Senior Research Seminar with Frédéric Keck (CNRS)

Senior Research Seminar with Frédéric Keck (CNRS)Fanon, Lévy-Bruhl and the anthropology of vigilance

 

Discussant: Jean Khalfa (University of Cambridge)

Abstract:

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon has severely criticized the psychiatric use of the ethnological work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl on « primitive mentality ». However, he also made positive uses of concepts from Lévy-Bruhl, such as participation, through his readings of Jean-Paul Sartre. In this talk, I will propose a reading of Fanon and Lévy-Bruhl through the anthropology of vigilance, that is, an ethnography of the techniques by which the body anticipates future threats. I will relate it to my ethnography of sentinel devices in Hong Kong, and extend it to other post-colonial situations.

 

Bio:

Frédéric Keck is a CNRS Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the Collège de France. He has studied  philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. He was the head of the research department of the musée du quai Branly between 2014 and 2018. He published Avian Reservoirs. Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts  (Duke University Press, 2020) and Solidarity between species. Living with animals exposed to pandemic viruses (Polity, 2024).