Economics and Culture in Africa
This chapter examines the articulation of two powerful determiners of individual and collective actions in the African context—culture and economy—from a point of view that could be called civilizational. The question is to determine in what measure the efficiency of an economic system is linked to its degree of adequation with its cultural context on one hand and, on the other, whether the efficiency of the resulting social system is dependent on respect of the functions assigned to each order by the group. A fruitful dialectics between economics and culture requires on one hand the assignation of each order to the finality for which it is the most efficient and, on the other hand, a better rooting of the African economies in their respective sociocultures.