Mestizo spaces

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.

"Under what conditions is anthropology possible today, when a crisis of social meaning - a crisis that makes it more difficult to conceive and manage our relation to the other - makes the need for anthropology appear more clearly than ever before? This book sets forth at least the beginning of an answer to this question." "Positioned in opposition not only to political theories of universalization and homogenization more or less tied to the theme of "the end of history," but also to "postmodernist" versions of anthropological theories of multiplicity and relativism, the author argues that social anthropology, through its self-critical tradition, is fully capable of adapting to the accelerated change that is continuously recomposing relations between universalism and particularism. It is for social anthropology to select, analyze, and understand the new modes of sociality and the new spaces in which (not without calamities and contradictions) these utterly new recompositions, a major aspect of our contemporary world, manifest themselves."--Jacket.

This book outlines an approach to anthropology that focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other. Why trace a line of demarcation between societies thought to warrant and require anthropological observation and others (namely, our own) thought to demand a different type of study? Once anthropology, through its study of rites, takes social meaning as its principal object, the necessity for a "generalized anthropology" that includes the entire planet seems obvious, especially in view of the rapid proliferation of new networks of communication and the integration of individuals into those networks.