, for example, the "local" theories of power cannot be reduced to a simple creation of colonialism but result from an accord between people of power and people of the earth - a pairing infiltrated by Islam and by the colonial theory of conquest. For, in order for that reappro- priation to take place, one surely has to assume the existence of a support that on the whole possesses the same characteristics as the elements that come to be added to the structure. The data brought by the anthropologist would then be the product of the accretion of a series of strata, causing the idea of an indigenous layer of population to regress to infinity. Anthropologists find them- selves in such a state of dizziness whenever they ask themselves about the first origin of the institutions they are studying. The loss of the conditions under which utterances were produced allows them to apprehend as structures those classifications that exist in the local society only in an unstable form. These classifications take on the power of law only through the magic of writing.

V. STATE AND STATELESS SOCIETIES

To refuse to ratify the distinction between state and stateless societies is not equivalent to taking refuge in a kind of formalism in which all cows are black. If the opposition between people of power and people of the earth is apparent in segmentary societies, the same is also true in societies with a central political power. The hesitation with which the first European travelers described the nature of power in coastal African societies (chief, prince, king, and so on) shows clearly that the classification of this or that society in the categories distinguished by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard in African Political Systems (1940) is largely arbitrary. To a great extent, political anthropology was as much a projection of the preoccupations of the outside observers as it was a pure description of the societies studied. To see in any one system of organization a stateless society or a society with a state thus would depend greatly on the angle of vision, but also on the attitude of the observers to their own society. Eighteenth-century writings on "civil society" have had an impact on the way in which anthropologists have classified African political systems. From the philosopher' effort to define an autonomous "public space" as a bulwark against absolutism arose a populist vision of society that resembles the underlying notion of segmentary society.37 One must stress that state and segmentary socie- ties, far from corresponding to two types of societies, are nothing but the two poles of an oscillating process.38 Thus civil society and segmentary society are not opposed to the state, but rather represent what is left of the state when it has been forgotten. This model explains at the same time the existence of a "public space" in the two forms of society.

37. Henrika Kuklick, "Tribal Exemplars: Images of Political Authority in British Anthropology, 1895-1945" in Functionalism Historicized, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison, Wisc., 1984).

38. Amselle, Logiques meitisses.

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By public space must be understood a space that, in a privileged manner, serves for the practice of external politics. With the aid of an example from the Peul, Bambara, and Malinke societies of southwestern Mali and of northeastern Guinea, I would like to try and show that "public space" is common to societies with a state and segmentary societies. In these societies this public space exists independently from the ethnic affiliation of the rulers and from the political form of the societies. In the states, in chieftainships, and in the village communi- ties, there are places where politicians, that is to say people who represent their community to the outside world, officiate. The households (du) of this region include a certain number of huts connected together by a surrounding wall, and this grouping, generally circular in form, does not communicate with the outside except through a hut with two openings, one turned inward and one outward. This hut, called a "vestibule" (bolon), is primarily meant to deal with the external relationships of the community and as such appears as the favored place of politics. It is in the vestibule that the head of the family (dutigi), also called "chief of the vestibule" (bolontigi), receives strangers and thus the contacts between the family as a political community and the outside world are established. It should be noted, however, that political authority is not randomly distributed among the whole of the society; it is, on the contrary, tightly linked to the possession of a certain social status. Only men of nobility (horon, tontigi) are named to be "chief of the vestibule," and neither slaves nor women can claim this title. In this ethnographic description political is identified with "common wealth" and exteriority.

Indeed, this definition puts the external relationships of the communities in the foreground, and, in this regard, it is difficult to imagine a society completely turned in upon itself, one that would not grant any space, no matter how minimal, to a stranger. If such a society did exist, I would reserve the name apolitical for it. But the model of "the war of each against each" (Hobbes) or of the "state of nature" (Locke, Rousseau), even though based upon concrete Amerindian societies,39 is a convenient fiction that allows political philosophy to elaborate the other fictions of contract and civil society. If no purely warfaring society has ever existed except for a very short period,40 then the "civil society" which is its inversion would also lose its operative value. With the same blow,

39. "It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before" (Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. C. B. MacPherson [Harmondsworth, Eng., 1968], 187.) It is in the writings of J. Acosta, a Peruvian Jesuit that Locke finds his illustrations of the "state of nature." "There are great and apparent conjectures," says he, "that these men [speaking of those of Peru] for a long time had neither kings nor commonwealths, but lived in troops, as they do this day in Florida-the Cheriquanas, those of Brazil, and many other nations, which have no certain kings, but, as occasion is offered in peace or war, they choose their captains as they please." (Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Govern- ment [1690] [London, 1924], 167.)

