Why Can’t the North Understand Africa?

How are we to understand Africa? Via universal models or by cataloguing its particularities?

The economic anthropology of Marshall Sahlins or Maurice Godelier, for example, has until now used specific behavioral patterns as a weapon against the universality of economic theory. Economists, on the other hand, and especially the new masters of the international agencies (IMF, World Bank), conceptualize African economy without the slightest contribution from anthropology.

And yet, i...