Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism and the Rule of Custom in France

Jean-Loup Amselle explores the issue of multiculturalism by delving into the history of France's confrontation with ethnic difference. Amselle analyzes France's relationship to Egypt, Algeria, and Senegal to show how ideas about difference and assimilation played out in French colonial policies and how these same tensions continue to be problematic as France grapples with cultural pluralism.Amselle's book has timely and wide-ranging implications. Arguing against the "liberal communitarian state" as it exists in the United States, Amselle contends that an overemphasis on difference can lead to what he calls "affirmative exclusion"―the flip side of affirmative action. The recognition of a multiplicity of ethnic groups in France, he asserts, creates an environment that fosters racism. "Despite an outward appearance of generosity, supporters of French-style multiculturalism, by promoting 'affirmative action,' run the risk of creating as many difficulties as there are 'target groups,' which they have helped identify and hence produce."Calling on theories of racial difference devised by early anthropologists―most notably, Louis Faidherbe―and on the work of political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Amselle makes historical and sociological sense of the debates over multiculturalism and the violence they engender. Toward a French Multiculturalism proposes directions for the future.

History

AMSELLE, Jean-Loup

Europe

Cornell University Press

Jean-Loup Amselle explores the issue of multiculturalism by delving into the history of France's confrontation with ethnic difference. Amselle analyzes France's relationship to Egypt, Algeria, and Senegal to show how ideas about difference and assimilation played out in French colonial policies and how these same tensions continue to be problematic as France grapples with cultural pluralism.
Amselle's book has timely and wide-ranging implications. Arguing against the "liberal communitarian state" as it exists in the United States, Amselle contends that an overemphasis on difference can lead to what he calls "affirmative exclusion"―the flip side of affirmative action. The recognition of a multiplicity of ethnic groups in France, he asserts, creates an environment that fosters racism. "Despite an outward appearance of generosity, supporters of French-style multiculturalism, by promoting 'affirmative action,' run the risk of creating as many difficulties as there are 'target groups,' which they have helped identify and hence produce."
Calling on theories of racial difference devised by early anthropologists―most notably, Louis Faidherbe―and on the work of political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Amselle makes historical and sociological sense of the debates over multiculturalism and the violence they engender. Toward a French Multiculturalism proposes directions for the future.

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. The opening chapters first treat the notion of ethnological reasonits history and ideological practicesthen oppose to it the reality of cultural tension, the fact that conflicts and negotiations bring about transformations in the identity of collectivities. The following two chapters illustrate a real system of transformation, and question some basic concepts of political anthropology. The discussion continues in a more illustrative manner over the next two chapters, which present case studies of two West African societies that challenge typologies of political anthropology and ethnographic classification. The last three chapterson white paganism, cultural identities and cultural models, and understanding and actingsituate the debate within a wider historical framework of political and cultural confrontations. Who defines ethnicities,” identities,” differences”? Where can one find them as pure essences witnessing to their own originary beings?

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

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Stanford University Press

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.

Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere (Mestizo Spaces)

Stanford Univ Pr

In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought

This important book by two leading scholars of Africa examines a series of issues that are central to the question of the postcolonial. The postcolonial paradigm, and the more recent decolonial paradigm, raise the issue of the universal: is the postcolonial the first phase of a new universalism, one which would be truly universal because it would be fully inclusive, or is it on the contrary the denial of all universalism, the triumph of the particular and of fragmentation? In addressing this issue Diagne and Amselle also tackle many related themes, such as the concepts of race, culture and identity, the role of languages in philosophy as practised in different cultural areas, the various conceptions of Islam, especially in West Africa, and the outlines of an Africa which can be thought of at the same time as singular and as plural. Each thinker looks back at his writings on these themes, comparing and contrasting them with those of his interlocutor. While Amselle seeks to expose the essentialist and culturalist logics that might underlie postcolonial and decolonial thought, Diagne consistently refuses to adopt the trappings of the Afrocentrist and particularist thinker. He argues instead for a total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all ‘centrisms’ and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time. This volume is a timely contribution to current debates on the postcolonial question and its new decolonial form. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, from African studies and Black studies to philosophy, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in the debates around postcolonial studies and decolonial thought

