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In a 1991 article, Orin Starn wondered how hundreds of
anthropologists could have been working in the Andes
during the 1970s without realizing that a major insur-
gency was about to detonate . Questioning why anthro-pologists
had missed the gathering storm of the ShiningPath, he asked his
colleagues the searching question:
How do events in Peru force us to rethink anthropology
on the Andes?
As riots flared in the banlieues (poor suburbs) of
Frances principal cities in October and November 2005,I could
not help asking myself why anthropologists in
France had failed to foresee these events, and why even
afterwards they had nothing to say about them. What sort
of epistemological or ideological reasons could explain
such difficulty in analysing what is going on so close to
us? How could we miss what was about to happen in
thebanlieues?
* * *These questions arose as I was doing fieldwork on rela-
tions between police and youth in the suburbs, going
out at night with the crime prevention squad into the
quartiers a designation used to cover all
difficultneighbourhoods, the historical product of economic
segregation of mostly immigrant families. Since the
riots were principally limited to these areas, most French
people remained physically untouched by events, expe-
riencing them mainly through television and the press,which
offered dramatic live pictures of fire and mayhem
and detailed maps of the geography of the burning sub-
urbs. This media coverage contributed to the generation
of fear rather than to an understanding of the facts.Let us
consider how it all started.
On 27 October 2005, three youngsters spent the after-noon
playing football. As they returned home, the police
received a call about a break-in at a nearby barracks, and
proceeded to chase the boys. The boys fled, climbing the
high wall of a power plant where they thought they could
find a refuge. Two, aged 15 and 17 respectively, died.
The third, aged 21, suffered severe burns. All three wereArabs,
the children of immigrants from North Africa, and
they lived in a cit(housing estate) in Clichy-sous-Bois.
During the hours following the incident the Minister of
Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, accused the three youngsters of
involvement in a burglary but denied that they had been
chased. Three days earlier, visiting Argenteuil, anothertown of
the banlieue, he had declared he would rid
them of the racaille (riff-raff), employing a term youths
would use to insult each other. A few months before,
commenting on the death of a child shot dead by a youth
in the infamous Cit des 4000 in La Courneuve, Sarkozyhad
brutally announced that he would cleanse the neigh-
bourhood with a Krcher (high-pressure hose).
The minister continued to provoke by repeating his
unfounded accusations against the boys, denying any
police responsibility for this episode. It has now been
officially recognized that there was no attempt at bur-glary,
that the police had chased the youths by mistake
and that they knew the boys had entered the power plant
but did nothing to prevent the accident. Neither the gov-ernment
nor the police made any gesture of compassion
or respect towards the grieving parents and relatives ofthe
boys. This was the spark that set off over three weeks
of urban rioting throughout France, during which 10,000
cars were burnt (compared with the monthly average of
3000 over the rest of 2005), 233 public buildings were
Februar y 2006 vol 22 no 1
vry two months
ISSN 0268-540X atanthropology
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Riots in France andsilent anthropologists
Guest editorial by Didier Fassin
Front cover caption (page 29)
DiDier FAssin 1
Riots in France and silent anthropologistsCeCil HelMAn 3Why
medical anthropology matters
JAson HArt 5Saving children: What role for
anthropology?
JeAn & JoHn l. CoMAroFF 9Portraits by the ethnographer as a
young
man: The photography of Isaac Schapera
in old Botswana
C.s. vAn Der WAAl &
vivienne WArD 17Shifting paradigms in the new South
Africa: Anthropology after the merger of
two disciplinary associations
CoMMent
n sbag-Mf, Dad Pc 21
Anthropology and spying
Mqu Bghff Mud,Ca McCab 22Whatever happened to human
sociobiology?
nArrAtive
ng rapp 23Anthropology as cosmopolitan study
ConFerenCes
Ca Mhuh 24
Interior insights
P.-J. ezh 25Tradition embracing change
CAlenDAr 27 neWs 28 ClAssiFieD 30
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2/32 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 22 NO 1, FebRuARY 2006
damaged (mostly schools and gymnasiums), 4770 people
were arrested (half of them after the riots), and 217 police
were injured (including 10 who were on sick leave for 10
days or more as a result).
