Bayart Rendall Roitman Derrick - The Illusion of Cultural Identity (2005)

THE ILLUSION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY
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JEAN-FRANCOrS BAYART
The Illusion of
Cultural Identity
TRANSLATED BY STEVEN RENDALL, JANET ROITMAN,
CYNTHIA SCHOCH, AND JO N ATHAN D ERRICK
The University o f Chicago Press

T h e U n iv ersity o f C h ica g o Press, C h ic a g o 60637
C . H u rst & C o. (Publishers) L td, L o n d o n W C 1 B 3P L
R e v ise d and u p d a te d e d itio n © C . H u rs t & C o. (Publishers) L td, 2 0 0 5

All rights reserved. P ub lish ed 2005
P rin te d in India
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 1 2 3 4 5
IS B N : 0 -2 2 6 -0 3 9 6 1 -7 (cloth)
IS B N : 0 -2 2 6 -0 3 9 6 2 -5 (paper)
First p u b lish ed in 1996 b y L ibrairie A rth e m e Fayard, Paris, as L ’Illusion Identitaire,

© L ibrairie A rth e m e Fayard, 1996.
L ibrary o f C ongress C a ta lo g in g -in -P u b lic a tio n D ata
B ay art.Jean -F ran ^ o is.

[Illusion identitaire. English]
T h e illusion o f cultural id e n tity / Je an -F ran ^ o is B ayart ; tran slated by
Steven R e n d all, ... [et al.].
p. cm .
Includes biblio g rap h ical references an d in d ex .
IS B N 0 -2 2 6 -0 3 9 6 1 -7 (cloth : alk. paper) — IS B N 0 - 2 2 6 -0 3 9 6 2 -5 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. G ro u p identity. 2. M u lticu ltu ra lism . 3. D e v e lo p in g c o u n trie s— C iv iliza
tio n — W e ste rn influences. I. T itle.
H M 7 5 3 .B 3 8 5 1 3 2005
3 0 5 .8 '0 0 9 — dc22
2005006370
@ T h e p a p e r used in this p u b lic a tio n m eets th e m in im u m re q u ire m e n ts o f th e

A m e ric a n N a tio n a l S tandard fo r In fo rm a tio n S ciences— P e rm a n e n c e o f P ap er
fo r P rin te d L ibrary M aterials, A N S I Z 3 9 .4 8 -1 9 9 2 .
ACKNOW LEDGEM ENTS
M y thanks first to the C entre d ’Etudes et de Recherches

Internationales (CERI) o f the Fondation Nationale des Scien
ces Politiques for having encouraged and financed the w riting
o f the present work. It required the patience o f the two suc
cessive directors o f the latter, Serge H urtig andJean-Luc D om e-
nach, to can y this ‘special project’ through to completion, w ith
a deplorable delay that did not, however, ham per their indul
gence. I hope they will now accept my gratitude.
M y colleagues at C E R I have helped me formulate my ideas
in a comparative perspective. T he works o f Christophe Jaffre-
lot, Alain Dieckhoff, Pierre Hassner and Guy H erm et have
been especially im portant in encouraging me to take an inter
est in the issue o f nationalism, w hich I managed to elude
throughout the 400 pages o f my book The Politics o f the State in
Africa. To my particularly close colleagues in political science,
history and anthropology who specialise in sub-Saharan Africa—
especially Peter Geschiere, Achille M bem be, Janet R oitm an,
C om i Toulabor, and Jean-Pierre Warmer, w ho have continued
to stimulate me w ith their curiosity and habitual good hum our—
I offer the customary salutations. Fariba Adelkhah deserves
special m ention for having convinced the Turcophile that I am
o f the charms o f Iranian society, and for having unceasingly re
m inded m e that things are never as simple as political scientists
w ould like them to be. To all these people my debt is great, and
I am conscious that I have not been able to make the most o f
so m uch intellectual generosity. I hope I have at least not
betrayed the lessons I have been taught!
H elene A rnaud devoted several sum mer days to a last re
reading o f this book, which Sylvie Haas has once again, emulating
v
VI Acknowledgements
Champollion, extracted from the formless mass o f my writing.

Last but not least, while the excellent Agnes Fontaine became
more and more threatening on the telephone, Linda Amrani,
Judith Arnaud, Richard Banegas, Rachel Bouyssou, Gregory
Cales, Jean-Pierre Joyeux and Patrick T ruel threw themselves
into the breach, battling a virus-—possibly identity-related but
certainly computer-related— that sought to derail the publi
cation o f this work, tracking dow n the Abbe Gregoire in the
Bibliotheque Nationale, and seeking out the very elusive pro
phet who, one evening, had visited Saddam Hussein, and w ho
had escaped from my files o f newspaper clippings.
To all o f you, thank you, and let’s get together next year for
the arrival o f the Beaujolais Nouveau, under the rheum y gaze
o f the owl!
Paris, spring 2 0 0 5 J.-F.B.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements page v
Foreword ix
P a r t I. T H E B E A U J O L A IS N O U V E A U IS H E R E ! 1
1. T h e In te r w e a v in g o f T ra d itio n s: G lo b a lis a tio n
a n d C u ltu ra l C lo s u re 7
Three dreams o f identity 10
The invention o f tradition as the invention o f modernity 33
Cnltnralism as an ideology o f globalisation 40
Christianity and globalisation in Africa 48
2. S h o u ld w e sto p u s in g th e w o r d ‘C u l t u r e ’? 59
Heritage or production? 65
Cnltnral extraversion and the transfer o f meaning 71
The fabrication o f authenticity 77
The formation o f primordial identities 85
Tableaux o f thought or tables o f the law? 96
Political utterance 109
P a r t II. O W L S W I T H R H E U M Y E Y E S 122
3. T h e I m a g in a r y Polis 133
The irreducibility o f political im a g in a ire s 137
The im a g in a ire , a principle o f ambivalence 163
4. T h e M a te r ia lis a tio n o f th e P o litic a l Imaginaire 181
The political symbolism o f hair 185
In the political oven: the culinary p o lis 188
The political symbolism o f clothing 195
77?e im a g in a ire , a principle o f incompleteness 226
C o n c lu s io n : th e P a ra d o x ic a l I n v e n tio n o f M o d e r n ity 233
Notes 253
Index 297
vii
‘Traditionally, Asia is used to being governed with an
iron hand: a Peter the Great or a Stalin does not surprise
a country that was conquered by the Mongolians.’
(Andre Siegfried, Voyage aux hides, Paris: Armand Colin,
1951, pp. 81-2)
FOREW ORD
This book is the fruit o f over thirty years’ research that I have
carried out at C E R I since the late 1970s, since w hen my chief
concerns have been the complex relationships betw een cul
tural representations and political practices, popular modes of
political action, and the political imaginaire— in short, what
I call ‘politics from below ’ and ‘political utterance’.1* I have
sought to explore these relationships by reference mainly to the
societies o f sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey and Iran, on w hich I
have w orked directly, but w ith the help o f numerous col
leagues I have also made comparisons w ith South and East
Asia, N o rth Africa and Europe.
T he book was w ritten after conflicts in the form er Yugo
slavia, the Caucasus, Algeria and the Great Lakes region o f
Africa endow ed the concepts involved in my research, w hich
had hitherto seemed rather abstract, w ith an immediate and
tragic significance. These wars and insurgencies turned on the
notion o f identity, drawing their lethal power from the assump
tion that a so-called ‘cultural identity’ necessarily corresponds
to a ‘political identity’. But each o f these ‘identities’ is at best a
cultural construct, a political or ideological construct; that is,
ultimately, a historical construct. There is no natural identity
capable o f im posing itself on m an by the very nature o f things.
T he old French expression designating the autochthonous
people o f a country as les naturels is misleading. And the term
‘prim ordial identity’ currently used by anthropologists and
political scientists is no better. T here are only strategies based on
* T h e n o te s th a t ap p e ar at th e en d o f this v o lu m e in c lu d e o n ly b ib lio g rap h ical ref

erences. T h e y can be ig n o red by a reader w h o does n o t w ish to ch eck m y sources.
IX
X Foreword
identity, rationally conducted by identifiable actors— the Serb

ian Com m unist apparatchiks converted into ultra-nationalists,
the Hutu extremists in Rwanda, and their respective militias—
and dreams or nightmares o f identity to w hich we adhere be
cause they enchant or terrify us. But we are not doom ed to re
main under the pow er o f such spells, which demonstrated their
inanity long before their ultimate cruelty was revealed: after
the First W orld W ar, a Europe based on nationalities and ‘na
tional economies’ immediately proved impracticable, and A dolf
H itler has been called ‘a logical W ilsonian nationalist’.2
T he goal o f intellectual inquiry is precisely to help us ‘free
ourselves from ourselves’: ‘W hat w ould be the value o f the
search for knowledge if it sought only to acquire knowledge,
and not also, in a certain fashion, to lead astray, as m uch as
possible, the person w ho knows?’3 N othing seems more urgent,
at the beginning o f the twenty-first century, than intellectually
‘leading astray’ the thinking citizen, insofar as it can spare him
or her from making far more dangerous errors. There are few
contem porary matters that do not involve the problem o f the
illusion o f identity. The general opening up o f societies—
‘globalisation’— is accompanied by the exacerbation o f par
ticular identities, w hether religious, national, or ethnic. This was
illustrated some time ago by the paradox o f H eidegger having
himself photographed in traditional Swabian garb.4
T he dialectical relationship betw een the tendency to uni-
versalisation and the assertion o f specificities underlies most of
the phenom ena that are the major topics o f discussion: the ex
tension o f the market economy and the concom itant audience
for the democratic idea outside the W estern world, the intensi
fication o f commercial exchange and the unprecedented ac
celeration o f global inform ation flows, the rapid increase in
migration, the revival o f overt racism in Europe, the deploy
m ent o f ‘ethnic cleansing’ in recent conflicts, the demands of
rebels in Chiapas, the vogue for ‘political correctness’ and multi-
culturalism in the U nited States, the rise o f H indu nationalism
in India, and the p o st-9 /11 fate o f political Islam. In their
Foreword XI
heterogeneity these manifestations, which are both rational and

phantasmal, implore us to better understand the sources o f glo
balisation and its obverse, withdrawal into the shell o f identity.
This implies a political critique o f the concept o f culture,
w hich is usually taken at face value. Is Confucianism the force
behind the rise o f China, Japan and the newly industrialised
countries in East Asia? Isn’t the West imposing on the rest
o f the world its own definition o f hum an rights and dem o
cracy? Is African culture compatible w ith a m ulti-party dem o
cracy? Is Islam an insurm ountable obstacle to integrating
N o rth Africans and Turks into W estern Europe? These are
uncertainties, or rather overly entrenched certainties that we
constantly encounter.
Identity-related withdrawal in the political domain impedes
intellectual and even moral inquiry. ‘They are Blacks, we are
W hites. T h at’s w hy we must not intervene [in R w anda]’,
a form er Gaullist minister declared in the National Assembly.
A French military judge found that soldiers o f the French
Foreign Legion guilty o f having summarily executed a poacher
were operating under ‘extenuating circumstances’ because the
crim e was com m itted in the Central African Republic, or, as
he described it, ‘another planet’. A French M inister o f Culture
maintained that the film Jurassic Park ‘imperilled French iden
tity’. A form er prim e minister and future president o f the
French R epublic argued that democracy is doom ed to fail in
Africa because o f tribalism, and Samuel H untington gravely
predicted that the twenty-first century w ould be dominated
by the ‘clash o f civilisations’.
W hat is amazing here is not that such absurdities are uttered
w ith a straight face, but that they play an increasingly im
portant role in public debate, to the point that they end up
organising it: ‘T he relativism o f cultural or historical values has
becom e a comm onplace o f our society; it is often accom
panied by the assertion, if not that we belong to different
species or sub-species, at least that com m unication between
Xll Foreword
cultures is impossible in principle’.5 T he debate is an ancient

but urgent one. W hen it takes a form that collides not only
with the researcher’s convictions but also w ith the conclusions
drawn from tw enty years o f observing various societies, one
must take part in it, less as a polemicist, a com m itted intel
lectual, or a philosopher, than as an analyst o f political reality.
T he goal pursued in the pages that follow is Nietzschean,
but it remains modest: to underm ine identity-related nonsense
by outlining an anti-culturalist examination o f the relationships
between culture and politics. Political action is automatically
cultural action; that at least is not in dispute. B ut culturalism
cannot account for this quasi-synonymy because it defines
cultures in a substantialist manner and assumes between cultures
and political action a relationship o f exteriority in the form of
an unequivocal causality. I am aware that a w hole intellectual
tradition has posited culture as a principle o f openness and
universality. T he first critics o f the Enlightenm ent did not
completely reject the Kantian heritage; they rem ained pre
nationalists and pre-culturalists, following the example o f
Herder, w ho had not yet referred explicitly to ‘the spirit o f the
people’ (Volksgeist),6 In fact, it was not till the advent o f G er
man Romanticism that culture became a principle o f exclusion
by being a badge o f uniqueness and belongingness, fuelling
nationalism and, ultimately, far worse things. Even if we set
aside the political consequences precipitated by the transfor
mation o f the idea o f culture, today we find it very hard to grasp
its relation w ith practices o f power or econom ic accumulation.
However, this book is not limited to a critique o f ideologi
cal, political, or academic culturalism, no m atter how engaging
this task might be. By posing the problem o f the relationships
between political and cultural action in a new way, it also seeks
to contribute to a better understanding o f the birth o f the state.
In their im portant book, Bruce Berm an and John Lonsdale
suggested a distinction between ‘state-building’, as a conscious
effort at creating an apparatus o f control, and ‘state formation,
as an historical process whose outcom e is a largely unconscious
Foreword X lll
and contradictory process o f conflicts, negotiations, and com

promises betw een diverse groups’.7 A reader familiar w ith my
earlier works will see that I am chiefly interested in this second
process, w hich I also address in the following pages. Analysing
the cultural dimension inherent in political action should help
us to refine our analyses o f ‘state form ation’ and to reflect on
the often paradoxical invention of w hat w e conventionally
call ‘m odernity’.
In order to do so I have found it useful to return to the fre
quently neglected achievements of Tocquevillian and Weberian
historical sociology, and to acknowledge that this approach
remains highly productive, particularly w hen employed by his
torians and anthropologists. Thus a third and final way of
reading my critical precis o f identity-related absurdities is to
see in it an invitation to return to some o f the key texts of
political science, whose heuristic pow er has not diminished
over time. It is not a m atter o f retreating into pedantic acade
micism, but rather o f drawing from a new reading o f these
works an augmented interpretative imagination, for, as [Tocfque^
ville said in the introduction to the first edition o f his D em o
cracy in America, ‘we need a new political science for a new
w orld’. W hen we return to these fundamental works, we are
struck by the way their inquiries converge. Intellectuals have
w orked indefatigably to erect walls separating approaches that
are m ore com plem entary than opposed, and to reduce living
thought to schools. O ne way o f reading this book is to follow
the thread that connects Foucault w ith Spinoza, Tocqueville,
Weber, Troeltsch and Elias.
Part I
THE BEAUJOLAIS NOUVEAU
IS HERE!
In its D ecem ber 1988 issue La G azette, a newspaper published
in Douala, reported on a ‘fine party’ that took place in Bayan-
gam, on the high plateau o f western Cameroon. M onsieur
Andre Sohaing, a w ell-know n businessman, was celebrating his
nom ination to the office o f fowagap, that is, great chief coun
sellor o f his native village. T he ceremony also included three
other elements: M . Sohaing was simultaneously celebrating his
tw enty-third w edding anniversary, the inauguration o f a pri
vate chapel he had had built on his own land, and his initiation
as a m em ber o f the Com pagnons du Beaujolais. ‘All in all’, the
journalist concluded, ‘an unforgettable party and a rewarding
discovery for all the guests, w ho left Bayangam w ith the
m em ory o f a charming village in a beautiful setting w ith a mild
climate. And each guest had only one thing to say: Thank you,
Sohaing A ndre!’
According to our intellectual categories, this event is easy to
explain. We are in Africa, in a T hird World country. A hack
w orking for the local paper reports, in his native language, a
custom: a local notable is ennobled by the traditional chief o f
his village, w ho rewards him in this way for his ‘actions’, his
‘achievements’, his ‘remarkable acts’. M oreover this big man is
also a capitalist boss, a Christian to boot, and apparently a good,
m onogam ous husband. B ut in him the heart o f deepest Africa
still beats. R oll the drums!
B ut this report tells the attentive reader about something
other than the resurgence o f traditional culture. First, w hat
1
2 Tlic Beaujolais Nouveau is Here!
culture are we talking about? T he Bamileke o f C am eroon are

a composite group from the point o f view o f their modes o f
political organisation and language.1They have diverse origins
and offer a now classic example o f ethnogenesis: Bamileke
society is a ‘frontier’ society in the American sense o f the term;
it was constructed by emigrants, or pioneers w ho came from
various places. The economic ethos o f this group, whose en
ergy is praised or feared in Cam eroon, is in reality differentia
ted, and the munificence shown by M onsieur Sohaing should
not deceive us; it corresponds, at least partially, to an ethics o f
retention among entrepreneurs to w hich the practices o f dis—
accumulation on the part o f other Bamileke actors are opposed.
In its ‘traditional’ form the Bamileke chiefdom— w hich, in
contrast to many such institutions in Africa, was not the
creation o f colonialism— has nonetheless undergone signifi
cant transformations since the eighteenth century. As a result
o f the integration o f the Bamileke region into the global market,
and then o f colonial occupation, the chiefs were on the w hole
able to evade surveillance by the councils o f notables and com
moners that surrounded them , expand their powers and enrich
themselves considerably. D uring the 1950s and ‘60s, they were
almost bankrupted by the nationalist movem ent and the
rebellion o f their ‘social juniors’.* M ost o f their palaces were
burned down. Nonetheless, the institution o f chiefdom was
reconstructed, often in the literal sense o f the term , and taken
over by new elites versed in W estern knowledge. In the Bam i
leke region, as in many African societies, a traditional chief is
often also a political dignatory, akin to a mayor, or even more
often, a CEO. As the G azette’s reporter put it, ‘everything is
done to ensure that the opening to m odernity is in accord
w ith fidelity to tradition’. Tradition, in other words, is neither
static nor unanimous. It adapts more or less to change and
gives rise to contradictory interpretations on the part o f
autochthonous actors themselves. Since the establishment o f a
* See m y The State in Africa (L o n d o n : L o n g m a n , 1993), pp. 112 fF.

H ie Beaujolais Nouveau is Here! 3
m ulti-party system in 1990, the Bamileke region has been one

o f the strongholds o f the opposition to the president o f the
R epublic, but many chiefs and businessmen w ere subjected to
strong political, banking, fiscal, and police pressure by the
regime, and ultimately w ere coerced to support the president’s
candidacy in the 1992 election.
A nd so the roots o f tradition grow deeper and deeper.
R uddy-cheeked, and wearing their blue aprons, the w ine
makers o f the Beaujolais region can ‘officiate according to the
secular rites o f their order ... in the bucolic setting ofB ayan-
gam ’. T hey bear the fragrance o f ‘the French soil’ and are every
bit as traditional as the local feathered dancers. T he party thrown
by A ndre Sohaing gives concrete form to ‘the conjunction o f
giving and receiving, so dear to Leopold Sedar Senghor’, our
lyrical journalist observes. ‘O n the one hand, the represen
tatives o f the Beaujolais region give new life, in the tropics, to
certain customs o f the French heartland, and on the other,
their Cam eroonian hosts exhibit some aspects o f the rich and
living heritage o f the Bamileke region’.
However, m odernity also grows apace. T he presence in
C am eroon o f the Com pagnons du Beaujolais attests to sound
business sense, a praiseworthy devotion to the new cult o f the
1980s that consisted in exporting w ine and conquering the
international market. Two days before, the Compagnons had
‘officiated’ in the same way, ‘in accord w ith the secular rites o f
their order’, in the gardens o f the Akwa palace— whose owner
is none other than M onsieur Sohaing— in order to offer ‘hun
dreds o f guests’ an opportunity to taste Beaujolais Nouveau.
In any event, one should not assume that one has to choose
betw een tradition and modernity. T he traditions o f French
w inegrow ing are a recent invention. T he first Bacchic broth
erhood, the Chevaliers du Tastevin, was created only in 1934,
in N uits-Saint-G eorges. Its Burgundian prom oters were con
cerned above all w ith arresting the drop in sales that followed
Prohibition in the U nited States, the econom ic crisis o f 1929
4 The Beaujolais Nouveau is Here!
onwards and the rise o f protectionism in Europe. And the ‘ro

tating St Vincent’, w hich takes place in January, the first
Sunday after the feast-day o f the patron saint o f winemakers—
it is held each year in a different village, sometimes in the C ote
de Nuits, sometimes in the C ote de Beaune— was established
by the Chevaliers du Tastevin only in 1938, w ith a scarcely
veiled commercial aim. T he founding o f the brotherhoods in
the Bordeaux w ine-producing region is even m ore recent: the
Academie des vins de Bordeaux and the Com m anderie du
Bontemps de M edoc et des Graves were both founded in
1950.2Monsieur Sohaing, w ho was, the G azette tells us, already
a Comm ander o f the Grand Conseil de Bordeaux and a Knight
o f the Coteau de Champagne, is thus buying into m odern
mercantile folklore. The history o f wine in France is, moreover,
one o f perm anent innovation. W ine consum ption itself is not
a stable marker o f French identity: it spread throughout the
country and supplanted beer and cider after the First W orld
War, thanks to mobilisation and rationing, and has continued
to evolve since the middle o f the century, diminishing in
quantity but moving toward better-quality wines.
In the Cameroonian context o f the 1980s, the ritual invol
ved in tasting Beaujolais nouveau amounts to w hat historians
o f colonisation have called ‘a working misunderstanding’.
French winegrowers came to sell and were dum bfounded by
local customs: ‘A m em ber o f the Beaujolais delegation, M o n
sieur Chevrier, carried away by the atmosphere, did not hesitate
to join the dancers o f the Bayangam chiefdom w ho enlivened
the gathering from beginning to end.’ Andre Sohaing, whose
successive initiations seem not to have refined his palate— from
Bordeaux to Beaujolais, what a fall!— resorts to W estern cul
tural symbols in order to gain a certain legitimacy, not only in
his own country or w ith regard to his foreign partners, but also
in the eyes o f his native place. In its kitsch character, the scene
is almost wilfully ‘post-m odern’, and no doubt allows us to see
in the flesh the ‘reinvention o f difference’ discussed by James
Clifford:3 globalisation is not synonymous w ith increasing
The Beaujolais Nouveau is Here! 5
cultural uniformity. H ow ever, these ‘Blacks’ and ‘W hites’

drink the same wine, share the same religious faith and try out
the same dance steps. N o t long ago, one group was the master,
the other the slave, and perhaps some day they will once again
com e into conflict based on the colour o f their skin. A few
years after Sohaing’s initiation, the Social Democratic Front,
w hich was well established in western Cam eroon, called for a
boycott o f French products— including Beaujolais!— in order
to protest Francois M itterrand’s support for President Biya.
B ut in Bayangam, on that fine day in N ovem ber 1988,
friendship and ambivalence prevailed. From this point o f view
one could say, parodying Gramsci, that Beaujolais N ouveau is
the ‘organic’ beverage o f the Franco-African historical bloc
(and for an opponent o f the colonial pact like me, nothing is
m ore hum iliating than to have to swallow this in a N ovotel
[a French hotel chain] in a tropical capital.*)
T he traditional concept o f culture is not o f m uch help in
understanding the party in Bayangam, in either its French or its
Cam eroon aspects. Nonetheless, M onsieur Sohaing’s strategy o f
pow er or social ascent and the econom ic activity o f the Beau
jolais producers clearly have a cultural dimension: the w ine
growers wear folkloric costumes; the chiefdom ’s notables wear
clothes that could be described as neo-M uslim; the wom en
wear a sort o f neo-British, w ide-brim m ed hat that is probably
ridiculed outside Bayangam and Sohaing wears a suit and tie.
H ow should we understand such cultural practices, w hich are
often exuberant and constantly changing, w ithout reifying
them in a series o f cliches regarding the economic and political
mentalities o f a people? H ow can we stop seeing the en
counter o f ‘civilisations’ as an inevitable ‘clash’? H ow can we
* T o b e fair, w e sh o u ld ac k n o w led g e th a t ch a m p a g n e is the o rg an ic beverage o f

F ra n c o -A fric a n relations. In 1989 A frica im p o rte d U S $ 1 5 to U S $ 2 0 m illio n w o rth
o f c h a m p a g n e, an d C a m e ro o n was th e largest A frican purchaser. B y calling it iro n
ically ‘h o m e w a te r’, th e B am ileke, w h o d rin k a g reat deal o f ch am p ag n e, reveal th e ir
in tim a te u n d e rsta n d in g o f th e w o rk o f th e Italian M arx ist p h ilo s o p h e r th a t does
th e m h o n o u r. O n th e n o tio n o f th e h isto rical p o stc o lo n ia l bloc, see m y The State in
Africa, ch. V II.
6 The Beatijolais Nouveau is Here!
avoid thinking o f acculturation and globalisation as a simple

zero-sum game in w hich adherence to foreign representations
and customs inevitably leads to a loss o f substance and authen
ticity? Such are the initial questions we shall try to answer in
order to underm ine identity-related absurdities. W e can sum
them up thus: how can we formulate the relationship betw een
culture and politics w ithout being culturalists?
1
THE INTERWEAVING OF TRADITIONS

G LO B A LISA TIO N A N D C U L T U R A L C L O SU R E
T he m odern w orld is haunted by the spectre o f difference van

ishing. It fears that everything will becom e uniform and, as a
result, there is a ‘general anxiety w ith regard to identity’. Thus
Pierre Hassner writes:
I am afraid that the celebrated cultural identities are being erased by m o d
ernisation, by A m ericanisation, by television, by a w hole process o f m aking
m odes o f life uniform . Yet at the same tim e, w ith in this universality, the
n eed to distinguish oneself is becom ing stronger. People used to say that the
Fifth R ep u b lic becam e A m ericanised w hile rem aining anti-A m erican;
today we are A m ericanising ourselves w hile at the same tim e inventing an
exaggerated cultural identity in order to distinguish ourselves from others.1
This ‘com bination o f interconnection and heterogeneity’ sets

in m otion com plex cultural mechanisms that ought to be
evaluated w ith equal complexity.
Before postm odern anthropologists emphasised the ‘reinven
tion o f difference’ inherent in globalisation, the French his
torian Fernand Braudel noted that the ‘industrial civilisation’
exported by the West is ‘only one o f the characteristics o f Western
civilisation’, and that ‘by accepting it the world does not neces
sarily accept at the same time the whole o f that civilisation. O n
the contrary.’2 This can be seen even at the heart o f the capi
talist m ode o f production, for example in the methods and
spirit o f industrial m anagem ent and in the consum ption o f its
m ost emblematic products. T he ‘cultural biography’ o f a
M ercedes is n ot the same in G erm any as it is in Africa; and
7
f
8 The Interweaving o f Traditions
O shin, the Japanese soap opera, or parades o f drum -m ajorettes

involve specific values and social roles that differ from one
country to another.3 O ne o f the ‘creative team leaders’ for Coca-
Cola International at the advertising agency M cCann-Erickson
thus rightly protests against reproaches o f ‘Coca-Colonisation’:
[They are] w rong because all the thing wants to do is to refresh you, and it
is willing to understand your culture, to be m eaningful to you and to be
relevant to you. W hy is that called C oca-colonisation?
Because values are being im posed from som ew here ex tern al...
I d o n ’t think they are. I d o n ’t think that’s true. I think that friendship was
there, is there, and will be there forever. It was there before C oke. If C oke
disappears, friendship will always be there. W hat C oke does is it treats
friendship accordingly. In Japan, that m eans one kind o f thing, and in Brazil
another. A nd C oke acknowledges these differences, but C oke stands for
friendship. So, w h a t’s w rong w ith that? I m ean, I d o n ’t think that th a t’s an
im position o f a value. I d o n ’t think that C oca-C ola projects. I think that
C oca-C ola reflects.4
In fact, one cannot imagine a cultural appropriation that is not

subject to this kind o f creative diversion. In eighteenth-century
Russia, Peter the Great’s reforms gave rise to social institutions
that were entirely foreign to the intellectual and moral univ
erse o f Western Europe, to w hich they nonetheless appealed.
For example, the proponents o f the Enlightenm ent established
harems composed o f educated young w om en w ho were
dressed in the European rather than in the Russian m anner
(and were, significantly, deprived o f their grand clothes and
sent hom e if they went astray). In everyday life, the subjective
feeling o f ‘Europeanisation’ did not coincide w ith a genuine
convergence w ith W estern social practices. Conversely, there
m ight be a genuine Europeanisation o f some customs that
were not perceived as such,5 like the ‘W esternisation’ and
‘Americanisation’ stigmatised by those w ho now attack ‘glo
balisation’ and other forms o f ‘cultural aggression’.
Anthropologists and international relations specialists argue
that the reinvention o f difference inherent in globalisation
takes place first w ithin the level o f local societies, and manifests
itself in the exacerbation o f identity-related particularisms.6
The Interweaving o f Traditions 9
Kemalism, a ‘globalising’ m ovem ent if there ever was one,

saw civilisation only in the W est and drew the most extreme
conclusions in order to free Turkey from ‘general ridicule’, to
use A tatiirk’s ow n words. B ut it also ensured the political
victory o f Anatolia over the cosmopolitan R oum elia, and the
westernisation o f the country w ent hand in hand w ith the
rehabilitation or reconstruction o f a ‘T urkish’ culture that was
supposed to act as ‘custodian o f the spirit o f “the ‘people’” , in
contrast to O ttom an civilisation.7 In our ow n time, conflicts
* in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian sub
continent and Africa, in w hich identity plays a major role,
belong to the same historical stage as the internationalisation
o f the econom y under the leadership o f neo-liberal ideolo
gues, although there is no obvious connection betw een the
tw o phenom ena.
It is a com m on error to attribute this irreducibility o f dif
ference to the influence o f ‘culture’, or m ore precisely to the
exclusive relationship each individual is supposed to have w ith
‘his’ culture. Certainly we know from having read M ax W eber
that m an is an animal caught in webs o f meaning he has him
self woven. There is no activity, even o f an economic nature,
that does not immediately produce meanings and symbols.
U nderstanding a social, econom ic or political phenom enon
amounts to deciphering its ‘cultural reason’, as we have been
taught by a w hole anti-utilitarian school o f anthropology: ulti
mately ‘it is culture that constitutes utility’.8
B ut it is not certain that the ‘cultural reason’ that we all
think we depend upon actually determines our actions, or
even that it exists as a totality or a tangible system.9 For ex
ample Tocqueville is w rong in maintaining that ‘alongside
each religion there is a political opinion that is joined to it by
affinity’. H e tacitly admits as m uch a few lines later w hen he
tries to account for the Irish paradox: ‘These Catholics show
great faithfulness in their practices o f worship, and are full o f
ardour and zeal for their beliefs; but they nonetheless con
stitute the most republican and most democratic group in the
U nited States.’ T o explain this, de Tocqueville is forced to

leave the terrain o f the sociology o f mentalities and enter that
o f the sociology o f religious organisation: the political inac
tivity o f priests is the condition sine qua non o f Catholics’
adherence to democracy and their emancipation from the
duty o f obedience.10 W e could m ention other factors, such as
the political conditions o f England’s occupation o f Ireland and
the conformist tendencies o f immigrants eager to be inte
grated, and emphasise that in Argentina, by contrast, Italian
Catholics tended to support authoritarian nationalism.
Three dreams o f id en tity

The culturalist argument is always a substitute for a dem on
stration. However, it has perhaps never been so m uch in
fashion as it is today. W hen the rise o f East Asia’s industrial
economies is analysed, the Confucian legacy is com m only
invoked, often in a rather contradictory manner, and the
Japanese example is cited to prove that capitalism can turn tra
dition to its own advantage. T he art o f the ‘developer’ is said to
consist in making the most o f this cultural capital and adapting
business management to it.11 Various cases of ‘ethno-devel-
opm ent’ are supposed to support this point o f view, namely
those o f the Indian and Chinese diasporas, and o f the Bamileke
in Cam eroon or the Sfaxians in Tunisia. U nfortunately the
limits to this kind of act o f faith are fairly clear. It implies that
‘developm ent’ involves no more than looking ‘one’s own cul
ture’ straight in the eye. Apart from the fact that things are not
so simple on the macro-econom ic level, it is difficult to locate
this ‘culture’ and assess its effects.
Long praised by all and sundry, the cultural dimension o f the
Japanese economic miracle is now being questioned. T he cele
brated concept o f the firm as a large family, supposedly one o f
the keys to Japan’s success, does not testify to an eternal Japan
ese character. It is one facet o f the construction, in the 1930s,
o f an authoritarian and nationalist family-state, o f w hich the
E m peror was supposed to be the father. Its ideology evolved

at a time w hen industry was no longer led, as it had been in the
M eiji period, by individual and patrimonial bosses, but by
bureaucratic managers trained at the University o f T okyo.12
M ore generally, ‘exchanges and the influence o f foreign cul
tures transformed Japanese culture m ore than any other’.13
Thus Paul Veyne compares the Japanese o f The Tale o f G enji
and o f the postwar period to the ancient Rom ans, ‘a people
w ho took their culture from that o f another people, the
Greeks’.14 In fact the culturalist m yth o f the Japanese miracle
goes back only to the beginning o f the 1970s. It emerged
during a conference on the modernisation o f the Japanese
archipelago held in H akone, but for some time it has been
giving way to a m ore political approach to the state and the
nation: the uniqueness o f Japan is seen as consisting less in
its insularity and as ow ing m ore to historical and East-Asian
dim ensions.15
It is now acknowledged that this economic trajectory was
extremely antagonistic. Historians have exhum ed memories o f
dissension that are as eloquent as the invented tradition o f con
sensus, and the num ber o f mentally ill people hospitalised—
nearly three times as many as in the U nited States w ith a popu
lation only half as large— does not suggest celestial harm ony
am ong the Japanese in either their economic condition or
their culture.16T he ‘ants’, to paraphrase a form er French prime
minister, make demands and protest as m uch as they obey and
produce. T he neo-C onfucian m odel is unable to explain such
behaviour, w hich it w ould describe at best as ‘deviant’,just as it
is doom ed to remain silent about the indiscipline, the cor
ruption, the decline o f institutions and the rampant criminality
in China.
Ultimately the social struggle and disorder that constitute
any historical configuration become, for a culturalist, synony
mous w ith anomie and alienation. But, one wonders, are rep
resentatives o f the Buddhist Komeito, the Christian churches
and left-w ing parties w ho refused to attend the ceremony
celebrating the enthronem ent o f the Em peror Akihito in 1990

on the pretext that it contravened the separation o f religion
and state stipulated by the constitution less ‘J apanese’ than
other Japanese?17 And the Koreans and Taiwanese w ho de
manded and obtained the democratisation o f their countries—
aren’t they still Koreans and Taiwanese?
O f course, the problem is not posed in this way. O n the one
hand, political or economic action in East Asia, as in any part o f
the world, is coloured by a strong cultural connotation. In
China, M ao’s personality cult used and abused the ideogram
shong (loyalty) and badges in the form o f a heart, whose C o n -
fucian meaning was clear.18As for Taiwanese businessmen, they
do nothing w ithout consulting an astrologer. N one o f these
cultural practices suffices to explain political or econom ic ac
tion. The latter involves far more complex orders o f causality,
and it is the great m erit o f French Sinology to have dem on
strated this.19 Thus the cunning shown by the ‘cat’ D eng
Xiaoping in capturing the ‘m ouse’ o f economic growth is
fairly foreign to the Confucian legacy. R ather, it belongs to the
dynamic continuity o f a particular form o f governm ent, that o f
the ‘distended em pire’, whose trajectory is in no way syn
onymous w ith the country’s history, even though it has been a
major tendency for centuries. In addition, the ‘cat’s’ talent is
particularly effective in the ‘blue’ China that was already the
epicentre o f a luxurious w orld-econom y in the thirteenth and
fourteen centuries, and w hich sheltered the ‘golden age’ o f the
Chinese bourgeoisie before the C om m unist R evolution. At
least for the m om ent, the ‘Asian renaissance’ is above all a re
naissance o f this maritime space w hich will perhaps be en
dowed w ith political institutions as the result o f the Taiwanese
experience, in contrast to the ‘m odernisation w ithout institu
tionalisation’ that characterised D eng’s econom ic reforms.20
It is much more than a simple revival o f Confucianism— such
as the relatively belated ritualisation o f social life, particularly in
Taiwan— and at the same time rather less than such a revival,
to the extent that reform has yet to have full impact on Vietnam
or N o rth Korea, w hich some in Beijing regard as part o f

‘Greater C hina’.
O nly recourse to a history that is both general and none
theless differentiated provides a better understanding o f the
trajectories followed by Asian countries. Evidently such a
history must pay heed to cultural representations, insofar as it
must attend to their transformation over time and the speci
ficities o f the actors and circumstances. But, in the end, the
analysis cannot be lim ited to this level o f knowledge. At best,
culturalism produces absurdities: ‘O ne can regard M ao as an
“anal” leader trying to transform an “oral” society’, R .H . Solo
m on sententiously declares.21 At worst— and the worst is often
inevitable in this area— it leads to a phantasmal perception o f
the w orld that quickly turns into the rise o f identity-related
malaise.
T he Islamophobia that has gripped France and other
W estern nations is part o f this pathology. O ne o f its first symp
toms was a hallucinatory discourse on the Shia threat, gen
erated by the repercussions o f the Iranian revolution. In order
to make sense o f this mad idea, one has to realise that the
overthrow o f the Pahlavi monarchy was not a Shia revolution,
or even a religious revolution in the true sense. R ather, it was ‘a
political revolution that operated in the manner, and had to
some extent the appearance, o f a religious revolution’, as de
Tocqueville said o f the French R evolution. It is incontestable
that popular Shia religious feeling provided the basic voca
bulary and the pathos o f the great mobilisations o f 1978, and
the factions that rook up the reins o f pow er under the new
regim e had forged their radical ideology w ithin the religious
field during the 1960s and 70s. B ut it w ould be hard to locate
a causal relationship betw een the Shia faith (or identity) and
the uprising o f the Iranian people. After all, many Sunni
Iranians, in particular the Kurds, participated in it. M any Shia
Iranians identified w ith the quietism stigmatised by the revolu
tionary philosopher Ali Shariati, and most o f the clergy did not
endorse K hom eini’s views. T he Islamic R epublic is not a
republic o f the mullahs, as is automatically assumed, and still

less that o f the ayatollahs, some o f the most em inent o f w hom
have expressed reservations or even gone over to the oppo
sition. At most, the revolution involved certain m iddle-rank
ing clergy, allied w ith laymen. It was begun only at the price
o f ferocious repression directed against m en and w om en w ho
were just as ‘Shia’ as its founding fathers: monarchists, liberals,
but also religious dignitaries w ho protested at its innovations
in the domain o f political theology or its economic planning,
as well as militant revolutionaries w ho w anted to blend Islam
w ith Marxism.22 Again we see that the culturalist interpre
tation overlooks contradiction and political conflict as factors.
M oreover it is hard to explain w hy the ‘Shia’ revolution did
not spread beyond Iran’s borders and sweep along w ith it Ali’s
adepts living in Lebanon, the G ulf and Pakistan.23 Since the
same causes are supposed to have the same effects, we have to
concede that the ‘Shia’ variable in the fall o f the Shah was less
decisive than other social factors.
However, despite this incontrovertible evidence, French
journalists and politicians nonetheless designated Shiism as the
‘Enem y’, even before the conflagration in Algeria and the
thesis o f a ‘clash o f civilisations’ allowed them to extend their
siege-mentality psychosis to political Islam as a whole. W hen
the car workers at Talbot and C itroen w ent on strike in 1982,
Gaston Deferre, the then French minister o f the interior, pro
claimed that they were ‘fundamentalists, Shias’.24 W hen Saddam
Hussein launched his war against Iran,Jacques Chirac, the then
prime minister, immediately w ent to his aid: ‘Iran poses an
extraordinary danger to us ... and our com m on objective
should be ... to prevent the spread o f fundamentalism in the
region. France plays its part in this context by helping Iraq to
contain it’.25 If M uslim girls cover their heads w ith veils, this
can only be at the behest o f the malevolent authorities in
Teheran. If Algerian Islamist fighters kidnap, sexually enslave
and then kill young w omen, this has to be a case o f tem porary
marriage, the famous siqeh o f the Shias, w hich is still practised
in Iran despite the disapproval o f the authorities o f the Islamic

R epublic, and w hose features are nonetheless rather dif
ferent.26 T hank God, ‘the vast majority o f the Muslim com
m unity in France is Sunni-M alekite, a m oderate com m unity
that wants to be assimilated and has nothing to do w ith ter
rorism or protest’, the President o f the R epublic informs us.27
This selective perception o f the facts is induced by the cul
turalist interpretation. Consider the report o f a W estern intel
ligence agency, w ritten in 1992. Its author appends a line of
Persian poetry as an epigraph: ‘It takes only one spark to set
this universe on fire.’ T he tone is set! T he report goes on to
explain:
T h e im perial destiny o f the Persian people is deeply anchored in the col
lective unconscious o f the Iranians; [...] It is this that gives every Iranian a
national p rid e that som etim es borders on pretension. This im perial destiny
still underlies the current developm ent o f Iran. Even the religious speci
ficity o f Persia, N estorian in the C hristian era and Shia in the M uslim era,
shares in the consciousness o f the nation s im perial destiny. Today S h iis m
and Iranian nationalism are so identical that it is difficult to say if the export
o f the Islamic revolution urged by the Im am K hom eini has as its goal the
victory o f Islam o r the re-establishm ent o f the Persian Em pire. T h e
ultim ate goal o f K hom eini and his successors, K ham enei and Rafsanjani,
m ight well be the same as that o f the Shah, even if the strategies differ: the
restoration o f the E m p ire’.
B ut these different strategies are based on a fundamental cul

tural characteristic:
W h e n speaking o f Iran, one m ust keep constantly in m ind the n o tio n o f
ketman or taqiyah. T hese term s could be translated as ‘dissim ulation’,
‘tric k ery ’, or ‘duplicity’, b u t they m ust be given a religious con n o tatio n that
relieves th e m o f everything the W est m ight see as evil in this m ode o f
behaviour. F or the Iranian, this behaviour is good, and the Shia clergy
teaches it (m ore than do the Sunnis). N o th in g the Iranians say or do can be
taken at face value. This ‘dissim ulation’ is clearly justified w h e n the interests
o f religion or the E m pire are at stake. [...] In accord w ith the same
principle that asserts the prim acy o f the religious over the political and the
econom ic, the people, the elite and the leaders seek in concert the victory
o f Islam, w h ich is seen as ‘oppressed’, over W estern im perialism , a source o f
oppression. T w o weapons have been privileged since 1979: hatred o f the

W est and the practice o f ‘lying’ as a means o f achieving the victory o f the
Islamic revolution over Christianity and Judaism . T h e procedures devised
for attracting capital and technology from the W est are part o f this tactic.
O nce this culturalist principle is outlined, the inane m echan

ism is set in motion:
T h e w eakening o f Iraq has n o t only elim inated for a tim e the threats posed
along the border, but m ight also create a tem ptation to reconquer, through
the Iraqi Shia interm ediaries, the holy city o f Karbala, so dear to the hearts
o f thousands o f Iranian Shias. If Iran is currently opposed to a dism em
bering o f Iraq, it is perhaps because it wants to swallow it up as a w hole, in
order to reconstitute the Persian Em pire.
But the most tangible threat has to do w ith nuclear prolif

eration:
T h e im perial idea, for either the Shah o r the Ayatollah, m eans possessing
nuclear weapons. In the eyes o f all T hird-W orld countries, this is the
sym bol o f independence and power.* [...] Proliferation has a religious
dim ension. N uclear weapons are an im portant argum ent for the Iranian
mullahs sent as missionaries to the M id-E ast and to Africa. It is a victorious
surah added to the Iranian Koran [sic].
Evidence o f the Iranian desire to acquire nuclear weapons is

‘weak’, as the author o f the report him self acknowledges, but
there is one piece o f evidence he describes as ‘rather strong’,
namely the visit o f inspectors from the International Atomic
Energy Agency: ‘If one wants to hide something, a good way
to do so is to show, through inspections that risk nothing, that
one has nothing to hide. T hat is truly the way a good Iranian,
an adept o f taqiyah or dissimulation, thinks.’ Here, o f course, we
are concerned wholly w ith intentions; lacking any ‘absolute
proof o f Iranian activities in the area o f nuclear arm am ents’,
the indictm ent is based on cultural presuppositions. ‘In order
for this to be convincing, one has to take into consideration
the statements made by the leaders and Iran’s political and
* A p h an tasm ag o ria w h ic h France, an in d u strial an d C artesian n a tio n , has escaped,

as every o n e know s!
religious interest in possessing nuclear w eapons’. O rphaned by

the end o f the C old W ar, the author constructs the Iranian
threat on the m odel o f the Com m unist threat. A statement by
President Rafsanjani, w ith his determination to combine
W estern technology w ith fidelity to revolutionary principles,
is immediately connected w ith Lenin’s famous comment:
‘Capitalists will sell us everything, even the rope to hang them
w ith .’ Iran is supposed to embody a ‘revolutionary Islam’ that
has becom e ‘the fundamental w eapon o f its imperial will’:
This w eapon is training a w hole group o f students com ing from all parts o f
the Islamic w orld to the Islamic universities in Q om . It is the financial
support given to Islamic m ovem ents o f oppressed m inorities in various
M uslim states. It is the hope, given to all the disinherited, o f a better world,
th ro u g h a retu rn to the ancient K oranic law. Iran wants to be the bearer o f
Islamic messianism. In this it has superseded the Soviet U n io n , once the
hope o f proletarians, w ith its L um um ba U niversity in M oscow and its
support for local revolutionary m ovem ents. It has the same advantages as
the U S S R , the land o f proletarians. Since the defeat at Karbala in 680, Iran
has been the land o f suffering, o f the disinherited and martyrs. It is the
herald o f their hopes.
We should not underestimate the change represented by such

‘revolutionary Islam’, compared to w hich Palestinian terrorism
seems respectable.
T h e terrorism o f the past ten years involved Arabs fighting for the Arab
cause, for Arab land in Palestine. Psychologically, the terrorist o f the 1980s is
a soldier and uses a soldier’s weapons: explosives, firearms, even naked
blades. [...]. T h e terrorist o f A bu N idal o r the Palestine Liberation O rgani
sation sees him self as the perpetuation o f the Arab horsem en w ho created
the E m pire o f the Um ayyads and the Fatimids; a knight o f Allah, using the
sabre, the rifle and, if necessary, explosives [.sic]. H e is fighting against an
enem y w h o is also a soldier. O u r crusades are the p ro o f o f this. For revolu
tionary Islam, things are com pletely different. T h e enem y has becom e an
‘infidel m isbeliever’. H e is totally hateful; he is the Great Satan w ho, using
his technology, has hum iliated the Islam o f the Fathers. H e m ust n o t only
be defeated b ut also punished and destroyed by annihilating his technology,
the foundation o f his pow er and the driving force behind his social devel
opm ent. If Iranian agencies get involved in terrorism , the m ethods used will
be very different from those w e have know n up till now.
Confronted by this threat o f ‘revolutionary Islam’, we have to

admit that ‘theology is a science’, and that we must try to
‘follow the development o f Islamic conferences which, in
Teheran and elsewhere, try to erase the differences betw een
Shias and Sunnis, gauge the real impact o f Iranian lawyers in
the development o f various forms o f fundamentalism, follow
the controversies that oppose the various schools o f jurispru
dence’ etc. For ‘Islam is at our door’. Thus the author o f the
report recommends that a ‘well-inform ed theological adviser’
be recruited! However in his conclusion he cannot conceal a
certain perplexity: ‘Iran attacked, Iran encircled, revolutionary
Iran. Imperial Iran or fragile Iran? Iran does not allow itself to
be easily understood.’ Moreover, he gravely wonders w hether
‘there is a single Iran, or only Irans w ith many different faces’.
Better to be safe: ‘Therefore I think that it is prudent, as far as
we are concerned, to take into account the maxim um threat,
namely imperial, revolutionary Iran, bearing Allah’s Vengeance
and destined to reign over the w hole world. We may be sur
prised to find that the real threat is less great. But then it will be
a pleasant surprise.’
O n reading such an anthology o f culturalism, we m ight well
wonder whether the author does not share M onsieur Sohaing’s
im moderate taste for Beaujolais Nouveau. O n the one hand,
the Islamic Republic is based on balances o f pow er far more
complex than those o f ‘revolutionary Islam’.28 O n the other, its
desire to acquire atomic weapons, w hich is in fact confirm ed
by reliable (and non-American) sources, is faced w ith prob
lems o f financing that delay the threat. This desire can be
explained rationally by the requirements o f national defence in
its strategic environment: Israel, Pakistan and India already
have nuclear arms. In addition, American sources, w hich are
not inclined to be indulgent w ith regard towards Iran, indic
ated at the same time that Iran’s military budget was relatively
modest. For 1989—90 and 1990—1 it was estimated at $1.9
billion a year which, according to the Pentagon, represented
only one-sixth o f Saudi Arabia’s military budget and less than
half o f Israel’s. M oreover, it had decreased since the 1960s in

relation to the GDP, and ranked only sixty-eighth in a group
o f 144 countries, after Iraq (no. 1), Saudi Arabia (no. 6), Israel
(no. 9), T urkey (no. 51) and France (no. 57).29 T he deterio
ration o f the financial situation and the slowness o f economic
reform in the Islamic R epublic since 1982 probably hindered
re-arm am ent. In any case military observers o f the Islamic R e
public’s army manoeuvres were unimpressed by the state o f
the weapons deployed. Unless w e assume that we were taken
in by ‘that fundam ental duplicity that characterises everything
Iranian’, and that the crisis itself was a stratagem invented by
mullahs w ho wished to acquire nuclear weapons, we have to
admit that the culturalist construct o f the facts is clearly a
source o f the political imaginaire whose effects on reality con
tinue to be a matter o f concern: thus in 1994 Charles Pasqua,
the French M inister o f the Interior, introduced an exit visa,
‘the better to control the coming and going o f foreigners o f
thirteen sensitive nationalities’, by drawing up a ‘first list ...
consisting o f countries that are obvious candidates, o f nations
that are potentially dangerous because they practise terrorism
or are involved in ideological w ar’. T he reader will not be sur
prised to learn that Iran was one o f the ‘countries that are ob
vious candidates’ and ‘potentially dangerous’.30
Such culturalist reasoning and semantic slippages led France
into a third dream o f identity: the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda.
Francois M itterrand’s support for the regime o f President
Habyarimana from O ctober 1990 to April 1994 and even later
no doubt had its origin in a trivial defence o f all-too-material
interests: the ties betw een the two presidential families were
notorious, and it is also possible that France got around the
embargoes affecting certain countries in the region w ith the
help o f the R w andan governm ent. B ut the arguments advan
ced in defence o f this policy revealed an elem ent o f irratio
nality that may have been crucial to the outcom e o f the events
that followed. W hile the Kagera river was carrying two corpses
a m inute downstream, 10,000 corpses were arriving in Lake
20 The Intenveaving o f Traditions
Victoria. T he frightening figure o f 500,000 victims— respon

sibility for which lay w ith H utu extremists— was being m en
tioned, yet high-ranking French military officials w ere still
justifying the struggle against the R w andan Patriotic Front by
arguing that it was necessary to defend the French language.31
O ne cannot help thinking that not even the Renaissance poet
Joachim du Bellay w ould have gone that far.
An unfortunate lie to fit the particular circumstances? T he
naivete o f inexperienced officers? We cannot say for sure, since
French diplomacy south o f the Sahara sometimes seems haun
ted by the m em ory o f the humiliation suffered at Fashoda, a
town on the U pper Nile w hich the M archand expedition
ceded in 1898 under pressure from the British, and w hich the
French Foreign Minister, Theophile Delcasse, chose to aban
don in order to strengthen France’s alliances in the O ld World
and establish the Anglo-French E ntente Cordiale o f 1904.
‘Perfidious Albion’ is no longer the chief villain. Instead it is
the U nited States, whose interests Britain was supposed to be
zealously serving, and whose attachment since the Second
World War to free trade, support for decolonisation move
ments, and attacks on the last vestiges o f the Colonial Pact
through the Bretton Woods institutions the French proponents
o f colonialism have never forgiven. T he Fashoda complex,
w hich bedevilled many o f those involved in shaping France’s
Africa policies, expressed above all this siege mentality and the
protectionist impulse that is still alive and well in certain busi
ness circles, among diplomats and in expatriate communities.
The role o f the French army in Chad, the Central African R e
public, the Democratic Republic o f the Congo and Rwanda,
and the machinations o f the French secret services in the
Sudan were perceived as forms o f discreet revenge for the dis
grace o f 1898. To give another example, among the many rea
sons that led France to condone the authoritarian restoration
o f General Eyadema in Togo, in 1991, were the contacts, real
or imagined, between Gilchrist Olympio, his main opponent,
and the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. W ith the approach o f the legislative
TJtree dreams o f identity 21
elections that w ere to bring Jacques Chirac back to power, his

party, the Rassem blem ent pour la R epublique, criticised the
socialist governm ent for its ‘scorched earth policy’ (sic), w hich
ignored the ‘bonds o f friendship’ betw een T ogo and France
and risked ‘allowing other countries to occupy the place that
up to now has been ours’.32 Similarly, in C am eroon the A m er
icans and British w ere suspected o f providing clandestine
support for the English-speaking leader o f the Social D em o
cratic Front, and thus giving Paris an additional motive for
indulging President Biya’s aberrations. Finally France defended
Zaire tooth and nail in meetings o f the IMF, even though Zaire
was no longer paying its debts, so that the body’s Francophone
membership w ould not be diminished. It was also because he
spoke French, albeit w ith a W alloon accent, that President
M obutu had sympathisers on the banks o f the Seine, and was
restored to his dignity as a guarantor o f regional stability dur
ing the R w andan crisis in 1994. Being subtle psychologists,
France’s African clients know how to feed its fears in order to
negotiate deals in their ow n best interests; and they did not
hesitate to go through the m otions o f courting W ashington in
order to get m ore from Paris.33
Nonetheless, the dream o f a Francophone cultural com
m unity appears on the w hole fairly benign, and even univer-
salist, compared w ith the array o f identity-related absurdities
that have determ ined France’s African policy for so many
years, w ith intellectual support from parts o f the press.34 M ilit
ary assistance to President Habyarimana was thus seen as an
ethno-dem ocratic option. ‘Since the population o f R w anda is
80 per cent H utu, and since in Africa free voting is always
ethnic, pow er has to devolve entirely to the H utus’, an official
o f the military co-operative mission told anyone willing to
listen, basing him self on the spirit o f the Franco-African con
ference held at La Baule, during w hich Francois M itterrand
exhorted his peers to open their doors to the great wave o f
democratisation.35 Jean-Frangois Deniau, a deputy from the
French departement o f Cher, com m ented in the same vein on
the genocide that occurred in April and May, 1994: ‘This is a

case o f abuse o f the majority. The President o f the R epublic
[Francois Mitterrand] supported the Hutus because they were
the majority ... whereas the Tutsis were a minority, but a
w inning minority. So where is democracy w hen it is a w in
ning minority? All our schemas are overturned.’36
This argument reduces the political dimension to ethnic
membership: ‘Hutuness’ determines an exclusive political ori
entation, and President Habyarimana was by definition the
repository o f democratic legitimacy since, as a H utu, he was
the natural representative o f the majority. T he analysis is ob
viously specious, assuming, as it does, that ethnicity is an
objective reality, whereas it is merely a state o f consciousness.37
It maintains that the feeling o f belonging to an ethnic group is
atavistic, whereas it changes in time and space: in 2000 one is
not a H utu or a Tutsi in the same way as in the 1950s or in the
nineteenth century (nor, o f course, will one be a H utu or Tutsi
in the same way after the 1994 genocide); nor is one a H utu or
Tutsi in the same way in the northern and southern parts o f
Rwanda, inside the country and in the refugee camps, or in
Rw anda and Burundi or in Kivu.38 For this reason the
nature— social or ethnic— o f the distinction betw een H utu
and Tutsi and the origin o f their antagonism— pre-colonial or
colonial— is the object o f lively debate among both specialists
and political actors.
N othing in this tragic story is obvious, as French authorities
would sometimes have us believe. And their strictly identity-
driven reading o f the conflict ignores other reasons that were
just as crucial. They take for granted that the Interhamwe
H utu militias killed Tutsis because they were Tutsis; the
genocidal intention is considered as proved, if only because
children were deliberately killed and foetuses torn from the
wombs o f their mothers. But behind this blinding clarity, is it
also not im portant that these militiamen were at the same time
young people struggling to survive or to rise socially in a war
economy, ravaged by econom ic crisis and floods o f refugees?
T hat they were paid for doing their dirty work? T hat half o f
them were H IV-positive and themselves condem ned to die?
T hat they belonged to a kind o f paramilitary organisation, a
militia, which, in R w anda as elsewhere, took in social rejects,
marginal people, thieves, and suddenly allowed them a legiti
mate outlet for their bitterness and desires? This war was social
and political as m uch as it was ‘ethnic’. In addition, the ethno-
substantialist argum ent overlooks the fact that, just because
one is H utu or Tutsi, one does not cease to be hum an— a prey
to fears, but also to preferences, to self-interested calculations
or acts o f generosity that are not entirely determined by iden
tity-related mem bership in a group. In R w anda, in 1994,
H utus sometimes saved Tutsis in the hope o f financial gain,
out o f political conviction, or even through simple humanity
or Christian charity, just as in 1972, Burundian Tutsis pro
tected H utus w ho w ere being hunted dow n by Colonel
M icom bero’s troops.
C onfronted w ith dissonances o f this kind, proponents o f the
ethnic interpretation have an identity-related response ready:
most o f the H utu opponents that destabilised General Habya-
rim ana’s governm ent in the first half o f 1990, before the
R w andan Patriotic Front (RPF) launched its O ctober offen
sive, came from the southern part o f the country and, as such,
constituted a sort o f sub-species. But this deduction has to do
w ith the most com m onplace sociology o f political fiefs or his
torical homelands. A lthough French socialists have often con
trolled the mayor’s office in Lille for years, and although the
Federation o f the N o rth plays a crucial role in the life o f their
party, no one w ould dream o f saying that the people o f Lille are
socialists or that the socialist party is a Lille party. And even
during the darkest hours o f the genocide, autonom ous polit
ical action w ith regard to ethnic dynamics continued, the fine
thread by w hich a very hypothetical reconstruction o f the
R w andan state hung: the R P F claimed that installing a H utu
president was its first priority and maintained dialogue w ith
the opposition, whose representatives tried to escape death in
the overcrowded rooms o f the H otel des Mille Collines in

Kigali, under the pathetic protection o f a detachm ent of
U nited Nations troops. A few leading figures in President
Habyarimana’s party joined dissidents abroad and condem ned
the massacres.
Although from 1990 to 1993 French soldiers checked iden
tity cards that stated the ethnic membership o f those bearing
them and thus designated as de facto accomplices o f the R P F
‘cockroaches’, it would naturally be injurious to the fair name
o f France to suggest that its army and governm ent were pre
pared to draw the most extreme consequences o f their fight
for the French language and the H utu democratic majority.
However, the H u tu Power extremists drew those consequences
for the French, after having convinced them that their own
identity-related argument was valid. T he hallucinatory power
o f the French imaginaire led in this case to military cover being
provided for the preparation o f a real genocide, and even— if
we believe certain sources— for carrying out this genocide, in
order to prevent the massacres that the R w andan Patriotic
Front would supposedly perpetrate, were it to win. This erratic
policy was only the last o f a long series o f misunderstandings
regarding African ‘cultures’. Grasping their extent involves
allowing oneself to understand how one could present as the
ultimate symbol o f Zaire’s unity a president w ho declared in
1988, in a speech on radio and television:
‘W h en I was still in Gbadolite, I heard that a dozen w om en ... had d e m o n
strated. [...]. W hat do you do, y o u ,J M P R [Youth o f the Popular M ove
m ent o f the Revolution]? W h at do you do, you, C A D E R [C orps o f
Activists for the D efence o f the R evolution]? You are n o t going to wait for
the gendarm es, you are n o t going to wait for the soldiers o r the J M P R . You
know the m eaning o f o u r dearly acquired peace. You have shoes, kick them .
I’m n o t saying disorder, b u t kick them . I’ll say it again, kick them . You have
hands, hit them . You have a head: K am o Z1- You rem ove them from the road
in the nam e o f peace.’
* A n irony o f history: this is h o w these representatives o f th e F re n c h language,

w h o m F rancois M itte rra n d strove to d efend, d escrib ed them selves,
t A n o n o m a to p o e ia d esignating a v io le n t b lo w w ith th e head.
O n that day it was the forces o f order that saved the peace in
Zaire that had been ‘so dearly acquired’. T he twelve w om en
were arrested and repeatedly raped by HIV-positive agents o f
the secret police.39 It is true that President M obutu, scared by
the fate o f his friend Ceausescu in R om ania, later converted to
the democratic faith and established a m ulti-party system in
1990. B ut he quickly reasserted the singular nature o f his rule.
As early as May 1990 com m ando units o f his Special Presi
dential Division used bayonets to clean up the dissident
campus in Lubumbashi, taking care to spare students w ho
came from M o b u tu ’s own hom e province o f Equateur.40 Thus
they regained control o f the situation, thanks to the spineless
indifference o f the W estern powers, most o f whose leaders
probably believed that M obutu was incorrigible in matters o f
administration as well as respect for hum an rights. Everyone
also saw that he dithered as a way o f re-establishing his own
supremacy. Nonetheless, he was given the benefit o f these cer
tainties, while leaders o f the opposition were not given the
benefit o f the doubt. It scarcely matters that the political class
in Zaire had destroyed its chances by its incom petence and
internal divisions, or that Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul
II had helped to re-establish M o b u tu ’s international respect
ability. W hat is so interesting is that a culturalist imaginaire was
in operation, and that we can see the process o f and selective
perception through w hich it operated. Three myths convinced
W estern powers— and especially France— to resign themselves
to a continuation o f the status quo in Zaire: the spectre o f a
resurgence o f the rebellions o f the 1960s and o f the fragmen
tation o f the country, whose position in the heart o f central
Africa was considered strategic; the idea that this giant state is
only a mosaic o f ‘ethnic groups’ ready to shatter into its com
ponent pieces; and the conviction that ‘African culture’ is
incom patible w ith political pluralism because it is based on
prim acy o f the chief.
‘Two male crocodiles cannot live in the same swamp’ is what
ideologists o f single-party regimes have repeatedly told us for
the past forty years. W e have been disposed to believe them

because they gave an air o f ex post facto respectability to the
idea (intended to be damning) o f colonial authority, and
because preventing the spread o f com m unism seemed to call
for strong powers. A nd then the convulsions o f m ulti-party-
ism and the fissiparous divisions o f opposition parties seemed
to provide fresh confirmation o f the theory concerning male
crocodiles. Basing themselves on these ethnographic ‘facts’,
French officials responsible for African policy hardly bothered
to conceal their lack o f faith in the viability o f the democratic
experiment south o f the Sahara. ‘T he m yth o f the “c h ie f’—
the chief o f the tribe, the warlord, the head o f state— remains
deeply entrenched, as is amply shown by the deplorable
examples o f Somalia and Angola’, Le M onde pointed out, call
ing for ‘prudent’ analysis.41 Far beyond enlightened political
and journalistic circles, forty years after decolonisation the
m yth o f the chief remains the jew el in the crow n o f Africanist
absurdities:
O n e sometim es has the feeling that Black Africans do n o t understand w hat
they are being asked to do, not only because their know ledge o f French is
n ot always adequate, but because we do n o t com m unicate w ith them in the
right way. I learned that Africans function to a large extent as clans, and that
it is very im portant to take the tribal c h ie f’s view into account w h e n one
w anted to establish som ething.
This was the explanation given by a manager o f the firm

w hich won the contract to clean the Paris Metro, on emerging
from a workshop on ‘becom ing sensitive to African cultures
and civilisations’.42
However, this ‘myth o f the leader’ exists only in the m ind—
it has not prevented hundreds o f thousands o f Africans from
demonstrating since 1989, and showing a marked lack o f re
spect for leaders in elections held in several countries. The
failure o f democracy in sub-Saharan Africa has little to do w ith
‘culture’ and a great deal to do w ith contests for political
power, the economic crises and globalisation. In addition, the
latter-day presidential authoritarianism being reconstructed

draws m uch o f its ideological and practical inspiration from
the colonial era, and not from the pre-colonial era. T he way
in w hich the late President M obutu in Zaire and President
Biya in C am eroon created ‘opposition’ parties in order to
divide their opponents recalls, for example, a w ell-honed
technique o f French administration during its struggles against
the nationalist parties. If dictators like Sekou T oure in Guinea
and political strongm en like C hief Buthelezi in South Africa
claimed to m odel themselves on prestigious figures in Africa’s
past (Samori T oure and Shaka respectively), this required a
m odem ideological reinterpretation, in the respective context
o f decolonisation or apartheid.43 As for Jean-Bedel Bokassa,
Gnassingbe Eyadema and Idi Amin, they w ere pure cultural
products o f the colonial army, even if their cunning brutality
drew on different exemplars peculiar to each.44 T heir past con
nection w ith the W hite M an’s coercive apparatus served them
well, since historically many Africans have seen the Europ
ean military bureaucracy as a vector o f m odernity and social
advancement, and taken it as a m odel for their ow n actions,
e.g. in connection w ith religion.45
Setting aside examples o f warlike states whose destinies were
shaped by despotic and predatory heroes— there was a rela
tively large num ber o f these in the nineteenth century-—the
political formations o f ancient Africa were characterised by
com plex balances o f power am ong various institutions or
social hierarchies. In this context it would probably be incor
rect to talk about democracy, but these statist or lineage config
urations, w hich often came close to constituting constitutional
orders, as in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Asante, limi
ted the autonom y o f those in authority.46 Thus the Bantu myths
o f the foundation o f sacred kingships ‘conveyed a genuine
political ideology’— unlike Am erican Indian mythology— and
‘developed a bicephalous conception o f pow er’ that may
rem ind us o f the first o f the three Indo-European functions
studied by Georges D um ezil.47 T he ‘black chiefs’ cherished by
G overnor R obert Delavignette had usually been created by

the colonising powers, w ho took care to co-opt native digni
taries to administer the societies they had conquered.
This is particularly true in acephalous societies that were
w ithout centralised political institutions, and the establishment
o f chiefdoms in these situations contradicted cultural represen
tations of power, resulting in conflicts or serious misunderstand
ings.48 But even in kingdoms or chiefdoms o f pre-colonial
origin, both the monarchical concept and the perception o f
authority were deeply modified by the actions o f the colo
nising powers. T he Germans and British in particular invoked
the imposing figures o f Kaiser W ilhelm II and Q ueen Victoria,
respectively, to gain prestige by organising numerous rituals
celebrating the ‘imperial monarchy’, rituals that were probably
just as kitsch as the Beaujolais N ouveau party in Bayangam. In
1890, for instance, a German officer presented the chief o f the
Chagga in Tanganyika w ith L ohengrin’s mantle and helmet,
which he had obtained from the Berlin Opera. For their part
the indigenous chiefs, in their concern to augm ent their sym
bolic resources, begged to be given the title o f ‘king’, sought
invitations to the coronations o f British sovereigns, provided
themselves w ith thrones, crowns and sceptres, and even began
to celebrate their jubilees. M oreover this fascination w ith
European political symbols was not limited to notables alone;
the anonymous mass o f citizens also became addicted to them ,
especially w ithin the framework o f dance associations that
adopted the dramaturgy o f Germ an military drill or the pom p
surrounding the British Q u een ’s representative.49
It would take a clever observer to tease out o f this tangle the
roles played by ‘Africanness’ and by colonial ideology. M obutu
wore a leopardskin hat, the leopard being an im m em orial sign
o f power among the Bantu people o f the forest.50 However, the
native chiefs w ho collaborated w ith Belgian colonisers had
earlier made use o f this insignia, and gave it a connotation dif
ferent from that w hich it may have had in a sovereign lineage
society in the nineteenth or the twelfth century. In Zaire,
m oreover, M o b u tu ’s authority was associated w ith the ter

rifying image of Bula Matari, ‘the rock-breaker’, evoked by
colonial dom ination.51 Similarly, historians know that pow er
in the Bantu w orld had long been expressed in terms o f family
relationships.52 In 1925 the Prince o f Wales w rote to the Par
am ount C hief o f the Sotho that he was ‘very happy that you
still cherish the m em ory o f my great-grandm other, Q ueen
Victoria. [...] She is no longer w ith us, but the King continues
to watch over you w ith fatherly care.’ In 1910 the Prince’s
father King George V had already addressed his subjects in
Basutoland in the same terms:
W h e n a child is in trouble he will go to his father, and his father after
hearing all about the m atter will decide w hat m ust be done. T h e n the child
m ust trust and obey his father, for he is b u t one o f a large family and his
father has had great experience in settling the troubles o f his older children
and is able to ju d g e w hat is best n o t only for the young child b ut for the
peace and advantage o f the w hole family. [...] T h e Basuto nation is as a
very young child am ong the m any people o f the British E m pire.53
A nd so tradition grows even m ore potent, as we observed in

the case o f Bayangam. We can now add that those w ho are the
most traditional are not always those w ho think themselves to
be so. In ancient Africa traditions were processes that provided
‘a m oving continuity’,54 whereas the ideological and juridical
endeavours o f colonisation cast them into customs and folk
lore.55 Simultaneously, European administrators sought to limit
the movements o f the peoples they had conquered, or at least
to channel their migrations in ways that suited their own
interests. T he end-result o f these public policies and the
strategies by w hich Africans responded to them is none other
than ethnicity. A great many anthropological and historical
studies have shown that pre-colonial societies were almost
always m ulti-ethnic, and included a great diversity o f cultural
repertoires; that the principal forms o f social or religious
mobilisation were trans-ethnic; and that ancient Africa most
definitely did not consist o f a mosaic o f ethnic groups.56 This
does not m ean that ethnicity is a pure construct (a ‘building’ in
Berman and Lonsdale’s sense) produced by colonising powers

that sought to divide the better to rule, as African nation
alists— and, paradoxically, some ethno-nationalists— still like
to believe. Colonised peoples took part in its ‘form ation’ by
appropriating the new political, cultural and econom ic re
sources of the bureaucratic state. In one o f many w orking mis
understandings, ‘Europeans believed Africans belonged to
tribes; [whereas] Africans built tribes to belong to ’ as John
Iliffe b r i l l i a n t l y expressed it.57 T he political im portance o f eth
nicity proceeds precisely from the fact that it is an eminently
m odern phenom enon connected to the ‘im ported state’, and
not a residue or resurgence o f ‘traditional culture’.
T he latter, ultimately, does not exist— at least not in the
sense assumed by culturalists. We can discern the persistence
through time, and in a given space, o f a certain num ber o f ‘tra
ditions’, in particular cognitive traditions, as Jan Vansina has
done for the Bantus o f the equatorial forest. B ut each o f these
representations is constantly being negotiated by a great
variety o f actors, including w ithin ‘ethnic’ subgroups. Can we
advance, for example, the idea o f an econom ic ethos o f the
Bamileke on the basis o f their legendary ‘energy’ and the fear it
arouses? To do so would be to take at face value an explosive
political discourse that flirts w ith ethnic cleansing. It would
also mean abandoning any attem pt to grasp the differentiation
o f means o f accumulation (or disaccumulation) according to
the social category and generation o f entrepreneurs.58 Should
we console ourselves w ith the notion o f an African political
culture that is assumed to be incompatible w ith the structures
o f a ‘Western-style state whose borders, drawn by the Congress
o f Berlin, are artificial’? T he profound crises in R w anda,
Burundi and Somalia suggest instead that territorial and cul
tural continuity betw een pre-colonial societies and contem
porary states is no guarantor o f stability. O ne m ight even
wonder, because o f the conflicts in the Great Lakes region,
w hether the ideological and military m odernisation o f states
w ith precolonial origins has not radicalised internal social rela
tionships, whereas their incorporation into enlarged political

spaces, as a result o f the change o f scale generally accompany
ing colonisation, made compromises am ong the elites inev
itable, and tended to dilute social contradictions, or at least to
m ute them .59 H ow ever that m ight be, the political crisis o f
Africa has little to do w ith the allegedly factitious character o f
its random borders, w hich are sometimes older than those o f
certain E uropean countries. T he border constituted by the
R h in e (so natural!) and the border (so historical!) that sep
arated the countries descended from the W estern R om an
empire from those descended from the Eastern R om an em
pire: have these really been factors for peace?
T he ways in w hich Africans have adopted the territorial
frameworks handed dow n by the colonising powers is one o f
the salient characteristics o f the continent’s recent history. T he
im ported state was immediately taken over by autochthonous
peoples. T he ‘form ation’ o f ethnicity, in response to new insti
tutions and new rules for allocating resources, has proved to be
one o f their favourite strategies, but it is not the only one: con
version to Christianity or to Islam; the form ation o f cults, pro
phetic sects, or independent churches; the organisation o f trade
unions or political parties; and the developm ent o f agriculture
and the informal sector have all simultaneously borne witness
to this resum ption o f ‘African initiative’60 in osmosis w ith the
colonial system. By signing the charter o f the Organisation o f
African Unity, the regimes that emerged from decolonisation
have solemnly assumed this continuity.
Today the civil wars that afflict Africa, whatever their re-
gionalist or ethnic content, do not put national unity in
question. Even the federal solution has sometimes been vio
lently rejected by the protagonists in these conflicts, w ho are
ferocious partisans o f a unitary state, as in Chad, Angola and
Sudan. T he only genuine attem pt at secession was that by
Biafra, in 1967, and it was crushed. T he secessionist project in
Katanga, in 1960, was largely controlled from afar by foreign
interests, and misfired, even though it remains present in the
historical m em ory o f the people o f the Congo, and was even

revived at regular intervals by the wily President M obutu,
w ho wanted to appear to be the last bastion against the break
up o f his country. But the great lesson o f the history o f the
Congo is precisely the persistence o f the idea o f the nation.
Here we have an immense country, w ith the majority o f its
population concentrated on its borders, whose system o f com
m unication is a shambles and whose rural areas are landlocked,
whose institutions have collapsed, whose cities are prey to
interm ittent pillaging, and whose econom y is completely free
o f regulations and taxation, even if it is not free o f extortion.
Nevertheless, it remains politically united, and the debate
concerning regionalism that took place during the National
Conference at the beginning o f the 1990s was formulated in
terms o f a necessary administrative decentralisation, not o f a
territorial dismemberment. A province like Kivu, for many
years left to itself by the regime, trades w ith the outside w orld
via the N ande diaspora; but it has not considered breaking its
ties to the centre, and it played a major political role in the
National Conference. Paradoxically the case o f the sick giant
o f Africa attests to the solidity o f the states laid out at the
Congress o f Berlin.* Still more eloquent are the armed conflicts
in the western Sahara, Eritrea and Somaliland, where the chief
goal has been a return to colonial borders, or to maintain them.
N o matter how difficult and conflictual it m ight be, the
grafting o f institutions and ideologies im ported into Africa as a
result o f European imperialism does not encounter an insur
mountable obstacle when confronted by a ‘traditional African
culture’, albeit one that is hard to define. O n the other hand,
we see how this myth, which is inherent in the culturalist argu-
* T h e o c c u p atio n o f th e eastern p a rt o f th e D e m o c ra tic R e p u b lic o f th e C o n g o by

R w a n d a an d U ganda, w h ic h beg an in 1996, an d th e possible a n n e x a tio n o f K ivu
th a t m ig h t result from it d o n o t invalidate this analysis: n o n e o f th e a rm e d
m o v em en ts a n d /o r rebellions in th e C o n g o is secessionist, an d th e w a r has even
stren g th en e d th e C o n g o lese n atio n al consciousness by g iv in g it an u n fo rtu n a te
racist anti-T utsi c o n te n t.
ment, inspired a political relativism that tends to deny Africans

access to the universal. Since ‘the race o f Negroes is a species
o f hum an different from our own, just as spaniels are different
from hares’, since ‘Negroes and Negresses, transported to the
coldest countries, still produce animals o f their ow n species’,61
it is pointless to try to impose on them our democratic model,
our conception o f developm ent, our idea o f the res puhlica — in
short, our culture. O n the banks o f Lake Kivu this fantasy
turned into a nightmare.
T h e in v en tio n o f tradition as the in ven tio n o f m o d ern ity