Literature & Fiction

Diagne, Souleymane Bachir

History & Criticism

Polity

Branchements: anthropologie de l'universalité des cultures

Flammarion

Vers un multiculturalisme francais: L'EMPIRE DE LA COUTUME

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

About the Author\nAnthropologue africaniste réputé, Jean-Loup Amselle est directeur d'études à l'EHESS. Inventeur d'une « anthropologie des branchements », ses travaux portent sur l'ethnicité, le métissage et le multiculturalisme. Parmi ses nombreux ouvrages : L'Occident décroché. Enquête sur les postcolonialismes (Stock, 2008) ; Rétrovolutions (Stock, 2010) ; Psychotropiques. La fièvre de l'ayahuasca en forêt amazonienne (Albin Michel, 2013).\nSouleymane Bachir Diagne est professeur de philosophie et de français à l'université de Columbia. Il est spécialiste de l'histoire des sciences et de la philosophie islamique. C'est l'une des voix africaines contemporaines les plus respectées. Il a notamment publié, chez Albin Michel, En quête d'Afrique(s) : universalisme et pensée décoloniale, coécrit avec Jean-Loup Amselle (2018).\nC'est dans la conjoncture de l'après Deuxième Guerre mondiale et de la conférence de Bandung (1955) qu'émerge le paradigme postcolonial, courant d'idées qui accompagne l'entrée sur la scène internationale des pays décolonisés dits du « Tiers Monde ». Dans leurs critiques de la domination occidentale, le ou les postcolonialisme(s) ont mis en avant la traite esclavagiste transatlantique et la colonisation. Progressivement, une théorie plus radicale s'est imposée : la « pensée décoloniale », qui fait remonter à la découverte des Amériques, en 1492, la mise en oeuvre d'une nouvelle formule de domina¬tion sociale et d'exploitation économique, désormais indexée sur la notion de race. 
À partir de leurs itinéraires respectifs, le philosophe Souleymane Bachir Diagne et l'anthropologue Jean-Loup Amselle dialoguent sur des questions cruciales qui engagent les rapports entre l'Afrique et l'Occident : l'universalisme, les spécificités culturelles et linguistiques africaines, le soufisme ouest-africain, le panafricanisme. 
Ces échanges reposent sur la conviction partagée que toutes les entreprises qui visent à établir une communication entre les différentes cultures humaines de notre planète sont salutaires, car elles permettront d'abattre les barrières réelles ou imaginaires qui fragmentent notre monde.

En quête d'Afrique(s): Universalisme et pensée décoloniale

ALBIN MICHEL

On a longtemps vu l’Afrique comme le continent des ethnies – ethnies dotées de systèmes religieux, politiques et économiques fixes – et l’on considérait que ces ethnies, strictement délimitées, étaient elles-mêmes à l’origine des multiples conflits qui ensanglantaient le continent africain.Ce livre, l’un des premiers à utiliser la notion de métissage en anthropologie, montre au contraire que les appartenances ethniques, culturelles et identitaires étaient extrêmement souples avant la colonisation et que, par exemple, on n’était pas Peul, Bambara ou Malinké de toute éternité, mais qu’on le devenait.De nombreux changements d’identité ont ainsi été observés dans tous les domaines. Des Peuls, pouvaient devenir Bambaras puis Malinkés et inversement ; des païens, devenir musulmans puis retourner au paganisme ; des sociétés villageoises, devenir des royaumes puis retomber dans l’anarchie ; des sociétés produisant pour leurs stricts besoins, s’ouvrir au marché puis se replier sur l’autarcie…Un essai devenu un classique de l’anthropologie, qui contredit l’image d’une Afrique figée dans la tradition et ne s’ouvrant que difficilement à la modernité coloniale et postcoloniale.

Logiques métisses (Bibliothèque scientifique payot) (French Edition)

Africa

Payot *

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