Presentation

Two years after Alban Bensa left us, on the 10th of October 2021, the Journal de la Société des Océanistes would like to commemorate the intellectual life and literary work of this major figure of anthropology in Kanaky New Caledonia. Following the footsteps of other great names in a discipline that decolonisation pushed to prompt self-reinvention, Alban Bensa has left his mark on several generations of researchers in this Pacific territory, as well as on the history of anthropology and, more broadly, social sciences.

In Kanaky New Caledonia, authors tend to agree with each other not so much through their scientific perspectives, than through the polemics and controversies their works generate. While the “people” of New Caledonia, whose origins and cultures are so diverse and sometimes so antagonistic, express their desire for a common alliance and peace through the motto “Terre de parole, Terre de partage” (“Land of words, Land of sharing”), the country is also home to many collective wounds and passions relative to identity. These wounds and passions inevitably take hold of those who approach these islands, often leading them to experience the emotions, feelings and affects, and then to share the desires and wishes of the people who live there. Alban Bensa was no exception: this “land of words” fascinated him to such an extent that the collective history of the island, and of the Kanak people in particular, is inextricably linked to his personal history and professional career. Alban Bensa was fundamentally a fieldworker whose ethnographic approach and interrogations were based on a human experience that deconstructed much of the knowledge he had acquired from Maurice Leenhardt’s books and Jean Guiart’s classes – whose footsteps he followed before paving his own epistemological way. He was also a committed intellectual, promoting what we may call an “ethnology on the move”, and a firmly “scientific” discourse; while at the same time declaring his active and unwavering support to the emancipation of a colonised people. In this call for contributions, we choose to focus on two angles that echo these salient features of Alban Bensa’s life and work.

The first theme concerns the distance that researchers must establish with their objects of study. Does distance always warrant a scientific approach in anthropological research? Is there such a thing as “the right distance”? Did Alban Bensa’s ideological commitment to the Kanak people undermine the objectivity and strength of his scientific analyses? Or, on the contrary, should a researcher consider the encounter with others, their recognition, as an ethical process that should always precede knowledge? Meeting others poses a question to the researcher, prompting a desire to discover, to acknowledge and then understand. This is our interpretation of Alban Bensa’s epistemology of knowledge, inviting us to reflect on the raison d’être of the knowledge produced by the Humanities, in contemporary Kanaky New Caledonia, where colonial history remains so close to us. We encourage contributors, researchers and other analysts of New Caledonia and the Kanak worlds, to engage in reflexive work about the role of commitment and ethics in the epistemology of research and the production of knowledge ‒ the perception, destination and use of which also need to be questioned.

As a second theme, we welcome articles reflecting on writing. This theme arose very early in Alban Bensa’s life: in 1979, he collaborated with Jean Bazin to translate Jack Goody’s The Domestication of the Savage Mind, published in 1977. For Goody, writing proceeds from a logic that simplifies the complexity and subtleties of the real world, which in turn inevitably leads to falsification. Writing leans against “graphic reason”, that orders, assembles and reconstructs, “... after the facts, what in practice is disparate and fragmentary, [and] engenders an illusion of perfect formal coherence” (Bensa, 2006: 89). With this risk in mind, Alban Bensa nurtured a keen interest in literature and in the capacity of non-scientific texts to intimately acquaint the reader with the world they describe. This resulted, as Jacques Bouveresse puts it, in a true epistemology of literature. Literary, poetic and artistic forms of expression thus have their rightful place in this special issue. In particular, we would like to encourage authors from Kanaky New Caledonia to submit proposals that include free writing, verbal expressions or transcribed oral testimonies, as long as they are epistemologically grounded. In other words, we welcome papers sitting outside the metropolitan-French prism and the stiffness of certain exogenous concepts and biases. We hope the inclusion of these approaches will open the volume to diverse understandings of the social, cultural and political realities of the New Caledonian society and contemporary Kanak worlds.

A longer version of this call for contributions is available in French (see below). It sets out the theoretical context of our proposal and suggests a framework of bibliographical references that may guide authors in preparing their contributions.

Contacts

This special issue is coordinated by:

Umberto Cugola: ucugola[at]gmail.com

Caroline Graille: idest.nc[at]gmail.com

Claude Grin (GSRL-EPHE-PSL): claude.grin[at]gmail.com

**Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.**

To email the Journal’s editorial team :

redaction.jso[at]services.cnrs.fr

Provisional timetable

• Abstracts: Please submit as soon as possible, and by 31st March 2024 at the latest.
  

• 31 May 2024: complete first drafts to be sent to the special-issue coordinators and JSO editorial team.
  

• June-October 2024: work on the drafts with the special-issue coordinators.
  

• October 2024: submit articles to the JSO editorial team so the evaluation process can begin.
  

• February 2025: peer-reviews and requests for corrections sent to authors by the JSO editorial team.
  

• 15 June 2025: final version of articles sent to JSO editorial teams.

• June-Sep 2025: editorial process and page layout.

• Sept-Oct 2025: proofs sent to authors for corrections.

• The special issue will be sent out for printing at the end of November 2025.

• Estimated publication date : late 2025/early 2026.