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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Chthonic science: Georges Niangoran-Bouah and the anthropology of belonging in Côte d’Ivoire
| Panel |
61. Autochtony, citizenship and exclusion - struggles over resources and belonging
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| Paper ID | 412 |
| Author(s) |
Arnaut, Karel
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | In this paper I make an attempt to situate the life and work of one of Côte d’Ivoire’s most renowned anthropologists, the late Georges Niangoran-Bouah (1935-2002), in the long colonial and postcolonial history of autochthony in his country. As director of the Institute of Ethno-Sociology at Abidjan University, Niangoran-Bouah advocated the need to decolonise academia in general and the human sciences in particular. This paper analyses Niangoran’s quest for chthonic or ‘autochthonic’ science, a science which uncovers the roots of what is African/Ivorian culture, and which develops on the basis of tenets that deeply belong to that culture. This project is not only a idiosyncratic undertaking and cannot be properly understood without paying attention to its academic and intellectual-ideological umwelt, both local and global.
Ever since the second half of the 1970s when Niangoran-Bouah’s work reached the public stage it has been politically charged. Such was the case when in 1980 his central ideas were being openly discussed and widely rejected by fellow opposition intellectuals. Much later, from the mid-1990s onwards, some of his ideas were absorbed by political developments in Côte d’Ivoire. In retrospect one can discern how he contributed to the formation of a scientific argumentarium for subsequent government projects of multiculturality, autochthony and national preference -- projects which relate to the present armed conflict in a deeply divided country.
Niangoran-Bouah belongs to the first generation of African professionals of science who worked assiduously towards Africanizing national education, academia, and public culture but his cultural nationalism awaited its uptake until new conflicts of belonging and citizenship embedded in a redrafted rhetoric of victimization, began to haunt parts of Africa as much as other parts of the world. This descriptive examination will lead into a series of reflections on the nature, status and impact of postcolonial anthropology in Africa and beyond.
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