Anthropology, Colonial Policy, and the Decline of French Empire in Africa by Douglas W. Leonard (review)

Soldiers, scholars, and administrators in Africa and Metropolitan France used the tools of ethnology, both oral and written, in their scientific quest to provide a better understanding of colonized social, political, and intellectual life, as a means of improving colonialism, all the while ignoring and introducing greater weaknesses in the underlying structures, ultimately leading to the decline of the French empire in Africa. Colonialism acted as a unilateral, asymmetric power dynamic, lacking any consent of the governed, and was, thus, doomed to fail as an unstable political form. Ethnologists and later social anthropologists from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, from Louis Faidherbe to Pierre Bourdieu, analyzed African societies from a non-European perspective, engaging in complex conversations with native intellectual communities, creating a rhizomatic network of native thinkers and metropolitan intellectuals. These social scientists believed that using the native African's perspective in colonial rule could help better understand and implement the methods required to create and maintain a fair, equitable, and humane, although seemingly paradoxical, colonial system through scientific examination. Douglas Leonard chronologically traces the biographies and studies of social scientists, soldiers, and colonial administrators, who had the support of the colonial state, beginning in the 1840s with General Louis Faidherbe and continuing to Marshal Hubert Lyautey, Maurice Delafosse, Paul Marty, Jacques Soustelle, and Pierre Bourdieu to analyze the productive intellectual engagement and the seeds of political destruction spread as a result of their work. Leonard argues the importance of biographical information on these individuals to unravel the rhizomatic structure of colonial ethnography in Africa. Leonard begins with Faidherbe, who was a colonial officer for the majority of his career and served as one of the early governors of colonial Senegal. Faidherbe was a proponent of the associationist approach to colonial governing and had an enormous influence on colonial political thought. He passed his methodology on to other generations, including Joseph Gallieni and Hubert Lyautey, who would become future colonial soldiers and governors, ranging from Algeria to Indochina, Madagascar, and Morocco where they reformed the colonial system as they went, employing natives to gain the information necessary to widen the cracks in local social and political structures. After Gallieni and Lyautey, Leonard presents Delafosse and Marty, two of the most prominent French scholars of West Africa, and their methods of moving toward a humanized colonial rule through employing Islam as a tool of governance. Following Delafosse and Marty, Marcel Mauss institutionalized ethnography and greatly influenced the next generation of ethnographers, including Jacques Soustelle, whose failures revealed the weakness of science as policy. The final portion of this work addresses the influence of Pierre Bourdieu in social anthropology's move away from focusing on a utopic colonial system. Instead, Bourdieu looks at the transition of these colonial societies and analyzes them in a postcolonial realm. Leonard's book provides an in-depth analysis of Francophone Africa's colonial governing system through the pitfalls of ethnography and social anthropology as instruments for policy change.