With the burning of cars and public institutions in the
news on a daily basis, the world discovered that Francewas
experiencing what the economist Jean-Claude
Casanova, a member of the French Academy of Moral and
Political Sciences, presented as a civil war. In response
to these events, the government declared a state of emer-
gency, using a 1955 law originally passed during the warin
Algeria: the symbolism could not have been clearer forthe
population of African origin.
* * *This response to the unrest was however somewhat exces-
sive. When I asked the chief superintendent of police in
the dpartementwith the second highest number of inci-dents in
the country about the current violence, he replied:
Which violence are you talking about? If youre thinking
of burned cars, we did indeed have
many. If youre referring to phys-
ical confrontations, we had none.
When I later asked him what hethought about police pressure
on
the youth (almost exclusively Arab
and Black) of the cits, he initially
protested that there was no racism
among his staff. Eventually, how-
ever, he admitted that the groundlessidentity checks and body
searches
carried out systematically (he could
have added illegally) in the streets
were both ineffective and a source
of resentment. In fact, having borneuncomfortable witness to
this every-
day discriminatory violence, I had
long been convinced that retaliatory
violence was inevitable, as I noteda growing sense of injustice
among
the youth.Having spent time a few months
before investigating youth revenge
against the police followed by
police retaliation against the inhabitants of a quartier,
the
explosion and spread of violence was therefore no surprise
to me. Nor was the draconian reaction of the governmentand the
massive support it received from the population:
73 % declared they were in favour of the curfew and an
unprecedented 67% supported Sarkozys actions.
What was unexpected, however, was the opportunity
the riots gave French society for a public confession of
the long-denied policies of economic inequality, residen-tial
segregation and racial discrimination towards a part of
itself not recognized as entirely French. Suddenly, a pre-
viously unacknowledged colour bar was discovered. The
word ghetto, previously banned from French vocabulary
on the grounds that it reflected a specifically Americanreality,
became common in editorials. Newspaper articles
and television reports revealed how difficult it was for
Arabs or Black people to get a job or a flat, how they were
stigmatized at school and humiliated by the police.
Alain Badiou, professor of philosophy at the Ecole
Normale Suprieure, published a deeply moving letter inLe Monde
(16 November 2005), in which he recounted the
life of his adopted son, arrested six times in 18 months,
often insulted, sometimes beaten up, simply because he wasblack.
France has the riots it deserves, he concluded.
What thousands of pages of academic and administra-tive
literature failed to do, a few thousand burned cars
made possible. France was at last beginning to admit that
its Republican model was not working, that its integration
paradigm had become a cover for the denial of its insti-
tutional racism. Though long evident to many foreign
scholars working on France, this realization finally entered
the French public sphere. For the first time the French
started to consider theirs a post-colonial society only a
few months after a law had been passed, in February
2005,asserting the positive effects of the colonization.
Remarkably, French anthropologists were the last to
realize what was happening. During and after the events
historians, sociologists, demographers, writers and intel-
lectuals intervened in the public sphere, expressing
com-prehension if not of the rioters actions then at least ofthe
problems they experienced (Grard Noiriel, Stphane
Beaud, Patrick Simon, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Emmanuel Todd
among many others) or, conversely, giving vent to hatred of
the Blacks and Arabs with a Muslim identity accused of
perpetrating Republican pogroms (Alain
Finkelkraut).Anthropologists remained peculiarly silent. Just as
we
had done during the impassioned debate on the prohibition
of the Islamic veil, we kept quiet
when the historian Hlne Carrre
dEncausse, permanent secretary of
the Acadmie Franaise, suggestedthat the main cause of the riots
was
polygamy in African families a
proposal subsequently reiterated by
right-wing political leaders. The
academically marginal but pro-
fessionally dynamic AssociationFranaise des Anthropologues
organized two meetings a few
weeks after the events, but signifi-
cantly invited sociologists to speak.
