La naissance de l'aire culturelle méditerranéenne dans l'anthropologie physique de l'Afrique du Nord.

Abstract

J.-N. Ferrie — The Birth of the Mediterranean Cultural Zone in the Physical Anthropology of Northern Africa. ; The main idea in the physical anthropology of Northern Africa in the 19th century was that Berbers were a separate people distinct from Arabs and related to European populations on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. It would be erro-neous to suppose that these anthropological taxinomies of race merely came out of the necessities of colonization and had nothing to do with contemporaneous scientific paradigms. By dealing with the diffusionism of genes, anthropological research ended up dealing with cultural diffusionism: race was a sort of infrastruc- ture; and culture, a sort of superstructure. It was also the vestige of northern migrations; but interest in the vestiges of cultural practices and beliefs tended to reverse the diffusionist approach: the diffusionism of genes merely served as a grounds for cultural diffusionism. This reversai is analyzed so as to show how the question of the northern origins of Berbers (Bertholon) became the problem of the existence of a Mediterranean race (Sergi). It is thus shown how certain cultural invariants could be studied in other than conjectural ways (Westermarck).