In one sense culturalism is like Beaujolais Nouveau: the ine
briation it produces is often malign and leaves behind a
hangover. However, the adage In vino veritas cannot be applied
to culturalism, as analysis o f the facts quickly invalidates it. The
reason for this is simple: culturalism maintains that a ‘culture’is
composed o f a stable, closed corpus o f representations, beliefs,
or symbols that is supposed to have an ‘affinity’— the word is
used by de Tocqueville as well as by M ax W eber— w ith spe
cific opinions, attitudes, or modes o f behaviour.
However, M ax W eber was not a culturalist, and he never
adhered to the interpretation o f ‘the spirit o f capitalism’ that is
still too often attributed to him by invoking selective and ten
dentious quotations from his famous book on the Protestant
ethic.62 H e refused to abstract economic factors from factors o f
the religious ethic in order to explain the genesis o f capitalism:
It is o u t o f the question to m aintain such an unreasonable and doctrinaire
thesis, w h ich w ould claim that ‘the spirit o f capitalism’ [...] could only be
the result o f certain influences o f the R efo rm atio n , and even that capitalism
as an economic system is a creation o f the R eform ation.
W eber spoke o f ‘the enorm ous overlapping o f mutual influ

ences betw een econom ic bases, forms o f social and political
organisation, and the spiritual content o f the periods o f the
R eform ation’. A nd he concluded his book w ith this summary,
which should have put a definitive end to an unfortunate

debate: ‘Is it necessary to protest that our goal is in no way to
substitute for an exclusively “materialist” causal explanation a
spiritualist interpretation o f civilisation and history that w ould
be no less unilateral? Both o f them belong to the dom ain o f the
possible; it nonetheless remains that to the extent that they are
not limited to the role o f preparatory w ork, but claim to
provide conclusions, both are inadequate to historical truth.’
O f course W eber does refer here and there to the ‘intrinsic
and perm anent character o f religious beliefs’, gives priority to
the study o f ‘dogmatic foundations’, and does not limit himself
to the analysis o f ‘moral practice’. However, his project o f ‘dis
covering w hether certain “elective affinities” are perceptible
between forms o f religious belief and professional ethics’ was
only one stage in his demonstration, w hich consisted in com
posing an ‘ideal type’, ‘such as is only rarely encountered in
historical reality’. As for the rest, W eber argues in terms of his
torical experience, or better yet, o f a historical matrix: ‘The
conceptualisation o f historical phenom ena ... does not, for
whatever purpose, place reality in abstract categories, but
rather seeks to articulate it in concrete, genetic relationships
that inevitably take on their own individual character’. In his
view, the genesis o f capitalism is a m atter o f contingency; it has
to do w ith a ‘sequence o f circumstances’. T he peculiarity o f
capitalism lies in its being a ‘cultural phenom enon’ because it
consists o f a ‘spirit’: ‘T he main problem in the expansion of
m odern capitalism is not the origin o f capital, it is the devel
opm ent o f the spirit o f capitalism’, w hich made its ‘appearance
in Western civilisation, and only there’. But if capitalism is
defined by its ‘spirit’, it does not proceed from ‘culture’ alone.
In this regard proponents o f the ‘neo-C onfucian’ explanation
o f the ‘miracle economies’ o f East Asia prove not very W eber
ian, in contrast to the historians o f the French school of
sinology who like to criticise the Heidelberg sociologist’s
hypotheses concerning China, even though they pursue the
same quest for a ‘global history’.
W eber also distances him self from culturalist assumptions

through the im portance he accords to the exogenous dim en
sion o f change. In his w ork societies do not respond solely to
the injunctions o f their own logic, and in particular to those o f
their culture. They are constantly interacting w ith their envi
ronm ent, even if the latter tends to be unduly reduced to the
category o f military and diplomatic phenom ena.53 From an
ideological point o f view, and due to his family connections,
the very Anglophile Weber was moreover alien to the R om an
tic nationalist and imperialist Zeitgeist that was, in Germany, the
main centre o f culturalist thought.64 In particular he rejected
any substantialist definition o f ethnic groups and nations,
w hich he regarded as ‘political artefacts’, w riting that ‘the
notion o f “ethnically” determ ined social action subsumes phe
nom ena that a rigorous sociological analysis ... would have to
distinguish carefully.’65
This remark is not purely anecdotal. In its m odern forms
political culturalism is an avatar o f these ‘great ways o f misun
derstanding other peoples’ constituted by scientific racism,
nationalism, and egocentric exoticism.55 From the point o f
view o f political analysis it should be connected more precisely
w ith the m ovem ent o f the ‘invention o f tradition’ that has
marked W estern history since the end o f the eighteenth
century.67 This ‘process o f formalisation and ritualisation’ was
reflected in the inculcation, by repetition, o f certain values and
norm s o f behaviour that referred explicitly to the past, the
latter possibly being reconstructed or fabricated. T he ‘in
vention o f tradition’ was a fundamental constituent o f the
‘building’ and the ‘form ation’ o f the m odern state in the West.
It conveyed the more or less conflictual integration o f regional
peripheries into the centre; the ‘awakening o f nationalities’and
the genesis o f nationalism; Italian and G erm an unification; the
establishment o f mass industrial societies; the creation o f
nation-states on the ruins o f old m ulti-ethnic empires; or, in
the N ew World and Australia, the melding o f heterogeneous
im m igrant populations.
Beyond this diversity o f situations, the main characteristic o f

the ‘invention o f tradition’ is the recycling— w hether instru
mental or unconscious— o f fragments o f a m ore or less phan
tasmal past in the service o f social, cultural or political
innovation. Thus in Britain the public pom p and circumstance
o f monarchical ritual were established only belatedly, at the
end o f the nineteenth century— and against the inclinations o f
Q ueen Victoria, w ho was psychologically reticent— in an
industrial society that was racked by the uncertainties o f com
petition from the other imperial powers and the rise o f the
working class. T he development o f the great newspapers,
starting in the 1880s, helped to popularise this glorification o f
royalty, before the BBC took over the task.68 Similarly, the
vogue o f the neo-G othic, the neo-Baroque, or the neo
classical architectural styles in Western capitals was con
comitant w ith centralisation, bureaucratisation, the extension
o f a civic role to an increasing num ber o f citizens and, m ore
generally, social innovation.69 In Vienna, for instance, the neo
Gothic style o f the Rathaus was supposed to recall, as liberals
saw it, that the city had been a free com m une in the M iddle
Ages, and was reconnecting w ith this past after a long period o f
absolutism; the neo-Baroque Burgtheater com m em orated the
epoch in w hich scholars, courtiers and com m oners had shared
a passion for the theatre; the neo-Renaissance style o f the uni
versity called attention to rationalism’s break w ith superstition;
and the classicism o f the Parliament building evoked the
Hellenic democratic ideal.70
In the colonised countries o f Africa and Asia, the ossifi
cation o f ‘traditional culture’ at the m om ent o f European
occupation corresponds to the same schema: the ‘process o f
ritualisation and formalisation’ o f custom w ent hand in hand
w ith an intensification o f social change. Thus in India the
establishment o f the imperial monarchy after the ‘M utiny’ o f
1857 and the abolition o f M ughal rule in 1858 were dressed in
the finery o f political and cultural traditionalism. T he Indian
princes w ho agreed to support the British crow n’s action saw
their etiquette and prerogatives institutionalised; they grad

ually constituted themselves as a dom inant category that was
‘traditional’ as that o f the ‘chiefs’ in Africa.71 ‘T he peoples and
cultures o f India’ w ere described, listed and photographed.
Collections in libraries and museums recorded a civilisation
said to be doom ed to disappear. Archaeological excavations
w ere begun, and the sub-continent’s ‘great m onum ents’ were
inventoried. In short, the English defined, w ith increasing
authority, w hat was Indian, and the Indians were expected to
look like true Indians; whereas before 1860 native soldiers
w ore uniforms cut in the European style, they later w ore neo-
M ughal military dress including a turban, sash and tunic.72
India’s entry into the era o f colonial imperialism took place
through the exaltation o f tradition, or at least o f exoticism. But
its entry into the period o f nationalist mobilisation and soon
after that o f com m unal conflict assumed a similar colouring.
W hile British colonial administrators fabricated ‘Indianness’,
H indu intellectuals were formulating Hinduness by resorting
to ‘strategic syncretism’. According to Christophe Jaffrelot, this
involved ‘structuring one’s identity in opposition to the O ther
by assimilating the latter’s prestigious and efficacious cultural
characteristics’: ‘T he appearance o f an exogenous threat awake
ned in the H indu m ajority a feeling o f vulnerability, and even
an inferiority complex, that justified a reform o f Hinduism
borrow ing from the aggressor its strong points, under the cover
o f a return to the sources o f a prestigious Vedic Golden Age
that was largely reinvented but whose “xenology” remained
active.’73 A recurrent feature o f Indian resistance to foreign
invasions, ‘strategic syncretism’ had two high points: at the end
o f the nineteenth century and in the 1920s, before institution
alising itself as a key tenet o f militant political practice among
H indu nationalists. T he latter were organised on the auto
chthonous m odel o f the sect, and m ore precisely on that o f the
akhara, w hich was both a disciplined political cadre and a place
o f physical and martial exercise w ith pronounced ritualised
characteristics. Terrorists were quick to appreciate the utility
o f the akhara, especially in com bining sources o f inspiration:

members o f one akhara swore allegiance before the goddess
Kali, the Bhagavad Gita in one hand, a revolver in the other.74
D uring the 1920s the H indu Mahasabha also encouraged the
creation o f akharas in order to defend itself against the Khilafat
(Muslim Caliphate) movem ent. But it abandoned physical
exercise and hand-to-hand combat in favour o f the team sports
so prized by the British. T he traditional form o f the akhara was
clearly subordinated to political and educational innovation.75
In short, the reinterpretation o f India’s ‘H indu’ past by the
nationalists and their instrumentalisation o f ‘tradition’ for
militant political purposes have for nearly a century sustained a
political identity unprecedented in the cultural landscape o f
the sub-continent, by incorporating foreign representations
into Hinduism— e.g. egalitarian individualism, proselytisation,
ecclesiastical structures— and by seeking to ‘homogenise in
order to create a nation, a society that is characterised by
extreme differentiation’.76 O n the Indian political chessboard,
the celebration o f a golden Vedic age is a mere fig-leaf con
cealing modernity, like the versions o f African ‘authenticity’
that developed in the wake o f the colonial invention o f tra
dition, in particular in M obutu’s Zaire, Tombalbaye’s Chad,
Eyadema’s Togo, Macias N guem a’s Equatorial Guinea or
Buthelezi’s Natal.
Such regressive definitions o f m odernity make identity-
related strategies potentially totalitarian.77 First, because the cul
ture imagined to be authentic is defined in opposition to
neighbouring ones that are seen as radically different, and
because this alleged alterity entails a principle o f exclusion
whose logical conclusion is ethnic cleansing: intercultural ex
change is then deemed to involve alienation, a loss o f sub
stance, even pollution. And second, because the imagined
culture assigns to those individuals w ho are supposed to be
long to it a simplified identity— one is tem pted to call it an
identity kit— that they are expected to endorse, if necessary via
coercion. This is the logic o f the Islamists, or o f Israel’s ‘m en in
77le invention o f tradition as the invention o f modernity 39
black’, w ho impose on their co-religionists an entirely arbit

rary reconstruction o f their history and faith. This is also the
terrible rationality o f the massacres in Bosnia and in Africa’s
Great Lakes: they are intended not only to drive the O ther
out, but also to prevent their O w n from dealing w ith him, if
necessary by forcing them into exodus, w hen the fortunes o f
w ar so dictate, as in R w anda in 1994 or in Sarajevo in 1996.
Nonetheless, politico-religious radicalisms and extreme
forms o f ethno-nationalism draw on the same com m on source
as European and Am erican nationalisms,78 w hich are also based
on political lies and illusions. ‘Forgetfulness and, I would say,
even historical error are essential factors in the creation o f a
nation,’ Ernest R enan w rote.79 From this point o f view the
‘great ways o f misreading others’ are always also ways o f mis
reading oneself. B ut this does not mean that the ‘imagined
com m unities’ resulting from the invention o f tradition are nec
essarily totalitarian. N o t all regimes possess the means to realise
their ends: Zairean ‘authenticity’ was a totalitarian project, but
its realisation hardly got beyond the stage o f authoritarian
control.80 Above all, the process o f ‘building’ identity-related
regimes has to compromise w ith the process o f ‘form ing’
states. T he complex interaction o f forces and social institutions,
the influence o f demography, the limits o f the economy, and
the practices o f the actors involved all make the efficacy o f
public policies relative.
Ultimately the invention o f political m odernity by invent
ing tradition can be com bined w ith any num ber o f strategies
and political regimes, neither necessarily being identity-rela
ted. Political m odernity has been one o f the cultural matrices
o f parliamentary democracy, and o f a universalist conception
o f citizenship and o f the welfare-state in England and France,
but it also inspired a descent into totalitarianism in Italy and
Germany. In addition, in each o f these countries, the elabora
tion o f a national tradition was contradictory. R enan, w ho be
lieved that various races descended from different original
ancestors, was convinced o f the ‘eternal infancy o f non-
perfectible races’. And since he could not require ‘o f the child

o f Sem the beautiful characteristics o f the Indo-European
race’, Barres would have preferred, ‘instead ofjudging Dreyfus
according to French morality and our justice, as if he were a
peer’, that he be recognised ‘as a living testimony, as a lesson in
the nature o f things, ... next to a chair o f comparative ethno
logy’.81 The controversial works o f the historian Zeev Stern-
hell have at least the merit o f rem inding us that France has not
escaped the cultural and organicist nationalism, or even the
biological and racial nationalism, that is usually associated w ith
German history.82 Conversely, in Italy and Germany national
ism has also had as its spokesmen democrats w ho ended up
prevailing after the Second W orld W ar. This ambivalence
o f political culturalism is also found in the ethno-linguistic
nationalisms o f Eastern and Central Europe: the belated codi
fication o f Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Bulgarian, Greek, R o
manian, Ukrainian, and Turkish cultures that accompanied
the building and formation o f the state in the nineteenth and
tw entieth centuries did not exclude any o f the liberal, fascist or
Com m unist expressions o f political culturalism. T he same can
be said o f ethnicity in Africa, w hich is simultaneously a prin
ciple o f exclusion and even death, and the vehicle o f a new
moral econom y o f the p o lis h
C u ltu ra lism as an ideology o f globalisation

In its political ambivalence the formation o f imagined cultural
communities has been one o f the most im portant ideological
manifestations o f globalisation since the nineteenth century.
By asserting the irreducible difference o f ethnic or national
identities and civilisations, culturalism contributes in a strange
way to the dialectical unity o f the world. For example, it has
been the filter that has sifted diffusion o f industrial technology,
the Western educational model, governmental and bureau
cratic organisation, Christian ecclesiastical schemas, and the
principles o f capitalist economics. To the great dismay o f
Culturalism as ait ideology o f globalisation 41
m alcontents and backw ard-looking people, it has generally

legitimised these borrowings by claiming that they w ould
serve the destiny o f the nation or religion w ithout altering
‘culture’, a w ell-founded view, but one that is in curious con
tradiction w ith its ow n philosophical premises.84
Seen from this angle, political culturalism goes beyond clas
sical theses, according to w hich nationalist mobilisation is sup
posed to have given Africans and Asians an opportunity to
turn the colonisers’ ow n weapons against them, as is said in
school textbooks. Nationalism, w hether ethnic or religious, is a
complex phenom enon that involves dynamics other than
those o f ‘state-building’ carried out by the demiurges o f ‘na
tional integration’: the Sukarnos, the N ehrus, the Atatiirks and
all the African ‘chiefs’ admired or scorned depending on
w hether they are nam ed Felix H ouphouet-B oigny or Jean-
Bedel Bokassa.
In the second edition o f his justly famous Imagined C o m m u
nities Benedict Anderson takes the opportunity to revise his
initial point o f view, and admits that colonial nationalism in
Asia and Africa cannot be reduced to the ‘official nationalism’
that the European dynastic states o f the nineteenth century
had sought to instrumentalise, w ith varying success.85 Thanks
to this reformulation, we can better understand why and how
the im ported state erected itself into an ‘imagined com m unity’
and w hy it was not challenged by the autochthonous peoples
at the time o f decolonisation. W hat was said about India can
be generalised. T hrough cartography, museology, archaeology,
history, ethnology and Orientalism, European occupants
inserted themselves into the continuity o f the political and civil-
isational configurations that preceded their arrival, even though
they conferred on them a unity they did not previously have,
and provided access to ‘progress’ for them. T he autochthonous
nationalists subsequently adopted this ‘process o f formalisation
.and ritualisation’ o f ‘traditional culture’, as well as the ‘logo-
isation’* o f a new state to w hich it had given rise.86
* T h is te rm is used by B e n e d ic t A n d e rso n , w h o also refers to ‘m u se u m isin g ’.
The imagination o f the national com m unity— sometimes

experienced as a religious community, for example among
Islamists, Sinhalese populists in Sri Lanka or the H indu mil
itants o f India’s BJP— has not always consisted solely in vali
dating a territorial framework, the development o f new political
and administrative institutions, and the allocation o f econom ic
resources or social status. It has also led to the emergence o f
new moral, economic, and political values that have been bit
terly disputed, but generally ended up providing the colonial
state w ith its status as a genuine polis.87 T hat is what makes it so
difficult to analyse not only nationalism but also the com
promise between the colonised peoples and the colonisers.
Natives w ho collaborated w ith the colonisers served not only
their own economic interests, along w ith those o f their sup
posed masters, but also incarnated ideals, norms, lifestyles,
bodies o f knowledge that might inspire respect, sympathy, or
fascination, and that some who once scorned them would soon
espouse. In this respect, a colonial situation or, more broadly, a
situation o f dependency, is always an ‘ambiguous adventure’: ‘I
am not a country in the Diallobe district, confronting a distinct
Western world, and assessing w ith sang-froid what I can take
from it and what I have to give it in return. I have becom e both
o f them. There is not one lucid head betw een the two horns o f
a dilemma. There is a strange nature, in distress at not being
tw o’, confides the hero o f the Senegalese novelist C heikh
H am idou Kane.88
In this task o f inventing tradition and imagining the com
munity, colonised and colonisers often acted together, some
times within the same institutions, the same intellectual currents,
and the same beliefs, but most often w ith differing objectives,
and almost always in the m ode o f a w orking m isunder
standing.89 Thus the Europeans were the first to attend to the
reification o f custom south o f the Sahara. It allowed them to
consolidate their racial identity and their social status in a
context whose precariousness we tend, retrospectively, to
minimise. In this way the British administrators o f Indirect
Cultumlism as an ideology o f globalisation 43
R ule forged a quasi-aristocratic lifestyle in order to overcome

the isolation in w hich they found themselves and to preserve
their dignity as ‘civilised’ people, whereas w hite miners in
South Africa and R hodesia developed a corporatist w orking-
class culture that asserted their distinctiveness w ith regard to
black workers.
At the same time, the culturalist interpretation o f colonised
society superseded a discourse on the hom e country. At the
beginning o f the nineteenth century British missionaries and
travellers compared the barbarism o f Africans to the savagery
o f the poor in L ondon’s underprivileged neighbourhoods: the
two struggles to civilise (or the two experiences o f fear in the
face o f primitive manners) w ent hand in hand.90 T he coloni
sers were not abstract agents o f social change, but rather flesh
and blood actors w ho came from concrete historical societies,
w ith their relationships o f inequality, their political debates,
and their mental representations, societies in w hich they had
themselves occupied precise positions and from w hich they
had drawn ambitions, frustrations, convictions, and dreams.91
T hat is, they had never form ed a hom ogeneous category: their
origins and values were disparate, their colonial projects diver
gent, and their culturalism was not o f the same kind. T he vio
lent conflicts betw een B oer colonists and the pastors of the
London Missionary Society in nineteenth-century South Africa
had already raised the whole problem o f cultural relativism.
T he form er believed in different geneses and based their pre
datory practise o f slavery on their Biblical conviction that
Kaffirs were ‘the children of H am ’ and were therefore doom ed
to servitude. T he latter thought Africans were perfectible and
thus wanted to raise them to the dignity o f bourgeois individ
ualism and the nuclear family, even at the cost o f completely
recasting their society.92
B ut the contradictions that characterised the microcosm of
the colonisers were echoed w ithin native society, especially
through the m ediation o f the school and the mission. The
fable o f the ‘village com m unity’ provides a good illustration o f
this symbiosis. E urope’s imperial expansion was coterm inous

w ith the Industrial R evolution, w hich inspired many changes
in nature, supposedly threatening the innocence o f the coun
tryside, and corrupting the cities. T he concom itant invention
o f tradition participated in this sensibility, especially in the
countries o f Eastern and Central Europe. Historiographical
and anthropological criticism has shown how m any o f the
concepts o f popular culture, popular religion, and folklore are
inseparable from this Zeitgeist, w hich contributed to the con
struction o f social inequalities.93
Christian missions and their allies put great stress on this
idealised representation o f rural life. In Liberia, for instance, the
American Colonisation Society, being im bued w ith Jeffer
sonian ideas, wanted Blacks repatriated to their original con
tinent to limit themselves to bucolic rural life, even though
their proteges associated agricultural activity w ith the despised
system o f slavery and often came from cities in the n o rth
eastern U nited States.94 Similarly, the Basel Mission Society
brought to southern and eastern Africa the ideal o f the
‘Christian village’ that it had established in W iirttem berg in
order to protect rural areas from the miasmas o f urbanisation.
Its chief goal was to find allegedly virgin land on w hich it
could establish German peasant communities. Styling itself as
‘a mission from the village to the village’, it dreamed o f a
Gemeinschaft that did not, o f course, exist in G erm any any
more than it did in M ozambique. In practice the Society’s
African outposts succeeded less in preserving the native peo
ples’ ‘traditional culture’ than in making it easier to control
them and introduce economic innovations.95
The missionaries’ attitude was very confused and constantly
oscillated between two positions: on one hand, they rejected
backward and often indecent customs, o f w hich nocturnal, las
civious dancing was the intolerable symbol, and hence sought
to reform the villagers’ morals in order to lead them to the
threshold o f civilisation, for example by encouraging trade. O n
the other, they had a naive respect for African authenticity,
Culturalism as an ideology o f globalisation 45
w hich could only be rural, and w hich had to be defended

against the cupidity o f traders, the brutality o f administrators,
the corrosive effects o f money, the foolish attraction to the trin
kets o f m odern W estern civilisation, the expansion o f Islam,
the aims o f Bolshevism, and, last but not least, the pernicious
evangelism o f com peting missions and denom inations.96
T hrough their creative transformation o f European cultural
forms, Africans rejected both o f these pastoral approaches,
w hich were both doom ed to fail. W hile remaining faithful to
Christianity, they developed ecclesiastical institutions and
unprecedented rituals, they tried to wear shorts and even,
horror o f horrors, trousers, going off to becom e vulgar city-
dwellers. For all that, the Christian myth o f the village com
m unity did not die. It resurfaced in the writings o f theologians
and religious associations that militated in favour o f ‘Christian
comm unities at the base’, w hich claims social and even
political mobilisation. Terence Ranger, however, rightly notes
that it has reconnected w ith the popular Christianity o f the
heroic era o f missionary endeavour.97 We must also add that
the colonial administration, especially its British variety, w hich
laid great emphasis on its ethos o f the bureaucratic ‘gentry’and
was convinced o f the benefits o f Indirect R ule, took pleasure
in this vision o f African societies, going so far as to guarantee
the organic harm ony o f rural Kenya by moving the people
into strategic hamlets in order to protect them from the Mau
M au revolt.98 It should be noted that the proponents o f ani
mation rurale and ‘African socialism’ adopted the same views
after Independence.99
In Asia as well, the jo in t invention o f tradition by the
coloniser and the colonised is inseparable from the key
concept o f the village community, to w hich M arx’s writings
on India and C hina lent an immense intellectual respectability.
In the D utch East Indies, for instance, the administration relied
on the pam ong desa, the village chiefs, at the same time that it
refused to assimilate the natives and prom oted a form o f
colonial nationalism. There ensued, especially in Java, a tw o

fold process o f ‘agricultural involution’ and the ‘invention o f
tradition’ that has been described, respectively, by Clifford
Geertz and Benedict Anderson.100 Nonetheless, ‘the idea that
there was a stereotyped Javanese village is a pure illusion’ that
is based on historical ignorance, and w hich has been sustained
by the ideological debate concerning the agrarian question,
first betw een the nationalists and the colonisers, and then
betw een the Communists and the right-w ing.101 Likewise the
first British administrators o f the Indian sub-continent were
convinced that the villages practised a kind o f primitive com
munism, were ignorant o f the caste system and lived in
autarky— a romantic U topia that the nationalists later en
dorsed. Gandhi made a great deal o f the notion o f panchayat,1'
to the point o f dreaming about a Village Republic; his
follower Vinoba Bhave revived the idea in the 1950s, and the
H indu militant party, the Jan Sangh, maintained that ‘villages
were the autarkic units o f Indian life, ... [that] they w ere self
sufficient and self-governing, [and that] the village panchayat
dated from the Vedic period’.102
Anthropologists w ho have worked on the ‘moral econom y’
o f the Asian peasantry have never entirely abandoned this
organicist view o f the rural community, even though their
leading light, James Scott, immediately objected to its rom an
ticism and refused to see in the ‘ethic o f subsistence’— a
calculated aversion to risk in an economically precarious situ
ation— an ideal o f social justice. According to Scott’s analysis,
the emphasis placed on reciprocity, the defence o f traditional
rights and obligations, and the demand for the restoration o f
the status quo, in short, the peasants’ ‘moral econom y’, ex
pressed less resistance on the part o f backward-looking com
munitarian representations w hen confronted w ith progress—
‘resilience’, or hctahauan, as the ideologists o f the N ew O rder
* A fiv e-m e m b er co u n cil, traditionally e n tru ste d w ith settlin g d isputes w ith in a
caste. In c o n te m p o ra ry India, th e te rm designates th e elective village in stitu tio n s.
Culturalism as an ideology o f globalisation 47
in Indonesia call it— than the developm ent o f conflict in a

m odem context as the countryside underw ent a capitalist
transform ation.103
T he most prom inent critic o f this anthropological approach,
Samuel Popkin, had an easy time attacking the cornerstone o f
this argument: the notion, formulated by Eric Wolf, o f a ‘clos
ed, corporate com m unity’, w hich obliterates simultaneously
the place o f outsiders on the margins o f the village, and in
equality am ong insiders w ithin it.104 M oreover the strengthen
ing o f the village structure is largely attributable to the colonial
bureaucracy, w hich co-opted its notables as intermediaries, and
expanded their para-administrative functions.105 Twenty years
earlier, Louis D u m ont had pointed out that Indian villages
were handing over at least one-sixth o f their harvests to the
panchayats and that their apparent unity concealed different
castes, or jatis, that transcended the space o f each o f them .106
T he ‘village com m unity’ is a myth. But through this alleg
ory colonial administrators, nationalists, religious men, ‘devel
opers’, intellectuals, businessmen and tourists discussed, in a
circum locutory way, the genesis o f modernity, a process in
w hich they were directly involved, and to w hich they were—
in the name o f the interests o f the village, o f course!— strongly
opposed. T he European administrators o f late colonialism
were concerned to defend the peasants, w hom they saw as the
trustees o f the eternal soul o f African or Asian culture, against
the activities o f predatory traders, lazy bureaucrats, and C om
munist intellectuals. Nationalist leaders, w ho were also in
search o f genuine developm ent from below, tried to retain
agricultural surpluses by launching collectivisation programs
centred on the ‘village’. M en o f religion, not to be outdone,
dreamed up a mythical village in the form o f a robust parish or
a dynamic grassroots community. Industrialists, foresters, and
planters negotiated w ith the appropriate ‘chief’ in order to
w in over the village whose land they coveted for investment.
In their turn, anthropologists w ent straight to the chief and,
thanks to his mediation, w rote village monographs. In the

spirit o f cooperation the Peace Corps and non-governm ental
organisations celebrated the merits o f ‘small projects’: sinall is
beautifidl Tourists photographed the villagers. As for members
o f the brotherhood o f Beaujolais N ouveau, after having offi
ciated ‘according to the rites o f their order’ they took away
with them ‘the m em ory o f a charming village in a beautiful
setting with a mild climate’.
T he dialogue among the various speakers o f the fable o f the
village com m unity quickly became surreal and absurd.107 That
is not, however, the essential point. In its multiple versions,
more or less racist, relativist, or substantialist, culturalism pro
vides precisely one o f the idioms through the intervention o f
which more and more actors in the international system
interact w ith each other, w hether in the m ode o f m isunder
standing or conflict.
C h ristia n ity a n d globalisation in A frica

Christianity’s current tendencies in Black Africa provide a
good illustration o f the subtle relationship betw een the asser
tion o f local uniqueness and globalisation, two developments
that are apparently contradictory but which the culturalist
illusion succeeds in synthesising.
At the beginning o f this chapter we drew attention to the
way in w hich missionary evangelism, from the early nineteenth
century to the Second World War, made it possible both to
diffuse Christian universalism south o f the Sahara and cul
turally to codify particularisms conceived in terms o f ethnicity,
notably by means o f translating the Scriptures into autochtho
nous languages that missionaries had helped to standardise in
order to make them better vehicles for their teaching. For
example, Yoruba identity in Nigeria results from this process.
W ithin this im ported religion, which was incontestably dom
inated by Europeans— whatever efforts the Protestants made
to co-opt an indigenous leadership— local entrepreneurs soon
‘reinvented difference’ by establishing many so-called ‘Inde

pendent’ Christian churches, structured ecclesiastically but
inspired by African ‘ritual’.
Those w ho analyse this differentiation o f the religious field
have long insisted on the latter point, seeing in such move
ments the revenge taken by ‘African cultures’ on ‘accultur
ation’. B ut one can just as well see in them the continuity that
links the Independent Churches to the missions and to nine
teenth-century popular Christianity. Several o f their charac
teristics, w hich are supposed to express their ‘Africanness’—
for example, the prophetic spirit, the practice o f possession and
exorcism— were borrow ed from nineteenth-century Western
religious sensibility.108 Ultimately, the Independent Churches
may have succeeded less in conveying a radical ‘inculturation’
o f the Testament than in establishing religious bureaucratic
organisation on the continent. In any event, for the past fifteen
years it has been clear that they are not the matrix o f a spe
cifically African Christianity, since they have been heavily
influenced by global political, economic, and religious trans
formations. In particular, they have been inserted into a context
o f the H oly See’s extreme mistrust o f any kind o f theology or
politicisation o f the clergy that might resemble Latin A m er
ican ‘liberation theology’, the West’s growing suspicion o f
Islam, the rise o f the ‘religious right’ in the U nited States, and
the involvement o f fundamentalist Protestantism in R onald
R eagan’s crusade against the ‘Evil Em pire’ and in various ‘low -
level’ conflicts.
T he influence o f American fundamentalism south o f the
Sahara is particularly interesting. Going back to the 1920s, this
trend is a m odern reaction to the religious innovations
introduced by the m ajor churches. O n the pretext o f returning
to a G olden Age it proposes to its followers innovations, o f
w hich the vogue for tele-evangelists is the most spectacular
manifestation. Far from being a form o f archaism or conser
vatism, it is in its own way a factor o f social change, or at least
50 The Intenueaving o f Traditions
o f adaptation to change. In this sense, it can be com pared to

H indu nationalism, Islam, or the ‘return to Judaism ’ in Israel.
But it is also similar to political-religious movements in w hich
it conveys an identity-related strategy o f a culturalist and
particularist type: that o f the Deep South in the U nited States,
deeply w ounded by the Civil War, humiliated by the trium ph
o f liberal capitalism, stricken by the Great Depression, m ourn
ing for its way o f life, driven by W ashington’s arrogance to
dismantle the barriers o f racial segregation. Biblical fundam en
talism has never ceased to refer to this idealised past: ‘T he past
as a dream o f purity, the past as a cause o f pain, the past as
religion,’ V.S. Naipaul w rites.109 But it is also active in the
present, for example w hen its ‘dispensationalist’ preachers
infer from their millenarian reading o f the Bible the necessity
o f supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, R enam o in M ozam
bique or U N IT A in Angola.110
In a country like Liberia, most preachers w ho adhere to
evangelical churches or to the ‘Biblical’ faith m ovem ent par
ticipate in this sensibility, and convey the teaching o f the
Scofield Reference Bible. T heir economic, theological and
ideological dependency on the churches o f the D eep South
grew during the 1980s, and this did not in any way limit their
local influence. Such religious organisations seem, on first
inspection, to constitute a form o f ‘Americanisation’ rather
than o f ‘Africanisation’. For example, the church that con
verted the most faithful in Monrovia in 1989, the Transconti
nental Evangelistic Association, had banned the use o f drums
and dances in its celebrations, on the pretext that these
practices were ‘African’, and replaced the drums w ith flutes
and trumpets, instruments it deemed ‘Biblical’. Generally the
preachers influenced by Protestant fundamentalism tend to see
in traditional African religions only the darkness o f pagan
ism.111 We must also emphasise the fact that the religious repre
sentations im ported south o f the Sahara in this way com e from
a very specific part o f the U nited States, the Deep South, and
that their relation to globalisation and the ‘N ew W orld O rder’
is very complex. If the Biblical ‘fundamentalists’ did not

hesitate to jo in w ith ‘freedom fighters’ in several ‘low -level’
conflicts during the 1980s, and proved to be inveterate
Zionists, they are also very critical o f multilateral organisations
they see as preparing the advent o f ‘world governm ent’, such
as the IMF, the W orld Bank, U N E S C O and G A TT, and they
think that ‘true believers will have nothing to do ’ w ith the
latter, w hich show that the end o f the world is nigh.112 These
kind o f discourses naturally take on a very particular meaning
in a sub-continent whose crippled economies are being sub
jected by the B retton W oods institutions to ‘structural adjust
m en t’. In reality the proliferation o f ‘Biblical’ movements
indebted to American fundamentalism in Africa has purely
local causes. In a context o f depression, these churches enable
entrepreneurs to extract resources from the international envi
ronm ent, and even from the com m unity o f the faithful. At the
same time, in the best cases, the latter are provided w ith a few
tangible benefits— for example, in terms o f education or sani
tation— thanks to the foreign aid they receive or, m ore fre
quently, a simple moral and spiritual support that nonetheless
becomes precious in such fragile societies.113
The Biblical movements thus present themselves as ‘alter
native com m unities’ that deaden the shock o f the crisis by pro
viding the disadvantaged w ith a social status, and, above all,
they contribute to the reconstruction o f the polis conjointly
w ith the failed m odel o f the post-colonial state. From this
point o f view, they are one avatar among others o f the im
posing prophetic m ovem ent that seems clearly to constitute
the chief m atrix o f m odernity in Africa.114 U nderstood in this
way, they are not simple vehicles o f ‘Americanisation’, since
they maintain a relationship w ith the ‘religious right’ that is
not one o f subordination, but o f creative divergence, in accord
w ith a schema we have already encountered on several other
occasions in discussing relations between Africa and the West.
Thus the political character o f religious mobilisations goes far
beyond the problem o f the apolitical stance affected by most
religious organisations. It is likely that in the short term, these

forms o f authoritarianism benefit from this reserve, since they
have often co-opted prophets by showering various benefits
on them .115 Nonetheless, the Greek tragedy that was the fall o f
Liberia’s Samuel D oe in 1990 shows the limits o f this exercise:
the Biblical preachers’ lack o f interest in the res pubJica and
their complicity w ith the regime prevented neither the latter’s
overthrow nor the ‘banalisation’ o f war as the means by w hich
young m en and w om en gain access to ‘global’ m odernity, and
as a way of sharing pow er.116
The connection between the religious sphere and the
political sphere is neither explicit nor strictly functional. It
consists in more tenuous exchanges. For example, Pentecostal
groups in Nigeria are engaged in combating the Devil, to
w hom they attribute an organisation o f a bureaucratic type.
They describe the Satanic hierarchy as a ‘governm ent’, w ith its
‘ministers’, and even its ‘federals’, together w ith its great ‘army
o f soldiers’, and acknowledge that ‘the Devil is an excellent
administrator’ and ‘the champion o f the division o f labour.’117
T he fact that Satan is depicted in this way and that his chief
intermediaries are supposed to be Muslims does not, o f course,
please the form er military officers w ho dominate the national
political scene, and whose contacts w ith the Islamic ruling class
in the N o rth are notorious. Despite their specious and studied
lack of interest in politics, N igerian Pentecostal movements
conceal a strong potential to criticise those in power, and they
may one day politicise their religious resistance to the advance
o f Islam.118 However, we must also ask ourselves w hether they
are not at the same time participating in the diffusion o f a
bureaucratic imaginaire and in the appropriation o f a W estern-
type state, to w hich their emphasis on morality and their sense
o f the collectivity might ultimately produce a new form o f
legitimacy.
In any case it is clear that the definition o f new political
subjectivities south o f the Sahara is taking place more than ever
through the mediation o f religious mobilisations, and that
Christianity and globalisation in A frica 53
through this play o f mirrors betw een ‘African culture’ and

‘W estern culture’ the relation betw een local societies and the
process o f ‘globalisation’ is constantly being negotiated.119
A final example, that o f Emanuel Milingo, the healing arch
bishop o f Lusaka w ho was forced by the Vatican to resign his
office in 1983, confirms that culturalism’s contribution to
‘globalisation’ is played out in an in-betw een space that is not
unequivocal.120 O n the one hand, Milingo makes no bones
about his Africanness. H e is convinced that there is a world o f
spirits located betw een the spheres o f G od and man. Contrary
to the Independent Churches, he does not associate this belief
w ith paganism, and thinks that Africa has its own spiritual
identity. O nly respect for the latter can enable its peoples to
share in the experience o f Revelation. O n the political level he
condemns the oppression to w hich his continent is subjected,
and he is close to the ‘contextual’ theology o f southern Africa.
H ence his conflict w ith R om e. In addition to the usual dis
sensions betw een expatriate missionaries and autochthonous
clergy, especially over the management o f the diocese, there
was also the Vatican’s suspicions regarding the risk o f the poli
ticisation o f Catholicism in Zambia. Milingo s growing popu
larity and his ability to capture the world o f spirits made him
an implicit rival to the president o f the republic, Kenneth
Kaunda, at a tim e w hen the latter’s credibility was declining in
the eyes o f the public.*
However, on the other hand, the form er archbishop o f
Lusaka has always based his convictions on an attentive reading
o f the Bible. H e remains faithful to his Catholic faith, from
w hich he takes the absolute dichotom y betw een G ood and
Evil, and has been strengthened in his views by the enthusiastic
support o f the American Charismatic Renewal movement,
* T h e H o ly See s c o n c e rn s w ere p artly w ell g ro u n d e d : th e trad e u n io n is t F red erick

C h ilu b a, w h o w o n th e 1991 presidential elections, is an ad ep t o f th e C h arism atic
R e n e w a l th a t le d to fo u r priests— tw o o f th e m W h ite — fro m th e K an ik i B ible
S o ciety in N d o la c o n d u c tin g a rite o f exorcism in his ap a rtm en ts at th e S tate H ouse,
in o rd e r to c o n ju re his p red e cesso rs presence (Africa Analysis, 10 Jan. 1992).
which confirmed his belief in the universal dimension o f his

therapeutic gift. Pope John Paul II, while he approved
M ilingo’s removal from office in 1983, nonetheless encour
aged him to devote himself to his healing ministry and caused
him to be named to head the Pontifical Commission for
Migration and Tourism in R om e. H e thereafter devoted all
his afternoons to caring for the sick and once a m onth held a
service attended by a considerable num ber o f believers o f all
origins and all classes. In addition, he travelled a great deal, but
avoided moving about Africa too frequently or surrounded by
too m uch publicity. H e also healed by correspondence and by
telephone. His reputation in the W est grew, thanks to the
Charismatic R enew al m ovem ent. The phenom enon is ambi
guous and not necessarily proof o f universality. Some o f his
sympathisers no doubt see in him an exotic figure, and further
proof that ‘Africa believes differently’, as a D utch newspaper
put it.121 Nevertheless, as the charismatics see it, he is only one
disciple o f Jesus among others, but one whose intense spiri
tuality responds to their religious needs as m odem people,
living in industrial societies.
Thus we can understand how M ilingo’s emphasis on his
African cultural heritage has to do w ith globalisation, but also
in what way his culturalism differs from that o f other trends in
Christianity. T he form er archbishop o f Lusaka defines C atho
lic ‘inculturation’ as a process o f ‘incarnation’ that ‘preserves
the identity o f one while at the same time borrow ing from the
other, w ithout either o f the two parties losing anything’,122 and
distances himself from the word ‘Africanisation’, w hich tends
to imprison Africans in their Africanness and to keep them
from drawing sustenance from universality. T he argum ent is
diametrically opposed to that o f the Liberian preachers, w ho
see universality only in the Biblical particularism o f the Deep
South. Milingo achieved his goals because his ‘African’ belief
in a spirit world allowed him to heal not only the anonymous
ills o f the industrial world, but also cases o f possession as cul
turally loaded as those o f the south o f Italy.
Moreover, the universality o f his message is not validated

solely by his success in the West. In Zambia itself the implicit
politicisation o f M ilingo’s charisma certainly had to do w ith a
unique history— that o f the great healers w ho were sometimes
also political leaders. In addition, the profile o f the form er arch
bishop o f Lusaka rem inded people o f a hero o f the nationalist
struggle, Sim on Kapwepwe, w ho opposed Kenneth Kaunda
after independence and died under suspicious circumstances.
However, in the Zambian capital the hypothesis most often
proposed to explain the replacement o f the ancient healers,
the nganga , by a figure like Milingo is that a Catholic prelate
is better prepared to combat a universal spirit in the posses
sed.123 Similarly, in Senegal ufann — the pre-Islamic spirit o f the
Badyaranke, w ho loves palm wine and cannot bear the odour
o f petrol em itted by trucks— w ithdrew into the forest w hen
exported cultures arrived in the region, leaving the field open
for A llah__124
Basing itself on its ambiguities, the culturalist representation
o f the international system has becom e a major position in
public debate, both domestically in various states and in the
relationships they entertain among themselves or in the trans
national dimension o f the m odern world. In their complexity,
these exchanges cannot be reduced to a ‘clash o f civilisations’.
W hen the prim e minister o f Malaysia, M oham m ad Mahathir,
the then Sudanese Islamic leader Hassan al-Tourabi, African
vice-presidents, and the neo-C onfucian dignitaries w ho over
see the econom ic performance o f their ‘East Asian tiger econ
omies’ question the pertinence o f the liberal conception o f
democracy and see in the latter a specifically Western cultural
characteristic, they are not distinguishing themselves from the
West as m uch as they claim. A considerable fraction o f Europ
ean opinion approves o f their relativism, the very fraction that
defends against hell, high water, and immigrants the consub-
stantial identity o f the nations o f the O ld C ontinent, and that is
ultimately not so convinced that liberal democracy is its unde
niable cultural expression. A Jean-M arie Le Pen is not offended
by Islamism; on the one hand, the latter confirms him in the

idea that Arabs cannot be civilised, and therefore cannot be
assimilated {pace his convictions in I960!); on the other hand,
the National Front pursues a similar identity-related strategy,
and reduces this ‘identity o f France’ to a Frenchness, and even
a stereotypical Frenchness, that it defines arbitrarily. O n the
same note, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head o f the Russian Lib
eral-Democratic party, declared that ‘we must not be afraid
o f Islamic fundamentalism’, because ‘fundamentalism is the
establishment o f an order, o f traditions, characteristic o f south
ern peoples. Polygamy, respect for the elderly, submission,
traditional trades, the Koran— w hat’s bad about that for us
Russians? T he Turkish ‘dem ocratic’ way that allowed the
Turks to spread throughout Europe is m uch worse for us: it is
Com intem ism , whereas fundamentalism is nationalism.’125
Unwittingly, xenophobic relativism is thus itself a rem inder
that in the contem porary world there are hardly any values
that are peculiar to civilisations, to cultural arenas, or to re
ligion doomed, at best, to mutual ignorance, and at worst to
confrontation. Some Muslims opt for the ‘Turkish democratic
way’, and if from 1989 to 1992 Chinese or Thai dissidents
apparently remained faithful to certain societal ‘values’, these
values were not as ‘Asian’ as proponents o f the ‘neo-C onfu-
cian’ business model would have us believe: according to polls,
53 per cent o f Americans approved o f the corporal pun
ishment inflicted on Michael Peter Fay by officials in Sin
gapore in 1994, for having com m itted vandalism, whereas a
year later the execution o f a Filipino employee in Singapore
aroused strong emotions in the Philippines, where in this case
people were unimpressed by the benefits o f so-called ‘Asian
values’. O n the one hand, the attraction o f the liberal m odel
has sent thousands o f protesters into the street in Africa and
Asia. O n the other, the patrimonial conception o f authority,
the admiration for work well done and for discipline, the
refusal to let young people wallow in licentiousness, the sus
picion regarding democratic disorder, the tem ptation to rein in
the right to strike, the cult o f the earth, nature, and com
m unity, and above all the intra-uterine definition o f one’s
ow n culture, have a definite appeal in the West: at least, under
Mussolini, the trains ran 011 time!
We have already noted, moreover, that Western societies
have not only exported the values o f ‘progress’ and ‘freedom ’.
In the nineteenth century, the Young O ttom ans found in their
teaching ideas and theories justifying their resistance to ex
cessive change.126 In Iran M ehdi Bazargan, the leader o f the
N ational Liberation M ovem ent, and Ali Shariati, one o f the
main inspirers o f the 1979 revolution, regarded Alexis Carrel’s
w ork as extremely im portant.127 A nd w ithout even m ention
ing the sympathy Hitler encountered among certain Asian lead
ers and in the Arab world, it is undeniable that the genocide in
R w anda was conceived by m en w ith diplomas from European
and A m erican universities, w ho apparently derived from their
studies an idea o f racial purity radically alien to the history o f
their country.128
O n May 1, 1991, H enri R ieben, a professor in the U ni
versity o f Lausanne w ith ties to the Radical party in the Swiss
canton o f Vaud, conferred a doctoral degree honoris causa on
his form er student, the late Jonas Savimbi,who incarnated eth-
no-nationalism , and even the regionalism o f the Angolan hin
terland, in opposition to the grasping cosmopolitanism o f the
mixed-race, materialistic elite in Luanda, and w ho had curried
the favour o f the religious right in the U nited States. To the
accom panim ent o f the spasmodic applause o f his clownish
foreign minister, the head o f U N IT A , in no way encum bered
by his neo-traditional com m ander’s baton, accepted the gift of
the volumes o f the Encyclopedic vaudoise, a m onum ent to the
glory o f a cantonal culture invented towards the end o f the
nineteenth century.129 Picturesque as it was, the ceremony
was no m ore devoid o f meaning than the celebration o f the
Beaujolais N ouveau in Bayangam, or the presentation o f
L ohengrin’s helm et to the chief o f the Chagga. T he origins o f
the O vim bundu and Swiss strategies o f identity are near
58 The Intcni’caviug o f Traditions
contemporaries. Swiss nationalism dates back to 1891, the

time o f the jubilee celebrating the ‘six hundredth centennial’
o f Switzerland, Obwalden and N idwalden.130 To repeat Bene
dict A nderson’s irreverent observation, Swiss nationalism be
longs to the same ‘last wave’ o f the ‘imagined com m unity’ as
the nationalisms o f Africa or Asia; for example, it precedes
Indonesian or Burmese nationalism by only a decade.131 T he
support Professor R ieben lavished on Savimbi thus takes on
a real ideological coherence. It illustrates the process o f
cultural closure which, as m uch as the process o f universali-
sation and o f false uniformisation, characterises contem porary
globalisation.
2
SHOULD WE STOP USING THE

W ORD ‘CULTURE’?
From the hills o f Beaujolais to the land o f the Bamileke, from

the Deep South to Liberia, from Lusaka to R om e, from the
canton o f Vaud to the land o f the O vim bundu, in short, from
one space or historical landscape (terroir historique) to another,
the intersection o f the processes o f inventing tradition, w hich
has been constitutive o f the general m ovem ent o f globalisation
for m ore than a century, reminds us that there is no culture that
is not created, and that this creation is usually recent. Moreover,
the form ation o f a culture or a tradition necessarily involves
dialogue, and occurs in interaction w ith its regional and inter
national environment. This is what we must now discuss in
greater detail by shifting our focus from facts to methodology.
As we have seen, the culturalist argum ent implicitly takes it
for granted, or at least for a necessity, that a political com m un
ity corresponds to a cultural coherence, w hether the latter is
original and hereditary (the post-Herderian Volksgeist) or ration
ally determ ined and chosen (Renans famous ‘everyday plebi
scite’). This may be the illusion indulged in by several states
that are now solidly constituted but which forged their
political unity by m ore or less belatedly constructing their cul
tural unity, following the example o f Japan, China, the nations
o f W estern Europe, or the ethno-linguistic nationalisms o f
Eastern Europe, including Turkey.
B ut let us not take the exception for the rule, or be duped
by the ferocious identity-related conflicts whose protagonists
59
60 Should we stop using the word ‘Culture’?
pretend to know w ho they are and w hom they are killing, for
these events are themselves merely the late harvest o f the cul
tural closure o f the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. History
and anthropology offer many examples o f culturally undefined
societies whose members base their identity on exchange,
intermarriage, and cosmopolitanism. M ost o f the maritime
areas have also been sites o f hybridisation, w hich have given
rise to more or less brilliant syncretic civilisations w hich were,
however, generally fragmented from a political standpoint,
such as the ‘galactic’ spaces studied by S. J. Tam biah in South
and Southeast Asia.1
Ethnic definitions o f culture do not allow us to grasp the
historical positivity o f these configurations, w hich we are
tem pted to see as incomplete. In this respect, the ‘Javanese
crossroads’ is a textbook case, in the same way as the M editer
ranean or the Caribbean:
T h e horizons o f trade were certainly very specific: C hina, India, the Arab
countries, Black Africa; but the m erchants w h o were engaged in it, m ost o f
w hom had com e from m ixed m arriages and were naturally polyglot, co n
stituted an extrem ely diversified and syncretic social m ilieu that was open
to all sorts o f cultures and had a predilection for universalist ideologies. This
is how we m ust understand the tw o great religions that they brought, one
after the other, to Southeast Asia: Buddhism , and then Islam, w h ich W est
erners have som etim es too great a tendency to see as ‘Indian’ or ‘A rabic’,
respectively, unconsciously giving a racial connotation to these term s.
T hese great netw o rk ideologies have deeply penetrated the Far East,
because they did away w ith the peculiarly ethnic factor that o th er religions,
and notably H induism , had exacerbated. In all this, C hina, far from being a
rebarbative mass, w ithdraw n into its ‘M andarin C onfucianism ’, also played
a role as a turntable, or even an engine. B uddhism and Islam deeply
influenced it, som etim es by central Asia or by sea.2
However, the problem goes beyond the case o f m aritim e and

mercantile spaces. It is not possible, for example, to identify an
African society that is not similarly a ‘frontier’ society, a ‘fringe’
society.3 Anthropological research over the last decade has
demolished the myth o f ‘Sudanese tradition’: the societies o f
Should we stop using the word ‘Culture’? 61
the N ile valley have constantly interacted w ith the M uslim

kingdoms that connected them w ith the slave markets o f Zan
zibar, Egypt, and the O ttom an empire, and this interweaving,
as well as the existence o f no m an’s lands betw een the m a i n
centres o f pow er, makes it impossible to find a ‘coherent tribal
cosmos, an integrated system o f discourse, an orthodoxy’ that
correspond to the old presuppositions o f ethnology.4 A nthro
pologists are now tending to abandon the concept o f an ethnic
group— though not entirely, and we shall return to this point,
that o f ethnicity or ethnic consciousness— and speak instead o f
‘networks o f societies’ that structured, in earlier times, more or
less vast and com plex regional spaces: mercantile spaces, m one
tary spaces, religious or political spaces that overlap w ithout
necessarily coinciding.5 In these contexts, disjunctions between
the political order and representations or cultural practices were
probably systematic. T he conquered populations maintained
their forms o f worship and customs in the kingdoms, and also,
in a way perhaps more difficult to perceive, in lineage societies.6
Colonisation merely dramatised this cultural pluralism by
rigidifying tradition, by modifying the nature o f social inequal
ity and by introducing racial discrimination. Far from oblit
erating the relative cultural indeterminatedness o f earlier times
by imposing rational, legal ‘civilisation’, it complicated it by
adding to it the dimension o f ‘heteroculture’: in our ow n time,
Africa ‘is nourished by two cultural matrices considered as
both essential (and even literally vital) and antagonistic’.7 O ne
may disagree over the ‘antagonistic’ character o f these two
‘m atrices’ and Africans’ ability to overcome the contradiction.
In any case Africans draw a distinction between these two ‘ma
trices’. For instance, the Bakongo in Zaire contrast the cultural
system o f the W hites (kim undele ) w ith that o f the Blacks (k in -
dombe); each system requires a different set o f ‘techniques o f
the body’ and beliefs. Prophetic sects make it possible to move
beyond the incompatibility o f these two worlds.8 Similarly, in
Togo and Cam eroon, for example, people are fond o f using the
expression the ‘W hite people’s country’ to designate the city,

and ‘W hite people’s w ork’ to describe a salaried jo b .9
B ut these fault lines or cultural uncertainties no m ore char
acterise the colonial heritage than they do the non-centralised
societies or ‘peripheries’ marginalised by the ‘centre’, as is
sometimes thought. The imposing edifice o f the R om an em
pire was based on an indirect structure and a policy o f m unici-
palisation that prom oted w ithin it a heterogeneity o f beliefs
and customs.10 In addition it was situated ‘on the fringes o f the
Greek world’: the R om ans adopted as their culture that o f
another people, just as the Japanese o f the M inam oto period
adopted Chinese beliefs and customs a m illennium later.11
Russian culture, w hich we think o f as rooted in the land,
continually situated itself w ith respect to a foreign pole o f ref
erence (or repulsion): Byzantium at the time o f Christianisa-
tion, then Enlightenm ent Europe during Peter the G reat’s
reforms, and now ‘the radiant future’ o f the free market
economy as it is understood by the gnomes o f Washington.
The O ttom an elite, for its part, identified w ith an Osmanli
culture that was open to Byzantine, Arabic, Persian,Jewish, and
Armenian influences, and that was out o f step w ith the de
motic culture o f the countryside, particularly w ith respect to
popular Turkish-speaking culture. This symbiotic disposition
o f the conquering Turks resurfaced in the Seljuk empire and
in the states the Turks established in Syria and E gypt.12 This
was so m uch the case that one m ight w onder w hether the
politics borrowed from the West, starting w ith the Tanzimat at
the beginning o f the nineteenth century, is not simply a re
surgence o f an older strategy, rather than being the spectacular
turnaround that our storytellers attribute to the demiurge
Atatiirk. We also have a tendency to forget how m uch Persian
culture, w hich was itself in osmosis w ith Hellenic thought, was
the centre o f cosmopolitan civilisation in central Asia and
India till the eighteenth century, and set its stamp on the West
ern m odernity o f the classical age through the interm ediary o f
trade w ith China and the Indian O cean.13 T he civilisations—
Should we stop using the word ‘Culture’? 63
Chinese, K hm er, Indian, Islamic etc.— majestically reconsti

tuted by learned Orientalists on the basis o f their great tra
dition in the context w e described above never had the
coherence lent them by the culturalist argument.
T he Europe o f the Christian Middle Ages, the Enlight
enm ent, and the H oly Alliance itself provide a good example
o f the disparity betw een local cultures that are strongly parti
cularised and a transnational culture o f which Latin and French
were successively the linguistic vehicles. It goes w ithout saying
that cosmopolitanism survived the m ovem ent o f cultural clo
sure that accompanied the flourishing o f nationalism. T he fall
o f the A ustro-H ungarian and O ttom an empires, the end o f the
liberal age— the ‘great transform ation’ o f w hich Karl Polanyi
speaks— betw een the two world wars, and the Holocaust have
not ensured the final trium ph o f identity-related strategies.
N ational Socialism and its allies were defeated, the protec
tionist and quasi-autarkic conception o f a ‘national econom y’
was bankrupted, the W ilsonian principle o f the correspond
ence o f state borders to cultural borders betw een nationalities
and languages proved impractical, and the Soviet empire,
w hich practised fanatical culturalism in the name o f prole
tarian internationalism, collapsed.
In light o f the wars in the form er Yugoslavia, the Caucasus
and Central Asia, one will obviously w orry about the exacer
bation o f ethno-nationalism that m ight ensue. Nonetheless,
‘we must pay attention not only to the dog that barks, but also
to the one that does not bark.’14 In sum, the worst is not always
certain to occur: Czechs and Slovaks have divorced, to be sure,
but on amicable terms; the Hungarians showed m oderation in
defending Magyar minorities in neighbouring countries, and
sometimes even regard them w ith indifference; the spectre o f a
bloody dism em berm ent o f Russia seems to have receded.*
* A u th o r’s note to the English edition T h e d e v e lo p m e n t o f th e B alkans, especially o f
Y ugoslavia, fro m 1996 to 2 0 0 0 seem s to c o n firm this g en eral view, ev e n i f th e
D a y to n A cco rd s d ip lo m atically validated e th n ic cleansing, an d even i f a r e tu r n to
m u lticu ltu ra lism in B o sn ia is n o w n o m o re th a n a u to p ia n goal, a n d a dan g ero u s
o n e at that.
Farther west, the recurrent difficulties involved in con

structing Europe are often less the result o f an identity-related
tensing o f public opinion than o f divergences among govern
ments regarding the nature and econom ic orientation o f the
European U nion. These fitful efforts to build cannot conceal
the development o f transnational integration on the level o f
regions, enterprises and individuals, as well as the progress
achieved in recognising cultural or political particularisms
w ithin certain fiercely centralising states, such as Spain. Despite
the w orrying banalisation o f racist and xenophobic views and
violence, and the rise o f wary economic or cultural protec
tionism, Europe, ravaged by two world wars, has been able to
revive its multi-cultural tradition and to give it an econom ic
basis for w hich the culturalist approach can offer no satis
factory account. Today the outlook for enlarging the Europ
ean U nion depends on accepting this principle o f diversity. As
Franôise de la Serre, Christian Lequesne and Jacques R upnik
point out,15 ‘The disappearance o f the East-West division
sounded the death knell for one-dimensional institutional
models that sought to achieve completion, and prom oted a
multiplicity o f processes whose main function now consists in
overcoming ambivalences and adjusting differences arising from
the continent’s disorganisation. [...] The European U nion is
doom ed to remain a political enterprise that is sui generis and
incomplete, evolving in accord w ith a sequence o f pragmatic
compromises.’ Public opinion’s sympathy for the Bosnian or
the Kosovar cause— w hich made it temporarily forget its anti-
Islamic paranoia— is only one sign among others o f this re
currence o f the cosmopolitan or universalist dream, like the
somewhat hypocritical nostalgia it shows for the Austro-
Hungarian empire or its fascination w ith the literary legacy
o f Trieste.
For its part the U nited States has to administer a hum an het
erogeneity that is not new but now refuses to dissolve itself in
the melting pot. Moreover, we have no reason to believe that
the radical identity-related strategies at w ork in Arab Muslim,
4
African, or Asian countries will overcom e their diversity,

whereas specialists on China w onder how Beijing will be able
to keep political control over the growing econom ic and
cultural autonom y o f its south-eastern provinces. Finally, dias-
poras, hom e countries and regions, as well as enterprises, found
ations, churches and sects are asserting themselves, pursuing
their ow n objectives w ithin the gaps o f the interstate system,
and contributing to the dissociation o f cultural identities and
political organisation.16
If we want to understand both strategies o f identity-related
closure and indecisiveness about identity or processes o f cul
tural expansion, the dynamics o f homogenisation as well as
those o f ‘heterogenisation’, culturalism cannot help us, for it
commits three m ethodological errors: it maintains that a cul
ture is a corpus o f representations that is stable over time; it sees
this corpus as closed in on itself, and it assumes that this corpus
determ ines a specific political orientation. T he time has come
to refute each o f these assertions.
H eritage or production?
As soon as one begins to reflect on culture, one has to take into
account one obvious fact: that o f heritage, o f w hat is received
from earlier ages and inculcated in new generations. However—
if only because we are ‘cultivated’!— we must not forget the
achievement o f Hegelian thought w hen it ‘understands from
the outset being-in-the-w orld as a production’.17 M ichel de
C erteau described very nicely this oscillation o f culture ‘be
tween two forms, one o f w hich continually causes us to forget
the other’:
O n one hand, it is w h at is ‘p e rm a n en t’; on the other, it is w hat is invented.
O n one hand, there are the dilatoriness, the latencies, the delays that pile up
in the thickness o f m entalities, obvious facts and social ritualisations,
opaque, stubborn life b u ried in everyday acts, sim ultaneously c o n tem
porary and age-old. O n the o th er hand, the irruptions, the deviancies, all
the m argins o f an inventiveness from w hich future generations will succes
sively extract their ‘cultivated culture’. C ulture is a vague darkness in

w hich yesterday’s revolutions sleep, invisible, w ithdraw n into practices—
but fireflies, and sometim es great nocturnal birds, cross it, apparitions and
creations that outline the opportunity o f another day.18
There is a great tem ptation to rem em ber only the first com
ponent o f the concept o f culture, and to emphasise trans
mission, reproduction, permanence, continuity and weight.
This was the path followed by Geistesgeschichte (the G erm an
equivalent o f the French histoire des mentalites), w hich gradually
attributed to the Zeitgeist a static coherence w hen the revolu
tionary thinkers o f the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, in particular A rndt and others down to Hegel, saw
in it an irresistible force o f transformation.19 Culture thus be
came a principle determining attitudes and resistance to change.
‘Personally, I have always been convinced and frightened by
the enorm ous weight o f distant origins. They crush us’, writes
Fernand Braudel, w ho did not hesitate to speak o f the ‘prisons
o f longue duree .20 However, for the historian this ‘long dura
tion’— apart from the fact that it cannot be entirely reduced to
cultural representations— does not exclude change. It des
ignates the ‘rhythm ’, w hich is original and slow.21 It is on the
basis o f this observation that Braudel privileges both the con
tinuity and the irreducibility o f cultures. H e believes in the
‘heterogeneity, the diversity, o f world civilisations, in their per
manence, in the survival o f their personages, w hich amounts to
seeing as one o f the most im portant tasks currently facing us
the study o f the acquired reflexes, attitudes lacking in flexi
bility, firm habits, deep tastes that can only be explained by a
slow, ancient history that is not very conscious [such as the
antecedents that psychoanalysis places at the deepest levels of
adult behaviour]’.22
All this is right and good if we keep in m ind that cultures are
at the same time ‘combinatorials o f operations’.23 As a result,
they are also innovative. Popular cultures and popular religions
are not in any way immobile: they undergo evolutions, trans
formations, and even metamorphoses.24 Thus, M ichel Vovelle
emphasises that ‘the history o f mentalities merges not only

w ith the history o f resistances, as inertias or periods o f latency,
but there is also a real possibility o f sudden mutations, o f cre
ativity on the spot, o f ages or mom ents w hen a new sensibility
abruptly crystallises’25— for instance, mom ents o f revolution
ary growth.
T he study o f political societies in Africa and Asia has been
confronted by this dilemma ever since decolonisation. We have
constantly asked ‘w hat in fact are the relationships betw een the
way in w hich N ew State polities behave and the way in w hich
traditional ones behaved’.26 And one cannot be sure that the
very non-com m ittal Clifford Geertz— whose w ork has been
so im portant for ‘the interpretation o f cultures’— is doing
m uch to advance the debate ‘w ithout succumbing to either o f
two equally misleading (and, at the m om ent, equally popular)
propositions: that contem porary states are the mere captives of
their pasts, re-enactm ents in thinly m odern dress o f archaic
dramas; or that such states have completely escaped their pasts,
are absolute products o f an age w hich owes nothing to any
thing but itself’.27
This dialectic o f perm anence and change in culture pro
ceeds in part from the relationship that every society is bound to
have w ith its environment. The myth o f the village community
suggests that W estern thought is not necessarily disposed to
agree w ith this view. However, the classical demonstration
offered by E dm und Leach in his study o f the Kashin in Burm a
has been corroborated by the analysis o f other cases in Asia and
Africa: ancient societies, instead o f being isolated, constituted
systems o f political, commercial, and cultural relations, and
were structured by these organic ties w ith the outside.28 W hat
is true o f ‘prim itive’ societies also holds, even more strongly, for
empires, ancient kingdoms and contem porary states. Hence,
‘m odernisation’ does not consist in an endogenous and uni
versal evolution from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘m odern’, but
instead involves regional or international em ulation.29 Thus
the nation-state in W estern Europe has often been form ed in
accord w ith a competitive principle, o f w hich the rivalry be

tw een France and Britain is the archetype, and has always been
included w ithin transnational m ovem ents.30
As for cultural phenom ena, strictly speaking the m atter
must be so obvious that we shall limit ourselves to trivial ex
amples. The ‘emblems’31 o f a cultural identity often result from
borrowing. Portuguese azulejo tiles, for instance: the technique
is o f Arab origin and the blue comes from China, w hich had
itself borrowed it from Persia. T he tomato, w hich is as typical
o f M editerranean cuisine as olives, bread and wine, was im por
ted from the Americas by the Spanish, and its name is Aztec in
origin. M int tea, the im m em orial ritual o f M oroccan socia
bility, was introduced there by the English in the eighteenth
century and became a substitute beverage during the econo
mic crisis o f 1874-84, finally becom ing the national drink.32
M ore seriously, political cultures, no m atter how unique,
always recycle foreign representations, theories, or practices.
For example, how can we discuss G erm an nationalism, w hich
is so specific in its culturalist appeal to a Volksgeist, w ithout ref
erence to the universalist model o f the French R evolution and
the episode o f the Napoleonic occupation? It is revealing, m ore
over, that emigres and refugees play a crucial role in the genesis
o f nationalisms (or ethno-nationalisms), and often prom ote
their radicalisation, as in nineteenth- and early tw entieth-
century Turkey, or more recently among the Irish, the Leban
ese, the Eritreans, the Sikhs, the Tamils, the H utu and the Tutsi.
These complex relationships between old and new and
between the inside and the outside have been analysed in a
remarkable way by the semiotic school o f Tartu and Moscow,
on the basis o f the structural opposition in Russian culture
between the ‘old’ (starina) and the new (novisna ). This distinc
tion intersected, and generally blurred, other dichotomies, for
example those between Russia and the West or betw een
Christianity and paganism, w ithout any o f these relationships
o f equivalence remaining constant. In addition, ‘the persistent
tendency to consider the Russian land as new ’ has often
coincided w ith the ‘revitalisation o f extremely archaic cultural

m odels’: ‘T he very concept o f novelty turns out to be a
product o f ideas whose roots go back to very ancient anti
quity.’ Thus in the sixteenth century, various popular protest
m ovem ents dem anded a return to form er times, whose ‘image
... was profoundly anti-historical and wanted to break w ith
the real tradition’. T he O ld Believers, on the other hand,
inverted historical time. Positive notions— orthodoxy, piety—
were given the epithet ‘old’, whereas sin was perceived as part
o f ''novelty’ and associated w ith the W est, a ‘new ’ space, but
one that was also ‘reversed’, ‘on the left’, that is diabolical. For
O ld Believers, Peter the G reat’s reforms could be nothing
other than sacrilegious, and in fact these reforms did claim to
be ‘new ’. T he Policeystaat, w hich is said to have given birth to
the image o f a ‘new Russia’ and a ‘new people’, was imposed
and perceived as a ‘Europeanisation’ o f ‘old’ Russia. As we
have seen, one must not be deceived by this ‘Europeanisa
tio n ’: ‘T he new culture was not so m uch constructed on
“W estern” models (though it was experienced subjectively as
“W estern”) as on “inverted” structural models drawn from
the old culture.’ W e can even observe that this Europeanisa
tion often ‘reinforced the archaic characteristics o f Russian
culture’, and that ‘in this respect, contrary to the current, super
ficial opinion, the eighteenth century belongs, organically, to
Russian culture as such’.33
Popular cultures themselves— whose definition by intel
lectuals was, as we have seen, a highpoint o f the movem ent o f
identity-related closure— have never been as hom ogeneous as
they were supposed to be by the theoreticians o f the invention
o f tradition, and in particular by the nationalists o f Central and
Eastern Europe. Historians have amply demonstrated that
‘popular religion’, for example, did not differ point-by-point
from clerical and learned religion, and that moreover it was
often an artefact fabricated by the clergy to m eet the needs of
their pastoral work. It is doubtful that there was ever a single
form o f religious practice in French rural areas under the
Ancien Regime; w ithout even m entioning regional differences,

manual labourers, farmers, artisans, winegrowers and notables
did not necessarily practise their faith in the same way. In
addition, various ‘cultural intermediaries’ ensured that beliefs
and rites m oved back and forth betw een the cities and the
rural world, betw een the people and the elites.34 Generally, ‘in
the eighteenth-century French people lived in contrasting and
m ixed cultural spaces.’35 Thus, on the eve o f the French R e v o
lution, R ousseau’s w ork was read as m uch by the urban lower
classes as by bourgeois merchants and aristocrats.36 W e w ould
do better to reflect on the interfaces betw een these ‘cultural
spaces’ than to see them as so many monads.
The fluidity o f the popular is demonstrated in situations in
which social polarity and cultural fragmentation m ight seem
to prevent it. In India, for instance, the lower castes worship in
a way different from that o f the Brahmins. Nonetheless, the
form er often copy the latter’s practices, and have a tendency to
‘Sanskritise’ themselves.37 Similarly, in the O ttom an empire, the
distance, and in particular the linguistic distance, betw een the
Osmanli culture o f the elite and the Turkish-speaking demotic
culture did not prevent them from sharing certain artistic
expressions: the poetic form o f the g h a za l * w hich unques
tionably belonged to the high literature o f the divan, was
appreciated by an audience broader than C ourt and literary
circles, even though it included a num ber o f Arabic or Persian
turns o f phrase and words, and ultimately developed a lyrical
thematics very close to that o f the popular poetry o f the a p k.i8
Thus we cannot accept literally assertions like that o f Marc
R aeff w hen he speaks o f the ‘isolation’ o f Russian popular
culture after Peter the Great’s reforms: ‘[Russian popular cul
ture] never disappeared, but was relegated to the periphery of
live, dynamic, creative forces; by sealing itself up in an isola
tionism that distrusted every kind o f foreign innovation, it
became petrified, rigidified’.39 It is more likely, on reading
* T h e ghazal is a lyric p o e m , usually q u ite sh o rt.

Cultural extraversion and the transfer o f meaning 71
B akhtin’s works and those o f the semiotic school o f Tartu and

M oscow, that the ‘rhythm ’ o f Russian popular culture’s trans
form ation slowed, while retaining go-betw een relationship
w ith other sectors o f society, for example through the agency
o f the serfs, w ho conveyed elements o f elite culture into popu
lar milieux, as R aeff him self acknowledges.
T he culturalist argument, w hich is as m uch political as sci
entific, eludes these roles played by innovation and borrowing
by assuming that a central, hermetically sealed core o f intan
gible representations persists over the centuries. In this it views
culture as m ore static than Braudel ever did, w ith his ‘prisons
o f longue duree’. As a cognitive or ideological version o f the
m ovem ent o f identity-related closure that forged, in the con
text o f ethnicist or nationalist folklore, traditions in the nine
teenth and tw entieth centuries, the culturalist argum ent does
not allow itself to reflect on the ways in w hich social actors
produce their history in a conflictual manner, by defining
themselves both in relation to their perception o f the past and
in relation to their conception o f the future.
Four o f these cultural operations deserve m ore detailed
examination, because o f their recurrence in the field o f poli
tics: tactics or strategies o f extraversion, practices o f transfer,
procedures o f authentication, and the processes of forming pri
mordial identities.
C u ltu ra l extraversion a n d the transfer o f m eaning

Extraversion consists in espousing foreign cultural elements
and putting them in the service o f autochthonous objectives.
It may be a kind o f ‘tactic’ involving, according to M ichel de
Certeau, ‘the construction o f one’s own sentences using a bo r
rowed vocabulary and syntax’, or a ‘strategy’, if it acquires ‘the
possibility o f adopting an overall project [and] totalising the
adversary in a distinct, visible, and objectivisable space.’40 Hindu
‘syncretism’, w hich was institutionalised through the mediation
o f various nationalist movements, seems to belong to the second
category, and Christophe Jaffrelot righdy describes it as ‘strategic’.
But situations o f domination, in particular colonial dom i

nation, open an immense field for ‘tactics’ o f extraversion,
whose accumulation ultimately affects the form ation o f the
state.41 American Indian adhesion to Christianity provides a
good example o f this kind o f historical experience. Faced w ith
Franciscans w ho deployed an evangelism o f a culturalist type
and sought to legitimise autochthonous civilisation to the point
o f taking care to respect its established hierarchy, the sedentary
natives o f N ew Spain chose to submit and to accept the E uro
peans’ religion. However, they converted ‘in order to remain
Indians’. The nativism o f the mendicant orders spared them
the Hispanicisation the Conquistadors sought, and gave them a
sort o f ‘shelter in w hich they could practice the old religion’,
in the name o f the worship o f the saints: ‘O ne can thus say,
w ithout paradox, that it is thanks to the m endicant orders that
the Indians o f M exico were converted, but it was also thanks to
them that they remained Indians’.42 However, over a longer
period, this new case o f cultural intersection— ‘the M exico o f
the sixteenth century saw missionaries faithful to their king
Indianising themselves to the point o f becom ing the cultural
m em ory o f the pagan civilisation, whereas Indians Christian
ised themselves while at the same time remaining Indians in
their being and in their beliefs!’43— is at the origin o f the idea
o f the nation. It was the mendicant religious orders w ho first
established ‘the existence o f a M exican entity by collecting its
history and describing its culture’.44 Similarly, Christian missions
in Africa were the chief matrices o f colonial nationalism, even
though today the emphasis is placed instead on their role in the
crystallisation and standardisation o f ethnic identities: the con
version to the W hite m an’s religion (or to Islam) was one of
the stages in autochthonous actors’ participation in the new
political framework and their instrumentalisation o f the state.
These examples make it clear that cultural extraversion im
plies a second operation: the transfer o f meaning from one
practice, one place, one representation, one symbol or text, to
another, for it is, almost by definition, a reinterpretation and
deviation. This is the case for the Christianisation o f Indians in

the N ew W orld, w hich led to osmosis betw een the foreign
faith and ancient beliefs, in the m anner o f the ‘w orking mis
understanding’ discussed above. T he worship o f the dead
found its niche in the interstices o f Catholic celebrations. In
Bogota the pilgrimage to M ontserrat allows the faithful to
converse w ith the supernatural powers o f the invisible, and
prostitution is banned on G ood Friday, in the same spirit as
the inhabitants o f the C olom bian capital visit certain ‘priv
ileged tom bs’— like that o f the founder o f the Bavaria B rew
ery— in order to attract good luck, or wear as talismans coins
that have passed through the funeral pyres o f unidentified
bodies.45
T he transfer o f sacredness was even more widespread in
Latin America because the Catholic C hurch often orches
trated it by seeking to capture for its own purposes the power
o f the sites or symbols o f autochthonous religion. This seems
to have been the origin o f the intense devotion to the Virgin
o f Guadalupe.46 In the early 1530s the first missionaries estab
lished a herm itage on the hill o f Tepeyac, on the site o f a pre
historic sanctuary, devoted to Toci, the m other o f the gods,
‘O u r M other’. T he Indians continued to visit it, maintaining a
pre-C hristian tradition, and from the middle o f the sixteenth
century onwards, Creoles also began going there to venerate a
painted statue o f the Virgin, O u r Lady o f Guadalupe. The
latter is supposed to have been the work o f a native artist w ho
was inspired by a European model, at the com m and o f Arch
bishop M ontufar. T he prelate is said to have surreptitiously
substituted the statue for the primitive image worshipped by
the Indians, and to have attributed this replacement to a more
or less miraculous divine intervention. T he ambiguity o f this
action and o f the new adoration did not escape the notice of
the Franciscans, w ho were furious about it. ‘And now to come
tell the natives that an image painted yesterday by an Indian
called Marcos performs miracles is to sow confusion’, thun
dered the order’s provincial from the pulpit. N o t w ithout
reason: the Indians w ho flocked to Tepeyac superimposed the

two names o f O u r Lady o f Guadalupe and Tonantzin; the
worship o f the two M others seems to have been com bined in
a single cult.
In a parallel manner, the conversion o f Russia to Byzantine
Christianity was accompanied by the penetration o f pagan ideas
into the newly established culture. Sometimes the old gods
were identified w ith demons, and occupied a negative but
cognitively legitimate place in the O rthodox faith. Sometimes
they were assimilated to the saints, behind w hich they faded
away. Occasionally they underw ent these two transformations
simultaneously: Volos became the dem on Volosatik, but also
St Blaise (Vlas), St Nicholas or St George; M okos continued
to be associated w ith impurity, particularly sexual im purity
(;m okos’j a : a loose woman), but also w ith the personification o f
G ood Friday, Paraskeva-Piatnitsa, or even the Virgin.47
However, if cultural extraversion implies a transfer o f
meaning, the latter can also occur independently o f this kind
o f radically heterocultural context. D uring the French R evo
lution, Republican cults were shaped by the Catholic religious
imagination. ‘Today, we carried the M other o f the living God
through the streets’, a weaver from Avignon wrote after a public
celebration o f the goddess Reason. Local services o f worship
were spontaneously organised around St Pataude, the saint
w ith tricolour wings; prophets such as Marat rose up; martyrs
were praised; revolutionary or patriotic posterity substituted
for the hereafter; and the ideology o f the sans-culottes unhesi
tatingly adopted Christian vocabulary.48 Conversely, the organ
isers o f revolutionary celebrations w ho eschewed this realm o f
possibilities and who ignored the sacred geography o f their
cities were m et w ith indifference, incom prehension, or hostil
ity by their fellow citizens.49
As a bridge linking culture as heritage and culture as inno
vation, the transfer o f meaning seems inherent in political
change, although the latter is not necessarily dramatic. For
example, in the sixth century, ecclesiastical institutionalisation

took place by means o f the cerem ony o f submission that
honoured the powerful o f the R om an empire: the entry o f an
archbishop into his city had to reproduce the ritual o f the
adventus o f the greatest imperial dignitaries; laymen were
enjoined to ‘bow hum bly’ before God and his clergy, as they
did before their king or judge.50 These symbolic or cognitive
shifts from one sphere o f society to another are systematic, and
are basic to the great processes o f shaping the state, in par
ticular its centralisation and rationalisation. It is hardly sur
prising that they characterise the extreme identity-related
strategies that exaggerate the role o f ‘forgetfulness’ (or lies) in
their rereading o f the past. Invoking Ibn Taymiyah (1263—
1328) to justify the assassination o f President Sadat, seeing in
the god R am , the god ‘w ith a tender heart’ o f the ancient
Hindus, the martial hero o f today’s struggle against India’s
Muslims, finding in the Bible the condem nation o f the Sov
iet ‘evil em pire’ and— w hy not?— the W orld Bank; all this
amounts to conferring an anachronistic meaning on texts writ
ten centuries or millennia ago, and recruiting them for battles
that w ere then unimaginable. B ut such transfers o f meaning,
far from being subterfuges peculiar to identity-related radical
isms, are the daily bread o f political action. It w ould even be
difficult to imagine the latter w ithout recourse to the former.
In Kenya, for example, the confusion o f the religious and
political registers is such that politicians’ speeches take on the
appearance o f sermons, w hen it is not sermons that turn into
political discourse: w hen in power, every week President arap
M oi issued the G ood W ord— his and his G od’s— in a church
o f a different denom ination, and in 1983, the pastor o f R ungiri
launched a furious politico-Biblical polemic by invoking the
parable o f the lame sheep incapable o f leading the flock into
the green pasture, w ithout it being clear w hether his target
was district MP, Charles N jonjo, w hom the media suggested
was a ‘traitor’, or the head o f state, shaken by an attempted
putsch.51 As early as the 1920s, hymns became forms o f
political expression, and congregations sang successively o f the

messianic charisma o f Harry Thuku or Jom o Kenyatta, the
courage o f M au M au in battle or their repression by British
troops.52 The Kikuyu squatters w ho colonised the R ift Valley
and the guerrillas w ho joined the resistance fighters in the
forests compared w hat they were doing with the Biblical
Exodus.53
Similarly, in Zaire political figures as antithetical as Simon
Kimbangu, Patrice Lumumba, Pierre Mulele, Joseph Kasa-
vubu, President M obutu and Etienne Tshisekedi seem to be
virtually interchangeable as ‘Messiahs’, ‘liberators’, ‘saviours’,
‘redeemers’ and ‘martyrs’. Ultimately the country’s history is
conflated w ith that o f Israel:
R eligious images illustrate political contexts. C om m unism appears as a ‘re
ligion’, supplied w ith an ethics, organised in ‘cults’ and ‘rites’, in ‘sacra
m ents’ and ‘sacrifices’. C onstitutional texts are com pared to the ‘B ible’, the
R o m a n C atholic ‘breviary’ or ‘missal’, ideologies to the ‘catechism ’, and
the political clientele to ‘acolytes’. Political options open the d o o r to ‘Par
adise’ or ‘H ell’, depending on the case. Political teachings are slipped into
evangelical images, episodes or parables, w hile the attitude o f som e poli
ticians earns them the nam e o f ‘scapegoats’. D em agogy moves am ong the
politicians, and in a m om ent o f crisis the co u n try is full o f antichrists or
antechrists; dissident leaders, groups, and regions are ‘lost sheep’ to be
brought back to the ‘fold’ represented by the governm ent. C olonialism is a
‘w hited sepulchre’, and independence is like a ‘painful b irth ’; political
episodes evoke the parables o f the ‘G o o d Sam aritan’, the ‘feast’, and ‘the
w heat and the chaff’.54
Thus in June 1982 the trial o f thirteen political commissars

that had founded the U nion for Democracy and Social Pro
gress was studded with religious hymns in Swahili, whose
social im port was abundantly clear:
Arise, Jesus C hrist is going to war against Satan,
We stand up w ith strength.
T h e w ord o f G o d is stronger than Satan.
M ay the V irgin M ary protect those w h o sacrifice themselves for the
people.
G od has chosen you to serve him w ith his w hole body and soul.
Suddenly a pastor is speaking to the crowd: ‘Moses was raised

to the court o f Pharaoh. H e had authority, he was called the
Pharaoh’s son, w hen he saw how w retched was his people he
left [Egypt].* Moses is the true democrat, he leads his people
but he will not enter the Promised Land; others will die w ith
him , along the way. T hat is the case today. Amen, Hallelujah.’55
In countries w here the churches have been the chief agen
cies for the socialisation o f the elites and where the tendency
to regard pow er as sacred is im mem orial, the Testament was
easily established as a m etaphor for action. For instance, in
1991 protestors in Madagascar marched around the presi
dential palace seven times in order to bring down its walls__
T h e fa b rica tio n o f a u th en ticity

