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Conflict of Rationalities: The Destiny and Destination of Research on Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Honorat Aguessy
Honorat Aguessy*
Affiliation:
IDEE, Ouidah, Benin
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Extract

There are many of us saying and even demanding that research on Africa should be intensified and further increased. Its destiny is linked to the future of Africans’ self-awareness and their radical de-alienation. However, the current direction of some projects gives us cause for constant concern in that the fundamental question they raise is whether what drives them is science or a certain unstated but active ideology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , May 2004 , pp. 93 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

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References

Notes

1. C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, paperback edition, p. 39.

2. C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, pp. 254-5.

3. R. Jaulin, La Mort Sara, p. 8.

4. Ibid., pp. 10-11.

5. R. Jaulin, ‘Un riche Cannibale’, in Les Temps modernes, p. 1063.

Editor's note: These criticisms have also been made by Francis Affergan in the context of the West Indies. He stresses the necessarily contradictory character of the anthropologist's and ethnologist's search for alterity. He highlights some sophisms in ethnological argument as well as the relationship between ethnologists and politics and a certain type of ethnocentrism. See Francis Affergan, Construire le savoir anthropologique, Paris, PUF, 1999. See also, by the same author, La Pluralité des mondes, Paris, Albin Michel, 1997.

6. Compare Habermas's extremely well-known views on this topic in La Technique et la science comme idéologie (editor's note).

7. A. Touraine, Pour la sociologie, Points, p. 48.

8. Ibid., p. 54.

9. Jean Monod, ‘Un riche Cannibale’, in Les Temps modernes, p. 1063.

10. Touraine, op. cit. note 8, p. 16.

11. Ibid., p. 26.