On sait que beaucoup de sociétés africaines associent une position sociale originate à la pratique d'un art quelconque: musiciens ici, devins ou guérisseurs ailleurs, sont placés hors du commun. Dans ce domaine des rapports entre occupations et status le sort de la métallurgie est remarquable par l'élaboration symbolique qui partout s'y attache et par la place réservée à ceux qui travaillent le fer: parias ou aristocrates, les forgerons sont des êtres à part. Ces phénomenès attestés partout sur le continent prennent des formes très variables, et de nombreux auteurs se sont attachés à concilier ces deux aspects: l'extrême généralité de l'existence d'un symbolisme du fer et d'un status spécial des forgerons, d'une part, et l'extrême variété des configurations observées, d'autre part.

Blacksmith status and symbolic justifications: a cognitive hypothesis

Blacksmiths in African societies are either despised or honoured; they are never thought of as ordinary craftsmen. Attempts to account for this phenomenon and the variety of its forms have proved less than satisfactory, owing to a theoretical bias which is reluctant to distinguish between status, understood as the set of rights and duties ascribed to a given social actor, and the cultural characterisation of the social category to which this actor belongs.

The author's hypotheses are grounded in the assumption that there is no such thing as a cultural definition of status, even implicitly. There are only symbolic commentaries concerning not the nature of the statuses but the fact that they exist. Such commentaries should hence be dealt with in the general framework of symbolic thinking as has been defined by cognitive psychology. Three cases (the Fang and the Mafa of Cameroon, the Dime of Ethiopia) are examined in the light of this approach. Symbolic justifications of blacksmith status are shown to be a means to integrate, in the realm of everyday knowledge, the link between smiths' activities and their status. In order to fulfil this function, symbolic thought consists of reasonings whose formal features can be readily apprehended. Indeed, native commentary, which tends to justify status by picking out and laying stress on certain symbolic features of blacksmithing, follows one or other of two general models: operational reasoning on the one hand and finalist reasoning on the other. In the former, while the interpretive operations involved remain strictly fixed by tradition, the outcome is left to extrinsic factors; in the latter, the reverse obtains, in that it is the outcome which is predetermined, and the paths leading to it which are open and variable.

The author's aim is to show that the structural features of the social system (e.g. the existence of a craftsmen caste) are above all linked not to the values maintained by native thought but to the logic that governs native thinking.