A n everyday procedure o f social life, the transfer o f meaning is
based on ambiguity and artifice. Does one explain the other?
T he dem and for, and if necessary, the fabrication of, authen
ticity are dear to culturalists, w ho claim to preserve the original
purity o f their identity from external pollution and the aggres
sions o f the O ther, if need be by reconstituting, in an authori
tarian manner, ‘their’ culture, at the end o f a regressive process:
evangelists seek to protect the admirable innocence o f the
natives raped by conquistadors, Creoles, colonists, and other
urban sinners; the nationalists o f Central and Eastern Europe
erect popular culture into a reliquary o f national identity; the
partisans o f militant Hinduism refer to a Vedic Golden Age; the
Islamic R epublic o f Iran wages war on W estern ‘corruption’;
Vladimir Zhirinovsky once suggested that Russia should con
quer Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, w here he would be welcomed
as a saviour, and w here he would leave ‘everything in the state
that the local inhabitants want it to be in: flocks, kebabs, pure
air, and the pilgrimage to Mecca— a pilgrimage on foot, not in
an airliner’;56 and President M obutu restored ‘authenticity’.
* An allusion to the fact that the leader of the UDPS had earlier been an official of
the single party and had composed the Nsele manifesto.
N eed it be said that determ ining the criteria for what is or is

not ‘authentic’ is always problematic? Authenticity is not estab
lished by the im manent properties o f the phenom enon or
object under consideration. It results from the perspective, full
o f desires and judgem ents, that is brought to bear on the past,
in the eminently contem porary context in w hich one is situ
ated: ‘It is in fact a matter o f a social construct, o f a convention,
that partially deforms the past’.57 From Parisian wine bars and
bistros to neo-traditional London pubs, from the vogue o f
local products to trade in ‘antiquities’, from the real estate
market for N orm an ‘farmhouses’ to fashionable ‘open beams’
in the Marais quarter o f Paris, industrial societies are great fac
tories o f ‘authenticity’.
This discourse on an entirely reconstituted, fantasized past is
first o f all a critical com m entary on the present.58 In other
words, it is bitterly disputed. Thus the restoration o f works o f
art elicits virulent public debate, such as that w hich accom
panied the restoration o f the Sistine Chapel. T he specialists
themselves disagree. The Vatican’s prestigious workshops seek
less to rediscover the original integrity or truth o f the work,
w hich is inevitably hypothetical, than to preserve it, and the
restoration is governed by the requirements o f maintenance.
Developed in Italy, this conception is dom inant in M editer
ranean Europe, but is opposed to that o f the more ambitious
English and Germ an restorers. In any case, the w ork o f resto
ration is marked by the taste and the state o f knowledge in the
period in w hich it is carried out. In the nineteenth century,
dark colours were preferred, under the influence o f rom an
ticism, and chromatic contrasts were muted. C ontem porary
sensibility requires a revision o f this artistic approach. T he pre
occupation w ith ‘restoring the restorations’ has becom e suffi
ciently intense to lead today’s restorers to take care to make
their own w ork reversible, in order to make that o f their suc
cessors easier w hen the idea o f the Beautiful and techniques
have once again evolved.
Similarly, the interpretation o f Baroque music has given rise

to intense debate betw een music lovers w ho accept ‘alterations
o f the sound structure, the balance, conceived by Bach’, and
those for w hom ‘the meaning o f a musical work is inseparable
from careful, vigilant restitution o f its sound structure’, w hich
requires that the styles o f execution that became general from
the nineteenth century on be abandoned.59
Given these conditions, we must always analyse the genesis
o f the character o f authenticity that we accord to a cultural
practice or product. Brian Spooner has provided a good study
o f the example o f the Turkm en carpet.60 In earlier times such
carpets were made by w om en w orking at home, w hich en
sured that rigorous technical standards were respected, and it
was this that gave the Turkm en carpet its specific quality. In
particular, the weavers, w ho were mostly wom en, avoided
buying wool on the market in order to retain control over
the choice o f fibres. At the end o f the nineteenth century, the
appearance o f synthetic dyes placed the production o f Turk
m en carpets w ithin the orbit o f the world economy, and their
high price probably prom oted their ‘com m odification’. Used
by the nomads themselves, and sold in the cities o f Central Asia
and the N ear East, the Turkm en carpet penetrated the Western
market w ithout losing its direct symbolic value in the eyes o f
its producers (in contrast, for example, to the carpets made in
the great urban centres o f Persia). It was assessed in accord w ith
two distinct cultural codes: one, strictly autochthonous, was
based on the reputation o f the craftswomen, the use for w hich
the carpet was intended, and its symbolism; the other, intro
duced by the consum er on the world market, depended on
various O rientalist fashions, such as the fad for Chinese art and
decorative objects, or for things Japanese. N o t only could the
interpretation o f symbols or the evaluation o f quality give rise
to a misunderstanding in passing from one code to another,
but, m ore profoundly, Turkm en producers sought to respond
to the demands o f their new customers by changing the size,
the motifs, or the colours o f their pieces, going so far as to
80 Should we stop using the word ‘Culture'?
reproduce the American star-spangled banner, as we see in a

carpet in the University o f Pennsylvania M useum.
Russian conquests, Persian and Afghani military pressure,
and the Sovietisation o f Central Asia during the period be
tween the two world wars all completely disrupted Turkm en
society, provoked many migrations, and in the late 1930s ended
up almost completely halting the production o f carpets. T he
latter did not really begin again till the 1960s, in factories in
the Soviet U nion, and in households or small workshops in
Afghanistan. W ith the new ways o f organising production, the
weavers were henceforth often m en or children (in particular
orphans and refugees, after the great famine o f 1971—2). It goes
w ithout saying that the war in Afghanistan com pleted the
transformation o f this econom y o f the carpet. From then on,
the second evaluative code seems to have w on out. N o m atter
how well they may now be made, contem porary Turkm en
carpets are very different from those o f the m id-nineteenth
century, even though one can immediately identify them as
Turkmen carpets. Moreover, the control exercised by tribal
associations, w hich limited the creators’ room for innovation,
has disappeared. And the foreign consumer, no m atter how
well-informed, has contributed to the unification o f an artistic
genre that used to be m uch more fragmented because o f the
heterogeneity o f Turkm en familial and tribal order. T he de
mands o f the global market have also changed. M ore attentive
to the designs o f oriental carpets before the appearance o f
mechanical looms, buyers later emphasised craftsmanship and
technique, w hich became a criterion o f distinction, and as it
grew it was extended to tribal carpets that had been formerly
neglected, such as those made by the Baluchi.
In short, the definition o f authenticity in carpets is elusive
and inseparable from the influence o f the world market, even
w ithout reference to the fact that it is not an exclusively
cultural, but also a material process. At the same time, young
Turkmens, young Afghans, young Iranians, no doubt caring
little about the authenticity o f their carpets, are looking for
authentic blue jeans, Levi’s 501s, to w hich they accord a

symbolic value far superior to the one they have for us.
T he processes o f ‘inventing tradition’ have already shown
us that the concern for authenticity is often connected w ith
transformations o f society and changes in the scale o f its place
o f reference. It is one o f the expressions o f m odernity and glo
balisation. As such, it is in no way limited to dependent societ
ies forced to redefine themselves in relation to changes imposed
from outside or compensating for their unbridled extraversion.
C ountry music in the U nited States— a superb example o f the
‘fabrication o f authenticity in the area o f popular culture’—
constitutes a response to the ‘progression o f m odernism by
preserving or constructing fundamentalist values’, at a time
w hen part o f A m erican public opinion is w orried about the
developm ent o f permissiveness in society and the decline o f
WASP hegemony.61 In this regard it is not unrelated to the rise
o f fundamentalism in the D eep South, even though the latter’s
m ain ideological target has been the East Coast establishment,
w hich is nonetheless also largely ‘Protestant, W hite, and Anglo-
Saxon’. B ut country music also plays a role similar to the
instrum entalisation o f popular music by the nationalists o f
Central and Eastern Europe. In 1931 the orchestra director
Lamar Stringfield praised ‘the bloom ing o f a form o f A m er
ican musical nationalism’ that could only come from ‘em o
tions rooted in the people’, and that he thought he saw in
‘retro’ music: ‘Naturally, the American popular music least
influenced by others is the one preserved am ong the inhab
itants o f the m ountain regions and the Great Plains. T he lack
o f m odern means o f transportation has helped these people
keep intact their sensibility as hum an beings, and protected
their music from any kind o f artifice.’62
H enry Ford, one o f the leading figures in the globalisation
o f our world,63 was strongly attached to this idea. Despite the
fact that his famous ‘M odel T ’ sold in great numbers thanks to
the lowering o f production costs, and accelerated the end o f
the isolation o f the countryside and the extension o f the urban
m ode o f life, he saw cities as ‘pestiferous excrescences’ and

praised country manners, w hich he considered ‘healthy’ and
marked by a ‘dauntless honesty’. He thought the ‘true U nited
States is outside the cities’, and naturally attributed to Blacks,
the most recent immigrants, and ‘international Jew s’ the
decline o f morality, the consum ption o f alcohol, the use o f
tobacco, sexual licence and jazz. H e did not shirk from
reprinting in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, excerpts
from the Protocols o f Z ion, to subsidise the G erm an-A m erican
Bund, whose leader was notoriously pro-N azi, and to accept
the German A dlerkreuz from the T hird R eich in 1938. T o
fight what he regarded as damaging developments in A m er
ican society, the brilliant carmaker prescribed, w ithout m uch
originality, a return to peasant customs. In 1925 he launched a
campaign to prom ote traditional dances, the round dance and
the square dance, and published a small book entitled Good M orn
ing: A fter a Sleep o f T w enty-F ive Years, Old-fashioned D ancing is
being Revived by M r and M rs H enry Ford, w hich condem ned the
Charleston and recom m ended that dancers hold their right
hands in such a way that only the thum b and the index finger
touched their partner’s waist. He had violinists come to D ear
born in order to ‘standardise the revival o f traditional dances’.
(This Taylorisation o f popular culture is comparable to other
efforts at ‘calibration’ in Central Europe, Turkey and the
Soviet U nion, by means o f constituting ethno-cultures and
turning popular practices into folklore.) T hrough his netw ork
o f dealers Henry Ford also sponsored tours by ‘retro’ violinists.
But the most interesting part o f this saga o f country music
resides in the attitude o f the public, w hich set its ow n defi
nition o f the authenticity o f popular culture. T he w inners o f
the musical contests financed by Ford often led deplorable lives
and hardly conform ed to the ethics o f abstinence he praised.
The old m an that he tried to substitute for them , A l l i s o n
M ellen D unham — a craftsman w ho had made the snowshoes
used by Admiral Peary on his N o rth Pole expedition— did not
cut the mustard. Ultimately, the figure o f the ‘retro’ musician
was displaced by tw o other types o f country music performers,

the ‘hillbilly’ and the ‘singing cow boy’, both o f them products
o f the m odem media. M ost o f the successful hillbilly singers
w ere in fact city-dwellers in the Southeast, and in California,
and not rustics from the Appalachian mountains, the area that
was supposed to be the hom e o f true American popular music.
In other words, ‘authenticity, as it was understood by devotees
o f country music, did not mean strict adhesion to an ideal tra
ditional music’, it was not ‘synonymous w ith historical tru th ’,
but was on the contrary culturally constructed, both by its
prom oters— the theoreticians o f musical nationalism, H enry
Ford, and radio personalities— and by the audience. M ore
generally, w e can conclude that ‘the collective m em ory is sys
tematically unfaithful to the past, in order to satisfy the needs
o f the present’,64 rather than providing a mechanical trans
mission o f a culture or an identity.
W hereas culturalist reasoning posits the existence o f a per
m anent inner core peculiar to each culture that confers on the
latter its veridical nature and determines the present, analysis
reveals a process o f cultural elaboration in the areas o f ideology
and sensibility that speaks to us o f the present by fabricating
the past. This is the inner spring o f the ‘cinescenic’ show staged
by the right-w ing French politician Philippe de Villiers in Puy
du Fou at his family castle and electoral fief.65 His consensual,
ruralist reconstitution o f earlier times is part o f an overall
strategy in the Vendee region, w hich was able to invent for
itself a very real m odernity— particularly in the agricultural
and industrial areas— in the name o f a ‘C houan (royalist rebel)
tradition forged in response to the shock o f the bloody events
o f 1793.66 In many ways this ‘refractory culture’— to adopt an
expression used by Jean-Clem ent M artin and Charles Suaud—
is comparable to that o f the American Deep South after the
Civil War. It draws from the historical expression o f a par
ticular sense o f place (terroir), a universal and contem porary
message. T he Vendee is supposed to be the land o f a right w ing
that is Christian, progressive, and even socially conscious,
through the agency o f Catholic Action movements. R ejecting

both liberal materialism and Marxist atheism, it is supposed to
represent a third avenue toward change. T hrough a pyro-
technical creation of a comm unitarian peasant world wickedly
disturbed by urbanisation, Philippe de Villiers, whose ‘heart
and body are firmly attached’ to the provinces, dramatised an
ideology o f rejection. Appealing to Cathelineau, Clem enceau,
and Marshal de Tassigny, he celebrated ‘the selfsame Vendee
that knows how to say “n o ”’.67 Thus he took his place in this
prestigious lineage by resigning his post as sub-prefect in 1981
to avoid serving a ‘socialist-communist governm ent’. N o n e
theless, contrary to appearances, renunciations were in no way
backward-looking. Philippe de Villiers got him self anointed
by universal suffrage in 1987 and represented the Vendee, in
full republican legitimacy, as the president of its general coun
cil. H e saw the period he rejected as simple parenthesis, w hich
he is seeking to close through his political efforts: ‘J eanne
Bourin said to us recently: “You are ahead o f your time. Y our
taste for risk, for creation, for popular art, for militant disinter
estedness, is not of this century. It belongs to the thirteenth
and the twenty-first centuries.” W e were bo m too late or
too early.’68
T he votes w on by the list led by Philippe de Villiers in the
1994 European elections reveal that this ‘refractory’ attitude
productive o f authenticity finds a certain resonance: it provides
a significant proportion o f the French population w ith a way
o f interpreting industrialisation and its consequences, a read
ing o f the economic crisis and integration into the European
U nion and the world market and a stance w ith regard to im
migration. Culturalist reasoning requires that the reaction op
posing so many changes inconceivable to the ‘C houans' and
their ‘peasant’ heirs be organised around the central notion o f
identity: basing himself on his Vendean identity, Philippe de
Villiers is defending French identity. It matters little to him
that this ‘identity o f France’, as Braudel has deciphered it, is
historically constructed at the confluence o f material and
cultural factors; that it was very belated, if w e follow Eugen

W eb er’s analysis; and that it is in any case incomplete, if we
take into account the residue o f real social diversity, for ex
ample in the dom ain o f family structures.69 For the culturalist
believes in the existence o f identity-related divinities, the pri
mordial identities, that im perturbably traverse the centuries,
each provided w ith its ow n core o f authenticity.* H ard as I
have looked, so far I have seen only processes o f forming
cultural or political identities whose crystallisation is often
recent, and can in any case be dated w ith relative precision.
T h e fo r m a tio n o f p rim o rd ia l identities

T he analysis o f political situations, w hich seems dom inated by
identity-related conflicts that should logically corroborate the
validity o f the concept o f primordial identity, in fact con
tradicts the latter’s pertinence. For example, the growing ten
sion betw een H indu nationalists and Muslims in India seems
to be the prototype o f an atavistic antagonism betw een such
prim ordial identities, since it sets against each other two re
ligions that have also been the matrices o f great civilisations.
Nonetheless, the conflict betw een H induism and Islam merely
adopts the ideological discourse o f militant organisations
w ithout m uch concern for the reality o f the facts. It overes
timates the age and unity o f each o f the protagonists, while at
the same time concealing the interchanges betw een them.
C ontrary to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, H induism is
not em bodied in any single Sacred B ook that provides it w ith a
unified model. Its religious texts are addressed to particular
sects, and historically it was presented precisely in the form o f
* L ike th e ways o f th e L o rd , th o se o f th e social sciences seem im p e n etra b le. T h e

c o n c e p t o f ‘p rim o rd ia l alleg ian c e’ seem s to have b e e n first fo rm u la te d b y a M arxist
au th o r, H a m z a A lavi. In th e m in d o f its p ro p o n e n t, it d esig n ated th e b o n d s o f a
g ro u p , su c h as ties o f caste o r fam ily relationship, th a t p re v e n te d p o o r peasants fro m
p e rc e iv in g class c o n tra d ic tio n s an d led th e m to act against th e ir o w n o bjective
interests. (H . A lavi, “ Peasant Classes an d P rim o rd ia l Loyalties,” Journal o f Peasant
Studies 1, O c to b e r 1973, pp. 23—62)
a ‘conglomerate o f sects’,70 to the point that Indologists had

doubts about its character as a religion, and saw in it a ‘j uxta
position o f religions, m oreover largely unstructured’.71 N o t till
the nineteenth century did movements o f socio-religious
reform seek to rationalise Hinduism by rediscovering its Holy
Scriptures in the monotheistic sense o f the w ord, by adopting
an ecclesiastical m ode o f organisation, by purifying practices o f
worship, by comparing Vedic teachings w ith W estern sci
entific knowledge and by attem pting a ‘social’ interpretation
o f the hierarchy o f castes. T he logic o f the reform movem ents
was clearly that o f ‘strategic syncretism’, and the adversary
from w hich they borrow ed ‘prestigious and efficacious cul
tural characteristics’ was the Christian m onotheism that mis
sionary proselytising made threatening.
But Islam soon provided a second model o f reference and
repulsion w hen, in the early tw entieth century, the colonial
power began to favour M uslim elites in order to counter
balance the nationalism o f their H indu counterparts and to
banish the spectre o f partition. Muslim political mobilisation
during the Khilafat movement in the 1920s turned into anti-
H indu communal agitation. O nce again H indu nationalists
reacted to this danger by adopting, still under the pretext o f
returning to the Vedic ‘Golden Age’, the qualities attributed to
the aggressor: physical robustness, solidarity, unity, and even,
in some cases, a non-vegetarian diet! T he H indu nationalist
movement that till 2004 governed India in the shape o f the
BJP was responsible for instigating dozens o f com m unal riots
in the latest incarnation o f ‘strategic syncretism’.
Thus we see that ‘the H indu nationalist identity engendered
by “strategic syncretism” is not very faithful to traditional H indu
values such as polytheism, religious tolerance, hierarchy, and
the absence o f ecclesiastical organisation.’72 T he fabrication o f
Vedic authenticity by ‘assimilating the O th er’s values’ has pro
vided a vehicle for a radical m utation o f H indu cultural iden
tity and its politicisation in a nationalist manner. For its part,
Islam in the Indian subcontinent has not proven to be either
77/eform ation o f primordial identities 87
m ore united or m ore stable than Hinduism, no m atter how

H indu nationalists have perceived it. In India, communalism
is fed, not by the internal coherence o f each o f the two
religious comm unities, but precisely by their relationship,
w hich has been an antagonistic one in certain situations and
historical periods. H ow ever it should be stressed that this
antagonism is not im m anent to their respective dogmas, or to
their encounter in an enlarged polity constructed by the colo
nising pow er. T he M ughal empire, especially during the reign
o f Akbar (1556—1605), was founded on a compromise— an
unequal one, to be sure— betw een Muslims and Hindus.
T here were num erous exchanges and examples o f syncretism
betw een the tw o groups, even in the religious domain. O f
course, the refusal o f the Muslim conquerors to let themselves
be assimilated by H indu culture— like so many other groups
before them — necessarily provoked autochthonous resistance,
and from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards
Shivaji’s empire, and later the Maratha Confederation, took
up arms against the Mughals. H ow ever, the crystallisation o f a
H indu com m unitarian identity did not occur till the 1860s.73
This concom itance o f the precipitation— in the chemical
sense o f the w ord— o f communalism and the construction o f a
bureaucratic state by the colonising power were not in any way
accidental. T he genesis o f particular identities in the new
political space was not the rejection or negation o f the state,
but rather an inventive adaptation to the radical changes it rep
resented, a way o f appropriating its institutions and sharing
in its resources. This is now well know n to Africanists, and
R .H . Bates can state, as a good liberal reductionist, that ‘ethnic
groups are, in short, a form o f m inim um w inning coalition,
large enough to secure benefits in the com petition for spoils,
but also small enough to maximise the per capita value o f these
benefits.74 We shall see that matters are, unfortunately, more
complicated than that. However, the organic connection
betw een the form ation o f the state, strategies o f material accu
m ulation in a suddenly enlarged econom y and identity-related
self-assertion are found in many situations.
In Europe itself the heralds o f linguistic nationalisms in

the nineteenth century often belonged to educated or semi
educated social categories that saw in official recognition of
their vernacular languages by the state— or better still, the
creation o f a state corresponding to the area in w hich their
vernacular language was spoken— a powerful means o f social
ascent.75 The motivations o f the Sinhalese militants w ho forced
the adoption o f their idiom as the official national language in
1956 resembled those o f the Arabic-speaking Algerian intel
lectuals w ho w on the same suicidal victory in the 1980s.
N ineteenth-century socialists were not mistaken in speaking
o f ‘petty-bourgeois nationalism’. Instead o f expressing the
spirit o f ‘peoples’ hidden in the depths o f their ‘popular
culture’ (as the culturalist fable would have it), identity-related
strategies betray the hunger o f the new elites, eager to be inte
grated, for power and wealth. T he responsibility o f the middle
classes, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and students (or dropouts) in
the radicalisation o f identity-related conflicts— for example, in
Sri Lanka, Natal or R w anda76— is often more crushing than
that o f the masses.
Let there be no mistake: these elites do not content them
selves with activating already constituted communities whose
identity is supposed to be in some way dorm ant. Far from pre
existing the state, primordial groups, w hether religious or
ethnic, o f w hich they claim to be the representatives, are the
more or less poisonous fruit o f the state itself. In this regard the
trajectories o f authenticity in sub-Saharan Africa or o f com -
munalism in India constitute the rule, w hich is confirm ed by
the examples o f communalism in Sri Lanka, ethnic national
isms in Burma, confessionalism in Lebanon and nationalism in
Central Asia and the Caucasus.77 In all these cases the crystal
lisation o f particular identities, such as we know them today,
took place in the colonial period, under the com bined (but
possibly conflictual) action o f the foreign occupiers, their
autochthonous collaborators and their adversaries.
77/e formation o f primordial identities 89
Nonetheless, colonisation was only one contingent factor in

this process, despite w hat African nationalist ideologues m ain
tain. State centralisation and economic change produced similar
identity-related logics in situations that it would be abusive or
anachronistic to term ‘colonial’. For example, in their current
consciousness and organisation, the Baluchi in Iran are the
progeny o f political and administrative measures taken in the
nineteenth century by the Qajar dynasty.78 Kurdish tribal con
federations in the province o f Khorassan were also founded by
the central governm ent, w hen they were deported by Shah
Abbas I, in the sixteenth century.79
As for the renow ned ‘Kurdish identity’ o f the relevant parts
o f Turkey and Iraq, it also proceeds from a process o f
ethnogenesis that has its origin in the regional com petition
betw een the O ttom an empire and Persia. Let us recall first o f
all that all Kurds are not integrated directly into the tribal
structure. T he latter was superimposed on other social rela
tionships and cem ented the dominance o f the military aris
tocracy over a floating population less faithful to a specific
tribe than following a leader w ho happened at the time to be
dom inant.80 As a result, Kurdish tribal consciousness is pro
bably just as m obile and relative as ethnic consciousness in
Black Africa. M oreover, the internal organisation o f the tribes
reflected the interactions betw een Kurdish society and its
neighbouring states, the Persian and O ttom an empires, w hich
made the m ountains o f eastern Anatolia a buffer zone betw een
their respective ambitions. In the nineteenth century, the
reforms instituted by the Sublime Porte abolished the insti
tution o f the Kurdish emirates, w ithout making arrangements
for direct administration o f this part o f the empire. T he tribal
chiefs then made themselves the privileged intermediaries o f
the central power, and tribal structure tended to fragment, its
complexity becom ing inversely proportional to the density o f
the administrative network. In addition, the prom ulgation o f a
land law in 1858 led to the emergence o f a new category of
landowners w ho changed the rules o f the clientielist game, and
in 1891 the raising o f a militia inspired by the Russian Cossacks,

the Hamidyah, changed the pow er relationship betw een the
tribes or even actually gave rise to para- or proto-tribal social
groups, as the Sah-Sevan militia established by Shah Abbas
I had done in sixteenth-century Iran.
Finally, the fall o f the O ttom an empire upset the framework
o f interaction between the state and the tribal order, the
drawing o f a border between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, w hich
prom oted unbridled smuggling, being one o f its im portant
consequences.81 In the context created by Balkan, Caucasian,
and Arab nationalism, the exterm ination o f the Armenians
and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the
Kurdish elites, encouraged by President W ilson’s enthusiasm,
were able to dream of an ethnic nation-state, if one can put it
that way. However, their nationalism did not eliminate either
identification w ith the tribe or the religious consciousness that
partially blurred it. M ost of the nationalist revolts were led by
sheikhs, and the leader o f the Kurdistan Labour Party, Abdullah
Ocalan, w ho had thought he could go to war against religion
in the name o f Marxism-Leninism, had, before his capture in
1999, to curb his ambition and began to speak o f a liberated
Kurdistan that would be the ‘cradle o f Islamic internation
alism’.82 But religious or political adhesion is not itself insep
arable from tribal identification. T he establishment o f the
Naqshbandiyah and Qadiriyah brotherhoods, followed by the
creation o f the N urcu brotherhood, were contem poraneous
w ith the tribalisation o f the province, and were in many ways
responses to the vacuum resulting from the overthrow o f the
emirates and the threat o f proselytisation posed by Christian
missions.83 Allegiance to the sheikhs usually occurred at the
tribal level and was collective, like the nationalist rebellions
that followed tribal lines and thus helped reproduce them , at
the price o f their military effectiveness. In other words, the
Kurds’ identity-related strategies, taken in their diversity, reflect
a century-old historical phase in the course o f w hich many
social and political innovations have taken place, such as the
Tlie formation o f primordial identities 91
centralisation o f the state, the developm ent o f the tribal order

and the various Sufi and other M uslim brotherhoods, the pri
vate appropriation o f land, emigration, urbanisation, the estab
lishment o f an armed revolutionary group, and guerrilla warfare
and its repression by a military bureaucracy trained in interna
tional ‘anti-subversive’ techniques. These strategies are any
thing but primordial.
H ence we must return to the W eberian approach that saw
in the tribe ‘a political artefact’ generally established by the state,
o f w hich it is a subdivision, and that denied the utility o f the
concept o f ethnicity: ‘T he notion o f “ethnically” determ ined
social action subsumes phenom ena that a rigorous sociological
analysis ... w ould have to distinguish carefully.’84 Curiously,
however, W eber does not pursue this thought to its logical
conclusion, and instead contrasts ethnic membership or ‘pre
sumed identity’ w ith a group based on family relationships and
endowed w ith a ‘concrete social action’, whose historical
character he nonetheless recognises.85 In fact, family rela
tionships are also an artefact, ‘an idiom rather than a system’,
through w hich actors constantly negotiate their membership
in groups and their social allegiances.86 As such, it is above all a
field o f conflict— for example, it is the main site o f sorcery in
Black Africa— before possibly becom ing a field o f solidarity
and collective action.87
Seen in this light, the generative continuity from the family
to ethnicity to the state is clear. In ancient Greece th egenos, the
phratry and the tribe were not ‘primordial identities’peculiar to
pre-civic society; they flourished as institutions o f the polis,
providing its mem bers w ith the cohesion, the philia, that
united them .88 Today, a concept like that o f asabiyyah, w hich
some specialists in the M uslim world use to designate the
‘com m unity ... bound by ties o f blood or simply a similarity o f
fate’, must not confuse us either. In Ibn K haldun’s writings, it
has to do w ith the domain o f illusion (amr wahmt) and has no
real foundation (la haqiqata lahu ).s9 ‘T he city in the head’, wrote
M ichel Seurat, w ho made use o f this concept in his study o f
Bab Tebbane in Tripoli, Lebanon.90 Thus defined, asabiyyah is

perhaps less a ‘basic solidarity’ than a ‘basic anim osity’. The
reaction o f differentiating oneself from the O ther (ta ’assab) is
primordial, and solidarity with on e’s ow n people is only a
ricochet action, according to the old adage ‘W ith my brother
against my cousin, with my cousin against my neighbour, etc.’91
In the very different situation o f the French departm ent o f
Yonne, ‘positions o f eligibility have long been transmitted
w ithin networks in which family ties and m atrim onial strat
egies are closely intertw ined’. Nonetheless, these networks are
not ‘fixed entities’, and it would be futile to try to classify them:
‘We are dealing here not with more or less identifiable groups,
but w ith a set o f potentialities that may be realised in accord
with concrete situations. The operation o f voting is one o f the
phases in which this relational system is actualised.’92 U nder
stood in this way, Arab (or Burgundian) asabiyyah merely
reminds us o f an obvious fact stubbornly denied by the cultural-
ists: there is no such thing as identity, only operational acts o f
identification. T he identities we talk about so pompously, as if
they existed independently o f those w ho express them , are
made (and unmade) only through the m ediation o f such iden-
tificatory acts, in short, by their enunciation.93
Historical experience shows that an individual’s act o f iden
tification is always contextual, multiple and relative. For ex
ample, someone from Saint-Malo will define him self as a
resident o f that tow n w hen dealing with som eone from
Rennes, as a Breton w hen dealing w ith someone from Paris,
as French w hen dealing with someone from Germany, as a
European w hen dealing w ith an American, as W hite w hen
dealing with an African, as a w orker w hen dealing w ith his
boss, as a Catholic w hen dealing w ith a Protestant, as a husband
w hen dealing with his wife and as an ill person w hen dealing
with his doctor. Each o f these ‘identities’ is ‘presum ed’, as M ax
W eber says o f ethnicity, and may prom ote integration into a
social group, for example into the political sphere, w ithout
itself alone founding such a group. As a corollary, none o f these
H ie formation o f primordial identities 93
‘identities’ exhausts the panoply o f identities at an individual’s

disposal. T he culturalist argum ent is flawed because, not being
satisfied w ith erecting into an atemporal substance identities
in continual m utation, it conceals the concrete operations by
w hich an actor or a group o f actors define themselves, at a
specific historical m om ent, in given circumstances and for a
lim ited time. T here is no doubt that in R w anda H utus killed
Tutsis in the name o f their respective ethnic identities, and we
shall have to account for that fact w hen the time comes. B ut if
both o f these groups were motivated solely by this one iden
tity-related factor, then w hy did they wait so long to kill each
other, and w hy did some Hutus not kill, choosing instead to
follow identificatory paths other than their ethnic membership
(their Christian faith, their democratic ideals, their R w andan
nationalism). In the same manner, w hy did Catholics stop
slaughtering Protestants and how did the French becom e rec
onciled w ith the Germans?
Anyone w ho studies a concrete society constantly encoun
ters such changes, as well as leaps from one identity-related
register to another. ‘We were distressed because we were pro
bably going to be drowned. Everyone had become a Christian
again,’ reported a Zairean officer fleeing the rebels in Kivu in
the 1960s w ho had been surprised by a storm in the middle o f
Lake A lbert.94 In this example the sequence o f the variation in
identity is very brief. B ut there are examples o f genuine, long
term itineraries o f identity, such as that o f the Chinese in
Indonesia. Recognising Islam’s commercial and cultural hege
m ony in the region, merchants w ho had come from Fujian or
G uangdong betw een the thirteenth and the eighteenth cen
turies converted to the M uslim faith and blended into Javanese
society. A lthough the D utch encouraged them to establish
themselves in specific communities, many Chinese remained
faithful to Islam and to Malay or Javanese customs till the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Starting in the nine
teenth century, the influx o f poor immigrants and Chinese
w om en, the political support o f the M anchu empire, the
advent o f the Republic in 1911, and especially the application

o f article 109 o f the Fundamental Statute o f the D utch Indies
(1854), w hich drew a distinction betw een ‘oriental foreigners’
( Vreemde Oosterlingen ) and ‘natives’ (Inlanders ), led to a gradual
‘re-Sinification’ o f the Chinese population o f Java, w hich
ended up being reduced to the status o f an ethnic m inority.95
By an irony o f history, their distant cousins in mainland
China, the H ui, remained Muslims, and now are experiencing
a similar fate in a radically different political and econom ic
context.96
The nature o f inter-com m unal violence defies explanation
if we do not take into account these changes o f identity-
register. T he neighbour w ith w hom one trades and socialises
as a fellow resident o f a com pound or village suddenly be
comes the Enem y one suspects o f the worst designs, w hom
one rapes or kills. In Maria Iordanidu’s novel, a few days after a
massacre o f Armenians in Istanbul, Loxandra suddenly asks
herself: ‘Is Mustafa, my egg-seller, a M oham m edan?’:
‘M em et, there’s som ething I’d like to know. B u t you m ust tell m e the truth.
W ere you there, in the streets, massacring people?’
‘By Allah, M em et was n o t there’.
‘Because I was w ondering a ls o ...’. A nd she broke into tears. ‘W h a t cam e
over them?
W hat had he ever done to them , p o o r little Ardine? N o, tell m e— w hy did
they have to kill him ?’
‘Alas, alas, alas!’ M em et lam ented.
‘Alas, alas, alas!’ the offal seller lam ented a little later.
‘Alas, alas, alas!’ said the m an w h o sold grilled chickpeas. ‘T h e y m ade a
mistake.’
T h e blood on the sidewalks disappeared, the dogs had lapped it up. Life
continued its course as though n o thing had changed.97
The abruptness o f this slide into mayhem, w hich shocks

foreign observers, is surprising only because we take for gran
ted the principle o f identity-related uniqueness. W ithout being
agreeable, it becomes plausible if we recognise that everyone is
given to tinkering w ith his or her identity, depending on the
alchemy o f the circumstances. To that extent, the idea o f com
The formation o f primordial idetitities 95
m unity is debatable. It suggests too strongly that we belong to

one, aggregate identity, w hich is supposed to dictate our
interests and passions, whereas we tend to situate ourselves
w ith respect to ‘a plurality o f partially disjunctive, partially
overlapping com m unities’98— but then why should we keep
using the term, if it is clearly misleading? It is not a m atter o f
denying the terrible efficacy o f identities that are fe lt to be pri
mordial. A lthough we are convinced o f the ‘artificial origin o f
the belief in com m on ethnicity’, so we must acknowledge that
this belief works, and that ‘rational association’ is likely to be
transformed into ‘personal relationships’ in an ‘overarching
com m unal consciousness’.99 In some sense, primordial iden
tities ‘exist’, but as mental facts and as regimes o f subjectivity,
not as structures. Instead o f being explanatory factors, they
must themselves be explained: while we agree that ‘identity,
considered ethnographically, must always be mixed, rela
tional, and inventive’, that it is ‘conjunctural, not essential’,100
it remains to be understood under what conditions a group o f
individuals apprehends it in the form o f a perm anent, pri
mordial core in order to follow magicians w ho instrumentalise
this illusion to their ow n advantage.
In the meantim e, an initial conclusion can be drawn that
contradicts the culturalist argument: we identify ourselves less
w ith respect to m em bership in a com m unity or a culture than
w ith respect to the communities and cultures w ith w hich we
have relations. Well know n to theoreticians o f ethnicity and
nationalism,101 this phenom enon is more widespread. In the
Cevennes region o f southern France, for instance, Catholic
and Protestant identities ‘are defined m uch more in relation to
each other than in themselves and in relation to their own
doctrines’.102Anyone familiar w ith village life in France knows
that Louis Pergaud’s T he War o f the Buttons (trans. Stanley and
Eleanor H ochm an, N ew York: Walker, 1968) is to the under
standing o f the countryside w hat Machiavelli’s The Prince is to
the study o f governm ent. T he coupling o f the assertion o f
identity and its borders throws light both on the development
o f particular identities w ithin the state and the identity-related

withdrawal concom itant w ith globalisation: in both scenarios,
the broadening o f social actors’ space puts them in contact
with other groups or other cultural habits.
This also reminds us, from a different point o f view, that the
‘culture’ to w hich people appeal and on w hich they draw itself
consists o f borrowings, and exists only in relation to the O ther,
a relation that may or may not be one o f conflict. T he pro
duction o f identities, and thus also the production o f cultures,
is relational; it reflects a relationship to the O ther as m uch as a
relationship to the Self. Thus it probably emanates less from a
‘privileged institutional site o f the symbolic process’ as M ar
shall Sahlins suggested, and from the ‘heart o f societies’, than
from their fringes and their hollows, both o f w hich interest
post-m odern anthropology.103
Tableaux o f th o u g h t or tables o f the law?

Thus ‘culture’ is less a m atter o f conform ing or identifying
than o f making: making something new w ith som ething old,
and sometimes also making som ething old w ith som ething
new; making Self w ith the O ther. Culturalism commits a final
error in attributing such cultural operations, whose logic it fails
to understand, to precise political orientations. T he section o f
French public opinion that fears Islam and associates it w ith
given practices or beliefs— segregation o f w om en, jih a d , the
amputation o f thieves’ hands, fatalism— would be less mechanist
if it rem embered that Christianity has also, at one time or
another, authorised the use o f all sorts o f means o f repression
and punishment. T he same is true in the social domain, and we
have seen Breton Catholicism— anti-revolutionary, anti-repub
lican, and ultramontane— transformed into a force for m od
ernisation and give rise to the most progressive agricultural
syndicalism o f its time, prom ote the birth o f an independent
press and open the way to a left-wing voting bloc.104
O n a strictly political level— and w ithout going back to the
Wars o f R eligion in w hich the French massacred each other in
the name o f G od— Christianity has been incarnated in diverse

and often antagonistic choices. U nder the Vichy governm ent,
for instance, tw o divergent interpretations o f Catholicism got
jum bled up. In Marshal Petain’s view, the defeat o f France by
G erm any was a punishm ent for the country’s moral bank
ruptcy: ‘T he spirit o f enjoym ent destroyed what the spirit o f
sacrifice had constructed [...]; you have suffered, and you will
suffer still m ore!’ This ‘penitential’ language was all the better
received by the bishops and most believers because in their
view the R epublic had never acquired full legitimacy, while
the new governm ent did not make any particular demands on
them .105 Nonetheless, some prelates, Catholic intellectuals
associated w ith the periodicals Esprit, Sept and Cahiers du
Temoignage chretien and young people shaped by the Catholic
Action m ovem ents, quickly distanced themselves from the
new ideology o f the moral order and its racist derivative,
w hich they interpreted in Christian terms as ‘a powerful pagan
trend’, as Father de Lubac put it. A m ong the anonymous mass
o f the faithful, the Resistance could resort to the language o f
religion, even if the spirit o f charity had to pay the cost, as is
illustrated by these tw o tracts that circulated in Besangon
in 1943:106
M y very dear brothers,
C hristm as will n o t take place this year. T h e V irgin and the child Jesus have
been evacuated. Saint Joseph is in a concentration camp, the stable has been
requisitioned, the M agi are in England, the Ass is in R o m e , and the C o w in
Berlin; the angels have been shot dow n by anti-aircraft fire, and the stars
have been detained by the head o f state.
Let us n o w pray ...
O u r Father de Gaulle w h o art in England, hallowed be thy name, m ay thy
victory com e on earth, on sea, and in the air. Give th em today their daily
bom bardm ent, and let them suffer a h u ndred times the sufferings they have
inflicted on the French. Leave us n o t un d er their dom ination, and deliver us
from the Boches. A m en.
Every form o f religious belief, every cultural representation,

every ideological discourse, every literary text, every symbol
can be interpreted in a different or contradictory m anner by
individuals or groups w ho refer to it. W e have already noted

that on the eve o f the R evolution R ousseau’s w ork was read
in very diverse milieux, but it is likely that the low er classes
and the aristocracy did not draw the same lessons from it. His
torians have pointed out that the nobles w ho emigrated or
were condem ned to death had in their libraries books that
were prized by the revolutionaries: Marshal de Broglie studied
the Encyclopedic in prison while Louis XVI read M ontesquieu
and Voltaire.107 ‘Ultimately’, Tocqueville w rote, ‘all m en pla
ced above the people were alike: they had the same ideas, the
same habits, followed the same tastes, enjoyed the same pleas
ures, read the same books, spoke the same language.’108 They
nevertheless cut each other to pieces.
T he Renaissance, another m om ent o f great historical
change, confirms the extreme political plasticity o f cultural
forms. Thus Elizabeth I’s trium phal entry into London in 1559
followed the Gothic style o f this ritual, barely purged o f its
Catholic apparatus: dynastic legitimacy adopted the usual
symbol o f the tree; the traditional virtues o f the speculum
principis were repeated in accord w ith a new Protestant ethic
through a tableau representing the Biblical beatitudes and the
defeat o f vice. Since the R eform ation condem ned religious
iconography and ceremonies, the monarchy easily took over
medieval festivities and used them to prom ote its own glory:
thus spectacles were staged in honour o f the Virgin Q ueen
visiting her kingdom .109 It is true that that era, w hich was sat
urated with neo-Platonic philosophy, was propitious for such
means o f transferring meaning: ‘All over Europe, humanists
and writers used a single repertoire o f sources and images to
express widely different ideals, depending on the period, the
place, and the circumstances. T he same mythological figures
and the same symbolic images might thus completely change
their meaning, and had continually to be adapted to differing
occasions.’110
But neither does the analysis o f the contem porary world
perm it us to conclude that ‘religions’, ‘cultures’, or ‘civilisa
tions’ have the hom ogenous political voices that Samuel H u n

tington sees as doom ed to collide. T he Shia faith has always
been inspired by a great diversity o f political attitudes that
cannot be reduced to an atavistic distrust o f temporal
authority.111 In other words, it did not predispose the Iranian
people to the 1978 revolutionary uprising. A few years before
the revolution, the philosopher Ali Shariati, w ho sought to
reconcile Islam w ith a radical, T hird W orld-type com m it
m ent, deem ed it necessary to stigmatise the ‘Safavid Shiism’ o f
his compatriots w ho had w orked hand in hand w ith the
monarchy. B ut he also clashed w ith Ayatollah M otahhari,
w ho was outraged by his extremism and w ho was set to
becom e one o f the chief ideologues o f the future Islamic
Republic, before being shot by other revolutionary Islamists.112
As soon as the new regime was established, its leaders, although
they were Shias, disagreed not only regarding problems o f
econom ic and foreign policy, but also over the principles o f
Islamic legitimacy to w hich they appealed. T he conservative
or quietist segment o f the clergy could not lightly accept
K hom eini’s creation o f the velayat-e fa q ih (government by
doctors o f law): the Grand Ayatollahs K ho’i, Q om i and
Shariat-M adari expressed their reservations, and the latter two
were im prisoned for speaking out; similarly, the Hojjatiyyeh,
an influential religious society founded in 1953 to combat the
Baha’i heresy as well as to propagate Shia Islam and ‘defend it
scientifically’, refused to grant Ayatollah Khom eini the status
o f Imam till 1983, w hen it was obliged to repent and officially
suspend its activities. The reservations o f this segment o f the
clergy w ith regard to the velayat-e fa q ih and the governm ent’s
action w ere dictated above all by theological considerations,
even if they also involved a rejection o f state control o f the
econom y, agrarian reform, and the political authority’s
infringements on the private domain in the name o f the sacred
rights o f the family and o f property.113
O ne day the complexity o f Ayatollah K hom eini’s thought
will have to be fully appreciated. Westerners read only his
political tracts— chiefly oral teachings taken dow n by students

in N ajaf in 1970, and then published in Persian and Arabic—
and not his treatises on philosophy and law, w hich are neo-
Platonic and Aristotelian in inspiration, or his mystical poetry,
composed in the Gnostic and esoteric (erfan) vein o f Shiism.114
M oreover as a leader K homeini played the part o f a jamnmard,
o f a ‘companion knight’, as m uch as that o f a messianic imam:
his behind-the-scenes style o f governm ent, relying on a
‘household’ (beyt) o f faithful assistants w ho served as his inter
mediaries, and proceeding by arbitrating betw een com peting
factions, recalled the ethos o f the fotow w at* w hich is certainly
not incompatible w ith Islam, but cannot be reduced to it.115
K hom eini’s way o f operating, w hich was characterised by
extreme rigidity till the fall o f the monarchy, later put great
emphasis on pragmatism— except on the question o f the
cease-fire w ith Iraq— and was governed less by the blinding
light o f Shia dogma (or that o f ‘revolutionary Islam’) than by
the necessities dictated by the circumstances. At first he pre
tended to remain ‘above politics’; he forbade Ayatollah Beheshti,
the leader o f the Party o f the Islamic Republic, to be a can
didate in the presidential election held in January 1980, and
asked other religious dignitaries not to concern themselves
w ith the official posts to be filled. O nly the wave o f attacks
that decimated the headquarters o f the Party o f the Islamic
R epublic and the governm ent during the sum m er o f 1981
allowed clerics to seize the levers o f state power, in particular
the accession o f Ayatollah Khameini to the presidency o f the
Republic. In the subsequent period (1982—3) the velayat-efaqih
was imposed, w ith the help o f a vast campaign, as an ideo
logical doctrine and constitutional principle, and the clerics
w ho persisted in rejecting it, following Ayatollah Shariat-
Madari, were ruthlessly repressed. Nonetheless, Ayatollah K ho
meini, in a final turnaround, partially revised the constitutional
* Groups of young people, inspired by a fairly ambivalent ‘knightly’ ethos, who con
trolled the neighborhoods in Middle-Eastern cities.
principle o f the velayat-e fa q ih on the eve o f his death, in the

hope o f preventing the R epublic from falling into the hands o f
conservative clerical elem ents.116
Thus is it som ewhat misleading to present the establishment
o f the Islamic R epublic in terms o f a mechanical victory o f
Islam over the state, the result o f a battle waged over several
centuries. T he Iranian revolution led less to the capture o f
pow er by religion than to the latter’s dependency on power, to
the extent that the Islamic sphere is subjected to increased
bureaucratisation and state centralisation.117 Above all, Shiism
has politically divided believers as m uch as it contributed to
their revolutionary unification in 1978-9, as a result o f a com
bination o f contingent circumstances. The very figure o f Imam
Hussein, whose m artyrdom in Karbala in 680 is celebrated
w ith great fervour during the annual ashura festival, and who
provided the demonstrators o f 1978 and the young soldiers in
the war against Iraq w ith a motivating symbol o f their fate, is in
reality equivocal. O ne can see in Hussein either a model o f the
battle against injustice and for truth, or a simple intercessor
w ith God, in the framework o f a quietist religious faith. T he
first interpretation justifies militant com m itm ent; the second
can accom m odate the classic moves o f relations w ith a cli
entele.118 I cannot resist the tem ptation to complicate matters
for my culturalist friends by rem inding them that at the height
o f the revolution, Imam Hussein was also invoked by Sunni
Muslims, w ho were foreigners and even hostile to ‘Shia culture’;
that in neighbouring Turkey, he shaped the Alevi m inority’s
adhesion to Kemalist secularism, and in the 1970s, even to
M arxist-Leninist criticism o f the capitalist state; and finally, that
he did not prevent the two main Lebanese Shia militias, Amal
and Hezbollah, from fighting w ith each other.119
Hussein is moreover not the only model o f life Shiism
proposes to its believers. M ehdi Bazargan, the historical leader
o f the Liberation M ovem ent o f Iran, w ho briefly occupied the
post o f prim e minister after the 1979 revolution, reproached
Shariati for having concealed the fact that Ali’s first son Hassan
concluded a pact w ith the caliph after his father’s assassination,

w ithdrew to Medina and preferred peace (and perhaps pleas
ure) to m artyrdom .120 Attacked for his moderate attitude w ith
regard to the monarchy, Ayatollah Shariat-Madari similarly
appealed to the example o f Hassan the conciliator.121
T he entire ‘political language o f Islam’122is subject to debate.
O ne example is the key notion o f jih a d , ‘holy w ar’, w hich
provokes a Pavlovian response in the Western world. Even
aside from the majority o f the Al-Ashar ulama and the mass o f
Egyptians w ho reject Islamism, the galaxy o f radical groups
contesting the legitimacy o f the Nasserian or post-Nasserian
regimes does not concur regarding the meaning o f this con
cept and the practical consequence to be drawn from it. For
Sayyid Q utb, the great Islamist thinker executed in 1 9 6 6 , jih a d
covered a w hole range o f practices that allowed the true be
liever to break w ith the impious order o f the jaliiliyah, and to
move from personal meditation on the Koran to armed combat:
To establish the reign o f G od on earth, to do away w ith that o f m en, to take
pow er away from those o f His w orshippers w ho have usurped it in order to
return it to G od alone, to give authority to divine law (chari’at allah ) alone
and to do away w ith the laws created by m an ..., all that cannot be done
w ith serm ons and discourse, for those w h o have usurped G o d ’s pow er on
earth in order to m ake His worshippers their slaves will not give it up
through the grace o f the W ord alone, for otherw ise the task o f His Envoys
w ould have been very easy.123
It remained for Q u tb ’s heirs to discover how to translate his

‘guidelines’ into acts. For example, Shukri Mustapha, the leader
o f Takfir wal-Hijra, chose the strategy o f retreat, o f hijrn, w hen
confronted by the impiousness o f the state, and contrary to the
Muslim Brotherhood, he refused to see the reconquest o f the
O ccupied Territories as a priority o f jihad. H e told his military
judges: ‘If the Jews or others arrive, the m ovem ent must not
take part in the battle in the ranks o f the Egyptian army, but on
the contrary, it should take refuge in some secure place. In
general our line is to flee before the external enemy as before
the internal enemy, and not to resist him.’124 O n the other hand
Faraj, the ideologist o f the group that assassinated President

Sadat, saw in jih a d the ‘hidden im perative’ w hich he took lit
erally, using Ibn Taym iyah’s w ork as justification: holy war is
an armed uprising against the jahiliyah and the m urder o f the
Pharaoh. His essay rejected one by one definitions accepted by
other Islamist groups and significantly influenced the avenue
opened up by Q u tb ’s pioneering book.125
T he multiplicity o f meanings o f the political language o f
Islam governs its indefiniteness. It authorises detours, shifts,
correspondences, transitions and possibilities that culturalist
assumptions ignore, and that the theoretical mishmash that has
com e to guide our thinking no longer takes into account.
N othing, for example, seems to us more clear than the M ani-
chaean com bat betw een Islam and secularism in Turkey. Yet
the lines o f continuity from the O ttom an empire to the R e
public are undeniable, and there are numerous ‘elective affin
ities ’ betw een M uslim and Kemalist ethics. Thanks to these
conformities, and to the institutionalisation o f democracy and
the structure o f civil society, both Islam and the Republic were
reconstituted differently: the form er adopted m uch o f the
latter’s positivist ideology and acted through the agency of
legal political associations, while the state gradually ‘Islamised’
itself, w ithout ceasing to be purely ‘republican’. It is this rene
gotiation o f the relationships between government and reli
gion that resulted, though not w ithout tensions, in the rise o f
an Islamic party— N eem ettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party, w hich
was transform ed into the Virtue Party in 1998 and into R ecep
Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Developm ent Party in 2001—
and o f the Islamic brotherhoods, albeit w ithin the framework
o f a parliamentary system.126
Egypt seems to be undergoing a process that is both com
parable, in that it confirms the compatibility o f Islam w ith
secular ideologies, and divergent, insofar as this compatibility
has operated in a different way and as its political orientation
casts considerable doubt on the future democratisation o f
the regime. Having acceded to the Presidency thanks to the
support o f the Muslim B rotherhood, in order to legitimate

his Arabism and his statism in the eyes o f the people, Nasser
disseminated a neo-Hanabilah and Ibn Taymiyah ideology,
while at the same time repressing his former allies. By so doing
he sowed in the 1960s the seeds o f Islamic radicalisation,
which Hosni M ubarak’s politically brittle governm ent has had
such a hard time controlling.127 T he Algerian governm ent and
military nexus, ‘le poiw oir, has also been accused o f having
nurtured this force, before it turned against it after 1992.128
Weber, unjustifiably appropriated by a pedestrian cultural
ism, can in fact help us avoid any misunderstanding by speak
ing about ‘the frequent ambivalence or silence o f religious
norms w ith respect to new problems and practices’. T he ‘logi
cal consequence’ o f this is ‘the unm ediated juxtaposition o f the
stereotypes’ absolute unalterableness w ith the extraordinary
capriciousness and utter unpredictability o f the same stereo
types’ validity in any particular application’. In order to illust
rate his point, Weber cites the very example o f ‘M uslim sharia :
‘It is virtually impossible to assert what is the practice today
in regard to any particular matter.’129 In itself, Islam has no
political meaning. T he radicalisation o f some o f its tendencies,
in addition to the fundamental fact that it does not constitute a
hom ogeneous phenom enon either w ithin the M uslim com
m unity or w ithin each o f the states that it encompasses, is his
torically contingent. It reveals the emergence o f an ‘ethic
based on inner religious faith’ ( Gesinnungsethik ) that ‘sys-
tematises’ religious obligations and thus ‘breaks through the
stereotyping o f individual norms in order to bring about a
meaningful total relationship o f the pattern o f life to the goal
o f religious salvation’:
M oreover, an inner religious faith does n o t recognise any sacred law, but
only a ‘sacred in n er religious state’ that may sanction different m axim s o f
conduct in different situations, and w hich is thus elastic and susceptible o f
accom m odation. It may, depending on the pattern o f life it engenders,
produce revolutionary consequences from w ithin, instead o f exerting a ste
reotyping effect. B ut it acquires this ability to revolutionise at the price o f
also acquiring a w hole com plex o f problem s w hich becom es greatly in ten -
sified and internalised. T h e inherent conflict betw een religious postulates
and the reality o f the w orld does n o t dim inish, b u t rather increases [...]. A
religious ethic evolves that is oriented to the rejection o f the w orld, and
w hich by its very nature com pletely lacks any o f that stereotyping character
w h ich has been associated w ith sacred laws. Indeed, the very tension
w h ich this religious ethic introduces into the hum an relationships tow ard
the w orld becom es a strongly dynam ic factor in social evolution.130
Islam, insofar as it depends on such an ‘ethic based on inner

religious faith’ rather than simply on conformism obtained by
social control or political coercion, does not involve adhesion
to a ‘stereotype’ peculiar to a cultural community. Instead it
involves rupture and is a vehicle o f individuation. It pushes
society towards innovation rather than towards legacy. It en
courages change instead o f providing a mere transmission o f
retrograde values and the ‘return to the M iddle Ages’ we hear
so m uch about. This is the lesson, for example, to be drawn
from a scrupulous analysis o f social transformations in Iran
since 1979, or from the nebula o f M uslim movements in
Turkey and Islamic organisations in Algeria.131 T he fact that we
do not care for this inventive response, in the form o f an iden
tity-related withdrawal, to the challenges o f the contem porary
world, or that it has ‘failed’,132 is another matter, on w hich
Muslims do not, alas, hold a monopoly.
In any event, we cannot limit ourselves to formulating the
problem in this way, as if political actors negotiated w ith a
single cultural corpus, namely ‘their’ culture. In studying a
concrete society, we discern a plurality o f cultural repertoires.
W hat we call a ‘political culture’ is a result, a m ore or less m ud
dled synthesis, o f these heterogeneous elements and their
m utual ‘elective affinities’. For example, the topic o f sacrifice
haunts N igerian political life and mediates many o f the rela
tionships am ong its actors: General M urtala M oham m ed, the
ephemeral head o f state assassinated in 1976 after a reign o f
200 days devoted to fighting corruption, remains the obliga
tory point o f reference for those w ho have succeeded him in
power. His m artyrdom echoes the m urder o f the main leaders
o f the N igeran Federation in January 1966, and that o f their
murderer, General Ironsi, a few m onths later. T he Igbos

experience o f war in Biafra was one o f mass immolation; the
northern, mainly Muslim cities are periodically ravaged by
mahdi w ho guarantee their acolytes prom pt access to a martyrs
paradise; and ritual murders or lynching o f thieves, corrupt
politicians and sorcerers are common, if one believes the febrile
imagination o f the Nigerian press. These practices and sacri
ficial discourses, which are omnipresent, draw on cultural rep
resentations that are diverse and even antagonistic: among
these are most ethnic groups’ myths o f origin, popularised
by many traditionalists, a myriad o f cultural societies and even
w ell-know n writers; Christianity and Islam, w hich celebrate
the Passion o f the Messiah and the Eid al-Fitr, and the het
erodox religious movements that follow m ore or less in their
w ake.133 In this example cultural innovation represented by
the problematic o f sacrifice is clearly relational: it registers an
interaction betw een heterogeneous corpuses, not the m uta
tion o f one o f them.
Obviously globalisation has intensified and systematised
such effects o f juxtaposition or osmosis. But the phenom enon
precedes globalisation and— let us reiterate— seems inherent
in the very reality o f culture. Islam, in particular, is not a civil-
isational unity. Although it is expressed primarily in Arabic, it
can also be experienced in high literate culture and a fortiori in
everyday life, through the mediation o f many other languages,
and above all in Persian and Turkish. O n the strictly political
level the concepts and symbols it conveys have their origin
in the Koran, the Traditions o f the Prophet and the examples
set by the earliest Muslims. B ut these texts and customs are
steeped in materials drawn from pagan beliefs in ancient
Arabia, from Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism. M ore
over, they have undergone, over time, other influences pro
ceeding from w ithin the confines o f the D ar al-Islam. Starting
in the eighth century, the translation into Arabic o f Persian
manuals on the art o f governance and court etiquette, as well as
o f Greek philosophical works, enriched and inflected M uslim
political thought and vocabulary. T he R om an, Persian and

Byzantine empires also transmitted to Islam many govern
mental practices before the Turkish and M ongol invasions o f
the eleventh to sixteenth centuries once again completely trans
formed Islam’s political culture. Last but not least, M uslim
societies fell under the sway o f the West. Willingly or unw il
lingly they assimilated many o f the latter’s mental categories.134
C ontem porary Islamism has flourished on these m ulti
layered contributions, even though it very classically prides
itself on its ‘authenticity’. O ne o f its precursors, al-Afghani,
borrow ed so heavily from European thought that one may
w onder about his religious faith.135 In any case contem porary
radical movements have introduced into Islam’s political
vocabulary many concepts that were foreign to it, beginning
w ith ‘republic’ and ‘econom y’.136K hom eini’s ideology was im
bued w ith T hird W orld and even Marxist representations,
w hich the Imam no doubt encountered through his encoun
ters w ith Palestinians during his exile in Najaf, and w hich his
disciples learned from Shariati.137 From this point o f view
Islamism is a prolongation o f nationalism.138 Following the
latter’s example, it sets itself against the West but at the same
time appropriates Western ideas and institutions. It is evident
that the dynamics o f globalisation have transformed the his
torical conditions o f the relationship between Muslim civili
sation and w hat Braudel called Civilisation, w ithout, however,
founding this relationship.
Thus anyone w ho wants to understand a ‘political culture’
must reconstruct the cognitive connections between one era
and another, w hich often consist in exchanges betw een one
civilisation and another. T he task is not always easy, for the
logic o f cultural closure, w hich is inherent in the invention o f
tradition, has as its consequence— and often its intention— to
conceal these linkages. Thus the fabrication o f H indu identity
by European Orientalist scholars and their autochthonous
emulators has led to a genuine ‘de-Islamicisation o f India’.139
U p to the early nineteenth century the Indian subcontinent
was nonetheless perceived by Western travellers as M uslim ter
ritory, and not w ithout reason, since the M ughal conquests o f

the thirteenth century had shifted the centre o f Islamic civili
sation from Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau towards
Delhi. T he East India Com pany recognised Muslim hege
mony by adopting Persian for its transactions, the language o f
the Mughal em pire’s educated classes and bureaucracy. W ith
the abolition o f the M ughal empire in 1857, India was grad
ually returned to its Buddhist and H indu past, reinterpreted
in a communalist light under the pressure o f identity-related
political strategies. T he Islamic stratum in the country’s m e
m ory could not, however, be simply ignored. Beneath the
‘Vedic’ and British heritages, the M uslim legacy still makes
itself felt in the vocabulary o f politics, in administrative tech
niques, in the conception o f the space o f sovereignty and in
the subcontinent’s integration into the Asian and Persian G ulf
trading economies. It is simultaneously ironic and eloquent
that the N ehru dynasty issued from a line o f bureaucrats who
served the Mughals, and that the spinning wheel, the Gand-
hian symbol par excellence, w hich is designated in H indi by
the Persian w ord ‘carkha , was introduced into the region by
the Muslims. From the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries
India was constructed on the basis o f a zone o f compromise
and osmosis betw een the social representations o f H induism
and those o f Islam, w hich are now said to be opposed. In the
‘galactic’ universe that prevailed before British colonisation,
the difference in religious views did not have the im portance
that was conferred on it by the problematic o f the nation and
the ideologising o f religious identities: ‘These two traditions
had homologous notions o f terrestrial life, conceived as a rite,
o f the moral personality o f man, and o f society conceived as an
organic, hierarchised w hole.’140 H ere we see again the effects
o f compatibility and detours that we located w ithin certain
Muslim societies.
T he complex relations between political action and cultural
repertoires are created precisely in the darkness o f these m uddy
waters that all the ethnic cleansing in the world will never make
clear. For their part, geologists have abandoned the hypothesis
o f an ‘igneous core’ at the centre o f the earth. B ut culturalists

still believe firmly in the existence o f such incandescent cores
at the heart o f cultures. Ultimately, it is this very concept that
is the problem , and the w ord culture should incontestably be
jettisoned if vocabulary were biodegradable: it inexorably
lends support, even am ong those w ho w ant to break w ith cul-
turalism, to the illusion o f cultural totalities and coherences
w hen w hat w e need to do is to express indeterminism, in
com pletion, multiplicity and polyvalence. Paul Veyne notes
that ‘our everyday life is composed o f a great num ber o f dif
ferent program s’, and that we ‘are constantly m oving from
one program to another, just as we change radio frequencies,
but w e do so w ithout know ing it’.141 It is time to propose a
simple step that w ould enable us to perceive, at the lowest
cost, cultural channel-changing in the political arena.
P olitical utterance
Thanks to post-Saussurean linguistics, we know that the
reading o f a text is part o f its production. T he same goes for lis
tening, and specialists now speak o f ‘musical perform ance’ in
order to rem ind us that the listener acts. Perhaps we should also
refer to ‘political perform ance’ in order to emphasise that the
reception o f cultural phenom ena, ideologies and institutions
is never passive and contributes to their ‘form ation’. Political
science is no doubt somewhat behind other disciplines— par
ticularly history and anthropology— in exploring this ap
proach, even though in the 1980s the latter was able to renew
to some extent our understanding o f authoritarianism .142 Let
us accept, then, the idea that a political field is first o f all one of
utterance or enunciation, and that the necessity o f approaching
‘politics from below ’, o f studying ‘popular modes o f political
action’, and o f distinguishing betw een ‘state-building’ and the
‘form ation’ o f the state proceeds from this obvious fact, rather
than from a populist conception o f the social sciences.143
Submission is itself a kind o f action. In the South Afri
can ‘hostels’ into w hich w hite owners literally packed their
110 ■ Should we stop using the word ‘Culture’?
workforce (2.8 m en per bed in one such dorm itory in the

W estern Cape!), the prison-like space was rearranged by the
residents, w ho tried to recover a m inim um degree o f com fort
by moving beds and chests to free up space to be used for pre
paring food.144 Similarly, in actual prisons, inmates try to
remodel their surroundings.145 Ultimately, the same is true o f
culture if one tries to define it in terms o f heritage, as a ‘prison
o f the longue duree: the act o f enunciation constantly reshapes
the straitjacket restricting action. T o espouse a cultural repre
sentation is ipso facto to recreate it. Thus notions o f cultural
‘survival’ or ‘dependency’, for example, have little validity. T o
exhume a text or a symbol from a distant past, or to im port an
ideology or an institution, amounts in fact to giving them a
new life. India’s trajectory has already taught us a great deal on
these two points: H indu nationalists have broadly reinterpre
ted the Vedic Golden Age they praise, and the parliamentary
system has little in com m on w ith the W estm inster model
bequeathed by the British. W e must move in this direction in
order to clarify the relationships betw een the order o f culture
and that o f politics, drawing on Mikhail B akhtin’s w o rk .146
First let us finally recognise the cultural heterogeneity o f
political societies. The latter do not form cultural wholes. They
contain a variety o f ‘discursive genres’ o f politics, limited in
number, but w hich are in theory irreducible to one another. A
discursive genre corresponds to a relatively stable form o f more
or less homogeneous utterances, for example, statements o f the
Islamic, Christian, H indu, Confucian, nationalist, liberal, or
Marxist-Leninist types. ‘Each particular utterance is certainly
individual, but each sphere o f linguistic usage elaborates its
own relatively stable kinds o f utterances, and that is w hat we call
discursive genres!147 A fundamental point: in our view discursive
genres— w hich we will also call repertoires— are not lim ited to
explicit discourses, w hether oral or w ritten, but extend to
other modes o f communication, for example gestures, music
and clothing.
T he irreducible diversity o f discursive genres is the foun

dation o f the heterology constitutive o f every society, that is
the radical heterogeneity that culturalism— along w ith other
trends in the hum an sciences— seeks desperately to conceal.
B ut at the same time the existence o f a finite num ber o f dis
cursive genres tends to limit this heterology by offering social
actors a range o f repertoires. ‘Each genre, if it is an essential
genre, is a com plex system o f ways and means o f taking
possession o f reality, o f completing it and at the same time
com prehending it. A genre is a set o f means for collective ori
entation to reality, w ith a vision o f com pletion’, Bakhtin
writes. Todorov adopts this definition in a way that is parti
cularly suggestive for our purposes: ‘Thus the genre forms a
m odelling system that offers a simulacrum o f the world ’148 on the
m odel, for example, o f Marxism, Islamism and all microcosmic
ideologies.
In addition, hybridisation occurs betw een genres and espe
cially betw een autochthonous and im ported ones: ‘We call a
hybrid construct an utterance that is related, by its grammatical
(syntactical) and compositional characteristics, to an individual
speaker, but in w hich two utterances, two ways o f speaking,
two styles, two “languages” , two semantic and evaluative hori
zons, are in fact mixed.’149
Thus the scholar must draw up a list o f the ‘essential genres’
o f politics coexisting in a given society by locating their origin
(autochthonous or im ported), the historical conditions under
w hich they crystallised and their possible hybridisation. This
kind o f approach allows us, for example, to demonstrate that
‘African political cultures’ are differing assemblages o f hetero
geneous political genres, and cannot be subsumed under an
ideal type o f ‘African culture’: the ‘essential genres’ are not
everywhere the same (nationalist and bureaucratic repertoires
in Cam eroon; M arxism and sorcery in the Congo; prophecy in
Zaire; the Christian repertoire in Kenya etc.). T he allogeneous
heritage o f colonialism is itself disparate (French Jacobinism,
British governm ent, Salazarian corporatism), and over time
acquired new ‘genres’, (e.g. the American federal m odel in

Nigeria, and Marxism-Leninism in Ethiopia, Angola, M ozam
bique, the C ongo and in Benin). A utochthonous repertoires
are no more hom ogeneous than other ones, and the possi
bilities ofhybridisation are many (in the C ongo, the repertoire
o f the invisible co-exists along w ith liberal democracy just as
well as it used to co-exist w ith Marxism, while in Ethiopia the
latter had strong affinities w ith the Christian repertoire o f the
Coptic church). M oreover, the analysis o f genres reminds us
that a political culture evolves, and it reconstructs the latter’s
dynamics: certain repertoires disappear (Marxism at the end of
the 1980s), and others are rehabilitated (multi-party dem o
cracy, ethno-nationalism) or appear (the them e o f civil society
and ‘good governance’, w hich are rather close to, but distinct
from, the liberal democratic repertoire and, in my opinion,
stand in a relationship ofhybridisation w ith the Christian rep
ertoire o f the Protestant missions).
O nce the basic political genres have been determ ined,
the scholar must examine the ‘dialogic’ relationship, that is, the
intertextual relation between these genres, from the twofold
point o f view o f synchrony and diachrony. O n one hand, from
a synchronic point o f view, ‘no utterance can in general be
attributed to a single speaker’: ‘It is a product o f the interaction
between interlocutors, and more broadly, a product o f the w hole
complex social situation in w hich it em erged’.150 In short it
is contextual, as we have seen in relation to identity-related
utterances: not only does the choice o f the identity one claims
depend on the circumstances in w hich one lives and on the
interlocutor addressed, but also an identity-related utterance
varies depending on w hether it is received w ith sympathy or
antipathy. O n the other hand, from a diachronic point o f view,
every utterance is related to earlier utterances: at the end o f the
twentieth century, one could no more speak o f the dicta
torship o f the proletariat or ethnic cleansing w ithout these
terms immediately taking on the sinister meaning conferred
on them by Stalinism and National Socialism, respectively, in
the same way that from one genocide to another, H utu and
Tutsi identities constantly changed.
Like H eraclitus’s river, w hat we call a ‘political culture’ is the
constantly changing and yet relatively perm anent resultant o f
these multiple effects o f intertextuality. That is why similar
utterances acquire a different and sometimes contradictory re
sonance from one actor to another or from one society to
another: as we have seen, the Shia m artyr Hussein is not inter
preted in the same way in Iran and in Turkey, or in the Iran o f
the Shah and in that o f Khomeini, not to m ention the vari
ations from one individual or group to another. This point
must be emphasised since it sets the limits o f the cultural inter
pretation o f politics. It is this context, ‘the w hole complex
social situation in w hich it em erged’, w hich cannot be reduced
to the conceptual dimension alone, that gives an utterance its
meaning.
Let us take the case o f the Christian discursive genre, which
imbues the political grammar and vocabulary o f many African
countries. First, it is capable o f intertw ining itself w ith a variety
o f repertoires. Thus in the 1960s a manifesto drawn up by
rebels in Congo-Leopoldville com bined in a single declaration
Marxist statements, racist sentiments and prophetic or even
millenarian Christian religiousness:
O u r revolutionary th eo ry is truly a correct and proper adaptation o f the
M arxism -L eninism o f the perio d o f M ao T se -tu n g ’s th o ught to the
concrete conditions in the society o f m en o f the Black race and th eir souls.
H ow ever, it is m o re than that, for w e are living the edification o f proletarian
B ro th erh o o d thro u g h the concrete and actual practice o f C h rists great
com m andm ent: ‘Love thy n eighbour as thyself.’151
Moreover, in the rest o f the text other repertoires are ‘em

bedded’,152 for example, that o f witchcraft (‘O u r enemies are
devils, ferocious demons, w ho have becom e extremely cruel’)
and that o f the bureaucratic state (the use o f a letterhead, the
choice o f a capital city, a plan to establish a Peace Bank).
A t other m om ents in Zairean history, or in other circum
stances, we can see the prophetic genre— whose historical
origin goes back to both an autochthonous tradition and

Christianity’s contribution— merging in another com bination
o f repertoires. As a w orthy successor to Patrice Lumumba,
Pierre Mulele andjoseph Kasavubu, President M obutu always
tried to appropriate this genre to his ow n advantage, and long
had state television and the ideologues o f his party present him
as a messiah. In the 1970s, for instance, he stigmatised the ‘ten
plagues’ that were ravaging the country, it being up to him to
deliver his people from them. But students at Kinshasa U ni
versity soon inverted this religious description o f the regime in
order to challenge it: they spoke scornfully o f Equateur, the
president’s native region, as ‘N azareth’, ‘B ethlehem ’, or ‘the
Promised Land’, in order to stigmatise the shameless looting in
which the presidential clique indulged.153 Later Etienne Tshi-
sekedi, w ho had become a dissident, tried to establish a stub
born synthesis o f the prophetic repertoire and democratic
demands w hich his sorry performance as opposition leader and
prime minister from 1991 to 1994 did not entirely discredit.
Thus prophecy is an ‘essential’ and extremely polysemous
genre in Zaire. But the series o f political meanings it assumes
depending on the speaker, the period, and the place— the pres
idential palace or the university campus— w here it is for
mulated, differs from those it will assume in another historical
situation, because there the ‘complex social situation’ will be
different, because the religious field w ith w hich it establishes a
‘dialogic’ relationship will have its own peculiarities and
because its speakers will have their unique personalities, forged
by an equally unique history.
In Cote d’Ivoire, President H ouphouet-B oigny also did not
hesitate to present himself as a messiah. To justify his refusal to
w rite his memoirs, he once told officials o f his party: ‘I’ve
always answered you w ith a smile: there are two great figures in
the world w ho wrote not a word, not even a single letter, but
w ho are nonetheless the most widely read in the world,
M oham m ed and Jesus Christ [applause]. You will say: they had
their words w ritten down by disciples. But all o f you w ho are
assembled here today, old and young, are disciples o f my

action [applause].’154 M oreover, in his view, his old adversary
N krum ah was a ‘false prophet’, a ‘false messiah’.155 T he pro
phetic tradition is also alive in C ote d ’Ivoire society, and the
state has not failed to try to co-opt into its machinery the
leading pastors o f this religious trend. Public opinion itself is
not insensitive to the transfer o f the redemptive genre into the
political field. Thus it was in very Christian terms that strikers
at the Ivoire H otel expressed their regrets in 1985:
As a result o f num erous conflicts, w e opposed o u r employer, w e clumsily
broke oft th e dialogue o n 23 D ecem ber 1982, thus com prom ising any pos
sibility o f negotiating. H en ce the party and the governm ent, co n cern ed to
m aintain public order and stability, for w hich they are responsible, m ade the
necessary decision. T hus tw o h u ndred and seventy o f us lost o u r jobs [...].
B ut w hatever the effects o f this decision that affects us, w e are aware o f the
fact that it was taken in the superior interest o f the nation, and thus in our
ow n interest, in conform ity w ith the ideals o f o u r great party, the P D C I-
R D A and its venerable leader. [...] T herefore w e ask the indulgence o f all
o u r brothers, and consequently, o f the President and the governm ent, for
the errors w e have com m itted, so that an op p o rtu n ity m ight be offered us
to recover o u r lost happiness__ 156
A nd yet it took only a b rief visit to Cote d’Ivoire to under

stand that the Christian prophetic repertoire did not mean
exactly the same thing there as it did in Zaire. Perhaps because
Felix H ouphouet-B oigny, even if he exaggerated his royal
ancestry, came from a good family and had always affected a
natural indifference to power— ‘I did not becom e a leader by
acceding to the supreme magistracy o f my country— I was
born a leader’157— whereas President M obutu had to act like a
Sartrean bastard. Perhaps also because his description as a
messiah, although it may appear somewhat excessive, was at
least based on his historic role in abrogating the forced labour
that had actually freed his people in 1946, whereas M obutu’s
personality and record were enough to make one disgusted
w ith the profession o f prophet. In any case in Zaire, the legiti
mising function imparted to the figure o f the Messiah operated
in a context o f political coercion and econom ic collapse that

contrasted cruelly w ith the situation in Cote d’Ivoire, at least
till that state too underw ent its ow n internal struggles. Thus
‘saying’ is not always equivalent to ‘doing’.158 T he practice o f a
single utterance is eminently variable because it is historical,
that is, unique. Paul Veyne w ould claim that it is ‘a period
political gimmick whose unexpected ornateness constitutes
the key to the enigma’: ‘hum an facts are rare’, in the sense o f
the Latin w ord ran to .159
In 1974 President Macias N guem a decreed that ‘N o hay mas
Dios que Macias’. H e required the Catholic clergy to state from
the pulpit that ‘God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to
Macias’, and played on similarity o f sound between ‘Macias’
and ‘Mecias’ (‘Messiah’ in Spanish).160 In itself this was no more
than what President Eyadema caused to be said about himself
in Togo, where he was systematically called Joshua ‘the con
queror o f Canaan’, Moses ‘the m an raised from the dead in
Sarakawa’, and ‘Saviour’. Archbishop Dosseh o f Lome com
pared him to Christ, and he appeared every evening on tele
vision in the form o f an ethereal being, standing on a cloud
descending from the sky and landing on the earth.161 However,
if ideological control and coercion were terrible in Togo, they
were even worse in Equatorial Guinea, w here virtually all
those w ho held degrees were killed and the population was
reduced almost to slavery. T he politico-prophetic gim m ick
was different in the two countries. It goes w ithout saying that
this historical specification o f the Christian messianic genre in
each o f the African states will be a m atter for ‘dialogue’ in gen
erations to come, and that its semiotic coherence will be to
that degree diminished. If this ‘relatively stable type o f state
m ents’ does not correspond to a general conception o f gov
ernm ent (or o f protest) in sub-Saharan Africa, we can guess
that elsewhere it is likely to clothe still other political trajec
tories. In Mexico, for instance, the liberal elites, w hether con
servative or anti-clerical, have continually made use o f an
eschatological discourse on revolution, studded w ith Biblical
references in w hich the M exican people also emerges as the

chosen people o f Israel, in search o f the Promised Land o f
democracy, freedom and the ejido ,*162
T he cultural interpretation o f politics is necessary, be
cause— and we shall return to this point— political action is
cultural. But this cultural interpretation must be part o f a
general history, as we immediately see in the case o f the neo-
Confucian m yth in East Asia. In addition, the ‘politics o f the
belly’ in Africa is not a ‘political culture’, and still less a political
culture o f corruption.163 It is a system o f historical action
whose uniqueness lies in its false resemblances.164 In w riting
this book I found in my files a quotation that I intuitively
attributed to an African apologist for the single-party regime:
‘We need a ram, we need a bull, otherwise the flocks o f sheep,
o f cattle will invade the country everywhere where there is aid
for grazing’. In fact these words were uttered by Lech Walesa
in O ctober 1981.165 They associate the Christian and Hebraic
conception o f pastoral power w ith the symbol o f the ‘ram ’ that
one encounters in Kenya and C ote d’Ivoire, and w ith the
equally ‘A frican’ them e o f ‘eating’ foreign aid. Nonetheless,
this lexicological and even semantic proximity o f political dis
courses veils historical trajectories that are clearly irreducible,
even if in these cases the objective o f the m etaphor was oddly
comparable: to justify the sole candidacy o f the leader and
make it enchanting.
T he idiom o f the belly in politics is not peculiar to Africa.
R onsard described unfair sovereigns as ‘subject-eaters’, and in
the seventeenth century Tuscans similarly said o f their com
manders (provedditore) that they ‘ate’ everything that came
w ithin their reach.166 In T he O a k and the Calf: a M em oir
Solzhenitsyn writes that the members o f the nomenklatura
‘nibble’, while in 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev lamented: ‘We are
cutting up the country like a cake. [...] They came to share
and drink and eat— or eat and drink.’167 In Brazil, Lula was
* The ejidos are the community properties created by agrarian reform.

astonished to see President Collor indulging in corruption

w ith ‘an incredible gluttony’.168 In China everyone has know n
since Confucius that an oppressive governm ent is m ore ter
rible than a voracious tiger. Entering a magistrate’s office was
like throw ing oneself into the maw o f a wild animal, and the
whole question was w hether one was going to eat or be
eaten.169 T he Republic did not improve the situation: in the
early 1920s, newspapers described as ‘pigs looking for food’
members o f parliament w ho shuttled back and forth betw een
Beijing and Shanghai to collect their pay in each o f the two
camps battling for the presidency o f the R epublic.170 A nd after
the revolution, at the time o f the Great Leap Forward, the
official responsible for the party’s rural policy gravely w o n
dered, ‘W hat does comm unism mean? First o f all, good food,
and not merely a sufficient quantity o f food.’171 In fact ‘heavy
eating and drinking’ (dachi dahe) remains a crucial political
ritual in today’s China.172 In Muslim countries the pastoral image
o f government appears in classical and early m odem Islamic
writing, and one o f the pastor’s duties is to feed his flock. T he
m etaphor o f food— the act o f cooking or eating it— some
times expresses the act o f occupying a public office: the sover
eign’s servants eat or break his bread; som eone paid a salary by
the O ttom an governm ent was an ‘eater o f w ork’ (uazifehor );
the janissaries’ officers were called soup-makers or cooks, and
w hen they w anted to give the signal for mutiny, they symbol
ically refused the sultan’s food by turning their kettles upside
down, the kettles having become the symbol o f the identity
and the fidelity o f their profession.173 Even President Jacques
Chirac complained in 1989 that the ‘renovators’ in his party
had failed to ‘avoir la reconnaissance du ventre’, that is, to show
gratitude to those w ho had helped them .174
T he recurrence o f this symbolism should not mislead us,
even w hen it is coupled w ith a pastoral representation o f
power: in each o f these situations, we are dealing w ith different
practices and unique intertextual relationships, because we are
encountering different overall histories. O n the one hand, the
same statements resonate w ith discursive genres that differ

from one situation to another: in Black Africa the ‘politics o f
the belly’ is connected not only w ith the pastoral, redemptive
problematics o f pow er— ‘First seek the political kingdom , and
the rest shall be given you as w ell,’ said N krum ah the Osagyefo
(‘R ed eem er’) in a truly prophetic way!— but also and espe
cially w ith the repertoire o f witchcraft, a practice located pre
cisely in the entrails.
O n the other hand, the pastoral-ventral them e ‘converses’
w ith particular historical processes: south o f the Sahara, the dif
fusion o f religious representations o f power has been pro
m oted by confessional education, w hich has been one o f the
chief matrices o f nationalism; Christian missions soon became
addicted to the delights o f economic accumulation and the
ecclesiastical pie is shared in the same way as the ‘national pie’
Nigerians talk about; and m odern forms o f witchcraft— such
as the ekong along the coastline o f Central Africa— serve as a
vehicle for the historical m em ory o f the slave trade etc. The
‘politics o f the belly’ that leads the hum orist’s goat in the
Cameroon Tribune to say ‘I graze, therefore I am ’ is the system o f
historical action that is practised in specific cultural modes but
nonetheless not reducible to a specific culture. It corresponds
to a historical positivity that M ichel Foucault ended up call
ing ‘governm entality’, but w hich he had already defined in
L ’Archeologie du Savoir.
T h e positive facts that I have tried to establish should n o t be understood as
a set o f determ inations that are im posed from outside on individuals’
th o u g h t or inhabiting it from the inside as it were in advance; rather, they
constitute the set o f conditions under w hich a practice is exercised, under
w h ich this practice gives rise to partially or w holly new utterances, and
u n d er w h ich it can be m odified: it is less a m atter o f limits put o n subjects’
initiative than o f the field in w h ich it is articulated (w ithout constituting its
centre), rules that it im plem ents (w ithout having invented or form ulated
them ), relationships that serve as its support (w ithout being their ultimate
result or the po in t w here they converge).175
Instead o f seeking to establish stable causal relations betw een

general cultural phenom ena and political action, we should try
to analyse concrete means o f enunciating a cultural represen

tation in a specific context. T he possible interpretations o f a
political discursive genre are probably not infinite, since the
latter is in a ‘dialogic’ relationship to a finite num ber o f earlier
utterances whose interpretation was itself not infinite. In
Russia, National Socialism tends to be associated w ith the
horrors o f the Second W orld War, and the definition o f it
proposed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky— ‘T he philosophy o f the
National Socialist, that is, o f the ordinary man, the petty
bourgeois.. .w ho wants to live peacefully in his apartm ent’—
remains atypical. In central Europe socialism remains asso
ciated w ith a feeling o f economic mediocrity, restrictions on
freedom and the alienation o f national sovereignty, even
though voters have now turned to the ‘post-C om m unists’.
Islam, having failed in the past to legitimise pluralist political
experiences w ith w hich contemporaries could establish an
intertextual relationship, now seems to be having some diffi
culty in expressing democratic passions, even though nothing
in its dogma obliges it to inhibit them. In general, Christianity
offers its believers a model o f liberation— Exodus— that can
also function as model o f political submission, insofar as it cel
ebrates the virtues of obedience and patience the R edeem er
requires o f us.
But these tendencies o f differing discursive genres are merely
historical. T hey reflect a certain sedimentation, a given rela
tionship o f intertextuality whose stability is relative and can be
reopened by cultural or political innovation, socio-econom ic
transformations and the production o f new utterances or the
reinterpretation of old ones.
C om m on sense requires us to acknowledge, w ith U m berto
Eco, that in a language vocabulary has a literal meaning, ‘the
one that dictionaries list first, the one that the man in the street
would m ention first if he were asked the m eaning o f a given
word: N o theory o f reception can get along w ithout this pre
liminary restriction. Every free act on the part o f the reader
comes after and not before the application o f this restriction.’176
Nevertheless, the field o f this ‘after’ is sufficiently vast to

deprive the culturalist argum ent o f validity. Christians have
sometimes interpreted the grammatical sentence ‘T h o u shalt
not kill’ in strange ways, w ith the C hurch’s blessing. W e have
also seen that in Islamic societies fundamental and relatively
elementary notions such as hijra and jih a d are interpreted in
divergent ways, w hatever the im portance o f the literal m ean
ing (jihad is a kind o f combat, w hich may be peaceful; hijra is a
journey, w hich may be internal). It is not even clear that an
utterance whose literal meaning is fairly clear— the verses
giving the man the ‘direction’ o f the w om an— constitutes the
absolute ‘scriptural prison’177 its reading suggests. C ontem
porary M uslim w om en decipher the Koran w ith regard to
their new social practices as city-dwellers, universal ratio
nalism, the com peting models set against it by television or
travel. Significantly, w hether or not there is a ‘scriptural
prison’, the Islamic R epublic o f Iran has had to adapt itself to
contem porary M uslim w om en’s desire to participate in the
public sphere and to ‘be in society’, w ithout this aspiration
necessarily contradicting their religious faith: in this regard the
m eaning o f wearing the veil has been m uch m ore ambiguous
than is often thought in W estern countries, especially France.178
In any event, the cultural dimension o f political action is still
m ore complex. T he political enunciation o f culture, as we have
said, exploits the polysemy o f more than one repertoire. It
involves a bundle o f essential genres that are historically sedi-
m ented and hybridised.* T he effects o f intertextuality produ
ced by this are multiple. We can now better see w hat we need
to examine. T he historically delimited polysemy o f cultural
representations leads us to substitute for the analysis o f political
cultures the study o f the cultural reasons for political action.
A nd the ambivalence arising from intertextuality suggests that
these cultural reasons for political action primarily involve
the imaginaire.
* We should remember that a plant is said to be hybridised when it is naturally fer

tilised by the pollen of another species or variety.
Part II
OWLS WITH RHEUMY EYES
D ow n w ith owls w ith rheum y eyes!*
D ow n w ith tortoises w ith double shells!
D ow n w ith cham eleons doing balancing acts!
D ow n w ith the stuffed turkeys!
This is how Burkina Faso’s ‘committees for the defence o f the

revolution’ expressed themselves during their second national
m eeting in 1987.1 T heir discourses, we can argue, took on a
specific cultural content. O n the one hand, the content seems
to us comical, because we now find it unintelligible. O n the
other hand, it was understood by everyone in O ugadougou,
because the Burkinabe had an ongoing symbolic relationship
w ith the animal world via totemism.
In Burkina Faso recourse to a zoological vocabulary in the
political sphere is not unusual. U nder the preceding regime
the two legally recognised parties had identified themselves
w ith the elephant and the lion, respectively, and ridiculing the
animal emblem o f the opposing party was the best way o f dis
crediting the latter. President Thomas Sankara developed a
veritable typology for animalising and destroying ‘enemies o f
the people’. T he commercial bourgeoisie were ‘panic-stricken
buffalos’, the local servants o f French imperialism were ‘black
cats’ and ‘roaming dogs’, corrupt officials were ‘mangy dogs’,
mercenaries and racists were ‘war dogs’, soldiers and dishonest
customs officials were ‘stuffed turkeys’, non-revolutionary gov
ernm ent officials were ‘dum bfounded owls’, T hird R epublic
* The French original is ‘au regardgluant'.
122
Owls with R heum y Eyes 123
politicians in the form er French colony o f U pper Volta were

‘owls w ith rheum y eyes’, merchants and crooked officials
w ere ‘tim id hyenas’, politicians were ‘ravening wolves’, m er
cenaries were also ‘wild geese’, fake militants were ‘strutting
guinea fowls’, merchants were ‘terrified foxes’, labour union
activists and merchants were ‘tortoises w ith double shells’, and
politicians, the forces o f darkness, and expatriates were ‘cha
meleons doing balancing acts’.2
T he hybridisation o f this symbolic repertoire and o f the
international revolutionary discursive genre was often rather
heavy-handed:
C om rades, let us have the courage to recognise that in a num ber o f our
offices and m ilitary corps hippopotam uses, lizards, and cham eleons are still
in o u r midst. T hese w ater or land animals are trying in every way they can
to block the transform ation taking place in the arm y B ut their acts o f
sabotage directed against the R D P* are so subtle and clever that all sincere
com rades m ust be m uch m ore vigilant and d eterm ined to unm ask and
com bat them . B u t the people will n o t be fooled. T h a t is w hy the im
m ediate task in cu m b en t up o n every soldier involved in the revolutionary
process is to dislodge the last representatives o f the neo-colonial army,
w herever they m ay be hiding.3
However, we must not underestimate the audience for this

kind o f politico-sociological vocabulary in Burkinabe public
opinion. T he latter was ‘conversing’ w ith the corpus o f stories
learned in childhood, whose heroes are often animals, the
actors in a veritable moral economy o f trickery, w hich Denise
Paulme persuasively compares to Greek metis.4 In addition, this
bestiary o f counter-revolution was probably not original and
was largely borrow ed— that is, in accord w ith the theory o f
enunciation, recreated— from the man in the street, w ho is
always ready to ridicule, to ‘distance himself facetiously’, and to
make ‘paradoxical implications’.5 Finally, and especially, these
revolutionaries knew how to use such animal vocabulary to
evoke a phantasmal resonance. Many o f their favourite m et
aphors— starting w ith the various avatars o f the owl— referred
* The Revolution democratique et populaire party.

