Ouvrir les frontières de l'Europe La géographie bureaucratique d'une discipline

Abstract

Ethnographie research conducted in Europe could exercise a significandy increased influence on the renewal of anthropological theory. Recalling the problems involved in the invention of a "Mediterranean cultural area", the author discusses the taxonomie dangers that the creation of a European "geo-body" (to use Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul's expression) generates. He therefore calls on anthropologists to resist the reductive effect of bureaucratic categories with a view to rethinking theory and comparison in the context of revised ideas about the meaning of "Europe". Keywords : Europe. Epistemology. Cultural areas. Geo-body. Taxonomy. © Presses Universitaires de France.