As based on Jules de Gaultier’s writings, a French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep decided to examine the presence of collective bovarism in the people of African republic of Liberia – black immigrants from the Antilles and the United States of America, conflicted with native Africans (“pagan brothers”). Their collective bovarism came into light as persistent following the American and European ideals and as gradual removal from indigenous traditions which, in spite of beliefs and desires, failed in gaining a new and better identity, but rather led to losing their own identity and exposed at ridicule in the eyes of the world. In his thorough analysis of Liberian habits, economy, agriculture, industry, policy, and even fashion, van Gennep tracks a successive decline of culture, urging to fight for regaining their own identity.
The article aims at analysing the collective bovarism in (post)colonial studies. The term “bovarism” was coined at the turn of 19th and 20th c. by Jules de Gaultier as one of the main assumptions of his idealistic philosophy. It refers to a man’s innate ability to imagine oneself different from real, which can be manifested alike at individual and collective level. Thus, the collective bovarism, inseparably tied to the process of evolution, is characteristic of numerous societies all over the world. The article focuses on the discussions about the various approaches to the collective bovarism as based on the analysis of the texts by Arnold van Gennep, who researched it in Liberians, Jean Price-Mars (in Haitians), Frantz Fanon (in Martinicans), as well as on discerning the similarities between the collective bovarism and Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of mimicry.
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