Mestizo logics: anthropology of identity in Africa and elsewhere

Abstract

The publication in English translation of Jean-Loup Amselle's remarkable work, Logiques metisses (1990) is a most welcome addition to the new literature on ethnicity. In an earlier work, Amselle sought to demonstrate the determining role of the colonial state in creating artificially fixed boundaries that belied the fluidity and continuity that had characterized African (Amselle et M'bokolo, 1985). Based on his research among several groups in Mali, including the Fulani, the Malinke and the Bambara, Amselle makes a strong case in Mestizo Logics the constructed character of these as ethnic groups. Rather than clearly separated units, where culture, language, political boundaries and social grouping coincide, he proposes a chain of societies, a labile continuum of schemas and practices governed by a kind of hybrid logic (a term that I prefer to the title used in the translation); that is, a continuist that emphasizes generalized, long-term syncretism where group boundaries exist in a state of flux that goes back as far as can be known. Amselle's chain of societies brings to mind Lee Drummond's well-known cultural continuum (1980), but takes a more radically constructivist approach, and is less encumbered by notions of pre-existing cultural systems.In comparison to writers in the postmodernist current like Drummond and Fischer (1986), Amselle focusses more on social collectivities (ethnic groups, villages, chiefdoms) than on individuals, a feature that should make the book all the more interesting to English-speaking readers. Possibly because of the North American tendency to focus on changes in individuals' identity rather than group definitions, it is rare to find the issue of shifting ethnic boundaries grounded in as much historical data as this book offers.Also, Amselle's approach makes a refreshing change from the volontaristic tone of many discussions of the construction of ethnic identifies (e.g., Mary Water's Ethnic Options). Waters' emphasis on individual choices is probably ethnographically accurate in contexts such as the American, but is not necessarily universal, and probably would not work well in the African context. Amselle's book brings out the importance of studying changes in ethnic boundaries on the group level even when individual changes of identity are also at issue. For example, the change of individuals' identifications from Canadien francais to Quebecois was accompanied by important changes on the collective level Quebec as well as concomitant changes of political relationships between French speakers in Quebec and the rest of Canada.The new introduction to the English version of this book underscores another very important point in Amselle's approach to identity; namely, that identifies are not exclusive: for instance, social actors may define themselves simultaneously as Moslems and pagans (p. xi). Now that in Anglo North America, mixedness and cumulative identifies seem (finally) to be gaining legitimacy in public and popular discourse, the point is all the more salient to ethnic studies on these shores.The French edition of this work elicited widespread commentary among Africanists, not always entirely favourable. …