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MARCEL DETIENNE

were the contemporaries of Machiavelli, the Ochollos of Southern Ethiopia of both today
and yesterday—not to mention the secular canons of the ninth to the fourteenth centu-
ries, or the Senoufos of the Ivory Coast.
We are concerned with twenty or so societies observed asmicroconfigurations, which
are elaborated for common use by the historians and ethnologists who study them. I use
the termmicroconfigurations, for it is not a matter of global comparativism. It is not my
intention to set up a ‘‘typology’’ or a ‘‘morphology’’ of ‘‘the wish to assemble together to
speak of matters of common interest’’ that is validurbi et orbi. I must repeat: this compar-
ativism aims to beexperimentalandconstructive. It needs these microconfigurations, for
they allow wide-ranging, freeexperimentation. We can go see what is happening in Japan,
for example, in the company of Japanese specialists who are already analyzing assembly
practices there; or we can launch an expedition into deepest Africa, to discover egalitarian
settings for initiation assemblies; or we can discover what ‘‘political settings’’ await us in
Kabylia or the forests of Amazonia.
The aim is to be both experimental and constructive. I should warn historians who
continue to cultivate homologies that we need to shun these like the plague. And I would
earnestly advise against ‘‘term by term’’ comparisons between societies that keep a jealous
eye on one another. Our kind of wide-ranging comparativism must be determinedly con-
structive. It needs to fabricate or fashionelements that are comparable, and this is done in
the laboratory of a ‘‘workshop,’’ where historians and anthropologists work and experi-
ment together, adopting a long-term view. In order to discover elements suitable for
comparison in an inquiry devoted to assembly practices, I have tried to make the most of
a series of notions that seemed potentially fruitful in our field of investigation as we
progressively narrow it down. Let me cite just a few. First is the notion of ‘‘public matters’’
or affairs of common interest. This becomes increasingly complex as soon as it is applied
to different societies. Next is the category of ‘‘citizen-citizenship,’’ along with its sub-
categories, and then there is the fascinating ‘‘sameness-equality’’ pair. Are these the best
objects of comparison? Maybe not, but I believe we could do worse, and that they may
prove to be of some use as we begin to try to see what the domain of politics might be in
this context. The political domain in general? Well, why not? In the wake of the first great
anthropologists, such as Lewis Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor, are we not all general-
ists? I, for my part, am happy to salute them, as one who hails from what used to be
called the Continent, or, rather, the part of it that is France, a country where the creation,
in 1986, of the first department of anthropology at the University of Nanterre constituted
the first anthropological clearing in the dense forest of history peopled with hordes of
national and nationalist historians.
Those are some of my reasons for mentioning ‘‘politics’’ in the title of this lecture.
Meanwhile, the gods have been waiting patiently for our attention. They know why I have
rejected a modern reference to ‘‘religion.’’ I confess that I have never held the terms
religiousandreligionin high esteem. And that is not solely because those terms, with their

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