Strategic anthropology: understanding the world through consumption

In collaboration with IQSOG

Dominique Desjeux's work is based on a single concern: interpreting the functioning and changes of societies using field surveys and an inductive method, rather than applying pre-established models. The strategic anthropology he proposes combines material and logistical dimensions, social networks, and symbolic universes to understand the spread of innovations over time, whether they be religions, forms of consumption, or political and commercial mechanisms. From the analysis of religious innovations in Christianity to that of marketing as "advertising transubstantiation," from investigations into witchcraft in the Congo to current conspiracy theories, from the global middle class to the domestic hub in the digital age, Desjeux shows how crises, everyday constraints, and collective imaginaries combine to shape practices. Methodologically, intuition is nourished by experience. It must remain in tension with the need for verification, change of scale, and triangulation of data. This meeting proposes to explore this intellectual trajectory in four stages: the art of inductive transposition (from strategic analysis to rural worlds and consumption), the method of on-demand investigation (intuition, induction, the unexpected), the global middle class and the domestic hub (daily routines and cultural differences), and finally, anthropological constants in the face of the future as a new exotic world.

Dominique Desjeux is an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Paris Cité University (Sorbonne). For more than fifty years, he has been developing an applied anthropology that combines fieldwork in Africa, surveys for public and private organizations, and research on consumption and organizations in Europe, the United States, Brazil, and China, where he has been traveling regularly for thirty years. His surveys highlight anthropological constants in the way people make sense of misfortune, manage uncertainty, and reorganize their daily lives.

He has gradually built what he calls a "strategic anthropology." At the heart of his work, intuition plays a key methodological role: nourished by field experience, it must be constantly verified by cross-checking data, confronting opposing points of view, and changing scale, from the individual to the geopolitical. This practice of "investigation on demand," where themes are defined by clients rather than by a pre-established theoretical program, has led him to develop a mobile, geographical, historical, and interdisciplinary knowledge base.