Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere (Mestizo Spaces/Espaces Metisses) - Tapa blanda

This innovative work seeks to reverse the perspective and reasoning of anthropology and to develop an alternative mode of conceiving culture that would not automatically privilege the colonizing West. That necessarily involves a critique of the ethnological reason that extracts elements from their context, aestheticizes them, and then uses their supposed differences to classify types of political, economic, or religious ensembles. Such reason yields classical oppositions like the State versus segmentary societies, market versus subsistence economies, and Islam or Christianity versus paganism. As an alternative, the author opposes to exclusionary categories a mestizo logic that sees social phenomena as situated on a continuum and accentuates indistinction and the originary syncretism in all cultures and other ways of categorizing human life. The book s rich source material is drawn from the author s fifteen years of fieldwork and research in West Africa.

Jean-Loup Amselle is Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and chief editor of Cahiers d'etudes africaines.