Ethnology as myth: A century of French writing on the Peuls of West Africa

Nineteenth‐century French ethnologists devoted great attention to the Peuls of West Africa because early travel reports indicated that the Peuls, although located south of the Sahara, were “European‐like” in appearance and had achieved a high level of “civilization.” Written descriptions of the Peauls consisted of elementary facts, diverse interpretive schemata, and a fundamental mythic element expressed in a “white‐black” dichotomy. The interpretive frameworks used to explain the Peuls varied widely depending on the professional, theoretical, and ideological positions of the observers while the racial myth remained constant. The article shows that in this historical case a mythic dualism served to deflect the external pressures that impinged on and skewed ethnological interpretations, and suggests that charged dualisms of a similar sort probably inform much current work in the human sciences.