Politiques, collections et médiations africaines
(Constructing Ethnology in Colonial Africa - African Mediations, Collections and Policies)
GEORGET, Jean-Louis, Hélène IVANOFF and Richard KUBA (edd.) (2020)
Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle
This collective volume retraces the construction of Africanist knowledge in Europe –particularly in France and in Germany – and identifies its African mediators, while also focusing on the collections that resulted from ethnographical encounters. By means of a crossover approach by historians, ethnologists, museologists and Germanists, the book questions the cultural interactions, the material and intellectual transfers between Europeans and Africans, from the mid-nineteenth century until independence. It draws attention to the flows at work in the manufacture of anthropological discourses, the connections behind the collection of data and the construction of knowledge in a colonial situation. Mainly through French and German case studies, the volume highlights the complexity of the European views of colonial Africa in the early days of anthropology, as well as the broader representations that resulted from that time. It also examines the perceptions of anthropological projects by the African actors who played an active part in these exchanges and who, behind the Europeans, were their main protagonists.