124 Owls with R heum y Eyes
to the disturbing world o f the invisible, and m ore particularly

to witchcraft. It is particularly revealing that the ‘enemies o f
the people’ were accused o f acting at night:
In fact, we have to recognise that m any o f these acrobatic cham eleons,
perching on old, grey branches, are m aking a last effort to adapt themselves
to the colours o f the branches o f the tree o f August.* This is show n by
the fact that som e individuals w ho probably think they are cleverer than
our m ilitary comrades are taking interm ediary positions; pretending to
be fervent defenders o f the R D P by day, they h u rry to don the m antle
o f counter-revolution once night has fallen. Fortunately for the revolu
tion, this m antle smells so bad that its nocturnal wearers can be quickly
detected.6
T he political battle against the ‘enemies o f the people’ is com

pared to tracking down witches, and this transfer o f meaning,
this switch from one register to another, has a very strong
emotional charge, at the same time that it seeks to root the
state’s concerns in those o f everyday life and in popular onto
logy. From this point o f view, the case o f the Burkinabe is not
unusual. O nly a few African leaders have resisted the tem p
tation to conflate opposition w ith subversion, and then sub
version w ith witchcraft. In O ctober 1990 Sassou Nguesso, the
president o f the Republic o f the Congo (Brazzaville), accused
‘dark forces’ o f having provoked the wave o f strikes that shook
his hold on power.7 Eleven years earlier President M obutu
claimed w ithin the legislative council that the leaders o f the
U DPS were ‘serpents, not nioka but udoki ’, that is, witches.8
President Hastings Banda o f Malawi exclaimed in 1992:
‘I know there are some dissidents w ho are acting in the shadows
and w ho m eet w ith foreigners at night. W hy don’t they come
out into the daylight so that we can have a constructive dia
logue?’9 And in Kenya President arap M oi constantly stigmat
ised the ‘nocturnal meetings’— in theory forbidden— which,
on the pretext o f being funeral wakes, allowed unscrupulous
politicians to force their fellow citizens to swear an oath o f
allegiance to them .10 Till he stepped down as president in
* Thomas Sankara took power in August 1983.

Ouds with R heum y Eyes 125
2002, he used the repertoire o f witchcraft in an attempt to dis

credit the m ulti-party system, the cause o f disorders.11 The
‘ethics o f unity’12 that has been constantly prom oted by single
party regimes for three decades implicitly confers on these
regimes a role analogous to that that had been played by cer
tain prophetic movements in the battle against witches. Perhaps
this explains their predilection for the redemptive genre.
In any case, single-party regimes have undeniably made use,
in order to legitimate themselves, o f the vague fear that conflict
arouses in sub-Saharan Africa because it is immediately asso
ciated w ith a m ore fundamental disorder o f a metaphysical
nature. This did not, however, prevent them from falling prey
themselves to the ‘demons o f division’ and having internal fac
tional struggles, which were also experienced in terms o f w itch
craft.13 In this context, there is no more convenient way o f
disqualifying an adversary than to attribute to him this kind of
plotting in the realm o f the invisible. T he accusation is some
times made explicit. In Cam eroon in the 1950s the part o f the
press favourable to French policy presented U m Nyobe, the
nationalist leader o f the U P C (Cameroon Peoples’ U nion), as a
blackmailer w hose father was ‘a monster, a panther-w itch who
was killed because he had also killed many o f his brothers in
the forest’.14 B ut the U P C themselves accused collaborators
w ith the colonising power, and especially informers, o f being
witches, a moral stance also adopted by nationalist fighters in
Zim babwe in the 1970s.15 '
T he example o f C ote d’Ivoire is still m ore interesting, since
there one sees the repertoire o f the invisible intertw ining with
the Stalinist them e o f ‘conspiracy’ inherited from the period
w hen the Rassem blem ent democratique africain (African
D em ocratic Rally) was allied w ith the French Com m unist
Party. In 1963 the first ‘conspiracy’ was discovered— or rather
invented— as Felix H ouphouet-B oigny himself later admitted.
It was followed by another affair, in 1964, w hich led to the
‘suicide’ o f Ernest Boka, the chief justice o f the Supreme
C ourt. ‘I am not afraid that some young people may get me
with fetishes,’ H ouphouet-B oigny warned. In fact, Boka

conceded in his ‘confession’, w hich was published in full in
the governm ent press, that there was supporting ‘p ro o f o f his
manipulations in the realm o f the invisible: ‘I have played the
sorcerer’s apprentice, but the great sorcerer is stronger. All the
forces rose up against me. I provoked them .’16 In 1973 it was
the turn o f the military officers, w ho were supposed to have
‘conspired’, to be accused o f making hum an sacrifices.17 As for
Jonas Savimbi, Professor R ieb en ’s form er student, it is more
or less beyond dispute that he had dissidents in his organisation
or rivals burned as witches, at least in 1983, and probably also
during the 1970s.18
Critics o f post-colonial authoritarian regimes also m ined
this vein, as soon as the conditions became more favourable. In
Benin President Kerekou was depicted as a w itch during the
great protest demonstrations in 1989,19 and in Madagascar the
lifeblood o f the opposition publicly claimed, in 1991, that
President Ratsiraka was raising two ‘monsters’ in his palace
that were supposed to be fed hum an foetuses in order to make
their predictions. But it quickly appeared that these accusations
were basically ambivalent, and that the indignation or fear they
manifested was mixed w ith a certain respect, or at least a cer
tain admiration, for truly extraordinary powers. It is, for instance,
revealing that President Kerekou rather smugly accepted his
nickname o f ‘Cham eleon’, and that in 1996 he was re-elected
w ith 59 per cent o f the votes cast, after surviving serious chal
lenges. Similarly Jean-Bedel Bokassa played alternately on two
registers o f his pantheon, that o f Tere, the peace leader (he was
called ‘G ood Father’ Bokassa), and that o f Ngakola, the war
leader (he was also called ‘indestructible’Bokassa, strengthened
by the fetishes given him by Idi Amin, and protected by witches
and female secret societies).20 A similar ambivalence seems to
have surrounded the figures o f Leon M ba in Gabon and
Fulbert Youlou in the Congo: their dealings w ith the invisible
made their fortune, before it got them into trouble.21
It was w ith o u t excessive embarrassment that African heads

o f state surrounded themselves w ith marabouts and joined
mystical brotherhoods that soon became the central organi
sations o f the regimes involved and agencies o f social advance
m ent.22 Thus the Zairean chronicle o f recent decades has
periodically been filled w ith sensational revelations. In 1982
Nguza Karl i Bond, a form er minister w ho had temporarily
gone over to the opposition, unveiled the action o f a ‘syn
dicate’ o f ‘wives o f governm ent barons’ w ho were battling
their rivals— the famed ‘deuxiemes bureaux '— and the ‘eco
nom ic success o f single w om en’, by using their influence on
President M o b u tu ’s wife— and by resorting to the services o f
an impressive num ber o f fetish-makers.
A part from certain facts it w ould be b etter n o t to m ention, fetishes and
fetish-m akers to o k up residence in the m ost intim ate part o f m y hom e: the
bed ro o m — in m y absence, to be sure. A nd, since as m inister o f Foreign
Affairs, I was alm ost always travelling, the fetish-m akers’ w ork was m ade
easier. T hese charlatans did n o t lim it themselves to leaving statuettes or
o th e r spells about, b u t also provided ‘m edicines’ in the form o f grains,
pow ders, o r liquids that could be p u t in m y food. O n e day, a frightened
servant told m e I should n o t touch the food. I pretended to have indi
gestion, and forew ent eating. A n o th er servant gave a piece o f m eat dipped
in this p o w d er to o u r shepherd dog. [...] T h e p o o r animal collapsed and
died imm ediately. From that poin t on, the situation becam e serious. [...]
T h e pow erful ‘syndicate’ decided to subdue me. T h e president sum m oned
m e for this purpose, and I had to tell him everything. His com prehension
was in p ro p o rtio n to the strange sim ilarity betw een his ow n case and mine.
‘O u r wives are goin g too far!’ he cried, to m y great relief.23
After the establishment o f a m ulti-party system, the dignitaries

o f the Second R epublic confessed all the turpitudes they had
had to condone in order to remain in favour w ith President
M obutu. O ne o f these dignitaries was Bofossa wa Mbea Nkoso,
a form er minister, w ho admitted to having lain alongside corp
ses as part o f a pact he had made w ith Satan.24 B ut there is no
need to hear such explicit accusations or confessions to be
convinced that there are invisible practices in the world o f
politics, since these practices clearly exist. There are no elections
without manipulations o f this kind: forty-seven marabouts

questioned in Abidjan in 1985 claimed to allow their clients to
w in an election, and in 1992, certain individuals in Brazzaville
tried to slip grains o f maize endow ed w ith ‘magical powers o f
multiplication’ into the ballot box, along w ith their ballots.25
N o ministerial portfolio could be had w ithout the inter
vention o f a practitioner o f the magical arts: ‘T here is no point
in consulting your marabouts, I know them all,’ H o uphouet-
Boigny warned, and in fact the avenue leading to his residence
in Cocody was the site o f num erous sacrifices.26 Every rebel
lion, w hether nationalist or Marxist, was accompanied by seers
and amulets.27 Every coup d’etat secured this advantage, to the
point that some putschists thought they could get along
w ithout other weapons, and succeed in overthrow ing the dis
honoured regime by strictly mystical means.28 Every political
career may even have involved hum an sacrifices. It has been
proven that Sekou T o u re’s career included such sacrifices; one
o f the functions o f the concentration camp in Boiro was to
serve as a breeding ground for victims, and reports o f ritual
murders multiplied in the countries around the G ulf o f
Guinea.29 In the battle against apartheid in South Africa, this
system o f inequality was assiduously associated w ith the evil
works o f ‘witches’: Bulala aba thakathil (kill the witches);
exclaimed Thabo M beki, one o f the leaders in exile o f the
A N C , in a speech given in Amsterdam, taking up the w ar cry
o f King Dingane. T he Inkatha death squads that hunted dow n
the A N C ’s ‘comrades’ on suburban trains, shouted in return:
‘Bulala aba thakathiV 30
Far from being the remnants o f a tradition that econom ic
development would soon erase, practices o f the invisible offer a
means o f interpreting the monetarisation o f exchange, o f con
ceiving the market economy, o f shaping changes in the family
order, and o f mediating relationships w ith W hites. Thus repre
sentations o f the invisible are not static: they are themselves
subject to change, and new forms o f witchcraft are appear
ing, such as the ekong in C am eroon.31 A lthough it speaks o f
ancestors, this dim ension o f social life cannot be reduced to a

cultural heritage. It is also a field in w hich the future is being
invented. G iven that fact, w hat w ould be extraordinary would
be political actors w ho did not put their trust in this field.
T here is no political action outside the invisible, for it is also
involved in every football match, every school examination,
every love affair or marriage, every illness or death, every lab
our conflict, every aspect o f business management, every kind
o f banditry.
T he belief in the invisible is shared by virtually all social
actors, large and small: every resident in a tow n may stop shak
ing hands for fear o f ‘sex killers’ w ho annihilate m en’s virility
by shaking their hands, or give up trading for fear o f ritual
murder, or hold out their palms in order to drive away the
‘w hite lady’ w ho kills babies; a Congolese insurance agent be
gins an investigation because he was convinced that several
o f his uncles were taking out life insurance policies on their
nephews in order to ‘eat’ them later on; the employees o f a
public enterprise in M auritania w ork only afternoons, w ithout
incurring the slightest disapproval, because the head o f the
firm is a m em ber o f the caste o f blacksmiths, and to avoid mis
fortune it is advisable to avoid members o f this caste during the
m orning.32 Even if he does not believe in the invisible, an Afri
can is forced to take into account the beliefs o f those around
him or his constituency: some candidates in the 1985 legis
lative elections in C ote d’Ivoire had themselves ‘arm oured’
solely in order to reassure their families or their supporters.33
Does this shared belief thus constitute the culture o f Africa?
Certainly not, if one means by that that it forms a hom o
geneous, atemporal set o f representations that are m ore im
portant than other repertoires, that are in some sense the
absolute discursive genre o f politics, and that they constitute a
prim ordial w orldview in relation to w hich everything else is
merely superficial. To be sure, the historian can locate a rela
tively unified conception o f witchcraft among the Bantus of
the rain forest.34 But anthropology shows that the actual practices
o f sorcery in this case are neither hom ogeneous nor exclusive

o f other repertoires o f social action. Contrary to a long-held
opinion, they can co-exist w ith cults o f possession35 and they
are found in the hearts o f Catholic believers w ho are not for
that reason any less Christian (or any m ore charitable!): ‘W hat
is really astonishing and scandalous is that the bishop o f Sang-
melima is going to war against those w ho are active members
o f the Christian community, and stands solidly behind witches,
magicians, and fetish-makers. [...] T he most w orrisom e thing
is that this prelate, as we know , has a certain num ber o f priests
on his conscience, from Y aounde to Sangmelima. Today, he
w ould clearly like to eat Abbe Gaspard M any alive, f ...] T he
rapidity w ith w hich he is rallying around this w hole affair, it
seems, shows a desire to destroy, pure and simple.’ This was
the com m ent o f a Cam eroonian newspaper after the sus
pension a divinis o f a priest involved in a m ovem ent com
bating witches.36
In addition, in a given cultural arena, practices o f witchcraft
vary from one region to another and from one period to
another.37 If we examine them today, we find a landscape o f the
invisible that is more diversified and complex than the w ork o f
the founders o f anthropology suggested it was. T he famous
distinction betw een witchcraft and sorcery, introduced by
Evans-Pritchard on the basis o f Azande culture, seems to have
been unjustifiably generalised; it is the exception rather than
the rule.38 Moreover, the claim that sorcery is an ideological
apparatus o f dom ination is unsatisfactory.39 In actuality it serves
the small as well as the great, and helps produce at least a re
lative social indeterminateness.40 Bakhtin would probably have
spoken o f ‘heterology’ here, and it may play in Africa the role
that Bakhtin attributed to carnival in sixteenth-century West
ern society.
Nevertheless, practices o f the invisible, while they do not
constitute African culture as such, are undeniably cultural prac
tices. O n the one hand, we like to think that they are foreign to
us, but nothing could be less certain. O n the psychological
Owls until R heum y Eyes 131
level African theories o f witchcraft say little more than the

writings o f G roddeck, Laing or Esterson. And the new forms
o f magic that identify getting rich w ith eating other people are
ultimately very Marxian: primitive accumulation is based on
real alienation, and it is because the capitalist seizes the pow er
o f life itself that there can be accumulation.41 But if that is so,
then it matters little that the construct o f a radical foreignness
separating ‘T h e m ’ from ‘U s’ helps make the African ‘invisible’
a cultural phenom enon o f exotic character.
O n the other hand, these practices o f the invisible, w hich are
immediately comprehensible for Africans, are one o f their fav
ourite instrum ents for reinventing their difference in the pro
cess o f globalisation, and thereby contribute to the definition
o f universality. In order to understand this, we must keep in
m ind that this dim ension o f social life has always been a priv
ileged ‘frontier’ along w hich cultural innovation took place, in
relationship to the foreign world. For example, the initiatory
itineraries o f healers or treatments o f the ill generally transcend
ethnic divisions, and marabouts attached to presidents are usually
natives o f other regions or other countries than their venerable
clients. In our ow n time, Africans move in a realm o f the invi
sible that is transnational and globalised: Kenneth Kaunda and
Joaquim Chissano have consulted Indian gurus, Paul Biya has
consulted an Israeli rabbi versed in the Kabbalah, and in
Douala there is a rum our that a band o f witches has links w ith
the Italian Mafia.42 Conversely, our mailboxes are overflowing
w ith the cards o f marabouts offering their services, and in
R o m e Archbishop Milingo is battling spirits that are assailing
charismatics the world over.
T he phenom enon is not new, and owes little to recent
advances in globalisation, insofar as W hites, even if they are
missionaries, are immediately perceived in relation to the dis
tinction betw een the visible and the invisible, and insofar as the
spectre o f witchcraft constantly haunts the social experiences
through w hich the subcontinent participates in the interna
tional system: slavery, the colonial situation, Christianisation,
the penetration o f the capitalist economy, and the political

struggles o f decolonisation.43 W hen, the better to oppose the
program o f structural adjustment the moneylenders sought to
impose on Tanzania, the crafty Julius N yerere said that the
International M onetary Fund was a ‘w itch’ and not a ‘healer’,
he could be certain that the argum ent w ould have an impact
on public opinion!44
But it is equally clear that these representations and politics
o f the invisible belong to the order o f the imaginaire. It is not
that all this is not ‘true’; it becomes true as soon as people
believe in it: they fall ill and die w hen attacked by witchcraft;
they hunt out and kill witches; they go into combat protected
by their talismans, and die in a hail o f bullets; they are sent to
prison because they are suspected o f ‘fetishing’; they are cured
in the name o f this same worldview by publicly exercising a
trade and sometimes by being members o f a professional society
recognised by the state. W itchcraft and the invisible exist be
cause there are people w ho are certain that they exist. The state
ments that proceed from this certainty are performative, and
that is enough. They are also equivocal, and that is still more
important. Between the good and bad uses o f the invisible, the
borderline is very thin. This world is a world o f reversibility,
and thus o f perm anent suspicion. The accusation o f practising
witchcraft tends, moreover, to be allusive: a hint suffices, and
there is a great deal o f over-interpretation. This amounts to
saying that misunderstanding is the rule, but it generally works,
for better and for worse. T he dimension o f the invisible is
imaginary because it is phantasmal. We recall Gilles D eleuze’s
definition: ‘The imaginaire is not the unreal, but the inability to
distinguish the real from the unreal’.45 All the same, the imagi
naire is not constituted once and for all; rather, it is ‘consti
tutive’.46 H ow can we conceive this ‘constitutive im agination’
o f political m odernity w ithout falling into magical idealism?
3
THE IMAGINARY POLIS
W ith the help o f post-m odern anthropology, the notion o f the

imaginaire is flying high and the idea o f studying ‘the imagi
nation as a social practice’ is now widely accepted.1 In 1964,
C ornelius Castoriadis put forward the concept o f the ‘social
imaginaire . In subsequent years, he refined his thought on ‘the
imaginary institution o f society’ to emphasise that ‘history is
impossible and inconceivable w ithout the productive or creative
imagination, w ithout what we have called the radical imaginaire
as it is manifested, simultaneously and inseparably, in both his
torical action and in the constitution, in advance o f any expli
cit rationality, o f a universe o f meanings’. In Castoriadis’s view
‘w hat holds a society together is holding together its world of
m eanings’.2
M ore elegantly Paul Veyne noted that ‘instead o f speaking
o f beliefs one has to speak simply o f truths’, but ‘truths them
selves are im aginations’. ‘Constitutive imaginations’ that have
‘the divine pow er o f constituting, that is, o f creating w ithout a
pre-existent m odel’:
This im agination is n o t the faculty psychologically and historically know n
u n d er that nam e; it does n o t enlarge, either in dreams or in prophecy, the
dim ensions o f the ja r in w hich we are enclosed; on the contrary, it builds
the sides o f this jar, and outside the latter, noth in g exists. N o t even future
truths, and thus these truths cannot be m ade to speak. In these jars, religions
and literatures are m oulded, along w ith politics, behaviours, and the scien
ces. T his im agination is a faculty, but in the Kantian sense o f the word: it is
transcendental, and constitutes o u r w orld instead o f being its leaven or its
daim on. H ow ever— and this w ould m ake any responsible K antian faint
133
134 The Imaginary Polis
dead away— this transcendental is historical, for cultures succeed each

other and do n o t resemble each other. H um ans do not find the truth, they
m ake it, just as they m ake their history, and truth and history pay them
back.3
Over the past thirty years historians, anthropologists and even

political scientists have made a great deal o f progress in under
standing these imaginary ‘containers’ that serve as systems o f
historical action. But this problematic is perhaps o f an older
vintage than one might imagine. W ithout going back to
Spinoza or M ontesquieu, and temporarily side-stepping Marx,
we see that in M ax W eber’s w ork individuals and groups have
economic interests and ideals that are expressed in ‘lifestyles’,
that is, in particular ethoi.4 The concept o f utility includes
precisely this dimension o f the imaginaire, and social action is
irreducible to an instrumental definition o f rationality: ‘The
Weberian conception o f a comprehensive sociology [...] com
bines methodological individualism w ith an anti-utilitarian
anthropology and a critique o f the rationalist conception o f
subjectivity: this paradoxical combination explains to a large
extent the originality o f W eberian sociology’, Philippe R ay
naud observes, emphasising that, for example, ‘the W eberian
analysis o f bureaucracy must be thoroughly revised in order to
bring out the impossibility o f a complete reduction o f subjec
tivity to instrumental rationality’.5
Despite the com m on interpretation o f his work, M ax
Weber forbids us to magnify the West as the great rational dis
penser o f capitalism. T he latter is an imaginaire resulting not
from any im m anent necessity— as in M arx— but from a ‘se
quence o f circumstances’. As for the m eaning and ‘universal’
value o f the cultural phenom ena that served as its matrix,
Weber expresses a reservation that is quoted only rarely: ‘at
least we like to think so’ (i.e. that they [these cultural phe
nomena] take on a universal meaning and value).6 H e stresses
‘how irrational this conduct is, in which man exists in function
o f his enterprise and not the other way around’. A nd he also
The Imaginary Polis 135
mocks: ‘W hen a w hole people’s imaginaire has been directed

tow ard purely quantitative magnitudes, as in the U nited
States, the romanticism o f numbers exercises its irresistible
magic on businessmen w ho are also “poets” .7M ore fundament
ally, the capitalist entrepreneur “gets nothing” for himself from
his wealth, except for an irrational feeling o f having done his
jo b [Berufserfii11ung].,s Even w ith regard to post-m odern con
cerns, W eber’s intellectual project is scarcely outdated: ‘R a
tionality is a historical concept that contains a whole w orld o f
oppositions. W e need to discover w hat spirit gave birth to this
concrete form o f rational thought and life: from what source
did this idea o f a jo b to be done [Berufsgedanke] and devotion
to professional w ork [Berufsarbeit] develop? This an irrational
idea, as we have seen, from the purely eudaemonistic point o f
view o f personal interest, yet it was and still remains one o f the
characteristic elements o f our capitalist culture. W hat interests
us here is precisely the origin o f this irrational element that it
contains, like any notion o f Beruf.,9
Tocqueville’s enquiry into centralisation and democracy
was already related to thinking about the imaginaire. Democracy
in America grasped what W eber later analysed in a famous
passage: in the U nited States utilitarian reason— the doctrine
o f enlightened self-interest— is ‘universally accepted’, and plays
the role o f w hat we w ould now call the social imaginaire. Thus
virtue is described as ‘useful’ rather than ‘beautiful’.10 And the
equality prized by the democrat is first o f all a feeling, or rather
an enchantm ent:11
It is in vain that w ealth and poverty, com m and and obedience, accidentally
set great distances betw een tw o m en; public opinion, w hich is based on
the ordinary course o f things, brings them back to the co m m o n level
and creates b etw een th em a kind o f imaginary equality, despite the actual
inequality o f their conditions. This o m n ip o ten t opinion ends up pene
trating the m inds even o f those w hose self-interest m ight m ake them
oppose it; it m odifies their ju d g em e n t at the same tim e that it subjugates
their w ill.12
Feeling in this case often becomes a ‘passion’:

D em ocratic peoples are fond o f equality at all times, b u t there are som e eras
in w hich they push their passion for equality to absurd extrem es. [...] In
these eras, m en rush to equality as if it were a conquest, and seek it as if it
were a precious good that som eone was trying to take away from them .
T h e passion for equality penetrates every part o f the hum an heart, expands,
and fills it entirely. D o n o t tell m en that by yielding so blindly to an
exclusive passion they are com prom ising their dearest interests; they are
blind, or rather they see in the w hole universe only one thing w orth
having.13
In Tocqueville’s work the form ation o f a public sphere that

underlies the R evolution and the construction o f democracy
is itself an imaginary process:
B eneath real society, w hose constitution was still traditional, m uddled, and
irregular, in w hich laws were still diverse and contradictory, ranks sharply
distinguished, social status fixed, and burdens unequal, an im aginary society
was gradually constructed, in w hich everything seem ed simple and co
ordinated, uniform , equitable, and in conform ity w ith reason. T h e masses’
im agination gradually abandoned the first society and w ithdrew into the
second.14
Passion and imagination: if these two notions are at the heart

o f the work o f the founding fathers o f political sociology, it is
because they designate tangible realities. Power, economics,
and the relationships between historical actors belong to a
dimension irreducible to simple materiality and its abstractly
‘rational’ management. Since we have discarded the w ord ‘cul
ture’, we can no longer say, w ith Marshall Sahlins, that ‘culture
is utility’.15 But we have to enquire into this radical autonom y
o f symbols, representations, languages and political feelings
through the m ediation o f w hich we produce our history: ‘In
the web o f synthetic acts o f consciousness, there appear at times
certain structures, w hich we shall call imaging consciousnesses.
These arise, develop, and disappear in accord w ith their own
laws ...; it would be a serious mistake to confuse this life o f the
imaging consciousness that endures, organises itself, and disin
tegrates, w ith that o f the object o f this consciousness, w hich
The irreducibility o f political imagiuaires 137
during this same time, may very well remain unchangeable.’16

In a similar m anner the object o f the imaging consciousness
may be transformed w ithout the latter changing in a significant
way, as is shown by symbolic inertia: for instance, the cleavage
betw een left and right in French political life emerged by
chance on the benches o f the Constituent Assembly in 1789,
but it continues to be effective and has even been transplanted
into a series o f foreign political systems.
In short, we have to understand the imaginaire as the dim en
sion from w hich issues a continuous dialogue between heri
tage and innovation that characterises political action in its
cultural aspect. U nderstood in this way, the imaginaire is first of
aH an interaction, since ‘an image is merely another rela
tionship’:17 that is, an interaction betw een the past, the present,
and a projected future, but also an interaction between social
actors or betw een societies, whose relations are filtered by their
respective ‘imaging consciousnesses’.
T h e irreducibility o f political im aginaires

Let us clear up any ambiguity if that should still be necessary.
‘R ational’, ‘centralised’, ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘disillusioned’ socie
ties are just as imaginative as older, ‘traditional’ societies that are
supposed to be dom inated by a magical or religious concep
tion o f the world. Nationalism is an ‘im agined com m unity’, as
A nderson reminds us. Proletarian internationalism was also an
‘im agined com m unity’. And today capitalist countries or m ul
tilateral institutions celebrate a ‘market democracy’ that is also
a myth; on the m odel o f R om an autarky18 it may enchant or
reassure, but it does not really correspond to the actual func
tioning o f the contem porary economy. The very idea o f a
market is based on a ‘fiction’, whereby labour, land, and m oney
are commodities: ‘Labour, land, and m oney markets are no
doubt essential for the market economy. But no society could
endure, even for a short time, the effects o f such a system based
on crude fictions, if its hum an and natural substance as well as
its commercial organisation were not protected against the

ravages o f this devilish mechanism.’19 Finally, w hat is the com
modity fetishism Marx talks about if not an imaginaire ? Belief,
the miraculous, rum our and rite remain im portant ingredients
o f industrial m odernity.20
Thus in all societies the blotter o f the imaginaire soaks up the
ink o f political action. Ultimately the latter becomes delirious
in the clinical sense o f the term. The anti-Semitic phobia o f
German National Socialists and some o f their European allies
was too extreme to allow conclusions to be drawn from it.
But in our own day the invention o f a phantasmal history by
nationalist ideologues o f the form er Yugoslavia— the reign o f
Dusan for the Serbs, that o f Tomislav for the Croats, the
Slovenes’ ‘millenarian dream’, the Albanians’ reference to their
Illyrian ancestors— has led them to a ‘kind o f deep incapacity
to distinguish what belongs to the present from w hat belongs
to the past’.21 For example, Serb extremists constantly trot out
the opportunity they lost in 1918, interpret contem porary
diplomatic positions in terms o f First World War alliances,
regarded the late President Tudjman as having dismembered
their fatherland using the same knife as was wielded by Croa
tian Fascists in the Second World War, and stigmatise the ‘Vati-
can-Com intern conspiracy’, the ‘Hitlerian-Vatican-Com intern’
or the ‘Islamic-Vatican-Comintern’ conspiracy. They scrawled
swastikas on the portrait o f Pope John Paul II and denounced
the director o f the hospital in Vukovar as a ‘female M engele’.
Political action can also involve dreams, and in the tw entieth
century they remained a very com m on m ode o f decision
making. Between the two world wars the Kikuyu national and
religious movement in Kenya was deeply influenced by the
aroti, seers whose wisdom came from the Holy Spirit and w ho
believed in a Christianity o f the poor, prophetic and poten
tially revolutionary.22 In the late 1950s R u b en U m Nyobe, the
nationalist leader o f the Cam eroon People’s U nion, kept a
careful record o f his dreams, and their great political im port
ance and anthropological richness have been analysed by
The irrcdiicibility o f political inmginaires 139
Achille M bem be.23 In Zanzibar John Okello, w ho led the 1964

revolution, had the distinct advantage o f receiving his instruc
tions from a divine emissary, and even, at the height o f his
career, from G od Himself.24 In Zim babwe guerrillas fighting
for independence in the Zambezi valley relied on Shona rain
makers w ho were mediums in com m unication w ith their
ancestors.25 In Liberia President Tolbert heard the U nique
O ne ask him to appoint as his vice-president the M ethodist
bishop w ho was leading Christian opposition to his regime.26
These examples may amuse or puzzle us. But we would be
w rong to see in this kind o f political-oneiric activity merely
the rem nant o f a tradition on its way out. Dreaming has been
historically, and still remains, a vehicle o f social change. Starting
in the seventeenth century, Malay and Javanese treatises on
oneirom ancy conceived o f nature ‘as a vast mechanism that
was complicated but coherent and predictable’; they were part o f a
trend to individuation and rationalisation related to Islam,
w hich broke w ith the order o f the concentric kingdoms o f the
hinterland.27 Even today young M uslim w om en often chose to
wear the liijab after having a dream, thus distancing themselves
in a more or less conflictual m anner from the quietism o f their
parents, and espousing a militant interpretation o f their faith.28
Thus the world o f the night serves religious innovation, social
com m itm ent and even cognitive transformation, if we join
most experts in acknowledging that the Islamist m ovem ent is
introducing new categories o f thought into Muslim civilisa
tion, in the name o f a return to tradition and authenticity. Sim
ilarly, in the West, dreaming has been ‘one o f the main ways in
w hich the individual has asserted him self’.29
Thus dreaming is nothing less than m odern, and is now part
and parcel o f the experience o f globalisation. Eugene Wonyu,
an official o f the Cam eroon People s U nion, wrote at the end
o f the 1950s: ‘In my quest for a way o f saving the Basaa, w ho
had been excluded because o f their false shepherd, one night
I received in a dream the visit o f a man w ho told me to go see
Ahidjo and make him understand that Mayi and his group
were not all the Basaa.’ In so doing he was already putting his
ambition as a notable w ho w anted to be co-opted into a con
text in w hich oneiric representations o f the native land were
mixed w ith nationalist demands and the stakes in the Cold
W ar.30 Nonetheless, his com m ent was hardly heard beyond
the boundaries o f his ow n country. O n the other hand, the
disappearance o f M boum a, the president o f the parliament in
Gabon, at the height o f the political crisis in 1990, aroused
great concern, w hich was immediately echoed in the foreign
media. H ad he been liquidated by President B ongo’s hench
men, w ho had already been accused of killing a political
opponent in a hotel? N o, his wife explained: he fled w hen he
saw soldiers assigned to protect him arriving, for the preceding
night he had dreamed that the army w ould attack his house
and arrest him .31 Political dreaming now moves around the
world ‘in real time’, and in O ctober 1990 the world held its
breath w hen Saddam Hussein said that the Prophet had very
opportunely, but apparently w ithout m uch logical consist
ency, asked him to w ithdraw from Kuwait.32
The oneiric side o f politics is clearly transnational. Thus
President Kaunda in Zambia was long counselled by an Indian
sage, D r M. A. Ranganathan. As a youth the latter had under
gone a shamanistic test that transported him to the banks o f an
unknow n river where a benevolent black man had com forted
him and said: ‘O ne day I’ll be your brother.’ R esponding to a
job offer, the young Indian went to Zambia in 1974 and dis
covered that the river in his dream was none other than the
Zambezi. Fascinated by President Kaunda’s humanistic thought,
D r Ranganathan obtained an audience, and to his great aston
ishment recognised in the head o f state the man in his ini
tiatory journey. W hen he told Kaunda this, the President said
simply: ‘You are my brother. Stay w ith me. We will w ork
together.’ Ranganathan wielded great influence over a leader
in w hom he saw a reincarnation o f Abraham Lincoln, and as a
result he was consulted not only by the Zambian political class
but also by other African heads o f state w hom he visited as his
‘brother’s’ emissary.33
The irreducibility o f political iiuagiuaircs 141
U ltim ately it m ight turn out that dreaming is one o f the

fundamental mechanisms o f globalisation, through w hich the
hybridisation o f cultural representations takes place. D uring
the M iddle Ages the inclusion w ithin the Christian corpus o f
the themes o f the O rient and the Celtic and barbarian ima-
giuaire occurred in part in the melting pot o f the monastic
orders, w hich had ‘stored up ’ dreams com ing from elsewhere
for several centuries before the urban revolution, Gregorian
reform, the transformations o f the regular clergy, and especially
the birth o f the m endicant orders made it possible to put this
oneiric capital into circulation.34
T he world o f images can be identified w ith the major issues
in a society to the point o f incarnating them. For example, the
torrent o f electoral marketing and encounters between polit
ical activists putting up posters in Western democracies unw it
tingly repeats ancient iconographic battles. T he seventh-
century Byzantine quarrel betw een iconoclasm and iconolatry
is legendary. Its bitterness resulted from the sophistication of
the theological codification o f the icon in the Eastern O rth o
dox C hurch. B ut in a comparable way, in sixteenth-century
France R eform ers and Catholics fought over images. This ver
itable ‘symbolic revolution’ did not am ount to either collective
insanity or social or econom ic rationality. R ather, it consisted
in a ‘learned political dram aturgy’, in ‘one o f the specific forms
o f prophetic action’.35 Iconography probably emerged all the
m ore strongly as a stake in conflicts because images substitute
for w riting w hen illiteracy is prevalent: ‘W hat the Bible is to
those w ho know how to read, the icon is to the illiterate’ (John
o f Damascus, D e Imaginibus, 1 ,17).
A m ong Catholics, O rthodox Christians and Lutherans, the
religious image was the prim ary instrum ent for propagating
the faith am ong the popular masses, and from the fifteenth
century on, overseas. Serge Gruzinski has analysed the ‘war o f
images’ that extended over five centuries o f M exican history.36
Having conquered the N ew World, the Spaniards distribu
ted many illustrations showing the saints or the Virgin, and
destroyed the Indian idols. The operations o f extra version and

transfer o f meaning have essentially taken the form o f a com
m utation o f religious effigies, and the ambiguous exchange
that gave rise to the ‘imagined com m unity’ o f nationalism
has been precisely a ‘w ar’, but also a com m union, or at least a
sharing o f images. The latter came to define the borderline
betw een life and death. Finding themselves firmly enjoined to
give up their idols, the Indians fabricated false ones in order to
satisfy their tormentors— at a time when, in order to get rid o f
someone, it sufficed to put such an idol in his hom e and then
call in the Inquisition. If the possession o f an image am ounted
to heresy, or on the contrary, to conversion, that was because
the image incarnated a genuine Weltanschauung. H ow ever, the
conquest soon produced compromises and misunderstandings
that opened up the ‘infinite chain o f syncretisms’,37 that is,
simultaneous, iconographic disputes, o f w hich the case o f the
Virgin o f Guadalupe is the archetype. In 1555 the first
Mexican religious council thought it necessary to criticise the
‘abuse o f paintings and the indecency o f images’: ‘In this
domain m ore than in others we must take steps, for w ithout
being able to paint or to understand w hat they are doing,
every Indian w ho wants to, w ithout distinction, starts painting
images, and this ends up discrediting our holy faith.’38 These
disputes preceded by a few years the iconoclastic madness in
the O ld W orld, and in the same way the Tridentine decree
regarding the legitimate use o f images, published in 1563,
anticipated nationalist movements in the Americas and the
awakening o f European nationalities in the nineteenth cen
tury, as Anderson points out.
This symmetry may not be purely accidental, since C hrist
ian imagery— and especially Baroque imagery— made a de
cisive contribution to the gradual unification o f the social
sphere, w ith political and religious representations constantly
overlapping.39 It was particularly through the avid consum p
tion o f religious images, w hich were received from the colo
nising power but immediately reinterpreted and recreated, that
The irreducibility o f political iinaginaires 143
the Indians were integrated into the Hispanic order and began
to shape it by appropriating it. These ‘everyday forms o f state
form ation’40 gave rise to an intense subjectivity o f the image.
In the eighteenth century, the latter was a permanent, hum an
ised presence; it was venerated but was attacked in disappoint
m ent, anger, or drunkenness: ‘The image is insulted, whipped,
scratched, slapped; it is burned w ith a candle, broken, torn
dow n, trampled, stabbed, pierced and torn to pieces w ith
scissors; it is tied to a horse’s tail, daubed w ith red paint or
hum an excrem ent, used to wipe the bottom !’41 From icono-
latry to iconoclasm is only a short step, especially since it may
involve drug-induced hallucinations, individual madness or
collective and profanatory deviance. In addition, religious ima
ges may also be vehicles o f political resistance, and even o f
rebellion, as in the case o f the ‘speaking V irgin’ o f Cancuc
am ong the Indians in Chiapas in 1712, or o f O u r Lady o f
Guadalupe am ong the rebels fighting for independence.42
T he example o f M exico reminds us that it is not only the
‘form ation’ o f a state, but also the form ation o f the inter
national system, that may sometimes take the form o f an
iconographical battle. We know how zealously the leaders o f
Saudi Arabia and Iran seek to contain the pernicious influence
o f satellite television; similarly, in Algeria, Islamists have made
the prohibition o f satellite disks one o f their energising themes.
Conversely, some French mayors are concerned about the
reception o f Arab images in their suburbs. As new as they are,
these contem porary conflicts o f globalisation are no differ
ent in nature from those that arose from the dissemination
over several centuries o f Western iconography, in particular—
but not exclusively— Christian iconography. The interweaving
o f traditions from w hich our ‘global’ world has emerged has
often involved a cross-fertilisation o f images, in w hich colo
nised peoples have constantly played creative roles. Represen
tations from foreign lands, and often imposed by foreigners,
have been reinterpreted in accord w ith autochthonous ‘ima
ginary consciousnesses’.
From this point o f view, the prodigious syncretic vitality o f

Latin America, w hich underscores the cultural procedures o f
extraversion and transfer o f meaning, is not in any way excep
tional. We can even note that the introduction o f Catholic and
Lutheran iconography into Malagasy society, in the course o f
the second half o f the nineteenth century, aroused immense
interest once the initial ‘sheer amazem ent’43 had passed. In fact,
for the Malagasy the illustrations o f the Sacred H eart repre
sented ‘the souls o f those w hom we had eaten’, an indigenous
conviction that referred to the traumatism o f the slave trade.
According to popular belief, the captives deported to the
Mascarene islands were eaten by the W hites, and thus the mis
sionaries w ho explained to their flocks that they did not want
to ‘take the bodies o f your children, only their hearts’ were not
as reassuring as they m eant to be. For the same reasons Mala
gasy catechists avoided singing the line o f the canticle o f the
Sacred Heart, ‘May my heart die o f love for you’. In their desire
to condem n the Infamous, Protestant communities spread the
rum our that priests killed people in order to ‘tear out their
hearts’. At the same time, however, they tried to defeat papist
images by projecting w ith a magic lantern large coloured
tableaux provided by the Religious Tract Society, w hich were
often inspired by Pilgrim’s Progress, a w ork constructed on the
basis o f a series o f religious visions. However, Protestants did
not always escape the misadventures o f their Christian enemy
brothers: at the end o f the century, a Protestant society founded
in Tamatave to aid orphans was accused o f being involved in
the export o f enslaved children. In 1891, the telescoping o f ima-
ginaires took on an unexpected amplitude w hen the Catholic
bishop condemned from the pulpit the establishment o f a Maso
nic lodge in terms heavy w ith unintentional innuendoes that
confirmed the M erina in their fear o f W hite anthropophagy.
Thus the role o f the imaginaire in the form ation o f political
societies is quite obvious. It remains to explain its status. It is
not always enough to see it as a ‘political unconscious’ on the
model of, for example, the ‘family romance’ Lynn H unt discerns
The irreducibility o f political imaginaires 145
‘under the surface o f conscious political discourse’, as so many

‘unconscious and collective images o f the family order that
underlie revolutionary politics’.44 For often the imaginaire is at
the fro n t o f the stage, and is part o f the actors’ consciousness,
though o f course we must not prejudge the nature o f the
unconscious to w hich it refers. For example, in Madurai, in
the southern Indian state o f Tamil N adu, ‘cinema is every
w here’: thousands, even tens o f thousands, o f fan clubs are
found all over the city; posters showing actors cover every
available space; film music is available on cassettes and CDs
and accompanies marriages, puberty rites and religious festiv
als; recordings o f dialogues are played in bars and restaurants,
and managers do not hesitate to reply to them; young people
imitate the hairstyles and clothing o f their stars, and children
replay the fightscenes that punctuate their favourite films.45
O ne m ight say that film provides the experiential framework
o f a lifestyle or ‘ethos’ that is constantly being ‘negotiated’
among the spectators, producers, and actors, between the state
ments made in films and their reception. M oreover, the seventh
art, introduced in India as early as 1896, was first a space o f
‘negotiation’ betw een the colonisers and the colonised society,
since native film directors immediately brought in aesthetic
conventions drawn from popular culture and classical theatre,
thus giving rise to the completely unprecedented genre o f the
epic and mythological melodrama.
B ut if film is ‘everywhere’ in Madurai, it is also, more pre
cisely, in politics. Perhaps it w ould be better to say that politics
is in film. At least in some states, Indian democracy quickly
became a ‘cine-dem ocracy’. T he different parties tried to rally
to their cause stars w ho could w in their fans’ votes. This instru-
mentalisation o f fame is itself com m on enough: in France,
the form er Rassem blem ent pour la Republique (Rally for the
Republic, a neo-Gaullist party) and the Socialist Party have
acted in the same way by putting athletes or famous artists on
their slates. Nonetheless, things go farther in India. T he actor-
candidates incarnate their film roles and get elected on this
basis. In Andhra Pradesh, ‘N T R ’ (N.T. Ram a R ao, 1923—96),

w ho had already played helpful divinities in a hundred Telugu
films, campaigned in 1983 robed in saffron, touring in a char
iot-like vehicle, and w on his seat m ore or less by incarnating
in his person a figure from the M ahabharata .46 In the neigh
bouring state o f Tamil N adu, Shivaji Ganesan and especially
M. G. Ram achandran (‘M G R ’, 1915-87) used their netw ork
o f fan clubs to convert into political capital their film images as
virile, self-made m en concerned about the poor. By so doing,
they achieved, both in their audience’s imaginaire and in the
reality o f their charitable practices— w hatever the latter’s
ambivalence— genuine ‘rituals o f m utuality’.47 In this case it
was less a m atter o f m utual aid or redistribution than o f dir
ection, reform, and moral rehabilitation in a society in w hich
generosity and benefaction define an individual.48 T he actor-
benefactor or politician-actor guides his audience, his elec
torate. H e proposes a model o f ethical and material success
with which the disadvantaged can identify. M G R was certainly
the actor w ho best achieved the transfer o f his personality to
his roles, and from his roles to his political personality: his
young admirers were convinced that he was in life w hat he
was in film, and that he w ould not have accepted roles whose
values he did not share. W hen M G R became C h ief M inister
o f Tamil Nadu, he affected the same simplicity and continued
to be perceived as a close relative, a protective big brother, a
father, and even for some a lover w ho was thought to take a
personal interest in each individual. T he fact that the govern
mental achievements o f the C hief M inister were not as satis
factory as his fine sentiments changed nothing, and did not
prevent his screen partner and friend, the actress Jayalalitha,
from succeeding him .49
Thus Dravidian populist nationalism was in a way a cine
matographic U topia.50 But can one not say the same thing
about the H indu nationalist m ovem ent today? T he campaign
to reconstruct the temple o f Ayodhya— the supposed birth
place o f the god R am — was largely orchestrated through
audio-visual techniques, at a time w hen television was w in

ning colossal ratings by broadcasting the H indu epics, the
R am ayana and the Mahabharata, in serial form and contributing
to their national standardisation. In 1990, the president o f the
BJP undertook a 10,000 km. tour o f India in a car altered to
resemble the god A ijun’s chariot; in this respect he confom ied
to the scenario o f the R a th Yatra (chariot procession),* and was
often w elcom ed w ith intense religious fervour, w om en per
form ing ras-garbaf or puja *, and militants brandishing trishuls
(tridents) or offering their leader containers filled w ith their
blood. As for the political exploitation o f R am by H indu
nationalism, it draws directly on the repertoire o f H indi B-
movies, beloved o f urban youths, by replacing the ‘god w ith
a tender heart’ o f ancient times w ith a more muscular and
aggressive avatar.51
Such situations— in w hich political actors are just actors and
follow scripts or scenarios more or less stereotyped by various
cultural genres— are not uncom m on. T he French know
som ething about them , having elected to high office in 1995 a
man w ho was perhaps as m uch a character in the ‘Guignols de
I’Info as a political leader. The American ‘televised dramas’—
’ **
the Senate hearings involving Judge Clarence Thomas and his

accuser Anita Hill in 1991 , the Oliver N o rth hearings in 1987,
and the K ennedy-N ixon duel in 1960 , not to m ention the
O. J. Simpson trial in 1995— are impressive examples o f the
genre.52 Film and television merely amplify, thanks to the
magic o f their art, w hat epics and the theatre have already
achieved. In classical scholarship Christian M eier has shown
that ‘G reek tragedy was necessary for Athenian democracy’.53
In the nineteenth century Balkan nationalists drew on the epic
* A procession with a chariot, on which is placed the statue of a divinity brought

out from its temple for this occasion. .
t Dances peculiar to Krishna.
t Worship of the divine image.
** Translator’s note A popular French TV programme that contributed to establishing
the image of Jacques Chirac as a sympathique man largely overwhelmed by events.
repertoire and in more recent times terrorists o f the Secret

Army for the Liberation o f Armenia (ASALA) took their
inspiration from the epic o f Vartan.54 Similarly, in T urkey the
militants o f the extreme left and right w ho fought each other
in the 1970s identified with the heroes o f oral popular lit
erature, w ith Karaoglan and Tarkan respectively. Supporters
o f Bulent Ecevit, the leader o f the Republican People’s Party,
also compared him w ith Karaoglan, w ho continued to be cel
ebrated in song, at the time by several more or less politically
com m itted bards (agik), and whose exploits were know n to
every schoolchild.55 In Sri Lanka Sinhalese and Tamil activists
stylised their battle by invoking mythical figures, while in the
Central African Republic ‘E m peror’ Bokassa drew on the
Napoleonic legend, to the point o f trying to make his ow n
return from the Island o f Elba.56 As a great lover o f the wajang
kulit, the classic Javanese marionette theatre, Sukarno took as a
pseudonym the name o f one o f its characters, Bima, and he
described the first female fighter in the battle to ‘liberate’ Irian
Barat in 1962 as a true Srikandi, a heroine o f this repertoire.57
Finally— a last example but not the least im portant— it has
often been noted that the Iranian revolution o f 1979 borrow ed
the form and the pathos o f the tazich, the ritual celebration o f
the death in 680 o f Hussein and his companions, at Karbala.
But the people o f the great cities w ho had risen up were
responding not solely to religious emotions. T heir choice was
political and conscious. For example, on D ecem ber 10 and 11,
1978, during tasu’a and ashura, the two most im portant days o f
m ourning for Hussein, the faithful were confronted w ith a
genuine alternative: participating in the usual procession in
their neighbourhood, com m em orating Hussein as an inter
cessor, or joining the enorm ous marches in the city centre
which praised the same Hussein as an inspirational figure and
where demonstrators risked their lives by demanding the de
parture o f the Shah. T he residents o f Teheran w ho chose the
second option felt that they were replaying the tragic scene in
Karbala: they identified w ith Hussein, rising up against injust

ice, or w ith his sister Zeinab, bearing witness to his mar
tyrdom; they saw in the Shah the villainous general, Shimr,
w ho served Yazid, and in w hom the American ‘Great Satan’
was reincarnated.58
T he notion o f the theatricalisation o f politics has sometimes
been suggested as an explanation for this kind o f phenom ena,
w ith reference to G eertz’s w ork on the ‘theatre-state’ in Bali:
It was a theatre-state in w h ich the kings and princes were the im presa
rios, the priests the directors, the peasantry the supporting cast, crew, and
audience. T h e crem ations, teeth-filings, tem ple dedications, the pilgrim ages
and blood sacrifices, m obilising hundreds, even thousands o f people and
great quantities o f wealth, were n o t means to political ends, they were the
ends themselves, they were w hat the state was for. C o u rt cerem onialism was
the driving force o f co u rt politics. Mass ritual was n o t a device to shore up
the state; the state was a device for the enactm ent o f mass rituals. To govern
was n o t so m uch to choose as to perform . C erem ony was n o t form but
substance. Pow er served pom p, n o t pom p pow er.59
In fact, the idea o f theatre, as we understand it today in the

West, presupposes a relationship o f representation that Brecht
theorised w hen he spoke o f the ‘distanciation effect’ (Ver-
frem dim gseffekt), so that ‘this art tears everyday things out o f the
sphere o f w hat goes w ithout saying’.60 But in politics we are
less in the register o f distancing or expression (Ausdruck) than
in that o f celebration, understood as a performative act. M G R ’s
fans in M adurai, participants in processions in the kingdom o f
M erina in the m id nineteenth century, Florentines taking part
in civic ceremonies that marked the pace o f city life during the
Renaissance, the people o f Teheran transforming the street
demonstrations in the autumn o f 1978 into an immense tazieh —
none o f these were attending spectacles to w hich they remained
exterior.61 T hey were weaving their history via the rituals
whose im portance Hegel grasped in his com m entary on the
French R evolution. In this sense any polis, even if it is m odern
and urban, is religious. This is a crucial point, to w hich we shall
return in our conclusion.
The concept o f distantiation is not found in the cultural

repertoires constitutive o f the political practices we have just
mentioned. The empathy linking ‘actors’ and ‘spectators’ is
very strong, the latter participating in the plot through their
exclamations or replies, by their laughter or tears, and by w hole
heartedly accepting the magic o f the ‘illusion’ Corneille spoke
about. Perhaps we should recall here that at the end o f the six
teenth century, English theatre critics thought that w hen male
actors wore w om ens clothing, it altered their virility and
threatened to compromise that o f their audience!62 Similarly, if
the conditions under which theatrical representations occurred
in Athens remain obscure, ‘we are justified in believing that ...
citizens attended the performance o f tragic dramas not only
as spectators but also as citizens.’63 The interaction between
audience and w hat happens on stage is just as intense in Java
nese ludruk or Iranian tazieh , and in the latter case, specialists
refuse to speak o f theatre: the efficacy o f the narrative o f Kar
bala is such that the w retched person w ho has agreed to wear
the red clothing o f the villainous Shimr sometimes has to be
protected from the anger o f the populace.64 This kind o f
investment in the dimension o f the imaginaire finds its sequel
today in the melodramatic genre that is sweeping Asia, or in
the soap operas produced by American and Japanese television
that draw colossal audiences: viewers o f these programs not
only identify w ith the characters, but reinterpret them in terms
o f the specific issues in their own societies, and transform their
family relations through this m ediation.65
Such existential religious forms prove to be powerfully
performative from the point o f view o f social action, but they
do not determ ine the latter. Foucault pointed this out w ith ref
erence to the ‘political spirituality’ o f the Iranian revolution, in
pages that have been too hastily refuted: ‘[religion] was truly
the vocabulary, the ceremonial, the atemporal drama w ithin
w hich one could situate the historical tragedy o f a people
staking its existence against that o f its sovereign.’66 At the same
time that they were making a rational, conscious choice to
rally to the revolutionary cause, the demonstrators were relying

on a narrative structure organised around the idea o f mar
tyrdom and the dem and for justice, a concept— haqq— whose
connotation in Persian is probably m ore complex than it is in
English or French, and refers to the dialectical relationship
betw een the order ofinteriority (baten) and that o f appearances
(.zaher ).67 T he expressions a z khodgosazhteh and a z ja n gozash-
teh, frequently used during the events o f 1978 to denote the
protestors’ ‘abnegation’, reflect the feeling o f abandonm ent
felt by those w ho were ready to die for justice, following the
example o f Karbala.68 B ut the efficacy o f the m yth o f Hussein
was nonetheless completely contingent: social actors can
interpret this m yth in a quietist mode, and in normal times his
celebration by merchants in the bazaar is, for the most part, a
means o f increasing commercial and financial trust, and is in
this respect comparable to the beliefs o f the N o rth American
Protestant sects studied by M ax W eber or to African tontines.69
T he immediacy— or, to’ adopt the philosophers’ term , ‘im -
m ediation’— o f political rituals, grasped in their evanescence,
has to do with the ‘em otion’, or ‘passion’, or ‘feeling’ they elicit.
In the preceding pages we encountered enough hatred and
fear to render expanding on them here superfluous. But the
em otional spectrum o f politics is broad: it often involves tears
that are not necessarily explained by fear or grief. W hen the
Europeans returned to Madagascar in 1861, Radam a II wept
on hearing the Ascension mass sung, and the first Catholic
believers w ept on contem plating a painted image o f the Sacred
H eart.70 W hen Paris was liberated in 1944, the faces o f Paris
ians were also bathed in tears, and the election o f the president
o f the R epublic by universal suffrage also aroused strong em o
tions. In Turkey robust Anatolian peasants wept at the m ention
o f the Dem ocratic Party that had done so m uch for the coun
tryside and whose leader Adnan Menderes had been so ini
quitously hanged by the military.71 In the M ethodist church
President Clinton allowed his feelings to show on the day o f his
inauguration.72 T h e Shias are well know n to be great weepers.
These affective reactions should not be taken too lightly.73

Spinoza saw in the passions ‘the causes and the foundations of
political society, o f its institutions and their disorders.74 T he
subject is less outdated than it might seem, and we have to
acknowledge that the question o f political subjectivity ought
to be one o f the central concerns o f political science, if only
because it often constitutes a political problem in itself. Thus in
Iran, there was serious debate about w hether the tears tradi
tionally shed to comm emorate the death o f Hussein were
counter-revolutionary or were instead related to a form o f pas
sive resistance that had maintained over the centuries the
m em ory o f his martyrdom .75 T he history o f Kenyan national
ism was dom inated by the famous clitoridectomy crisis of
1928-30, w hich set the Kikuyu elites against the Christian
missions.76 And in the U nited States, polemics regarding moral
ity, ‘political correctness’, or the return to ‘American values’ are
rife.77 Paul Veyne opportunely points out that ‘culture is also a
question o f pride, o f the relationship to the self, o f aesthetics, if
one prefers; in short, o f constituting the hum an subject’, and
that subjectivity ‘has been, over the centuries, a historical issue
as disputed as economic issues or the distribution o f pow er’.78
Seeing politics from this point o f view amounts to returning
to the founding fathers o f the social sciences. That does not nec
essarily involve restoring to the throne the Subject, supposedly
so battered by the erring ways o f m odern philosophy. From
Tocqueville to W eber and Foucault there emerges, on the
contrary, a great continuity o f thought that brings out the his
toricity o f all subjectivity and seeks to conceive ‘the historicity
even o f forms o f experience’.79 T he question then becomes
not that o f the Subject, or that o f individualism— for in their
non-specificity, these notions are incapable o f accounting for
this kind of historicity o f experience. T he question is that o f
the production o f subjectivity, in other words, o f the ‘subject-
ivation’ that Gilles Deleuze, com m enting on Foucault, has
defined in terms so W eberian that they are probably almost
acceptable to political scientists: ‘Subjectivation is the pro-
The irreducibility o f political imagitiaires 153
duction o f modes o f existence or lifestyles’.80 This point should

be emphasised: subjectivation and even individuation are not
synonyms o f individualisation. Among the Tamils, for instance,
‘individuality o f eminence’ and ‘civic individuality’ are achieved
through the relation betw een the individual and his family, his
caste and his neighbourhood. From a W estern point o f view,
this ends in the paradox that ‘Tamils have a strong sense o f
individuality, but no abstract notion o f the individual.’81 Y et it
is possible to find in it an ethos, a socially valued lifestyle that
structures the subjectivity o f actors. Similarly, the repertoire o f
the ‘refined’, ‘civilised’, ‘polite’ (alus) person in Java or that o f
the ‘m an o f integrity’, ‘fellow knight’ or ‘being in society’
(adam-e edjtem d’i) in Iran epitomises a relationship to the self
inseparable from a relationship to the O ther.82
T he sphere o f politics (or o f the state) constantly interacts
w ith these processes o f subjectivation, even w hen the latter
seem to emerge uniquely from the heart o f private life: ‘It was
fascinating to see how the state and private life interacted, col
lided, and at the same time were embedded within each other’,
Foucault noted regarding the research he conducted w ith
Arlette Farge on ‘disorder in families’.83 And Tocqueville had
already perceived that the om nipotence o f the state and the
autonom y o f the individual were correlative, and that the pro
cess o f individuation involved the rationalisation o f the family.84
Even if ‘we must abandon the simplistic scenario according
to w hich individualism develops along w ith the state’,85 the
pastoral conception o f power, w hich came from Egypt, Assyria
and Judaea, was adopted by Christianity, w hich made it into a
kind o f individual relationship between the shepherd and his
flock, and associated it, at the end o f the M iddle Ages, w ith a
new form o f political organisation, that o f the m odern state:
‘I do n ot believe that we have to consider the “m odern state”
as an entity that has developed in spite o f individuals, unaware
o f w hat they are or even o f their existence; rather, we should
see it as a very elaborate structure in w hich individuals can be
included on one condition: that their individuality be assigned
a new form and that it is subjected to a whole set o f specific

mechanisms. In a sense, the state can be seen as a matrix o f
individualism or a new form o f pastoral pow er,’ Foucault ex
plained.86 T he concrete research carried out by French his
torians, as well as by German rational critique— in the works
o f Cassirer, Elias and Panofsky— have shown that these were
not simple philosophical abstractions. T he state’s actions have
in fact contributed to the shaping o f the very divisions be
tween the emotional and the rational, betw een appearance
and the inner self, popular cultural practices and so-called high
culture.87 In return these various repertoires inform political
language and symbolism.
Although we are not always able to interpret it very well, the
sexualisation of power relationships recurs in many societies,
and it is not the least im portant procedure for the disqualifi
cation or, on the contrary, the implicit prom otion, o f those in
authority. W ithout going back to the pornographic literature
that attacked M arie-A ntoinette, we have only to listen to cer
tain French militants and officials— In the words o f a supporter
of the Front National in Haute-Loire, ‘We are the R ig h t w ith
real balls. The others, Giscard and Barrot, are the R ig h t w ith
hardly any balls at all.’ ‘We have to let the institutions and the
badly-fucked scream, they are the false elites,’ proclaimed the
mayor of Valenciennes, Jean-Louis Borloo88— a strong indi
cation that populism in France in the 1990s was connected
with a certain idea o f virility. In a different genre English con
servatives, already terrified by the independence o f w om en
working in factories and the religious or charitable activism o f
M ethodist women, were quick to vilify the ‘lost creatures’ (i.e.
prostitutes) w ho joined the ranks ofworking-class radicalism.89
This relationship between the conception o f subjectivity
and political action is perm anent and crucial. Politics is also,
from day to day, a matter o f pleasure and aesthetics. W hat has
been pompously called a ‘political culture’ is above all, and per
haps only, a political style that is experienced as being con
gruent w ith an ethical imaginaire.™ W ithout being necessarily
aware o f it, we expect our leaders to have specific qualities,

and politicians themselves make such claims. The Greeks
wanted their leaders to be handsome, to speak well and to have
active sexual roles.91 T he Rom ans also associated passivity in
pleasure w ith political im potence, and at least their emperors
dem onstrated all too clearly that this was an unfounded
prejudice.92 B ut the plebeian also wanted the ruler’s necessary
evergetisme to be exercised w ithout pride and that it be given a
popular face, even if it annoyed the viri graves atque severi, the
wise, grave m en o f the upper levels o f society, w ho deplored
this kind o f levitas popularis, w hich was so contrary to the
severitas and the gravitas they themselves expected in the sov
ereign. That is w hy Caesar, Augustus, Germanicus, N ero and
even, at the beginning o f his reign, Caligula were loved by the
masses, and w hy Tiberius was so hated.93
Today, our contem poraries cultivate in the same way an
ethical conception— a ‘moral econom y’, as John Lonsdale puts
it94— o f their polis, w hich imposes itself on actors, but which is
not unanim ous and remains an object o f debate, and even con
troversy. In Africa, for example, wealth is often perceived ‘as
the external sign o f internal virtue’.95 It may be exhibited as
such by politicians.96 Nonetheless, w ith the growing denun
ciation o f corruption, it is increasingly stigmatised. O ne o f the
difficulties involved in establishing democracy south o f the
Sahara may result from the fact that public opinion requires
from its leaders everything and its opposite in this domain:
both the redistributive benefits o f the ‘politics o f the belly’ and
the austerity befitting ‘good governance’.
T he elusive character o f the qualities expected in politicians
also poses a problem for the analyst, for it is hard not to reify
them w hen putting them down on paper. The analyst may
point out that Felix H ouphouet-B oigny suffered from being
shorter than M odibo Keita and Sekou Toure, a disadvantage
for w hich he compensated by delivering marathon speeches:
‘W ithout consulting his notes, w ithout drinking a glass o f
water or allowing himself any rest, the “O ld M an” spoke for
five and one-half hours before an audience fascinated by the
dem onstration,’ the single party crow ed in 1985.97 T o the des

pair o f the diplomatic corps, these performances became the
main way o f rem inding the world that the head o f state was
still alive. H owever, can we be sure that the party members
attending these meetings did not secretly share this dismay
when confronted by such a massive demonstration o f the orato
rical art befitting the ‘chief? Moreover, Paul Biya, in Cameroon,
probably never surm ounted the terrible handicap represented
by his high-pitched voice in a society in w hich eloquence is
on a par w ith sexual activity as an attribute o f the exercise o f
power, and denotes that the person concerned possesses the
principle o f the evn.9** Biya nevertheless succeeded in keeping
control o f the state under singularly difficult conditions.
If we wish to break w ith the culturalist argument, the whole
problem o f interpretation stems from the fact that political
qualities are both central and elusive. In Java, one has to show
one’s radiance (teja). W hen he was on the point o f being
deposed, Amangkurat III (1703—8) seemed to be ‘pale as a Chi
nese with a stomach-ache’, whereas his predecessor, Amang
kurat II (1677—1703), had a face transformed w hen he went
to war. Are these impressions produced by the chroniclers o f
ancient times? Everything suggests that Sukarno did not
neglect this repertoire, and drew a certain legitimacy from his
escapades in a country where the ruler’s sexual potency is a
guarantee o f the kingdom ’s prosperity.99 From this to erecting
radiance into a tangible and necessary quality, there is a step
that our approach forbids us, o f course, to take.
Autres lieux, autres moettrs (or in any case, other ideas). T he
Senegalese, w ho have nothing against love, nonetheless em
phasise the political qualities o f join, kersa and m un. Speaking
before a m eeting o f his party in 1976, Leopold Sedar Senghor
declared:
‘In fact, our Senegalese hum anism is based on the three m ajor values repre
sented by jom , kersa, and mun.Jom is the inner feeling o f o n e ’s “ h o n o u r” , o f
* The evu is the organ of witchcraft among the Beti.

The irrechicibility o f political imagitiaires 157
one s dignity as a w h ole m an, w hich inspires the respect o f others, and
manifests itself as taraanga or “politeness” . Kersa could be translated as “ self
m astery . It is the spiritual strength that allows us to dom inate o u r instincts,
o u r passions, and o u r feelings in order to channel and guide them . It is also
the sensitiveness o r esprit de finesse that allows us, in each situation, and for
each problem , to apply ourselves to the object in the p ro p er m easure. It is
the restraint” , the “m odesty” that causes us to avoid every kind o f excess,
every disintegration o f the person, no m atter h o w m inim al. As for mun,
far from signifying resignation, it is the peasants’ “patience” [...] that sig
nifies coherence and persistence in action as well as in ideas or feelings, in
efficacy.100
Senghor drew from these remarks a critique o f the city, and

especially o f officials and businessmen w ho sinned through a
lack o f jo m by being too fond o f money, and whose capri
ciousness betrayed a lack o f m u n .m In the view o f the Sene
galese, kersa is the essence o f the well-bred man. It is not
surprising if a particular minister belonging to a caste turns out
to be crude and irascible, as were, according to rum our, Habib
T hiam and Iba D er Thiam. Conversely, the ‘restraint’ o f Pre
sident A bdou D io u f inspired hagiographers.102 However, we
should not underestimate the actors’instrumentalisation o f this
repertoire, or the perm anent negotiations they conduct w ith
the ‘moral econom y’ o f their polis: Abdou D io u f took care to
choose as his prim e minister a ‘caste’ man, if only because the
latter could not overshadow or try to succeed him. Similarly,
by stigmatising the sins o f the city, Senghor implicitly re
m inded his audience that he was the hero o f the peaceful social
revolution that (in the 1950s) established the supremacy o f the
rural hinterland and the Islamic brotherhoods over the Creole
elite o f the ‘four urban com m unes’.
T he culturalist ideology o f the identity-based populism
that we have scrutinised— for example, Islamist movements or
H indu nationalists— exploits the benefits o f public generosity,
developing genuine ‘strategies o f beneficence’.103 They proba
bly derive a large part o f their influence from this register of
subjectivation, w hich cannot, however, be reduced to a simple
econom ic reward given to their voters: it is also a symbolic or
ethical gesture that responds to expectations o f a moral or

cultural order, i.e., the order o f the imaginaire. For that reason
it is difficult to define precisely.
Democratic and bureaucratic societies also have their
political styles, w hich are curious mixtures o f representations
inherited from history and current fashions. O n the one hand,
these issue from the ‘quiet power’ o f m em ory and terroirs. O n
the other, they arise from the bearing and energy o f a young
man, and even, if possible, an athlete. O ne has to preside over
republican banquets and assiduously attend receptions, but also
pose for photographs, with a radiant smile, in relaxed postures,
pretending to have been caught in a swimsuit, or— why not?—
hitch-hiking to a meeting, like the French prim e minister
Edouard Balladur in 1995. Rem arks made in the same year by
Jacques Chirac’s young supporters on the eve o f his election as
president o f France show that ultimately a leader anointed by
universal suffrage is still elected because o f certain qualities that
are attributed to him:
‘I voted for Chirac because I love him . H e is handsom e, he has presence.
H e ’s fantastic in the pictures o f him as a young m an. I w ould really like to
have gone to bed w ith him at that age. I’d still like to, for that m atter.’
‘Chirac is great w ith his clow n’s face, and I like that a lot. It’s freedom , the
legalisation o f hash. O h, you d o n ’t think so? Well, maybe. H e lets you
dream, anyway.’
‘T h e family is im portant. It’s obvious that C hirac’s wife is com pletely psy
chotic and a little decrepit. A nother m an m ight have asked for a divorce.
Chirac d id n ’t. H e ’s standing by her. H e even found a jo b for his daughter.’104
In their comical diversity, these comments show once again

the contradictory and even conflictual character o f political
subjectivation. M ore than the expression o f a culture buried in
the depths o f society, it is a perm anent and fluctuating process
o f production, all the more disputed because initiative often
comes from subordinate groups, such as freed slaves in the
R om an Empire, ‘radical’ craftsmen and workers in England
during the Industrial R evolution, ‘diggers’ o f diamonds in
The ineducibility o f political imaginaircs 159
M o b u tu ’s Zaire, the proletarians in the Javanese port o f

Surabaja or the low er castes o f India.105
Moreover, the repertoires o f subjectivation, as draped as they
are in the mantle o f ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’, are fundamentally
ambivalent, and this ambivalence is merely the flipside o f their
transience. T he javam nard in Teheran— beginning w ith the
city’s form er mayor Gholam-Hossein Karbastchi— are both
respected as public benefactors and feared as ‘thick necks’, and
this style is acted out in extremely subde ways.106 In the Javanese
ludruk the illicit role par excellence, that o f the transvestite,
incarnates the traditional code o f civility and refinement (alus)
that proletarians in Surabaya, w ho are attached to picaresque
and virile values (kasar), scorn to some extent, but to w hich
they want the young people in their neighbourhood to con
form in their relationships w ith their elders.107 Similarly,
the ethos o f discipline, sobriety, and m utual aid prom oted by
M ethodism and by working-class radicalism’s ‘rites o f m utu
ality’ was not unanimously adopted by English workers; the
craftsmen had m ore ‘aristocratic’ aspirations, and debauchery,
intemperance, and criminality offered other moral reference
points.108 As J. Pitt-R ivers’ classic studies have shown, the am
bivalence o f ethical qualities results from the fact that they are
often presented as essentially religious, while at the same time
being based on the interaction o f social partners: the boss’s
honour proceeds primarily from the clients that honour him.
Thus the M erina’s hasina — the strength, vigour, fertility, and
even saintliness that constitute the ‘virtue’ o f the hero-kings—
is less a state than the result o f practices o f subjects and o f a
cultural subterfuge: ‘W hat proceeds from the ambiguity con
tained in the term hasina is the possibility o f representing it as a
natural quality possessed by superiors and an advantage that
benefits inferiors; in fact, this illusion is created by an inverse
act: the gift ... made by the inferior to the superior.’109
These processes o f subjectivism are woven through the
fabric o f society, all the m ore because they often invoke the
redefinition, or even the refoundation o f the polis and its
subjects. T hey tend to set in m otion representations that claim

to be primordial, appealing to blood, sperm, land, identity, or
authenticity. Insofar as they are procedures o f subjectivation,
the interweaving o f tradition, on w hich identity-based poli
tical strategies are founded, becom e so passionate, and even
phantasmal and phobic, that they end up becom ing sinister
imaginaires o f purity. T he O ther is then seen as polluting the
integrity o f the comm unity, the race, the nation, the caste or
the faith. This threat is felt in the arcana o f sexuality as well as
in those o f death. The futile quest for pure identity is always
pursued in specific, complex social contexts. But it can be
reduced to a tragically simplifying equation that shows the
superiority and integrity o f the Self through the physical deg
radation and symbolic destruction o f the O ther. This is, in
particular, the meaning o f the m odem form o f torture that no
longer seeks to obtain information or confessions, but to create
the Enemy, to purify the social body o f its soiled elements, to
deconstruct the humanity o f the subversive.110
It is at these extreme limits o f identity politics that we can
better understand how actors situate themselves in an imagi
naire that is ‘a factor o f social life that has gained autonom y’.111
Too often, the accent is put on the instrumentalisation o f the
imaginaire by rational operators. But the idea, for example, of
the ‘management o f political passions’, developed by Pierre
Ansart, is restrictive. It is not enough to enquire into the ‘pro
duction o f emotive signs seeking to capture conform ing feel
ings’, or to show how power maintains itself ‘by maintaining
conform ing passions’.112 This aspect o f things is o f course not
negligible. European absolute monarchies and twentieth-century
totalitarianism have flattered and often manipulated political
affects in order to strengthen their bases. And in France Jean-
Marie Le Pen appointed a subordinate to be ‘in charge o f large
demonstrations, responsible for setting the scene and aesthe
tics’, w hich modified the style o f the Front N ational’s public
meetings, taking its inspiration from the technique o f A m er
ican televangelists by flying the flags o f the thirty-eight form er
provinces o f the Ancien R egim e as a ‘symbol o f rootedness in

contrast to the purely arbitrary division o f the current regions’,
by seating military veterans in the front rows ‘in homage to
those w ho fought for France and to refute the view that sees us
as the party o f collaboration’, and by playing Handel, B eetho
ven and Verdi at high volum e in the hall. ‘There is a sacred
dimension to politics that other parties have forgotten. W e are
trying to return to this solemnity. W hence our use o f white,
the image o f purity. People need it. W e have to restore the
dream to politics.’113 O ne couldn’t put it better. M oreover, the
strategies adopted by other political groups proceed in the
same way, recruiting their ow n image consultants, w ho might
be less talented, or m ore scrupulous, regarding the passions,
feelings, and political symbols they use.
Be that as it may, it does not explain why subjects, voters, or
militants adopt the political affects thus suggested to them. In
addition, political leaders and their experts are themselves
involved in the imaginaire they are trying to use to legitimise
themselves. Were not the leaders w ho made ‘n o ’ votes red and
‘yes’ votes black— Hussein’s colour— in Iran’s constitutional
referendum o f 1979 themselves following the m odel o f
Karbala? Were they cynical and stupid to the point o f thinking
that people w ho had just carried out one o f the most aston
ishing revolutions in history would let themselves be led in
such a crude way? It is more likely that the red colour o f the
opposition seemed obvious to them. Here we re-encounter a
debate we already set forth in connection w ith primordial
identities, and particularly communalism in India. It is unde
niable that India’s nationalist leaders deliberately fabricated
M uslim and H indu consciousnesses in order to increase sup
port w hen universal suffrage was introduced. Even then, their
constituencies had to follow them. Marc Bloch adroitly side
steps this dilemma by studying the origins o f the ‘king’s touch’
(thought to cure scrofula) in France and England: ‘In order for
an institution intended to serve specific ends marked by an
individual will to impose itself upon a w hole people, it still has
to be supported by deep currents in the collective conscious

ness; and perhaps, reciprocally, in order for a som ewhat vague
belief to take concrete form in a regular rite, it is not insig
nificant that a few clear intentions help shape it.’114
Thus it is im portant to ‘account for passionate states in
themselves’.115 It is im portant to understand why and how, in
Rwanda, good people, good Christians and good neighbours,
followed the muffled orders broadcast by R adio Mille C ol-
lines; went to ‘w ork’, to use the singular expression that the
backers o f the genocide employed, and w hich everyone ap
parently found intelligible; used machetes to dismember their
acquaintances and colleagues in an unprecedented orgy of
cruelty, or offered them a ‘luxurious’ death by shooting, if their
victims could afford it; threw bodies, sometimes still alive, into
latrines or left them to be eaten by dogs. For that is w hat the
political imaginaire in the Great Lakes is, and it goes beyond the
intentions o f the new masters in Kigali, the (perhaps) tem
porary defeat o f ‘H utu Power’ or the sympathetic souls o f the
humanitarian N GO s: dogs gorging on hum an flesh, neigh
bours in whose homes are seen (or thought to be seen) the
property o f one’s massacred relatives, survivors w ho will always
suspect or be suspected, victors dazed with grief w ho drive
their trucks drunk, orphans o f a very special kind.116 In short,
there are many passions to be managed, certainly, but some
thing a little m ore as well.
W hat demands our attention here is ultimately not that on
February 2, 1991 Saddam Hussein, for example, praised Iraq’s
‘spiritual victory’ and had his propagandists claim that the ‘R e
publican Guard broke the aggressors’ spinal colum n and drove
them back beyond the border’.117 N o r is it that, properly
speaking, the Iraqis believed these claims, for after all some
were not satisfied and revolted. It is rather the Iraqis w ho
maintained their support, if not for Saddam Hussein, at least for
his regime, and w ho accepted Saddam’s emotional discourse
while at the same time being well aware that their country had
in fact been defeated in the cruellest way as a result o f a crazy
gamble.
The imaginaire, a principle o f ambivalence 163
Pretending to ask if the Greeks believed in their myths, Paul

Veyne has showed that this is not even a pertinent question
since ‘culture, w ithout being false, is not true, either’.118 The
twelve-year-old child w ho played the role o f George Bush in
Dacca, and w ho was felled by a stone throw n by his playmate
identifying w ith Saddam Hussein, certainly knew that he
was not G eorge Bush. T he same goes for the adults w ho were
w atching the scene, and w ho no doubt accompanied it with
their shouts. Nonetheless, the child died.119 T he imaginaire has
to do w ith this grey area betw een the true and the false, w hich
is revealed in particular by the ‘twofold act’ (Marc Bloch) o f
instrumentalisation and adhesion. In other words, it is a prin
ciple o f ambivalence, w hich political operators sometimes cul
tivate. T he N ational Front’s wily dramaturge protests:120 ‘We
are compared to Nazis because we put burning urns on our
platforms. T h at’s stupid: do people say the same thing about
the Olym pic Games?’
T h e im aginaire, a principle o f am bivalence

