Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

More recent work concern local powers and decentralization in the context of stratified societies in Africa (Olivier de Sardan and Tidjani Alou, 2009), political corruption among state actors in cash-starved African contexts (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan, 2006) and the ethnography of elections (Olivier de Sardan, 2015). He has also contributed to insert medical anthropology into health policy and system research (HPSR), analyzing health service delivery in West Africa and the interactions between patients and health workers (Jaffré and Olivier de Sardan 2003), and developing an empirical approach of public health policies in Sahelian countries (Olivier de Sardan & Ridde, 2015). His latest work focuses on African public policies and administrations. He is particularly interested in "traveling models" (standardized health and development policies) and their confrontation with local contexts ("pragmatic contexts"), a major aspect of which is the "practical norms" that regulate the "non-observant behaviors" of civil servants, i.e. informal regulations of routine practices that deviate from official norms (De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan, 2015; Olivier de Sardan and Piccoli, 2018). It is also within this framework that he co-edited with Bierschenk a book on "States at work". Based on these various works and more generally on the results of the last twenty years of research in Niger and West Africa, he published a major work in 2021: "La revanche des contextes" (The revenge of contexts), which analyses in depth the unexpected effects of interventions (carried out to change behaviour and organizations) when confronted with the local contexts in which they are implemented, the complexity of the practical norms of field agents, the diversity of modes of governance that deliver services of general interest, or the tangle of social logics that underlie the practices of actors.

Olivier de Sardan has also authored a reference book on anthropological method and epistemological issues (2008, translated in English 2015). He has strong views on the need to conduct rigorous and long term fieldwork, and he has developed with Thomas Bierschenk an innovative procedure for team research and collective fieldwork in anthropology (the ECRIS canvas).

He helped found, and was first President of, APAD - the Association Euro-Africaine pour l’Anthropologie du Changement social et du Développement and its journal. He established LASDEL in Niamey (Laboratoire d’études et de recherches sur les dynamiques sociales et le développement local). He obtained citizenship of Niger in 1999.

Olivier de Sardan has also made significant contributions to the understanding of social change and development on African societies, through empirical observation in Niger, Benin, Mali and other countries in Africa (but also including the Lozère region in France). After fifteen years he moved away from classic ethnographic description of small scale society to observe how modernity and western influences are incorporated into, and subverted by, African societies - particularly through public and collective services delivery, and by development aid. In his 1995 book (Olivier de Sardan, 1995, English version 2005) he significantly enhanced the field of anthropology of development, advocating for a "fundamental" and non-normative anthropology of development (and not only an "applied" one), being attentive to the drifts, unintended effects and implementations gaps of development projects, describing the various perceptions and logics of development 'actors' and stakeholders in Africa and how they related to existing socio-political structures. The techniques of international development aid, especially "participation", came under scrutiny and he set out some of the key features of anthropological investigation of development impacts. A further volume (2000) was the first study of development aid "brokers" situated between local societies and international aid agencies.

For his doctoral work, he studied social change among the Wogo people in Niger, after first being recruited by Jean Rouch to conduct fieldwork with this group over a year in 1965. Over time his close observations of the Songhay-Zarma people have informed other projects, on more general topics, but all grounded in empirical researches in Africa: anthropology of development, medical anthropology, anthropology of bureaucracies, and, more generally, an anthropology of public actions and of the delivery of public and collective goods and services in Africa. He was a pioneer in the use of the anthropological method for the study of public policy and development aid in Africa. Known as an unconventional anthropologist, he had many collaborations with sociologists, historians or political scientists, and has produced innovative concepts such as "local modes of governance" and "practical norms".

Olivier de Sardan studied political science and anthropology in France during the late 1950s, gaining a Diploma at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po, 1961), Licence in Sociology from the Sorbonne (1963), and in 1967 his PhD (Doctorat de 3e cycle) in anthropology (ethnologie) supervised by R. Bastide. His Doctorat d’état was directed by Jean Rouch and Georges Balandier and awarded in 1982. He was a leading activist against the Vietnam war, and participated in the May 1968 demonstrations in France.

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (born in Languedoc, 11 July 1941-) is a French and Nigerien anthropologist, and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseilles. He is also Emeritus Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and associate professor at Abdou Moumouni University in Niamey.