at

February 2006 vol 22 no 1

every two months
ISSN 0268-540X

anthropology
today
Front cover caption (page 29)

Comment

Didier Fassin 1
Riots in France and silent anthropologists

Niel Sebag-Montefiore, David Price 21

Anthropology and spying

Cecil Helman 3
Why medical anthropology matters

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder,

Carl McCabe 22
Whatever happened to human
sociobiology?

Jason Hart 5
Saving children: What role for
anthropology?

narrative

Jean & John L. Comaroff 9

Portraits by the ethnographer as a young
man: The photography of Isaac Schapera
in old Botswana

Nigel Rapport 23
Anthropology as cosmopolitan study

C.S. van der Waal &

Vivienne Ward 17
Shifting paradigms in the new South
Africa: Anthropology after the merger of
two disciplinary associations

Clare Melhuish 24
Interior insights

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Riots in France and

silent anthropologists
Guest editorial by Didier Fassin

In a 1991 article, Orin Starn wondered how hundreds of

anthropologists could have been working in the Andes
during the 1970s without realizing that a major insurgency was about to detonate . Questioning why anthropologists had missed the gathering storm of the Shining
Path, he asked his colleagues the searching question:
How do events in Peru force us to rethink anthropology
on the Andes?
As riots flared in the banlieues (poor suburbs) of
Frances principal cities in October and November 2005,
I could not help asking myself why anthropologists in
France had failed to foresee these events, and why even
afterwards they had nothing to say about them. What sort
of epistemological or ideological reasons could explain
such difficulty in analysing what is going on so close to
us? How could we miss what was about to happen in the
banlieues?
***
These questions arose as I was doing fieldwork on relations between police and youth in the suburbs, going
out at night with the crime prevention squad into the
quartiers a designation used to cover all difficult
neighbourhoods, the historical product of economic
segregation of mostly immigrant families. Since the
riots were principally limited to these areas, most French
people remained physically untouched by events, experiencing them mainly through television and the press,
which offered dramatic live pictures of fire and mayhem
and detailed maps of the geography of the burning suburbs. This media coverage contributed to the generation
of fear rather than to an understanding of the facts.
Let us consider how it all started.
On 27 October 2005, three youngsters spent the afternoon playing football. As they returned home, the police
received a call about a break-in at a nearby barracks, and
proceeded to chase the boys. The boys fled, climbing the
high wall of a power plant where they thought they could
find a refuge. Two, aged 15 and 17 respectively, died.
The third, aged 21, suffered severe burns. All three were
Arabs, the children of immigrants from North Africa, and
they lived in a cit (housing estate) in Clichy-sous-Bois.
During the hours following the incident the Minister of
Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, accused the three youngsters of
involvement in a burglary but denied that they had been
chased. Three days earlier, visiting Argenteuil, another
town of the banlieue, he had declared he would rid
them of the racaille (riff-raff), employing a term youths
would use to insult each other. A few months before,
commenting on the death of a child shot dead by a youth
in the infamous Cit des 4000 in La Courneuve, Sarkozy
had brutally announced that he would cleanse the neighbourhood with a Krcher (high-pressure hose).
The minister continued to provoke by repeating his
unfounded accusations against the boys, denying any
police responsibility for this episode. It has now been
officially recognized that there was no attempt at burglary, that the police had chased the youths by mistake
and that they knew the boys had entered the power plant
but did nothing to prevent the accident. Neither the government nor the police made any gesture of compassion
or respect towards the grieving parents and relatives of
the boys. This was the spark that set off over three weeks
of urban rioting throughout France, during which 10,000
cars were burnt (compared with the monthly average of
3000 over the rest of 2005), 233 public buildings were

Didier Fassin is professor

at the Universit de Paris
Nord and the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, and co-ordinator
of the research programme
The new frontiers of French
society. His email is
dfassin@ehess.fr.

Just call me Zero, Zero

Tolerance. French Minister
of the Interior Nicolas
Sarkozy, in a cartoon by
Kiro published in Le Canard
Enchan, 2 November 2005.

Amselle J.L. 1990. Logiques

mtisses. Paris: Payot.
Aug M. 1994. Pour une
anthropologie des mondes
contemporains. Paris:
Aubier.
Starn, O. 1991. Missing
the revolution:
Anthropologists and the
war in Peru. Cultural
Anthropology 6(1) : 63-91.

