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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Africa and Avant-Garde, Anthropology: The Psychoanalysis of Exoticism |
Author: | Janis, Michael |
Year: | 2006 |
Periodical: | Cahiers d'études africaines |
Volume: | 46 |
Issue: | 183 |
Pages: | 567-596 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Africa |
Subjects: | anthropology Anthropology and Archaeology History and Exploration colonialism Bibliography/Research |
About person: | Michel Julien Leiris (1901-1990) |
External link: | https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.6009 |
Abstract: | Africa profoundly alters modernist culture, art, and anthropology in the twentieth century, leaving an impression that is nowhere better described - registered in the breadth of its psychological and philosophical complexity - than in the writings of Michel Leiris. As an anthropologist, with well-known titles such as 'L'Afrique fantôme' (1934) and 'La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Éthiopiens de Gondar' (1958), who is perhaps still better known for his idiosyncratic autobiography 'La Règle du jeu' (1955), Leiris has a long career, from life on the fringe of Dada and Surrealism as a young man seeking escape from bourgeois society in négrisme and primitivism to thoughtful writings on African culture as an ethnographer with the Musée de l'Homme. His avant-garde ethnography marks the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial, securing his place as a critic of colonialism and as chronicler of African culture from Mali to Ethiopia. Reading Michel Leiris gives rise to pivotal questions on the metaphysics of the exotic, in the expanded sense of the relation between self and other. If Leiris's autobiography exoticizes the self, his anthropology of African cultures de-exoticizes the other, while always contemplating the ontological subtlety of cross-cultural experience. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract] |