R Launay

Biographic Data

ID32905
NAMER Launay
GIVEN NAMESR
FAMILY NAMELaunay
SIGNATURELAUNAY R
AFFILIATIONSNorthwestern University
ORCID0000-0002-6916-0219
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS67
TOTAL CITATIONS86
AUTHOR COUNT67
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1968
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX5

  • The Bagayoko Curse: Mystical Powers and the Power of Words

    R LaunayARTICLEJournal of Religion in Africa2026

    Belief in the reality of mystical powers has proved remarkably tenacious, in Africa and elsewhere. While “culture” may explain the form such ideas take, it cannot account for individual convictions that such powers are efficacious, not to mention dangerous. One example from Korhogo, Côte d’Ivoire, suggests mechanisms by which such beliefs are effectively sustained. The case concerns a curse which could be pronounced over a stolen item and that wo…

  • Gagliardi Susan Elizabeth, Seeing the Unseen. Arts of Power Associations on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier”

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2025

  • Colleyn Jean-Paul & Sanogo Mingoro, Les « dit-on » et autres récits plus sérieux. Mali, 1980-2020

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2025

    fledged collaborators, and even rarer that they include them, as Jean-Paul Colleyn has done with Mingoro Sanogo, as co

  • Tymowski Michal. — Europeans and Africans: Mutual Discoveries and First Encounters

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2024

    Despite its sweeping title, Tymowski's fascinating book is about Portuguese expeditions to West Africa in the fifteenth century. Admittedly, not quite all the European protagonists were Portuguese. A few, like the Venetian Alvise de Ca da Mosto, were trading on Portugal's behalf, while others, such as the Flemish merchant Eustache Delafosse, were unsuccessfully attempting to break the Portuguese monopoly. The Africans in question were all situate…

  • Defining Religion: Durkheim and Weber Compared

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLEReligions2022References: 14

    Emile Durkheim began The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life with an injunction: "In order to identify the simplest and most primitive religion that observation can make known to us, we must first define what is properly understood as a religion". Almost simultaneously, Max Weber would begin the long section on the sociology of religion in his unfinished work Economy and Society by insisting, "To define 'religion', to say what it is, is not po…

  • Michael Lambek. Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLEThe American Historical Review2020

  • Viti Fabio. - La Côte d'Ivoire et ses étrangers

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2019

    The status of strangers in Côte d’Ivoire has been a politically divisive and sometimes deadly issue, especially since the death of Félix Houphouët-Boigny and the advent of multi-party elections. Indeed, as Viti perceptively notes in his introduction to the volume, the question of who constitutes a “stranger” is by no means self-evident, and can vary from context to context. The book is a collection of essays on the subject of strangers in Côte d’…

  • Madore Frédérick. - La construction d'une sphère publique musulmane en Afrique de l'Ouest: Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2016, 208 p., bibl., ill

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2019

    Muslims were a minority in Burkina Faso upon its independence. Its first president, Maurice Yaméogo, was Catholic, and indeed a Catholic elite dominated the entire state apparatus. Islam and Muslims were distinctly marginalized. Fifty years later, more than half the population is Muslim, mosques have proliferated in the capital and throughout the country, while Islamic organizations occupy a highly visible—if not dominant—place in the national la…

  • Culture, Concept of

    Open AccessR LaunayOTHERThe International Encyclopedia of…2018

    The anthropological concept of culture refers generally to the corpus of shared knowledge, attitudes, and learned behaviors of a given population. Its multiple meanings are best revealed in the context of controversies in anthropology where culture, as an explanatory framework, has been contrasted either to “nature” or to “society.” Franz Boas and his students used the concept to call ideas of European racial and intellectual superiority into que…

  • Maize avoidance? Colonial French attitudes towards Native American foods in the Pays des Illinois (17th-18th century)

    R LaunayARTICLEFood and Foodways2018Cited by: 1References: 7

    French colonists in seventeenth century New France were introduced to maize, the staple of the Native American diet. In the eighteenth century, when French agriculturalists settled along the Mississippi River, they grew maize but preferred not to eat it themselves, as fur traders and soldiers had previously done. Maize avoidance reflected the changing socio-economic framework of French settlement. Fur traders were concerned with integrating thems…

  • Introduction: Eating French

    R Launay, Aurelien MauxionARTICLEFood and Foodways2018References: 4

    This introductory essay provides a general reflection on the meanings of ‘French food’ and proposes analytical directions to explore this concept. While this expression is often associated with refinement, restaurant culture, and haute cuisine, in this special issue we are extending the frame of its meaning to explore the ways in which this category relates to processes of identity construction, especially in regards to ethnicity, class, and race…

  • Werthmann, Katja & Sanogo, Mamadou Lamine (dir.). La ville de Bobo-Dioulasso au Burkina Faso. Urbanité et appartenances en Afrique de l’Ouest: Paris, Karthala, 2013

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2015

    Werthmann, Katja & Sanogo, Mamadou Lamine (dir.). — La ville de Bobo-Dioulasso au Burkina Faso. Urbanité et appartenances en Afrique de l’Ouest. Paris, Karthala, 2013, 324 p., bibl. L’ouvrage de Katja Werthmann et Lamine Sanogo sur Bobo-Dioulasso comble une lacune de nos connaissances sur les villes du Burkina Faso. L’introduction présente une synthèse des études sur les villes du Burkina Faso puis évalue l’apport des contributeurs de diverses di…

