Description:
Jean-Loup Amselle explores the issue of multiculturalism by delving into the history of France's confrontation with ethnic difference. Amselle analyzes France's relationship to Egypt, Algeria, and Senegal to show how ideas about difference and...
Brief description: Jean-Loup Amselle is Directeur d'etudes a l'ecole des Hautes etudes en Sciences Sociales and the author of many books, including Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere.
Review Quotes:
After decades of work in Africa, Jean-Loup Amselle, one of France's most creative social anthropologists, has developed a strikingly original genealogy of France's contemporary original multiculturalism.... In his championing of a republican renewal, Amselle joins other French anthropologists and sociologists, whose own natural-law origins trump any relativist leanings when they have called for a ban on headscarves in schools and questioned France's recent turn to 'positive discrimination'.... In Amselle's (and others') 'republican turn' we are reminded of the strikingly different political philosophies that underlie our social sciences. When read as a political critique, colonial history, and disciplinary genealogy, Amselle's work wonderfully remarker the landscape of the engage anthropology of contemporary France.
--John R. Bowen, Washington University "Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"