damaged (mostly schools and gymnasiums), 4770 people

were arrested (half of them after the riots), and 217 police
were injured (including 10 who were on sick leave for 10
days or more as a result).
With the burning of cars and public institutions in the
news on a daily basis, the world discovered that France
was experiencing what the economist Jean-Claude
Casanova, a member of the French Academy of Moral and
Political Sciences, presented as a civil war. In response
to these events, the government declared a state of emergency, using a 1955 law originally passed during the war
in Algeria: the symbolism could not have been clearer for
the population of African origin.
***
This response to the unrest was however somewhat excessive. When I asked the chief superintendent of police in
the dpartement with the second highest number of incidents in the country about the current violence, he replied:
Which violence are you talking about? If youre thinking
of burned cars, we did indeed have
many. If youre referring to physical confrontations, we had none.
When I later asked him what he
thought about police pressure on
the youth (almost exclusively Arab
and Black) of the cits, he initially
protested that there was no racism
among his staff. Eventually, however, he admitted that the groundless
identity checks and body searches
carried out systematically (he could
have added illegally) in the streets
were both ineffective and a source
of resentment. In fact, having borne
uncomfortable witness to this everyday discriminatory violence, I had
long been convinced that retaliatory
violence was inevitable, as I noted
a growing sense of injustice among
the youth.
Having spent time a few months
before investigating youth revenge
against the police followed by
police retaliation against the inhabitants of a quartier, the
explosion and spread of violence was therefore no surprise
to me. Nor was the draconian reaction of the government
and the massive support it received from the population:
73 % declared they were in favour of the curfew and an
unprecedented 67% supported Sarkozys actions.
What was unexpected, however, was the opportunity
the riots gave French society for a public confession of
the long-denied policies of economic inequality, residential segregation and racial discrimination towards a part of
itself not recognized as entirely French. Suddenly, a previously unacknowledged colour bar was discovered. The
word ghetto, previously banned from French vocabulary
on the grounds that it reflected a specifically American
reality, became common in editorials. Newspaper articles
and television reports revealed how difficult it was for
Arabs or Black people to get a job or a flat, how they were
stigmatized at school and humiliated by the police.
Alain Badiou, professor of philosophy at the Ecole
Normale Suprieure, published a deeply moving letter in
Le Monde (16 November 2005), in which he recounted the
life of his adopted son, arrested six times in 18 months,
often insulted, sometimes beaten up, simply because he was
black. France has the riots it deserves, he concluded.
What thousands of pages of academic and administrative literature failed to do, a few thousand burned cars
made possible. France was at last beginning to admit that
its Republican model was not working, that its integration

paradigm had become a cover for the denial of its institutional racism. Though long evident to many foreign
scholars working on France, this realization finally entered
the French public sphere. For the first time the French
started to consider theirs a post-colonial society only a
few months after a law had been passed, in February 2005,
asserting the positive effects of the colonization.
Remarkably, French anthropologists were the last to
realize what was happening. During and after the events
historians, sociologists, demographers, writers and intellectuals intervened in the public sphere, expressing comprehension if not of the rioters actions then at least of
the problems they experienced (Grard Noiriel, Stphane
Beaud, Patrick Simon, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Emmanuel Todd
among many others) or, conversely, giving vent to hatred of
the Blacks and Arabs with a Muslim identity accused of
perpetrating Republican pogroms (Alain Finkelkraut).
Anthropologists remained peculiarly silent. Just as we
had done during the impassioned debate on the prohibition
of the Islamic veil, we kept quiet
when the historian Hlne Carrre
dEncausse, permanent secretary of
the Acadmie Franaise, suggested
that the main cause of the riots was
polygamy in African families a
proposal subsequently reiterated by
right-wing political leaders. The
academically marginal but professionally dynamic Association
Franaise des Anthropologues
organized two meetings a few
weeks after the events, but significantly invited sociologists to speak.
Anthropologists had little to say on
these subjects for two reasons: first,
because very few were working on
the banlieues, on immigration or
inequality, or on religious or racial
questions, and secondly because
many found their beliefs and ideals
uncomfortably challenged by the
issues emerging.
***
So why did French anthropologists fail to address the riots?
What does this tell us about the discipline, and the lessons
we are to draw for the future? These are pressing questions
for anthropology in France.
One explanation relates to the history of the discipline
in France and its predominant epistemological position.
Marc Aug (1994) suggests that anthropology is above
all the study of the present of remote societies: from this
perspective, the strength of area studies, on the one hand,
and the focus on structures and invariants on the other,
have left little space for the ethnography of nearby, heterogeneous, changing societies like those which have grown
up on the outskirts of French cities.
Even when French anthropologists became interested
in their own society, they tended to analyse its traditional
aspects, such as rural marketplaces or popular beliefs on
disease. When a few of us turned to the study of politics,
most described it in terms of rituals and institutions, comparing them with the display and organization of power in
African societies. Scientific analyses have certainly been
rich and sometimes innovative, but seldom related to the
issues that we face in our own societies today.
To take the question of race as an example, it is as if
Lvi-Strauss Race et histoire (1961) was the last word in
the debate, condemning racism on conceptual grounds and
thus rendering superfluous the empirical study of its contemporary forms. And with regard to the colonial legacy,
it seems that Georges Balandiers Sociologie actuelle de
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 22 No 1, fEBRUARY 2006

lAfrique noire (1955), which deconstructed the classical

image of the colonized continent, has not been followed
by a symmetrical anthropology of post-colonial France,
which the riots now reveal as so necessary.
The second explanation may be even more painful to
examine because it concerns an ideological bias in the
invisible framework that supports anthropological thought.
The Enlightenment ideals of universalism and secularism,
and the Republican model of integration, have laudably
impregnated our discipline. However, in this context it has
been difficult to criticize these ideals and this model on
the grounds not of what they proposed, but of what they
allow to go unseen. As Jean-Loup Amselle (1990) writes,
the Republic has always got on well with Race and its
institutions are grounded in unavowed catholicism. The
reluctance of anthropologists to recognize the existence
of racial and religious discrimination in France is thus as
problematic as the paradigms they do engage with.
Indeed, colour blindness and secularism become more
difficult to defend as the evidence of racist practices and
anti-Muslim reflexes increases, but also at a time when