  • Chanter l’amour en pays dioula (Côte-d’Ivoire). Badinage, sexe et jalousie: Paris, Classiques Africains, 2013, 249 p., bibl

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2015

    Derive, Jean (dir.). — Chanter l’amour en pays dioula (Côte-d’Ivoire). Badinage, sexe et jalousie. Paris, Classiques Africains, 2013, 249 p., bibl. In the 1970s, I vividly remember attending wedding ceremonies in Dyula villages where the brides, accompanied by their yet-unmarried age-mates, would dance bare-breasted holding photos of their jarabi, their sweetheart and singing tearful laments about how their relationship was abruptly coming to an …

  • Islam in Black and White

    R LaunayARTICLEComparative Studies of South Asia…2015References: 12

    Ware's impassioned condemnation of the idea of Islam noir is a reaction to its unfortunate consequences for the scholarly study of Africa and of Islam: the marginalization of Islam in the study of Africa and of Africa in the study of Islam. On the other hand, if we attempt to historicize the emergence of the paradigm of Islam noir in terms of European attitudes toward Africa and toward Islam in the early twentieth century, we can reach a more nua…

  • Kobo, Ousman Murzik. Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West African Islamic Reforms: Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2012

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2015

    Kobo, Ousman Murzik. — Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West African Islamic Reforms. Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2012, 383 p., bibl. Ousman Kobo’s book is an excellent comparative study of the so-called Wahhabi movement in Burkina Faso and in Ghana. As Kobo acknowledges, the label “Wahhabi” is controversial, and the organizations in question now refer to themselves as “Ahl as-Sunna”, “The people of the Sunna”. However, the Sunni label is just …

  • Analyses et comptes rendus

    Open AccessKerrie Thornhill, M Cahen et al.ARTICLECahiers d études africaines2015

    new monograph, Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War, expertly addresses aspects of postconflict reconstruction and social trauma that have gone relatively unexamined in social science research. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and her own experiences working in mental health, Abramowitz documents how global mental health approaches were "vernacularized" in community development programmes during the initial years of Liberia's post…

  • Ferguson, Adam

    R LaunayCHAPTERTheory in Social and Cultural…2013

  • Friedson, Steven M. — Remains of Ritual

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2013

    In the early twentieth century, a delegation of Ewe from southern Ghana journeyed north to Dagarti, bringing back with them the cult of Lahare Kunde or Brekete, the subject of Friedson’s ethnographic and ethnomusiclogical study. Unlike other studies of the establishment of “northern” cults in southern Ghana, Friedson employs a phenomenological rather than—arguably to the exclusion of—a historical and sociological approach. Since the author is an …

  • Goody, Jack. — Myth, Ritual and the Oral

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2013

    This is a collection of articles by Goody, most of them published in the last ten years. The title is somewhat misleading. Except for the first chapter as well as a long chapter on the Bagre—a long recitation (actually two separate recitations, the Black Bagre and the White Bagre) which Goody and his collaborators recorded several times and which accompanies initiation ceremonies among the LoDagaa of Ghana—the central concerns of the bulk of the …

  • Is Lévi-Strauss Still Good to Think

    R LaunayARTICLEReviews in Anthropology2013Cited by: 4References: 4

    The centenary of Claude Lévi-Strauss' birth, and his death shortly afterwards, have generated a spurt of publications ranging from biographies to collections of essays to unpublished works. Some of these works dwell on his worldview, his preoccupations with globalization, overpopulation, and the environment, albeit in ways that reflect the poverty of his sociological analysis. Reappraisals of his structural approaches to the study of kinship, myt…

  • Lemaire, Marianne. – Les sillons de la souffrance

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2012

    Les sillons de la souffrance is a richly documented ethnography that focuses on the range of activities and meanings associated with the word faliwi among the Tyebara, a Senufo sub-group in the region of Korhogo in Côte-d’Ivoire. As Lemaire points out, faliwi can only very approximately be translated as “work”. Some activities which we would consider “work”, such as food preparation, are not considered faliwi, which can however include ritual act…

  • McIntosh, Janet. — The Edge of Islam

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2012

    The Edge of Islam is a detailed study, not of a particular community, but rather of the ethno-religious boundary that separates Giriama from Swahili in and around the coastal town of Malindi in Kenya. This is not, however, a symmetrical boundary. Giriama are excluded by the Swahili, living for the most part in slums on the outskirts of the town and relegated to economic and social inferiority. McIntosh took deliberate steps to avoid being identif…

  • Babou, Cheikh Anta. — Fighting the Greater Jihad

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2012

    It is a paradox, as Cheikh Babou points out in Fighting the Greater Jihad, that there are a plethora of studies of the Muridiyya, the Sufi Brotherhood founded by Amadu Bamba Mbacke in Senegal, but there is a paucity of biographical studies of the founder himself. Analyses of the Muridiyya have by and large adopted a sociological approach to the Brotherhood, focusing on its rapid and phenomenal growth in the early twentieth century, its associatio…

  • Cardinal Directions: Africa’s Shifting Place in Early Modern European Conceptions of the World

    Open AccessR LaunayARTICLECahiers d études africaines2010References: 5

    Analyses of early modern European representations of Africa have sought to pinpoint the origins of European racism rather than to understand such representations in their own context. In fact, depictions of Africa and Africans were often an epiphenomenon of European understandings of their own place within the world as a whole. In the sixteenth century, the predominant schema was a variant of Hippocratic theories of humors and climates. Regions o…

  • Traders Without Trade: Responses to Change in Two Dyula Communities

    R LaunayBOOKTraders Without Trade2009