Dembour, Marie-Bénédicte. – Recalling the Belgian Congo: Conversations and Introspection. New York-Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2000, 235 p., index, bibl. (« New Directions in Anthropologie » 9).

When reading Recalling the Belgian Congo it is good to bear in mind what Sherry Ortner wrote in 1995: “The anthropologist and the historian are charged with representing the lives of people who are living or once lived, and as we attempt to push these people into the molds of our texts, they push back.” Ortner’s text provides a possible keying for Dembour’s first book as an ethnography of resistance–and its double: co-authorship. The dialectic process of “pushing” and “pushing back” effects a.