40. For example in Wasolon; cf. Amselle, Logiques mitisses, 212.

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associated anthropological notions (segmentary society, society against the state) become null and void, as does the contrast between state and stateless society. Every society has a "public space" to be managed, every society is directly political. It is by denying the political side, by refusing to recognize an exteriority in different societies, that ethnological reason, a faithful continu- ator of a certain political philosophy, has won its renown.

VI. INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY

Another way to locate certain societies in a radical alterity is to deny them the possibility of reserving a place for the individual. In contrast, to begin the analysis with the individual is doubtless one of the best ways to escape from any form of exclusion, stigmatization, and racism. This is so even if that proce- dure flies in the face of sociological and anthropological tradition that empha- sizes the communitary and collective aspect of "primitive" societies and ethnic minorities (Durkheim, Thnnies, L. Dumont). What one might call the "imputa- tion of community" is one of the favored ways of advancing racist discourse: it is by assigning a "singular plural" - the Jew, the Arab, the Bambara, the homosexual -and thus by the negation of individuality that all forms of rejec- tion are practiced. To recognize the individual status of an Other is to recognize him or her as an alter ego, as a participant in the same humanity and the same contemporaneity. In that sense racism is in no way peculiar to Western societies: when Europeans make general statements about the Peul or the Bambara, their attitude is completely symmetrical to that of Malians who are incapable of seeing the individual in the European. Racism is therefore as much the act of the dominated as of those who dominate; it results from a holistic misreading that consists of reasoning in culturalist or communitarian terms. Every society is at once holistic and individualistic: it is holistic when observed from the outside, and individualistic when one becomes one with it. From this perspec- tive, racism is not linked to ignorance of the Other but to failure to recognize the Other as an individual. The belief in the existence of "corporate groups"- lineage, clan, people, civil society-that is, as organs that have a claim to sovereignty, constitutes in a sense the most elementary form of racism.

Sartre is, as has already been mentioned, one of the rare authors who has tried to safeguard the essence of Marxism by relying on a methodological indi- vidualism.41 The intersubjective approach, for which he was denounced by the structuralist Marxists, seems to constitute the main contribution of his approach. The priority he gave to the aims and projects of individuals, and thus to a phenomenological grasp of the social, reinvigorated what in Marxism had become congealed, both in its Stalinist and its structural version. But if one cannot but subscribe to the way in which Sartre proceeds with the ideal construction of social groups (serial groups, groups in fusion, organized groups, institutionalized groups), it is still the case that his individualist sociology and

41. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique.

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theoretical humanism drew on the deficiency of the majority of social theories, namely a sharp opposition between primitive and other societies. In fact, when Sartre puts individual praxis in the center of his approach, he conceives of its role only in the framework of historical societies, while the "primitive" societies remain fixed within the repetition of the Same and owe their modifications only to external influences.42 In that sense, Sartre finds himself in the same place as Levi-Strauss who has frequently contrasted "cold" and "hot" societies.43 In short, it seems as if all sociology, no matter how individualist, needs an exterior referent or an implicit ethnology in order to affirm its validity. Grant me the primacy of individualism in historical societies, the sociologist seems to say, and I will leave you the non-historicity of exotic societies. This is why Sartre, despite his profession of a progressive or Marxist faith, should definitely be placed in the mainstream of liberal thinking.

