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

Anthropology is the handmaiden of colonialism, or so it is often said. While such a dismissal does gesture to the sophisticated critiques of Talal Asad, Vine Deloria Jr, Renato Rosaldo, and other activist-scholars since the 1970s, it broadly misses the point. On the one hand, it singles out anthropology from the other social sciences equally involved in the management of empire at home and abroad but far less self-reflexive and self-critical of that participation. On the other hand, it implies a singular relationship of complicity, sidelining the important roles anthropologists have played in reformist, anti-colonial, and even decolonial projects, as flawed and contradictory as those roles may have been. Douglas W. Leonard provides a healthy rejoinder with a sweeping study of the complexly intertwined development of anthropology (or ethnology) and colonial rule in the French empire from the 1840s to the 1960s. Leonard marries intellectual and political history and organizes the book around biographies of key colonial scholars and administrators. Some — such as Hubert Lyautey, Marcel Mauss, and Pierre Bourdieu — have been well studied; others — including Maurice Delafosse, Georges Hardy, Paul Marty, Jacques Soustelle, and Germaine Tillion — are less well known outside the purviews of Africanist anthropology or French colonial history. Nearly all came from marginal, provincial backgrounds but rose through the ranks of the army and the academy through their colonial service. All documented native beliefs, social structures, and practices as part of a larger technocratic push for what Timothy Mitchell has called a ‘rule of experts’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) — whether along the lines of political ‘association’ under General Louis Faidherbe and Marshal Lyautey in 1850s Senegal and 1910s Morocco, or ‘integration’ under Governor General Soustelle in 1950s Algeria. In tracing over a century of intimate connections of ethnological knowledge production and imperial governance, Leonard builds on foundational work by Edmund Burke III, William B. Cohen, Alice Conklin, Frederick Cooper, Patricia Lorcin, Emmanuelle Sibeud, and Gary Wilder, as well as more recent work by Helen Tilley and Jonathan Wyrtzen. Like several of these latter scholars, he is attuned to the dialogic, transactional, and translational nature of the anthropological project; to the ways in which the soldier-scholars actively sought collaborations with native elites such as Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Mouloud Mammeri and promoted their scholarly endeavours; to the ways in which the latter manipulated colonial structures and appropriated colonial rhetoric to further their own, ultimately decolonial ends. Leonard underlines the fraught and unequal character of these exchanges and shows how the officers’ self-serving, patronizing humanist narrative was indissociable from colonial violence. Their ethnological reduction of African societies to cultural wholes consistently missed their internal heterogeneity, historical dynamism, and transregional connections. Even Bourdieu, who comes off as a relative hero in Leonard’s text for his anti-colonial stance and attention to individual agency, failed in this regard. With his magisterial chapter on Delafosse and Marty, Leonard succeeds in reminding us how much the French anthropological tradition from Mauss and Arnold van Gennep to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu depended on imperial knowledge and coercion.