John Strachan HFrance（约翰·斯特HFrance）.pdfVIP

134 French History and Civilization The Dogon as lieu de mémoire John Strachan “…the desire…in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest…It is not the differentness that worries Conrad [in Heart of Darkness] but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry.” Chinua Achebe1 In February 1933, as he crossed the Mediterranean on his return from Africa to Europe, Michel Leiris read three books by Joseph Conrad.2 His choice appears curious and, perhaps, revealing. Leiris had completed nearly two years as secretary and philologist to the Dakar- Djibouti mission, traversing the continent from west to east, acquiring extensive collections of African artefacts, and making some of the most important contributions to date to the practice and popularity of French ethnography. Seventeen years later, in the preface to a new edition of L’Afrique fantôme (his mission journal ), Leiris wrote that the Africa he had encountered in the early 1930s appeared strange and unfamiliar precisely because it resembled so little the Africa he had read about in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness .3 Leiris – a dissident surrealist, sometime poet, jazz and bull-fighting enthusiast whose range of intellectual pursuits is difficult to describe concisely – devoted much of his later life to the study of Africa.4 In L’Afrique fantôme, Leiris contrasts the mythical Africa of