Like Sartre, Luc Boltanski makes a categorical distinction between "critical societies" (ours) and traditional societies.44 Different from traditional societies, critical societies are supposedly characterized by the existence of several "cities," thereby allowing the actors to pass alternatively from one world into the other. What makes Boltanski's approach so interesting for anthropologists is that it permits a circumvention of the opposition between individual and collective action. By introducing the notion of "agent" into the analysis of denunciation, Boltanski manages to substitute the dyad "singular versus general" for the dyad "individual versus collective" and thereby gives prominence to what he calls continual variations of size. In aim this approach is thus totally comparable to that of Evans-Pritchard when, for example, he analyzes the phenomena of fusion and fission in segmentary African societies. There, too, a movement is at work in which groups of increasing size are embraced (individuals, segments, lineages, clans). The alternation of phases of political contraction and expansion may be clearly observed at the outbreak of a conflict that is at first purely local but that progressively involves larger units. Let us take for example the late nineteenth-century conflict known in Wasolon (Mali) under the name of the "Peul War." On the occasion of a funeral, the Jalo of Lontola sent a challenge to Chief Namakoro Jakite, who responded with another challenge and asked

42. Ibid., 124, n. 1: "Il ne faudrait pas definir l'homme par l'historicit6-puisqu'il y a des societes sans histoire - mais par la possibility permanent de vivre historiquement les ruptures qui bouleversent parfois les societes de repetition. Cette definition est necessairement a posteriori, c'est-A-dire qu'elle nait au sein d'une sociWte historique et qu'elle est en elle-meme le resultat de transformations sociales. Mais elle revient s'appliquer sur les societes sans histoire de la meme maniere que l'Histoire elle-meme revient sur celles-ci pour les transformer - d'abord par l'exterieur et ensuite dans et par l'interiorisation de l'exteriorite."

43. Claude Levi-Strauss, La pensee sauvage (Paris, 1962), 328-329. He clearly perceived the difficulties inherent in Sartre's position, but the solution he proposes -history unfolds the fan of societies in time, ethnology in space (339)-reintroduces a split between ethnology and sociology. Either every society is historical or no society is, and it is not so much the option chosen that counts as the fact of initiating or not initiating a rift between several types of societies. Nevertheless, as far as methodology goes, it is true that the technique, consisting of varying the variables within the same cultural area, is often the only way to grasp the meaning of an institution.

44. Boltanski, Les cadres.

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a neighboring chief, Kunjan Jemori Sako, to help him subdue the Jalo. Kunjan Jemori Sako's army went to Lontola, pillaged the village, and went home, but failed to hand over part of the booty to Namakoro Jakite. During a conflict with another local chief, Namakoro Jakite tried to take revenge on Kunjan Jemori Sako and succeeded in bringing into the war a large number of regional chieftainships, as well as the king of Wojene. After a reversal of alliances, customary in such situations, all the Peul regrouped against the forces of the king of Wojene, thus constraining the commander-in-chief to take flight. But this confederation against the King of Wojene, with its ethnic character, had only an ephemeral existence. A short time afterwards the region fell back into a phase of segmentation, that is to say of wars of one against all.

In this example, it appears that purely local and segmentary clashes, which frequently originate in conflicts among individuals, can trigger wars involving states, through an enlargement of the scope of conflict. Conversely, the interven- tions of the state are often very brief and quickly give way to the feuds and vendettas that are the usual form of violence in the region. In reference to Hume's analysis of the relationship between paganism and Christianity,45 one may deem these conflicts to be rooted in the political oscillation whose trace is also observable in ethnic identity changes.

Thus, critical societies are not the only ones to possess a plurality of "cities": exotic societies can equally move back and forth between several worlds. By passing from segmentarity to the state, the societies of southern Mali, for ex- ample, also pass from the singular to the general through a kind of ascent to the extremes. Here, then, the state and the segmentary constitute two possible modalities of the public space.

VII. PRIMORDIAL SYNCRETISM

In regard to the Peul, Bambara, and Malinke populations of Mali and Guinea, I have defended the idea of mixture or primordial syncretism.46 Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow developed the same idea in their analysis of the Khoi, San, Tswana, and Herero populations of the Kalahari, thereby rendering the vision of the Bushman as eternal hunter-gatherer null and void.47 In fact, these different populations are involved in a plurality of economic activities: foraging, hunting, gathering, cattle breeding, agriculture, trade, and craftsmanship. Over a long historical period, they simultaneously or alternately practiced all of these activi- ties and entered into a constant network of interaction. The very object of research must thus be organized by the articulation of these social formations and is not limited itself to each entity taken in isolation. At the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of merchants and European mission-

45. David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 4 vols. (London, 1753-1754). 46. Amselle, Logiques mitisses. 47. Edwin N. Wilmsen and James R. Denbow, "Paradigmatic History of San-speaking Peoples

and Current Attempts at Revision," Current Anthropology 31 (1990), 489-524.

