Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan


Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan is a French and Nigerien anthropologist, and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseilles. He is also Emeritus Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and associate professor at University Abdou Moumouni in Niamey, Niger.

Background

Olivier de Sardan comes from an aristocratic background in Languedoc in southern France, and was educated in Paris where his father was posted as a civil servant. He has seven children and has been married more than once.
Olivier de Sardan studied political science and anthropology in France from the late 1950s, gaining a Diplôme at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, Licence in Sociology from the Sorbonne, and in 1967 his PhD in anthropology supervised by R. Bastide. His Doctorat d’état was directed by Jean Rouch and Georges Balandier and awarded in 1982. He was a leading activist against the Vietnam war, and participated in the May 1968 demonstrations in France.
For his doctoral work, he studied social change among the :fr: Wogo |Wogo people in Niger, after first being recruited by Jean Rouch to conduct fieldwork with this group over a year in 1965. Over time his close observations of the Songhay-Zarma people have informed other projects, on more general topics, but all grounded in empirical researches in Africa: anthropology of development, medical anthropology, anthropology of bureaucracies, and, more generally, an anthropology of public actions and of the delivery of public and collective goods and services in Africa. Known as an unconventional anthropologist, he had many collaborations with sociologists, historians or political scientists, and has produced innovative concepts such as "local modes of governance" and "practical norms".
He helped found, and was first President of, APAD - the Association Euro-Africaine pour l’Anthropologie du Changement social et du Développement and its :fr:Bulletin de l'APAD|journal. He established LASDEL in Niamey. He obtained citizenship of Niger in 1999.

Research contributions

Olivier de Sardan's first fieldwork was a classic anthropological investigation of a particular society, the :fr:Wogo |Wogo along the banks and islands of the Niger River in Western Niger. Several later books describe the language and culture of the broader Songhay-Zarma populations of this region, including their therapeutic practices and former slavery relations. He and the visual anthropologist Jean Rouch are probably the foremost ethnographers of western Niger.
Olivier de Sardan has also made significant contributions to the understanding of social change and development on African societies, through empirical observation in Niger, Benin, Mali and other countries in Africa. After fifteen years he moved away from classic ethnographic description of small scale society to observe how modernity and western influences are incorporated into, and subverted by, African societies - particularly through public and collective services delivery, and by development aid. In his 1995 book he significantly enhanced the field of anthropology of development, advocating for a "fundamental" and non-normative anthropology of development, being attentive to the drifts, unintended effects and implementations gaps of development projects, describing the various perceptions and logics of development 'actors' and stakeholders in Africa and how they related to existing socio-political structures. The techniques of international development aid, especially "participation", came under scrutiny and he set out some of the key features of anthropological investigation of development impacts. A further volume was the first study of development aid "brokers" situated between local societies and international aid agencies.
More recent work concern local powers and decentralization in the context of stratified societies in Africa, political corruption among state actors in cash-starved African contexts and the ethnography of elections. He has also contributed to insert medical anthropology into health policy and system research, analyzing health service delivery in West Africa and the interactions between patients and health workers, and developing an empirical approach of public health policies in Sahelian countries. His latest work focuses on African public policies and administrations. He is particularly interested in "traveling models" and their confrontation with local contexts, a major aspect of which is the "practical norms" that regulate the "non-observant behaviors" of civil servants, i.e. informal regulations of routine practices that deviate from official norms. It is also within this framework that he co-edited with Bierschenk a book on "States at work".
Olivier de Sardan has also authored a reference book on anthropological method and epistemological issues. He has strong views on the need to conduct rigorous and long term fieldwork, and he has developed with Thomas Bierschenk an innovative procedure for team research and collective fieldwork in anthropology.

Honours

;In English
Books
Articles
;In French
Books