Let us return to these points, for they are key to our argument.
As the seat o f passions, o f aesthetics, o f symbolic activity, the
imaginaire is by definition both a domain o f ambivalence and a
dom ain ofim m ediation. As soon as we acknowledge its central
place in political practices, we see that the latter are, also by
definition, ambivalent.
This property o f politics is largely unrecognised, not only by
the principal actors— they usually pretend to be motivated by
an ideal, even if it is rationalist and utilitarian— but also by
political science, w hich is itself deeply positivist and utili
tarian.121 Voters w ho ridicule the opportunism o f their leaders
and are outraged by their corruption are no more lucid, be
cause they expect from the latter complete purity, despite all
the evidence to the contrary. In fact, the main epics o f the
m odern world are so confused that our contem poraries have
willingly got lost in them. In Europe, Japan and the U nited
States, the painful debates over responsibility for crimes against

humanity during the Second W orld W ar testify to this fact.
But the anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa were no
clearer. The natives’ resistance did not preclude their collabo
ration, certain individuals or societies passing quickly from one
register to the other. As we have seen, at the everyday level the
colonial regime was based on these kinds o f ‘w orking m isun
derstandings’, w hich gave rise to a ‘negotiated version o f real
ity’ worked out between administrators (or missionaries) and
the native populations.122 In this way, both realised their own
imagiuaires, usually through a tacit celebration o f a compromise,
but sometimes at the price o f a confrontation that could lead
to a genuine, prolonged struggle. We have also observed that
these everyday interactions gave rise to imagiuaires that were at
least partially shared— those o f development, o f tradition, or of
nationalism— even though colonial misunderstandings had
degenerated into bitter fighting. Thus historical m em ory con
tinues to haunt France’s relations w ith Algeria and Vietnam
several decades after the proclamation o f independence. This is
because, ultimately, the nationalist demand was just as ambi
valent as colonisation: it was simultaneously a quest for free
dom and dignity, a desire for wealth and social prom otion, the
reconstitution o f a system of inequality and injustice, and even
the adoption o f an imperialist project inherited from the colo
nising country, to the detrim ent o f neighbouring countries. In
Africa, the historical m ovem ent that collaborated w ith the
occupying power gradually eroded the latter’s influence from
the period between the two world wars onward, and finally
supplanted it, diverting to its own advantage the econom y’s
resources, at first in the name o f statist nationalism, and then
via the economic liberalisation and privatisation policies de
manded by the World Bank and other international m oney
lenders. In many situations, the remarkable stability o f elites
testifies to this continuity betw een different phases o f state
form ation.123 Even the struggle against apartheid did not boil
down to a racist H ollywood Western that right-m inded
literature portrayed it to be. In an incisive essay, Shula Marks

analysed ‘the ambiguities o f dependency’ in South Africa: the
ambiguity o f the state, the ambiguity o f nationalism, the am
biguity o f classes and class consciousnesses, w hich the ‘tight
rope policy’ followed by C hief Buthelezi transformed into a
dangerous synthesis.124 Almost everywhere south o f the Sahara
this confused passage from colonisation to the post-colonial
period is vaguely felt.125
As for revolution, it is also a realm o f chiaroscuro, as borne out
by the difficulty historians and political scientists have in dis
tinguishing betw een the respective roles o f continuity and
rupture. If we follow Tocqueville, the French R evolution was
an avatar o f monarchical centralisation, and the same thing
could be said about the Soviet regime in Russia, the People’s
R epublic in China, the Islamic Republic in Iran, or Turkey’s
Kemalist republic.126 In 1964 Congolese rebels, millenarian and
subversive as they were, indulged w ith delight in the bureau
cratic rituals o f the order they wanted to overthrow: Malembe,
the head o f the ‘R evolutionary G overnm ent o f M aniem a-
K ivu’, w arned officials that he would receive them only if they
‘had a paper provided by their direct superior, w ith the ap
proval o f the provincial secretary and that o f the secretary-
general’, adding that ‘if these agents driven by their whims do
not stop infringing the rights o f the hierarchy, they will be
subject to painful measures’, clearly alluding to the coloniser’s
shameful w hip.127 M ore generally, an analysis o f nationalism
and Islamism has shown us that antagonism and rejection can
be ways o f appropriating the adversary’s mental categories,
values and institutions.
Thus it is high time that we acknowledged ambivalence as
an intrinsic characteristic o f politics. Ways o f thinking that are
fashionable in W estern universities may not be o f m uch help
to us in this regard. B ut certain cultural repertoires o f politics
praise the very characteristic that we consider suspect. D uring
a cruel initiation, the young Spartan had to learn ‘not to be
seen, to move about furtively, to slip unnoticed into gardens
and banquets, hide out during the day in order to attack at

night, never let himself be caught, prefer to die rather than
admit a theft, even if the theft is part o f an obligatory role.’ His
accession to the status o f citizen paradoxically required him
to endure an unrestrained application o f the w hip, a shameful
punishment that was spared free men and was reserved for
helots. The Spartan ephebes were whipped all the more fiercely
w hen they were caught stealing: to punish them, not for their
theft, but for letting themselves be caught.128 O n the m odel o f
hunting or fishing techniques, in ancient Greece metis ‘pre
sided over all activities in w hich a man had to learn how to
manoeuvre hostile forces that were too powerful to be con
trolled directly, but w hich could be used in spite o f them
selves, w ithout ever confronting them face to face, in order to
realise in an unexpected way the goal one had in m ind’:
In any situation o f confrontation or com petition ... success can be o b
tained in tw o ways. E ither by superiority in ‘pow er’ in the dom ain in w hich
the battle takes place, the stronger w inning the victory, or by using p ro
cedures o f another order, w hose effect is precisely to falsify the results o f the
trial and to cause to w in the one w h o m ight have been th o ught certain to
be beaten. T h e success provided by metis thus takes on an am biguous
m eaning: depending on the context, it can lead to contrary reactions.
Som etim es it will be seen as the result o f fraud, the rules o f the gam e not
having been followed. At other times, it will arouse adm iration, in pro
portion to its unexpectedness, the weaker, against all likelihood, having
found w ithin him sufficient resources to put the stronger at his mercy. In
som e respects metis is o riented toward dishonest trickery, perfidious lying or
treachery, despised weapons used by w om en and cowards. B ut in other
respects it is a sort o f absolute w eapon, the only one that has the pow er to
ensure in any situation, and no m atter w hat the conditions o f the battle
m ight be, victory and dom ination over the o th er.129
Denise Paulme compares the Greek metis w ith the way the
‘trickster’ operates in folklore. T he latter’s role is central in
African tales, even though his incarnations vary and take on
different meanings depending on w hether he is the hare, the
spider, or the clever child. This character is a paradoxical figure,
an ‘awkward dem iurge’ w ho ‘accomplishes the “impossible
task” only to fail at the last m inute’: ‘In the tales, at least, trick
ery trium phs only w hen it has to save the innocent, unveil the
guilty, or punish a crim e.’ T he trickster is defined by his ‘clev
erness in taking advantage o f circumstances and especially by
the procedure that consists in having him self replaced, turning
the situation to his advantage’, through his ‘flexibility’, his
‘duplicity’, his ‘inversion’, his ‘trickery’. M uch beloved by the
audience, he nonetheless arouses ‘complex feelings’ o f admi
ration, irritation, and mistrust, as a result o f the frequently odious
character o f his behaviour.130 T he political or economic actor
in contem porary Africa— w hether he is a president, minister,
prophet, trader, bandit, crook, drug trafficker, or migrant—
frequently borrows these characteristics o f the trickster in order
to reverse his alliances, deceive the adversary, fool the naive,
set up schemes o f customs fraud, or cross borders.131
Similarly the Iranian bazaar m erchant’s ethos requires him
to ‘have a heart’, to ‘know how to do things’, and to cultivate
the elegance o f ambivalence: for how does a javanmard, a knight,
act w hen he sees a man who, sword in hand, makes him pro
mise not to say anything to his pursuers? H e goes somewhere
else so that he can tell the pursuers that he hasn’t seen anyone
‘since he has been sitting here’.132 Moreover, Shiism allows the
believer to conceal his faith w hen necessary: this is the famous
taqiyah or ketm an that so concerned the secret agent we quoted
at length at the beginning o f this book. Western diplomats and
businessmen negotiating w ith the Asian or African coun
terparts must get very entangled w ith their repertoires o f
fairness and trust, w hich force them into hypocrisy, lying, and
bad consciences. T heir partners have been brought up on
trickery and transformation, and they see in them qualities or a
style indispensable for the moral econom y o f business in the
polis. Thus in Indonesia everyday language easily adopts the
metaphors o f the puppet and the mask cherished by traditional
Javanese drama (wayang) to describe the political game and the
equitable character o f reversals that we should describe as be
trayals or scandalous recantations.133 In classical Chinese thought
blandness legitimises what we should call opportunism . ‘Let

your heart move w ith blandness and detachm ent, unite your
vital energy w ith the general lack o f differentiation. If you feel
the spontaneous m ovem ent o f things, w ithout allowing your
self an individual preference, the whole world will be at peace,’
counsels a Taoist apologue, and it is clear that this lesson in
insipidity is also sage advice for the politician: ‘Thanks to his
blandness, the wise man will be able to share in all the virtues
w ithout becom ing bogged dow n in any o f them , and in pass
ing through changes in political life, be always ready to face
up— w ith serenity— to the demands of the time; like the
Heavens, he may appear to change frequently, but he never
veers off course.’134
W ith the help o f cultural inertia, Western diplomats and
businessmen are quick to talk about the inscrutability o f
yellow and black peoples. They quote the inevitable Book o f
Ruses dear to those tricky Arabs, those dissimulating Persians.
They might, however, turn to their own intellectual tradition:
neo-Platonic philosophy praised ‘honest dissimulation’, and
‘duplicity’ has not always been condem ned in Europe.135 But
the culturalist argument that we are criticising denies, precisely,
that ambivalence is a constitutive property o f the political—
except, o f course, w hen it is a question o f attributing it to
certain ‘cultures’ that are more or less scorned (or fascinating).
T he preceding chapters have shown how the cultural bases of
politics proceed through metaphors. There are no strategies o f
cultural extraversion, o f transfers of meaning, o f procedures of
authentication, o f the formation o f primordial identities, and
no polysemy o f the discursive genres o f politics w ithout a hefty
dose o f ambivalence. T he latter is, so to speak, the fuel o f poli
tical enunciation.
In particular, ambivalence nourishes w hat at least appears to
be the most universal political repertoire o f all: the enunciation
o f power relationships in terms o f family relationships. In
reality, this universality is a mere optical illusion, because family
configurations are themselves irreducible to each other: ‘The
term “family relationship” is therefore clearly fallacious and an

erroneous criterion for comparing social facts. It designates
neither a distinct class o f phenom ena nor a distinct type o f
theory.’136 A fortiori, ideological and political elaborations of
the social relationships that appeal to ‘family relationships’ are
heterogeneous. W hat do the m ythology o f the state or o f the
business firm as a family in Japan after the Meiji revolution
have in com m on w ith Turkish representations o f the state as a
good father or the terroir as a mother? O r the fiction o f family
relationships in mercantile exchange in sub-Saharan Africa
and the sublimation o f the family unit by direct marketing
organisations in the U nited States? Probably not m uch, insofar
as the parental roles to w hich these allegories refer vary from
one society to another, as well as within a single society, from
one group to another and from one era to another, since the
family is em inently a site o f social change.
In addition, a family consciousness o f politics is rarely found
in a pure state, unm ixed w ith other discursive genres that com
pletely diversify this type o f utterance. W hen President Biya
declared in C am eroon ‘I am the father o f the nation, I think
about everyone, about all my children’, he was appropriating the
image o f the head o f the household and at the same time giving
it a Christian connotation in order to present himself impli
citly as God the Father, in accord with an expression then current
in the authoritarian regimes o f the region.137 W ith the help o f
the notion o f ‘Asian values’, the paternalistic style o f leadership
was all the rage in East Asia. But, apart from the fact that it
draws on a different, supposedly neo-Confucian, store o f rep
resentations, it is inevitably hybridised through interaction
w ith other repertoires.
Finally, since Freud we have know n that feelings between
parents and children are mixed at best. It is thus quite possible
that the same discursive genre o f politics may shape contra
dictory orientations in a given situation, and nourish a genuine
affective ambivalence w ith regard to those in power. N othing
is more confused and volatile than the tales o f the ‘love’ between
rulers and the ruled, and current reality is full o f sudden re
versals in w hich people move from fervid expressions o f alle
giance to the most violent kind o f rejection. Political affects
are never simple, and they are clearly very difficult to ‘ma
nage’!138 ‘A traveller w ithout a lamp has to walk alongside a
man w ho has one. A child w ho obeys his father’s orders is
always approved, helped, and supported insofar as possible,’
declared a Cam eroon notable in the 1950s, concerned to
justify his collaboration w ith the French colonial authorities,
at a time w hen the nationalist m ovem ent was faced w ith re
pression.139 Similarly Jean-Bedel Bokassa presented the elimi
nation, under horrible circumstances, o f his companion Colonel
Banza as a simple family m atter that he had to deal w ith by
weaning him, just as every true father does in such a situation,
and w hen he was not having thieves publicly beaten, he liked
to describe himself as Papa-Pelican: ‘T he military m an that I
am is also a good Papa. [...] Children should tell their father
everything, they have nothing to hide from him. [...] It’s
normal for a father to give his children gifts and feed them .’140
Such remarks conceal a double ambivalence. First, the
ambivalence o f the speaker-collaborator sincerely attached to
the work o f colonialism, but w ho broods on all the hum ili
ations it implies. O r o f the speaker-dictator w ho constantly
kills and steals but w ho also hands out a certain num ber o f
gifts, simultaneously playing on the two repertoires o f Tere, the
peace leader, and Ngakola, the war leader. Second, the ambiv
alence o f the receiver o f these messages: the colonial adminis
tration that is pleased by the notables’ support while at the
same time vaguely scorning them, if only for racial reasons,
continuing to mistrust them on the political level, and some
times abandoning them to the victory o f their com m on adver
sary, as in Indochina and Algeria. O r the ambivalence o f the
people o f the Central African Republic w ho shamed the pre
datory emperor at the end o f his reign and marched through
the streets shoulder to shoulder to overthrow him, but also
granted him a diffuse indulgence once he had fallen and his
successors had shown their greedy mediocrity.
D ue to their ambivalence, such representations o f the poli

tical necessarily go beyond the univocal use certain actors make
o f them . T he most talented o f the latter play w ith brio on this
range o f indeterminacy. W anting to assert his authority over
the Front N ational’s newly elected mayors, but forced to admit
their autonomy, Jean-M arie Le Pen presented himself as their
‘inspiration’, their ‘big brother’.141 ‘Papa is coming back!’ sang
the Turkish masses to the tune o f an old popular song, thus
w elcom ing Suleyman Dem irel to the meetings o f the True
Path Party in 1991. This old political hand, w ho has no chil
dren and defines him self as ‘the father o f all Turks’, followed
the m odel o f Mustafa Kemal, whose most direct ideological
heirs he nonetheless contests, insisting that the conduct o f the
state must be ‘firm and loving’. Despite the fact that he was the
political heir o f Adnan Menderes, w ho was executed by a
military governm ent in 1961 and had himself been deprived o f
his civil rights after the 1980 coup d’etat, he adheres in these
comm ents to the conception o f the ‘state-Papa’ (.Devlet Baba)
o f w hich the army claims to be the guarantor. His True Path
Party— whose adopted name was very similar to that o f its
earlier incarnation, the Justice Party, w hich was banned— is
implicitly the party o f the N arrow Path along w hich the father
o f the nation can lead you, but w hich also has a discreet Islamic
flavour. All in half-tones, these messages designate less a rational
‘m anagem ent’ o f passions than a complex emotional field that
no one can hope to master, and o f w hich those in power are
themselves the captives.
In Mali President Konare subtly proclaimed on the day o f
his inauguration: ‘I am not a father o f the nation, but only a son
am ong other sons, called upon to play the role o f elder brother.’
H e took care to distinguish him self from Moussa Traore’s dic
tatorial style, w hile at the same time claiming a circumstantial
seniority o f a democratic type. All the same, this repertoire of
the elder brother is too rich in Africa for the newly elected
president to be sure he could contain all the reverberations it
awakened in his audience. After all, while the elder brother
expects his younger brothers to obey him, he also has to aid

and protect them. He likes to exploit the workforce and pays
it back in the form o f various benefits. An unequal exchange,
no doubt. But one way to obtain something from a powerful
man is to award him the status o f an elder, and there are
ostensible allegiances, in the name o f fictive relatives, that one
could well do w ithout. All the m ore so as an elder brother
w ho fails to m eet his obligations immediately puts him self in a
position w here he is likely to be suspected o f witchcraft.
A significant episode in Kenyan political life illustrates well
the ability of the idiom o f family relationships to mediate power
relationships, and to make itself a symbolic stake in the latter,
thanks to its own logic. In 1981, O dinga Oginga, the form er
leader o f the opposition, asserted that President arap M oi had
invited him to jo in the governm ent in these terms: ‘C om e on,
Baba,join me and let’s w ork together for this country.’ H e said
he was prepared to take this step, for unlike Jom o Kenyatta, his
predecessor, the head o f state was w orking for the benefit o f
the wananchi, the children o f the country, and not for himself.
Obviously arap M oi could not allow O dinga O ginga to put
himself in a position o f seniority in this way. H e tartly replied
that he had never called Odinga ‘Baba’, and that in any case the
latter had no right to claim he was following him while at the
same time criticising Kenyatta. The next day, a legislator entered
the fray and demanded that the patriarch o f the opposition,
w hom he considered as his ‘father in age and in politics’, to
leave Kenyatta alone. T he dispute ended a week later w hen
President arap M oi stated during a meeting, in Odinga O ginga’s
presence: ‘I am the only “Father,” the only head o f the gov
ernm ent o f this country.’142 In this allusive way, w hich is char
acteristic o f Kenyan political life, more than thirty years o f
personal rivalries, ideological divergences, ethnic and regional
competition, and accumulated conflicts were stylised into a
muffled duel around the image o f the Father. However, the
latter and other figures w ith w hich it is associated arouse
emotions or feeling that have their distinctive power, and that
transcend the actors’ intentions: in a vague way, the allegory

o f ‘Baba’ finds its meaning in the w hole ‘moral econom y’
whose contradictory definition has been one o f the main sites
o f confrontations in Kenyan politics since the inter-war years.143
In fact the acquired autonom y o f the kinship idiom as
an ambivalent political idiom raises a m uch more im portant
question than that o f the ‘managem ent o f passions’, w hich re
mains problematic: the problem o f the latent correspondences
betw een transformations w ithin the family and changes in the
political imaginaire, the ‘intertw ining o f private feelings and
public policy’ that Lynn H unt, for instance, has analysed w ith
regard to the French R evolution.144 Edm und Burke com
plained that the hum iliation o f the king and queen o f France
in O ctober 1789 damaged ‘all the pleasant fictions that lighten
authority and soften obedience, w hich guarantee the harm ony
o f the different aspects o f life, and cause to reign in public life,
by a gradual assimilation, the same feelings that embellish and
sweeten private life.’145
Focusing on the familial imaginaire inherent in a political
configuration should not simply consist in studying the poli
tical use o f family models for the purposes o f legitimisation or
political protest, nor in assessing the influence o f represen
tations o f family relationships on political action, in the purest
vein o f culturalism or psychologism. Instead it should involve
unravelling the circulation o f emotional, symbolic, or cognitive
schemas betw een the two spheres. O n one hand, the political
imaginaire may nourish its familial equivalent, for example by
contributing to a ‘democratisation’ o f the exercise o f parental
authority. O n the other hand, the familial imaginaire may
nourish the political imaginaire, especially by providing it w ith
‘the principles o f domestic confidence and fidelity that shape
the duties and bonds o f social life’ (to adopt B urke’s language):
Jacques Chirac, the citizen-president w ho claims to scorn
flashing lights and police escorts, takes on something o f the
simplicity o f the m odern father w ho takes his daughter to a
M adonna concert.
C om m on sense tells us that the interaction betw een the two

spheres is not reducible to an isomorphic relationship. For ex
ample, most economic reforms inspired by liberalism seem— at
least till they have been inventoried— to result in a renego
tiation o f relations between the public and the private sphere.
But the latter is open, registers a certain state o f the forces
present and opens a field o f social innovation that cannot be
reduced to either the familial dimension, the political dim en
sion o f society, or even exclusively to the interaction betw een
the two. In China, the phenom enon o f bureaucrats’ offspring
who take advantage o f economic liberalisation cannot be inter
preted as a simple resurgence o f an original family structure
that is supposed to have resisted comm unism and predisposes
people to the private appropriation o f the res publica and to
political obedience. M ore plausibly, it is a manifestation o f the
remodelling o f the institution o f the family, at the intersection
o f money and power w hich Jean-Luc D om enach and H ua
Chang-m ing identified very early on,146 and w hich is now
situated in a regional context o f strong economic growth, if
not globalisation. Similarly, in Iran the family, o f w hich the
Islamic Republic claims to be the protector and conservatives
close to the bazaar say they are the zealous defenders, is in the
midst o f transformation: the protection o f the moral order to
w hich the regime is devoted and w hich no doubt constitutes,
along with nationalism, its main source o f legitimacy, is not the
maintenance o f the status quo.147 In this retroactive relationship
between the sphere o f family relationships and that o f politics
or economics, none o f these terms is particularly stable or has a
single meaning; moreover, none o f them can be isolated from
other factors w ith w hich it is connected.
T he path for analysis is thus a narrow one. O n the one hand,
we must take into account what Michel Foucault called ‘the
heterogeneity o f pow er’, w hich ‘always emerges from some
thing other than itself’.148 Asked about Iran, Foucault quoted
Francois Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution, adopting his
‘distinction betw een the totality o f the processes o f econom ic
and social transformation, w hich began long before the revo

lution o f 1789, and ended long afterward, on the one hand,
and the specificity o f the revolutionary event, on the other’.149
T he political imaginaire borrows heavily from the other
dimensions o f the social imaginaire: from the familial imaginaire,
but also from those o f religious belief, the business world, sport
ing com petition, the international environm ent, etc.
O n the other hand, we should keep in m ind that each o f
these sectors o f society has its own pace o f change and is
peopled w ith images that are often contradictory, and in any
case subject to various interpretations. Thus the circulation o f
cognitive, emotional, or symbolic schemas from one domain to
another is inevitably governed by the law o f ambivalence, and
is purely contingent. Here Foucault suggests that the pheno
m enon being studied must be ‘eventalised’, for this alone can
lead to a salutary ‘breach o f self-evidence’: ‘W here there is a
tem ptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate
anthropological trait or an obviousness that imposes itself uni
formly on all (eventalisation) means making visible a singu
larity’ M ore precisely, ‘eventalisation’ means locating the con
nections, the intersections, the supports, the blockages, the
interplay o f forces, the strategies, etc. that shaped, at a given
m om ent, w hat will later seem self-evident, universal, necessary.’
T he ‘causal m ultiplication’ required to ‘eventalise’ the pheno
m enon at hand, to understand its contingency, its uniqueness
as a ‘rare knicknack’, to refer to Paul Veyne— consists in
‘analysing an event according to the multiple processes that
constitute it ..., by constructing around the singular event
analysed as process a “polygon” or rather a “polyhedron” o f
intelligibility, the num ber o f whose faces is not given in
advance and can never properly be taken as finite.’ In short, to
accept a polymorphism that increases as the analysis proceeds.150
H ere we are once again very close to M ax W eber’s intel
lectual project. Namely, he refused to see the capitalist imaginaires
relationship to the R eform ation imaginaire as causal, and em
phasised the ‘enormous intertwining o f m utual influences

among the economic bases, forms o f social and political organi
sation, and the spiritual content o f the periods o f R efor
m ation’.151 If psychoanalytic essays on the political imaginaire
often prove disappointing, isn’t it precisely because they re
strict such ‘intertwinings’ to a few stereotyped equations o f the
unconscious? Isn’t it because they fail— paradoxically, if we
refer to Freud— to reconstruct the radical ambivalence o f
these ‘interconnections that are not isomorphisms?’152
The circulation o f cognitive, emotional, and symbolic sche
mas from one domain o f society to another assumes that these
schemas are reinterpreted by new actors, and in light o f the
new contexts in which they are deployed, thanks to one o f the
procedures o f cultural production we examined in the pre
ceding chapter. It is precisely the ambivalence and polysemy
o f these schemas that allows them to be reinterpreted and
authorises a variety o f readings. But, conversely, reinterpreta
tion produces ambivalence in turn. To be sure, it has its ‘limits’
(Um berto Eco); nevertheless, it is the foundation o f politics.
Ultimately the latter is like ‘a theatre in w hich w hat counts are
not merely people’s actions (and still less their intentions and
principles), but the effects produced by their actions, the way
in which they are understood, perceived, and interpreted’.153
This is all the more true because o f over-interpretation. This
is a recurrent characteristic, for example, o f great massacres.
Let’s kill them before they kill us! In the French tow n o f
Romans, in 1580, the G uerin faction was w orried that the
Carnival o f the Poor might demand that the wealthy return to
the town property they had unfairly acquired: ‘T he poor want
to take our property [...] and our w om en as well; they want to
kill us, they even want to eat us.’ W hen Paumier, the leader o f
the lower classes, dressed up as a Candlemas bear and tried to
take a rank and a seat that were not due him, this was im m e
diately seen not as an innocent carnival joke, but as a sign o f a
threatening personal ambition, if not a Protestant conspiracy.
W h en the St Blaise dancers carried brooms, flails, and ‘m or

tuary robes’, this was seen as p ro o f o f the intention to drive
out decent people, to beat them and bury them. T he fact that
they also cried out ‘Christian flesh for sale for six deniers!’
requires no commentary.
From then on, G uerin’s m en preferred to act first and to kill
those w hom they were convinced were imperilling not only
the established order but also their own existence.154 Eight
years earlier, according to Denis Crouzet, the neo-Platonic pro
ject o f establishing harm ony w ithin the kingdom, w hich
C atherine de M edici and Charles IX had fom ented at the cost
o f the ‘hum anistic’, selective and preventive murder o f Admiral
Coligny and his entourage, was suddenly ‘deprogram m ed’ by
the unleashing o f the Catholics’ eschatological fears, in a sit
uation in w hich ‘a primordial obsession was predominant,
namely the suspicion that always suggests another suspicion,
and so on infinitely’: ‘Imaginaires o f murders and deaths, o f un
derground, dissimulated actions seeking to weaken or destroy
the presumed adversary, both in time o f peace and in time o f
war, came and went, collided and crashed, were made and un
made, w ithout any discontinuity.’155
In their phantasmal sources, contem porary strategies o f
identity function in the same way. Thus after making a careful
enquiry into violence in South African miners’ hostels, a team
from the C entre for Conflict Analysis recom mended, as a
priority, the establishment o f a ‘collective system o f limiting
rum ours’.156 If it were feasible, this prescription would be just as
valid for the Great Lakes region: in R w anda and B urundi the
ethnic description o f political and social cleavages now operates
as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, each o f the groups involved cal
culating that its adversary has planned its exterm ination and
acting accordingly.157
These are extreme situations. Nevertheless, they rem ind us
that the phantasm o f conspiracy is a strong and universal form
o f political imaginaire. T he allusions to Daniel C ohn-B endit’s
Jewish origins made by R aym ond Marcellin, the French

minister o f the Interior, during the events o f May 1968, show
that the most stable democracies are not exem pt from such
transgressions. In July 1995 Jacques Chirac accused the same
C ohn-B endit o f organising the protest o f w hich he was the
victim w ithin the European Parliament, in response to his
decision to resume French nuclear testing!
Nonetheless, we have to recognise that certain social imagi-
naires are haunted more than others by the fear o f conspiracies,
w hether because o f their political nature— totalitarian regimes
and revolutionary episodes often develop paranoid tenden
cies— or because o f the cultural repertoires that history has
crystallised within them. In Africa, as we have seen, the obses
sion with witches’ nocturnal meetings gives a particular colour
ing to authoritarian regimes’ denunciations of subversive plotting.
As for Iran, it provides a textbook case. T he series o f foreign
invasions, Russian and British attempts to divide the coun
try between them , and the burden o f American tutelage all
strengthened in public opinion the idea o f international m ach
ination, o f w hich the trade embargo decreed by President
Clinton in May 1995 and aggravated by the approval o f the
D ’Amato bill in August 1996 was only one twist. This idea is
all the more firmly anchored in popular belief that the external
and the foreign are the source o f corruption in the framework
o f the dichotomy between the principle o f interiority (baten)
and that o f appearance (zaher ): Shaitan the tem pter has his seat
in the order o f zaher, he penetrates the baten, and, according to
pre-Islamic representations, evil resides outside the country or
on the periphery o f civilisation. U nder these conditions, the
battle against ‘cultural aggression’ launched by the Guide of
the Revolution finds an echo in the social imaginaire, even if
the majority o f Iranians shrug their shoulders w hen concrete
measures are taken to restrain this aggression, and even if the
West, the vector o f ‘corruption’, still remains a necessary detour
for acceding to knowledge and ‘being m odern’.158 We also see
77/e imaginaire, a principle o f ambivalence 179
that the identification o f the U nited States w ith the ‘Great

Satan’ in 1978—9 took on a meaning richer than the puerile
expression o f Islamic radicalism: it established itself at the
intersection o f the Iranians’ historical consciousness and their
ethical imaginaire.'159
To be completely convinced o f this, it is useful to refer to
Freud’s analysis o f dreams, and more generally, o f the ‘creative
pow er o f symbols’. Freud emphasises that ‘dreams do not allow
alternatives, and w hen two hypotheses present themselves, it
brings them both into the same association o f ideas’: ‘The con
tradictory representations are almost always expressed in the
dream by one and the same element. It seems that the word
“n o ” is unknow n in dreams. T he opposition between two
ideas, their antagonism, is expressed in dreams in a completely
characteristic way: another elem ent is transformed, after the
fact, as it were, into its contrary.’160 From this point o f view,
oneiric activity is comparable to the logic o f certain ancient
languages in w hich the same root can express opposing ideas.
This results from the effects o f the dream-work: condensation,
whereby ‘the content o f the manifest dream is smaller than
that o f the latent dream, [...] and consequently represents a
sort o f abridged translation o f the latter’; displacement,
w hereby a latent elem ent is replaced, not by one o f its own
constituent elements, but by ‘som ething more distant, there
fore by an allusion’, or by w hich the ‘psychic accent is trans
ferred from one im portant element to another, less im portant
one, so that the dream receives a different centre and appears
strange’; and finally, the transformation o f ideas into visual
images.161
In many ways these effects through w hich the individual’s
dream is elaborated are found in the elaboration o f social
imagiuaires as well. W hence the ‘absurd’ character— in the
Freudian sense o f the w ord— o f the latter. T he most im portant
may be related to the condensation effect, through w hich cer
tain latent elements are eliminated or conflated: the manifest
political imaginaires that we have encountered in the preceding
pages present themselves as arbitrary and often comical ‘abrid

ged translations’ o f social imaginaires that are certainly more
extensive, richer, and more complex.
Seen in this perspective, political analysis is necessarily a
herm eneutics whose pertinence ‘depends on the skill, the ex
perience, and the intelligence’ o f the interpreter.162 B ut before
claiming access to these deeper meanings, the interpreter has
to recognise the peculiar logic o f the effects o f the elaboration
o f manifest imaginaires, w hich will exacerbate a phenom enon
that is ‘rationally’ anodyne, treating opposites in the same way
as analogies or representing them by the same image. Thus we
can provisionally say that ‘the imaginaire is the m otor o f hist
ory’,163 whose mechanism is so often implacable. Recognising
the role played by the ‘constitutive im agination’ in political life
and the formation o f states must not, however, tem pt us to
lapse into magical idealism.
4
THE MATERIALISATION OF THE
POLITICAL IM A G IN A IR E
T he ambivalence inherent in the world o f the imaginaire also

resides in its relationship to materiality, w hich postm odern
authors have greatly neglected.1 ‘N o event in history is produ
ced by the imaginaire alone; m en and wom en always live in com
plex, intertw ining situations in w hich acts, gestures, practices
and representations mix and mutually inform each other. Even
if the sixteenth century was fearful, besieged by the idea o f
divine punishm ent, it was also a tem poral century in w hich
econom ic and political necessities, the problems o f power, and
everyday realities and rivalries led each person toward specific
actions,’ writes Arlette Farge, criticising Denis C rouzet’s analy
sis o f the St B artholom ew ’s Day Massacre.2
‘ A first limit on the interpretative power o f the imaginaire has
to do w ith the materiality o f the facts themselves. This mate
riality is not always easy to establish. ‘N o m atter how exaggera
ted they may be [the posthum ous accusations levelled against
Paum ier’s m em ory], they probably contain a grain o f truth.
But w hat is it?’ asks Em m anuel Leroy Ladurie in his book Le
Carnaval de R om ans.3 And actors and observers o f the tragedy
in R w anda continue to debate w ho shot down President
Habyarim ana’s aeroplane on April 6, 1994, and w hether the
subsequent genocide was premeditated. In a way, these con
cerns are out o f date: Paum ier died and his supporters were
decimated; the Tutsi were massacred, along w ith H utus suspec
ted o f ‘com plicity’, and then the R w andan Patriotic Front
181
182 The Materialisation o f the Political Imaginaire
took power. True or false, the victor’s narrative will structure

reality, even if those o f the vanquished remains at w ork in the
interstices o f society.4 Nonetheless, the process o f interpreta
tion or over-interpretation, following the logic o f the ‘self-
fulfilling prophecy’, has shaped the material o f facts: the nar
rative elaboration would not have been the same had the facts
been different.
In addition, interpretation itself and, more generally, acts o f
imagination are inseparable from a certain materiality. O ur
conceptions o f time and space, for example, proceed in large
part from technological innovations.5 W ith the development
o f highway and railway systems, as well as high-speed trains
(the famous TGVs), the representation o f France has changed.
And the ‘time-space compression’ characteristic o f the imagi
naire o f globalisation on the w orld-wide scale, is above all the
product o f an industrial revolution that has completely trans
formed transportation and communication.
Similarly, the ‘imaginaire o f the Terror’ during the French
R evolution was inseparable from the countless technical pro
blems raised by the guillotine.6 By stipulating on June 3,1791,
that ‘every person condem ned to death shall have his head cut
off’, the Assembly made, through the selection o f a modus
operandi, a symbolic choice: it set aside hanging, w hich was tra
ditionally considered shaming for the family o f the condem
ned person, and in a very egalitarian way gave every citizen the
right to have the honour o f going to the block. T he only re
maining question was how to do so. Two years earlier D r Guil
lotine had been ridiculed w hen he proposed that the prisoner
be decapitated by means o f ‘a simple mechanism’: he had too
crudely affronted social representations o f death. B ut using the
sword— apart from the fact that it would have been expensive,
since the instrum ent had to be o f the best quality— assumed
that the condem ned would display a courage and dignity that
could not be attributed, a priori, to comm oners. W hen it was
further taken into account that the executioner had to be
skilled and that often he was not, it was quickly seen that this
The Materialisation o f the Political Imaginaire 183
m ethod o f decapitation in no way guaranteed that capital pun

ishment, which was supposed henceforth to be equal for every
one, w ould in practice be applied in exactly the same way in
every case. Therefore it was necessary to return to the ‘simple
m echanism ’ w hich, once the irony o f 1789 had dissipated, had
the additional m erit o f corresponding to the vogue o f the
M achine.
T he guillotine soon came to incarnate another dream as
well, that o f the Revolution, which required justice to be ‘quick
as lightning’, and the ‘body politic’ to be subjected to ‘purifi
cation’. Camille Desmoulins exclaimed:
‘T h e national representation is becom ing p urer every year. [...] Doubtless
the fourth purifying election will produce in the Assembly a p erm anent
and unchanging m ajority for the friends o f freedom and equality. [...] Vice
was in the blood. P u rg in g the poison and driving it outside, through the
em igration o f D u m o u rie z and his lieutenants, has already m ore than half
saved the body politic; and the am putations o f the R evolutionary Tribunal
..., the vom iting up o f the Brissotins, rem oving th em from the C onvention,
w ill com plete the process o f giving it a healthy constitution.’
Why, then, not develop ‘accelerating’ guillotines in order to

speed up the ‘purging’, as ‘the people’ demanded? According
to an engineer in Lons-le-Saunier, ‘in order to carry out this
task m ore quickly, a water-powered guillotine should be con
structed; he knew just the place, near the new bridge at the end
o f the new street, w ith a well six feet deep to receive the
blood.’7 Technically it was also feasible to construct a machine
w ith multiple blades, so that several people could be decap
itated at once; some zealots suggested as many as thirty! But
this innovation did not seem legitimate in view o f the R ep u b
lican imaginaire. A guillotine w ith four blades constructed in
Bordeaux was n o t approved by the city’s oversight committee,
w hich found it ‘contrary to all revolutionary laws’, and ‘con
flicted w ith the law o f justice and hum anity’ because it denied
the individuality o f the condem ned. As Daniel Arasse points
out, ‘By decapitating the condem ned one by one, by making
them m ount the scaffold one by one, and by repeating for each
individual all the phases o f the execution, the guillotine also

shows that the enemy to be killed is none other than the indi
vidual w ho has chosen to follow his ow n will to the detrim ent
o f the general will.’8 The executioners now had only to show
dexterity, and this they did not lack: in an early foretaste o f the
‘compression o f time and space’ and o f the celebration o f
speed as a political quality, tw enty-one Girondins were ‘dealt
w ith in twenty-six m inutes’.
T he worship o f the sinister M achine during the Terror
attests to the fact that the political imaginaire is also realised
through material objects. For Benedict Anderson, the printing
press and the ‘administrative pilgrimage’ were the vectors o f
the ‘imagined com m unity’ o f the nation; and today, lacking
‘Little Irans’ or ‘Iran Towns’, the deterritorialised colonies o f
Iranians living in the U nited States, establishes its existence in
its diversity through the interm ediary o f its audio-visual pro
duction.9 M ore precisely, an imaginaire has to w ork in order to
survive, to reassure, to enchant. But this property depends at
least partially on its relation to a given materiality. T he failure
o f the ‘radiant future’ in the Soviet U nion or the dream o f ‘in
dustrialising industry’ in Algeria were also, and perhaps espe
cially, the results o f problems w ith overcrowded housing and
taps running dry. There are even iniaginaires that are so cala
mitous that they becom e clearly suicidal: in Cape Province, in
1856—7 the Xhosa slaughtered their flocks at the behest o f a
prophetess, and in so doing greatly facilitated the seizure o f
their land by British colonists, while in Albania Enver Hoxha
squandered his country’s meagre resources building 500,000
bunkers that were supposed to stop a jo in t invasion by ‘im peri
alists’ and ‘revisionists’.10
But if political dreams (or nightmares) have very material
consequences, it is also true that phenom ena whose materiality
is manifest occur to a decisive extent in the imaginaire, whatever
the role o f the tangible flows on w hich they are based. These
include the determ ination o f the value o f currency, globalisa
tion, the formation o f a public sphere in pluralistic democracies,
and, in some African countries, national integration and the

establishment o f a m arket econom y by standardising the rep
resentations o f the invisible from one region to another.11 The
relationship that each individual entertains w ith his ow n body
and his physiological functions is itself developed by resorting
to the social processes o f subjectivation, w hich take into ac
count the licit and the illicit, the distinguished and the vulgar.
As a result the political ethos, along w ith its qualities, is often
expressed through body language and material condensations
whose very im portance prevents it from limiting the reper
toires o f action to genres that are strictly discursive or con
ceptual. T he analysis o f several practices— hair-styles, cuisine
and clothing— will help us to explain this point.
T h e p o litical sym b o lism o f hair

Since they are traditionally an object o f intense investment on
the part o f individuals in most societies, the symbolism o f hair
styles is closely related to practices o f the political imaginaire:
‘Beard, moustache, body hair, and head hair are unexpected
actors on the social scene,’ writes Daniel R oche, w ho reminds
us o f the relationship that till the sixteenth century connected,
by opposition, long hair w ith a beardless face. Thus the beard
w orn by Olivier, the president o f the Paris Parlement in the
reign o f Francois I, shocked his colleagues, and the Church
asked its bishops to shave.12 M ore recently, in the 1960s and
1970s, long hair divided French families,'who m ight have been
consoled to learn that young Amish protestors cut their hair to
defy the authority o f their church.13
Political history is full o f similar conflicts based on hairstyle
and other legitimate problematics related to body hair. In
Florence, the entry o f giovani into the militia, that is into the
rank o f citizens, was marked by cutting their long hair, w hich
was regarded as too feminine and as exposing them to the risk
o f being raped in the event o f a defeat.14 In Russia, Peter the
Great made m en o f religion cut off their beards; since they
regarded their beards as emulating the image o f God, it seemed

to them that Peter was reducing them to the status o f animals.
But that was the price to be paid for cultural rapprochem ent
w ith Europe.15 In 1912 Chinese w ho wanted to show their
support for Sun Y at-sen’s republic cut off their braids, w hich
the M anchu conquerors had made mandatory in the seven
teenth century. And in Turkey the Kemalist revolution was
also a hairstyle revolution that sacrificed the believer’s beard,
but not w ithout establishing the trium ph o f the moustache.
M oreover, since that time the shape o f the moustache has
been a powerful emblem o f identity. In the late 1970s it
allowed various terrorist groups— the ultra-nationalist ‘Grey
W olves’, leftists and the alevi— to be immediately recognised,
the better to kill each other.16 In 1993 Tansu Ciller’s accession
to pow er led several members o f her party in the legislature to
shave off their moustaches, and the editor o f Hiirriyet, praising
this new fashion, henceforth signed his daily column w ith an
image o f himself clean-shaven. For several years Istanbul intel
lectuals, annoyed by the ‘invasion’ o f their city by hordes o f
Anatolians, expressed their disapproval by sacrificing this virile
attribute to distinguish themselves from the wealthy and osten
tatious world o f the nouveaux riches: ‘T he magonda [stinker] o f
the 1960s had a big moustache, a silk shirt unbuttoned dow n to
his navel, showing a hairy chest ornam ented w ith a gold
necklace, fringed boots, silk socks w orn under loose trousers,
and in his hand an expensive tesbih [string o f beads],’ m ocked
the caricaturist Gukhan Gurses.17 It goes w ithout saying that
the Prosperity Party’s success in the municipal elections o f 1994
and the legislative elections o f 1995 changed the situation
again, even though the new mayor o f Istanbul, M r Erdogan,
cultivated an image as an energetic, clean-shaven manager.
In fact, no contem porary political movem ent seems to have
a better articulated hair-style than Islamism, to the point that
militants are comm only called ‘the bearded ones’ and cari
catured as such in the media. Nonetheless, a more qualified
view o f this political repertoire is appropriate here as well. For
example, Nabil B eyhum has noted the differences in hair-style

that distinguished Christian militiamen from Islamist fighters
in B eirut from 1976 to 1982. T he former, w ithout being
shaven, had used razors to cut their hair very short, and usually
slicked it dow n w ith gel; in addition, they w ore whiskers. T he
latter also w ore short hair, but it was m ore unruly, and was not
slicked down; and they w ore larger whiskers.18 D o the perm u
tations o f political hair-styles found in Lebanon take on the
same form elsewhere? This is far from clear, and the complex
problem o f hair in Islamism merits m ore detailed analysis.
Since I am neither an anthropologist nor a barber, I will
confine myself to pointing out that this political genre, how
ever it may be practised in specific cases, can becom e a funda
mental dividing line in other situations. T he body then tends
to incarnate the order o f politics, and especially political sub
jectivity; as such, it becomes a central issue itself. In Iran, pro
scribing ‘decadent’ hair-styles— probably the ‘rap’ style, short
on the sides w ith a crest in the middle, adopted by some young
urban youths— is equivalent to battling ‘cultural aggression’.19
In Algeria in 1990—1 letting one’s beard grow was a means o f
showing support for the Islamic Salvation Front, w hich was
the vehicle for an ethos o f individuation and emancipation
w ith respect to patriarchal authority.20 In 1992 shaving off
on e’s beard was a mark o f prudence, given the repression o f the
state, whose forces were on the lookout for a certain kind o f
face; but it was also to incur the condem nation o f some Islam
ist preachers w ho fulminated against ‘those w ho have shaven
their beards and are therefore m ore afraid o f policem en than o f
G od’, or m ockery in one’s neighbourhood: ‘So, brother, you’ve
been using Yaxa?’*21 Persisting in wearing a beard then took
great courage, bearing witness to the attractions o f this lifestyle,
w hich is now less that o f Islamic militancy than o f a fighter in
the GIA, if we accept Luis M artinez’s analysis.22 In any case
it corresponds to a genuine civic subjectivity: thus ‘A hm ed’
* A depilatory for women.

continues to wear a little beard that causes him no end o f diffi

culties at police barricades but represents for him an act o f ‘de
fiance’ that symbolises the interiority o f his enrolm ent, both
ethical and political, under the banner o f Islam.23
A hair-style’s ability to condense the political is well illus
trated by a small Palestinian polemic. O ne day Hamas expres
sed its outrage at the fact that the Palestinian A uthority’s police
had shaved off the beards o f its im prisoned officials; in its view
this was ‘a very serious matter, worse than beatings or torture’
(sic). General Moussa Arafat seemed to agree, since he hastened
to deny the charge: ‘I am amazed to hear such rum ours; no
one w ithin the A uthority is com m itting such horrors!’24
In the political oven: the culinary polis

Similarly, culinary practices can easily becom e independent
systems o f political symbolism, through w hich the develop
m ent o f a polis takes place. B ut they tend to be more inclusive
and classificatory than conflictual.
To be sure, food is a strong ‘em blem ’ o f identity. ‘Tell me
what you eat, and I’ll tell you w ho you are,’ Brillat-Savarin
wrote in his Physiology o f Taste. For example, the propensity o f a
Muslim living in France to accept an invitation to dine w ith a
non-M uslim family, and thus to run the risk o f being served
‘uncut’ meat, w hich is ritually forbidden, will be seen as an
index o f his distance w ith respect to Islam; his categorical re
fusal will be seen as a sign o f his adherence to Islam or perhaps
o f his re-Islamisation: ‘Forget my culture, eat pork?— that I
cannot do.’25 Thus culinary practices often serve to express the
disqualification o f the O ther. T he English call the French
‘frogs’ on account o f their consum ption o f these amphibians,
the French call English rosbifs and Italians macaronis, w hile in
Iran the people o f the Plateau refer condescendingly to the
Rasti in the north as ‘fish-head eaters’, fish-heads being a ‘cold’
(sard) food that dooms them to extreme sexual indolence.26
T he quantity or quality o f the food consum ed are recurrent
Ill the political oven: the culinary polis 189
elements o f social distinction. In addition, the degree o f a

given cuisine’s differentiation reveals the overall organisation
o f a society— the existence o f a great culinary tradition going
hand in hand w ith the polarisation o f inequality and political
centralisation27— and tastes define cultural areas: ‘H ow can we
call Bali a H indu country since the use o f milk and dairy pro
ducts was never adopted there?’ complains Denys Lombard.28
Nonetheless, if food marks off the O ther (and consoles the
Self), it does not seem to be an identity-related repertoire that
is as sensitive as that of, for example, the hair-style system, espe
cially if we take into account food’s explosive potential in the
dom ain o f social protest. Food riots are a classical elem ent o f
that history: their spectre is now one o f the chief obstacles to
the liberal econom ic reforms required by the IMF, and the
thematics o f ‘food supplies’ similarly dom inated political life
in Europe up till the middle o f the nineteenth century.29 Beer
shortages can sometimes lead to serious popular unrest in a
country like C ongo.30B ut dietary pogroms are rare, even w hen
in India, for example, zealots throw dead pigs into mosques or
mistreat cows in order to arouse comm unal riots. In Russia the
role o f Jews in the vodka business was often a pretext for anti-
Semitic violence, and regulations regarding alcohol consum p
tion have been a point at w hich the battle against racial segre
gation in southern Africa has crystallised.31
O n the other hand, eating has a recognised integrating power.
Fustel de Coulanges emphasises the role o f ‘public meals’ in
the Greek polis’s worship: perform ing this rite to honour tute
lary divinities was essential to salvation, and all citizens were
expected to participate in it.32 Similarly, in the Cairo o f the
Fatimid dynasty food was one o f the most effective ways o f
transmitting the caliph’s baraka (charisma): at the N ew Year’s
banquet the caliph offered food to his guests w ith his own
hands, and during R am adan food served in the palace was dis
tributed to the people.33
As a ritual o f integration, the meal, far from being a simple
mechanism o f autom atic consensus, is an instance o f nego-
tiation, and thus o f relative indetermination. It can function as

a procedure o f mobilisation, allegiance, or reconciliation. In
the latter case, it offers, o f course, a marvellous opportunity for
treachery, and certain invitations are not accepted w ithout
misgivings. But the very com ponent o f ambivalence that pro
duces the varying behaviour o f the guests is inherent in dining,
for a meal is polysemous and accepts divergent expectations:
‘Hunger, piety, a taste for pomp and ceremony, the pleasure
o f being together under some pretext, concentrating in a short
period the small excess at one’s disposal in order to draw from
it the m axim um pleasure by using it all up at once’— this ex
plains why, according to Paul Veyne, the philanthropic ban
quet was in R o m e ‘a veritable institution, ready to enter into
all kinds o f combinations’, and o f w hich religion was ‘some
times the chief motive, and sometimes only a pretext’.34
Thus eating together is a recurrent means o f political partic
ipation in all its dynamism, complexity, and even conflictuality.
In France both the court society o f the Ancien R egim e and the
Republic were largely structured along these lines, and the
twists and turns o f the 1995 presidential campaign in France—
from the dinners for legislators concurrently organised by
Messrs Chirac and Balladur to the luncheon marking the rec
onciliation o f M r Juppe and M r Sarkozy, by way o f the estab
lishment o f the calf’s head as the symbol o f the reduction o f
the ‘social fracture’— demonstrated the persistence and influ
ence o f the culinary repertoire.35 In China as well, clientele
bonds iguanxi) are made and unmade w ith the help o f ‘heavy
meals and heavy drinking’ (dachi dahe), fundamental com po
nents o f political life whose economic cost should not be
underestimated.36 And in Turkey and Iran, socialising at the
end o f fasting during Ramadan is a crucial point in factional
and electoral battles. It allows the protagonists to position
themselves thanks to a ‘climate o f piety that precludes suspi
cion regarding the intentions o f those w ho lay out a tablecloth,
cover it w ith various dishes, and welcome all those w ho
belong to their entourage’.37
In the political oven: the culinary polis 191
T he im portant thing to understand is the performative

efficacy o f such micro-procedures. W hen the vizier al-Afdal
was killed in Cairo in 1121 after having usurped many o f the
caliph’s prerogatives, the delicate problem o f transition was
negotiated through the political stage o f the banquet. O n the
one hand, the sovereign al-Amir, restored to full power, inten
ded to assert his authority. O n the other hand, he had to ac
com m odate al-Afdal’s sons and the troops they controlled. The
feasts associated w ith the end Ram adan offered an opportunity
to m eet both o f these contradictory requirements, even though
one had to respect the proprieties o f the m ourning period that
began the same day. T he caliph invited the deceased m an’s
family to an initial private dinner, and shared a date w ith each
o f the family mem bers present. H e then put on his m ourning
clothes and presided over a second meal, at w hich the form er
vizier’s brother served as his spokesman. T hen he distributed
food to those present. T he symbolism o f the shared meal was
crystal-clear: ‘T he family o f the deceased vizier, al-Afdal,
by accepting food from the hand o f the caliph himself, relin
quished any claim to a grievance concerning al-Afdal’s death;
the caliph, on the other hand, by sharing his table w ith the
m urdered vizier’s son and brother, assured them o f their own
safety. T he other recipients o f food were both witnesses to this
“transaction” and its beneficiaries. [...] Thus in the private
banquet, the state was reconstituted; in the public banquet, this
fact was announced.’38 T he political efficacy o f the ritual was in
this case facilitated by the austere character of the meal fol
lowing the end o f R am adan fasting at the court of the Fatimid
princes, w ho were eager to draw parallels w ith the tradition of
the Prophet w ho was satisfied w ith a date or a grape.
W hile culinary practices thus attest to the role o f perform
ative mediations in political relationships, we should also assess
their latent role in relation to long-term historical devel
opments. D o n ’t they contribute, discreetly but decisively, to
‘holding together’ political societies and their ‘worlds of
m eaning’? After all, the meal is a procedure carried out from
one to three times a day; there are few as regular as that. Be
longing for the most part to the private sphere, it is a primordial
site at w hich relationships betw een the sexes are negotiated,
and where the family is transformed. But it is also increasingly
located in the public sphere, because o f the grow ing com
modification o f societies. In A u d e n Regim e France, the system
o f regrat (reselling), w hich allowed a ‘trickle-dow n transfer
from the good food eaten by the wealthy to the mediocre
food eaten by the poor’ by buying left-overs from meals ser
ved in noble and bourgeois households, and in convents and
religious communities, and reselling them in low-class eating
establishments,39 produced an extensive network o f restaurants.
The latter was subsequently one o f the key institutions o f
political socialising during the R evolution and all through the
nineteenth century. Along w ith cookbooks it led to a certain
unification o f table manners and principles o f taste.
N o m atter how quiet they are, culinary revolutions help
produce a certain cultural homogenisation that is not w ithout
political effects. In the U nited States the requirements o f the
war effort following the wo rid-wide food shortages o f 1916—
17, the experience o f mobilisation in Europe, and the role o f
dieticians gradually reduced the culinary particularisms o f im
migrant communities and the southern states, and prom oted a
diet that contained more meat and was better balanced, but to
the disadvantage o f black and red pepper, w hich the propo
nents o f culinary reform explicitly associated w ith dubious
social practices such as robbery or revolutionary agitation. T he
standardisation o f food, w hich also made possible the growing
industrialisation o f production, was a crucial part o f the A m er
ican melting pot. This logic o f unification was not, however,
w ithout ambiguities: it was able to proceed by co-opting and
making more widely popular certain dishes favoured by im m i
grant communities, such as spaghetti w ith tom ato sauce, w hich
dieticians and patriots both liked, since Italy had entered the
war on the Allied side.40 Today the increasing num ber o f
‘ethnic’ restaurants provides a background accom panim ent to
the demands for multiculturalism.
In the political oven: the culinary polis 193
Ultimately, the gastronomic sphere participates in the civic

sphere, and contributes to the latter’s realisation. In Iran, rice,
formerly the privilege o f indolent R asti because it was so ex
pensive, is now becoming the emblematic national food, thanks
to massive imports. And in this case as well, the hom ogeni
sation o f the culinary landscape is occurring through the incor
poration o f regional dishes (mahalle) such as Armenian sausage.41
In so far as these notions o f culinary citizenship and civic
cuisine are pertinent, it is im portant to pay special attention to
the globalisation o f certain habits that constitute a process that
is perhaps m ore complex than those w ho attack Coca-C ola
and other global corporations believe. Im ported models o f con
sum ption are likely to prom ote the integration o f a national
society, to repeat an observation made by Fariba Adelkhah
regarding Iran: tea in M orocco, beer in black Africa, the potato
in various European countries— all have become genuine sym
bols o f belonging to the ‘im agined com m unity’, and it suffices
to have heard, early in the m orning at the border station in
Domodossola, an Italian stridently calling an itinerant coffee
seller to realise that a recently adopted dish or drink can quickly
becom e almost a national drug. M oreover the circulation of
culinary customs facilitates, or at least indicates, cultural and later
civic reconfigurations o f identity. Thus in Europe tourist ‘pil
grimages’ (in the sense defined by Victor Turner and adopted
by Benedict A nderson in discussing ‘administrative pilgrima
ges’ in the N ew W orld42), the disappearance o f customs barriers,
and the advent o f regulation by the European C om m unity
have led to the popularisation, on the continental scale, o f habits
w ith regional or national connotations, such as the baguette,
pizza, espresso coffee, beer or feta cheese. T he production o f
cam em bert in D enm ark is ultimately a case o f vice paying
hom age to virtue that must w arm the heart o f any Frenchman
w ho is a consistent supporter o f the Maastricht treaty.
We should probably not push this line o f argument too far:
their shared love o f slivovitz has not prevented Serbs, Croats
and Bosnians from making war on each other and splintering

the Yugoslav ‘imagined com m unity’. B ut the order o f food
requires political respect, especially since it is closely linked to
the process o f subjectivation (Michel Foucault) and to the def
inition o f ‘lifestyles’ (Max W eber). In Europe, for instance,
gastronomic creativity has been a fundamental aspect o f the
‘civilisation o f manners’, o f the gradual refinement o f social
behaviour in growing segments o f the population, and o f
mastery over the body through mastery over diet.43 T he con
cept o f diet is often central to the concerns o f thinkers inter
ested in ‘reform ing’ their fellows, even though there is a wide
gap betw een the dietary preoccupations o f the ancients and
those o f a Ceau§escu. In our ow n time it also characterises the
reflexive project o f the Self prom oted by globalisation.44
W hen all is said and done, the interconnection o f the sphere
o f politics and the sphere o f food is vigorous, and it is not
w ithout reason that the novelist Lu Wenfu traces forty years o f
Chinese comm unism through the tribulations o f a gourm et.45
In my view, the suggestive power o f this relationship betw een
food and politics resides in the com bination o f four distinct
properties. Feeding oneself is a necessary physiological act,
w hich is at the same time an act o f intense pleasure whose sex-
ualisation is clear, even in pre-Freudian societies. In this respect,
it arouses passions and frustrations; it also crystallises moral
qualities whose transgression can be a source o f scandal or dis
approbation. In addition, this necessary, pleasant, and moral act
is shared: it gives rise to privileged forms o f sociability and also
represents an im portant stage in the socialisation o f children.
Finally eating, the object o f an extreme investment, is at the
same time a more banal act than, for example, the sexual one.
These four characteristics o f necessity, pleasure, sharing and
banality confer on the translation o f the culinary repertoire
into political action its singular power becom ing itself a consti
tutive principle o f the ‘politics o f the belly’, as in Africa, or at
least a m etaphor and a preferred transaction, as in China.
T h e p olitical sym b o lism o f clothing

Symbolism involving the body cannot be abstracted from its
relationship to the material culture o f the society in w hich it
functions. For example, there is no relationship to the body
that is not simultaneously a relationship to clothing. For M ar
shall Sahlins clothing ‘amounts to a very complex scheme of
cultural categories’, w hich he is probably w rong in seeing as
functioning ‘on a kind o f general syntax: a set o f rules for
declining and com bining classes o f the clothing-form so as to
formulate the cultural categories’:
T h e clothing system in particular replicates for W estern society the func
tions o f so-called totem ism . A sum ptuary m aterialisation o f the principal
co-ordinates o f person and occasion, it becom es a vast schem e o f c o m m u
nication— such as to serve as a language o f everyday life am ong people w ho
may well have n o p rio r intercourse or acquaintance. ‘M ere appearance’
m ust be one o f the m ost im p o rtan t form s o f symbolic statem ent in W estern
civilization. For it is by appearance that civilization turns the basic contra
diction o f its construction into a m iracle o f existence: a cohesive society o f
perfect strangers. B u t in the event, its cohesion depends on a coherence o f a
specific kind: on th e possibility o f apprehending others, their social co n
dition, and thereby their relation to o n e se lf‘on first glance’.46
O th er authors have shown that clothing codes are eminently

contextual and relative: they are purveyors o f ambivalence
b oth in the social dom ain and in the domain o f sexual identifi
cation.47 Ultimately the expression ‘clothing system’ is mislead
ing because it sums up under a single term both elusive and
ambivalent practices. First o f all, clothing, like any cultural phe
nom enon, involves both heritage and innovation: analysing it
implies grasping ‘in a single m ovem ent stability and change in
appearances’. M oreover, it consists in a ‘constitutive inter
tw ining o f the real and the im aginary’, being ‘a way o f con
ceiving o f the sensible’, in w hich ‘the spiritual and the material
com bine w ith special force’: ‘There, the mental becomes
bodily, the individualised body exposes the fugitive transcrip
tions o f the person, clothing brings out the underground
correspondences betw een m atter and spirit.’48 T he versatility
o f clothing makes it a preferred means for constructing and

negotiating identities: not only individual identities (just think
o f a teenager’s anxieties w hen choosing clothes!), but also col
lective ones. Clothes make the man, and political actors are
well aware o f this. In India they convey saintliness, purity, or
pollution, at the same time as it defines status.49 In the Middle
Ages it ‘designated each social category’ and was a ‘veritable
uniform ’: ‘W earing the clothing o f a class different from on e’s
own amounts to com m itting the major sin o f ambition or de
generating to a low er level.’50 In 1471 Lorenzo the M agni
ficent was still being advised to change his dress in order to
distance himself from the giovani age group and thus convince
the Holy See o f his ‘seriousness’.51 As for the military dictators
o f the tw entieth century, they often thought that it sufficed to
appear on television in a three-piece suit in order to civilise
their regimes and reassure public opinion. O ne m ight say,
again parodying the French title o f J.L. A ustin’s book H o w to
D o Things with Words, ‘Dressing is doing.’
T he performative nature o f clothing is often taken literally
by religious reformers, revolutionaries, and even traditionalists.
Thus, even in industrial societies, initiation rites generally
include a symbolism o f clothing. In Japan students start wear
ing a ‘recruitm ent suit’— invariably grey, w orn w ith a red-and-
white striped tie— as soon as they are hired, and not long ago
in France the switch from short pants to long trousers marked
boys’ yearned-for exit from childhood. Ultimately the ini
tiatory quest merges w ith the clothing quest: for example,
‘sapenrs’* in the C ongo head off on ‘an adventure’ to Paris to
buy luxury clothing, return hom e and parade around Brazza
ville as ‘Parisians’, and, after having conducted a few successful
raids, acquire the status o f ‘Greats’ ( Yaya).52
* Translator’s note Tropical dandies; sape is slang for ‘clothing’. By punning on sapeur
(sapper, demolitions expert) and on sapeur-pompicr (fireman), the expression also
invokes the imaguiaircs of the colonial military bureaucracy and subversion (to sap or
undermine morale, to sap the regime).
Tltc political symbolism o f clothing 197
In the political arena the construction o f the new man sim

ilarly requires that he dress in an appropriate way. D uring the
French R evolution the C om m ittee o f Public Safety asked the
painter Jacques-Louis David to design a national civilian uni
form, an idea that was quickly abandoned after the fall o f
Robespierre, but w hich did not exempt the Convention from
considering w hat kind o f republican dress should be assigned
to authorities, and from adopting a decree to this effect on the
basis o f a report by Abbe Gregoire: ‘T he language o f signs has a
peculiar eloquence: distinctive costumes are part o f this idiom;
they awaken ideas and sentiments analogous to their object,
especially w hen they grip the imagination by their striking
character.’53 N o t being able to impose a national uniform , rev
olutionary societies made the wearing o f the Phrygian cap and
the tricolor cockade almost obligatory: at Largentiere, in the
Ardeche, w om en had to wear the cockade ‘over the most sen
sitive spot, w hich is the heart’, and the neighbouring tow n o f
Joyeuse threatened to throw into prison any woman w ho failed
to wear ‘this emblem o f liberty’ (sic).54 Dressing in conform ity
w ith revolutionary norm s was proof o f republican virtue, even
though the repertoire tended to diversify after the end o f the
Terror, and acquired a redoubtable semiotic complexity under
the Directory. N o matter, since, in the Republicans’view, ‘dress
was not so m uch the measure o f the man as the maker o f the
m an’.55 Similarly, Mustafa Kemal completed the abolition o f
the caliphate by making it illegal to wear a fez: ‘Gentlem en, it
was necessary to abolish the fez, w hich sat enthroned on the
heads o f the nation as an emblem o f ignorance, negligence,
fanaticism, and hatred o f progress and civilisation, and to accept
in its place the hat, an article o f headgear in use throughout the
civilised world; in this way, we shall show that the Turkish
nation, in its m entality as in other respects, in no way deviates
from civilised social life.’56 In China the imposition o f Maoist
blue overalls reflected the same belief in the magical power
o f fabrics. .
As a constitutive element in processes o f identification, clo

thing is quick to unleash passions. It is an issue not only in
romantic relationships, but also in conflicts betw een parents
and children, and between adults and young people. A m ong
the W olofin Senegal, ‘to have a father is to be dressed by h im ’:
‘The child feels himself to be empowered by his father, to be
beloved by his father, w hen he is well-dressed, w hen he ima
gines other people seeing him well-dressed’, the Ortigues note;
many o f their young patients suffered precisely from being
‘badly dressed’ by their progenitors. T he symbolic pow er o f
fabric is such that a proverb says: ‘Some words w hich, if they
were new pagnes *, we would wear.’57 In France too practices o f
dress in families crystallise the inter-generational discords that
shape the personalities o f children and adolescents: wearing a
mini-skirt or, among boys, the initiatory transition from short
pants to long pants has given rise to desires, prohibitions, frus
trations, bitterness, negotiations, and tensions. Today in the West
‘training shoes are synonymous with independence and freedom;
they prove that one is freeing oneself from family supervision;
and they are also a symbol o f mobility, the confirm ation that
one can escape one’s social milieu.’58 Young Londoners’ fasci
nation with and desire to acquire nam e-brand trainers have led
to muggings, while in Philadelphia fifteen-year-old Chris
Demby was stabbed by a gang o f youths for his R eeboks.59
Clothing also materialises individuals’ sexual desire through
various cultural or social repertoires and their own biogra
phical itinerary. Occasionally it gives rise to fetishism.60 B ut this
does not mean that it loses its polysemy, and this ambivalence
adds to its emotive content. Shorts, a symbol o f the child’s de
pendent status, can become a source o f pleasure in a young adult
homosexual w ho wants to be ‘liberated’: ‘Handsome, loving
prince, 28, dreams o f a cute little brother, 18-20, girlish face,
beardless, sensual, childish, like a little boy. [...] Boy scout wel
come. Enclose photo (in shorts if possible).’61 Nonetheless, in
* Transactor’s note Colourful wax-printed fabrics, originally from Indonesia.

the W est shorts have lost most o f their erotic connotation and
as an emblem o f childhood they have been supplanted because
they are widely w orn by adults due to the popularity o f sports
wear— even if advertising continues to speak o f cheese for
‘gourmets in short pants’, Philippe Seguin m ocked the ‘bunch
o f kids in short pants’ in Alain Juppe’s governm ent, and Alain
T ouraine urged the Socialist Party to don ‘long trousers’: ‘The
Socialist Party is facing a difficult decision that cannot be made
in a few months. As the Chileans say, they have to put on
“long trousers” instead o f shorts, and they have to have the
courage to speak and act independently ,.. . ’62 O n the other
hand, shorts are still deem ed scandalous in most M uslim socie
ties, w here they are associated w ith ‘corruption’ (fesad). Thus
Algerian Islamic fundamentalists attacked Hassiba Boulmerka,
the w inner o f an Olym pic gold medal in the w om en’s 1,500
metres, for ‘running in shorts in front o f thousands o f m en’.63
T hey echoed the polemic that was unleashed for the same rea
sons against Turkish w om en athletes during the inter-w ar pe
riod.64 A nd in 1936 many parents in the holy city o f Q om ,
w ho were already upset about the prohibition on wearing the
veil issued the preceding year, w ithdrew their boys from
school because the new school uniform included ‘indecent’
short pants.65
But we should not smirk too readily at such prudishness and
w hat it reveals o f the magical thinking o f those w ho are
affected by it. In the late sixteenth century some Englishmen
could not bear actors wearing w om en’s garments on stage:
cross-dressing affected their virility and even the idea o f mas
culinity.66 Similarly the very Cartesian, secular French republic
is certain that wearing a hejab represents the subjection o f
w om en to m en and a rejection o f the law. ‘In wearing the scarf,
som ething m ore is involved than in wearing a cross or the
kippa. T he scarf is more than a religious symbol. It includes the
assertion that one must not mix, that for a M uslim secular law
does not count; the only law that counts is Islamic law. But
hum an rights often begin w ith w om en’s rights. These are two
major dangers that are in contradiction both w ith the French

national pact and w ith our republican pact’, averred Francois
Bayrou, the minister o f education.67 This conception was wisely
rejected by the Council o f State:
In itself the scarf expresses nothing, unlike signs that are by themselves or by
their historical use an incitem ent to hatred or violence. [...] T h e scarf is felt
to be an attack on w o m en ’s dignity only by way o f a w hole reconstruct on
the basis o f w hat one know s about Islamic religion or civilisation. It seems
clear, how ever ... that neither the adm inistration n o r the ju d g e can get
involved in such considerations.68
For several years political debate, academic or professional con

flicts, and legal proceedings on this issue have been all the rage
in France, revealing that the imaginaire o f clothing can elicit
passions, even in an industrial society that is supposed to be
‘disenchanted’.
Nevertheless, dress not only awakens issues o f power or
status, but also participates in the pleasure that results from self
realisation, w hen the latter is satisfying and always refers to
positive norms. The commercial value o f clothing proceeds in
part from the imaginary repertoires o f subjectivation and col
lective mobilisation that create fashions, and often make them
extremely volatile: in Mogadishu, for example, fashion follows
a weekly cycle, and the price o f fabrics sold in the market on
Thursday drops every day till the following Thursday; similarly,
in Cote d’Ivoire commemorative pagnes are the object o f fever
ish speculation.69 Practices o f dress are rites o f everyday life,
both material and symbolic, through w hich the individual
situates himself in society, and through which society is, ultima
tely, established. In this way, they also constitute a formidable
economic stake in both state-formation and nation-building.
Clothing, like the entire cultural repertoire, is instrum ental-
ised by political actors w ho use it to transmit messages o f
authority, proximity, or protest, or again to refine their style. If
Lorenzo the M agnificent’s concern was to make him self seem
older and more ‘serious’, that o f Valery Giscard d ’Estaing was
to seem young and m odern: thus in the 1960s he appeared on
77/e political symbolism o f clothing 201
television wearing a sweater. In Japan M orihiro Hosokawa

also cultivated an ‘unconventional’ style, for instance in the
way he knotted his tie. A reader o f the weekly Aera wrote:
‘W hen I saw Hosokawa on television w ith other heads o f
state, I was struck by the way he w ore his muffler, like a young
man. I had never seen a prime minister dressed in this way. H e
impressed m e very m uch.’ Zargana, a Burmese actor-political
gadfly, w ent for a walk one day wearing a stylish shirt and a
ragged longyi; everyone understood that he was m ocking the
gap betw een the military regime and the people.70 In China
students in Tiananm en Square set up a tw elve-m etre-high
portrait o f their hero, H u Yaobang, wearing a suit and tie,
opposite the official image o f M ao in his eponymous jacket:
the clothing duel betw een the tw o dead leaders summed up
the program o f the democrats. And in D ecem ber 1995, w hen
the head o f state Jiang Zem in w anted to give Taiwan a milit
ary warning, he presided over a m eeting o f C hina’s leaders in a
drab olive-green shirt that he liked to w ear w hen inspecting
the troops, rather than in a suit or the Com m unist official's
jacket.71 As for the w om en students at the University o f T ehe
ran w ho opposed the Pahlavi, even before the demand for an
‘Islamic R epublic’ began to spread, they wore veils to show
their rejection o f a regime that had tried to prohibit the hejab
in 1936 and had finally decided to tolerate it, but continued to
regard it as a symbol o f traditionalism and backwardness.72
In the end, as we have seen, the building o f a governmental
space tends to merge w ith the inculcation (or prohibition) o f a
statem ent in terms o f clothing. As early as the first half o f the
seventeenth century, long before French, Turkish, Chinese
or Iranian revolutionaries, King Friedrich Wilhelm I o f Prussia
understood the advantages to be gained from this kind o f sym
bolism as a means o f centralising and modernising his country
around a bureaucratic, parsimonious ethos. At court he wore
only the uniform o f a simple regimental com m ander in order
to express his attachm ent to the army. H e standardised and
simplified the latter’s uniforms, reducing by almost half the
quantity o f material required to make them by giving military

dress an angular style that conform ed w ith his idea o f dis
cipline. As for the rest, the Sergeant-King w ore only modest
Prussian-made clothes as a way o f prom oting his protectionist
program, which helped Prussia’s economy to ‘take off in a
spectacular fashion.73
However, these voluntaristic measures, w hich seek to unify
a political society through the m ediation o f a kind o f national
dress, soon collide w ith the harsh realities o f the ‘form ation’ o f
the state. In Zaire, for instance, the designation o f the abacost as
‘authentic’ clothing misfired, if only because the m an in the
street could never afford to buy it: tailored in Europe by Arsoni,
Fabrice or Charly, it quickly became the identity-related pre
rogative o f the regim e’s nomenklatura.74 That does not mean
that attempts to unify clothing, no m atter how incomplete, are
w ithout importance; however, they are rarely carried out in
a vacuum, entirely w ithout connection to the subterranean
processes o f ‘form ing’ the imaginaire o f clothing, and w ithout
having an effect on the latter. Thus the abacost has its origins
not only in the M ao jacket that dazzled President M obutu
during his visit to Beijing in 1973, but also in the style o f
clothing w orn in the 1960s by West Africans living in the
neighbourhoods o f Barum bu and Lingwala, in Kinshasa, in the
‘African’ dress w orn by Kwame N krum ah, in the sango o f his
rival Felix Houphouet-Boigny, or in the ‘ministerial attire’ o f
the Congolese political elite w ho came to power in Brazzaville
after the 1963 revolution.75 Finally, a quick glance is all it takes
to spot the abacost’s relationship to the safari jacket w orn by
colonial administrators and w ith the comparable outfits w orn
by their assistants and other catechists. If further evidence o f
the political continuity from the colonial era to the post-colo
nial state were required, we could provide it. And it is amusing
to see the proponents o f authenticity parading around in the
vaguely ‘tropicalised’ gear w orn by their form er masters, w hen
they are so quick to criticise the cultural alienation o f ‘W hite
N egroes’, even though at that time— and we shall return to

this— w earing a suit and tie represented a symbolic revolution
w ith regard to the detested era o f European colonialism.
State building and state form ation through the repertoire o f
clothing thus go hand in hand. T he global process o f ‘rational
ising’ societies is partly mediated by practices o f dress. The
birth o f the uniform in eighteenth-century Europe gave con
crete form to several fundamental changes w ithin the Ancien
Regime: the institutionalisation o f standing armies that equip
ped foot soldiers w ith firearms and acquired m odern artillery;
the consolidation o f the absolute monarchies, w hich defini
tively liberated themselves from the feudal nobility and raised
and paid their troops themselves; the search for a new con
nection betw een civil society and military activity; the devel
opm ent o f collective hygiene; and the creation o f a place in
w hich m en perm anently took over functions that had been
symbolically assigned to w om en.76
Friedrich W ilhelm Is devotion to the uniform should be
seen in light o f these various transformations; it was not a
simple epiphenom enon o f the enterprise o f modernisation
undertaken by the Hohenzollerns, w hich culminated in the
bloody ritual o f the First World War.77 O f course the new
military dress did not precipitate so many changes. But con
versely, we can hardly imagine the m odern state w ithout the
uniforms that were, as Daniel R oche has w ritten, ‘a way o f
domesticating violence, a tool for progress’.78 Granted, and
W eber showed that democracy itself was the child o f the
infantry and o f military discipline— o f the uniform .79 We
should nonetheless be m ore thorough, and less optimistic. The
uniform provided the symbolic framework for a general bu-
reaucratisation that is m aking itself felt in the economic
domain— certain enterprises supply their employees w ith spe
cific clothing, their managers usually comply w ith an implicit
dress code, and for a time labourers wore caps as a sign o f their
mem bership in the w orking class.80 It is also apparent in the
dom ain o f administration and public service, as well as in that
o f mass destruction: the tw o world wars were fought in uni

form, and it was uniformed SS m en w ho exterm inated the
Jews, who themselves wore uniforms.
In the final analysis, the clothing ritual incarnates a genuine
Weltanschauung. Traditionalists were not w rong in vigorously
opposing the introduction o f Western clothing into the armies
o f Persia and the O ttom an empire at the beginning o f the
nineteenth century: didn’t wearing farengi boots and scan
dalously short garments violate the com m andments o f the
Prophet, and suggest a coming conversion to Christianity?81
The political and economic revolutions that marked the nine
teenth and twentieth centuries were inseparable from revo
lutions in clothing, and were often experienced as such by
actors. T he growing symbolic autonom y o f the clothing re
gister provided a privileged stage on w hich the conflicts, com
promises, and alliances between the parties involved in social
change were woven. It constituted one o f the ‘concrete gene
tic relationships that inevitably take on their own individual
character’82 and became matrices o f the formation o f the state.
From this point o f view, it has often consisted in a pure and
simple invention o f tradition.
The clothing-related ethnogenesis o f Scottish identity in
the Highlands provides a first example. As everyone knows,
genuine Scots wear kilts and play bagpipes. However, the tradi
tional garb o f the Highlanders evolved only ‘after, and some
times long after, the U nion w ith England, against w hich it is, in
a sense, a protest’.83 In both hum an and cultural terms, western
Scotland was a colony o f Ulster, to w hich it remained con
nected till the mid eighteenth century. It did not have its own
traditions, and was part o f the Celtic cultural sphere, from
w hich it freed itself only in the late eighteenth century, thanks
to an extensive re-w riting o f history. In a second phase
Lowland Scotland, w hich was populated by Piets, Saxons and
Normans, adopted this new identity-related ideology. W earing
kilts was an innovation that occurred fortuitously in the 1730s
against this background: ‘T he kilt is a purely m odern costume,
designed and first w orn by an English Q uaker industrialist

w ho bestowed it upon the Highlanders not to preserve their
traditional way o f life but to ease its transformation: to bring
them out o f the heather and into the factory.’84 Like all other
distinctive signs o f regional identity, the governm ent in Lon
don prohibited it after the Jacobite rebellion o f 1745. W hen
the ban was lifted thirty-five years later, the wearing o f the kilt
spread again, not among the low er classes for w hom it was
originally intended but am ong the gentry and the bourgeoi
sie, thanks to the R om antic m ovem ent w hich was sweeping
through E urope and rehabilitating the lost innocence o f the
Savage and the peasant. Above all, the Highland regiments of
the British Army, w hich had been created by William Pitt the
Elder immediately after the 1745 rebellion, and which had been
exem pted from the ban on distinctive clothing, gradually adop
ted the kilt. T he Scots probably also owe to the Highland reg
iments the differentiation o f the motifs and colours that were
eventually associated with the various clans as the Romantic sensi
bility brought them back into fashion during the nineteenth
century.
After the prohibition on distinctive clothing was lifted in
1782, the kilt em erged as the symbol o f a particularism that
threatened to becom e national, though not w ithout protests by
certain scholars w ho were aware that this was fraudulent. The
military continued to play a crucial role in its diffusion, partic
ularly after the battle o f Waterloo in w hich the Highland reg
iments distinguished themselves. Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which
prepared the way for George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822,
did the rest, and the definition o f the Scottish ‘imagined com
m unity’ henceforth passed through the filter o f the Celtic m ino
rity, w hich had long been considered ‘barbarian’, and whose
identity was now embodied in a strange garment, designed more
than a century earlier by an English Quaker. Sir Walter Scott’s
son-in-law went so far as to speak o f a collective ‘hallucination’.
But, as we have amply seen, it is always at the cost o f such
illusions that cultures and identities crystallise. W hat is inter-
esting in the case o f Scotland is that the ‘hallucination’ was

related to clothing, and that it allowed a restive province to
forge a political consciousness at the same time that it was re
negotiating its relationship to the centre o f the kingdom. From
this point o f view, regional costume served simultaneously to
condense conflicts and to precipitate compromises. T he abo
lition o f the legislation regarding distinctive dress in 1782 was
celebrated in Scotland as a victory o f the Celtic tartan over
Saxon trousers. But this success was made possible only through
the British army, and it was systematised by the m odem textile
industry, w hich marketed the kilt w ith the cultural guarantee
o f the Highland Society o f London and the political approval
o f Q ueen Victoria.85
In its ambivalence the history o f the kilt is symbolic. It is also
the history o f the N orth African fez, w hich the Sublime Porte
imposed on its army in 1828, despite traditionalists’ reserva
tions, and w hich in a few decades became the hated or beloved
symbol o f the very tradition that Mustafa Kemal attacked.86
Similarly, in Java, the rulers and the new elites wavered between
the autochthonous style (earn fa w i) and the D utch style (cara
Walandt), and this hesitation became one o f the matrices o f the
idea o f an Indonesian nation from the nineteenth century
on, by reifying a local tradition and appropriating elements o f
European m odernity; in other words, it was one o f the ways in
w hich the colonial nationalism discussed by A nderson was
imagined.87
The political autonomisation o f clothing as a point where
political battles crystallise, as a site where compromises between
the protagonists in these battles are negotiated, and as a major
locus o f social innovation, cannot be understood unless we
keep in m ind its close relationship w ith the process o f subjecti-
vation. Clothing materialises the more or less conscious claim
to a lifestyle, w ith its aesthetics, its values, its normative idea o f
the polish moral economy, and thus, in short, its relationship
to politics. T he sartorial im agination then frees itself in turn
and becomes an issue in its own right in confrontations or
conciliations: the ‘social drama’ becomes a clothing drama.

