Séance annulée
Jeudi 20 Juin 2013
de 15h00 à 17h00
salle 11 , 105 Boulevard raspail 75006 PARIS
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Keith HART (University of Pretoria & London School of Economics)
The anthropology of unequal society and the struggle for economic democracy
Discutant : Riccardo CIAVOLELLA
Séminaire du LAIOS 2012-2013 “Anthropologie Politique : Globalisation, Race, Etat”
Véronique BENEÏ
Jean-Bernard OUEDRAOGO
“This is an early draft of an essay for Annual Reviews of Anthropology (2014). Modern anthropology was born to serve the coming democratic revolution against the Old Regime. A government by the people for the people should be based on what they have in common, their “human nature” or “natural rights”. The great Victorian synthesizers, such as Morgan, Tylor and Frazer, stood on the shoulders of predecessors motivated by an urgent desire to make world society less unequal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau deserves to be seen as the source for an anthropology that combines the critique of unequal society with a revolutionary politics of democratic emancipation. The most impressive work coming out of the post-war American school was Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History (1982). But Claude Lévi-Strauss tried to redo Morgan in a single book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship(1949). Jack Goody has also engaged with world history, producing a score of books investigating why Sub-Saharan Africa differs so strikingly from the pre-industrial societies of Europe and Asia, with a later focus on refuting the West’s claim to being exceptional, especially when compared with Asia.
The research program that I co-direct at the University of Pretoria (http://web.up.ac.za/humaneconomy) exposes me to world society from the perspective of the global South and Africa in particular. Young political anthropologists are breaking new ground in Southern Europe and elsewhere around the world. I hope to get more pointers to relevant reading on recent directions in anthropological research from this seminar. I will speak in English, but read and understand French.”