La guerre au Baoulé

Fabio Viti offers a historical ethnography, a detailed description, as close as possible to the facts, concerning warlike practices belonging to the past that are no longer observable but whose detailed and punctual reconstruction has been made possible by recourse to a plurality of sources: oral, sound and material for the Baoule; written, cartographic and iconographic for the colonial archives. These sources are ethnographic as well as historical, field and archival, primary and secondary.

It is from traces and the superimposition of fragments, debris and scraps of all kinds that the author endeavors to reconstitute the materiality of the vicinal wars of the precolonial era and of the final clash between the Baule and the colonial troops. A materiality that concerns the fight at ground level but that also conceals a more general and deeper sense of war, of violence, of mobilized forces, of the confrontation of bodies and affects, that is, of life and death.