Entre descriptions (pré)coloniales et descriptions de soi. La fabrique de l’identité jula au fil des enquêtes en Afrique de l’Ouest (XVIe-XIXe siècles)

The article focuses on a trading diaspora that was elevated to the status of an analytical category by the anthropologist Abner Cohen in the late 1960s. However, it is the historian Philip D. Curtin, through his now classic Cross-Cultural Trade in The World History, published in 1984, who contributed to the popularization of the study of trading diasporas in modern times. The article, however, proposes a different perspective on the case of the Jula trading diaspora. It is not so much an economic history as an investigation into the production of knowledge relating to Jula identity, and the role time played in its construction and development. How did it emerge over time, and what are the interactions that shaped it? To address this history of knowledge production, I have chosen Fredrik Barth’s interactionist perspective as my theoretical horizon, which enables us to think more clearly about the entanglement and interdependence of identities in the space and time of migratory contexts. The social processes involved in the “making of identities” become all the clearer as a result of Barth’s emphasis on the eminently relational nature of social realities and the fact that, from this perspective, the notions of culture and identity lose all essentialist connotations and come to refer primarily to contingent practices within and between culturally different human groupings that, through migration, have come to exist next to each other on a given territory. This approach highlights the interactions that take place around the symbolic boundary of ethnicity, and moves us away from what the sociologist Rogers Brubaker calls “groupism”. Drawing on European, Arab and African sources, as well as existing scholarly literature, I propose to sketch the key features of the construction of Jula identity in West Africa over the course of the period under study (1500-1900).