Abstract
The idea is to conjure up a fantastical Africa from the theory of the civilization process elaborated by Norbert Elias in his 1930s thesis: La Civilisation des mœurs et La Dynamique de l'Occident (original text published in German in 1939, translated into English in 1969 and into French in 1973 and 1977). The aim is also to give an Eliasian reading of the Africanist writings of the Ancien Régime, and to revisit the African art collecting activities of the sociologist who spent two years in Accra, Ghana, in the early 1960s. Elias's collection will be studied in relation to the apprehension of African art by his contemporary and fellow Briton, art historian Kenneth Clark, in his 1969 Civilization, a personal view. It seems to me that this fictional encounter between the two men, but above all the hypothetical coming together and crossing of their respective works, enables us to understand the place of Africa and, even more so, of African art in the conception of the notion of civilization, in Europe, at the end of the 1960s.
