Bensa, Alban (1948-2021)

French anthropologist Alban Bensa (1948-2021) did his first fieldwork in rural France but is best-known for his research on Kanak societies in New Caledonia, developed from 1973 onwards. He studied the social and political organization of communities located in the Paicî and Cèmuhî linguistic areas. His work combines ethnolinguistics, anthropology, history and political sociology, with reflections on interdisciplinarity and the ethnographic praxis that culminated in his critique of both culturalist anthropology and Lévi-Straussian structuralism. From the 1980s onwards, Bensa took side with the Kanak independence movement. Attentive to the colonial history of the island and to the life histories of Kanak individuals, he co-edited in 2015, with Yvon Kacué Goromoedo and Adrian Muckle, the volume Les sanglots de l’aigle pêcheur. Nouvelle-Calédonie: la guerre kanak de 1917.

Keywords: History | Political anthropology | Ethnolinguistics | Pragmatic Anthropology | Fieldwork | Political commitment | Anticolonialism | Decolonisation | Second half of the 20^th century | 21^st century | New Caledonia | Kanak | Colonial situation | Epistemology