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As presented in the bibliography of his works, the oeuvre of Jean-Loup Amselle might also seem perplexing: by adding a new title almost every year, it is constantly opening up new horizons and objects of research. Yet despite its very profusion, and its both pioneering and iconoclastic character, the thinking that underlies it still has a powerful drive towards synthesis. It ultimately appears, in all the senses of the term, ‘uncompromising’.

In the best anthropological tradition, nothing human is foreign to Amselle’s work, and the intellectual curiosity it displays is unbounded; but it is also intransigent with regard to a certain number of demands and principles. For example, it rejects all essentialism, and, like Diagne’s work, it opposes all the culturalizations or continentalizations of thinking that would trap thought in predefined predicates such as European thought, African thought, Black thought, Mestizo (or ‘mixed’) thought, and so on. Moreover, Amselle’s work aims to overcome binary oppositions and all hierarchies presented as natural, so as to defend a concrete universality of all cultures in their openness to others, or in their fundamental porosity with their surroundings.

An anthropologist by training, Amselle in fact broke with the rigid categorizations of his discipline (race and ethnicity as fixed units), while at the same time refusing to analyse social and cultural phenomena on a strictly local scale. From his earliest works, Les Migrations africaines (The African Migrations)²⁶ and Les Négociants de la savane (The Traders of the Savannah)²⁷ up to his recent studies Psychotropiques (Psychotropics)²⁸ and Islams africains: la préférence soufie (African Islams: The Sufi Preference),²⁹ he has constantly probed the deployment of identities within extensive networks, including commercial systems that are spreading across the world in the contemporary process of globalization.

From an epistemological point of view, his approach remains mainly genealogical, in other words, quick to spot significant paradigm shifts, the most important of which is certainly for him ‘the defeat of the continuum’.³⁰ The various phases of European colonial expansion established a range of oppositional, hierarchical and binary schemas in the relations between the West and the rest of the world. These ethnological or raciological patterns then broke the great chain of entanglements, interweavings and concatenations that have always linked Europeans to other societies, cultures or epistemes.

This ‘defeat of the continuum’ subsequently led to two major upheavals. Firstly, the cultures that were brought into contact with each other slipped into relations of gradual differentiation, or ‘schismogenesis’, to use a term taken from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.³¹ They thus gradually became specialized in attitudes that were sometimes symmetrical – the notorious mimeticism and all the games with mirrors and reflections so often criticized by Amselle – and sometimes complementary or mutually adapted (such as the relations of domination–submission, voyeurism–exhibitionism, assistance–dependence, highlighted by Bateson).

These various feedback processes not only favoured the triumph of ‘ethnological reason’ on both sides of the relationship, but they also changed the dominant axis of identity constructions. For a long time, in fact, such constructions favoured horizontality by integrating themselves – in a dialogic, even polemical, way – into networks or ‘chains of societies’ involving a series of lateral branchings or connections. In this context, the only verticalities stemmed, on the one hand, from the logics of empire or the distinction between ‘encompassed’ and ‘encompassing’ societies, and, on the other hand, from the inevitable class struggles in each society, struggles that could obviously take a racial turn, as in the slave societies of the New World.

But after the end of colonial empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ‘in the post-Cold War situation’, ‘vertical clashes’, according to Amselle, were soon reconfigured: the historicist and Marxist paradigm of class struggle was abandoned, even though this struggle stemmed directly from ‘race struggle’. The vertical paradigm was reinvigorated and decisively assumed greater importance than lateral branchings or connections, or ‘horizontal conflicts’. From the old colonial relations we were left with ‘vertical, ethnic identities’ cutting across, fragmenting and now partitioning social bodies and intellectual, literary and artistic fields into so many ‘slices’ and ‘vertical gashes’. Today, we are witnessing a ‘return of race’, as well as a growing ethnicization of cultural relations and social conflicts, as Amselle has abundantly demonstrated in recent studies such as L’Ethnicisation de la France (The Ethnicization of France)³² and Les Nouveaux Rouges–Bruns (The New Extremists across Right and Left).³³

The highlighting of these variable geometries of identity – plotted against the two axes of verticality and horizontality, and their potential historical reversals – also plays a part in another model, one that is equally important in Amselle’s epistemology: this is the geographical model and its often worldwide scale. Amselle, in fact, has never stopped practising a globe-trotting anthropology on multi-located sites, from Europe to the Africas and the Americas, and from India to Peru via Mali. The anthropologist thus links disparate worlds, and he pursues ‘channels’ and ‘networks’ at various points of the planet; his studies can therefore be read as extensive geopolitical coordinate systems.

A third model structures these works, based on a socio-linguistics, and more specifically a pragmatics, which constantly insists on the shifting nature of referents and on the fundamentally performative character of ethnonyms. This socio-linguistic framework moved centre stage after Branchements (2001), which focused on ‘particularist derivations of signifieds in relation to a network of planetary signifiers’,³⁴ while, following on from this, other studies (of contemporary African art, postcolonialism and new forms of primitivism) have tracked the various processes of ‘relexification’ of artefacts and concepts, and all the phenomena of ‘creolization’ or ‘code-switching’ which characterize contemporary artistic, literary and intellectual practices.

These three models – historical and dynamic, geometric and geographical, socio-linguistic and pragmatic – ultimately lie within the same problematic: it is a matter of thinking first and foremost about the relations of force within societies, as well as between different societies, languages and cultures. The latter, in fact, as Amselle tells us,

are not situated next to each other like Leibnizian monads without doors or windows: they take up their place in a moving whole that is itself a structured field of relations. […] The definition of a given culture is actually the result of an intercultural relation of force: the spatially dominant culture has the power to assign to other cultures their own place in the system, turning the latter into their subjected or determined identities. […] The system is not static, however: certain cultures that were once subjected become dominant while others, like stars, are born and then vanish.³⁵

This issue of ‘relations of force’ is certainly Amselle’s major concern, and the keystone of his whole oeuvre. It is a theme he also explores in cultural and linguistic relations as well as in artistic, literary and intellectual productions.