A similar reduction occurs even m ore easily if it is based on a
unique history or econom y that emphasises the role o f cloth
ing in society.
This was the case in India, whose textile industry was one o f
the most flourishing in the world, where clothing systems were
at the heart o f the caste system, and where a ‘controlled diver
sity o f styles’, rather than the prom otion o f uniforms showed
the grandeur o f the M ughal empire.88 W ith the help o f colo
nisation and the industrial revolution, British firms established
themselves in the Indian market, and the cause o f indigenous
producers ruined by imports became the nationalists’ key theme
from the turn o f the century onward. T he process was m uch
m ore complex, however, than official historiography makes it
seem. Indian consum ers’ fascination w ith foreign textiles was
initially a recognition o f their convenience and quality, even
w ith regard to certain autochthonous values— they were re
puted to be easier to take care of, ‘purer’— and it also reg
istered an equivocal form o f adhesion to the new Raj, w hich
was also found in other domains, for example in the course o f
the transform ation o f religious philanthropy into charitable
w ork in the Victorian m anner.89 In fact, the princely rulers o f
the sub-continent had adopted Western dress in the early
eighteenth century, w ithout, however, neglecting the alter
natives on offer in other Asian courts or the Sublime Porte:
extroversion in clothing provided them w ith precious sources
o f prestige. Later, European or neo-European clothing con
tinued to offer the R a j’s elites a w hole range o f accessories that
conferred a specific appearance on their strategies and social
practices: drinkers and meat-eaters wore trousers, lawyers and
journalists adopted English clothing rituals, m odernist Sunni
Muslims tem pered their W estern dress by sporting Turkish
headgear, while their Shia counterparts wore hats like those
favoured by Persian reformers.
W hen Bengali nationalists made the defence o f local
industry their chief objective during the Swadeshi (lit. ‘o f our
ow n country’) campaign o f 1905—8, they situated themselves

on this terrain o f subjectivation and sought to invert the
imaginary register that had gradually legitimised im ported
textiles. Domestic weaving was praised as a symbol o f the
spiritual and moral rebirth o f India: ‘W e must be swadeshi in all
things, in our thoughts, and in our educational m ethods and
developm ent.’90 Boycotts and campaigns to destroy im ported
cloth were launched, especially in Bengal, during the protest
m ovem ent against the partition o f the province; the protesters
bathed in the Ganges, put on Indian clothes, and tied around
the wrists o f other protesters bracelets traditionally symbolis
ing the ties betw een siblings, and that were now supposed to
represent national brotherhood. Because it cost more, locally
made clothing was associated by figures like Sri A urobindo
w ith a regenerative sacrifice on the part o f both the individual
and the nation. Singers, actors and preachers w orked to combat
the prejudices, suggesting that im ported textiles were purer
than local products, and village artists sought to associate the
latter with images o f maternity. It is well know n that Gandhi
did a great deal to resituate wearing Indian garments in the
repertoire o f purity, seeing in hom e weaving a veritable prayer
(mantra), w ithout bothering himself w ith the econom ic con
tradictions involved in this view.
In a very different historical and cultural context, clothing
practices in sub-Saharan Africa illustrate well the same ability
to condense the subtle interplay o f conflict and compromise
between social actors, and to embody the process o f subject-
ivating them and o f being a major purveyor o f modernity. As
in India, the symbolisms o f clothing (but also those o f nudity)
played a crucial role in delimiting power and dependency. The
ostentatious display o f rare goods, and especially o f jewellry,
was a ‘barom eter o f success and influence’91 that manifested the
status o f the great. In this respect, clothing could also be per
ceived as a representation and an extension o f the person whose
achievements it expressed.92 C ontrary to a com m on view, it
was thus the object o f clearly individual practices and creations
that were docum ented in late nineteenth- and early tw entieth-
century photographs.93 Because o f its value, clothing might

also serve as a currency o f exchange.94
But— in fundamental contrast w ith respect to India, w hich
was, in the late seventeenth century, the w orld’s leading ex
porter o f textiles— production by African craftsmen was limited
and vulnerable, irrespective o f its aesthetic merits. In the Congo
basin, for instance, notables seem to have abandoned raffia for
European or Indian fabrics as early as the mid eighteenth
century, and imports rapidly increased.95
Even more than in Asia, perhaps, clothing extraversion was a
crucial resource in autochthonous political battles, in accord
w ith the logic o f the reinvention o f difference inherent in
globalisation: ‘patterns from w ithout, meaning from w ithin’, as
Christraud Geary sums it up in speaking about the adoption,
and later abandonm ent, o f G erm an military style by the king
o f Bam um (in western Kamerun, then under Germ an control)
in the early tw entieth century.96 T he most spectacular expres
sion o f the repertoire o f ostentatious rivalry to w hich the
powerful became addicted was the multiplication o f cere
monial rituals that aroused astonishment and condescension in
European observers. At the end o f the nineteenth century the
Marquis de Com piegne described precisely the refinement o f
dress o f the M pongw e grand moude (high society) along the
coast o f Gabon, and recalled what Griffon du Bellay had
w ritten: ‘Every day for almost six weeks [King Denis] was able
to appear to his amazed subjects in a different costume, each
m ore brilliant than the last: one day dressed as a French general,
the next as a marquis in Moliere, and then as an English admiral,
and always wearing a wig.’97 Similarly, in Madagascar the M erina
court and high society developed an extraordinarily sophis
ticated and controlled ‘theatre o f pow er’,98 during which
corteges and masked balls dramatised the issues involved in the
m odernisation and Christianisation o f the kingdom, using
numerous Western, Creole, and Arab disguises:
A n u m b er o f m eanings are invested in such displays: they are defiant
displays directed tow ard foreigners, and intended to show that Malagasy
p ow er is capable o f assimilating the decorum on w hich they pride th em

selves and integrating it into its ow n decorum . T h ey are also com petitive
displays on the part o f the tw o great rival families (hova), flaunting their
wealth, and exhibiting the latest gifts m ade them by the king. Finally, they
are ail outlet for the im agination o f a high society restricted by all sorts o f
interdictions and constantly subject to royal w him s, w hich are sources o f
both life and death. K ept on a leash, but incited to engage in the game, the
urban bourgeoisie invests and dissipates in the diversions o f disguise its
concern w ith regard to the political situation and its implicit wish to see the
w hole society ch an g e."
Thus it was that the dress o f pages and royal favourites in the
European Middle Ages was used to conceive m odernity in the
Indian Ocean!100 Viewed in this way, the presentation o f
Lohengrin’s helmet to the Chagga chief takes on a significantly
richer m eaning than might at first have been supposed. In
itself, it symbolises the immense labour o f recom position that
was carried out during colonialism under the cover o f clothing
practices. This inevitably involved numerous conflicts over the
order o f clothing that set not only the colonised against the
colonisers, but also the colonised against each other, in relation
to their aspirations, interests and values. T he attitude o f the
Europeans was itself quite confused, in addition to the fact that
their views varied from the administrators to the missionaries
and from one colonial or evangelising tradition to another.
T heir ultimate objective was to ‘civilise’ African societies, and
this involved, in one way or another, making them wear ‘re
spectable’ Western clothes. It was also im portant to preserve
their ‘culture’, if only in order to keep the natives in their place.
The register o f clothing was admirably suited to such vari
ations in ambivalence, it being understood that Africans did
not lag behind from this point o f view, and continued to
adhere to the cultural codes o f those against w hom they were
fighting w ith increasing alacrity.
Thus wearing trousers or a pagne came to stylise the tri
angular relationship among the necessities o f ‘colonial devel
opm ent’, the new autochthonous elites’ strategies o f social
emancipation and the conservatism o f the native establishment.
As usual, B ruce Berman and John Lonsdale have offered a

good account o f the terms o f the debate as it occurred in
Kenya: ‘T he role o f the administration was to guide the Afri
can along the road to a higher civilisation, while preserving
the organic integrity o f society. [...] T he African politicians,
the m en in trousers, interposed themselves betw een the
administrator and “his people”, the m en in pagnes.’m B ut the
‘m en in trousers’, w hether officials o f associations or simple
migrant workers, w ere well aware that in their native villages
they had to w ear blankets appropriate to com m on people if
they w anted to avoid open confrontation w ith their nota
bles.102 These tensions w ere particularly strong in the Christian
churches. At a very early stage converts were designated as
‘clothing people’ because they adopted European modes of
dress. B ut the missionaries themselves generally opposed the
craze for W estern fashions, lam enting that ‘our religion should
consist in large part in wearing a pair o f trousers’.103 In Frere-
tow n, Kenya, the C hurch Missionary Society discouraged the
w earing o f trousers.104 A nd in Tanganyika the Universities
Mission to C entral Africa’s battle against the Beni dance
m ovem ent, w hich began to spread from the Swahili-speaking
coast to the interior in the 1890s, was focused on this issue.
According to the missionaries, w ho sought to prom ote a nativ-
ist pastoral vision, it was the same ‘inferiority com plex’ that
drove Africans to adopt the customs o f the Swahili-speaking
coast and colonising powers, w hether in the form o f dance
steps or long trousers. T he latter, according to the bishop o f
Masasi, V incent Lucas, were nothing less than a forerunner o f
Bolshevism. According to testimony collected by Terence
R anger in this diocese, the dance society had nothing to do
w ith any C om m unist organisation, o f course, and its prohi
bition by Lucas is to be explained simply by the fact that ‘the
priests did not w ant the m en to w ear trousers’.105 Even shorts
w ere disapproved o f by the missionaries, although they were
com m only w orn on the plantations and places o f work, and
w ere eventually adopted in schools, albeit reluctantly, as late as
the 1930s, students in Chidya, Tanganyika, still had to threaten

to rebel to get Vincent' Lucas to allow them to wear trousers
rather than the old-fashioned shuka, w hich was supposed to
express their Africanness.106
In these battles, which they could not win, churchm en
received a sympathetic hearing from autochthonous notables
w ho linked lack o f discipline and even depravity am ong young
men and w om en w ith their new ways o f dressing.107 Thus it is
hardly surprising that these symbolic systems later became one
o f the dividing lines between nationalist movements and col
laboration w ith the colonial powers. If in 1940 the activism o f
a small group o f Portuguese and m estizo students at the sec
ondary school in Nova Lisboa was described as a ‘rebellion o f
the short pants’ in order to minimise its importance, the mere
fact o f being calcinhas* that is dressed in the European style, led
a num ber o f Angolans to be killed in Malanga tw enty-one
years later during the repression o f the revolt o f April 1961.108
In French Equatorial Africa, there was similar suspicion re
garding ‘advanced’ people, some o f w hom were supposed to
be ‘crazy about terylene trousers’.109 In 1939, in Cam eroon,
Paul Soppo Prisot caused a scandal by trying to jo in the army
to fight against Hitler, ‘wearing the colonists’ combat boots and
helmet, and not the native colonial infantrym en’s uniform ’.110
Wearing shoes provided another bone of contention between
the new African elites and the coloniser. In Kenya, for instance,
wearing shoes was long prohibited inside missionary buildings,
and in Congo-Brazzaville servants, night watchm en and also
native colonial infantrymen and policemen had to go barefoot.
In 1936 a bitter controversy even arose betw een African foot
ball teams and the French administration, w hich wanted to
continue to ban the wearing o f football boots.111 Grafting itself
on to already overloaded clothing imagitiaires, this kind o f dis-
* From cal(ao, trouser.

t A Duala notable who became president of the Territorial Assembly after the
Second World War.
crim ination probably helped make wearing European clo

thing even m ore desirable. M oreover, far from forbidding the
adoption o f European clothing, in some ways colonisation
made it easier while simultaneously implementing a Malthusian
culturalism that was opposed to Africans wearing such clothing.
In any event, the facts are clear: the constant increase in
imports, even if they consisted o f second-hand clothing, m ul
tiplied the possibilities o f extraversion in this domain and Afri
cans became massively involved in clothing, as borne out by
the often high proportion o f the family budget devoted to this
expense.112 It is also indicated by the recurrence o f social move
ments that emphasised dress, in particular in the club scene.
T he ‘Societe des ambianceurs et de personnes elegantes’ (SAPE) in
the Bakongo quarter o f Brazzaville (see Justin-Daniel Gan-
doulou’s fine study o f this group) is not an isolated case. M ore
over, in the C ongo itself it was preceded by clubs— the Existos,
Cabaret, Simple and Good, the Club o f Six— that were also
w orshipping elegance during the 1960s, once again to the
great dismay o f the Catholic C hurch.113 M ore or less every
w here on the continent, many associations were devoted for
social reasons to dressing well or wearing a certain category o f
clothing— in Leopoldville, for instance, members o f the May
Gul club m et on Saturdays, drinking beer, wearing shirts over
their trousers, w ithout ties and barefoot. O r they pursued
activities directly connected w ith these practices, on the model
o f Beni dance groups in East Africa, Kalela dance groups in
northern Rhodesia, Tchiloli theatre in Sao Tome, or Hawka
possession cults in Niger, w hich adopted the repertoire o f the
uniforms w orn by the colonial army and administration.114
Above all, and in a m ore diffuse way, the concern for elegance
characterised most o f the W estern-type social relationships
that gradually spread (including those w ith religious pretexts—
church services were a significant occasion for sartorial display).115
These m ight consist o f simply walking around, as in the case o f
turn-of-the-century Brazzaville, described by Gaston B outel-
lier, w hich was subsequently systematised by ‘sapeurs’.Ub
‘Clothes do not make the man,’ comm itted, dejected intel

lectuals complained, dismayed to witness such excessive and
unproductive expense, echoing the Catholic press and the
colonial administration, although for different reasons. They
also saw in this development a sort o f escapism detrim ental to
social solidarity, to the emancipation o f Africans and eventually
to the nationalist struggle.117 In doing so, they were doubly
mistaken: clothes do make the man, and it is w orth noting that
some initiation rituals have adopted Western clothing reper
toires. A m ong the Luo o f Kenya, during the ‘festival o f new
clothes’ that marked the symbolic transformation o f the child
into an adult, as early as the 1930s, children were no longer
given an animal skin but rather a shirt and a pair o f shorts or
trousers. Similarly, among the Soninke in Mali, a ‘cerem ony o f
putting on trousers’ theoretically put the adolescent on an
equal footing w ith his father.118
It must be acknowledged that European dress is often con
ceived as a way o f achieving plenitude. Overtly borrow ing
Western genres, it confers social respect on the wearer, is a
condition o f entrance into the public sphere, and provides
intense satisfaction. ‘I feel so good w hen I’ve got on top-of-
the-range clothes that nothing else exists for me. I’m on cloud
nine. T hen I can go places where I don’t usually go. I can walk
a very long way, just to be seen. It’s as if I were soaring above
the whole universe. In general I go to public places because I
want to please, to be seen: bars w here there is dancing, cafes,
the main avenues and intersections etc.,’ confesses a sapeur
w ithout concealing the fact that his clothing guarantees that
girls will be attracted to him as bees to honey.119
In Abidjan a boy’s family begins to train him in ‘elegance’ at
a very young age, and later the teenager interiorises ‘elegance’
as ‘an imperative practice’ that ‘appears to him in the form o f
requirements’.120 A young declasse in secondary school reports
that if a student does not acquire new clothes, other students
‘will gradually exclude him from the group. T hey form groups
in relation to taste. For example, there is a group that likes to go
dancing; they dance well, in great clothes. T o get into this

group, even if you live in the neighbourhood, you have to
dance well and you have to dress well. There are other groups
that like to talk, and then clothes are also involved. Each
group has a certain idea about clothes.’ R eady-to-w ear cloth
ing is more valuable than tailored, and should be bought abroad
if possible. Even w hen imitated by local tailors, the style is un
mistakably W estern: ‘Am erican’, ‘Italian’, ‘disco’ or ‘reggae’.
‘Dressing w ell’ (bien friuguer) is particularly indispensable for
the great priority o f social life, seducing w om en: ‘In C ote
d ’Ivoire, it is very rare for a girl to fall in love w ith a boy if he
has neither m oney nor elegance,’ another boy notes. T here is
also a place for m ore sentimental relationships. C urrent voca
bulary distinguishes betw een tw o roles for male lovers: the
grotau, w ho seduces by means o f his social position, and the
genitau, the ‘soul m ate’. But elegance is required o f ‘little char
m ers’ as well as o f ‘big guys’. Elegance is a classic marker o f
social status that makes it possible to know immediately w ho is
who: ‘W e ourselves create classes by means of our gear,’ points
out a young resident o f Abidjan. But since a class is a ‘com
m unity’,121 clothing is at the same time a principle ofsubjectiv-
ation, a producer o f a lifestyle, that is, an ethos.
O n the other hand, however, it is not clear that these kinds
o f sartorial practices lead us as far from politics as some com
m itted intellectuals or conservative intellectuals fear. After all,
in Congo-Brazzaville the Jeunesse du m ouvem ent national de
la revolution (J M N R , a youth organisation connected w ith
the new regime that emerged from the 1963 revolution),
mobilised against lineage and the post-colonial state ‘virtually
all’ young people betw een the ages o f fourteen and thirty,
fighting as well on the sartorial front.122 In some ways the
m ovem ent inserted itself into the range o f clothing-related
mobilisations that stretches from the N ew Year’s Day parade
described by Gaston Boutellier to the Existos and ‘sapeurs\
A nd we must not forget also the pronounced taste for various
trinkets o f W estern m odernity manifested by young fighters in
Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone: their wars are to some

extent a kind o f aggressive form o f rural exodus whose style is
determined not only by Kalashnikovs and ‘technicals’ (pick
up trucks m ounted w ith large-calibre m achine-guns or anti
aircraft guns) but also by w om en’s wigs and sunglasses.123
This is not the place to discuss at length the hidden political
meanings o f these practices, as some people have sought to do
for the sapeurs. Thankfully, the playful portion o f aesthetics
and pleasure that constitutes their specificity seems irreducible.
But since for a long time the moral authorities o f traditional
societies, colonial regimes and Christian churches allowed
young people and w om en to engage in such practices in only a
very limited way, in themselves they were and remain an
im portant political issue. In a historical and cultural situation in
w hich the art o f dress and ornam entation was equalled only by
the control over it by those w ho held power, and in w hich it
represented a symbolic resource o f great importance, the colo
nial encounter implied an immense revolution in clothing that
allowed those in inferior positions— young people, w om en—
to elude a num ber o f prohibitions and to appropriate for their
own advantage the culture o f extraversion. This was one o f the
ways in w hich the European occupation was legitimised. It
goes w ithout saying that the traditional elites did not remain
passive w ith regard to this threat o f a symbolic deregulation
that they had been facing for at least a century: their prosperity
allowed them to maintain, here and there, at least for a time,
their m onopoly on chic, as was the case for the Creoles in
Sierra Leone and the Americo-Liberians. N o r should we
forget the regions o f sub-Saharan Africa on w hich Islam im
posed different clothing-related political problematics. These
involved either another textile genre o f social ascent or by
providing the colonising power w ith ready-to-w ear clothing
intended for the docile, collaborating native: thus we have the
Zanzibar style beloved by the missions and the British adm in
istration in East Africa.124 But, on the whole, we can say that
the novi homines w ho directly benefited from the ‘second
colonial occupation’ in the 1930s, led the nationalist m ove

ments in the 1950s, and eventually took pow er w hen their
countries gained independence, pursued this brilliant political
itinerary in trousers, and then in neo-Safari jackets, and finally
in a suit and tie, only to be supplanted in some cases by milit
ary m en in richly coloured and brocaded uniforms.
T he ‘im ported state’125 was grafted onto black Africa largely
through the m ediation o f clothing styles. However, this par
ticular manifestation o f globalisation, as one might expect,
continues to be accompanied by the reinvention o f difference:
it is also through the m ediation o f clothing that Africans have
negotiated on a day-to-day basis their relationship w ith the
West. In fact, matters have not always been as distinct as the
Kenyan conflict betw een trousers and pagnes suggests. M ost
people refused to choose so categorically betw een the two
‘looks’, and com bined them as they saw fit.126 T he fertile line
o f the colonial administration’s neo-safari jackets, right down
to its ‘tropicalised’ offspring, the abacost, is the direct result o f
such a creative synthesis. Thus the ‘outfit’ (complet) favoured by
the ‘big m en in C ote d ’Ivoire:
[This outfit] consists o f a shirt and trousers, bo th cut to m easure from the
same light cloth o f a neutral colour (tobacco, blue, som etim es grey). T he
straight, n o n -fitted, short-sleeved shirt falls below the waist; the buttons do
n o t look exactly like those o f an ordinary shirt: there are fewer o f them , and
they are larger in diam eter; the form o f the lapel, the possible addition o f
square outside pockets and the choice o f a gabardine fabric m ake it look
even m ore like a shirt-jacket. A n outfit that remains foreign to rapid chan
ges in fashion, and com m only w o rn by salaried employees (especially in
offices), this ‘o u tfit’ is w o rn w ith n either tie n o r coat. O n e m ight think that
such a un ifo rm m ig h t lead em inent governm ent figures to be confused
w ith subordinate officials? In reality, the austere sim plicity o f the m odel
makes possible a set o f distinctions through the quality o f the cut, the style,
and the m aterials; as always in C o te d ’Ivoire, social disproportions are
n e ith e r dissimulated n o r treated euphemistically. W hatever the indices that
distinguish the ‘o u tfit’ o f a ‘big guy’, this city-dw eller’s clothing is African,
and it is virtually the only African article o f clothing w o rn in public by the
d om inant groups; in fact, there are very few occasions (funerals, various
rituals) rep o rted in the press and on television on w h ich the political class
adopts traditional dress.127
To analyse the subtle equilibriums w hich are at the heart o f the

political system in C ote d’Ivoire, Em m anuel Terray has used
the allegory o f the veranda and air-conditioning.128 To the ex
tent that these two poles correspond in theory to traditional
dress and the suit and tie, the ‘outfit’ provides a symbolic
mediation betw een the two. Moreover, in the middle classes it
coexists w ith other styles that apportion the dose o f African-
ness differently: the bubus that copy or modernise traditional
forms while ‘detribalising’ or ‘deconfessionalising’ them , and
the ‘ensembles’ composed o f trousers and an ample tunic, in
bright colours and made to order in grasscloth, batik, indigo, or
English embroidery.129
The fact that clothing practices have been central to Afri
cans’ appropriation o f the state as well as to the— at least
symbolic— social revolution that they have been undergoing
for more than a century and the ways in w hich they are nego
tiating the broad curve o f globalisation, together explain the
persistent bitterness o f political conflicts in the domain o f dress.
These are usually limited and anecdotal clashes that nonetheess
remind us o f the emotive content o f this register. O ne sub
prefect, a recent graduate in administration, undertook the
Sisyphean task o f disciplining the peasants and m aking them
observe elementary rules o f modesty:
INTERNAL MEMO
to all neighbourhood heads a n d officials o f neighbourhood watch com m ittees

in L o u m
It has com e to my attention that m any individuals, both m en and w om en,

have acquired the deplorable habit o f bathing un d er the open skies in
certain areas o f the marshlands frequented by the public, w ith o u t taking
care to cover themselves w ith a bathing suit or even a simple pair o f u n d e r
shorts.
A m ong those w h o have often been seen naked are m arried w om en
bathing at the same tim e as unknow n young people from various neigh
bourhoods, thus shamelessly exposing their nudity to every passer-by.
T his practice, w hich seems to be a very old one in the district, n o t only
has unfortunate repercussions on the h o n o u r o f certain respectable m arried
w o m e n o f L O U M , b u t in addition dangerously corrupts o u r young
people, w h o m it introduces at an early age to debauchery.
For this reason, it is strictly forbidden th ro u g h o u t the area o f L O U M to
bath in public w ith o u t a bathing suit or undershorts. Violators o f this rule
will im m ediately receive a sum m ons to present themselves to be sanc
tioned in accord w ith the provisions o f article 263 o f the Federal Penal
C o d e regarding offences against public m odesty.
All n eig h b o u rh o o d heads and all officials o f n eighbourhood w atch com
m ittees are therefore requested to see to it that this m em o is w idely dis
tributed, and n o t to hesitate to report violators should the occasion arise.
Police brigade com m anders in L O U M and N Y O B E are entrusted, each
in his o w n area, w ith the strict application o f the present internal m e m o .130
In Natal Inkatha militiamen killed w om en w ho wore trousers

and boys w earing training shoes because ‘these are symbols o f
modernity and anything modern is associated with the A N C ’.131
Soldiers in C had attacked a trader, asking him ‘w hether I was
unaware that throughout the world, only the authorities wore
trousers and headgear, and that com m on people didn’t have
the right to do so’.132 President M obutu, w ho wanted to halt
the social advancement o f w om en, put it this way:
‘This inclusion o f w om en, we w ant it at all levels [...]. W e w ant to re
cognise that the Z airian m am a has the rights that are conferred on h e r as an
equal partn er w ith m en. B ut o f course w hen all is said and done in every
family there will always be a boss. A nd lacking evidence to the contrary, the
boss, in o u r society, is the one w h o wears the pants. O u r w om en citizens
have to understand that, and accept it w ith a smile and revolutionary
submission.’133
Sartorial confrontations can gather great m om entum , becom

ing a ‘total social phenom enon’ (Marcel Mauss). We will give
only one example, but a famous one: that o f Zaire. W hen in
1990 President M obutu had to resign him self to the estab
lishm ent o f a m ulti-party system, he understood that merely
lifting the de facto prohibition on wearing a suit and tie would
make his thaw seem more credible:
‘In the political context previously described, we have established a national
costum e such as exists in m any o th er countries. In o u r society, this is called
the abacost. H ow ever, although it will continue to be the national costum e, I
believe that in this dom ain as well each Zairean can exercise his o w n free
choice. Exercising m ine, I should explain that you will not see m e in a tie;
I m ade m y choice in February 1972. I am very com fortable being a Z ai
rean nationalist.’
For a decade, the militants in the opposition party, T he U nion

for Democracy and Social Progress, defied the regime by occa
sionally wearing ties or European suits.134 But M o b u tu ’s April
24 speech was followed by an unprecedented clothing m obili
sation that gave the masses in the country’s principal cities a
rather surrealistic outdated look: everyone dug out old, w orn
clothes from the 1960s to celebrate the return o f democracy, or
at least the end o f the dictatorship. The latter, however, quickly
recovered. Its henchm en, w hen they w eren’t ransacking the
offices o f opposition newspapers, attacked people in the street
wearing suits, w ho were immediately assumed to be connec
ted with the hated UDPS. M oreover television presenters at
Tele-Zaire were forbidden to wear a tie on screen, even though
one o f the president’s men, a form er head o f the secret service,
tried to be reassuring: ‘I sometimes wear a tie because I want to
show that the president’s decision is sincere and must first be
given concrete form by his associates. T he tie is not a symbol
that belongs to the opposition, after all!’135 T he Kasaians o f the
Shaba region understood: to m ock Nguza Karl i Bond, w ho
had once again betrayed the opposition, they put ties on dogs,
called them by his name, and walked them about.136 In O cto
ber 1994, the country was rocked to its heels w hen, for the first
time in twenty years, President M obutu appeared on television
wearing, instead o f an abacost, an open-collared shirt w ith a
scarf.137 The ambivalence o f the ‘democratic transition’ in Zaire
was clothing-related. The French R evolution ended in similar
confusion produced by the desire for revenge felt by the
incroyables and the muscadins, the dandies w ho w ent about the
streets o f Paris after the fall o f Robespierre, shouting ‘P ut your
knee-breeches back on!’, and also by the quarrel betw een the
proponents o f trousers and o f knee-breeches at the turn o f the
nineteenth century.
As a final example o f the symbolic power o f clothing as an

‘abridged translation’ (Freud) o f politics, we may cite a case in
w hich social drama tends to merge w ith a drama o f clothing:
namely in the Islamic world. T he main thread o f the plot is, o f
course, w om en w earing the veil, although m en wearing shorts,
a kainis (shirt) or a tie also constitute significant themes. This
is a complicated plot full o f dramatic reversals, for not all the
characters in the play agree on how it should end. B ut ‘Islamic
culture’ will not w rite the script. Consider the following. For
Ali Shariati ‘the veil is a chain that holds our w om en prisoner
and humiliates them ’. However, for another inspirer o f the
Iranian revolution, Nawab-Safavi, the libido is ‘the primary
m otor o f psychic life’; the frenetic search for satisfaction weak
ens the m an’s nervous system; the sexually exciting parts o f the
w om an’s body distract him, keep his intellect from functioning
properly, and hinder him from fulfilling his social responsi
bilities: thus the veil is necessary, and should expose to others
only the face; a w om an w ithout a veil is as if naked, she is syn
onymous w ith ‘moral perversion’ and ‘social degeneracy’.138
Thus two em inent thinkers w ith contrary opinions both
appeal to Islam, and a single principle— encouraged or rejec
ted— is interpreted in various ways: ‘U nanim ity concerning
the principle o f “the face and the hands”* does not prevent
there from being [...] a real multiplicity o f forms o f the hejdb.
These forms are w om en’s responsibility, and [...] they must see
to it themselves that the principle is applied, on the basis o f
their ow n interpretation o f the verses in the Koran and their
ideological demands,’ writes Fariba Adelkhah concerning Iran,
emphasising that ‘this variety o f the forms o f the hejab’ is based
‘on relatively diverse opinions’.139
* Some members o f the clergy insisted that women must cover their faces and
hands, as well as their bodies and hair. This debate was largely settled in Iran in the
nineteenth century by Ayatollah Ansari, Ayatollah Khomeini s official mentor, who
decreed the ‘principle of vajh-o kaffeyn’ (literally, ‘the face and the hands’), implying
that the face and hands could remain uncovered.
W omen, and especially militant Islamic w omen, thus have to

choose between the traditional chador (a piece o f cloth, gen
erally black, that covers the body from head to foot, open in
the front, and that has to be held closed w ith the hands), the
rnaqna’eh, a sort o f cowl that falls over the shoulders as far as the
elbow, and that is now recognised as correct attire in gov
ernm ent offices, or the Islamic mantle, a long garm ent w orn
over pants and accompanied by a scarf o f varying colour.
W omen make their choices in relation not only to their tastes
and convictions, but also to circumstances. For example, a
woman may don a black chador to enter a sanctuary, a coloured
chador to move about inside, or a m aqna’eh to drive in town,
carry a child or do errands. Moreover, the form o f the hejab has
changed over the years o f the Islamic R epublic’s existence: in
the early days o f the revolution, it often consisted o f a scarf that
was knotted under the chin and did not hide the shoulders, a
loose blouse that fell over a skirt or pants w ithout hiding the
figure, and heavy tights— an outfit that would later be con
sidered unacceptable. In other words, the principle o f the veil,
in its material expression, has been continually adapted at the
level o f individual wearers as well as at that o f society at large;
many Islamic w om en are abandoning the chador, considered
too traditional to bear witness to their com m itm ent, or too
inconvenient to be compatible with an active life, or too easily
soiled. And in large cities, how strictly the hejab is arranged is a
good indication of the political pressure exerted at a given
m om ent by the Iranian government, through the m edium o f
the police.
T he plural interpretation o f the veil gives rise to conflicts '
and has provided a focal point for political contradictions
w ithin Muslim societies. W earing it or prohibiting it in schools
and universities has led to intense administrative and judicial
battles in Turkey; in Algeria a professor o f theology was killed
by the GIA to punish her for ‘her views regarding the veil’;
while Islamist militants in Kuwait protested against the ban on
driving while wearing a niqqab, a cloth that hides the whole
face and thus, according to the hom e minister, restricts the

driver’s field o f vision.140
Still more tragically, the hejab emerged as a powerful divi
ding line in the Algerian crisis, in w hich Islam is not as im
portant a factor as it is often thought to be: the civil war was
less religious than social in nature, and history and traditional
terroirs played a m ore obvious role in the violence than did
the K oran.141 A lthough w om en perhaps did not suffer as much,
objectively, as have other sectors o f the Algerian population in
the crisis, the veil became one o f the chief emblems that sym
bolically em bodied these struggles and gave them a kind o f
intelligibility, albeit an erroneous one. W om en were killed for
choosing not to wear the veil, and the Organisation o f Young
Algerians responded: ‘If unfortunately a w oman is attacked
because she is not w earing the chador, the organisation promises
to avenge her by simply and purely liquidating twenty w om en
w earing the hijab and twenty bearded fundamentalists.’142 C ity-
dwellers have thus had to get used to a ‘variable geom etry’, or
rather a ‘variable geography’, regarding their dress, in accord
w ith the formula adopted by the weekly La N ation, changing
appearance depending on the area to be traversed or the road
blocks to be crossed: ‘I walk very quickly and I have a scarf
around my neck that I use to cover my head from time to time
w hen I see some shady-looking guy coming along’, a young
w om an from Blida says.143 In Algeria’s liberation struggle the
guerrillas o f the FLN (National Liberation Front) had already
dealt w ith such dangerous dilemmas in order to underm ine
the vigilance o f French soldiers: ‘T he soldiers asked veiled
w om en for their papers, and sometimes searched them w hen
there were roadblocks, and on several occasions I was stopped
and questioned w hen I was veiled. Whereas w ithout a veil,
I got through, I was young, I smiled and I w ent on through.
T he first time I felt as if I were naked, and then afterward it
didn’t bother m e any longer.’144 O ver time, the war in Algeria
became a war for or against the hejab, for or against the emanci
pation o f w om en, between Islamists and secularists. The illusion
involved is, o f course, enormous, the conflict is reconstructed

in a phantasmal m ode that can easily be dispelled, at least in
theory. W ithout even dissecting the allegedly progressive vir
tues o f the very secular Algerian military security force, we
should immediately abandon ‘the sterile debate over the hejab’,
as Fariba Adelkhah urged us to do,145 while rem inding us that
in this arena nothing is straightforward. First, because Islam
does not require the veil, and because a Muslim believer can
obviously conceive o f his faith outside o f or even against the
wearing o f this garment: Ali Isik, tw enty-three, the im am o f
the village o f Kapakli in Turkey, asked for a divorce because
his wife insisted on covering her head, and refused to dress
‘like a civilised w om an’.146 Second, because the use o f the hejab
matters only in relation to the context in w hich it is practised,
and historically it is often accompanied by a rationalist view o f
religion, and more pronounced individuation via a quest for
elegance, to the great delight o f fashion stores.147 Thus in Iran
...th e hejab is certainly a symbol o f the rejection o f an im p o rte d and im
posed m odernity; but its m eaning for Islamic w om en is m uch rich er and
m ore essential than that. It is the m aterialisation o f a continuity betw een
hum an nature and Koranic revelation, and it structures the relationships
betw een the private sphere and the public sphere, betw een the space o f the
family and the social space. T his tw ofold function o f the hejab leads Islamic
w om en to dem and, w ith som e variations, certain elem ents o f a m o dernity
that has been established over the past few decades: the unrestricted right to
a m o d ern education and to work; recognition outside the sphere o f the
family; and involvem ent and participation in all the debates current in
Iranian society.148
The Iranian example is particularly interesting because twenty-

three years after the only successful Islamic revolution in history,
one can discern the reconstitution— even in the political
sphere— betw een Islamic and secular attitudes, whose cleavage
is dramatised in the Algerian crisis in the form o f an irre
ducible antagonism.149 T he social polysemy o f the veil is now
well understood in anthropological and sociological research,
though not by the Western media, public opinion and politi
cal classes.150 H ow should we account for this persistent gap
betw een scientific knowledge, or even simple com m on sense,

and social representations?
It can probably be explained by the role the veil plays in
subjectivising the w om en w ho wear it or reject it: the passions
it arouses proceed from the moral economy that it represents,
and they indicate conflicts over the definition o f subjectivity,
whose im portance has been emphasised by Paul Veyne. If we
accept his analysis, it may be no accident that the chief actor in
this drama is the dom inated category par excellence, namely
w om en.151 Some w om en reject the veil in the name o f a par
ticular interpretation o f freedom and sexuality, for w hich they
pay a high price: ‘Putting a scarf on her head is like accepting
her loss o f her soul. B ut to leave her bare-headed is to expose
her to any crank w ho comes along,’ says an Algerian m other o f
her daughter, just before the beginning o f the school year.152
O ther w om en dem and the veil, sometimes also at their own
peril, and it is a very French kind o f arrogance that sees in this
the manifestation o f a simple alienation, obscurantism or even
pernicious manipulations. In fact, the hejab is also associated
w ith positive norm s whose register is not necessarily very dis
tant from those prom oted by secularists. For example, among
Iranian Islamists, it corresponds, as a garm ent and an appear
ance (zaher), to the internal hejab (dam n, baten) that is also
manifested on the level o f the senses by one’s gaze, voice and
modes o f behaviour, and it requires an attitude o f truth and
justice (haqq) w ith regard to the world and its creator. H ere we
are not far from the Rousseauan reasoning o f the Jacobins, for
w hom clothing was supposed to reveal the citizen’s interior,
not conceal it. Thus the veil is nothing other than the textile
em bodim ent o f qualities such as simplicity, modesty, firmness,
gravity, chastity, dignity, seriousness and magnanimity, each o f
w hich designates its contrary; it speaks o f a certain ‘concern
for the self’.153
T he reader may find this easier to accept if we pause to
consider the example o f Tuareg society. Tuareg m en wear a
veil, and m uch m ore strictly than do their women: it is more
appropriate for the latter not to go about bare-headed, but it is

unthinkable for men to show their faces. Therefore they cover
their faces w ith a piece o f cloth more than five yards long,
which they are constantly rearranging, if necessary w ith the
help o f a small pocket mirror, and taking care to give it a per
sonal touch that allows them to be recognised from a distance
w hen they approach a camp. W orn in this way, the veil is
evidence o f the ‘restraint’ required o f a man in good standing;
it is connected with being a husband or potential husband, and
w ith the virility thereby implied; and it protects the wearer
from the maleficent beings o f the desert, the kel esu f w hich are
quick to take advantage o f any effusions, w hether o f words,
saliva, or sperm.154 Here as well, the ethical imaginaire takes a
material form— in this case, a fabric— and calls for certain ways
o f dressing that are simultaneously coded and individuated. If
necessary, it is defended by force o f arms, as French troops,
and after them troops in N iger and Mali, learned at regular
intervals. It is therefore not surprising that during the govern
m ent’s repression carried out in M arch 1990, soldiers in N iger
publicly disrobed Tuaregs suspected o f complicity w ith the
rebellion, in order to break them.
T h e im aginaire, a principle o f incom pleteness

T he condensation o f latent social imagiuaires into manifest
political imaginaires thus goes hand in hand w ith the conden
sation o f imaginary practices into practices o f materiality. Here
D eleuze’s definition o f the imaginaire— ‘T he imaginaire is not
the unreal, but the inability to distinguish the real from un
real’— acquires its full meaning. In this respect, it may be the
object o f a genuine political economy, to w hich research on
‘material culture’, ‘social life’ and ‘the cultural biography o f
things’, as well as on the historicity o f values, is already making
a contribution.
Consider the use o f ‘drugs’, that is, o f vegetable or chemical
substances that, when consumed, ‘trigger’ and ‘amplify’ a cultural
The imaginaire, a principle o f incompleteness 227
imaginaire latent in the user,155 and at the same time activate

equally intense mental representations in certain political, ju d i
cial or police authorities. H ere and there these narcotic prac
tices are closely connected with political practices. For example,
in Africa combatants in armed movem ents constantly take
drugs, thus endangering their lives by testing the operative
character o f their warrior imaginaire. Narco-sociability can also
help modify the relationships betw een the private and pub
lic spheres, as it does in the case o f the chewing o f khat in
Y em en.156 Simultaneously, the incorporation o f drugs into the
regular trading sphere led to significant financial flows that
made the fortune o f the East India Company, supplied incom e
for the French and D utch colonial administrations in Indo
china and the D utch East Indies through state-controlled sales
o f opium and now constitute an im portant though hidden
aspect o f the international economy. Today several wars are
being financed through drug trafficking.157 T he latter has be
come an issue o f vital concern for public policy-makers and, in
particular, for American diplomats. A principle o f illusion par
excellence, drugs nonetheless always relate to a more trivial world.
T he same can be said about political strategies o f identity
and their culturalist ideologies: their phantasmal discourses are
also subject to condensation, too often in the form of violence—
violence that is only too physical— that is now an integral part
o f their imaginaires. W hat would the imaginaire o f ‘Greater
Serbia’ have been w ithout the rapes, murders and ethnic cleans
ing? W hat w ould the imaginaire o f ‘H utu pow er’ have been
w ithout the m utilated bodies floating down the Kagera river?
In short, the ambivalence inherent in the very notion o f the
imaginaire and its complex relationship w ith the order o f mate
riality compels us to relinquish a certain use o f the concept that
is nonetheless widespread. We should not take literally expres
sions such as ‘social imaginaire or ‘historical imaginaire . They
are convenient, but they suggest that a given social (or his
torical) imaginaire is a totality, endowed w ith a range o f rela
tively coherent and restricted meanings. This m ight lead us to
attribute to the imaginaire powers that we have just denied

culture, and to confer on it the ability to over-determ ine
political practice. W hen all is said and done, the concept o f the
imaginaire, understood in this way, is no more than a pedantic
version o f the concept o f culture.
In any given society we encounter only procedures in the
imaginaire that give rise to figures o f the imaginaire that are more
or less strong, more or less shared, more or less stable. These
figures are necessarily fragmentary and polysemous: none of
them absorbs— usurps— the function o f imagination, whatever
its power in a particular historical situation. Moreover, none of
them has a definitive political meaning. We could repeat here
our analysis o f discursive genres, since the latter are simulta
neously genres o f the imaginaire: jih a d and hijra do not have the
same political meaning for all Muslims, even if Muslims in
general see these phenom ena as more im portant than some
others, for example those of a liberal or Marxist kind. Similarly,
we may suppose that the Vietnamese ‘social imaginaire is dom
inated by a w hole series o f representations inherited from their
ancient history, by nationalism, by the m em ory of a thirty-year
long war, by the bruises suffered under Com m unist totalitar
ianism, and by mixed feelings regarding the French. B ut all this
does not prevent them from laying offerings on the tom b o f
the Frenchman Alexandre Yersin, w ho developed a serum
against the plague bacillus— offerings consisting o f portions o f
‘ Vache-qui-rif cheese-—or from being convinced that this ven
erable man stabbed a w itch w ho had eaten children’s livers.158
Conceiving the social imaginaire as a signifying totality would
am ount not only to jettisoning the immense literature on
symbolism and the unconscious— starting w ith Freud— but
also obscuring the heightened kitsch that globalisation lends to
the function o f the imaginaire in contem porary societies. It is all
the more crucial to emphasise this point because many o f the
great authors on w hom we m ight rely in reintroducing the
problematics o f the imaginaire into political thought have a
monistic view o f the imagination. Thus M ontesquieu asso
ciated a political passion w ith each o f the systems o f govern

m ent in his typology, and the different passions were supposed
to correspond to the structure and functioning o f the systems
w ith w hich they were associated.
Thanks to recent research, we are now able to understand
that social imagiuaires are in fact amorphous nebula o f often
disparate figures that are ultimately ambivalent from a political
point o f view and o f varying duration: in short, that they are
historical phenom ena. It may be that changes in the order of
the imaginaire are long-term developments like those described
by Braudel, and that they are imperceptible to contemporaries.
Nonetheless, this optical illusion must not lead us to conceive
the order o f the imaginaire in a society as a constant. T he sym
bolism o f sacred kingship in France and England has finally
eroded and lost its resonance, even if Francois M itterrand’s
funeral in 1996 re-staged the old myth o f the king’s two
bodies.159 Similarly the imaginary figures o f the carnival were
omnipresent throughout the sixteenth-century wars o f reli
gion in France: the repertoire o f scatology, rites o f inversion
and animal symbolism were mobilised to ridicule and destroy
the adversary. B ut this genre was defused during the reign o f
Louis X IV and did not re-em erge till the French R evolution,
w hen it played a central role in the processes o f state-forma-
tion in the provinces, w here it conveyed the new meanings
and stakes created by the republican idea.160 This is a funda
m ental point, for too often the study o f festivals has taken the
form o f ‘the obsessive task o f finding one and the same sig
nified through a m ultitude o f signifiers’,161 disregarding several
obvious facts, one o f w hich is that the power o f symbolic
language resides in being polysemous as well as clear. Thus
Em m anuel Le R oy Ladurie writes concerning the animal
m etaphors used in the French tow n o f R om ans in the six
teenth century: ‘Say it w ith meats! It’s so m uch clearer, even if
the meanings are multiple and vary depending on the festival
or com m on action concerned. Cocks, eagles and partridges are
at once representative and functional; they set up a m ulti
headed strategy; they allow a part o f a group to make itself

the master o f a given situation or to derive certain advantages
from it.’162
But we must add that another faction may turn the same
animal metaphors to its own advantage if the situation takes a
more favourable turn; as Freud put it,
T h e analogous elem ents o f the latent materials are replaced in the manifest
dream by condensations. C ontraries are treated in the same way as
analogies, and they are preferably expressed by the same m anifest elem ent.
Thus one elem ent o f the m anifest dream that has a contrary can itself
signify this contrary, or bo th at the same time. It is only the general m eaning
that allows us to m ake a choice regarding the interpretation. T h a t is w hat
explains the fact that we do not find in dreams any representation, or at least
any unequivocal representation, o f ‘n o ’.163
Carnival, w hich is rich in animal and other metaphors, re

presented a principle o f radical heterogeneity in the Western
European society. It is pointless to reduce it to ‘a determ inate
and limited content ... for in reality it automatically trans
gresses limits’.164 This repertoire may at times be exhausted or
marginalised. But the imaginary function it perform ed in the
Middle Ages and the sixteenth century remains transcendent,
whatever forms it might take today (sports, for instance).165
This is not only because one cannot grasp all its possible m ean
ings, but also because the well o f these meanings is bottomless.
In Freud’s work, ‘every dream has at least one place w here it is
unfathomable, like an umbilical cord that attaches it to the
unknow n’: ‘T he dream thoughts that are reached through the
process o f interpretation must, obligatorily and absolutely uni
versally, remain w ithout issue and run in all directions in the
intertw ined network o f the world o f our thoughts.’166 T he
imaginative content o f our history and o f our political think
ing remains similarly uncreative, because its figures are mutable
and have many meanings. This is evident in everyday life
through the circulation and reinterpretation o f ideologies, insti
tutions and the products o f material culture around the world.
Thus it would be a crude mistake to assume a deep or original
structure in w hich all the figures o f the imaginaire w ould be

resolved.
Som eone m ight nonetheless ask how this can be true if
w hat holds a society together is holding together its world o f
meanings , as we hypothesised following Cornelius Castoriadis.
H ow can ‘imaginary social meanings’ hold together, and thus
hold together society, if they have to ‘remain incom plete’? Pre
cisely through their radical ambivalence. All architects facing
the seismic dangers will tell you: the flexibility o f the reed is
better than the solemnity o f the oak ... Historians and anthro
pologists have demonstrated that many political formations—
and not the least im portant ones, either: R om e, for example—
were governed by such a law o f incompleteness. And so is, a
fortiori, the international system, in its cultural dimension as
well as in its economic dimension.167 Transnational flows have
becom e so intense that the ‘end o f territories’168 is being
announced, though this does not mean the end o f states.
In addition, many societies remain marked by deep ‘episte-
mic ruptures’.169 T heir peoples live in disparate space-times
and neither political nor cultural centralisation has eliminated
‘m inority temporalities’170 from them. Even in France, the uni
fication o f time came relatively late, despite the power and the
nature o f the state.171 T he Islamic Republic o f Iran lives by
both the solar and the lunar calendar. And in a province like
R uthenia, three distinct times co-exist: the official time, that o f
Kiev; that o f Moscow, for the nostalgic; and ‘our own tim e’,
that o f the R uthenians, w ho follow the time zone o f the
capital cities o f Western Europe in order to mark their dif
ference from U kraine.172 Nonetheless, the heterogeneous con
figuration o f time in a society goes beyond the problem o f its
centralisation. Dissidence o f this kind may also be religious: in
Pennsylvania, for instance, the Amish set their watches to a
different time in order to express their withdrawal from m od
ern society, w hich does not prevent them from being successful
in business in the econom ic niches they occupy,173 and Muslim
theological authorities rarely agree on the date o f the appear-
ance o f the m oon that marks the end o f Ram adan. In fact, in
every society, even industrial societies, ‘we are actually living
in several times, both qualitative and quantitative, that can
not be reduced to a single tim e’, and that can even enter into
conflict.174
Let us draw some conclusions from all this. Society realises
itself as a totality only in the ambivalence o f the imaginaire,
including, o f course, in the material com ponent o f the latter:
through the imaginary figures o f the market, the state, and the
‘international community’, which dispenses images and feelings
at the same time as more tangible things in the form o f goods,
services, sanctions, bombings, and aid. Steeped in ‘intercon
nections that are not isomorphisms’, society is based on silence,
ignorance, indifference, illusion, and a swarm o f m ore or less
incoherent ‘tiny details’. But as one o f Gombrowics’s char
acters warns us, ‘you’ve no idea how immense one becomes
with all these tiny details...’
C O N C L U S IO N
THE PARADOXICAL INVENTION

OF M ODERNITY
We now turn to consider the four points that have been

propounded:
(1) T he function o f the constitutive imagination plays a cen
tral role in the form ation o f the state, and more generally in the
production o f politics.
(2) N o m atter how hard political actors may try to instru-
mentalise this function, it remains irreducible, even if the polit
ical actors are hegemonic. Thus it can be considered infinite
and ungovernable.
(3) T he function o f the imaginaire is inseparable from the order
o f materiality: it is this property that gives it its structuring
capacity and that makes political and economic processes occur
in its dimension. In parallel fashion, one can envisage a form of
materiality only in its relation to the imaginaire.
(4) Finally, in a given society the imaginaire does not represent
a coherent totality, since it includes a host o f heterogeneous,
constantly changing figures. Imaginary productions are thus
not necessarily isomorphic. Moreover, as symbolic productions
by definition they have many meanings and are ambivalent.
It is in this respect that they help ‘hold together’ a society
w ithout this ‘holding together o f its world o f meanings’ ever
being dem onstrated or even assumed to be demonstrable.
These few m ethodological rules that have been established in
the course o f our discussion may make the reader feel uneasy
or even dizzy. However, in consulting a few classic texts in the
233
234 Conclusion: The Paradoxical Invention o f Modernity
social sciences and philosophy, we have seen that the radical

heterogeneity o f society was noted long ago and has been
amply debated. Tocqueville, Marx, W eber, D urkheim , Bakh
tin and Elias have all come to this disturbing conclusion— each
in his ow n way, to be sure, but often in ways that are comple
mentary rather than contradictory. Anthropologists and soci
ologists— for example, Clifford Geertz, R oberto Da Matta,
Georges Balandier, Anthony Giddens— have confirmed the
same conclusion on the basis o f their ow n experience. Michel
Foucault is thus synthesising a well-established intellectual tra
dition w hen he writes— referring, moreover, to B ook II o f
Das Kapital — that ‘society is an archipelago o f different powers’:
‘A society is not a single, unified body in which one and only
one power is exercised, but rather a juxtaposition, a connec
tion, a co-ordination, and also a hierarchy o f different powers,
which nonetheless retain their specificity’.1
Curiously, Western societies find it very difficult to acknow
ledge and incorporate this fundamental lesson. They are con
stantly falling back into the ruts made by utilitarian arguments
(attributing too m uch im portance to instrumentalisation and
to the manipulation o f imaginary figures, emotions) or holistic
demonstrations (giving priority to primordial cultural factors).
The conception o f social change, in particular, remains n o r
mative, linear, and teleological, as is shown by ratiocinations on
‘transitions to democracy’ and the passage toward a ‘market
econom y’.2 However, for a long time ‘historians have been
accustomed to no longer necessarily seeing m odernisation as a
general transformation’.3 For instance, the standardisation o f
money in the U nited States was not a linear process. It was one
o f the most explosive social issues o f the late nineteenth
century, and was largely frustrated by various practices that
subverted the idea o f money as uniform .4 And how can we
situate in the neo-liberal paradigm o f reform an event that
occurred in D nepropetrovsk in 1994: ‘W hile Anatoly Kosoy,
37, was walking in the [city] park, a large dog attacked him,
apparently attracted by the strong odour o f alcohol he was
Conclusion: The Paradoxical Invention o f Modernity 235
emitting. D uring the ensuing battle, the man killed the animal
by ripping open his throat w ith his teeth’5? After all, in
Ukraine the m arket econom y is ‘shaped’ or not ‘shaped’ in
relation to such events!
Because the dimension o f the imaginaire, and especially o f its
‘w orking o u t’ (in the Freudian sense o f the term) is concealed,
the dimension o f ambivalence is concealed as well. This obliv
ion makes the paradoxical invention o f m odernity incon
ceivable or scandalous. Yes, the polis is ‘absurd’ (in the Freudian
sense). B ut its absurdity is inherent in its realisation in the
imaginaire, in its ‘w orking o u t’, in its ‘abridged translation’, and
in a w hole series o f disparate, baroque, and segmented prac
tices. In criticising some o f these paradoxes, culturalist reas
oning is certainly not the least o f the misinterpretations that
prevent us from understanding our own time.
Consider, for example, the religious invention o f modernity.
We know that this was a major modality in the history o f the
West; that the system o f parliamentary representation was
ecclesiastical in origin; that the C ounter-R eform ation, just as
m uch as the R eform ation itself, helped bring about new
political and artistic configurations; that Catholic activism was
crucial for the transformation o f society, and even for the spec
tacular economic development o f Ireland, Brittany, the Vendee,
Bavaria, Flanders, and Venetia; that these same Catholics,
whose democratic tendencies the Church long resisted, finally
managed to institutionalise these ideas through the inter
mediary o f Christian-D em ocratic parties; that pietism was the
crucible o f Prussian power in the eighteenth century, and
M ethodism that o f radical working-class consciousness in
nineteenth-century England, just as American independence
and democracy are the progeny o f Puritanism; that the most
conservative religious trends have not necessarily been the
least modernising, and that there has even been a ‘genuine rad
icalism o f tradition’.6
All this is not surprising from a theoretical or m ethodo
logical point o f view. First o f all, many scholars have adopted
H egel’s insight regarding the role o f civic processions in the

French R evolution. They note the creative function o f ritual
in the medieval and m odern city that Fustel de Coulanges
wrongly thought peculiar to the ancient city. T he city is
created and transformed— regenerated— through celebrations
o f this kind, which combine the religious w ith the profane
and are far m ore than simple theatrical representations o f the
city’s identity. Florence, for example, depended on the media
tion o f multiple ceremonies that simultaneously produced its
unity and regulated com petition am ong its leading men. In
the fifteenth century, a ‘ritual revolution’ provided a frame
w ork for the transition from the Republic to the proto
absolutist state and the gradual integration o f children, ado
lescents, and plebeians into the processional life o f the city,
w hich had previously been closed to them .7 Similarly, accord
ing to Victor T urner’s seminal study, ‘pilgrimage centres [...]
generate a “field,” and may have helped ‘to create the com
munications net that later made capitalism a viable national
and international system’.8 As we have seen, in the N ew W orld
the secularised ‘administrative pilgrimage’ seems to have been
decisive in the crystallisation o f the ‘imagined com m unity’ o f
the nation, while today the ‘tourist pilgrimage’ may be seen as
outlining a European civic space.
Nonetheless, religious rituals, in the literal sense o f the term,
played a significant role in the formation o f European nations.
W ithout even dallying on the ‘king’s touch’ in France and
England, let us recall that the confrontation between the young
Italian state and the H oly See in the second half o f the nine
teenth centuiy took place on this stage. In 1878 Pius IX ’s fune
ral cortege was violently attacked on the Ponte Sant’Angelo by
a crowd crying ‘Throw the pig pope in the water! Long live
Italy! Long live Garibaldi!’ It had to be rescued by the police,
whose protection the Vatican had initially rejected, in order to
avoid recognising the pre-em inence o f the state in the cere
monial procedure. In September 1882, w hen thousands o f
priests assembled in San Lorenzo to honour the m em ory o f
Conclusion: 77te Paradoxical Invention o f Modernity 237
the sovereign pontiff, the liberals called a counter-dem onstra

tion in the Pantheon on Victor Em m anuel’s tom b.9 W e can
argue that the symbolic com petition centering on the two
mausoleums constituted an ‘abridged translation’ o f the con
flict regarding legitimacy that was sapping Italy. The relations
betw een certain peripheral areas and the political or religious
centres on w hich they depended were also often mediated by
ritual imaginary action: betw een 1830 and 1950, no fewer
than eighty apparitions o f the Virgin confirmed the assertion
o f the identity and the interests o f Catholic Brabant w ithin the
Protestant-dom inated Low Countries, and in 1981 she also
appeared opportunely at M edjugoije, in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
in order to help Franciscans eager to preserve their autonom y
w ith regard to the political authorities, the bishop o f Mostar
and the Vatican.10
T he m odern polis is thus not as disenchanted as M ax Weber
thought. Ceremonies, processions— in some cases, in the form
o f demonstrations— continue to be performative and are still
key m om ents in the enunciation o f the m odern polis’s ‘moral
econom y’. T he staging o f death, for instance, is always marked
by a solemnity that helps order the hierarchies o f power and
wealth by observing a strict protocol, but this solemnity may
also lead to an explicit politicisation by giving material form to
the confrontation betw een the authorities and the opposition,
and to the appropriation o f the deceased’s prestige by his more
or less w ell-m eaning supporters (as in France after the death o f
Georges Pom pidou), or even by his adversaries (as in 1996,
w hen Jacques Chirac rendered homage to his predecessor
Francois M itterrand). In Chapter 3 we noted that the perform-
ativity o f political ritual proceeds from the passion that it con
denses. M ourning is an em otion, and it is peculiarly propitious
to the transform ation o f feelings into practical political action.
For example, in August 1914 Leon Jouhaux, the secretary-
general o f the C G T (Confederation generale du travail, France’s
largest trade union federation)— the only im portant organi
sation on the extreme left that had not yet lent its support to
the governm ent’s defence policy— improvised his funeral

eulogy for Jean Jaures. In the republican fervour o f the cere
mony, and urged on by the crow d’s applause w hen he m en
tioned the need to resist German aggression, he ended up
supporting, in the name o f the revolutionary tradition, what
Prime M inister R aym ond Poincare was to call, in the address
to Parliament that he delivered a few hours later, ‘the sacred
U nion’, thus sealing the return o f the syndicalised w orking
class into the bosom o f the nation.11
As a result, funeral ceremonies inevitably exceed efforts to
‘manage’ them. They can unleash violent anger directed
against the state, deemed to be responsible for the death o f a
hero— as in Palermo in 1992, during the funeral o f the judge
Paolo Borsellino and his escort— or simply a sadness so pro
found that it retrospectively transfigures the political career o f
the person involved, as in the case o f King B audouin o f
Belgium, form er French prim e minister Pierre Beregovoy, or
Francois M itterrand. Seen from this angle, they are valuable
indications o f the masses’ civic expectations and the ‘moral
econom y’ o f the state: through the anger o f the people o f
Palermo could be glimpsed the rejection o f the dark side of
the basis o f power in Italy; in Parisians’ sad reflection on the
body o f Pierre Beregovoy, a meditation on w hat the left had
become, on the relationships betw een money and politics, and
between the press and public life; and in the Belgians’ sorrow a
referendum in favour o f the unity o f the kingdom . Thus in
Western Europe as well, funeral rites enunciate the ‘im agined
com m unity’ and give it an ethical as well as a political content.
From this point o f view Francois M itterrand’s funeral epito
mised the genre. It was a barely disguised replica o f the myth o f
the king’s two bodies, and the television coverage was obliged
to split the screen in order to show live the two synchronous
and symmetrical ceremonies, one reserved for M itterrand’s
family and the tow n where he was born, the other for world
figures. T he burial confirmed the recognition o f M itterrand’s
daughter born out o f wedlock and the official cohabitation o f
tw o w om en he had loved. This was a scene that seemed to

foreign correspondents so bizarre that they often preferred to
ignore or misrepresent this ‘cultural exception’. But one can
not deny its m odernity, in the sense that it corresponded to
the lived experience o f many o f his contemporaries. T he ‘pol
itician w ho was said to be discredited and out o f touch with
society offered a life narrative that provided food for thought
and was capable o f arousing emotion: the scene was ‘beau
tiful’, as in the cinema or in soap operas. Similarly Francois
M itterrand’s long m editation on death, the revelation that he
had been fighting cancer since 1981, and that he had chosen
the time w hen he w ould die, all no doubt contributed to
modifying the social representation o f an illness perceived as
m ore terrible than others, at the very m om ent at w hich an
enorm ous scandal was tarnishing the A R C , the main organi
sation in the fight against cancer. Finally, the participation of
the president’s Labrador in the private cerem ony— it was
noted that he travelled in the childrens’ plane— sanctioned the
role canines play in French society today, and not only, alas, in
the private sphere.12
In opposition to both observations and research that de
monstrate, in a neo-Fustelian or neo-D urkheim ian sense, that
the m odern polis is also a ritual polis, we also have a theoretical
literature o f considerable proportions that urges us to crossbreed
explanatory factors, to carry out a ‘causal multiplication’, and
to ‘establish interconnections that are not isomorphisms’ among
the various areas o f society. In addition to the Foucauldian
approach w hich we have just cited, and w hich underlies the
concept o f governmentality, there is also, for instance, Max
W eber’s emphasis on ‘the enorm ous intertw ining o f mutual
influences’, the accent put by Alltagsgeschichte on actors’ ‘m ulti
dimensional experiences’ (Mehrschichtigkeiten) , m icro-interac-
tionist trends in American sociology, Giddens’ theory o f
structuration and Elias’ configurational model. These varying
approaches all recognise the ambivalent and paradoxical nature
o f the modalities o f social change. The expression ‘unwittingly’
(a leur insu) was already repeatedly used by Tocqueville. At the

same time as he constructed ideal types, W eber also acknow
ledged that ‘we must expect that these effects o f the R efor
mation on culture will have, in large measure, consequences
that were unforeseen and undesired in the works o f the R e
formers, consequences often far rem oved from everything
they had sought to achieve, and sometimes even in contra
diction w ith their goal’.13 There follows a similar analysis re
garding ‘modes o f the economic orientation o f action’.14
Ernst Troeltsch, W eber’s friendly opponent, w ent m uch
further than the latter in studying the paradoxical invention o f
modernity, emphasising that ‘the role played by Protestantism
in the emergence o f the m odern world is certainly in no sense a
simple one’: ‘[It] is, in many ways, an indirect and even invol
untary role, and what Protestantism, despite itself, has in
com m on w ith m odern culture is very deeply buried in the
hidden depths o f its thought, and not immediately accessible
to consciousness. There is, o f course, no question o f a direct
creation o f m odern culture by Protestantism, but only o f w hat
role it played in this creation. But even this role is not hom o
geneous and simple. In each o f the various cultural domains, it
is different, and in all o f them, it is more or less hidden and
complex’.15 Thus it is appropriate to ask ‘w hat significance
Protestantism might have had, not in a resurrection or general
creation affecting the whole o f life, but chiefly in indirect or
unconscious consequences, and even directly in effects o f an
epiphenomenal and contingent order, or influences exercised
in spite o f itself.16 He concludes, in the inimitable style in
fashion in turn-of-the-century Germany:
We can arrive at an understanding o f the true causal relationship only if we
give up a unitary fram ew ork based on a leading idea, w hich is supposed to
derive and elaborate everything by itself, and only if w e take in to account
the plethora o f different, parallel, independent, and som etim es intersecting
influences. C hance, that is the sudden connection established am ong several
independent causal sequences, m ust never be underestim ated w h e n dealing
w ith such p h e n o m e n a .17
Finally, situating him self in this line o f thought, N orbert Elias

has emphasised that ‘civilisation’ and ‘rationalisation’ are not
produced by hum an ratio, but rather by what he called ‘the
order o f interdependency among m en’. R esorting precisely to
Elias’s configurational model, the contem porary historian will
show, for example, how the processes that determined the forms
o f stratification in French society in the nineteenth and tw en
tieth centuries are given concrete form by ‘blind dynamics’:
T h e social space appears in tact to be structured by several types o f
cohesion that differ bo th in nature and in duration, and that appear in com
petitio n for the resources and form s o f possible developm ent. [...] T he
process o f evaluation, as it is seen in a configurational m odel, is thus far from
being linear and d eterm in ed in a unidirectional m anner by single, m acro-
structural phenom ena. In m ost cases, im portant changes are brought about
on the basis o f peripheral, relatively w eak m ovem ents. [...] T h e im age that
is established on the basis o f such processes is in fact a configuration o f
m obile points organised in accord w ith specific local forms. A configu
ration that is sensitive to the m ovem ents o f each o f its com ponents, to their
particular structurations, and to the dynamics these structurations engender.
It is at this level that w e can speak o f blind evolutions, for it is clear that each
synchronic form , each o f the overall configurations achieved in the course
o f the process o f evolution, is a tem porary product o f several m ovem ents
that take place on the basis o f varying interests, perspectives, and projects.18
For example, the Protestantism of'cam isards’ (early eighteenth-

century French H uguenot rebels in the Bas-Languedoc and
Cevennes regions o f southern France), w hich was obviously
an obstacle to monarchical centralisation, served the latter in
the long run by adopting French, not Occitan, as its religious
language.19 Likewise, the political transition in Spain after
Franco s death was the result o f ‘interstitial choices’ made by
actors w ho were guided less by a great rational alternative ‘for’
or ‘against’ democracy than by the traditions or rules o f the
game already prevailing in various sectors o f civil society. In
particular, Spanish democracy is heavily indebted to the ‘meta
m orphoses’ o f the C hurch in the 1950s and to its ‘avatars’,
because o f the rise o f young Catholics within the Church, its
242 Conclusion: The Paradoxical Invention o f M odernity
integration into the West European religious field, and the

repercussions o f Vatican II.20 As we have seen, slippages and
interactions between one sphere o f society and another are con
stant, and all the more disturbing because they correspond to
pure contingency.21 W hen they occur, these ‘interconnections
w ithout isomorphism’ are the result o f cultural operations—
especially the transfer o f meaning— analysed in C hapter II,
and w hich are situated in the autonom ous dimension o f the
imaginaire; they are one o f the ‘concrete genetic relationships
that inevitably take on their ow n individual character’ that
W eber discusses.22
Carrying all this baggage, Western political societies are
nonetheless more or less paralysed and incapable o f m aking use
o f it as soon as they have to decipher their relationship to the
Other: for example, their relationship w ith Islam or their par
ticipation in globalisation. They follow Tocqueville in his
interpretation o f the founders o f N ew England as ‘simulta
neously ardent sectarians and impassioned innovators’: ‘Held
within the most restrictive bonds o f certain religious beliefs,
they were free from all political prejudices.’23 But they im m e
diately refuse to say the same about the Islamist movement.
Between the latter and a social mobilisation inspired by C hris
tianity there is supposed to be a difference in kind that pre
cludes any comparison. It does not m atter that the historian
reminds us that in Java ‘the earliest signs o f m odernity did not
appear with the arrival o f the Portuguese or the D utch, but
with the arrival o f Muslim traders and the rise o f the first sul
tanates’.24 N o one listens to him or to his colleague w ho estab
lishes a strong correlation betw een movements revitalising
Islam and social change.25 Similarly, it matters little that ac
cording to anthropologists this mobilisation itself is a vehicle
for deep changes in both religious practices and ways o f being
in society.26 If they even dare to suggest this w ith regard to
wearing a veil, the secular chorus protests. According to the
culturalists, Islam is one and indivisible, doom ed to reproduce
itself eternally in obscurantism and fanaticism, at best under a

closely-watched ‘m oderate’ regime— even though Islam has
shown in T urkey that its reason can evolve and be rationalised
under the influence o f historical constraints.27 O n this subject,
public debate has rem ained m arooned in w hat in the Middle
Ages was called ‘psychomachies’, that is, confrontations between
abstract rival entities: Athens vs. Sparta, R o m e vs. Carthage,
the Christian and secular W est (secular because Christian,
pace the U nited Kingdom, the U nited States, and a few other
second-order democracies!) vs. Islam. T o those w ho are not
satisfied w ith this M anichean view o f the world, it is gravely
conceded that the religion o f the Prophet may in fact be the
bearer o f social change. But, its objectors immediately retort,
does that involve m odernity, in the sense in w hich we under
stand it in the W est, in accord w ith the heritage o f the
Enlightenm ent: as being ‘m an’s moving beyond his im m a
turity, for w hich he himself is responsible’ (Kant)?
This question is w orth discussing briefly. Either we have a
historical or sociological definition o f modernity, and we see in
it, for example, ‘an era turned -toward the future, conceived as
being probably different, and if possible, better than the present
and the past’,28 or a social experience peculiar to this particular
era, especially the experience o f globalisation.29 Or, like Fou
cault com m enting on K ant’s essay Was ist Aufkldrung?, we do
not understand ‘very well’ what this notion o f m odernity
means,30 and we envisage it ‘as an attitude rather than as a his
torical period’, seeking to discover how, ‘since it took shape,
[it] has been involved in a struggle w ith attitudes o f ‘contra-
m odernity’. T hen ‘m odernity’ becomes an ethos: ‘A kind of
philosophical interrogation that problematises simultaneously
the relationship to the present, the historical m ode o f being,
and the constitution o f the self as an autonom ous subject’. For
Foucault ‘the thread that may attach us in this way to the
A ufkldrung is not fidelity to elements o f its doctrine, but rather
the perm anent reactivation o f an attitude; that is, o f a philo
sophical ethos that could be characterised as a perm anent

critique o f our historical being’. The rest o f his argum ent is
interesting for our subject because it rejects any ‘“blackmail”
involving A ufkldrung’ in the form o f ‘a simplistic and authori
tarian alternative:’ ‘Either you accept the Aufkldrung, and you
remain in the tradition o f its rationalism ... or you criticise
A ufkldrung , and then you try to escape these principles o f
rationality’. In addition, Foucault rejects any confusion be
tween A ufkldrung and humanism. M ore positively the ethos o f
modernity consists in ‘an extreme attitude’— ‘we have to be at
the frontiers’— that seeks to ask ‘what in us is given as uni
versal, necessary, obligatory, and what is unique, contingent,
and due to arbitrary constraints’.31
T he Islamist movement corresponds to the first definition
o f modernity, even if it sometimes takes a fundamentalist
approach by seeking to restore the golden age o f the Caliphate:
it sees itself as revolutionary or progressive; it wants things to
go better from the moral point o f view, but also from that o f
national independence, democracy, and social equality; nor
does it conceal its fascination w ith technology. If we privilege
the second definition o f modernity, it is hardly less clear that at
least some Islamist militants are trying, through their com
m itm ent, to move beyond their ‘im m aturity’ by using reason,
to the great dismay o f the traditionalists. Seen phantasmally as
the seat o f the obscurantist ‘International’, Iran is in fact a labo
ratory in w hich what some people describe as reform w ithin
Islam is being experim ented with, w ith all the debates, con
flicts, and uncertainties this involves: the groundw ork for the
1979 revolution was laid by intense intellectual and theological
work, especially in the holy city o f Najaf;32 today, major re
alignments between religious thought and secular thought are
occurring in the name o f the Islamic Republic— conflictually,
o f course.33 Ultimately for Said A qom and ‘contem porary con
stitutionalist clerics in Iran are the first established M uslim
authorities to feel an urgent need to reconcile the fundamental
concepts o f the Greek science o f politics w ith sharia, the

Islamic religious law’.34 O n the other hand, it is evident that
the constant ‘blackmail’ involving A ujklarung and the hotch
potch o f humanistic principles and Realpolitik that applauded
the 1992 coup d ’etat in Algeria on the pretext o f defending
the secular state and w om en scarcely coincide w ith the ethos o f
m odernity.
This critique o f culturalism will, I hope, allow us to escape
from the false dilemmas in w hich Western societies tend to
trap themselves. T he choice is not between universalism by
uniformisation, notwithstanding the diversity o f ‘cultures’, and
the relativism produced by exacerbating ‘cultural’ uniqueness
at the price o f certain fundamental values. Universality is equi
valent to the reinvention o f difference, and there is no need to
make the latter the precondition for the former. D oing so is
not only pleonastic, but suspect, for it opens the way to all sorts
o f mental and political restrictions.
Culturalist discourse, and, unfortunately, increasingly cultur-
alist diplomacy as well, imprison concrete historical societies in
a substantialist definition o f their identity by denying them the
right to borrow, to be derivative, that is, to change, possibly by a
paradoxical invention o f modernity. There is nothing less than
a conservative ‘Holy Alliance’ between native despots and their
W estern protectors or accomplices, an alliance whose inconsis
tencies we have seen in Iraq, Rwanda, Algeria, Serbia, China,
and Russia, and w hich cannot ensure peace even by repression.
N o t everyone can be a M etternich! Western democrats should
be able loudly to proclaim the universality o f their political
principles while foreseeing that they will be refashioned in the
societies that receive them. A nd their values will shine in their
acceptance o f their ‘globalisation’, that is, from their reinven
tion, not only by leaders concerned w ith ‘authenticity’, but by
the concrete w ork o f uttering them from deep w ithin the
societies involved.
246 Conclusion: The Paradoxical Invention o f M odernity
Young Fulani wear sunglasses, multicoloured socks, hand

bags, and w om en’s rubber high-heeled sandals to distinguish
themselves from other ethnic groups as well as from their
elders. Just as objects belonging to capitalist material culture,
far from altering the identity o f their consumers, can strengthen
it, so democratic values and institutions can generate identity-
related specifications w hen they are transplanted to other climes.
T he problem is not how to determine, for example, w hether
democracy is adapted to ‘African culture’, but how African
societies will adapt it in adopting it and will reconfigure it as a
polis, just as India has rew ritten the ‘Westminster m odel’.35
Moreover, it is significant that representative systems, once
transplanted outside Europe, have prospered less in the register
o f copies in conform ity with the original than in that o f hybri
disation, by resorting to autochthonous sources o f legitimacy.
Thus ‘political man in democratic India has been w rought out
o f traditional materials; he is not a new m an’.36 Similarly, ‘it is
because [of] the Islamic past, and not because they have read
J. S. Mill, that the Turkish masses support m odern dem ocracy’:
‘They support it to the extent that they see in it an oppor
tunity to assume the most im portant part o f their innate right,
namely the right to “prom ote good and combat evil,” and to
protect their own private sphere’.37 T he continuity o f the elec
toral orientation in Turkey since 1950, in the form o f various
partisan avatars, records this attitude, and it is not at all obvious
that an Islamic party’s accession to power would represent a
major shift in this respect. Braudel said o f capitalism that it was
a ‘night visitor’: ‘It arrives w hen everything is already in place.’38
The same can be said o f democracy, and the question is that o f
its authentication, through the intervention o f autochthonous
political genres, rather than that o f its ‘authenticity’.
The blindness o f the conservatives in this area is all the more
unjustifiable because their favourite author, Tocqueville, very
clearly saw this possibility o f the differentiated universalisation
o f democracy— not, it is true, w ithout sometimes giving the
impression that he was limiting it to ‘Christians’. Foreseeing its

‘im pending, irresistible, universal advent ... in the w orld’,39 he
wrote: ‘W hat I see among the Anglo-Americans leads me to
think that democratic institutions o f this nature, introduced
prudently into society, blending little by little with habits, and
gradually m erging w ith the opinions o f the people, could
subsist outside A m erica.’ And he wonders: ‘If other peoples,
borrow ing from America this general and fertile idea, and
w ithout w anting to imitate its inhabitants in the particular
application they have made o f it, sought to make themselves
suitable for the social condition that Providence imposes on
m en in our time, and thus to escape the despotism or anarchy
that threaten them , what reason w ould we have to think they
w ould necessarily fail in their efforts?’40
Nonetheless, let us play the devil’s advocate. D o n ’t relativists
limit themselves to merely taking cognisance o f this inevitable
reinvention o f difference w hen they speak o f the African,
Asian, or Islamic conceptions o f democracy and the rights o f
man, w hen they envisage the possibility that ‘[the] universal
values o f justice, tolerance, and freedom [...] can be expressed
in differing forms, through our respective cultures and tra
ditions?’41 O u r reply is an emphatic ‘n o ’. T he two approaches
differ in nature. O n the one hand, the culturalist argum ent dis
qualifies the diffusion o f values and models by postulating
them to be incompatible w ith the inner core o f intangible
cultures and by seeing in them a source o f instability for these
cultures. O n the other hand, the anti-culturalist argum ent
trivialises the grafting o f these values and models by ques
tioning neither their mutability nor the ability o f the societies
that im port them to appropriate them in inventive ways. In
addition, behind this difference o f approach, we can glimpse a
genuine philosophical divergence in m ethod between two
definitions o f the concept: in the culturalist argument, the
term ‘concept’ designates ‘the essence’; in the anti-culturalist
argum ent, it designates ‘the event’.42
‘T he event’ in this case, and insofar as we are concerned

here, is the development o f ‘concrete genetic relationships that
inevitably take on their own individual nature’; they are the
processes o f the ‘form ation’ o f the polis, w hich may be dem o
cratic. Such sequences o f productive events (sequences evene-
mentielles) can be very broad: M ax Weber relates the genesis o f
capitalism to the ethical revolution o f the R eform ation, but
also to a whole series o f institutional transformations that oc
curred in the High Middle Ages w ithin cities, the feudal
system, and the Catholic C hurch.43 If we provisionally adopt
the notion o f interconnections w ithout isomorphism linking
religious change w ith political change, we should see how the
form er interferes w ith the transformation o f the civic scene.
Let us not assume that these interactions are teleological. Nothing
guarantees that they are by nature democratising factors. But
we must pay attention to the relationships that arise betw een
religious movements, especially w hen they are prophetic or
millenarian, and to the ‘form ation’ o f the public sphere. All the
more since these mobilisations, w hich are often syncretic, are
often at the same time vehicles for ecclesial bureaucratisation,
as in Cao Dai in Vietnam, Bahai’ism in Iran, N urcu in Turkey,
prophetic cults in C ote d’Ivoire and extremist H indu national
ism in India.44 They are also capable o f elaborating new, radical
discourses on freedom which are not w ithout impact, and
w hich rem ind us that the democratic West has no m onopoly
on this idea.45 T he influence o f liberal principles will grow
even greater to the extent that they are intertw ined w ith
autochthonous or syncretic representations o f emancipation.
Nonetheless, religious movements are not the only vectors
o f political globalisation. It is the w hole o f the practices o f
symbolisation that we must connect w ith the processes o f the
‘form ation’ o f the polis, and especially w ith the ‘general and
fertile idea’ o f democracy. In the preceding chapter, we offered
an overview o f these kinds o f ‘interconnections’, m entioning
the various repertoires o f political action connected w ith hair
styles, cooking, and dress, and showing that they could inspire
genuine cultural m ovem ents comparable to social or religious

movements. Such cultural movements thus take the form o f
the rites o f m odernisation’ as in, for example, the ludruk in
Java. Before the establishment o f the N ew Order, this theatri
cal genre allowed young people to distance themselves from
the closed universe o f their neighbourhood or slum, and situ
ate themselves in the economically and socially differentiated
w orld o f the city o f Surabaya, and even in national space. It
provided them w ith the practical or cognitive means for deal
ing w ith the institutions o f the state and contem porary society.
It was an instrument o f relative rationalisation and ‘disenchant
m ent’ since it helped to prom ote the monetarisaton, the bu-
reaucratisation and even the ‘conjugalisation’ o f the Javanese
proletariat’s social representations, in a way that often contra
dicted, moreover, the ideals defended by the Indonesian C om
munist Party, w ith w hich some o f the troupes were associated.46
Political societies imagine themselves by means o f a wide
diversity o f social cults o f this kind, whose heterogeneity, and
often their triviality, are subsumed under the pompous rubric
o f ‘culture’. Today, this is one o f the meanings o f sports, and
especially o f football, a prom inent site o f globalisation, includ
ing its aspect o f reinventing difference from one country or
club to another. ‘A paradigm o f male language, transgressing
regions and generations, bringing the singular and the indi
vidual into dialogue, juxtaposing m erit and chance, justice and
trickery, “w e” and “they,” the soccer match appears ... to be
one o f the deep symbolic matrices o f our time. H overing be
tw een festival and war, comic and tragic, ridiculous and se
rious, fiction and reality, ritual and show, it condenses into a
unique, hybrid genre the fundamental values that shape our
societies’, writes Christian Brom berger at the conclusion o f a
remarkable investigation in Marseilles, Turin and Naples.47
W hatever ‘herm eneutic plasticity’ it may have that prevents it
from being reduced to a single, univocal function, it is clearly
‘the site par excellence w here the democratic imaginaire takes
concrete form, glorifying equality o f opportunity, universal
competition, and personal merit [.. .]’,48 at the same time that it
allows chance and deception their place. T he globalisation o f
its practice and the passions it unleashes suggest that it has be
come one o f the major rituals through w hich relationships
among the actors in a single society or in different societies are
negotiated: the m odem polis is ‘footballerian’ and m ore gen
erally athletic, as m uch as it is religious, one not hindering the
other, as was shown in Algeria by young sports fans’ support
for the Islamic Salvation Front.49 Thus in Africa, confronta
tions betw een supporters o f different cities or countries are a
com m on ‘abridged translation’ o f ‘tribalism’ or xenophobia,
just as the exploits o f the national football team, ‘Bafana,
Bafana’, constituted an extraordinary civic celebration o f inter
racial reconciliation in the new South Africa in 1996.50
Like other kinds o f interconnections, exchanges betw een
the sphere o f sporting passions and that o f political passions are
contingent and w ithout specific orientation. T he spectators in
the Greek Olympia, w ho came from various cities, had already
‘decided to feel that they were experiencing a general Greek
ceremony, a symbol o f their civilisation’, w ithout assembling
for the explicit goal o f glorifying their unity and their identity
w ith respect to the barbarians.51 In our own time the contri
bution made by football to the ‘imagined com m unity’ is o f the
same order. Sport is one o f the mediations through w hich the
public sphere is conceived. From the U nited States to the
Islamic Republic o f Iran, televised coverage o f matches even
provides for the globalisation o f the various possible elabo
rations o f the public sphere. But the condensations that sport
invokes are just as paradoxical as the religious invention o f
modernity. Oblique, fragmentary, facetious or violent, they are
anything but linear, and their bizarreness cannot help but
remind us o f certain episodes recounted in this book. For
example, French majorettes have drawn heavily on the military
repertoire: their baton toss is borrowed from the American
army, w hich is supposed to have im ported it from Thailand,
Samoa, or even Arabia in the 1930s, but it has been merged
w ith the French parade tradition; in addition, their troupes

observe a discipline, adopt a hierarchical organisation, wear
uniforms, and m ove in accord w ith a music whose style re
peats, in a distanced or even parodic manner, that o f the French
armed forces, n o t w ithout slightly embarrassing or annoying
the officers in the local garrison. M utatis mutandis, this ludic
and increasingly athletic activity should be compared w ith the
Beni dance that popularised the ‘drill’ technique in East Africa.
C om bining in a very ambivalent way a strict moral conform
ism and a grass-roots exhibitionism, the m ovem ent o f French
majorettes has allowed ‘quite simple girls’ from modest back
grounds to escape from their families, at least for a time, to
increase their social visibility, and perhaps even to begin to rise
in society.52
R ath er than disapproving o f cultural movements— w hether
connected w ith religion, sport, hair-styles, etc.— by describing
them at the outset as futile, alienating, or retrograde in relation
to allegedly universal criteria, we should try to locate the
meanings they convey in specific historical contexts. Moreover, all
effects o f universalisation are not necessarily good, and they do
not excuse us from m aking ethical judgem ents, w hich are the
prerogative o f each individual’s conscience. Simply, let us judge
know ing w hat we are about, not on the basis o f scanty infor
mation; let us not allow the wool to be pulled over our eyes; let
us take care to consider as productive events (evenementialiser)
the matrices o f symbolic action through w hich the imaginary
figures o f politics are constituted and condensed.
In addition, let us not conceal the fact that while the
criticism o f strategies o f political identity involves the exercise
o f reason — rasonieren o f the Enlightenm ent, w hich is indis
pensable for ‘m oving beyond im m aturity’— it also implies a
reconquest o f the imaginaire, for reasons we have explained at
length in the last two chapters. T he Abbe Gregoire declared
the Convention:
We all have senses that are, as it were, the doors o f the soul; through them
we are all capable o f receiving deep impressions; and those w ho claim to
govern a people by philosophical theories are no philosophers. E ven a m an

as free o f everything material as it is possible to be is susceptible to the
prestige o f decorations and the magic o f all the arts o f im itation; and the
person w h o prides him self the m ost on being guided solely by reason has
perhaps yielded less often to reason’s voice than to the illusions o f the
im agination and the senses: these effects derive from the very nature o f
man; and if it is philosophical to analyse it by using abstractions that m ake it
easier to understand, it is no less philosophical to analyse it as a w hole, to
start out from this point to act upon his heart and to direct it tow ard the ful
film ent o f the duties that ensure the stability o f the social ord er.53
Today nothing threatens the ‘stability o f the social order’ more

than the illusion o f cultural identity. It needs, as never before, to
be contested by a m odern philosophical ethos that unravels the
roles o f the contingent and the universal, now that political
parties in Europe and elsewhere have seized the initiative in
what they call the ‘battle for identity’.
[pp. ix-4]
NOTES
Foreword
1. J.-E Bayart, ‘L’enonciation du politique’, R evue frangaise de science politique, 35/3,
June 1985, pp. 343—72; L ’E tat en Afrique. La politique du ventre, Paris: Fayard, 1989;
and (with A. Mbembe and C. Toulabor), Le Politique par le bas en A frique noire.
Contributions a une problematique de la democratie, Paris; Karthala, 1992.
2. E. Hobsbawm, N ations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge University Press,
1990,
3. M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite, vol. II: L ’Usage des plaisirs, Paris: Gallimard,
1984, p. 14.
4. ‘One cannot imagine Diderot in regional dress. There seems to be a contra
diction. Is it possible to be a world-renowned philosopher and at the same time
wear a regional costume...? The uniformity which we expect to see every
where leads to unexpected reactions in all domains,’ says the writer Cees
Nooteboom sarcastically, being the good ‘business-oriented’ Dutchman that he
is. Interview in Liberation, 4—5 Aug. 1990.
5. T. Todorov, N ous et les autres. La reflexion frangaise sur la diversite humaine, Paris:
Seuil, 1989, p. 79. •
6. Cf. especially G. Delannoi, ‘Nations et Lumieres, des philosophes de la nation
avant le nationalisme: Voltaire et Herder’, and A. Renaut, ‘Logiques de la nation’
in G. Delannoi and P-A. Taguieff (eds), Theories du nationalisme, Paris: Kime,
1991, pp. 15-46.
7. B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa, vol. II:
Violence and Ethnicity, London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann; Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 1991 (reviewed in R evue frangaise de science politique, 44/1,
Feb. 1994, pp. 136-9).
Part I T he Beaujolais N ouveau is here!

