Jean-Loup Amselle

This 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.

"This important book by two leading scholars of Africa examines the relationship between politics, religion and identity in contemporary culture and the possibility of a new universalism. Erudite, wide-ranging and eminently readable, it will be of great interests to students, scholars, and general readers alike"--