Leonard, Douglas W.Anthropology, colonial policy, and the decline of the French empire in Africa. 248 pp., bibliogr. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. £29.99 (paper)

Douglas Leonard's Anthropology, colonial policy, and the decline of French empire in Africa examines the complex networks of soldiers, administrators, and scholars who participated in ethnographic knowledge production across French Africa from the 1840s to the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Leonard explores how colonial officials generated ethnological knowledge and mobilized local networks to develop new methods of governance. Leonard's study is unique in examining both colonial actors and academics, tracing how relationships between the two allowed ethnographic knowledge to move between colony and metropole through what he terms, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome of colonial knowledge production. His book builds on and contributes to the broader scientific literature on the interplay between anthropology and colonialism, as well as recent works on the links between the colonial context and the emergence of ideas and practices in the social sciences. The book is organized chronologically into a series of biographies of key figures related to colonial knowledge production, each demonstrating a different stage of the interaction between anthropology and colonialism in the French case. Leonard concentrates on the trajectory of a single idea – political association – and how it is developed over time and in different locations in French Africa. This illuminates one of the inherent contradictions of the French colonial project: systems designed to produce knowledge and better governance through dialogue with local networks were harnessed for colonial domination, ultimately skewing understanding and undermining the empire. The first half of the book studies colonial ethnologue-administrateurs and how their approaches and practices linked to political association evolved over time. It opens with Louis Faidherbe, colonial officer and later governor of Senegal, who favoured an associationist political structure and set up knowledge networks to create new methods of colonial governance. This is refined by Joseph Gallieni and Hubert Lyautey, who installed a system of governance based on instrumentalized ethnology. Maurice Delafosse and Paul Marty applied more empirical rigour and extensive language skills, making their work influential in both academia and governance. The second half of the book examines the impact the men of the first chapters have on academics. Leonard uses Marcel Mauss, demonstrating how he leveraged colonial support to institutionalize ethnological sociology in France and used colonial knowledge to create theory. Jacques Soustelle, an anthropologist who later became governor of colonial Algeria, shows the disastrous consequences of using the framework of ethnological surveillance and information gathering developed by his colonial predecessors in combination with Mauss's teachings, without seeing new developments or the wider picture. The final chapter brings us to the introduction of reflexivity, modern context, and critique of the colonial system of knowledge production through the case of Pierre Bourdieu, who uses his work in Algeria to refine his sociological analysis. Leonard concludes that the structures and knowledge developed in the colonial context led to the decline and fall of the French empire in Africa. This undersells Leonard's achievement, which is to illuminate the origins of a system whose impact goes far beyond the scope of his book. Leonard's meticulous work detailing colonial knowledge structures clearly demonstrates that the ethnological rhizome did not end with the French empire. In fact, the rhizome is extremely useful, necessary even, for understanding French knowledge production on Africa, particularly in the years after the African independences. France's politics of coopération were an evolution of the systems described by Leonard in his book. When the official imperial era had ended, France was eager to maintain influence over its former colonies and leaned heavily on knowledge production to do so. The number of French researchers in Africa to produce knowledge for governance (for the young African governments, the French government, and international institutions) increased dramatically in most of French Africa after independence. This was made possible by a massive influx of financial and human resources, much of which was sent to the colonial research institutions in Africa, which were reinforced in the decades surrounding the African independences, creating powerful new networks, which included a number of former colonial agents and administrators. Leonard's work thus proves more significant than this own analysis suggests – the colonial knowledge networks didn't decline with empire, but rather evolved, proving to be one of France's most durable imperial legacies, enabling continued influence long after the end of empire.