Forbidding Ethnicities in French Sociological Thought: The Difficult Circulation of Knowledge and Ideas

摘要

Even a cursory glance at sociologies of ethnic relations indicates they vary from one location to another, cross over, and change over time. Yet in France, the development of the field is laborious, and externally fashioned problematics are viewed suspiciously and often rejected, creating a void that this article seeks to elucidate. A brief comparison of sociologies of ethnic and 'race' relations points to their different trajectories, corpuses, and 'oversights'. Moving on to France, where the field has been immobilised, I identify the symbolic and material structures that prevented its development from within and halted the flow of concepts and paradigms from without. Opposition to the field entails a complex interplay between the Republic, colonialism, universalism and antiracism, which produces a double erasure that can be observed upstream and downstream. The sociology of ethnic relations now stands out as a variable shaped by social relations that inform the production, reception, circulation, and transformation of knowledge in the world system.