Aidan Southall The Ethnic Heart of Anthropology Amselle launches the book with detailed historical analysis of ethnie-tribu as the heart of anthropology which anthropologists somehow neglect as they rush on to their studies of kinship and religion whereas the definition of the ethnic group studied should constitute the fundamental epistemological enquiry in any monograph from which the other aspects should flow The fundamental error of anthropologists has been to go out with the admirable intention of studying the lives of people as they are but doing so late in the colonial period and not only assuming that they could find integrated societies which each could call his own but that what they saw in the mid-zoth century was primeval state of affairs the ethnographic present After the rather tired ethnic monographs which have begun to repeat themselves in Britain and America as recent commentator concluded Ethnicity analysis has reached plateau to which only the enrichment of wholly new empirical infusion or improbably original reconceptualization can impart new the contributions in this book have distinctively Gallic quality which is refreshing They deal with the history of ideas and usually misconceived ideas at that rather than the history of events except where imme diately involved Indeed it is an entertaining and bitter history of the genesis of misconceptions as the best approach to unravelling them Half the volume deals with Rwanda Burundi and Katanga but the main thrust is on West Africa Segmentary societies are not considered on the possible ground that as in studies of North Africa they are always defined in relation to precolonial States and cities the same argument that Fried brought from but hardly true of Africa outside west and north It would be hard to find against what States or cities the Dinka Nuer Lugbara Luo Kikuyu Safwa Tiv Somali Tonga etc. were defining themselves Consequently the suggested refocus away from ethnic groups to international chains of societies and inter-societal relations as primary factors is less relevant But it is true that these forces had to be disarticulated by colonialism to create tribes as clear-cut homogeneous building blocks for colonial administration All terms attached to debased subjects become debased themselves but in English the sociologists term ethnicity is less debased than because it speaks to wider and less irrational world of discourse Ethnicity was the

Cahiers tudes africaines loo XX V-4 1085 pp 567-572