Coevalness

Coevalness is a temporal concept that refers to the existence or origins of people and objects in the same time. The term has become associated with anthropology and the retooling of that field’s conceptual vocabulary since the 1960s. Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983) is the seminal work on this subject. In it, Fabian highlights a key paradox, or ‘schizogenic use of Time’ (21), framing the practice of anthropology. On the one hand, dialogue between anthropologists and their referents clearly constitutes ‘coeval research’ (60) as it takes place in contemporaneous, shared time. On the other, theoretical interpretations of that..

Primitivism

Primitivism has a long history. Its beginnings as a distinctive discourse, however, are more widely associated with early-modern encounters between European explorers and the New World. As this early era of exploration developed into a sustained period of global conquest and colonization, primitivist figures began to feature heavily in textual and visual representations of the non-European Other. The term ‘ primitivism’ itself is derived from the Latin primitivus, meaning the first or earliest of its kind. As used or evoked by writers from the sixteenth century and beyond, primitivism broadly denotes humankind in a ‘wild’, ‘savage’, ‘unrefined’ or ‘natural’ state...

Anthropology

As suggested by its Greek roots (anthropos meaning humankind; logia meaning ‘study’ or ‘science’ of), ‘anthropology’ refers to the broad disciplinary study of peoples and cultures. Anthropology as a subject of intellectual curiosity coincides with the earliest encounters of European travellers and explorers with cultural difference (see, e.g., The Histories of Herodotus). As anthropological inquiry developed, its purview remained overwhelmingly non-Western peoples, with the explanation of ‘other’ cultures serving as its primary intellectual motor. In Europe, the amateur beginnings of ‘anthropology’ were formalized during the second half of the nineteenth century with the formation of learned societies such as the..

Something to Laugh About? Representations of Europe in Francophone African Cinema and Literature, 1954-1974

The history of slavery, colonisation and neocolonial dependency, which have scarred the relationship between Europe and Africa for centuries, scarcely appears an appropriate subject for a volume on laughter. This is not to claim that it is impossible to derive comedy from these contexts but rather to acknowledge the racially and ideologically charged symbolic order in which comic representations of Africans have been forged. In the sphere of representation, the uneven terms of exchange betwee..

Le rire européen

Rabelais apprit jadis à l’Europe que le rire était le propre de l’homme. Sur ce point, il se peut que les Européens soient plus hommes encore que les autres : « inventeurs » de la comédie (grecque), de l’esprit (français), de l’humour (anglais), du Carnaval et de la caricature, « possesseurs » de Cervantès, de Charlie Chaplin et de Raymond Devos, ils ont fondé, au mépris des traditions sérieuses qui les ont également traversés, une culture où le rire est conçu à la fois comme un merveilleux conducteur de sociabilité et un irremplaçable instrument de la raison critique. À l’heure où, bon gré mal gré, les Européens se décident à se donner un destin politique commun, il a paru intéressant d’examiner les opportunités que leur offre le rire –pour se comprendre, mais aussi pour se différencier. Y a-t-il un rire européen ? Une façon particulière de rire ensemble malgré des sensibilités culturelles irréductibles à toute uniformisation ? Sur quelles connivences, soutenu par quelles valeurs, au sein de quelles tourmentes, dans l'espoir de quelles libérations, le rire européen fuse-t-il, d’une nation de l’Europe à une autre ou de l’Europe vers les autres continents ? Ces questions méritaient le concours d’historiens, de sociologues, de littéraires et de linguistes, venus de France et de Grande-Bretagne mais aussi d’Allemagne, d'Italie, de Roumanie, du Danemark et du Niger. Dans le vaste éventail qu’ils ouvrent ici, on verra se déployer toutes les facettes d’un rire qui, de Milan Kundera à Pier Paolo Pasolini et de l’Inde à l’Afrique noire fait entendre la voix d’une Europe complexe, à la fois sûre et inquiète d’elle-même, héritière (infidèle ?) et inventrice (épuisée ?) d’une certaine forme d’humanisme de la Joie