Robert Launay
Department of Anthropology

Robert Launay, (Ph.D. Cambridge), Professor of Anthropology. His ethnographic research, based on field work in northern Côte d'Ivoire, focuses specifically on the anthropology of Islam, the subject of his most recent book, Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town (1992). He is also the author of Traders Without Trade: Responses to Change in Two Dyula Communities (1982). Currently he is conducting research on the history of anthropology, dealing, among other things, with the Enlightenment on the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns at the beginning of the eighteenth century as it relates to the discipline. In this context he recently presented a paper at an international symposium in Paris on the French colonial ethnography of northern Côte d'Ivoire. He is also starting a long-term project on the "prehistory" of anthropology, specifically on the place of cross-cultural comparison in Western European thought from the fourteenth to the early twentieth century, and on descriptions of "hottentots" at the Cape of Good Hope as embedded in late seventeenth century narratives of journeys to Asia.

rg1201@northwestern.edu