1. C. Tardits (ed.), Contribution de la recherche ethnologique a I’histoire des civilisations du
Cameroun, Paris: CNRS, 1981; C. H. Pradelles de Latour, Etlmopsychanalyse en
pays bamileke, Paris: EPEL, 1991; J.-P Warmer, L ’esprit d ’entreprise au Cameroun,
Paris: Karthala, 1993.
2. M. Lachiver, Vins, vignes et vignerons. Histoire du vignoble frangais, Paris: Fayard,
1988, pp. 502—3 and 506.
3. J. Clifford, The Predicament o f Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and
A rt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 15.
253
254 Notes [pp. 7-11]
Chapter i T he Interweaving o f Traditions

1. P. Hassner, La violence et la paix. D e la bombe atomique au nettoyage ethnique, Paris:
Esprit, 1995, pp. 309,341,380-1.
2. F. Braudel, Grammaire des civilisations, Paris: Arthaud-Flammarion, 1987, pp. 38
9 (authors italics).
3. A. Appadurai (ed.), 77ie Social Life o f Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
Cambridge University Press, 1986 (esp. chs I and II, by A. Appadurai and
I. KopytoS); F. Adelkhah, Being Modern in Iran, London: Hurst, 1999; S. Darbon,
D esjeunesfilles toutes simples. Ethnographie d ’une groupe de majorettes en France (no
date or place of publication, but appearing 1995). O n cultural differences in
management, cf. P. Iribarne, La logique de I’honneur. Gestion des entreprises et tra
ditions nationales, Paris: Seuil, 1989, and, for non-Western examples, P.-N. Den-
ieul, Les Entrepreneurs du developpement. L ’ethno-industrialisation en Tunisie. La
dynamique de Sfax, Paris: Harmattan, 1992; J.-P. Warmer, L ’esprit d ’entreprise au
Cameroun, Paris: Karthala, 1993.
4. W. M. O ’Barr, ‘The Airbrushing of Culture: An Insider Looks at Global
Advertising’, Public Culture 2/1, 1989, p. 15.
5. J.-M. Lotman and B.-A. Ouspenski, Semiotique de la culture russe. Etudes sur
I’histoire, Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1990, pp. 47—9.
6. J. N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory o f Change and Continuity,
Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 143; A. Giddens, M odernity and Self
Identity: S e lf and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford University Press, 1991;
P. Hassner (n. 1).
7. B. Lewis, Islam et laicite. La naissance de la Turquie moderne, Paris: Fayard, 1988 (esp.
pp. 233ff. and 425—6); D. Kushner, The R ise o f Turkish Nationalism, 187 6 —1908,
London: Frank Cass, 1977.
8. M. Salilins,y4i/ coeur des societes. Raison utilitaire et raison culturelle, Paris: Gallimard,
1980, p. 8.
9. This is contrary to what Sahlins thinks when he writes o f ‘a cultural schema...
variously modified by a dominant place of symbolic production, which feeds
the major idiom of other relations and activities’, and of a ‘privileged institu
tional place of the symbolic process, from which there emanates a classifiying
pattern imposed on the culture in its entirety’, (ibid., p. 263)
10. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
11. Cf. esp. the work of Alain Henry at the Caisse Franâise de Developpement,
esp. Tontines et banques au Cameroun. Les principes de la Societe des amis, Paris:
Karthala, 1991, of which G.-H. Tchente and P. Guillerme-Dieumegard are co
authors.
12. K. van Wolferen, H ie Enigma o f Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless
Nation, N e w York: Vintage Books, 1990 (esp. pp. 29 and 184£F.);H. Ooms, ‘Les
capitalistes confuceens’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 80, Nov. 1989,
pp. 81—6.
13. Y. Shinichi, ‘Le concept de public-prive’ in H. Yoichi and C. Sautter (eds),
L 'E ta t et I’individu au Japon, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales, 1990, p. 36. For current transformations in Japanese culture,
[pp. 11-21] Notes 255
cf. E. Seizelet, ‘La societe japonaise et la mutation du systeme de valeurs’, Les
etudes du C E R I , July 1995.
14. P. Veyne, L ’Elegie erotique romaine, Paris: Seuil, 1983, p. 25.
15. Y. Shinichi (n. 13), pp. 34—5, and K. Postel-Vinay, La revolution silendeuse du
Japon, Paris: Calmann-Levy, Fondation Saint-Simon, 1994, pp. 85-183.
16. A. Walthall, Peasant Uprisings in japan: A Critical Anthology o f Peasant Histories,
University of Chicago Press, 1991. Cf. also the review of the work of Japanese
medievalists, esp. Yoshihiko Amino, by P Pons in Le Monde, 3 March 1989,
p. 19.
17. Le Monde, 11—12 Nov. and 22 Nov. 1990.
18. I am grateful to Jacques Andrieu of the CN RS Centre Chine for having
‘opened my eyes’— as Cameroonians would say— to this symbolism during a
visit to an exhibition of Maoist badges at Xian in Oct. 1993.
19. M.-C. Bergere, L ’A ge d ’or de la bourgeoisie chinoise, 1911—1937, Paris: Flam-
marion, 1986.
20. Y. Chevrier, ‘L’Empire distendu’ in J.-F. Bayart (ed.), La Greffe de 1’Etat, Paris:
Karthala, 1996 (ch. 9).
21. R.H . Solomon, M a o ’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture, Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1971, p. 521.
22. N. R. Keddie (ed.), Religion and Politics in Iran: S h i’ism from Quietism to R evo
lution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983; Y. Richard, Le C h i’isme en Iran.
Imam et Revolution, Paris: Librairie d’Amerique et d’Orient,Jean Maisonneuve,
1980.
23. J. L. Esposito (ed.), T he Iranian Revolution: Its Global Impact, Miami: Florida
International University Press, 1990.
24. Quoted in G. Kepel, Les banlieues de 1’islam. Naissance d ’une religion en France,
Paris: Seuil, 1987, p. 253.
25. Interview with Jacques Chirac by the Washington Times in Nov. 1986,
reproduced in L e Monde, 11 Nov. 1986, p. 2.
26. S. Haeri, The L aw o f Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran, London: I. B. Tauris,
1989.
27. ‘L’intervention televisee du president de la Republique’, Le Monde, 28 Oct.
1995, p. 8.
28. F. Adelkhah, J.-F. Bayart and O. Roy, Thermidor en Iran, Brussels: Complexe,
1993.
29. P. Clawson (ed.), Iran’s Strategic Intentions and Capabilities, Washington, DC: Insti
tute for National Strategic Studies, 1994.
30. Liberation, 15 Feb. 1994.
31. As reported by R . Girard, Le Figaro, 19 May 1994.
32. Le M onde, 18 Feb. 1993.
33. Cf. for example at the rime of Operation Manta, in 1983: J.-E Bayart,
La politique africaine de Francois Mitterrand, Paris: Karthala, 1984.
34. J. de Barrin, ‘Un quart de siecle d’independance au Burundi et au Rwanda. Pas
de fete de famille pour les jumeaux des Grands Lacs’, Le Monde, 1 July 1987.
35. As reported by R . Girard, Le Figaro, 19 May 1994. The officer quoted was very
probably General Huchon, then head of the Military Cooperation Mission at
the French Ministry of Cooperation.
256 Notes [pp. 22-29]
36. Interview in Le M onde , 13 July 1994. Cf. also interview with Francois
Mitterrand in Lc Figaro, 9 Sept. 1994: ‘[Juvenal Habyarimana] represented in
Kigali an 80 per cent majority ethnic group.’
37. J.-F. Bayart, L ’Etat en Afrique (n. 1), ch. 1.
38. C. Newbury, The Cohesion o f Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda,
1860—1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; C. Vidal, Sociologie
des passions. Rwanda, C ote-d’Ivoire, Paris: Karthala, 1991; R . Lemarchand,
Burundi, Etlmocide as Discourse and Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
39. Quoted in M. G. Schatzberg, M obutu or Chaos? The United States and Zaire,
1 9 6 0 -1 9 9 0 , Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Foreign Policy
Research Institute, 1991, pp. 47—8.
40. According to some recent sources, this massacre has not been proved, or at least
it would appear to have been exaggerated. But it has been established that the
security services maintained their pressure on opponents, despite the intro
duction of multi-party politics, attacking independent newspapers and leaders
of the UDPS.
41. ‘Un proces exemplaire a Bamako’, Le Monde, 14-15 Feb. 1993, p. 1.
42. Liberation, 25 Sept. 1990, p. 25. A good example of the globalisation of identity-
based absurdities: that supervisory employee was of Tunisian origin.
43. On the rebuilding of Zulu ‘tradition’ by Inkatha, cf. S. Marks, ‘Patriotism,
Patriarchy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness’ in
L. Vail (ed.), The Creation o f Tribalism in Southern Africa, London: lames Currey,
1989, pp. 215-40.
44. Didier Bigo, Pouvoir et obeissance en Centrafrique, Paris: Karthala, 1988; C. M.
Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadema, Paris: Karthala, 1986.
45. T. O. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ in E. Hobsbawm
and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention o f Tradition, Cambridge University Press,
1983, pp. 41-2. '
46. E. Terray, ‘Le debat politique dans le royaumes de l’Afrique de l’Ouest. Enjeux
et formes’, R evue frangaise de science politique, 38/5, Oct. 1988, pp. 720—30;
I. Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution o f a Political
Order, Cambridge University Press, 1975; R .H . Bates, Essays on the Political
Economy o f Rural Africa, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 41—2.
47. L. de Heusch, Le roi ivre ou I’origine de I’etat, Paris: Gallimard, 1972, pp. 94ff.
48. P. Geschiere, Village Communities and the State: Changing Relations among the
M aka o f Southern Cameroon since the Colonial Conquest, London: KPI, 1982.
49. Cf.— as well as Jean Rouch’s short film Les Mattres fo u s — T. O. Ranger, ‘The
Invention o f Tradition in Colonial Africa’ (n. 45), and Dance and Society in
Eastern Africa, 1890—1970: The Beni Ngoma, London: Heinemann, 1975;J. Iliffe,
A Modern History o f Tanganyika, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 100.
50. J. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History o f Political Tradition in E qua
torial Africa, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
51. C. Young and T. Turner, The R ise and Decline o f the Zairian State, Madison: Uni
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 30ff., and B. Jewsiewicki (ed.), Naftre et
mourir au Zaire. Un demi-siecle d ’histoire au quotidien, Paris: Karthala, 1993.
52. J. Vansina (n. 50).
[pp. 29-37] Notes 257
53. T. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ (n. 45).
54. J. Vansina (n. 50), p. 258.
55. For a critique o f tradition reified in this way, cf. F. Eboussi Boulaga, La Crise du
M u n tu . Authenticity africaine et philosophic, Paris: Presence africaine, 1977. In
contrast to Jan Vansina, S. Feierman relativises the extent of that reification:
Peasant Intellectuals, Anthropology and History in Tanzania, Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1990.
56. E. Colson, ‘African Society at the Time of the Scramble’ in L. H. Gann and
P. Duignan (eds), Colonialism in Africa, 1 8 7 0 -1 9 6 0 , vol. I: The History and Politics
o f Colonialism, 18 7 0 —1 9 1 4 , Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 31.
57. J. Iliffe (n. 49), p. 324. The role of African middlemen, especially the literate
ones, in this process of colonial ‘imagination’ of ethnicity is now better
understood than a few years ago, when emphasis was placed on the inter
vention of European administrators and missionaries: cf. for example L. Vail
(n. 43) and B. Berman andj. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, Harlow: Longman, 1992.
58. J.-P. Warmer (n. 3).
59. J.-F. Bayart, L ’E tat en A frique (n. 37), ch. V I am grateful to Eric de Rosny for
drawing my attention to that perverse effect of the Rwandan state’s territorial
continuity.
60. According to a celebrated, and much debated, expression of Georges Balandier.
61. Voltaire, Essais sur les moeurs, Paris: Garnier, 1963, vol. II, p. 305, and vol. I, p. 23.
62. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit o f Capitalism, London, Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1989.
63. R . Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
64. G. Roth, ‘Weber the Would-be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History’,
in H. Lehmann and G. R oth (eds), Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence,
Contexts, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 83-121. Cf. also H. Goldman,
M a x Weber and Thomas M ann: Calling and the Shaping o f the S e lf Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1988. However, M. Herzfeld ( H ie Social Production o f
Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots o f Western Democracy, New York: Berg,
1992, p. 21) recalls that in 1904 Weber was still attributing the supposed speci
ficity of Western rationality to ‘heredity’.
65. M. Weber, Economy and Society: A n O utline o f Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther
R oth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978,
pp. 385ff., esp. pp. 393—4.
66. T. Todorov, N ous et les autres. La reflexion franfaise sur la diversite humaine, Paris:
Seuil, 1989, p. 429.
67. Cf. esp. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), 77te Invention o f Tradition (n. 45).
68. D. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: the British
Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c. 1820—1977’, ibid.,pp. 101—64.
69. E. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870—1914’, ibid., pp. 263—
307.
70. C. E. Schorske, Vienne f i n de siecle. Politique et culture, Paris: Seuil, 1983, pp. 50ff.
71. C. Hurtig, Les Maharajahs et la politique dans I’lnde contemporaine, Paris: Presses de
la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988.
72. B. S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’ in E. Hobsbawm and
T. Ranger (eds) (n. 45), pp. 165—209. M. van Woerkens however observes that
258 Notes [pp. 37-40]
the ‘Indian Renaissance’ movement set off by Orientalist studies turned out
less strong in Britain than in France or Germany (Le Voyageur etrangle. L ’Inde
des Thugs, le colonialisme et I’imaginaire, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995, p. 274).
73. C. Jaffrelot, Les Nationalismes hindous. Ideologie, implantation et mobilisation des
annees 1920 aux annees 1990, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques, 1993, pp. 24 and 41.
74. Ibid., p. 45. Colonial observers were disturbed by this mixture of styles and
were naturally inclined to treat them as criminal, remembering the eradication
of the criminal Thug sect in the nineteenth century: ‘The bomb-parast is an
individual who has placed a bomb or grenade in the sanctuary of Shiva so as to
adore her in company with Kali the Hungry, and to revel in advance in the
blood that is to flow. In Bengal the pre-trial examination of all these assassins
shows how the Hindu student, physically and morally victim of premature
sexual activity, responds to propaganda of crime and adores the apotheosis of
the Goddess under the power of nitro-glycerine... The cult of the grenade is
similar to that of Bhowani and Kali, tutelary saints of Thuggism, whose thirst
for blood spared nobody.’ Thus one of them fulminated in 1934 following an
attempt on the life of the Viceroy (quoted by M. van Woerkens [n. 72],p. 352).
75. C. Jaffrelot (n. 73), pp. 44ff.
76. Ibid., pp. 83—4. See also,by the same author, ‘Les (re)conversions a l’hindouisme
(1885—1990): Politisation et diffusion d’une “invention de la tradition’” ,
Archives des sciences sociales des religions, 87, July—Sept. 1994, pp. 73—98.
77. ‘...totalitarianism results from the attempt, in a society where individualism is
deeply rooted and predominant, to subordinate it to the primacy o f society as a
totality,’ wrote Louis Dumont (H om o Aequalis. Genese et epanouissement de
I’ideologie economique, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, pp. 21—2). In this case the ‘totality’
is ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’.
78. Benedict Anderson reminds us that nationalism arose first in the New World,
not in the Old (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f
Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983).
79. E. Renan, Q u ’est-ce q u ’une nation? in Oeuvres completes, Paris: Calmann-Levy,
1947, p. 891.
80. J.-F. Bayart, ‘L’hypothese totalitaire dans le Tiers monde. Le cas de l’Afrique
noire’ in G. Hermet, P. Hassner and J. Rupnik (eds), Totalitarismes, Paris:
Economica, 1984, pp. 201-14.
81. Quoted by T. Todorov (n. 66), pp. 130 and 76—8. For a relativisation of the
opposition between civic/political and ethnic/cultural conceptions of the
nation, cf. A. Dieckhoff, ‘La deconstruction d’une illusion. L’introuvable oppo
sition entre nationalisme politique et nationalisme culturel’, L ’A n n ee sociolo-
gique, 46/1,1996, pp. 43—55.
82. Z. Sternhell, N i droite, ni gauche. L ’ideologie fasciste en France, Paris: Seuil, 1983,
and (with co-authors) Naissance de I’ideologie fasciste, Paris: Fayard, 1989, as well
as his commentary on Francois Mitterrand’s admissions to Pierre Pean about
his Vichy past (in Le Monde, 8 Sept. 1994, p. 8) and the polemics which that
set off!
83. See on this subject B. Berman andj. Lonsdale (n. 57), chs. 11 and 12.
[pp. 41-45] Notes 259
84. Cf. the essay by the Iranian philosopher Djalal Al-el Ahmad, L ’Occidentalite,
Paris: Harmattan, 1988.
85. B. Anderson (n. 78), 1991 revised edition, pp. 163ff. Cf. also the critique of the
instrumentalist character of the Hobsbawm-Ranger thesis by A. Smith (‘The
Nation: Invented, Imagined, Reconstructed?’, M illennium , 20/3, winter 1991,
pp. 353—68), and the development of Ranger’s thinking on this point (‘The
Invention of Tradition Revisited: the Case of Colonial Africa’in T. Ranger and
O. Vaughan (eds), Legitimacy and die State in Tiventieth Century Africa: Essays in
Honour o f A .H .M . Kirk-Greene, London: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 62-111).
86. Ibid., p. 183. Cf. also, on the Javanese casej. Pemberton, O n the Subject o f ‘J ava’,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
87. Cf. the admirable study of Kikuyu society in Kenya by B. Berman and
J. Lonsdale (n. 57), and the no less remarkable interpretation of the ‘trial of
independence’ in Bassa society by A. Mbembe, La Naissance du maquis dans le
Sud-Cam eroun (1 9 2 0 -1 9 6 0 ). Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie, Paris:
Karthala, 1996.
88. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L'A venture ambigue, Paris: UGE, 1979 (new edition),
p. 164. Cf. also the famous essay by G. Balandier, A frique ambigue, Paris: Plon,
1957, and S. Marks, The Am biguities o f Dependence in South Africa: Class,
Nationalism and the State in Twentieth Century N atal, Johannesburg: Ravan Press,
1995. This idea is developed in ch. 3.
90. J. and J. ComarofF, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1992, p. 285.
91. Cf. for example the portrait of Chatelain, founder in 1897 of the Lincoln
mission station in Angola, by D. Peclard, Ethos missionnaire et esprit du capitalisme.
La Mission philafricaine en Angola. 1897—1 907 , Lausanne: Le Fait Missionnaire,
1995.
92. J. andj. ComarofF, Ethnography (n. 90), ch. VII, and O f Revelation and Revolution,
vol. I: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, University of
Chicago Press, 1991, ch. II. The relations between the Conquistadors and the
Jesuits and the Mendicant Orders in the New World provide another classic
example of such disagreements within the colonial world.
93. Cf. for example the fierce criticism o f the ideas of popular culture and folklore
by M. de Certeau, La culture au pluriel, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1980, ch. II
(co-authored with D. Julia andj. Revel): ‘Does popular culture exist elsewhere
than in the act that suppresses it?’ (p. 74).
94. J. G. Liebenow, Liberia: The Q uest fo r Democracy, Bloomington: Indiana Uni
versity Press, 1987, p. 21.
95. T. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’ (n. 45).
96. Cf. for example D. Peclard (n. 91) and N. Monnier, Strategie missionnaire et
tactiques d ’appropriation indigenes: La mission romande au M ozambique, 1888—1896,
Lausanne: Le Fait Missionnaire, 1995.
97. T. Ranger, ‘Religion, Development and African Christian Identity’ in
K. H. Petersen (ed.), Religion, Development and African Identity, Uppsala: Scandi
navian Institute o f African Studies, 1987, pp. 49fF., and J.-F. Bayart, ‘Les Eglises
260 Notes [pp. 45-48]
chretiennes et la politique du ventre: Le partage du gateau ecclesial’, Politique
africaine, 35, Oct. 1989, pp. 18—19.
98. B. Berman andj. Lonsdale (n. 57), pp. 234 and 254.
99. M. von Freyhold (Ujamaa Villages in Tanzania. Analysis of a Social Experiment,
London: Heinemann, 1979) emphasises for example the kinship between
Ujamaa and villagisation in Tanzania and colonial thinking; and T. Ranger
stresses the affinities between African Christianity and the Socialist transfor
mation of peasant communities: ‘Religious Development and African Christ
ian Identity’, in K.H. Petersen (ed.) (n. 97), p. 30.
100. C. Geertz, Agricultural Involution: the Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966; B. Anderson, Language and
Power. Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1990, and Imagined Communities (n. 78);J. Pemberton (n. 86).
101. D. Lombard, Le Carrefour javanais. Essai d’histoire globale, vol. I: L ’heritage des
royaumes concentriques, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, 1990, pp. 15ff. and 74ff.
102. C. Jaffrelot (n. 73), pp. 141-2. Cf. also E.E Irschick, Dialogue and History on
the ‘dialogic’ birth of the village in southern India in the nineteenth century,
and G. Prakash, ‘Introduction’ in G. Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism pp. 6—7,
on the ‘post-colonial text’ of the village at Gandhi’s home, who reinterpreted
colonial archives in the light of Henry Maine, Tolstoy, Thoreau and Ruskin, as
well as R. O ’Hanlon, ‘Recovering the Subject. Subaltern Studies and Histories
of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, 22/1, 1988,
pp. 189—224, for a critical review of the ‘Subaltern Studies’ historical school
and its analysis of the peasantry.
103. J. C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Rebellion and Subsistence in South
East Asia, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
104. S. L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant. The Political Economy of Rural Society in
Vietnam, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, pp. 2—3, 10ff., 22ff.
and 43ff.
105. Ibid., p. 149.
106. L. Dumont, La Civilisation indicnnc ct nous, Paris: Armand Colin, 1964, pp. llff.
and 121.
107. Let the villagers themselves speak, such as this student at a N orth Cameroon
agricultural college answering a questionnaire in writing and talking to us not
o f ‘the village’ but of the peasants:
Q u e stio n ‘In w h a t respects has the village m a d e progress ?’
‘These villages have made most progress in the area of work in “Baba’s” fields. That
means, work in the fields of the Chief of Rey Bouba only. Even to work in their indi
vidual fields, they have no right when the rainy season comes; the chief’s dourgourous
[guards] come to look for them in the village, to go first to the chief’s fields so as to
come back and start work for themselves late in the day; that is why I say they have pro
gressed in the area of the Rey Bouba chief’s fields.’
Q u e stio n ‘H a s this progress been m a d e b y all the p ea sa n ts, or o n ly b y so m e? W h y ? ’
‘I tell you that this progress is made by all the peasants, because the region or Lamidate
of Rey Bouba comprises these tribes: [the names of various ethnic groups follow]. They
[pp. 49-55] Notes 261
are all the slaves o f the chief of Rey Douba. Nobody among the tribes 1 have just men
tioned has any rights as a person.’
(Handwritten homework found at Baikwa, North Cameroon, in an agricultural
training school, Dec. 1984)
108. T. Ranger, ‘Religious Development and African Christian Identity’ in
K. H. Petersen (ed.) (n. 97),p. 31; A. Hastings,/! History of African Christianity,
1950—1975, Cambridge University Press, p. 179.
109. V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, p. 40. Cf.
also H. Cox, Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology, New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1984, and G. Kepel, La revanche de Dieu. Chretiens,
juifs et musulmans a la reconquete du nionde, Paris: Seuil, 1991, ch. III.
110. P. Gifford, Christianity and Politics in Doe’s Liberia, Cambridge University Press,
1993, pp. 264ff.
111. P. Gifford, ibid. pp. 21 Off. and 293ff. for a solidly documented analysis. Cf. also,
for a Sudanese example, W. James, The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion
and Power among the Uduk of Sudan, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, ch. IV.
112. ‘Dispensationalist’ commentary quoted by P. Gifford (n. 110), p. 252.
113. For the Liberian example, see P. Gifford (n. 110).
114. J.-F. Bayart (ed.), Religion et modernite politique en Afrique noire. Dieu pour tons et
chacun pour soi, Paris: Karthala, 1993. This approach has been particularly
employed in reference to Zaire, esp. by P. Ngandu Nkashama, Eglises nouvelles
et mouvements religieux. L’exemple za'irois, Paris: Harmattan, 1990, and R . De-
visch, ‘Independent Churches Heal Modernity’s Violence in Zaire’in B. Kap-
ferer (ed.), Peripheral Societies and the State, Oxford: Berg; and, concerning
Nigeria, by R . Marshall, “‘Power in the Name of Jesus”: Social Transfor
mation and Pentecostalism in Western Nigeria “Revisited”’in T. Ranger and
O. Vaughan (eds), Legitimacy and the State (n. 86),pp. 213—46; and, concerning
Ivory Coast, by J.-P. Dozon, La Cause des prophetes. Politique et religion en
Afrique contemporaine, Paris: Seuil, 1995.
115. J.-F. Bayart (n. 37), pp. 236ff.
116. P. Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone,
International African Institute/James Currey and Heinemann, London and
Portsmouth, NH , 1996.
117. Tracts and testimony cited by R. Marshall, “‘Power in the N am e...”’ (n. 114),
p. 236.
118. Ibid., pp. 234ff.
119. The works by Filip de Boeck and Rene Devisch on Zaire (Louvain, Africa
Research Centre) are particularly enlightening on this point.
120. Source: G. Ter Haar, Spirit of Africa: the Healing Ministry ofArchbishop Milingo of
Zambia, London: Hurst, 1992.
121. Quoted by Ter Haar, ibid., p. 259.
122. Quoted in ibid., p. 178.
123. Ibid., p. 123.
124. D. Cruise O ’Brien, ‘La filiere musulmane. Confreries soufies et politique en
Afrique noire’, Politique africaine 4, Nov. 1981, pp. 16ff. (quoting notably
W. Simmons, ‘Islamic Conversion and Social Change in a Senegalese Village’,
Ethnology 18/4,1979).
262 Notes [pp. 56—61]
125. Article published in Izvestia, 28 Aug. 1993, reproduced in Le Monde, 23 Dec.
1993, p. 3.
126. S. Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization
of Turkish Political Ideas, Princeton University Press, 1962.
127. H. E. Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religions Modernism: The Liberation
Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1990, pp. 47fF.
128. C. Vidal, ‘Les politiques de la haine’, Les temps modemes, 583,July—Aug. 1995,
p. 25.
129. Personal observation, recorded in ‘L’Angola entre guerre et paix’, La Croix, 29
June 1991.
130. C. Hughes, Switzerland, New York: Praeger, 1975, p. 107.
131. B. Anderson (n. 78),p. 139.
Chapter 2 Should We Stop Using the W ord ‘C ulture’?

1. S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renonncer: A Study of Buddhism and Pol
ity in Thailand against a Historical Background, Cambridge University Press, 1976,
Chs Vll and VIII, and Culture, Thought and Social Action: an Anthropological Per
spective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, ch. VII.
2. D. Lombard, Le Carrefour javanais. Essai d’histoire globale, vol. 2: Les reseaux asia-
tiques, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1990,
pp. 130—1. Cf. also, for the Caribbean, E Constant, ‘Construction communau-
taire, insularite et identite politique dans la Cara'ibe anglophone’, Revue frangaise
de science politique, 42/4, Aug. 1992, pp. 618—35; D.-C. Martin, ‘Je est un autre,
nous est un meme. culture populaire, identite et politique a propos du carnaval
de Trinidad’, Revue frangaise de science politique, 42/5, Oct. 1992, pp. 747—64.
3. I. Kopytoff, The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
4. W. James, The Listening Ebony. Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among the
Udak of Sudan, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 3. Cf. also J. J. Ewald, Soldiers, Traders
and Slaves. State Formation and Economic Transformation of the Greater Nile Valley,
1770-1885, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, and W. G. Clarence-
Smith (ed.), The Economics of the Indian Ocean: Slave Trade in the Nineteenth
Century, London: Frank Cass, 1989.
5. J.-L. Amselle and E. Mbokolo (eds), Au coeur de I’ethnie. Ethnies, tribalisme et Etat
en Afrique, Paris: La Decouverte, 1985; J--P- Warmer, Echanges, developpement et
hierarchies dans le Bamenda precolonial (Cameroun), Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1985.
6. Cf. for example C. Tardits, Le royaume bamoun, Paris: Armand Colin, 1980,
pp. 296-7; P. Laburthe-Tolra, Les Seigneurs de la foret. Essai sur le passe historique,
Vorganisation sociale et les twrmes ethiques des ancietis Beti du Cameroun, Paris: Publi
cations de la Sorbonne, 1981; P. Bonnafe, N zo Lipfu, le lignage de la mort. La
sorcellerie, ideologic de lutte sociale sur le plateau kuknya, Nanterre: Labethno, 1978,
and Histoire sociale d’uii penple congolais, book 1: La Terre et le Ciel, Paris:
[pp. 61—66] Notes 263
O R STO M , 1987; S. F. Nadel, A Black Byzantium, Oxford University Press
for the International African Institute, 1942.
7. J. Poirier, ‘Tradition et novation. De la “situation coloniale” a la situation
hetero-culturelle’, Revue de ITustitnt de sociologie (Brussels), 3-4,1988, p. 75.
8. W. MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1983, pp. 97ff.
9. C. M. Toulabor, Le Togo sons Eyadema, Paris: Karthala, 1986, p. 37; P. Geschiere,
Village Communities aud the State: Changing Relations among the Maka of Southern
Cameroon since the Colonial Conquest, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982,
p. 206.
10. M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite, vol. 3: Le Souci de soi, Paris: Gallimard, 1984,
pp. 102—3 (taking over for his purposes the works of S. H. Sandbach,
M. RostovtzefFandj. Gage).
11. P. Veyne, L’Elegie erotique romahie, Paris: Seuil, 1983, p. 25 (which itself estab
lishes the comparison with the Japan of the Tale of Genji).
12. C. Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968,pp. 369—70.
13. R . N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East, London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1975; P. D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, Cam
bridge University Press, 1984; Palacio Nacional de Queluz, Musee National
des Arts Asiatiques, Du Tage a la mer de Chine. Une epopee portugaise, Paris:
Editions de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1992.
14. According to the well-chosen expression used by Ernest Gellner, in J. Rupnik
(ed.), Le Dechiremeut des nations, Paris: Seuil, 1995, p. 262.
15. F. de la Serre, C. Lequesne and J. Rupnik, L ’Union europeenne. Ouverture a VEsP.
Paris: PUF, 1994, pp. 133—4. See also the fine work of V. Perez Diaz, Le defi de
I’espace public europeeu, Madrid: ASP, 1994.
16. O n the importance of these transnational flows, cf. B. Badie and M.-C. Sinouts,
Le Retournement du nionde. Sociologie de la scene internationale, Paris: Presses de la
Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Dalloz, 1992, and A. Colonomos,
Sociologie des reseaux transnatiouaux. Communantes, entreprises et individus:lien social
et systeme international, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995.
17. M. Henry, Man-, vol. I: Unephilosophie de la realite, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, p. 109.
18. M. de Certeau, La Culture au plnriel, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1980, pp. 238-9.
19. M. de Certeau, L’Ecriture de I’histoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, p. 37, n. 15.
20. F. Braudel, L’Histoire de la France. Espace et histoire, Paris: Arthaud-Flammarion,
1986, p. 237.
21. J. Le GofF, ‘La vie de Saint Louis et le XHIe siecle’, Esprit, Aug.-Sept. 1992,
pp. 39—40.
22. F. Braudel, ‘L’histoire des civilisations: le passe explique le present’ in Ecrits sur
I’histoire, Paris: Flammarion, 1969, p. 305.
23. M. de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, vol. I: Arts de faire, Paris: UGE, 1980,
p. 10.
24. M. Vovelle, Ideologies et meutalites, Paris: F. Maspero, 1982, pp. 125fF., and Les
Metamorphoses de la fete en Provence (1750-1820), Paris: Flammarion, 1976;
P. Joutard, La Legende des Camisards. Une sensibilite au passe, Paris: Gallimard,
1977; R . Mandrou, De la culturepopulaire aux X V Ile et X V llIe siecles, Paris: Stock,
264 Notes [pp. 67-72]
1975 (new edn); M. Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges. Etude sur le caractere surnaturel
attribue a la puissance royale, particulierement en France et en Angleterre, Paris:
Gallimard, 1983 (new edn); CNRS, La religion popidaire, Paris: Editions du
CNRS, 1979.
25. M. Vovelle, Ideologies et mentalites (n. 24), p. 261.
26. C. Geertz, Bali. Interpretation d'une culture, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, p. 251.
27. Ibid.
28. E. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, London: Bell, 1954; S. J. Tambiah
(n. 1);G. Balandier, Anthropologie politique, Paris: PUF, 1967, and Sens et puissance.
Les dynamiques sociales, Paris: PUF, 1971; 1. Kopytoff (ed.) (n. 3);J.-P. Warmer
(n-5)- . . ,
29. R. Bendix, ‘Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered', Comparative Studies in
. . .
Society and History, IX/3, April 1967, pp. 292—346.

30. Cf.— besides the works of Max Weber (and the commentary on Weber by
R. Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1986,
ch. VI) and those of Otto Hintze— A. R. Zolberg, ‘L’influence des facteurs
“internes” sur l’ordre politique “internet”’ in M. Grawitz and J. Leca (eds),
Traite de science politique, vol. I, Paris: PUF, pp. 567—98.
31. D.-C. Martin suggests substituing this expression ‘emblem of identity’ for the
idea of ‘identity marker’ borrowed from the vocabulary of biology and often
used (‘Le choLx d’identite’, Revue fran(aise de science politique, 42/4, Aug. 1992,
p. 589). '
32. P. Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Berkeley: University of Cali
fornia Press, 1977, pp. 35—7.
33. 1. Lotman and B. Ouspenski, Semiotique de la culture nisse. Etudes sur I’histoire.
Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1990, pp. 27, 39, 44, 51.
34. CNRS, La religion populaire (n. 24); Centre Meridional d’Histoire Sociale, des
Mentalites et des Cultures, Les iuteruiediaires culturels, Aix-en-Provence: Publi
cations de l’Universite de Provence, 1981.
35. D. Roche, La France des Ltunieres, Pans: Fayard, 1993, p. 99 (my emphasis).
36. R. Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la Revolution frau(aise, Paris: Seuil, 1990,
p. 105ff.
37. M. N. Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, Oxford Uni
versity Press, 1965, pp. 214ff.
38. W. G. Andrews, Poetry’s livee, Society's Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry, Seattle: Uni
versity of Washington Press, 1985, ch. VIII.
39. M. Raeff, Couiprendre lAncien Regime rnsse, Paris: Seuil, 1982, p. 87.
40. M. de Certeau (n. 23), pp. 12 and 20—1.
41. J.-F. Bayart, L ’Etat au Cameroun, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques, 1979; L ’Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre, Paris: Fayard,
1989; and (with C. M. Toulabor and A. Mbembe) Le Politique par le has en
Afrique noire. Contributions a une problcmatiqtie de la deinocratie, Paris: Karthala,
1992; as well as A. Mbembe, Afriques indociles. Christianisme, pouvoir et etat en
societe postcoloniale, Paris: Karthala, 1988.
42. C. Duverger, La conversion des ludiens de Nouvelle-Espagne, Paris: Seuil, 1987,
pp. 216£F., 247,252-3,260-61. For another example of the Indian extraversion
[pp. 72-79] Notes 265
strategy, cf. J. Fried, Two Orders of Authority and Power in Tarahumara
Society in R. D. Fogelson and R. N. Adams (eds), Tlw Anthropology of Power:
Ethnographic Studies from Asia, Oceania and the New World, New York:
Academic Press, 1977, pp. 263—9.
43. C. Duverger (n. 42), p. 15.
44. Ibid., p. 261. As we shall see later, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe— con
demned by the Franciscans, but very popular among Spaniards and Indians
alike— is also often associated with the assertion of a Mexican proto
nationalism (S. Gruzinski, La Guerre des images. De Christophe Colomb a ‘Blade
Runner’ (1492-2019), Paris: Fayard, 1990, pp. 188ff.).
45. I am grateful to Philippe Burin des Roziers and Rodolfo Ramon de R oux for
having shared their observations with me while giving me hospitality in
Bogota in 1981.
46. S. Gruzinski (n. 44), pp. 152fF.
47. I. Lotman and B. Ouspenski (n. 33), p. 28.
48. M. Vovelle (n. 24), pp. 312fF.; M. Ozouf, La Fete revolutionnaire, 1789—1799,
Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
49. J. Delumeau, Rassurer et proteger. Le sentiment de securite dans I’Occident d’autrfois,
Paris: Fayard, 1989, pp. 152-6. Cf. also O. Ihl, La fete republicaine, Paris:
Gallimard, 1996, pp. 231fF.
50. J.-C. Schmitt, La Raison desgestes dans I’Occident medieval, Paris: Gallimard, 1990,
pp. 57ff.
51. File 140/221, ‘Elites politiques. Charles Njonjo’, Nairobi: CRJEDU.
52. B. Berman a n d j. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, London:James Currey; Nairobi:
Heinemann; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1991, pp. 281, 369ff., 443ff.,
458; J. Spencer, KAU: The Kenya African Union, London: Kegan Paul Interna
tional, 1985, p. 43; R. Buijtenhuijs, Le mouvement ‘mau-mau’. Une revolte
paysanne et anti-coloniale en Afrique noire,The Hague:Mouton, 1971,pp. 373—4.
53. B. Berman andj. Lonsdale (n. 52), pp. 383,458.
54. Nyunda ya Rubango, Les Etudes de lexicologie politique au Zaire. Bilan critique et
perspectives (no place or date of publication indicated, but appearing in
Lubumbashi), xerox, Brussels: CEDAF, file 083.
55. Source: anonymous letter of 19 June 1982, giving the record of the first session
of the trial of the the thirteen political commissars. Brussels, CEDAF, ‘Oppo
sition’ file 016.4.
56. Article published in Izvestia, 28 Aug. 1993, reproduced in Le Monde, 23 Dec.
1993, p. 8.
57. R.A. Peterson, ‘La fabrication de l’authenticite. La country music’, Actes de la
recherche en sciences sociales, 93, June 1992, p. 4.
58. J.-P. Warmer (ed.), Le Paradoxe de la marchandise anthentique. Imaginaire et
consonnnation de masse, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994.
59. P. Beaussant, Vous avez dit ‘baroque’? Musiqne du passe, pratiques d’aujourd’hui,
Arles: Actes Sud, 1988, p. 63.
60. B. Spooner, ‘Weavers and Dealers: the Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet’ in
A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 195—235.
266 Notes [pp. 81-88]
61. R.A. Peterson (n. 57), pp. 3—19.

62. L. Stringfield, ‘America and her Music’, University of North Carolina Extension
Bulletin, 10, 1931, pp. 19, 14, 13 (quoted in R.A. Peterson, ibid., pp. 9-10).
63. D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990.
64. R.A. Peterson (n. 57), pp. 4 and 11.
65. J.-C. Martin and C. Suaud, ‘Le Puy duFou. L’interminable reinvention du
paysan vendeen’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 93,June 1992, pp. 21—37,
and M. Vovelle, ‘Un historien au Puy du Fou’, Le Monde diplomatique, Aug.
1994, pp. 16-17.
66. B. Bucher, Descendants de Choiians. Histoire et culture populaire dans la Vendee
conteinporaine, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1995.
67. J.-C. Martin and C. Suaud (n. 65), p. 31.
68. Le Puy folais, 13, 1982, p. 4, cited in ibid., p. 36.
69. H. Le Bras and E. Todd, L’invention de la France. Atlas anthropologique et politique,
Paris: Hachette, 1981 (Le Livre de Poche series).
70. R. Thapar, ‘Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the
Modern Search for a Hindu Identity’, Modem Asian Studies 23/2,1989, p. 216.
71. C. Jaffrelot, Les Nationalismes hindous. Ideologic, implantation et mobilisation des
Sciences Politiques, 1993, p. 19.
72. C. Jaffrelot, ‘Le syncretisme strategique et la construction de l’identite
nationale hindoue. L’identite comme produit de synthese’, Revue fran(aise de
science politique, 42/4, Aug. 1992, p. 616.
73. C. A. Bayly, ‘The Pre-History of “Communalism”? Religious Conflict in
India, 1700—1860’, Modern Asian Studies, 19/2, 1985, pp. 177—203. Benedict
Anderson’s analysis of two Javanese epics, the Semt Centhini (probably com
pleted in 1814) and the Suluk Gatlwloco (composed in 1854—73), shows a
similar transition from a syncretic identity, combining ‘a flexible mixture of Sufi
mysticism and pre-lslamic Hindu-Javanese tradition’ in the eighteenth century
to a situation where Islamic orthodoxy oriented towards Mecca was in oppo
sition to a Javanese cultural nationalism (B. Anderson, Language and Power:
Exploring Political Cidtures in Indonesia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
' 1990, ch. VIII, esp. p. 293).
74. R.H . Bates, ‘Modernization, Ethnic Competition and the Rationality of
Politics in Contemporary Africa’in D. Rothschild and V. A. Olorunshola (eds),
State versus Ethnic Claims: African Policy Dilemmas, Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1983, pp. 152 and 164—5.
75. E. Hobsbawm, Nations et nationalisme depuis 1780. Programme, Mythe et Realite,
Paris, Gallimard, 1990, pp. 151—152.
76. S. J. Tambiah, Sri Lanka. Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, Uni
versity of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 74—5; C. Vidal, Sociologie des passions (Cote-
d ’lvoire, Rwanda), Paris: Karthala, 1991, pp. 19ff.; S. Marks, ‘Patriotism, Patriar
chy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness’, in L. Vail
(ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, London: James Currey, 1989,
pp. 251-40. '
77. Ibid.
[pp. 89-91] Notes 267
78. B. Spooner, ‘W ho are the Baluch? A Preliminary Investigation into the
Dynamics of an Ethnic Identity from Qajar Iran’ in E. Bosworth and
C. Hillenbrand (eds), Qajar Iran: Political, Social and Cultural Change, 1800
1925, Edinburgh University Press, 1983, pp. 93-110. Cf. also J.-P. Digard (ed.),
Lefait cthniqne en Iran et en Afghanistan, Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1988 (esp. the
ch. by R. L. Tapper, with a very ‘Africanist’ tone).
79. M. M. van Bruinessen,^/;a, Shaikh and State: On the Social and Political Organi
zation of Kurdistan, Utrecht: Rijksuniversiteit, 1978, p. 7.
80. Ibid., ch. II.
81. Ibid., ch. III.
82. Message from Abdullah Ocalan to the Kurdistan Islamic Movement in Berlin,
in July 1984, quoted by J.-F. Bayart, ‘Faut-il avoir peur de l’islam en Turquie?’,
Cahiers d ’etudes sur la Mediterranee orientate et le monde turco-iranien, 18, 1994,
p. 353; on the role of the Naqshbandiyya in the great revolt of 1925, cf.
M. M. van Bruinessen (n. 79); on the PKK guerrilla campaign, see the same
authors ‘Between Guerrilla War and Political Murder: the Workers’ Party of
Kurdistan’, Middle East Report, July-Aug. 1988, pp. 40—6.
83. S. Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case ofBediiizzaman
Said Nursi, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
84. M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. G. Roth
and C. Wittich, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, pp. 393—5. It
follows that the evolutionist idea of political organisation, closely linked to
culturalist reasoning, must be abandoned. Humanity does not travel from the
lost innocence of the primitive (village) community to the dereliction of world
government. We have seen that Kurdistan has passed from the proto-state stage
to that of chieftaincy— the age of emirates— and then to that of tribal configu
ration, before succumbing to the charms of nationalist demands. Similarly, Afri
can empires and kingdoms either built themselves up on the basis of lineage
structure, or were overstretched or broken up to the benefit of that structure.
85. Ibid., pp. 389 and 357.
86. P. Geschiere, Village Communities and the State: Changing Relations among the
Maka of Southern Cameroon since the Colonial Conquest, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1982, p. 56 and all of ch. II. Cf. also, for example, P. H. Gulliver,
Neighbours and Networks: The Idiom of Kinship in Social Action among the Nderi-
deuli of Tanzania, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971; E. Schildkrout,
People of the Zongo: The Transformation of Ethnic Identities in Ghana, Cambridge
University Press, 1978.
87. P. Geschiere, Village Communities (n. 85) and Sorcellerie et politique en Afrique, La
viande des autres, Paris: Karthala, 1995.
88. E de Polignac, La Naissance de la cite grecque, Paris: La Decouverte, 1984, p. 16.
89. A. Cheddadi, ‘Le systeme de pouvoir en islam d’apres Ibn Khaldun’, Annales
ESC, 3-4, May—Aug. 1980, pp. 534—50. O. Carre suggests equivalence— ‘more
or less’— between asabiyya and Gemeinsinu in Max Weber, L ’Utopie islamique
dans 1’Orient arabe, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, 1991, p. 41.
268 Notes [pp. 92-98]
90. M. Seurat, L’etat de barbaric, Pans: Seuil, 1989, chapter VIII. See also the recent
works of Olivier Roy on asabiyya, esp. Croupes de solidarite an Moyeii-Orieut et
eu Asie centrale, Paris: CERI, 1996, and his analysis of qawm in Afghanistan
(L’Afghanis tan. Islam et nwdernite politique, Paris: Seuil, 1985).
91. N. Beyhum, Espaces eclates, espaces domiues. Etude de la recomposition des espaces
publics centmtix de Beyrouth de 1975 a 1990, Lyons: Universite Lyons II, 1991,
pp. 510 and 165.
92. M. Abeles, Jours tranquilles eu 89. Ethnologie politique d’uu departement frangais,
Paris: Odile Jacob, 1989, pp. 350-1. Cf. also S. C. Rogers, Shaping Modem
Times in Rural France: The Transformation and Reproduction of an Aveyronuais
Community, Princeton University Press, 1991, and B. Bucher, Descendants de
Chouatis (n. 66), esp. pp. 104—5.
93. See on this point the analysis of the nisba at Sefrou in Morocco by C. Geertz,
Savoir local, savoir global. Les lieux du savoir, Paris: PUF, 1986, pp. 83fF.
94. Mambida-Babinza (Colonel), Odyssee des evenements de Kisangani-Bukami,
1960—1967 (no place of publication given, but appearing in Kinshasa),
Connaissance des Forces Armees (undated but 1973), p. 88 (my emphasis).
95. D. Lombard (n. 2), pp. 49, 64,75, 21 Iff., 301ff.
96. Ibid., p. 308, and F. Aubin, ‘Une Chine multinationale’ in M .-C. Bergere,
L. Biano and J. Domes (eds), La Chine au X X e siecle, vol. 2: De 1949 a
aujourd’hui, Paris: Fayard, 1990, pp. 287—304.
97. M. Iordanidou, Loxandra, Le Mejan: Actes Sud, 1994, p. 142. Cf. also the mur
der of Tridib in A. Ghosh, Lignes d ’ombre, Paris: Le Seuil, 1992, pp. 274ff., and
the remarkable analysis of ‘initimate crim e'in a context o f ‘good neighbour
liness’by X. Bougarel (Bosnie. Anatomie d’un conflit, Paris: La Decouverte, 1996,
pp. 81-100). '
98. R. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 1993, p. 182.
99. M. Weber, Economy and Society (n. 84), p. 389.
100. J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature
and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 10—11.
101. F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture
Difference, Bergen: Universitetsforlaget and London: Geo. Allen & Unwin,
1969; J. A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1982.
102. Joutard (n. 24), p. 40.
103. See for example Rosaldo (n. 98).
104. M. Lagree, Religion et cultures en Bretagne (1850-1950), Paris: Fayard, 1992.
105. J. Chelini, ‘Les catholiques sous Vichy’, La Croix-L’Eveuement, 7 May 1993,
p. 7.
106. Personal documents. It will be observed that these texts offer a superb
example of transfer of meaning.
107. R. Chartier (n. 36), pp. 105ff.
108. In L ’Ancien Regime et la Revolution, quoted by Chartier, ibid., p. 107.
109. R. Strong, Les Fetes de la Renaissance (1450-1650). Art et pouvoir, Arles: Solin,
1991, pp. 24-37.
[pp. 98-102] Notes 269
110. Ibid., p. 63.
111. Y. R ichard, Le Shi’istttc en Iran. hnan et Revolution, Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve,
1980; N. R . Keddie, Religion and Politics m Iran: Shi’ism from Quietism to
Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983; J. R. I. Cole and
N. R . Keddie (eds), Shi’ism and Social Protest, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986.
112. H. E. Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religions Modernism: The Liberation Move
ment of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1990, pp. 202ff.
113. S. A. Aijomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988; P. Vieille, ‘L’institution shi’ite, la
religiosite populaire, le martyre et la revolution’, Peuples mediterranean, 16,
July—Sept. 1981, pp. 77—92; Y. Richard, Le Shi’isme en Iran (n. I l l ) and L ’Islam
chi’ite. Croyances et ideologies, Paris: Fayard, 1991, pp. 108ff., 160-1,175,236. On
the innovative character of velayat-e faqih, see H. Enayat, ‘Iran: Khumayni’s
Concept of the “Guardianship of the Jurisconsult’” in J. P. Piscatori (ed.),
Islam in the Political Process, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 160—80, and
G. Rose, ‘Velayat-e faquih and the Recovery of Islamic Identity in the
Thought of Ayatollah Khomeini’ in N. R. Keddie (ed.), Religion and Politics
(n. 111), pp. 166-88.
114. On Imam Khomeyni s thought, cf. G. Rose (n. 113) and H. Algar, The Roots
of the Islamic Revolution, London: Open Press, 1983, p. 43, as well as Christian
Bonnauds thesis (which I have not been able to consult in its entirety).
115. F. Adelkhah, ‘L’imaginaire economique en Republique islamique d ’Iran’in
J.-E Bayart (ed.), La Reinvention du capitalisme, Paris: Karthala, 1994, pp. 117—
44, and Traite des conipagnons-chevaliers, ed. Henry Corbin, Teheran and Paris:
Departement d’Iranologie de Tlnstitut Franco-Iranien de Recherche/
Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1973.1 am grateful to Christian Bonnaud for drawing
my attention to the affinities between javctnmardi and Imam Khomeyni’s
political style.
116. A. Ehsteshami, After Khomeini: The Iranian Second Republic, London: R out-
ledge, 1995, pp. 24ff.
117. F. Adelkhah, J.-E Bayart and O. Roy, Thermidor en Iran, Brussels: Complexe,
1993.
118. M. Hegland, ‘Two Images of Husain: Accommodation and Revolution in an
Iranian Village’in N. R. Keddie (ed.) (n. 111), pp. 218-35. Cf. also R. Motta-
heded, The Mantle of the Prophet Religion and Politics in Iran, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985, p. 353, and S. A. Aijomand, ‘Ideological Revolution
in Shi’ism’ in S. A. Aijomand (ed.), Authority and Political Culture in Shi’ism,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, p. 201.
119. J.-F. Bayart, ‘La question Alevi dans la Turquie moderne’ in O. Carre (ed.),
L ’Islam et VEtat dans le monde d ’aujourd’hih, Paris: PUF, 1982, pp. 109-20;
M. Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam: A n Anthropologist’s Introduction, London:
Croom Helm, 1982, chapter III.
120. H. E. Chehabi (n. 112), pp. 72-3.
121. Richard (n. 111), Paris: Fayard, 1991, p. 44.
270 Notes [pp. 102-107]
122. B. Lewis, Le Langage politique de I’islain, Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
123. Signes de piste, quoted by G. Kepel, Le Prophete et Pharaon. Les mouvements
islamistes dans I’Egypte contemporaine, Paris: La Decouverte, 1984, p. 56. Cf. also
O. Carre, Mystique et Politique. Lecture revolutionnaire du Coran par Sayyid Qutb,
Frere musulmatt radical, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, Les Editions du Cerf, 1984.
124. Quoted by Kepel (n. 123), p. 83.
125. Ibid., pp. 183ff.
126. R. and N. Tapper, ‘Religion, Education and Continuity in a Provincial Town’
in R. Tapper (ed.), Islam in Modern Turkey. Religion, Politics and Literature in a
Secular State, London: I. B. Tauris, 1991, pp. 56—83; S. Mardin, ‘The
Nakfibendi Order in Turkish History’, ibid., pp. 121—42, and Religion and
Social Change (n. 83);J.-F. Bayart, ‘Les trajectoires de la Repubique en Iran et
en Turquie. Un essai de lecture tocquevillienne’in G. Salame (ed.), Democraties
sans democrates. Politiques d'ouverture dans le monde arabe et islainiqne, Paris: Fayard,
1994, pp. 373-95.
127. O. Carre, L ’Utopie islamique (n. 89) and, in collaboration with G. Michaud, Les
Freres musulmans. Egypte et Syrie (1928—1982), Paris: Gallimard,Julliard, 1983.
For a different interpretation, cf. M. Gilsenan, ‘L’Islam dans l’Egypte con
temporaine. Religion d’etat, religion populaire’, Annales E .S.C ., 35/3—4,
May—Aug. 1980, pp. 603£f.
128. O. Carlier, Entre nation et jihad. Histoire sociale des radicalismes algeriens, Paris:
Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1995; A. Rouadjia,
Les Freres et la mosquee. Enquete sur le mouvement islainiste en Algerie, Paris:
Karthala, 1990. '
129. M. Weber, Economy and Society, p. 578.
130. Ibid., pp. 578-9.
131. F. Adelkhah, Being Modern in Iran, London: Hurst, 1999; E. Abrahamian,
Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993; R. Tapper (ed.), Islam in Modern Turkey (n. 126), and S. Mardin,
Religion and Social Change (n. 126); L. Martinez, ‘Les groupes islamistes entre
guerilla et negoce. Vers une consolidation du regime algerien?’, Les Etudes du
CERI, Aug. 1995, and S. Labat, Les Islamistes algeriens. Entre les urnes et le maquis,
Paris: Seuil, 1995.
132. O. Roy, L ’echec de VIslam politique, Paris: Seuil, 1992.
133. We follow the analysis by G. Nicolas, ‘Recompositions sacrificielles au
Nigeria contemporain’, Archives enropeenues de socioloîe, XXXII, 1991,
pp. 299-326. ‘ v
134. B. Lewis (n. 122), pp. 18fF.
135. N. Keddie, A n Islamic Reponse to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of
SayyidJamal ad-din 'al-Afgliam', Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
On the line of descent from al-Afghani to the Islamists, cf. also O. Carre,
L ’Utopie islamique (n. 89).
136. O. Roy (n. 132).
137. G. Rose, ‘Velayat-e faqih’ in N. R. Keddie (ed.), Religion and Politics (n. 113),
pp. 166—88; H. Algar (n. 114).
[pp. 107-113] Notes 271
138. G. Salame, ‘Islam and the West’, Foreign Policy, 90, spring 1993, pp. 22-37.
139. Gopal Krishna, quoted by M. Gaborieau, ‘Le legs de la civilisation musulmane
aux formations etatiques du sous-continent indien’ in J.-F. Bayart (ed.), La
grejfe de I’etat, Paris: Karthala, 1996, ch. V; we follow the analysis in that work.
See also B. S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’ in
E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge
University Press, 1983, pp. 165—209; and, on other trajectories of cultural con
catenation, D. Lombard (n. 2) and S. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism
in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamizationfrom the Eleventh through the Fifteenth
Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
140. P Hardy, ‘The Authority of Muslim Kings in Medieval India’, in M. Gabo
rieau (ed.), Islam et societe eu Asie du Sud, Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales, 1986, p. 55. The current trend among historians is to
question the excessive specificity which Louis Dum ont’s work suggests that
Hindu culture has. Dumont nonetheless admitted that in India ‘new forms do
not drive away old ones’, and spoke of ‘stratified accumulation’ through a
‘process of coexistence and reabsorption’ (La Civilisation indienne et nous.
Esquisse de sociologie coinparee, Paris: A. Colin, 1964, pp. 31—54).
141. P. Veyne, Les Grecs ont-ils cru h leurs mythesi Paris: Seuil, 1983, p. 97. Cf. also, for
a criticism of ‘cultural totality’, M. Foucault, L ’archeologie du savoir, Paris:
Gallimard, 1969, pp. 29—101, and M. de Certeau, L ’ecriture de Vhistoire (n. 19),
pp. 36ff., 123fF.
142. ‘La politique en Afrique noire: le haut et le bas’, Politique africaine l,Jan. 1981,
and ‘Passage au politique’, Revue frangaise de science politique, 35/3,1985 (some
of these texts were reproduced in J.-F. Bayart, A. Mbembe and C. M. Toula-
bor (n. 41));J.-F. Bayart, L ’Etat eu Afrique (n. 41); A. Mbembe, Afriques indociles
(n. 41); C. M. Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadema (n. 9).
143. Cf. J.-P Olivier de Sardan, ‘Populisme developpementiste et populisme en
sciences sociales: ideologie, action, connaissance’, Cahiers d’etudes africaines,
120, X X X -4 ,1990, pp. 475-92.
144. A. Minnaar (ed.), Communities in Isolation. Perspectives on Hostels in South Africa,
Pretoria: Human Science Research Council, 1993, pp. 131—2.
145. J.-L. Domenach, Chine, Varchipel oublie, Paris: Fayard, 1992; D. Bigo, ‘Ngaragba,
“l’impossible prison’” , Revue frangaise de science politique, 39/6, Dec. 1989,
pp. 867—86.
146. The best introduction to Bakhtin’s work— only incompletely and, it is said,
often badly translated into French— is that by T. Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine. Le
principe dialogique, suivi de Ecrits du cercle de Bakhtine, Paris: Seuil, 1981.
147. M. Bakhtin, quoted by T. Todorov (n. 146), p. 127.
148. T. Todorov, ibid., p. 128 (my emphasis).
149. M. Bakhtin, quoted in ibid., pp. 113-14.
150. M. Bakhtin, quoted in ibid., p. 50.
151. Les Fleurs du Congo, suivi de Commentaires par Gerard Althabe, Paris: Francois
Maspero, 1972, pp. 8—9.
152. E. Goffman, Forms of Talk, Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1981.
272 Notes [pp. 114-118]
153. C. Young and T. Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 157, 169, 351.
154. ‘Jah Houphouet-Boigny vous parle’, set to music by Alpha Blondy (tran
scribed by P. Burge, Reggae, rastafarisme et politique, Lausanne: Institut de
Science Politique, 1989, p. 39). On Houphouet-Boigny’s prophetic side, see
also J.-P. Dozon, La Cause des prophetes. Politique et religion en Afrique contem-
poraine, Paris: Seuil, 1995.
155. J.-P. Siriex, Houphouet-Boigny on la sagesse africaine, Paris: Nathan and Abidjan:
Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1986, p. 214.
156. Document drawn up on 2 May 1985 by hotel employees who had been made
redundant, quoted by I. Toure, ‘L’UGTCI et le developpement harmonieux.
Un syndicalisme anti-conflits?’, Politique africaine, 24, Dec. 1986, p. 85.
157. Jeune Afrique, 1 May 1990, p. 18.
158. To parody the title of the French translation (Quand dire, e’estfaire, Paris: Seuil,
1970) of a leading work of pragmatic English philosophy which contributed
much to refining the theory of enunciation: J. Austin, How to do Things with
Words, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, 1976.
159. P. Veyne, ‘Foucault revolutionne l’histoire’ in Comment on ecrit I’histoire,
followed by Foucault revolutionne I'histoire, Paris: Seuil, 1978, pp. 207 and 204,
also pp. 230—1.
160. C. Gillard, Le regne de Francisco Macias Nguema sur la Gninee equatoriale. Un
nepotisme meconnn, Bordeaux: Institut d’etudes politiques, 1980, p. 56.
161. C. M. Toulabor, Le Togo sous Eyadema (n. 9) and ‘Mgr Dosseh, archeveque de
Lome’, Politique africaine 35, Oct. 1989, pp. 68—76; La Croix-L’Evenement, 13
Sept. 1975.
162. E. Jauffret, Un mytliefondateur de la nation mexicaine au X Xe siecle. La revolution,
Paris: Universite Paris 1,1984, xerox, p. 96.
163. J.-E Bayart, L ’etat en Afrique (n. 41), and my debate on this subject with
Achille Mbembe in J.-F. Bayart, A. Mbembe and C. M. Toulabor, Le Politique
par le has en Afrique noire (n. 41), Chs VII and VIII.
164. P. Veyne, ‘Foucault revolutionne I’histoire’ in Comment on ecrit I’histoire
(n. 159) pp. 230—1: ‘...a false natural object such as religion or a particular
religion aggregates very different elements.. .which, at other times, are
exposed in sharply differing practices and objectivised by them under sharply
varying appearances.’
165. Quoted by G. Hermet, Les Desenchantements de la liberte. La sortie des dictatures
dans les annees 90, Paris: Fayard, 1993, p. 187.
166. J.-C. Waquet, De la corruption. Morale et pouvoir a Florence aux X V Ile et XVIHe
siecles, Paris: Fayard, 1984.
167. Le Monde, 14 Dec. 1991.
168. Le Monde, 19 Dec. 1992.
169. R. H. Solomon, Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1971, pp. 42ff., lOOff., 135ff.
170. L. Bianco, ‘Seigneurs de la guerre et revolution nationaliste (1913—1927)’ in
M.-C. Bergere, L. Bianco and J. Domes (eds), La Chine an XXe siecle. De 1949
h aujourd’liui, Paris: Fayard, 1989, p. 135.
[pp. 118-124] Notes 273
171. F Godement, ‘La tourmente du vent communiste (1955-1965)’ in Bergere,
Bianco and Domes (eds) (n. 170), p. 46. ’
172. J.-L. Rocca, ‘Corruption and its Shadow: an Anthropological View of Cor
ruption in China , China Quarterly, 130,June 1992, pp, 401—416, and ‘Pouvoir
et corruption en Chine populaire’, Perspectives cliinoises, 1l-12,Jan.-Feb. 1993
pp. 20-30. ’
173. B. Lewis (n. 122), pp. 36-7.
174. ‘Chirac, l’amer de Paris’, Le Canard enchame, 12 April 1989.
175. M. Foucault, L ’Archeologie du savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1969, pp. 271-2.
176. U. Eco, Les Limites de Vinterpretation, Paris: Grasset, 1992, p. 12.
177. O. Carre, L’lslam laique on le retour de la Grande Tradition, Paris: Armand Cohn
1993, p. 114. ’
178. F. Adelkhah, La Revolution sous le voile. Femmes islamiques d’Iran, Paris: Karthala,
1991. We return to this subject at the end of ch. IV
Part 2 Owls w ith R heum y Eyes

1. Quoted in L. Martens, Sankara, Compaore et la revolution burkinabe, EPO Edi
tions (no place of publication given), 1989, p. 161.
2. P H. Euphorion, ‘Du langage animalier en politique’, Genive-Afrique XXVI/2,
1988, pp. 97-108.
3. Editorial in L ’Armee du Penple, 6, Oct. 1984, quoted in ibid., p. 103.
4. D. Paulme, La Mere devorante. Essai sur la morplwlogie des contes africains, Paris:
Gallimard, 1976.
5. Cf.— in addition to the classic works by Comi Toulabor on political derision in
Togo in J.-F. Bayart, A. Mbembe and C. M. Toulabor, Le Politique par le bas en
Afrique noire. Contributions a une problematique de la democratie, Paris: Karthala,
1992— the analysis o f ‘facetious distancing’ of football fans by C. Bromberger
(Le Match defootball. Ethnologie d’une passion partisane a Marseille, Naples et Turin,
Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1995, Chs XV and XVI)
and of ‘paradoxical involvement’ in contemporary ritual by A. Piette (‘Les
rituels. Du principe d’ordre a la logique paradoxale. Points de repere theo-
riques’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie,XXll, 1992, pp. 163—79).
6. Quoted in P H. Euphorion (n. 2), p. 103 (my emphasis).
7. Marches tropicaux et mediterraneens, 19 Oct. 1990.
8. Quoted in J.-C. Willame, L'Automne d’un despotisme. Pouvoir, argent et obeissance
dans le Zaire des annees quatre-vingt, Paris: Karthala, 1992, p. 128.
9. Marches tropicaux et mediterraneens, 2 Oct. 1992.
10. Kenya Times (Nairobi), 2 Aug. 1983; The Standard (Nairobi), 15 July 1983. The
electoral impact of this practice of oath-taking— commonly used for political
purposes in the Kikuyu country since the inter-war period—seems fairly
significant and legal actions for cancellation on the basis of this fact are very
common: ‘Elections. Recours en annulation’ dossier, 144/201, Nairobi:
CREDU ; D. Bourmaud, ‘Elections et autoritarisme. La crise de regulation
politique au Kenya’, Revue frangaise de science politique, 35/2, April 1985, p. 219;
C. Legum andj. Drysdale, Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Doc
uments 1969—1970, London: Rex Collings, 1970, B-123 and B-124.
274 Notes [pp. 125-128]
11. F. Grignon, Le Multipartiswe au Kenya? Reproduction autoritaire, legitimation et
culture politique eu imitation (1990^1992), Nairobi: IFRA, 1993, p. 11.
12. J.-F. Bayart, L’etat an Cameroun, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques, 1979, pp. 53, 233.
13. Ibid., p. 208; G. Thompson, T h e Bewitchment and Fall of a Village Politician’,
Cambridge Anthropology, 7/2,1982, pp. 25-38; P. Geschiere, Village Communities
and the State: Changing Relations among the Maka of Southeastern Cameroon since
the Colonial Conquest, London: Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 292fF., and Sorcellerie et
politique en Afrique. La viande des autres, Paris: Karthala, 1995, Chs II and III.
14. A. Bikim, ‘L’UPC et nous’, La Presse du Cameroun, 30 Jan. 1958, quoted in
R. Um Nyobe, Le Probleme national kamerunais, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984, p. 27.
15. A. Mbembe, La Naissance du maquis dans le sud du Cameroun (1920-1960).
Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie, Paris: Karthala, 1996, pp. 304—5; D. Lan,
Guns and Rains: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, London: James
Currey, 1985, pp. 167fF.
16. Fraternite Matin (Abidjan), 17 April 1964.
17. N. Leconte, Cote d'Ivoire: L’apres-Honplwuet, Paris: Nord-Sud Export Con
sultants, June 1989.
18. W. Minter, The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) as
Described by Ex-Participants and Foreign I "isitors, research report submitted to the
Swedish International Development Authority, Washington, DC: Georgetown
University, 1990, pp. 13—14.
19. U. Sulikowski, ‘“Eating the Flesh, Eating the Soul”: Reflections on Politics,
Sorcery and Vodun in Contemporary Benin’in J.-P. Chretien (ed.), L ’Invention
religieuse eu Afrique. Histoire et religion en Afrique noire, Paris: Karthala, 1993,
pp. 379-92. ’
20. D. Bigo, Ponvoir et obeissance en Centrafriqne, Paris: Karthala, 1988, ch. IV.
21. F. Bernault, Democraties ambigties en Afrique centrale, Paris: Karthala, 1996,
pp. 232—4 and 250—4.
22. On West Africa, Africa Analysis, 2 Oct. 1992; on the place of transcendental
meditation in Mozambique, Le Monde, 10 June 1994; on the role of the
Rosicrucians in Cameroon, personal documents.
23. Nguza Karl I Bond, Mobutu on I’incarnation du mal za'irois, London: Rex
Collings, 1982.
24. La cite africaiue (Kinshasa), 29 July 1991. The figure of Satan seems increasingly
present in politics in Africa—for example in Zaire, Kenya, Benin and
Nigeria— and that is probably not unconnected with the activism o f American
fundamentalist churches, on the one hand, and the influence of the Iranian rev
olution of 1979, attacking the ‘Great Satan’, on the other. The relationship
between that general theme and witchcraft, monotheism, bureaucratisation and
democracy would merit systematic study.
25. Marches tropicanx et inediterraneens, 21 Aug. 1992, p. 2208; B. Labe Noukouri,
Marabontage et escrocqnerie b Abidjan. L ’exemple de la commune de Yopoiigon,
Abidjan: Universite Nationale, Departement de l’lnstitut de Criminologie,
1985, xerox, pp. 22ff.; Fraternite-Matiu (Abidjan), 14 Nov. 1985 (on the death
[pp. 128-130] Notes 275
of the deputy Coulibaly Bakari in a car accident, unanimously considered
‘suspect’).
26. Sources: interviews, and S. Andriamirado, ‘Un gouvernement en attente?’_/ei<Me
Afrique, 23 July 1986.
^7. Cf., in addition to reports on the Liberia and Sierra Leone wars in the 1990s,
D. Lan (n. 15); B. Verhaegen, Rebellions au Congo, Brussels: CRISP, 1966 and
1969, C. GefFray, La Cause des annes an Alozambiqne. Anthropologie d’une guerre
civile, Paris: Karthala, Nairobi: CREDU, 1990; A. Mbembe (n. 15).
28. Cf., for example, on the Sainte-Croix plot, J.-F. Bayart, L ’Etat au Cameroun
(n. 12), pp. 133-5.
29. A. Diallo, La Mart de Diallo Telli, premier secretaire general de I’OUA, Paris:
Karthala, 1983, pp. 6 8 ,109;J.-P. Alata, Prison d'Afrique. Cinq ans dans les geoles de
Guinee, Paris: Seuil, 1976, pp. 189fF.; A. A. Diallo, La Verite du ministre. Dix ans
dans les geoles de Sekou Toure, Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1985. On Liberia, Marches
tropicaux et mediterraneens, 14 Nov. 1986, p. 2868; P. Gifford, Christianity and
Politics in Doe’s Liberia, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 30ff. On Sierra
Leone, Marches tropicaux et mediterraneens, 17 Nov. 1989, p. 3317, and Africa Con
fidential, 6 April 1990. On Ivory Coast, B. Labe Noukouri (n. 25), p. 24, and
Ivoire-Dimanche (Abidjan), 6 Oct. 1991, 4 May 1992, 20 April 1992, 10 Feb.
1992. On Gabon, La Lumiere (Libreville), Nov. 1992. On similar cases in South
Africa, cf. Liberation, 17—18 Nov. 1990;D. Chidester, Shots in the Streets: Violence
and Religion in South Africa, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 48,163.
30. Quoted in D. Chidester (n. 29) pp. 151—2. On the massacres in trains, see
‘Hunting “Witches” on Trains’, Weekly Mail (Johannesburg), 31 March 1994,
p. 7. On murders of sorcerers in Natal, cf. J. Evans, “‘Scapegoat Intended”:
Aspects of Violence in Southern Kwazulu’ in A. Minnaar (ed.) Patterns of
Violence: Case Studies of Conflict in Natal, Pretoria: Human Sciences Research
Council, 1992, pp. 215—26.
31. Cf., among the large body of excellent literature, P. Geschiere, Sorcellerie et
politique en Afrique, La viande des autres, Paris: Karthala, 1995; J.-P. Warnier,
L ’esprit d’entreprise au Cameroun, Paris: Karthala, 1993; E. de Rosny, Les yeux de
ma chevre, Paris: Plon, 1981; G. Dupre, Un ordre et sa destruction, Paris: Editions de
l’ORSTO M , 1982, ch. XVI; R. Devauges, L ’Oncle, le ndoki et I’entrepreneur. La
petite entreprise congolaise a Brazzaville, Paris: Editions de l’ORSTOM , 1977.
32. A. Bonnassieux, De Dendraka a Vridi-Canal. Chronique de la precarite a Abidjan,
Paris: EHESS, 1982, xerox, p. 202; West Africa, 3 and 10 Feb. 1992;D. Desjeux,
Strategies paysannes en Afrique noire. Le Congo (Essai sur lagestion de Vincertitude),
Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987, p. 86; P Marchesin, ‘Etat et societe en Mauritanie,
1946—1986. De l’historicite du politique en Afrique Paris: Universite de Paris-
1, xerox, 1989, p. 43, n. 32.
33. Source: interviews, Abidjan, 1986.
34. J. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equa
torial Africa, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, pp. 96-7.
35. I. M. Lewis, Religion in Context: Cults and Charisma, Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
276 Notes [pp. 130-134]
36. Le Messager (Douala), 116, 7 Sept. 1987, pp. 4-5. Cf. also Cameroon Tribune
(Yaounde), 20 Aug. 1987, and, to put the matter in perspective,J.-F. Bayart and
A. Mbembe, ‘La bataille de l’archidiocese de Douala’, Politique africaiue, 35, Oct.
1989, pp. 77-104.
37. P Geschiere (n. 31).
38. I. M. Lewis (n. 35), pp. 10—11.
39. C f, besides British anthropological studies of the 1950s—particularly those by
M. Gluckman and the Manchester School— M. Auge, Poiwoirs de vie, pouvoirs
de mort, Paris: Flammarion, 1977.
40. J.-F. Bayart, ‘Quelques livres consacres a l’etude des representations et des pra
tiques therapeutiques d’origine precoloniale’, Revue franfaise d’etudes politiques
africaiues, 133,Jan. 1977, pp. 100—8; F. Bonnafe, N zo lipfu, le lignage de la mort. La
sorcellerie, ideologie de la lutte sociale sur le plateau kukuya, Nanterre: Labethno,
1978;J.-P. Dozon, La Societe bete (Cote-d’Ivoire), Paris: Karthala, 1985, pp. 127ff.
P. Geschiere (Sorcellerie et politique, n. 31) emphasises this fluidity of status, but
notes that the new elites, which also practice witchcraft, are only slightly vul
nerable to the action o f ‘small people’ in the realm of the invisible; he therefore
disputes whether this area of activity can be called a ‘popular mode of political
action’.
41. M. Henry, Marx, vol. 2: Une philosophie de I’economie, Paris: Gallimard, 1976,
pp. 130—1.
42. P. Geschiere (n. 31); G. Ter Haar, Spirit of Africa: The Healing Ministry of Arch
bishop Milingo of Zambia, London: Hurst, 1992, pp. 220—2; La Croix-
L ’Eveuement, 7—8 Sept. 1986.
43. W. MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1983; I. M. Lewis (n. 35), pp. 64fF.; C. Vidal, ‘De la
religion subie au modernisme refuse, “Theophagie”, ancetres clandestins et
resistance populaire au Rwanda’, Archives des sciences sociales des religions, 38,
1974, p. 69; F. Raison-Jourde, Bible et pouvoir a Madagascar au XIXe siecle. Inven
tion d’une identite chretienue et construction de VEtat, Paris: Karthala, 1991,
pp. 587fF.; B. de Dinechin and Y. Tabart, Un souffle venant d ’Afrique. Cotntnu-
nautes chretiennes au Nord Cameroun, Paris: Le Centurion, 1986, pp. 77, 82, 97
and 173.
44. Marches Tropicaux et Mediterraneens, 18 Sept. 1987, p. 2458.
45. G. Deleuze, Pourparler, 1972-1990, Paris: Minuit, 1990, p. 93 (which ‘does not
attach much importance to the idea of imaginaire’, p. 94).
46. P. Veyne, Les Crecs out-ils cru cl leurs mytlies? Essai sur Vimagiuatiou constituante,
Paris: Seuil, 1983.
Chapter 3 T he Imaginary Polis

