Paper short abstract:

How can be conceived an anthropology made by those who have often been mere 'ethnographic documents'? Can the 'subjects' of ethnographic research make their own anthropology? Starting from my Dogon ethnography, the paper considers these controversial issues in a context of violence and conflict.

Paper long abstract:

Colonial anthropology imposed an interpretation of experience, local knowledge and the psyche that conformed to Western epistemological and political horizons. Colonial psychiatry and psychoanalysis have not escaped this process (Boni and Mendelsohn 2023). Today, there are many critics of the idea of a fully-fledged hegemony, of a 'apparatus' (in the sense defined by Agamben) that would have successfully inscribed its own meanings onto the territories of desire and the forms of experience.

The long lasting research I have carried out in several West African countries, and more specifically on the transformations of the languages of suffering and ritual therapies on the Dogon plateau (Mali), has enabled me to consider the ways in which local knowledge resisted colonial discourse, and the singular effect of a 'reverse colonization' such as can be recognized in Dogon ethnography itself. Apart from this, how can be conceived an anthropology made by those who have often been mere 'ethnographic documents' ? Can the subjects of classical anthropology make their own anthropology? And where do we recognize the latter: just in books or even in ‘local’ knowledges, cultural memories and rituals? Reflecting on the dialectic of decolonisation/decoloniality also requires to consider the forms in which this specific desire for 'epistemic sovereignty' is manifested today. My paper explores how these issues are often revealed in difficult academic relations, cultural and artistic productions, or more simply in the desire for autonomous anthropological reflection on oneself and one's own culture.