Between “reality on the ground” and a “new humanism”: the anthropology of Mamadou Dia
by Isaac Stanley
Currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at the London School of Economics, my Economy of Francesco Fellowship has provided a valuable opportunity to develop a complimentary strand of research to my core doctoral project. While the latter explores competing imaginaries of economic solidarity in contemporary Senegal, my EoF fellowship research has allowed me to situate current developments within a longer history of local economic thought, by excavating local ideas around “alternative” and “solidarity” economies, and the way that economic thinkers have drawn on anthropology and theology.
A particularly interesting figure in this regard is Mamadou Dia, Senegal’s first President de Conseil des Ministres (Prime Minister), who played a major role in leading the country to independence and had been a pioneering scholar of African economies in the 1950s.
While Dia has received relatively little attention in contemporary scholarship (and particularly in anglophone scholarship), Dia was an influential figure, who has been rediscovered and contested in the context of contemporary Senegalese debates around economic transformation.
My EoF fellowship project has sought to illuminate the ways in which Dia’s coneception of African economic life, and his vision of an alternative economic system, were both shaped by his life-long engagement with anthropology. I have focused on three “moments” of this engagement. Firstly, his formative encounter with anthropology in the 1930s and early 1940s, when as a primary school teacher in colonial Senegal, Dia conducted ethnographic studies of religious practices and funerary rites. Secondly, between the 1950s and early 1960s, when Dia drew decisively on anthropological writings to develop an account of African economic history and the “human economy”. Finally, I have examined the place of anthropology in a series of works published after his release from political imprisonment in 1974, notably Émancipation des économies captives (1975) and Socio-anthropologie de l’Islam (1979). Anthropology emerges as central to Dia’s thought in providing a picture of African societies as dynamic and creative rather than governed by timeless tradition. Secondly, it drew attention to the concrete local realities which were, for Dia, the crucial starting point for the construction of a “new humanism”.
Isaac Stanley
Isaac Stanley is a socio-cultural anthropologist, writing and researching at the intersection of anthropology, intellectual history and economic thought. His PhD project, supported by an ESRC studentship, interrogates changing imaginaries and practices of solidarity in contemporary Senegal. In particular, he is focusing on a set of state initiatives seeking to promote and formalise the «social and solidarity economy»: i.e. cooperatives and other forms of (largely female) collective enterprise. Through ethnographic engagement with the various actors involved – from bureaucrats, academics and activists to informal groupings of female producers/vendors and the musicians who animate their life-cycle ceremonies – he explores the competing meanings these interventions take on in a wider context of contestation around economic justice, neo-colonialism and gender relations. Recent publications include a paper in the Review of Political Economy entitled ‘Oikos and Surplus: The Search for an Anthropological Economics’ (2025) and a chapter in in For a Social Ecological Transformation starting from Laudato si (ed. Raul Buffo and Federico Ro, 2025). 2025-2026 EoF Academy Fellow.