1. A. Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’,
Public Culture 2/2, spring 1990, p. 5.
2. C. Castoriadis, L’Institution imagiuaire de la societe, Paris: Seuil, 1975, pp. 204, 451
(author’s emphasis).
3. P. Veyne, Les Grecs out-ils au Hleurs mytlies? Essai sur Vimagination constituante, Paris:
Seuil, 1983, pp. 11,137,12.
[pp. 134-139] Notes 277
4. R. Collins, ‘A Comparative Approach to Political Sociology’ in R. Bendix
(ed.), State and Society. A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology, Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1968, p. 50. On this point the interpretation of Weber by
Cornelius Castoriadis seems to be a little hasty (L’institution imaginaire, n. 2,
pp. 490ff.); is the theoretician of Heidelberg speaking of anything other than
‘the imaginary institution of society’?
5. P. Raynaud, M ax Weber et le dilemme de la raison moderne, Paris: PUF, 1987,
pp. 121,209. ’
6. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic. S. H. Rudolph also emphasises the very
postmodern nature of this qualification (‘The Role of Theory in Comparative
Politics’, World Politics, 48, Oct. 1995, pp. 21-8.
7. Ibid., p. 73.
8. Ibid., p. 74.
9. Ibid., p. 80.
10. A. de Tocqueville,
11. ‘The security-giving myth of self-sufficiency.. .was a symbolic conduct that
delighted the ancients because it seemed to them the realisation in this world
here below of the ideal of autarky, and at the same time flattered their pride in
ownership.’ (P. Veyne, La societe romaine, Paris: Seuil, 1991, p. 145)
12. A. de Tocqueville (my emphasis).
13. Ibid., p. 495.
14. A. de Tocqueville, L ’Ancien Regime et la Revolution, II, I (quoted in D. Roche, La
France des Lumieres, Paris: Fayard, 1993, p. 378). Cf. also K. Baker, Au tribunal de
Vopinion. Essai sur I’imaginaire politique au XVIIIe siecle, Paris: Payot, 1993, and
F. Furet, Penser la Revolution frangaise, Paris: Gallimard, 1978.
15. M. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1976, p. 8.
16. I.-P. Sartre, L ’Imaginaire. Psycholovie, phenomenolovie de Vimagination, Paris:
Gallimard, 1940, pp. 17-18.
17. Ibid., p. 17.
18. P. Veyne, La Societe romaine, op. cit., pp. 144£F.
19. K. Polanyi, La Grande Transformation. A u x origines politiques et economiques de notre
temps, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, pp. 108—9.
20. Cf., for example, the credulity of American listeners as to the rural origin of the
hillbillies in 1930 (R. A. Peterson, ‘La fabrication de l’authenticite. La country
music’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 93, June 1992, pp. 3—19) or
‘Reflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre’ in M. Bloch,
Melanges historiques, Paris: Bibliotheque Generale de l’Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes, SEVVEN, 1973, vol. I, pp. 41—57.
21. P. Garde, Vie et mort de la Yougoslavie, Paris: Fayard, 1992, p. 348.
22. B. Berman andj. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, vol. 2:
Violence and Ethnicity, London:James Currey, Nairobi: Heinemann, Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 1991, pp. 398—9.
23. A. Mbembe, ‘Domaines de la nuit et autorite onirique dans les maquis du Sud-
Cameroun (1955-1958)’,Journal of African History, 1992, pp. 89-121.
24. J. Okello, Revolution in Zanzibar, Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967.
278 Notes [pp. 139-146]
25. D. Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, London:
Janies Currey and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
26. P. Gifford, Christianity and Politics in Doe’s Liberia, Cambridge University Press,
1993, p. 60. ^
27. D. Lombard, Le Carrefour javanais. Essai d ’histoire globale. Tome II: Les reseaux
asiatiques, Pans: Ed. de l’EHESS, 1990, pp. 169—71. Cf. also M. Foucault, Rever
de ses plaisirs. Sur l’“onirocritique” d’Artemidore’ in Dits et Ecrits 1954-1988,
vol. 4: 1980-1988, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 462-88.
28. F Adelkhah, La Revolution sous le voile. Femmes islamiques d’Iran, Paris: Karthala,
1991; S. Labat, Les Islamistes algeriens. Entre les urnes et le maquis, Paris: Seuil, 1995,
p. 192.
29. J. Le Goff, L ’imaginaire medieval. Essais, Paris: Gallimard, 1991, p. 313.
30. E. Wonyu, Cameroun. De I’UPC a I’UC. Temoignage a I’aube de I’mdependance,
Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985, p. 72.
31. La Croix-L’Evenement, 1 June 1990.
32. AFP, 22 Oct. 1990.
33. G. Ter Haar, Spirit of Africa: The Flealing Ministry of Archbishop Milingo of Zambia,
London: Hurst, 1992, pp. 220—2.
34. J. Le Goff (n. 29) p. 312.
35. O. Christin, Une revolution symboliqne. L ’iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction
catholique, Paris: Minuit, 1991, pp. 131,291.
36. S. Gruzinski, La Guerre des images. De Christophe Colomb a ‘Blade Runner’ (1492—
2019), Paris: Fayard, 1990.
37. Ibid., p. 154.
38. Quoted in ibid., p. 158.
39. Ibid., pp. 218fF.
40. G. M. Joseph and M. Nugent (eds), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revo
lution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, Durham, NC: Duke Uni
versity Press, 1994.
41. S. Gruzinski (n. 36), pp. 250—1.
42. Cf., as well as S. Gruzinski (n. 41), V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors.
Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974,
ch. Ill (on the epic of Miguel Hidalgo as ‘social drama’).
43. Testimony from the time, quoted in F Raison-Jourde, Bible et pouvoir a Mada
gascar au XIX e siecle. Invention d’une identite chretienne et construction de I’etat, Paris:
Karthala, 1991, p. 589. For the following quotations, cf. pp. 591, 775, 777.
44. L. Hunt, Le roman familial de la Revolution franâise, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995,
pp. 9—11 (my emphasis).
45. S. Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India, Cambridge University
Press, 1993, pp. 3ff. Cf. esp. on the activities of fan clubs, ch. IX, and, on cinema
in India,J. Farges, ‘Le cinema en Inde. Rasa cinematografica’ in C. Jaffrelot (ed.),
L ’lnde contemporaine de 1950 a nos jours, Paris: Fayard, 1996, ch. XXIV.
46. A. Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability, Cam
bridge Unoiversity Press, 1990, ch. IV, and ‘The N T R Phenomena in Andhra
Pradesh: Political Change in a South India State’, Asian Survey, Oct. 1988,
pp. 991-1017.
[pp. 146-149] Notes 279
47. To reproduce in a different context E.P. Thompson’s expression in The Making
of the English Working Class, London: Victor GoUancz, 1963, ch. XII.
48. M. Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices. Community and Individuality in South India,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
49. Cf. for example the reports by B. Philip, ‘Ubu Reine a Madras’, Le Monde,
29 Dec. 1993, and ‘Les elections indiennes tournent au delire a Madras’, Le
Monde, 8 May 1996.
50. S. Dickey (n. 45), ch. IX; A. Kohli (n. 46), ch. VII; D. Forrester, ‘Factions and
Filmstars: Tamil Nadu Politics since 1971’, Asian Survey, X V 1/3,1976, pp. 283
96, and R.L. Hardgrave, Jr, ‘Politics and the Film in Tamilnadu: the Stars and
the DM K’, Asian Survey, X III/3 ,1973, pp. 288-305.
51. C. Jaffrelot, Les Nationalistes hindons. Ideologie, implantation et mobilisation des
Sciences Politiques, 1993, pp. 492ff, and ‘Reinterpretation du mythe de Ram
et mobilisation nationaliste hindoue’ in D. C. Martin (ed.), Cartes d’identite.
Comment dit-on ‘nous’ en politique?, Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1994, pp. 113—14.
The author however tends to reduce those phenomena to their instrumental
aspect alone.
52. E. Fassin, ‘Pouvoirs sexuels. Le juge Thomas, la Cour Supreme et la societe
americaine’, Esprit, Dec. 1991, pp. 102—30.
53. C. Meier, De la tragedie grecque comme art politique, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991,
p. 10.
54. K. Totolyan, ‘Narration, Culture and the Motivation of the Terrorist’ in
J. Shotter and K. J. Gerned (eds), Texts of Identity, London: Sage Publications,
1989, pp. 99-118.
55. A. Saktanber, ‘Muslim Identity in Children’s Picture Books’ in R. Tapper (ed.),
Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State, London:
I. B. Tauris, 1991, p. 173; A. N. Caglar, ‘The Grey Wolves as Metaphor’ in
A. Finkel and N. Sirman (eds), Turkish State, Turkish Society,London: Routledge,
1990, pp. 79-101.
56. S. J. Tambiah, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, Uni
versity of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 117-20; D. Bigo, Pouvoir et obeissance en
Centrafrique, Paris: Karthala, 1988.
57. J. Peacock, Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian Prole
tarian Drama, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 4.
58. N. R. Keddie (ed.), Religion and Politics in Iran. Shi’ism from Quietism to Revo
lution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983 (esp. Chs X and XI).
59. C. Geertz, Bali. Interpretation d ’une culture, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, pp. 247—8. Cf.
also, by the same author, Negara: The Theater State in nineteenth century Bah,
Princeton University Press, 1980, and the critical review of that work by
G. Hamonie in Archipel, 27,1984, pp. 213—19.
60. B. Brecht, Ecrits sur le theatre, Paris: L’Arche, 1963, p. 122.
61. R. C. Trexler explicitly rejects the word ‘theatre’ regarding the civic rituals of
Florence (Public L fe in Renaissance Florence, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991, pp. xviiff. and 213-14).
280 Notes [pp. 150-153]
62. L. Levine,Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization. 1579
1642, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
63. C. Meier (n. 53), p. 12.
64. J. Peacock (n. 57); F. Gaffary, paper for one-day conference ‘R ue et politique
en Iran’, CERI, Paris, 10 April 1995; M. Hegland, ‘Two Images o f Husain’ in
N. R. Keddie (ed.) (n. 58), p. 233; L. Echghi, ‘La pratique du ta’ziye dans l’lran
postrevolutionnaire’, Cahiers d ’etudes sur la Mediterranee orientale et le monde turco-
iranicn, 20,July-Sept. 1995, pp. 307-15, and Un temps entre les temps. L ’Imam, le
clu’isme et I’Iran, Paris: Le Cerf, 1992.
65. W. Dissanayake (ed.), Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Cambridge University
Press, 1993; F. Adelkhah, ‘La Republique islamique a l’heure du temps mondial’
in Z. Laidi (ed.), Le Temps mondial, Brussels: Complexe, 1997.
66. M. Foucault, ‘L’esprit d’un monde sans esprit’ in Dits et ecrits, 1954—1988,
vol. 3: 1976—1979. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, p. 746. Cf. also ‘A quoi revent les
Iraniens?’, ibid., p. 694.
67. Cf. the fundamental works by P. Vieille, which stress the importance of the
subjectivity of actors in the revolution, and of the imaginaire in the way it
unfolded: esp. ‘L’orientalisme est— il theoriquement specifique? A propos des
interpretations de la revolution iranienne’, Peuples mediterranean, 50, Jan.—
March 1990, pp. 149—61, and— with F. Khosrokhavar— Le Discours populaire de
la Revolution iranienne, Paris: Contemporaneite, 1990.
68. M. Hegland, ‘Two Images of Husain’ in N. R. Keddie (ed.) (n. 58), p. 233.
69. G. E. Thaiss, ‘Religious Symbolism and Social Change: the Drama of Husain’,
PhD dissertation, Washington University in St Louis, MI, xerox, 1973,
pp. 213fF„ 299fF.
70. F. Raison-Jourde (n. 43), p. 239.
71. N. Vergin, Industrialisation et changanent social. Etude comparative dans trois villages
d’Eregli (Turquie), Istanbul: Giiryay, 1973, pp. 170, 214.
72. La Croix-L’Evenement, 31 Jan. 1993.
73. See esp. P. Ansart, La Gestion des passions politiques, Lausanne: L’Age de
l’Homme, 1983, on ‘political sentiment as a permanent dimension of the
political sphere’, in democratic societies among others, those being subject, for
example, to ‘real electoral emotions’ (ch. IX).
74. A. Matheron, ‘Passions et institutions selon Spinoza’ in C. Lazzeri and
D. Reynie (eds), L i Raison d'Etat. Politique et rationalite, Paris: PUF, 1992,
pp. 141-70.
75. M. Hegland (n. 68), pp. 230ff.
76. B. Berman andj. Lonsdale (n. 22), vol. 2: Violence and Ethnicity, pp. 385fF.
77. E. Fassin (n. 52).
78. P. Veyne (n. 11), pp. 307-8.
79. M. Foucault, ‘Preface a “l’Histoire de la sexualite’” in Dits et Ecrits, 1954—1988,
vol. 4: 1980-1988 (n. 66), p. 579. Cf. also his homage to Philippe Aries, ibid.,
pp. 646-55, and Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite, vol. 2: L ’Usage des
plaisirs, Paris: Gallimard, 1984, p. 39.
80. G. Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972-1990, Paris: Minuit, 1990, p. 156.
81. M. Mines (n. 48), pp. 40, 65, 87ff., 198ff.
[pp. 153-159] Notes 281
82. J. Peacock (n. 57); F. Adelkhah, Being Kiodern in Iran, London; Hurst, 1999.
83. ‘Le style de l’histoire’ in Foucault, Dits ct Ecrits (n. 79), Tome I l f p, 653, and Le
Desordre desfamilies, Paris: Gallimard, Julliard, 1982.
84. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, op. cit.
85. M. Foucault, ‘Le Style de l’histoire’ in Dits et Ecrits (n. 79), vol. 4, p. 654.
86. M. Foucault, ‘Le sujet et le pouvoir’, ibid., p. 230. See also “‘Omnes et
singulatim”. Vers une critique de la raison politique’, ibid., pp. 134ff.
87. Cf. for example A. Burguiere, Les Formes de la culture, Paris: Seuil, 1993.
88. Liberation, 26 April 1993, p. 10, and 29 Feb.-l March 1992, p. 11.
89. E. P. Thompson (n. 47), pp. 453ff., 802£F.
90. O n the ideas o f ‘style’ and ‘stylisation’, cf. the work of Peter Brown, who in
fact influenced Foucault.
91. B. Sergent, L ’Homosexualite dans la mythologie grecque, Paris: Payot, 1984,
pp. 60—61; M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite, vol. 2: L ’Usage des plaisirs,Paris:
Gallimard, 1984.
92. J. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western
Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Uni
versity of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 74fF.; P. Veyne, L’elegie erotique romaine, Paris:
Seuil, 1983, p. 91, and La societe romaine (n. 11), pp. 115£F.; F. Foucault, Histoire
de la sexualite. Tome II (n. 91).
93. Y. Zavetz, La Plebe et le Prince. Fonle et vie politique sons le Haut-Empire romain,
Paris: La Decouverte, 1984, pp. 186fF.
94. B. Berman andj. Lonsdale (n. 22), vol. II.
95. J. Lonsdale, ‘La pensee politique kikuyu et les ideologies du mouvement
mau-mau’, Cahiers d'etudes africaines, 107—108, XXVII, 3—4,1987, p. 347.
96. J.-F. Bayart, L ’Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre, Paris: Fayard, 1989,
pp. 296ff.
97. Press conference on 14 Oct. 1985.
98. On political qualities among the Betis, cf. P. Laburthe-Tolra, Les Seigneurs de la
foret. Essai sur le passe historique, I’organisation sociale et les uormes ethiques des
anciens Bed au Cameroun, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1981, pp. 353fF.
99. B. Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 31—2.
100. UPS, Congres extraordinaire, 21 au 29 decernbre 1916. Pour une societe senegalaise
socialiste et democratique. Rapport de politique generale par Leopold Sedar Senghor,
secretaire general de I’UPS, Dakar: NEA, 1976, pp. 50—51.
101. Ibid.,p. 54,
102. See ‘L’homme Abdou D iouf’ in Senegal d’aujourd’lmi (Dakar), April 1981,
pp. 2Iff.
103. According to an expression that emerged during discussions by the Analysis
Group on Trajectories of the Political Sphere, at the Centre d’Etudes et de
Recherches Internationales, Paris (1988—94).
104. Liberation, 9 May 1995.
105. P Veyne, La Societe romaine (n. 11),passim; E. P. Thompson (n. 47), Chs II, IX
and XVI; J. Peacock (n. 51), passim; R. O ’Hanlon, ‘Recovering the Subject.
282 Notes [pp. 159-164]
Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South India’,
Modern Asian Studies 22/1, 1988, pp. 189—224.
106. F. Adelkhah, ‘Limaginaire economique en Republique islamique d’Iran’ in
J.-F. Bayart (ed.), La Reiuvention dn capitalisme, Paris: Karthala, 1994, pp. 117—
44, and ‘Quand les impots fleurissent a Teheran. Taxes municipales et for
mation de l’espace public’, Cahiers du CERI, 12,1995.
107. J. Peacock (n. 57).
108. E. P. Thompson (n. 47).
109. M. Bloch, ‘La separation du pouvoir et du rang conune processus devolution.
Une esquisse du developpement des royautes dans le centre de Madagascar’ in
F Raison-Jourde (ed.), Les Sonverains de Madagascar. L’histoire royale et les
resurgences coutemporaines, Paris: Karthala, 1983, pp. 280fF.
110. D. Chidester, Shots in the Streets: Violence and Religion in South Africa, Cape
Town: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 76fF.;E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: the
Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985;
L. DuBois, ‘Torture and the Construction of an Enemy: the Example of
Argentina, 1976—1983’, Dialectical Anthropology, 15, 1990, pp. 317—28; and
S. Gregory and D. Timermann, ‘Ritual of the Modern State: the Case of
Torture in Argentina’, ibid., 11, 1986, pp. 63—72.
111. C. Castoriadis (n. 2), p. 180.
112. P. Ansart (n. 73), p. 54.
113. M. Feltin, ‘Les raises en scene de Jean-Marie Le Pen’, La Croix-L’Evenement,
20 March 1992, p. 5.
114. M. Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, p. 86.
115. C. Vidal, Sociologie des passions (Cote d ’Ivoire, Rwanda), Paris: Karthala, 1990,
p. 11.
116. C. Vidal, ‘Les politiques de la haine’, Les temps modernes, 583, July—Aug. 1995,
pp. 6—33.
117. Le Monde, 27 Feb. and 2 March 1991.
118. P. Veyne, Les Grecs (n. 3), pp. 136—7.
119. The Globe and Mail, 25 Feb. 1991, p. A ll (from an Associated Press despatch).
120. M. Feltin (n. 113).
121. Among contemporary authors, it is probably Norbert Elias who has most
emphasised the fundamental relationship between social organisation and
ambivalence (cf. L i Dynamique de I’Occident, Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1975,
pp. 107fF.). Cf. also, in Germany, the Alltagsgeschichte school, with the work of
AJf Ludtke.
122. D. C. Dorward, ‘Ethnography and Administration: A Study of Anglo-Tiv
Working Misunderstanding’,Journal of African History, XV/3, pp. 475-7, and
F A. Salamone, ‘The Social Construction of Colonial Reality: Yauri Emirate’,
Cahiers d’etudes africaines, 98,X X X V -2,1985, pp. 139-59. O n colonisation as a
historical system of action based on interaction between the coloniser and the
colonised, cf. esp. E. F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India,
1795-1895, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; J. Pemberton, On
the Subject of Java’, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994;J. A. Dunn and
A. F. Robertson, Dependence and Opportunity: Political Change in Ahafo, Cam
[pp. 164-167] Notes 283
bridge University Press, 1973; J. D. Y. Peel, Ijeshas and Nigerians: The Incorpo
ration of a Yorttba Kingdom, 1890-1970, Cambridge University Press, 1983;
B. Berman andj. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley (n. 22); A. Mbembe, La naissance
du maquis dans le Sud-Catneroun (1920—1960). Histoire des usages de la raison en
colonie, Paris: Karthala, 1996.
123. For an overall vision, cf. J.-F. Bayart (n. 96). The exemplary case of Kenya is
well examined in G. Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making
of an African Petite Bourgeoisie, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. On the
ambivalence of economic policies, cf. B. Hibou, L‘Afrique est-elle protection -
niste? Paris: Karthala, 1996.
124. S. Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa, Johannesburg: Ravan
Press, 1986.
125. Cf., for example, the identification of Mobutu with the mythical figure of
Bula Matari in Zaire, in C. Young and T. Turner, The Rise and Decline of the
Zairian State, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, and life stories in
B. Jewsiewicki, Naitre et mourir au Zaire. Un demi-siecle d’histoire au quotidien,
Paris: Karthala, 1993.
126. J.-F Bayart, ‘Les trajectoires de la Republique en Iran et en Turquie: un essai
de lecture tocquevillienne’in G. Salame (ed.), Democraties sans democrates, Paris:
Fayard, 1994, pp. 375-95.
127. Documents quoted in B. Verhaegen, Rebellions au Congo, vol. 2: Maniema,
Brussels: CRISP and Kinshasa: IRES, 1969, p. 693.
128. J.-P. Vernant, L ’indiuidu, la mort, Vamour. Soi-meme et Vautre en Grtce ancienne,
Paris: Gallimard, 1989, pp. 195fF., 203.
129. M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, Les Ruses de /' intelligence. La metis des Grecs,
Paris: Flammarion, 1974, pp. 57,19-20.
130. D. Paulme, La Mere devorante. Essai sur la morphologie des contes africains, Paris:
Gallimard, 1976, passim.
131. J.-F Bayart, ‘L’Afrique invisible’, Politique Internationale, 70, winter 1995-6,
pp. 287—300, and J.-F Bayart, S. Ellis and B. Hibou, The Criminalization of the
State in Africa, London: International African Institute in association with
James Currey (Oxford) and Indiana University Press (Bloomington), 1999.
Didier Bigo had noted earlier that the figure of Bokassa corresponded with
the trickster in the Banda people’s pantheon (Pouuoir et obeissance en Centra-
frique, Paris: Karthala, 1988, ch. VI), and Ralph Austen identified one of the
African types of crime with that model (‘Social Bandits and Other Heroic
Criminals: Western Models of Resistance and their Relevance for Africa’ in
D. Crummey (ed.), Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest, London:James Currey,
1986, pp. 89-108). ’
132. F Adelkhah, ‘L’imaginaire economique en Republique islamique d’lran’in j.-
F Bayart (ed.) (n. 106), pp. 117—44.
133. B. Anderson (n. 99), pp. 149-50. Cf. also J. Peacock (n. 57) on the Iudruk,
another, more popular theatrical form, and interview with J. Leclerc, ‘Le
theatre d’ombres de Soharto’, Sudestasie, 63, 1990, pp. 13—15, on the secret
nature of executions which should be interpreted as human sacrifices.
284 Notes [pp. 168-177]
134. F. Jullien, Eloge de lafadeur. A partir de la pensee et de I’esthetique de la Chine, no
place of publication given, Editions Philippe Picquier, 1991, pp. 38, 55-6.
135. T. Accetto, De I’honnete dissimulation, Lagrasse: Verdier, 1990; G. Lamarche-
Vadel, De la duplicite. Les figures du secret au XVIIe siecle, Paris: La Difference,
1994; D. Crouzet, La Nuit de Saint-Barthelemy. Un reve perdu de la Renaissance,
Paris: Fayard, 1994, pp. 327ff (on the power of King Charles IX as ‘a system of
pretence’).
136. R. Needham (ed.), La Parente en construction. Onze contributions a la theorie
anthropologique, Paris: Seuil, 1977, p. 95.
137. Cameroon Tribune (Yaounde), 20 Feb. 1987, p. 7.
138. P. Ansart (n. 73), p. 54.
139. Quoted in A. Mbembe, ‘Pouvoir des morts et langage des vivants. Les
errances de la memoire nationaliste au Cameroun’in J.-F. Bayart, A. Mbembe
and C. Toulabor, Le Politique par le bas en Afrique noire, Paris: Karthala, 1992,
pp. 190-1.
140. Quoted in D. Bigo, Forme d’exercise du pouvoir et obeissattce en Centrafrique
(1966—1979). Elements pour une theorie du pouvoir personnel, Paris: Universite
Paris-1,1985, pp. 223,329.
141. Le Monde, 2—3 Jan. 1995.
142. Weekly Review (Nairobi), 10 and 17 April 1981.
143. B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley (n. 22) (dealing with Kikuyu
society, to which neither the Luo Oginga Odinga nor the Kalenjin arap Moi
belonged).
144. L. Hunt (n. 44), p. 20.
145. Quoted in ibid., pp. 19—20.
146. J.-L. Domenach and Hua Chang-ming, Le Mariage en Chine, Paris: Presses de
la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1987. Cf. also D. Davis and
S. Harrell (eds), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
147. F. Adelkhah, La Revolution sous le voile (n. 28) and Being Modern in Iran,
London: Hurst, 1999.
148. M. Foucault, ‘Precisions sur le pouvoir. Reponses a certaines critiques’ in Dits
et Ecrits (n. 66), p. 631.
149. M. Foucault, ‘L’esprit d’un monde sans esprit’, ibid., p. 745.
150. M. Foucault, ‘Impossible Prison’ in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961—84, Semio-
text(e), 1996, p. 277.
151. M. Weber, Cf. also W. Schluchter, Paradoxes of Modernity. Culture and Conduct
in the Theory of Max Weber, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 241 (on the idea
of causality in Weber).
152. F. Foucault, ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’ in Dits et Ecrits (n. 66),
vol. IV, p. 450.
153. J.-C. Eslin, ‘Critique de l’humanisme vertueux’, Esprit, June 1982, p. 17
(referring to the work of Merleau-Ponty).
154. E. Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans. De la Chandeleur au mercredi des
cendres, 1519—1580, Paris: Gallimard, 1979, pp. 188—98ff, 233ff.
155. D. Crouzet (n. 135), pp. 239, 267ff, 385ff
[pp. 177-185] Notes 285
156. A. Minaar (ed.), Communities in Isolation: Perspectives on Hostels in Sout
Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1993, pp. 226, 240-2. ’
157. C. Vidal, ‘Les politiques de la haine’ (n. 116), pp. 24-5.
158. F. Adelkhah, ‘La Republique islamique’ (n. 65).
159. W. O. Beeman, Images of the Great Satan: Representations of the United
States in the Iranian revolution’ in N. R. Keddie (n. 58), pp. 191-217.
160. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, New York, Macmillan, 1913.
161. S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, New York, Boni and Liveright
1921. ’
162. Ibid.,
163. D. Crouzet (n. 135), p. 13.
Chapter 4 T he Materialisation o f the Political Imaginaire

1. D. Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity: A n Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
2. Liberation, 2 June 1994,pp. 28—9. Cf. esp., on this crucial point, the works of ref
erence by Daniel Roche— in particular La Culture des apparences. Une histoire du
vetement (X VIIe-XVIIIe siecle), Paris: Fayard, 1989, as well as A. Appadurai (ed.),
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1986, and J.-P. Warmer (ed.), Le Paradoxe de la marchandise
anthentique. Imaginaire et consommation de masse, Paris: Harmattan, 1994.
3. E. Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans, De la Chandeleur an mercredi des
cendres, 1579—1580, Paris: Gallimard, 1979, p. 280.
4. P. Joutard, La Legende des Camisards, Paris: Gallimard, 1977, and N. Wachtel,
La Vision des vaincus, Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
5. D. Harvey (n. l),p. 204.
6. Source: D. Arasse, La Guillotine et Vimaginaire de la terreur, Paris: Flammarion,
1987.
7. Quoted in R. Cobb, La Protestation populaire en France (1789-1820), Paris:
Calmann-Levy, 1975, p. 243.
8. D. Arasse (n. 6), p. 106; author’s emphasis. Cf. also pp. 30—31 and 99ff.
9. H. Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, Minne
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
10. S. Michel, ‘Sous la plage, des bunkers’,Journal de Geneve, 21 Aug. 1992, p. 2;J.-
B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nougqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing
Movement of 1856—57, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989.
11. P. Geschiere, Sorcellerie et politique en Afrique. La viande des autres, Paris: Karthala,
1995, and ‘Kinship, Witchcraft and “the Market’” in R. Dilley (ed.), Contesting
Markets: Analysis of Ideology; Discourse and Practice, Edinburgh University Press,
1992, pp. 159—79; A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things (n. 2);
J. Habermas, 77le Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: A n Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989; V. Zelizer, Tire Social
Meaning of Money, New York: Basic Books, 1994.
12. D. Roche, La Culture des Apparences (n. 2), p. 35.
13. D. B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni
versity Press, 1989, p. 57.
286 Notes [pp. 185-189]
14. R.C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991, pp. 540—1.
15. R. Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule, Berkeley: University
o f California Press, 1980, p. 500.
16. A.N. Caglar, ‘The Grey Wolves as Metaphor’ in A. Finkel and N. Sirman (eds),
Turkish State, Turkish Society, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 26 and E. A. Olson,
‘Muslim Identity and Secularization’, Anthropological Quarterly, 58/4, Oct. 1985,
p. 163.
17. Source: J.-P. Perrin, ‘La virilite turque perd un de ses attributs’, Liberation, 24
June 1993.
18. N. Beyhum, Espaces eclates, espaces domines. Etude de la recomposition des espaces
publics centraux de Beyrouth de 1875 a 1900, Lyons: Universite Lyon II-Lumiere,
1991, pp. 430-1.
19. Le Monde, 8 Dec. 1993.
20. S. Labat, Les Islamistes algeriens. Entre les urnes et le maquis, Paris: Seuil, 1995;
O. Carlier, ‘De l’islahisme a l’islamisme. La therapie politico-religieuse du FIS’,
Cahiers d’etudes africaines, 126, XXXII—2, 1992, pp. 185—219.
21. G. Millet, ‘Contre le FIS, le pouvoir a gagne une bataille’, Liberation, 22—3 Feb.
1992, p. 17.
22. L. Martinez, ‘Les groupes islamistes entre guerilla et negoce. Vers une consoli
dation du regime algerien?’, Les Etudes du CERI, Aug. 1995.
23. N. Lamine, ‘Ahmed, islamiste malgre tout’, La Croix-L’Evenement, 6 July 1995,
p. 5. On the other hand, one Palestinian Islamist preferred to escape the vig
ilance of Yasser Arafat’s police by shaving off his beard: ‘It now grows within,
not outside!’ (Quoted by C. Boltanski, ‘Sur les terres de Hamas’, Liberation, 14
April 1993, pp. 22-3).
24. AFP, 2 July 1995.
25. ‘Moi, Khaled Kelkal’, Le Monde, 7 Oct. 1995, p. 10. Cf. also G. Kepel, Les
Banlieues de Vislam. Naissance d’une religion en France, Paris: Seuil, 1987, pp. 34ff.
26. C. Bromberger, ‘Les blagues ethniques dans le nord de l’lran. Sense et fonction
d’un corpus de recits facetieux’, Cahiers de litteratnre orale, 20,1986, pp. 73—101.
27. J. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 253.
28. D. Lombard, Le carrefour jai’anais. Essai d ’histoire globale, vol. 3: L ’Heritage des
royaumes concentriqnes, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, 1990, p. 14.
29. R. Cobb (n. 7), and E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common, New York: The
New Press, 1993.
30. M.G. Schatzberg, Politics and Class in Zaire: Bureaucracy, Business and Beer in
Lisala, New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1980, ch. V.
31. J. D. Klier and S. Lambroza (eds), Pogroms: Anti-Jeunsh Violence in Modern
Russian History, Cambridge University Press, 1992, andj. Crush and C. Ambler
(eds), Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992.1
am grateful to Max-Jean Zins for drawing my attention to the case o f India. On
this point cf. A. Appadurai, ‘Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia’, American
Ethnologist VIII/3, pp. 494—511.
[pp. 189-196] Notes 287
32. F. de Coulanges, La cite antique, Pans: Flammarion, 1984, ch. VII.
33. P. Sanders, Ritual, Politics and the City in Fatitnid Cairo, Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1994, pp. 28fF.
34. P. Veyne, Le Pain et le Cirque. Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique, Paris:
Seuil, 1976, p. 286.
35. Cf. O. Ihl, La Fete republicaine, Paris: Gallimard, 1996, pp. 98ff., 208ff.
36. J.-L. Rocca, ‘Pouvoir et corruption en Chine populaire’, Perspectives chirwises,
11-12, Jan-Feb. 1993, pp. 20-30.
37. F. Adelkhah, ‘Politique et Ramadan en Iran’, Le Monde, 29 Feb. 1996.
38. P. Sanders (n. 33), pp. 68—70.
39. D. Roche, La France des Lumieres, Paris: Fayard, 1993, p. 559.
40. H. Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915—1945, New York: Harper
Collins, 1992, pp. 156-76.
41. F. Adelkhah, ‘La Republique islamique a l’heure du temps mondial’ in Z. Lai'di
(ed.), Le Temps mondial, Brussels: Complexe, 1997. According to Christian
Coulon, French regional cuisine fulfilled a similar function.
42. V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1974; B. Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991, ch. IV
43. N. Elias, La Civilisation des moeurs, Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1973, ch. IV; D. Roche
(n. 33), pp. 560ff.
44. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modem Age,
Stanford University Press, 1991.
45. Lu Wenfu, Vie et passion d’un gastronome chinois, Arles: Editions Philippe Pic-
quier, 1988.
46. M. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1976,
pp. 179 and 203.
47. F. Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
48. D. Roche (n. 33), pp. 14,15,48,487. O n changes in dress in Asia, often under
estimated by European authors—notably by Braudel— cf. K.N. Chaudhuri,
Asia before Europe. Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of
Islam to 1750, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 187ff.
49. A. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society,
1700—1930’in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things (n. 2), p. 285.
50. J. Le Goff, La Civilisation de I’Occident medieval, Paris: Flammarion, 1982
(Champs series), p. 329.
51. R.C . Trexler (n. 14), pp. 439—40.
52. J.-D. Gandoulou, Dandies a Bacongo. Le culte de I’elegance dans la societe congolaise
contemporaine, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989, and Entre Paris et Bacongo, Paris: Centre
Georges Pompidou, Centre de Creation Industrielle, 1984; R. Bazenguissa,
“‘Belles maisons” contre S.A.P.E.: pratiques de valorisation symbolique au
Congo’ in M. Hambert et al. (eds), Etat et societe dans le Tiers monde. De la mod
ernisation a la democratisation?, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1992, pp. 247—
55; J. Friedman, ‘The Political Economy of Elegance: An African Cult of
Beauty’, Culture and History, 7 , 1990, pp. 101—25.
288 Notes [pp. 197-202]
53. ‘Rapport et projet de decret presentes au nom du Comite d’instruction
publique, sur les costumes des legislateurs et des autres fonctionnaires publics,
seance du vingt-huit fructidor, l’an trois, par Gregoire, depute a la Convention
nationale’ in Oeuvres de I’Abbe Gregoire, Paris: EDHIS, 1977, vol. II, p. 396,
quoted in English in L. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 77—8.
54. Minutes for autumn 1793, quoted in Abbe Charles Jolivet, La Revolution dans
I’Ardeche (1788-1795), Apremont: Curandera, 1988, p. 464.
55. L. Hunt (n. 53), p. 83.
56. Quoted in B. Lewis, Islam et laicite. La naissance de la Turquie moderne, Paris:
Fayard, 1988, p. 34.
57. M.-C. and E. Ortigues, Oedipe africain, Paris: UGE, 1973, pp. 24ff. and 37
(authors’ emphasis).
58. Dennis Frydman, psychoanalyst, quoted in E. Dior, ‘Dans les banlieues
londoniennes, mourir pour des “pompes”’, La Croix-L’Evenement, 14—15 Oct.
1990, p. 8.
59. Ibid.
60. On the fetishism for school uniforms in Japan, cf. L. Lampriere, ‘Fantasmes bleu
marine au Soleil Levant’, Liberation, 31 Aug. 1993, p. 17.
61. Advertisement in ‘Sandwich’ column, Liberation, 27—28 June 1981.
62. Le Canard enchame, 24 May 1995; A. Touraine, ‘Les pantalons longs: la strategic
du parti socialiste’, Le Matin, 22 Feb. 1980.
63. A. D., ‘Le short de la discorde’, La Croix-L’Evenement, 10 Sept. 1991.
64. N. Gole, ‘Ingenieurs islamistes et etudiantes voilees en Turquie: entre le
totalitarisme et l’individualisme’in G. Kepel and Y. Richard (eds), Intellectuels et
militants de I’islam contemporain, Paris: Seuil, 1990, p. 169.
65. H. E. Chehabi, ‘Staging the Emperor’s New Clothes:Dress Codes and Nation-
Building under Reza Shah’, Iranian Studies, 26/3-4, summer 1993,p. 220, n. 59.
66. L. Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing. Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579—
1642, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
67. Interview with Francois Bayrou, La Croix-L'Evenement, 28-9 Nov. 1993.
68. Le Monde, 20 Dec. 1995.
69. Interview with Roland Marchal and Claudine Vidal, Paris, 1995.
70. L. Lampriere, ‘Hosokawa, le “Kennedy japonais’” , Liberation, 15 Feb. 1994,
pp. 18-19; A. Dubus, ‘La resistance de Zargana, le “Coluche” birman’, La
Croix-L’Evenement, 25 Jan. 1995, p. 9.
71. Le Monde, 21 April 1989 and 22 Dec. 1995.
72. M. M. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1980, p. 186; F. Adelkhah, La Revolution sou le voile.
Femmes islamiques d ’lran, Paris Karthala, 1991.
73. R.L. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia, Cambridge
University Press, 1993, pp. 232 and 248-9. L’abbe Gregoire was to write later:
‘Reflecting on the question of dress, the first idea on which we settled was to
exclude any material not of French manufacture.’ ‘Rapport et decret’ (n. 53)
p. 398.
74. C. Young and T. Turner, Tlte Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, Madison: Wis
consin University Press, 1985, p. 117.
[pp. 203-209] Notes 289
75. H. Thassinda Uba Thassinda, Zaire. Les princes de Vinvisible. L’Afrique noire
bMonnee par le parti unique, Caen: Editions C ’est-a-dire, 1992, pp. 103-4.
76. D. Roche (n. 33), ch. IX.
77. O n the relationship of the Great War with the imaginaire of modernity in the
Reich, cf. M. Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern
Age, New York: Doubleday, 1990.
78. D. Roche (n. 33), p. 244.
79. M. Weber, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology, New York.
Bedminster Press, 1968.
80. E. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914’ in E. Hobs-
bawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University
Press, 1983, pp. 287-8.
81. A. Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 1785-1906. The Role of the Ulama in the
Qajar Period, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, pp. 78-9 and 177;
B. Lewis (n. 56), pp. 93fF.
82. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, op. cit.
83. H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of
Scotland’ in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds) (n. 80), p. 15.
84. Ibid., p. 22.
85. Ibid., pp. 15—41.
86. B. Lewis (n. 56), pp. 94fF.
87. J. Pemberton, On the Subject of ‘Java’, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1994,pp. 65ff.;B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (n. 42). Cf. also D. Lombard,
Le carrefourjavanais (n. 28), vol. I, pp. 89fF., 129ff.
88. Source: C. A. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi’ (n. 49), pp. 285—321.
89. D. E. Haynes, ‘From Tribute to Philanthropy: the Politics of Gift Giving in a
Western Indian City Journal of Asian Studies, 46/2, May 1987, pp. 339—60.
90. H. and U. Mukerkjee (ed.), India’s Fight for Freedom on the Swadeshi Movement,
1905—6, Calcutta, 1908, quoted in C. A. Bayly (n. 88), p. 311.
91. J. Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples, Madison: Uni
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1978, p. 185. Cf. also J. C. Miller, Way of Death:
Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830, Madison: Uni
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
92. M .-C. Dupre, ‘Raphia Monies among the Teke: their Origin and Control’ in
J. I. Guyer (ed.), Money Matters: Instability Values and Social Payments in the
Modern History of West African Communities, London: James Currey, 1995,
pp. 45—6.
93. M.J. Hay, Who Wears the Pants? Christian Missions, Migrant Labor and Clothing in
Colonial Western Kenya, Boston University African Studies Center, 1992, pp. 7—8.
94. M.C. Dupre (n. 92).
95. P. M. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville, Cambridge University
Press, 1995, pp. 155—7.
96. C. Geary, Patterns from Without, Meaning from Within: European-Style Military
Dress and German Colonial Politics in the Bamum Kingdom (Cameroon), Boston
University African Studies Center, 1989.
290 Notes [pp. 209-214]
97. Marquis de Compiegne, UAfrique equatoriale. Gabonais, Pahouins, Gallois, Paris:
Plon, 1876, pp. 186fF., 196.1 am grateful to Frarôis Gaulme for helping me
to discover this work.
98. This, in the opinion of Raison-Jourde, justifies in these circumstances the idea
o f ‘theatre’ which we for our part have questioned: in the grand procession of
Dec. 1848 the prince was dressed as a European king, a personage whom he
‘assumed with the combined evocation and distancing of an actor’ so as to
create images of a programme o f ‘good government’ (F. Raison-Jourde, Bible
et pouvoir a Madagascar an XIXe siecle, Paris: Karthala, 1991, pp. 214ff.).
99. Ibid., p. 218.
100. Ibid., for the masked ball of 27 Dec. 1856.
101. B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, London: James Currey, Nairobi:
Heinemann, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991, vol. II, pp. 238-40.
102. Ibid., p. 360.
103. Quoted in M. J. Hay (n. 93), p. 12.
104. Ibid.
105. T.O. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma,
London: Heinemann, 1975, pp. 126—32.
106. M .J. Hay (n. 93), pp. 19-20.
108. R. Pelissier, La Colonie du Minotaure. Nationalismes et revoltes en Angola (1926
1961), Orgeval: Pelissier, 1978, pp. 205,561.
109. 1958 article quoted in F. Bernaut-Bosswell, Democraties ambigues. La construc
tion d’une societe politique au Gabon et au Congo-Brazzaville, 1945—1964, Paris:
Universite Paris-VII, p. 533.
110. Tribute by Louis Sanmarco, Marches tropicaux et mediterraneens, 14 June 1996,
p. 1189.
111. P. M. Martin (n. 95), pp. 1,154; M .J. Hay (n. 93), pp. 11-12.
112. Georges Balandier had observed this earlier (Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires,
Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1985, pp. 92—
3, new edn). The crisis that has struck the continent since the end of the 1970s
has probably altered consumer behaviour; in Dakar, for example, ‘only a small
part of the budget is devoted to clothing’ (E.-S. Ndione, Le Don et le Recours.
Ressorts de Veconomie urbaine, Dakar: Enda, 1992, p. 119).
113. P. M. Martin (n. 95), pp. 171—2;J.-D. Gandoulou (n. 52).
114. J. Dehasse, Le Role politique des associations de ressortissants a Leopoldville,
Louvain: Institut de Sciences Politiques et Sociales, 1965, pp. 32—4, 98fE;
T.O. Ranger (n. 105);J.C. Mitchell, The Kalela Dance. Aspects of Social Rela
tionships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia, Manchester: The Rhodesia
Livingstone Papers, 1956; ‘Tchiloli de Sao Tome e Principe’, Internationale de
Vimaginaire, 14, 1990 J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, ‘La surinterpretation politique.
Les cultes de possession hawka du Niger’ in J.-F. Bayart (ed.), Religion et
modernite politique en Afrique noire, Paris: Karthala, 1993, pp. 163—213.
115. A. Cohen, The Politics of Elite Culture, University of California Press, at Los
Angeles, 1981, on the Creoles of Sierra Leone.
116. G. Bouteillier, Douze mois sous I’Equateur, Toulouse: Imprimerie Adolphe
Trinchant, 1903, quoted in P. M. Martin (n. 95), p. 154; J.-D. Gandoulou
(n. 52).
[pp. 214-220] Notes 291
117. J. Etho, ‘L’habit ne fait pas le moine’, Liaison (Brazzaville), 38, Aug. 1953, p. 26,
quoted in P. M. Martin (n. 95), p. 172.
118. M. J. Hay (n. 93), p. 20; M. Samuel, Lc Proletariat noir en France, Paris: Franipois
Maspero, 1978, pp. 185-6.
119. Testimony o f a sapeur, quoted in J.-D. Gandoulou (n. 52), p. 97.
120. M. Le Pape and C. Vidal, ‘Raisons pratiques africaines’, Cahiers internationaux
de sociologie, LXXIII, 1982, pp. 31 Iff. Cf. also C. Vidal, Sociologie des passions
(Cote d ’Ivoire, Rwanda), Paris: Karthala, 1990.
121. M. Weber, Economy and Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978,
vol. II, pp. 927ff; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class,
New York: Vintage Books, 1963.
122. P. Bonnafe, ‘Une classe d’age politique. La JM N R de la Republique du
Congo-Brazzaville’, Cahiers d’etude africaines, 31, V III/3 ,1968.
123. R . Marchal, ‘Les inooryaan de Mogadiscio. Formes de violence dans un espace
urbain en guerre’, Cahiers d’etudes africaines, 130,XXXIII/2,1993, pp. 295-320.
124. M .J. Hay (n. 93).
125. B. Badie, L’Etat importe. L ’occidentalisation de I’ordrepolitique, Paris: Fayard, 1992,
examined by J.-F. Bayart, ‘L’historicite de l’Etat importe’ in J.-F. Bayart (ed.),
La greffe de I’etat, Paris: Karthala, 1996, ch. 1. On the trajectory of the state in
Africa, cf. J.-F. Bayart, L’Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre, Paris: Fayard,
1989.
126. M .J. Hay (n. 93), p. 4, quoting the works of Joanne Eicher (University of
Minnesota).
127. M. Le Pape and C. Vidal (n. 120), p. 314.
128. E. Terray, ‘Le climatiseur et la veranda’ in Afrique plurielle, Afrique actuelle.
Hommage a Georges Balandier, Paris: Karthala, 1986, pp. 37—44.
129. M. Le Pape and C. Vidal (n. 120), p. 315. For the record, we should note some
African haute couture efforts (M. Devey, ‘Les stylistes africains a la conquete du
marche curopcen’, Marches tropicaux et mediterraneens, 9 April 1993,pp. 939—41).
130. Circular by the Sub-Prefect of Loum (Cameroon), 25 Oct. 1968. It may be
noted that in another part of that country— the Far North— civil servants’
zeal in banning nudity has been proportional to their personal interest in the
second-hand clothing trade.
131. Testimony reported in Le Monde, 4 May 1994, p. 3.
132. Testimony reported in P. Doornbos, ‘La revolution derapee. La violence dans
Test du Tchad (1978—1981)’, Politique africaine, 7, Sept. 1982, p. 11.
133. Za'ire-Afrique, 172, Feb. 1983, quoted in B. Jewsiewicki and H. Moniot,
Dialoguer avec le leopard? Pratiques, savoirs et actes du people face au politique en
Afrique noire contemporaine, Paris: Harmattan and Sanite-Foy, Ed. SAFI, 1988,
p. 437.
134. M.G. Schatzberg, Mobutu or Chaos? The United States and Zaire, 1960—1990,
Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991, p. 49.
135. Interview with Mokolo wa Mpombo ,Jeune Afrique, 25 Sept. 1991, p. 20. On
the years from 1988 to 1991 in Zaire, cf. J.-C. Willame, L’Automne d’un
despotisme. Pouvoir, argent et obeissance dans le Zaire des annees quatre-vingt, Paris:
Karthala, 1992.
292 Notes [pp. 220-227]
136. S. Smith, ‘Une guerre tribale massacre la transition democratique’, Liberation,
1 July 1993, pp. 15—16 (relating the events of Aug. 1992).
137. Liberation, 7 Oct. 1994.
138. Quoted in A. Rahnema and F. Nomani, The Secular Miracle: Religion, Politics
and Economic Policy in Iran, London: Zed Books, 1990, pp. 72, 77.
139. F. Adelkhah, La Revolution sous le wile. Femmes islamiques d’lran, Paris: Karthala,
1991, p. 212.
140. Liberation, 6 April 1994; Le Monde, 9 Oct. 1990; La Croix-L’Evenement, 15 Nov.
1994; A. Chellali, ‘Le voile a l’ecole. Enjeux d u n decret, avatars d’un proces’,
Egypte-Monde arabe, 20,1994, pp. 133-41; E. A. Olson, ‘Muslim Identity and
Secularisation’ (n. 16).
141. L. Martinez (n. 22).
142. Liberation, 31 March 1994, p. 20.
143. G. Millet, ‘Entre voile et treillis. Blida sous influence’, Liberation. 28 April 1994.
144. D. Amrane, Les Femmes algeriennes dam la guerre, Paris: Plon, 1991, pp. 130—1.
145. F. Adelkhah (n. 139), p. 197.
146. Hurriyet (Istanbul), quoted in Liberation, 6 May 1993. Comparisons can be
drawn between this news item and the opinion of a Tel Aviv rabbi that ‘the
sleeves must reach the elbows and cover them entirely’ and ‘if a woman bares
her arms in the street her husband has a right to divorce her’ (Le Monde, 26
Aug. 1994).
147. Cf. reports on the Salam Shopping Center for Veiled Women in Cairo in
International Herald Tribune (12 Feb. 1993) and Liberation (22 May 1992).
148. F. Adelkhah (n. 139), pp. 197-8.
149. F. Adelkhah, ‘Les elections legislatives en Iran. La somme des parties n’est pas
egale au to u t...’, Les Etudes du C ERI,]u\y 1996.
150. Cf. also, for example, L. Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a
Bedouin Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, and N. Gole,
Musulmanes et modernes. Voile et civilisation en Tnrquie, Paris: La Decouverte,
1993.
151. P. Veyne, La societe romaine, Paris: Seuil, 1991, p. 145.
152. Quoted in Le Monde, 21 March 1994.
153. Quoted in F. Adelkhah (n. 39), ch. V.
154. Here we follow D. Casajus, La tente dans la solitude. La societe et les marts chez les
Touaregs Kel Ferwan, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
and Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 315fF.
155. C. Levi-Strauss, ‘Les champignons dans la culture. A propos d’un livre de
M .R.G. Wasson’, L’Homme, X (1), Jan.—March 1970, pp. 5—16: ‘Halluci
nogenic drugs do not conceal a natural message, of which the very notion
seems a contradiction; they are the elements that set off and magnify a hidden
discourse that every culture holds in reserve, and whose elaboration is made
possible or made easier by drugs.’ (p. 61)
156. S. Weir, Qat in Yemen: Consumption and Social Change, London: British M u
seum Publications, 1985. Cf. also L. V. Cassanelli, ‘Qat: Changes in the Pro
duction and Consumption of a Quasilegal Commodity in Northeast Africa’
in A. Appadurai (ed.) (n. 2), pp. 236—57.
[pp. 227-234] Notes 293
157. A.W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drugs Trade,
New York: Lawrence Hill, 1991.
158. S. Colombani, ‘Saint-Yersin de Nha Trang’, Le Monde, 28 Dec. 1991 pp 9
and 11.
159. M. Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges, Paris: Gallimard, 1983; R. Chartier, Les
origiues culturelles de la Revolution fratqaise, Paris: Seuil, 1990. Cf. also O. Ihl
(n. 35) on the erosion of the festive Republican imaginaire.
160. R. Chartier (n. 59), p. 173. Cf. for example M. Agulhon, La republique au village.
Les populations de Var de la Revolution a la He Republique, Paris: Seuil, 1979.
161. E-A. Isambert, Sens du sacre. Fete et religion populaire, Paris: Minuit, 1982,p. 159.
162. E. Le Roy Ladurie (n. 3), p. 351.
163. S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1924.
164. M. Bakhtine, L ’Oeuvre de Francois Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et
sous la Renaissance, Paris: Gallimard, 1970, p. 26.
165. C. Bromberger, Le Match defootball. Ethnologie d ’une passionpartisane a Marseille,
Naples et Turin, Paris: Eds de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1995.
166. S. Freud, D/e Traumdeutung. Gesammelte Werke II, p. 116, n. 1 and pp. 529—39,
quoted and translated by C. Castoriadis, L ’lnstitution imaginaire de la societe,
Paris: Seuil, 1975, pp. 378—9. On this point Castoriadis considers that the
available French and English translations are wrong.
167. Cf. for example the remarkable chapter by J. Coussy, ‘Les ruses de l’Etat
minimum’ in J.-F Bayart (ed.), La Reinvention du capitalisme, Paris: Karthala,
1994, pp. 227-48.
168. B. Badie and M.-C. Smouts, Le Retournement du monde. Sociologie de la Scene
internationale, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques,
Dalloz, 1992 and B. Badie, La Fin des territoires, Paris: Fayard, 1995.
169. J.-F. Bayart, ‘La revanche des societes africaines’ in J.-F. Bayart, A. Mbembe
and C. Toulabor, Le Politique par le bas en Afrique noire, Paris: Karthala, pp. 84fF.
170. K. Pomian, L ’Ordre du temps, Paris: Gallimard, 1984, p. 265.
171. E. Weber, La Fin des terroirs. La modernisation de la France rurale, 1870-1914,
Paris: Fayard, Recherches, 1983, pp. 685—6.
172. M. Danes, ‘Le peuple ruthene en mal d’Europe’, La Croix-L’Eveneinent, 17—18
Jan. 1993, p. 4.
173. D. B. Kraybill (n. 13).
174. K. Pomian (n. 170), pp. XIII, 326fF., 349ff.
Conclusion
1. M. Foucault, ‘Les mailles du pouvoir’ in Dits et Ecrits 1954—1988, vol. 4: 1980—
1988, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, p. 187.
2. J.-F. Bayart (ed.), La Reinvention du capitalisme, Paris: Karthala, 1994.
3. A. Burguiere, ‘Le changement social. Breve histoire d’un concept’in B. Lepetit
(ed.), Les Formes de I’experience. Une autre histoire sociale, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995,
p. 261.
4. V. Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money, New York: Basic Books, 1994.
294 Notes [pp. 235-240]
5. Liberation, 15 Feb. 1994. For a ‘contextualisation’ of that news item, cf. S. White,
Russia Goes Dry. Alcohol, State and Society, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
6. C. Calhoun, ‘The Radicalism of Tradition: Community Strength or Venerable
Disguise and Borrowed Language?’ American Journal of Sociology, 88/5, March
1883, pp. 886-914. Cf. esp. E. Troeltsch, Protestantisme et modernite, Paris:
Gallimard, 1991; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1984 (original edn 1926); E. R. Wolf, Religious Regimes and
State-Formation. Perspectivesfrom European Ethnology, Albany. State University of
New York Press, 1991; M. Lagree, Religion et cultures en Bretagne, 1850-1950,
Paris: Fayard, 1992; Y. Lambert, ‘Developpement agricole et action catholique’,
Sociologia Rura1is,XVUl/4, 1978, pp. 245-53; L.-M. Barbarit and L.-M. Clenet,
La Noiwelle Vendee. Voyage dans la Vendee industrielle, Paris: Ed. France Empire,
1900; G. Hermet, Le Peuple contre la democratie, Paris: Fayard, 1989, and A u x
frontieres de la democratie, Paris: PUF, 1983; B. Cucher, Descendants de Chouans.
Flistoire et culture populaire dans la Vendee contemporaine, Paris: Eds de la Maison
des Sciences de l’Homme, 1995; A. Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apoc
alypse in the Puritan Migration to America, Cambridge University Press, 1992;
R.L. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth Century Prussia, Cambridge
University Press, 1993; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
Class, London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.
7. R.C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991,pp. 213-14 and Part IV.Cf.also N.-Z. Davies, Les cultures du peuple.
Rituels, savoir et resistances au X V II siecle, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1979 and, for
a non-Western example, P. Sanders, Ritual, Politics and the City in Fatimid Cairo,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994, or, on the Rom an Empire,
P. Brown, Le Culte des saints. Son essor et safonction dans la chretiente latine, Paris: Le
Cerf, 1996.
8. V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1974, p. 226.
9. D. I. Kertzer, ‘The Role of Ritual in State-Formation’ in E. R . Wolf (ed.),
Religious Regimes (n. 6), pp. 96-7.
10. M. Bax, ‘Religious Regimes and State Formation: Toward a Research Per
spective’ and ‘Marian Apparitions in Medjugoqe: Rivalling Religious R egi
mes and State-Formation in Yugoslavia’, in Kertzer (n. 6), Chs I and II. Cf. also,
in the same work, A. Weingrod, ‘Saints, Shrines and Politics in Contemporary
Israel’, pp. 73-83.
11. A. Ben-Amos, ‘La “pantheonisation” de Jean Jaures. Rituel et politique sous la
Ille Republique’, Terrains, 15, Oct. 1990, pp. 50—1.
12. ‘L’alchimie politique de la m ort’, La Croix-L’Evenement, 30 Jan. 1996.
13. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, op. cit.
14. ‘Economic orientation may be a matter of tradition or of goal-oriented ratio
nality. Even in cases where there is a high degree of rationalisation of action, the
element of traditional orientation remains considerable. [...] A high degree of
traditionalism in habits of life, such as characterised the laboring classes in early
modern times, has not prevented a great increase in the rationalisation of eco
nomic enterprise under capitalistic direction.’ M. Weber, Economy and Society: an
[pp. 241-246] Notes 295
outline of interpretive sociology, ed. Guenther R oth and Claus Wittich, New
York: Bedminster Press, 1968, pp. 69, 71.
15. E. Troeltsch (n. 6), p. 54.
16. Ibid., p. 68.
17. Ibid., p. 69.
18. M. Gribaudi, Les discontinuites du social. Un modele configurationnel’ in
B. Lepetit, Les Formes de Vexperience (n. 3), pp. 224-5. Cf. also N. Elias, La
Dynamique de I’Occident, Paris: Presses Pocket, 1990, pp. 181ff. ’
19. P. Joutard, La Legende des Camisards. Une sensibilite au passe, Paris- Gallimard
1977, p. 39. ’
20. V. Perez Diaz, The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic Spain,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
21. ‘The resemblance of the political relationship to the religious is just as devoid of
mystery, just as variable, as the resemblance of the themes of poetry to the sur
rounding natural or social reality; it is a matter of words, images and sources of
inspiration—when there is a desire to be inspired.’ (P Veyne, La Societe romaine,
Paris: Seuil, 1991, p. 309)
22. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, op. cit.
23. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
24. D. Lombard, Le Carrefour javanais. Essai d’histoire globale, vol. 2: L ’Heritage des
royaumes concentriques, Paris: Eds de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, 1990, p. 152.
25. S. A. Arjomand, ‘Social Change and Movements of Revitalization in Contem
porary Islam’ in J. A. Beckford (ed.), New Religious Movements and Rapid Social
Change, London: Sage, 1986, pp. 87—112.
26. F. Adelkhah, La Revolution sous le voile. Femmes islamiques d’lran, Paris: Karthala,
1991.
27. P.-X. Jacob, L ’Enseignement religieux dans la Turquie moderne, Berlin: Klaus
Schwarz Verlag, 1982.
28. G. Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond. Tlte Trajectory of European Societies,
1945—2000, London: Sage, 1995, p. 4.
29. A. Giddens, 77te Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press, 1990.
30. M. Foucault, ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’in Dits et Ecrits (n. 1), vol. IV,
pp. 446—7.
31. M. Foucault, ‘Q u’est-ce que les Lumieres’ in Dits et Ecrits (n. 1), vol. IV,
pp. 568ff. Cf. the course published under the same tide by Le Magazine litteraire
and better known in France (ibid., pp. 679—88).
32. The Renewal of Islamic Law: Muhammed Baqr as-Sadr, Najaf and the Shi’i Interna
tional, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
33. F. Adelkhah, ‘Les elections legislatives en Iran. La somme des parti(e)s n ’est pas
egale au tout’, Les Etudes du CERI, July 1996.
34. S. A. Arjomand, ‘Religion and the Diversity of Normative Orders’ in
S. A. Ag’omand (ed.), Tlte Political Dimensions of Religion, Albany: State Uni
versity of New York Press, 1993, p. 49.
35. Cf. the chs by M. Gaborieau, C. Hurtig, C. Jaffrelot, S. Kaviraj andj. Manor in
J.-F. Bayart (ed.), La grejfe de Vetat, Paris: Karthala, 1996.
296 Notes [pp. 246-252]
36. L. Rudolph, ‘The Modernity of Tradition: the Democratic Incarnation of
Caste in India’ in R. Bendix (ed.), State and Society: Reader in Comparative
Political Sociology, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968, p. 544.
37. S. Mardin, ‘Le concept de societe en tant qu’element d’approche de la societe
turque’, Les temps modernes, July-Aug. 1984, pp. 64-5.
38. F. Braudel, La Dynamique du capitalisme, Paris: Arthaud, 1985, pp. 72-8.
39. A. de Tocqueville, ‘Avertissement a la douzieme edition’, De la democratic en
Amerique, l,in Tocqueville,Paris:Robert LafFont, 1986,p. 72 (Bouquins series).
40. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
41. Jacques Chirac at Cairo University, quoted with commentary in J.-F Bayart,
‘Le danger du multiculturalisme’, Croissance, May 1996, p. 50.
42. G. Deleuze, Pourparlers, 1972—1990, Paris: Minuit, 1990, pp. 39—40.
43. W Schlichter, Paradoxes of Modernity. Culture and Conduct in the Theory of M ax
Weber, Stanford University Press, 1996, ch. IV.
44. M. Sarkisyanz, ‘Culture and Politics in Vietnamese Caodaism’ in
S. A. Aijomand (ed.), The Political Dimensions (n. 34), pp. 205—18;J. R. I. Cole,
‘Iranian Millenarism and Democratic Thought in the 19th Century’, Interna
tionalJournal of Middle Eastern Studies, 24,1992, pp. 1—26; S. Mardin, Religion and
Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediiizzainan Said Nursi, Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1989; J.-P. Dozon, La Cause des prophetes.
Politique et religion en Afrique contemporaine, Paris: Seuil, 1995; C. Jaffrelot, Les
Nationalistes hindous. Ideologic, implantation et mobilisation des annees 1920 aux annees
1990, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993.
45. Cf. for example P. Ngandu Nkashama, Eglises nouvelles et mouvements religieux.
L’exemple zairois, Paris: Harmattan, 1990, or C. Jambet, La Grande Resurrection
d’Alamdt. Lesformes de la liberte dans le shi’isme ismaelien, Lagrasse: Verdier, 1990.
46. J. Peacock, Rites of Modernization. Symbols and Social Aspects of Indonesian Prole
tarian Drama, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
47. C. Bromberger, Le Match defootball. Ethnologic d ’une passion partisane a Marseille,
Naples et Turin, Paris: Eds de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1995, p. 377.
48. Ibid., pp. 191, 197. Cf. also A. Ehrenberg, Le Culte de la performance, Paris:
Calmann-Levy, 1991.
49. O. Carlier, ‘De l’islahisme a l’islamisme. La therapie politico-religieuse du FIS’,
Cahiers d’etudes africaines, 126, XXXII—2, 1992, pp. 185—219; S. Labat, Les
Islamistes algeriens. Entre les urnes et le maquis, Paris: Seuil, 1995.
50. Africa Confidential, 16 Feb. 1996.
51. P. Veyne, ‘Olympie dans l’Antiquite’, Esprit, April 1987, p. 60.
52. S. Darbon, Des jeunes files toutes simples. Ethnographic d’une troupe de majorettes en
France,Jean-Michel Place (no date or place of publication, but appeared 1995).
53. ‘Rapport et projet de decret presentes au nom du Comite d’instruction
publique, sur les costumes des legislateurs et des autres fonctionnaires publics’in
Oeuvres de VAbbe Gregoire, Paris: Editions d’Histoire Sociale, 1977, vol. II,
pp. 396-7.
IN D E X
Afghanistan and Afghans, 80 Argentina and Argentines, 10

Africa/Sub-Saharan Africa and Armenia and Armenians, 90, 94,148
Africans: 40,41, 60,65,88,91,155, Asante, 27
166-7,169,185, 189,193,194,202, Asia and Asians: 57—8, 65, 247; Central,
206, 227, 246,247,250,251; and 9, 60, 62, 63,79, 88; and colonialism,
Britain, 29, 42—3, 45, 216; chiefdom 36,41,45-8, 67,164; East, 10-13,
in, 2—3 ,2 5 -9 ,3 7 ,4 7 —8; and Chris 34,55-6,117,169; South, 60;
tianity, 48-55,72,113-17,119,131, Southeast, 60,170
138-9, 209-14, 216; and colo Atatiirk, Mustafa Kemal, 9,41, 62,171,
nialism, 2, 5,20,26—32,38, 41,42—5, 197,206
47-8,61, 67,131,164-5,202-3, Australia and Australians, 35
209—17; and France, 5, 20—1, 25—7, Austria and Austrians, 36
212; pre-colonial, 27—8, 29—31, 61; Austro-Hungarian empire, 63, 64
and USA, 21; and witchcraft, 124— Aztecs, 68
32,178, 185; see also clothing
Africanisation, 50, 54 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 71,110—11,130, 234
Albania and Albanians, 138,184 Balkans, 9 ,63n, 90,147
Algeria and Algerians: 88,104,105, Baluchi, 80,89
143,170,184,187,199,222-5,245, Bamileke: 1—6; and France, 3—4
250; and France, 14,164 Bantu, 27-9, 30,129
Ali Shariati, 13,57, 99,101,107,221 Basuto, 29
ambivalence: 163—80,190, 210, 227, Bayangam, see Cameroon
229,231,232,233,235,239;con Belgium and Belgians, 28, 238
spiracy, 177—9; familial relationship, Benin and Beninese, 126
168-73 Biafra and Biafrans, 31,106
Americanisation, 7—8, 50—1 Biya, Paul, 5,21,27,131,156,169
Americas: 68,142; Indians of, 72—4, BJP, 42, 86,147
142—4; Latin, 73—4,141—4; see also Bokassa, Jean-Bedel, 27, 41,126,148,
United States of America 170
Amin, Idi, 27,126 Bosnia/Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Anatolia and Anatolians, 9, 89,151,186 Bosnians, 39, 63n, 64,194,237
Anderson, Benedict, 41, 46,137,142, Braudel, Fernand, 1, 66, 71, 84,107,
184,193,206 229,246
Angola and Angolans: 26, 31, 57, 212; Brazil and Brazilians, 117—8
UNITA, 50,57 Bretton Woods institutions, 20, 51
Arabia and Arabs, 17, 56, 57, 60, 62, 64, Britain and the British: 36,178; and
68,70,88,90,92,106,168 colonialism, 20,28,29,36—7,42—3,
297
298 Index
46, 76, 184, 227; and USA, 20; see clothing: 5, 8,14, 37,121, 195—226; in
also Africa, Cameroon, France, India Africa, 209-20; fez, 197, 206; in
Buddhism and Buddhists, 11, 60, 108 India, 207-9; kilt, 204-6; uniform,
Bulgaria and Bulgarians, 40 203—4; veil in Islam, 121, 199, 221—
Burkina Faso and Burkinabe, 122-4 6,242
Burma and Burmese, 58, 67, 88, 201 Colombia and Colombians, 73
Burundi and Burundians, 22—3,30,177 colonialism: 2,4,20,27—31,36—8,41—2,
Buthelezi, Chief, 27, 38 43-8, 61-3, 67-8,72, 86-7,107-8,
Byzantium, 62, 74, 107,141 131-2,141-4,164-5,206,207-14,
216-18, 227; see also state formation
Cameroon and Cameroonians: 128, Communism: 17, 26, 40, 118, 174, 211,
130,138,139-40,156,169,212, 228; see also China, USSR
218—19; Bayangam, 1—6, 28, 29, 48, Congo, Democratic Republic of, and
57; and Britain, 21; and colonialism, Congolese: 20,113,124,126,128,
61,125,170, 209; and France, 5, 21, 129,165,189,196,202, 209,212—
27,125,170; and USA, 21 13, 215; Katanga, 31; see also Zaire
capitalism, 7,10, 33—4, 62,131,132, Confucianism, 10—12, 34, 55—6, 60,
134-5,137-8,175,246 117,118,169
Carrel, Alexis, 57 Cote d’Ivoire and Ivorians, 114—17,
Catholicism and Catholics, 9—10, 53—5, 125-6,129,200,214-15,217-18,248
73-4, 83-4, 93,95,96-8,116,130, Croatia and Croats, 138,193—4
141-4,151,177, 213-14,235-7, cuisine, 188—94
241,248 culturalism and culturalists, xi, 6, 10,13,
Caucasus, 9, 63, 88, 90 18-19, 25-6,30, 32-3,35,40-1,43,
CeauPescu, Nicolae, 25,194 48,50, 53-4,55-8, 63-5,77, 83, 85,
Central African Republic and Central 92-3,95,96,103-4,109, 111, 121,
Africans, 20,148,170 156,157,168,173,227,235,242,
Chad and Chadians, 20, 31, 38, 219 245,247
Chagga, 28, 57, 210 culture and cultural practices: and
Chile and Chileans, 199 authenticity, 77—85, 86, 88,107,139,
China and Chinese: 10, 11,12—13, 34— 160,168,176,202,245,246;and
5,45,56, 59,60, 62, 65, 68,79, 118, diversity/plurality, 60—5, 70, 105—9,
165,167-8,174,186,190,194,197, 110—11, 121, 245; and economics, 2,
201; empire, 12, 93; in Indonesia, 3-5,9, 10-12, 30,33-4, 4 2 ,6 8 ,79
93—4; Muslims in, 94 80, 84, 87, 89-90,108,131-2,174,
Chirac, Jacques, 14,21,118,147,158, 184-5,189, 190, 200, 202-3, 208;
173,178,190, 237 and ethnicity, 29—30, 31,35, 40, 48—
Christianity and Christians: 11, 63, 68, 9,59-63,71,72,87, 106,192;
74,85,93,96,106,120,121, 130, extraversion of, 71—4, 81, 142,144,
141-4, 153, 162,204,242,247; 168, 209, 213, 216; and heritage, 65—
missions and missionaries, 43—5, 48— 71,74, 110; and meaning, 72—7, 96—
9,72-4,86,90,119,131, 144, 152, 108,109-21,142,144,168,176,
164,210—12,216; see also Africa, 181-2,189-90,209-10,229-31,
Catholicism, Methodism, Protes 233, 242, 249—51; popular, 44, 66,
tantism, United States of America 69-71,77 ,8 1 -3 ,8 8 ,1 4 5 -5 1 ;and
Clinton, Bill, 151,178 society, 9, 35, 213, 219, 232; see also
Index 299
clothing, colonialism, cuisine, Ford, Henry, 81-3
globalisation, hair, language, Foucault, Michel, 119, 150,152,153-4,
modernity, nationalism, political 174-5,194,234, 239, 243-4
imaginaire, politics, religion, state France and the French: 19,39-40, 66,
formation, tradition 68, 69-70, 93,95,96-8,137,141,
Czechs, 40,63 143,145,147,151,154,158,160-1,
176-7,178,185,188,190,193,196,
Declasse, Theophile, 20 197,198,199-200,228, 229, 231,
Deferre, Gaston, 14 235, 236, 237—9, 250—1; and Britain,
Deleuze, Gilles, 132,152, 226 20—1, 68; and colonialism, 20, 122—3,
democracy, 10, 21-7,33,39, 55-6,103, 164, 227; identity, 4, 56, 84,92; and
112,135-6,145,147,155,203,234, Iran, 14—15, 19; and Iraq, 14; and
235,241,244,246-9 Islam, 13—19; and language, 20—1, 24,
Deniau, Jean-Fran 9 ois, 21 40,241; Revolution, 13,68,74,98,
Denmark and Danes, 193 149,165,173,182-3,192, 220,229,
Doe, Samuel, 52 236; Vendee, 83—4, 235; see also
Dutch East Indies, 45—6, 93—4,206,227 Africa, Algeria, Bamileke,
Cameroon, Rwanda, Togo, Zaire
economics, see capitalism, culture and Freud, Sigmund: 169,176, 221, 228,
cultural practices, Marxism 235; dreams, 179,230
Egypt and Egyptians, 61, 62, 102-4,
189, 191 Gabon and Gabonese, 126, 139, 209
Elias, Norbert, 154, 234, 239 Gandhi, Mohandas K. (Mahatma), 46,
Elizabeth I, Queen, 98 108,208
England and English, 39, 68, 78, 98, GATT, 51
150,154,158,162,188,198,199,
Geertz, Clifford, 46, 67,149,234
204-6, 229, 235,236
George V, King, 29
Enlightenment, 8, 62, 63, 243, 251
Germany: 35,39—40, 66, 68, 78,82, 93,
Equatorial Guinea and Eq. Guineans,
97, 138, 204, 240; and colonialism,
38,116
28,44
Eritrea and Eritreans, 32, 68
globalisation, 4—6, 7—9,40,48—58, 59,
ethnicity an ethnic identity, see culture
80-1,106-7,131,139,141,143,
and cultural practices, identity,
174,182,184,193, 194, 203,209,
politics, state formation
217-18,228,242-50
Europe and Europeans: 31,48, 62, 63,
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 117
88,107,142,160,163,168,189,193,
194,203,206,236, 246,252; Greece and Greeks, 40, 62,90,147,
Central, 40,44,69, 77, 81,120; and 150,155,163,166,189,250
colonialism, 41, 42, 44, 47; Com Guinea and Guineans, 27,128
munist, 40; Eastern, 40,44,59,69,77,
81; Mediterranean, 60, 68,78; West Habyarimana, President of Rwanda,
ern, 59, 64, 67, 230, 231,238, 242 19,21-4
European Com m unity/Union, 64, 84, hair, 185—8
178,193 Hegel, 65,66,149,236
Europeanisation, 8, 69 Hinduism and Hindus: 60,189;
Eyadema, Gnassingbe, 20, 27, 38, 116 nationalism and nationalists, 37—8,
300 Index
42, 46, 50, 71, 77, 85-7, 107-8, International Monetary Fund, 21,51,
110, 146-7, 157 132,189
Hitler, Adolf, 57, 212 Iran and Iranians: 13—19, 57, 77, 80, 89,
homogeneity: and heterogeneity, x—xi, 99-102,105,121,143,148-9,150
7-9,60-5,66,106,110-11,121, 3 ,159,161,165,167,174,178-9,
129-32,192-3,233-4,240,242,249 184,187,188,190,193,201,221-2,
Houphouet-Boigny, Felix, 41, 114—5, 224,225,231,244,248,250;and
125-6,128,155,202 Iraq, 14,16,100, 101; Kurds in, 13,
Hungary and Hungarians, 40, 63 89; Shias in, 13—18, 99—105; Sunnis
Hussein, Imam, 101,148—9,151—2, 161 in, 13, 1 5 ,18;iee also France
Hussein, Saddam, 14,140,162—3 Iraq: 19, 89—90,162—3; see also France,
Hutu, 20,21-4, 68,93,162,181,227 Iran
Ireland and Irish, 9—10, 68, 235
Ibn Taymiyah, 75,103—4 Islam and Muslims: 45, 50, 52, 55—6,
identity: 7,112,160-3,177; cultural, 60-1,63,64,72, 85-6, 90-1,93-4,
ix—xiii, 4, 7—9, 10—19, 25, 38—40, 55— 99-108,118,120,121,139,171,
8,59-65,68-71,77,83-5,85-8, 95 188,189-91,199, 200, 204, 216,
6 ,109,193,246,252; diverse/plural, 228,231-2,242-6,247; revolu
60-5,92-5,105-9; ethnic, 21-4, 25, tionary, 15—19,77, 99—105; Shiism,
29-30,38-40, 48-9,59,63, 68,71, 13-15,99-103,151,167,207;
72, 88—95,160,177, 245; linguistic, Sufism, 91; Sunnism, 101, 207; see
20—1,24,40, 59, 88; national, 4, 9, also clothing
10-13,31-2,39-40,42, 55-8, 59, Islamism and Islamists, 14, 38-9, 42,
63-4,68, 71,72,75,77, 84, 85-7, 88, 55-6, 90-1, 99-105, 107, 139,143,
90,108,160-1,186,197,202^, 207 157,165,186-8, 222-5,242-5
8 ,217-20; political, ix-xiii, 13-19,
Islamophobia, 13-19, 64, 96, 143
25.38-40, 55-8, 59,63-5, 72, 85-7,
Israel and Israelis, 18-19,38—9,50,76
88-90,108,160-3,177-80,195—
226,227,251; primordial, 71, 85—8, Italy and Italians, 10, 35, 39—40, 54, 78,
91—2, 95,160—1,168; religious, 13— 117,148,185,188,192,193,196,
19.38-9,48-56,72,75, 77, 85-7, 236-7,238
88,90,93-5,107-8,160,185-8, Ivory Coast, see Cote d’Ivoire
221-6; social, 10-13, 25,193,198,
200, 213—15, 219; see also clothing, Japan and Japanese, 10-12, 59, 61, 79,
cuisine, hair, political imaginaire 150,163,169,196,201
imaginaire, see political imaginaire John Paul II, Pope, 25, 54,138
India and Indians: 18, 41, 45, 62, 88, Judaism and Jews, 50, 62, 85, 102,106,
140,159,189, 196, 246; and Britain, 178,189,204
36—8,46,110, 207; and colonialism,
36-8, 41,46,47, 86-7,107-8, 207; Kapwepwe, Simon, 55
Hindus in, 37-8, 42,70,75, 85-7, Kaunda, Kenneth, 53, 55, 131, 140
107—8,110,161, 248; Muslims in, Kemalism: 9,101,103, 165,186; see also
75, 85-7,107-8,161, 207; Tamil Atatiirk, Turkey
Nadu, 145—6,149; see also clothing Kenya and Kenyans: 45, 75-6, 117,124,
Indonesia: 47, 58,167; Bali, 149,189; 138,152,172-3,211,212,214,217;
Java, 46,60, 93-4,139,148,150,153, Mau Mau, 45, 76
156,159,167,206,242,249 Kenyatta,Jomo, 76,172
Index 301
Khamenei, Ayatollah, 15, 100 modernity: 2-3,7,38,39,47, 51-2, 81,
Khilafat movement, 38, 86 206,208,210,219, 234-52; see also
Khmer, 63 tradition
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 13,15,16, 99-101, Moi, Daniel arap, 75,124,172
107,221 Morocco and Moroccans, 68,193
Kikuyu, 76,138,152 Mozambique and Mozambicans: 44;
Kivu, 22,32-3,93,165 Renamo, 50
Korea and Koreans: 12; see also North Mughal empire and Mughals, 36, 87,
Korea 108,207
Kosovar, 64 Mussolini, Benito, 57
Kurds: 89—91; see also Iran
Kuwait and Kuwaitis, 140, 222—3 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 102,104
National Socialism, 63,82,120,137,163
language: 40, 59, 70, 88,106, 108; see nationalism and nationalists: and
also France, identity, state formation culture and cultural practices, 10,
Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 55-6,160, 171 11-12,31-2,35, 37-40,41-2,46-7,
Lebanon and Lebanese, 14, 68, 88, 92, 55-8,59, 63-4, 68-9,71,72,74-5,
101,187 81, 85-7, 88,108,137,142,146-7,
Liberia and Liberians, 44, 50, 52, 54, 164-5,185,206,207-8,212-14,
139,216 217—20; see also Hinduism, identity,
Lorenzo the Magnificent (de’Medici), religion, state formation
196,200 Nehru, Jawarhalal, 41,108
Nguema, Francisco Macias, 38,116
Madagascar and Malagasy, 77,126,144,
Nicaragua and Nicaraguans: Contras, 50
151,209
Niger and Nigeriens, 213, 226
Magyar, 63
Nigeria and Nigerians, 48, 52,105—6,
Mahathir, Mohammad, 55
119
Malawi and Malawians, 124
North Korea and North Koreans, 13
Malaysia and Malaysians, 55
Mali and Malians, 171, 214, 226
Olympio, Gilchrist, 20
Mandela, Nelson, 25
Ottoman empire: 9, 61, 62, 63, 70, 89—
Mao Tse-tung, 12,13,113,197,201,
90,103,118,204, 206,207; see also
202
Turkey
Marx, Karl, 45, 134,138, 234
Marxism, 14,90,101,107,113,131,228 Ovimbundu, 57—8
Mauritania and Mauritanians, 129
Methodism and Methodists, 139,151, Pakistan and Pakistanis, 14,18,77
154,159,235 Palestine and Palestinians, 17, 102,107,
Mexico and Mexicans, 116—17, 141—3 188
Micombero, Colonel, 23 Palestine Liberation Organisation, 17
Milingo, Emanuel, 53—5,131 Pasqua, Charles, 19
Mitterrand, Francois, 5, 19, 21, 24n, Persia and Persians, 15—16, 62, 68, 70,
229,237,238-9 80,89,107,168,204
Mobutu, President of Zaire, 21, 24—5, Peter the Great, 8, 62, 69, 70,185—6
27,28-9,32,38,76,77,114-15,127, Philippines and Filipinos, 56
159,202,219-20 Poland and Polish, 40
302 Index
political imaginaire: 132,133-8,160-3, Roman empire and Romans, 31, 62,

226-32,235,242,249-51; drama, 75,107,155,158,190,231
147-9; dreams, 138—41, 184; film, Romania and Romanians, 25, 40
145—7; iconography, 141—4; and Rousseau, 70, 98, 225
identity, 160-3; and materiality, 181— Russia and Russians: 8, 56, 62, 63, 68—
5, 226—7, 232, 233; and passion, 71, 74,77,120,178,185-6,189,231;
151-2,171,173,198-200,225,229, see also USSR
237—9, 250; and performance, 149— Rwanda and Rwandans: 21—4, 30, 39,
51,191,196,237-9;and 57,88,93,162, 177,181-2;and
subjectivation, 152—60,185,200, France, 19—22, 24
206—8; television, 146—7; see also Rwandan Patriotic Front, 20,23-4
ambivalence, clothing, cuisine, hair
politics: and culture and cultural Sadat, Anwar, 75,103
practices, ix—xiii, 5—6, 9—12, 25—33, Sahlins, Marshall, 95, 136, 195
35,39,41-2,55-8,59,63-5,67-8, Saudi Arabia and Saudis, 18—19, 143
71,72,83-5,90,109,110-121,122 Savimbi, Jonas, 57—8,126
132,233; discursive genres of, 109—21, Scotland and Scots, 204—6
129—32,168,185,228; and ethnicity, Senegal and Senegalese. 42, 55,156—7,
21—4, 29—30, 39—40; and religion, 198
9 -1 0 ,1 3 -1 9 ,3 7 -8 ,5 0 -6 ,7 4 -7 ,83 Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 5,156—7
4 ,85-7,96-108,113-17,138-44, Serbia and Serbs, 138, 193—4, 227
235—7,241—50; see also ambivalence, Shah Abbas I, 89, 90
clothing, cuisine, democracy, hair, Shah of Iran, 14, 15,16,148—9
identity, political imaginaire Shaka, 27
Portugal and Portuguese, 68 Sierra Leone and Sierra Leoneans, 216
Protestantism and Protestants, 33, 48— Sikhism and Sikhs, 68
51,54,93,95,98,144,151,176,240 Singapore and Singaporeans, 56
Prussia and Prussians, 201—2, 203, 235 Sinhala and Sinhalese, 42, 88, 148
Slovaks, 63
Qutb, Sayyid, 102—3 Slovenia and Slovenes, 138
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 117
Rafsanjani, President of Iran, 15,17 Somalia and Somalis, 26, 30, 200, 216
religion: and capitalism, 33—4, 236, 248; Somaliland, 32
and culture and cultural practices, 9— South Africa and South Africans, 27,
10,13-19, 33-4,37-8,41-2,48-56, 43,109-10,128,164-5,177,184,
69-70,72-7,83-4,85-7,96-108, 250; Natal, 38, 88, 219
113-17,139-44,188-91,221-6, Spain and Spaniards, 64, 68, 241
235—7,250; and economics, 13,33— Sparta and Spartans, 165—6
4, 51-2; and nationalism, 37—9, 41, Spinoza, Baruch, 134,152
42,51-2,55-6,74, 85-7,107; see Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans, 42, 88, 148
also Buddhism, Catholicism, Chris state formation: and colonialism, 30—2,
tianity, Hinduism, identity, Islam, 41—2, 72, 86—7, 88—9; and culture
Methodism, politics, Protestantism, and cultural practices, xii—xiii, 30—
Sikhism 32,35,37,39-40,41-2, 72, 87, 89,
Rhodesia and Rhodesians: 43; see also 143,164,180,202-4,218, 229,233,
Zimbabwe 236, 238; and ethnicity, 30—2,35,
Index 303
39—40, 41, 88—92; and language, 40, United States of America and
88; and nationalism, 31-2, 35, 39— Americans: 18, 20, 44,56,62, 64,
40, 41-2, 67-8, 86-7, 88-91; and 135,147,150,152,163-4,169,178
tradition, 35-6, 39, 41-2 9 ,184,192,198,227,231, 234,235,
Sub-Saharan Africa, sec Africa 242, 247, 250; Catholicism in, 9—10;
Sudan and Sudanese, 20, 31, 55, 60 Christian fundamentalism of, 49—51,
Sukarno, 41, 148, 156 54, 81; country music in, 81—3; see
Switzerland and Swiss, 57-8 also Africa, Britain, Cameroon
Syria and Syrians, 62, 90 USSR and Soviet Russians: 17, 63, 75,
80,82, 165,184; see also Russia
Taiwan and Taiwanese, 12, 201
Tamils (Sri Lankan), 68,148,153 Veyne, Paul, 11, 109,116,133,152,
Tanganyika and Tanganyikans, 28, 163,175,190,225
21 1 -1 2 Victoria, Queen, 28, 29, 36, 206
Tanzania and Tanzanians, 132 Vietnam and Vietnamese, 12, 164,228,
Tartu and Moscow, 68, 71 248
Thailand and Thai, 56 village community, 43-8, 67
Tocqueville Alexis de, 9,13,33,98,135— de Villiers, Philippe, 83-4
6,152,153,165, 234,240, 242,246
Togo and Togolese; 38, 61,116; and Walesa, Lech, 117
France, 20—1 Weber, Max, 9, 33-5, 91-2,104-5,
Tombalbaye, N ’Garta (Francois), 38 134-5,151,152,175,194,203, 234,
al-Tourabi, Hassan, 55 237,239,240,242,248
Toure, Samori, 27
Westernisation, 7-9
Toure, Sekou, 27, 128,155
Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 28
tradition: 1-2, 10, 29—30, 35—40, 41-2,
Wilson, Woodrow, 63, 90
44-8, 59-60,65-71,81-4,139,159,
World Bank, 51,75,164
164, 216—18, 236; invention of, 35—
40,41-2,44-8, 59-60, 65-71, 74-7,
81-4, 86-7, 96-108,164, 204-6; and Xiaoping, Deng, 12
modernity, 2-3, 30, 33-40, 47, 67,
69—71, 235,243—6; sec also state Yemen and Yemenis, 227
formation Yoruba, 48
Tshisekedi, Etienne, 76, 114 Yugoslavia and Yugoslavians, 63,138,
Tuareg, 225—6 194
Turkey and Turks: 9, 19, 40, 56, 59, 62,
68,77, 82,89, 94,101,103,105,107, Zaire and Zairians: 24—5, 38—9, 76—7,
148,151,165,169,171,186,190, 93,113,127,159,219-20; and colo
197,199,222-4,243,246, 248; and nialism, 29, 61, 202; Equateur, 25,
Anatolia, 9,186; and Ottoman 114; and France, 21, 25, 27; see also
empire, 9, 70, 90,103, 206 Congo
Turkmen carpets, 79—80 Zambia and Zambians: 140; Lusaka,
Tutsi: 22—3, 68; genocide of, 19—20, 53-5
22-4,57,93,162,181 Zanzibar, 61,139,216
Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 56, 77, 120
Ukraine and Ukrainians, 40, 231,234—5 Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans: 125,
UNESCO, 51 139; see also Rhodesia
After an ironical and sometimes comic journey through the political imaginaires and passions
of the contemporary world, this probing work invites the reader to reinvent the democratic
concept in its entirety in order to confront those engaged in contemporary identity conflicts
or movements. The murderous force of the communal riots in South Asia and o f such wars
as those in the former Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Algeria, and Africa derives from the belief
that for each imagined cultural identity there exists a corresponding political identity.This is
an illusion, for these identities are often fairly recent constructions.There is no such thing as
a native identity that imposes itself through force o f circumstances.There are only strategies
pertaining to identities— which are rationally pursued by identifiable actors— and identity-
related dreams or nightmares to which we adhere due to their power to seduce or terrify us.
Bayart argues that we are not condemned to remain in thrall to these enchantments, and that
the “clash of civilizations” is not inevitable.
“Jean-Fran?ois Bayart has, at least since the publication of his La politique du ventre, been known
to a wide circle of admirers as a person o f exuberant intelligence, endowed with the rare gift of
intellectual imagination and boundless curiosity. He is also driven by a polemical inner demon,
and in his forays marshals a bibliography apparently unlimited in time, space, or language with
promiscuous erudition. In The Illusion o f Cultural Identity Bayart takes on one of the most power
ful intellectual fashions of contemporary Anglo-American academia and political life, namely the
notion that people are endowed with a culture which has origins and boundaries and needs to be
protected in the name of the rights of those people.” —DAVID LEHMANN, UNIVERSITY
OF CAMBRIDGE
‘‘In The Illusion o f Cultural Identity, Bayart offers a sustained critique of the widespread opinion that
rather rigid or permanent cultural identities exist and that these offer an explanation for political
action* >. .This is a work of great subtlety and erudition on -a subject that is close to the heart of
world politics and seems set to stay at the forefront of debate for years to come__ He goes beyond
the fashionable (and now outworn) demonstration that tradition is an invention to state that ‘the
cultural interpretation of politics is necessary, because . .. political action is cultural.’”
—STEPHEN ELLIS, UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN
JEAN-FRANgOIS BAYART, a prominent French intellectual, is research director at the

CNRS/CERI (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques) and professor at the IEP •
(Institut d’Etudes Politiques) in Paris. Among his best-known works is the much-cited
The State in AfricaiThe Politics o f the Belly.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

www.press.uchicago.edu
Cover Photograph
© DieterTelemans / Panos Pictures
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly
Zaire). Confusion among the waiting military as the
Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt arrives on an
official visit to the Congolese President Joseph Kabila.
The visit marked the resumption of aid to this former
Belgian colony after a suspension of ten years. *

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THE ILLUSION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY

The University o f Chicago Press

R e v ise d and u p d a te d e d itio n © C . H u rs t & C o. (Publishers) L td, 2 0 0 5

First p u b lish ed in 1996 b y L ibrairie A rth e m e Fayard, Paris, as L ’Illusion Identitaire,

L ibrary o f C ongress C a ta lo g in g -in -P u b lic a tio n D ata

B ay art.Jean -F ran ^ o is.

@ T h e p a p e r used in this p u b lic a tio n m eets th e m in im u m re q u ire m e n ts o f th e

M y thanks first to the C entre d ’Etudes et de Recherches

Champollion, extracted from the formless mass o f my writing.

Paris, spring 2 0 0 5 J.-F.B.

* T h e n o te s th a t ap p e ar at th e en d o f this v o lu m e in c lu d e o n ly b ib lio g rap h ical ref­

identity, rationally conducted by identifiable actors— the Serb­

heterogeneity these manifestations, which are both rational and

cultures is impossible in principle’.5 T he debate is an ancient

and contradictory process o f conflicts, negotiations, and com ­

culture are we talking about? T he Bamileke o f C am eroon are

* See m y The State in Africa (L o n d o n : L o n g m a n , 1993), pp. 112 fF.

m ulti-party system in 1990, the Bamileke region has been one

onwards and the rise o f protectionism in Europe. And the ‘ro­

cultural uniformity. H ow ever, these ‘Blacks’ and ‘W hites’

* T o b e fair, w e sh o u ld ac k n o w led g e th a t ch a m p a g n e is the o rg an ic beverage o f

avoid thinking o f acculturation and globalisation as a simple

THE INTERWEAVING OF TRADITIONS

T he m odern w orld is haunted by the spectre o f difference van­

This ‘com bination o f interconnection and heterogeneity’ sets

O shin, the Japanese soap opera, or parades o f drum -m ajorettes

In fact, one cannot imagine a cultural appropriation that is not

Kemalism, a ‘globalising’ m ovem ent if there ever was one,

U nited States.’ T o explain this, de Tocqueville is forced to

Three dreams o f id en tity

E m peror was supposed to be the father. Its ideology evolved

celebrating the enthronem ent o f the Em peror Akihito in 1990

or N o rth Korea, w hich some in Beijing regard as part o f

republic o f the mullahs, as is automatically assumed, and still

in Iran despite the disapproval o f the authorities o f the Islamic

B ut these different strategies are based on a fundamental cul­

oppression. T w o weapons have been privileged since 1979: hatred o f the

O nce this culturalist principle is outlined, the inane m echan­

But the most tangible threat has to do w ith nuclear prolif­

Evidence o f the Iranian desire to acquire nuclear weapons is

* A p h an tasm ag o ria w h ic h France, an in d u strial an d C artesian n a tio n , has escaped,

religious interest in possessing nuclear w eapons’. O rphaned by

We should not underestimate the change represented by such

Confronted by this threat o f ‘revolutionary Islam’, we have to

half o f Israel’s. M oreover, it had decreased since the 1960s in

Victoria. T he frightening figure o f 500,000 victims— respon­

elections that w ere to bring Jacques Chirac back to power, his

the genocide that occurred in April and May, 1994: ‘This is a

the overcrowded rooms o f the H otel des Mille Collines in

* A n irony o f history: this is h o w these representatives o f th e F re n c h language,

the past forty years. W e have been disposed to believe them

This was the explanation given by a manager o f the firm

latter-day presidential authoritarianism being reconstructed

G overnor R obert Delavignette had usually been created by

m oreover, M o b u tu ’s authority was associated w ith the ter­

A nd so tradition grows even m ore potent, as we observed in

Berman and Lonsdale’s sense) produced by colonising powers

tionships, whereas their incorporation into enlarged political

historical m em ory o f the people o f the Congo, and was even

* T h e o c c u p atio n o f th e eastern p a rt o f th e D e m o c ra tic R e p u b lic o f th e C o n g o by

ment, inspired a political relativism that tends to deny Africans

T h e in v en tio n o f tradition as the in ven tio n o f m o d ern ity

W eber spoke o f ‘the enorm ous overlapping o f mutual influ­

* T h e n o te s th a t ap p e ar at th e en d o f this v o lu m e in c lu d e o n ly b ib lio g rap h ical ref

identity, rationally conducted by identifiable actors— the Serb

and contradictory process o f conflicts, negotiations, and com

onwards and the rise o f protectionism in Europe. And the ‘ro

T he m odern w orld is haunted by the spectre o f difference van

B ut these different strategies are based on a fundamental cul

O nce this culturalist principle is outlined, the inane m echan

But the most tangible threat has to do w ith nuclear prolif

Victoria. T he frightening figure o f 500,000 victims— respon

m oreover, M o b u tu ’s authority was associated w ith the ter

W eber spoke o f ‘the enorm ous overlapping o f mutual influ

their etiquette and prerogatives institutionalised; they grad

black’, w ho impose on their co-religionists an entirely arbit

colonial nationalism. There ensued, especially in Java, a tw o

‘reinvented difference’ by establishing many so-called ‘Inde

Chinese, K hm er, Indian, Islamic etc.— majestically reconsti

Farther west, the recurrent difficulties involved in con

accord w ith a competitive principle, o f w hich the rivalry be

But situations o f domination, in particular colonial dom i