SUMMARY:

The article by Alain Blum and France Guérin-Pace presents a theoretical reflection on the role of knowledge, and in particular statistical categories used in the creation and reproduction of forms of social, cultural, ethnic, religious and racial difference and diversity. This theoretical reflection is part of current intellectual and political debates in France’s academic community and politics. The authors’ position is twofold: they are scholar-outsiders, who analyze the ongoing debate and its implications; and at the same time they are expert-insiders, whose opinions circulate in French mass media and determine the practical decisions on how to describe and tackle diversity in contemporary French society. The insider position of the authors itself presents a very interesting case of dilemmas that scholars and intellectuals face when they utilize their expertise in the context of political debate. It also highlights the ambiguities of modern knowledge – when this knowledge, including its genealogy and history of usage, forms judgments on justice and social politics of contemporary societies.
The immediate background and matter of the debate under analysis is the treatment of the issue of immigration after the wave of suburban riots in France. The authors take a step back and reconstruct the history of the emergence, development, and debates on ethnic categories in statistics. They locate two prevalent stances among the statistical professional community on ethnic categories: one is represented by statisticians from the Habsburg and Russian empires and advocates the inclusion of ethnic categories as essential markers of the population; the other is represented by French statisticians, and denies the claim that ethnic categories are essential attributes of a population. Focusing on the history of French statistics the authors reveal a more nuanced picture. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries French statistics developed differently in France and in French colonies. In the twentieth century, ethnic and racial categories were integrated into the statistical methods used for surveys of the French citizenry. The article argues that a qualitative shift occurred in 1999 when the statistical categories were changed to reflect the external parameters of migration (immigration) in contrast to the blurred categories prior to 1999, which did not differentiate between internal migration and immigration. The authors discuss the evolution of the debate on ethnic categories in statistics, from the claim that they help to ascertain the process of integration of immigrants into French society, to the claim that they help combat discrimination. The latter phase of debate is scrutinized by the authors. Replying on the results of the research project “The History of Life,” the article demonstrates the incommensurability of a complex reality with homologizing and reductionist statistical categories, argues against their reification in official statistics, and projects an alternative and reflexive model for taking into account the phenomena of difference.