LA RACE, ENTRE IMAGES ET FANTASMES

Abstract: The aim of this analysis is to show that racial discourse and the categorisation of the human species that it induces and sustains are nothing more than fiction. And this fiction always takes the form of a scientific discourse, fuelled by observation and anecdotes. It is not for nothing, moreover, that the entire structure of the bundles of representations of the self and the other is based on the use of fiction. Anthropologists and ethnologists, while prepared to use science (based solely on the analysis of observed facts) to present the results of their fieldwork, nevertheless make room, as if it were self-evident, for narrative. So they choose to “tell” rather than “expose”. They also like to give the floor to a narrator. Keywords: Race – Fiction – Fantasies – Inequalities – Biogeography - Law of curiosity - Overhanging universal - Differentialist universal - Cultural diversity