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aries, this network of overlapping relationships was dismembered and gave birth to societies and cultures circumscribed and reified by colonial administra- tors. The Bushmen of the Kalahari are thus neither the living relics of the period preceding the neolithic, nor the emblematic representatives of a "mode of a foraging production" whose roots supposedly go back to prehistoric times. The Bushmen and the San are categories invented by colonial thinking just as the representation of the people of the Kalahari as foragers is invented. In fact, this representation has been extracted from a whole series of subsistence strategies in which the totality of the rural populations of Botswana was involved. Thus from a syncretic situation, societies, cultures, indeed "modes of production"48 have emerged under the pressure of colonialism and of the European gaze. By postulating a primordial syncretism, I wanted to advance the idea of a multiplicity, a plurality of belonging at the beginning, which seemed to me to be the main characteristic of precolonial Africa. By showing that only fuzzy groupings prevailed before the European conquest, I simply wanted to underline that changes in identity were the rule and that, consequently, categories such as those of culture and society could not appear. In fact, in order for African cultures to exist as such, it was necessary that the European cultures had been hypostatized and that the idea of them had been projected onto exotic realities. On this condition, a filtering process and a disarticulation of the "networks of society" can be made operative, a process that gives birth to a representation of Africa as the land of welcome for a multitude of cultures or ethnicities.

Thus, the debate on the autonomy of hunter-gatherer societies ties in with the debate on ethnicity. Indeed, a common naturalist and typological inspiration propels the definition both of pure types of societies and of immutable ethnici- ties. Jan Vansina thus points out, in reference to Wilmsen and Denbow's article, that such research undermines the foundations of all comparative anthropology by relying on a sociocultural approach of the evolutionist type and, conse- quently, that it is necessary to change paradigms.49 This kind of work does, indeed, force researchers to redefine the premises on which an adequate compar- ative anthropology can henceforth be constructed.

In defining cultures or types of societies, ethnologists quite frequently employ ideological representations that mirror in reverse their own society. If the topos of the hunter-gatherer, for example, has so effectively taken root in our imagina- tion, it is because it constitutes an identity referent indispensable to the func- tioning of our civilization.50 This civilization, like the sociological theories that account for it, presuppose, as we have seen, an implicit ethnology.

From this perspective, the relationship between anthropology and history appears very different from what it was at the start. Distorted by the debate

48. Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge, Eng., 1979).

49. Jan Vansina, "Comments on Wilmsen and Denbow," CurrentAnthropology 31(1990), 516. 50. Edwin N. Wilmsen, Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari (Chi-

cago, 1989).

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between functionalism and evolutionism, the question of historicity could not have been satisfactorily broached until a true history of exotic societies was established; that is, until historians began to be interested in the past of these societies. Then the contemporaneity of the latter could be postulated as well as the different phenomena accompanying it: feedback of literacy over orality and the weight of imported representations on indigenous consciousness. But the coexistence of a plurality of systems (indigenous and imported) equally forces one to question oneself on the compatibility of these schemas with one another. Thus, for example, rather than detecting the result of foreign influences (Islam or colonization) in West African binary oppositions like the people of power versus the people of the earth, would it not be appropriate to see in them a universal characteristic? If such is the case, the question of historicity would refer back to that of universalism, that is to say to a favoring of resem- blances over cultural relativism.

Two possibilities, in short, are offered to the anthropologist: to start by positing differences in order then to find resemblances or, on the contrary, to hypothesize similarities in order, later, to appreciate the full extent of dis- cordance. I prefer the second solution.

EHESS, Centre d'Etudes Africaines Paris

TRANSLATED BY MARJOLIJN DE JAGER