Summary
It would be a mistake to think that Africa remained on the sidelines of world history until it was opened up by colonization, just as it would be a mistake to believe that nothing happened there that wasn't introduced from the outside. This great Gulliverian body, harassed at its edges, is also at all times traversed by internal movements, fermentations and bubblings. [...] In a way, the African continent presents itself as a gigantic ethnographic gallery containing almost all the elements, in their various combinations, on which anthropological sagacity is exercised. And this gallery, far from displaying dead or moribund materials, survivals or archaisms, displays them before our eyes in the abundance of life. In this way, Africa provides the necessary material for in-depth anthropological work : it always provides the resource to compare its present-day societies, which are diverse, with each other, while at the same time confronting them with others that are external to it, but it also offers the possibility of seeing in situ the functioning of institutions, and sometimes even more broadly, types of social organization that elsewhere are known only through ancient ethnographic descriptions or history.
