Abstract
G. Boetsch — Black Egypt, White Barbary: The Missed Meeting between Biology and Culture. This study of the classificatory models of raciology used by 19th-century French and English anthropologists has two interests. First of all, these scholars played a central role in the knowledge that European, in particular French, science claimed to have about this part of the world. Secondly, the geographical region of North Africa raised serious questions for anthropology since the apparent "raciological" unity, repeatedly discovered there, could not be observed in the cultural realm. Anthropologists' attention was drawn to the fact that the vestiges of a major civilization existed in Egypt but not in western North Africa. Oddly enough, binary models of explanation were always proposed for this: Copt/Fellah, Arab/Berber. Explaining the development of a civilization in terms of the bio-logical characteristics of the people that built it seemed to be scientific to 19th-century anthropologists. They thought they could explain in a simple, satisfying way the complex relationship between biology and culture.
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