Anthropologists had little to say onthese subjects for two
reasons: first,
because very few were working on
the banlieues, on immigration or
inequality, or on religious or racialquestions, and secondly
because
many found their beliefs and idealsuncomfortably challenged by
the
issues emerging.
* * *So why did French anthropologists fail to address the
riots?
What does this tell us about the discipline, and the lessons
we are to draw for the future? These are pressing questionsfor
anthropology in France.
One explanation relates to the history of the discipline
in France and its predominant epistemological position.
Marc Aug (1994) suggests that anthropology is above
all the study of the present of remote societies: from this
perspective, the strength of area studies, on the one hand,and
the focus on structures and invariants on the other,
have left little space for the ethnography of nearby,
hetero-
geneous, changing societies like those which have grown
up on the outskirts of French cities.
Even when French anthropologists became interestedin their own
society, they tended to analyse its traditional
aspects, such as rural marketplaces or popular beliefs on
disease. When a few of us turned to the study of politics,
most described it in terms of rituals and institutions, com-
paring them with the display and organization of power in
African societies. Scientific analyses have certainly beenrich
and sometimes innovative, but seldom related to the
issues that we face in our own societies today.
To take the question of race as an example, it is as
ifLvi-StraussRace et histoire (1961) was the last word in
the debate, condemning racism on conceptual grounds andthus
rendering superfluous the empirical study of its con-
temporary forms. And with regard to the colonial legacy,
it seems that Georges Balandiers Sociologie actuelle de
Amselle J.L. 1990.Logiques
mtisses. Paris: Payot.Aug M. 1994. Pour une
anthropologie des mondescontemporains. Paris:
Aubier.
Starn, O. 1991. Missingthe revolution:
Anthropologists and the
war in Peru. Cultural
Anthropology 6(1) : 63-91.
Didier Fassin is professor
at the Universit de Paris
Nord and the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, and co-ordinator
of the research programme
The new frontiers of French
society. His email is
[email protected].
Just call me Zero, ZeroTolerance. French Minister
of the Interior Nicolas
Sarkozy, in a cartoon by
Kiro published in Le Canard
Enchan, 2 November 2005.
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3/3ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 22 NO 1, FebRuARY 2006
lAfrique noire (1955), which deconstructed the classical
image of the colonized continent, has not been followed
by a symmetrical anthropology of post-colonial France,
which the riots now reveal as so necessary.
The second explanation may be even more painful to
examine because it concerns an ideological bias in theinvisible
framework that supports anthropological thought.
The Enlightenment ideals of universalism and secularism,
and the Republican model of integration, have laudably
impregnated our discipline. However, in this context it has
been difficult to criticize these ideals and this model onthe
grounds not of what they proposed, but of what theyallow to go
unseen. As Jean-Loup Amselle (1990) writes,
the Republic has always got on well with Race and its
institutions are grounded in unavowed catholicism. The
reluctance of anthropologists to recognize the existence
of racial and religious discrimination in France is thus
asproblematic as the paradigms they do engage with.
Indeed, colour blindness and secularism become more
difficult to defend as the evidence of racist practices and
anti-Muslim reflexes increases, but also at a time when
a Black organization, the Conseil Reprsentatif des
Associations Noires, is set up to assert an identity based
on the historical experience of domination. Nevertheless,
many still resist acknowledging this reality and prefer to
ironize about what they see as an excessive display of vic-
timhood, which they interpret as the unfortunate influenceof
American scholars. It is therefore not surprising that,
although the book was initially published in French, dis-
cussions of Achille Mbembes On the postcolony (2001)
take place on the other side of the Atlantic.
* * *In some ways, banlieues and cits seem today more exoticfor
French anthropologists than African cities, Amazonian
villages or Indian temples. Racial and religious issues
remain difficult for many of us to raise when it comes to
actual practices because they confront our values with a
reality we would rather avoid. Let us hope that the riotsof 2005
where violence derived less from the youth than
from society itself will open new spaces for research and
debate in French anthropology, as they have already done
in the French public sphere at large.l