a Black organization, the Conseil Reprsentatif des

Associations Noires, is set up to assert an identity based
on the historical experience of domination. Nevertheless,
many still resist acknowledging this reality and prefer to
ironize about what they see as an excessive display of victimhood, which they interpret as the unfortunate influence
of American scholars. It is therefore not surprising that,
although the book was initially published in French, discussions of Achille Mbembes On the postcolony (2001)
take place on the other side of the Atlantic.
***
In some ways, banlieues and cits seem today more exotic
for French anthropologists than African cities, Amazonian
villages or Indian temples. Racial and religious issues
remain difficult for many of us to raise when it comes to
actual practices because they confront our values with a
reality we would rather avoid. Let us hope that the riots
of 2005 where violence derived less from the youth than
from society itself will open new spaces for research and
debate in French anthropology, as they have already done
in the French public sphere at large. l

Why medical anthropology matters

Guest editorial by Cecil Helman
Cecil Helman is Professor
of Medical Anthropology
at Brunel University. He
was awarded the 2005 Lucy
Mair Medal for Applied
Anthropology. His email is
c.helman@pcps.ucl.ac.uk.

Medical anthropology as a separate field of study is

only about 30 years old. Yet it is today one of the most
vibrant and successful of all the branches of anthropology,
attracting large numbers of students, grants and the interest
of other professions. The integration of medical anthropology into mainstream North American anthropology
was comparatively rapid, and today it is one of the most
popular choices among graduate students in anthropology.
However, in the United Kingdom it has taken many years
for it to become part of the anthropological mainstream.
Here, many anthropology departments have regarded
applied anthropology as a contradiction in terms, putting
the emphasis more on observing than on participating.
Applied anthropology was seen as not pure scholarship,
but rather as contaminated by its close engagement with
practical and policy issues.
***
As an increasingly confident sub-discipline medical anthropology has a lot to offer not only because of its applied
approach, but also because it has already contributed an
enormous amount to the theoretical basis of anthropology.
It is an eclectic discipline, drawing its ideas and research
methodologies not only from anthropology itself, but also
from epidemiology, genetics, medical history, literary criticism and semiotics, as well as from clinical medicine and
psychiatry (see Helman 2001).
In recent years applied anthropology has been moving
steadily towards centre stage in anthropology for a variety
of reasons, among them the disappearance of the disciplines traditional field bases: small-scale, bounded societies are no longer small-scale, nor are they quite as bounded
as before. As anthropologys core field of study diminishes,
and new social issues emerge much closer to home, there
has been a growing need to embrace the various forms of
applied anthropology (Mars 2004). Population movements
worldwide have generated many millions of migrants
and refugees, resulting in an increasing mix of cultures
and social groups. Populations (as well as languages and
ideas) that were once over there are now over here. For
example, a survey in 2000 found that only two-thirds of
London schoolchildren had English as a home language,
and they now speak a total of 307 different languages

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 22 No 1, fEBRUARY 2006

(Baker, Eversley and Lam 2000). The situation is similar

to that found in many other cities in Western Europe and
North America.
This diversity in mother tongues spoken in any one
place is parallelled by a diversity of views held about
health and illness, and by a proliferation of alternative
healing sub-cultures, each with its own particular view
of how illness (and other forms of suffering) should be
explained, and then dealt with. Many of these therapeutic
approaches, like acupuncture, shiatsu and ayurveda, are
based on traditional healing systems borrowed from other
countries, though often practised here in a syncretic form.
At the same time, hundreds of traditional healers have
been imported into Britain from abroad to serve different
ethnic communities: vaids and hakims from south Asia,
marabouts and obeah men from parts of Africa, spiritual
advisers from the Caribbean, practitioners of Traditional
Chinese Medicine from Hong Kong and elsewhere, not
to mention the many West African churches that practise
religious healing.
All of this means a growing number of interfaces, and
potential conflicts, between different therapeutic systems,
but it also opens up a new set of opportunities for anthropologists: to act as brokers or cultural interpreters between
health professionals and their clients, and between national
health systems and local communities. In medical and
nursing education anthropologists could help to promote
cultural competence, but could also counteract some
of the simplistic doctrines of the new ethnic minority
medicine, with its stereotypes, static view of identity, and
neglect of the social and economic contexts of health and
illness. These are exemplified by the growing number of
cultural recipe books directed at health professionals,
which include long lists of supposedly fixed cultural
attributes (Muslims always believe X, Hindus always
do Y), but take no account of personal, regional, class or
generational variations within a community.
Understanding this increasingly complex medical pluralism requires a rather different, less traditional, way of
carrying out research, especially in urban environments
(cf. Mars 2004). We need this research, though, not only
to understand the variety of syncretic healing forms now