Douglas W. Leonard - Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa

Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa

Douglas W. Leonard

As with any large work, it is not possible to thank everyone who contributed. I will thank some specific people below, knowing that I will inevitably miss someone. I can only say thank you to the many whose names do not specifically appear due to a lapse of memory on my part.

This book would not have come together without the contribution first of Alex Roland. He saw the potential in the work and helped me to frame my ideas in productive and useful ways. Bill Reddy was always available with sage advice on what it took to succeed in the academic world. Engseng Ho and Laurent Dubois offered superb advice that shaped this project in meaningful ways, particularly in my efforts to understand difficult anthropological theory or the strands that pulled the French colonial empire together. It is almost impossible for me to describe the debt I owe to Bruce Hall. Simultaneously mentor, colleague, and friend, Bruces broad knowledge of the literature and history of Africa opened my eyes to a world of possibilities. I will never be able to reciprocate all that Bruce and his family have done for my family and me. I look forward to more collaboration in the years to come.

Coming after almost ten years of toil, this book would not exist without the figurative village of assistance. John Martin helped to shape my thought and writing at a time when I felt lost in the intellectual wilderness. Orin Starn introduced me to the fascinating world of anthropology and drove me to go beyond simple critiques of colonial scholarship. Jolie Olcott opened both her home and her wide range of contacts in the academic and publishing worlds, sharpening my research project at an early stage. Dick Kohn brought his unique set of governmental and historical expertise to bear for me in wonderful and inventive ways, including in his cogent and pointed criticism of very early versions of . Colleagues and mentors at the US Air Force Academy pushed me along in my research as well. To Dana Born, Mark Wells, John Abbatiello, John Plating, Derek Varble, and Larry Johnson, I therefore send a sincere thanks. Most important, I must thank Meg Martin, who gave me the time, space, and unflagging support that I needed to bring this to the finish line.

Ultimately, no historical research works without the assistance of the amazing professionals who help us find and make sense of sometimes obscure materials. I must thank Heidi Madden at Duke for her incomparable research support as well as the staff of the interlibrary loan office at Perkins library. In France I must thank the archivists and staff at the Archives Nationales, the Musum dhistoire naturelle, and the Socit Historique de la Dfense (SHD) in Paris; the Archives Nationales doutre-mer in Aix-en-Provence; and the Institut Mmoire ddition contemporaine in Caen, who made research a smoother (and quicker) process than perhaps should be the case. In particular, Andr Rakoto at the SHD made my work in Paris easier and much more enjoyable. At Bloomsbury, I must thank Maddie Holder, Dan Hutchins, and Gopinath Anbalagan for their phenomenal guidance and support. I would be remiss if I did not also thank Lester Crook, who first saw value in the publishing of my work.

At the same time, friends were crucial to my success. I could not have made it without the help, support, and laughs supplied by Jeannine Cole, Emily Margolis, Fahad Bishara, Julia Gaffield, Willeke Sandler, Samanthis Smalls, Wynne Beers, Daniel Bessner, Elizabeth Brake, Eric Brandom, Karlyn Forner, Vanessa Freije, Ketaki Pant, Erin Parish, Sean Parrish, and John Roche. Each knows what he or she has done to help me along.

Finally, I must thank my wonderful and ridiculously patient family. My daughters Cara and Katie simply could not wait until the day my book was done so that I could spend more time with them. Kathys willingness to serve as a first-line copyeditor, despite my truculence, was amazing. Without their love and support, I could never have completed this work, which too often kept me away from them.

Portrayals of an Africa frozen in time justified colonial conquest and rule, particularly after the 1830 invasion of Algiers ushered in a new era of colonial expansion for France. It was the nature of this colonial rule, though, that caused significant debate between those who advocated for a parallel association with local African social and political structures and those who pressed for a combined assimilation toward an ideal French social condition.

These thinkers expanded the field of possible sources and introduced new concepts, but they continued to view native Africans as sources of information and only rarely as reasoning interlocutors and intelligent interpreters. Scholars laid analytical frames atop what Michel Foucault has described as a new mode of thought, one focused on identity and difference instead of the long-dominant search for resemblance.

In this process lay the potential for productive intellectual engagement but also the seeds of political destruction. These conversations, conducted across time and space and involving a wide variety of texts and sources in translation, revealed the inherent contradictions of a larger project that required successful dialogue but delivered systems

Far from passive recipients of metropolitan thought, men and women in the colonies actively shaped metropolitan ideas on basic social structure and interaction as they emerged. In the French science de lhomme, intellectual innovation came not always from academics in stuffy rooms but instead from direct interaction and dialogue with the subjects of study themselves. These efforts ultimately fell under the rubric of ethnology, a social science devoted to understanding distinctions between civilizations or races and employing historical, linguistic, and ethnographic tools of analysis.

From General Louis Faidherbe (18181889) in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle (19121990) and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (19302002) in the 1950s and 1960s, a succession of soldiers, scholars, and administrators cultivated colonial sources to translate indigenous ideas for a metropolitan audience interested primarily in a more efficient form of colonial rule, in this case, the grafted associationist approach. It was this act of translation, though, that undermined the entire effort. French thinkers built their ethnological ideas through interaction with native sources, both living and written, but the simple act of selection artificially narrowed their view and doomed the colonial structures that followed. Building from a place of initial weakness due to limited language skills and local contacts, French explorers and administrators adopted local norms exulting Arabic language forms for diplomacy, trade, and religion. Their insular approach, with head down toward the page instead of head up toward the sociopolitical events swirling through Africa and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, caused them to grasp the wrong conclusions. These limitations were largely hidden from view at the time as these thinkers built intellectual networks wider than those employed by their predecessors, even confronting and countering theories proposed by social scientists such as Emile Durkheim (18581917).

By 1955, for instance, Soustelle adopted ethnological institutions and principles in an ultimately incomplete and failed effort to govern Algeria with an associationist eye while stamping out the nascent nationalist revolt. At the same time, in the work of Bourdieu and his associates, French Africanist ideas formed the core of a new, empirically grounded, and personally contingent alternative to the dominant structuralist, sociological, and anthropological perspective in France advocated by Claude Lvi-Strauss (19082009), among others.