I am grateful that Jonathon Repinecz took the time to review our book. I respond here only to the implication that it plagiarizes the work of other authors. Put so starkly, this may not have been the reviewer’s intention, but it reads that way. Repinecz starts with Ousmane Sembène’s rebuke, addressed to Jean Rouch in 1965, of studying Africans as he might insects. Is it placed prominently to imply that Sembène’s suspicion of ethnography extends to everything written by ethnographers or anthropologists in the next half century? It seems so, although the comment might equally be construed historically as a reaction to one kind of French ‘Africanist’ colonial ethnography, or to one kind of ethnographic film; even in 1965 Sembène excluded Rouch’s Moi, un noir from his strictures.1 This opening prepares the ground for the statement that ‘Fardon’s anthropological emphasis privileges themes such as “kinship” and “kleptocracy”, classic issues in the social sciences’. What would be the alternative? Xala is the story of a businessman who takes a third wife the age of his oldest daughter only to discover that he is stricken with impotence. He at first attributes his affliction to the jealousy of a co-wife, but is eventually forced to recognize that his manhood has been ‘tied up’ by his kin in revenge for the theft from them that set him on the path to becoming a rich polygynist. At the denouement, his seat on the Board of Commerce will be taken by a petty thief. So, it is difficult to see why elucidating these ‘issues’ in an expressly introductory work reflects the concerns of the social sciences at the expense of the social themes from which Sembène chose to craft a storyline that interlaced moralities in intimate relations and in the relations of state. Ethnography and anthropology are set up as foils to other fields, later identified as literary and cinema studies. Repinecz suggests I have made ‘a claim to creative licence’ so this work ‘enjoys a degree of relative freedom from citation that seems, at times, unwarranted’; ‘many of [the book’s] unattributed claims have been covered by previous scholarship. That fact deserves recognition.’ If this is ‘fact’ then it is a serious allegation of which we are given two examples. The first and most detailed is my failure to cite Kenneth Harrow’s 2013 Trash: African cinema from below, to which the discussion ‘seems strongly indebted’. What evidence of indebtedness is offered? A ‘diligent reader’, to borrow the reviewer’s self-description, will notice that my ‘First word’ is dated April 2013 and April 2014, Dakar – this being the place and those the times of completion of the two

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对 Richard Fardon 和 Sènga la Rouge 的 Jonathon Repinecz 评论的回应，从诅咒中学习：Sembene 的 Xala。伦敦：赫斯特（hb £17.99 – 978 1 8490 4695 4），2017 年，133 pp. in Africa 88 (4): 885–6

我很感激 Jonathon Repinecz 花时间审阅我们的书。我在这里只回应它抄袭其他作者作品的暗示。直截了当地说，这可能不是审稿人的本意，但它是这样读的。Repinecz 从 Ousmane Sembène 在 1965 年对让·鲁什（Jean Rouch）的斥责开始，指责他像研究昆虫一样研究非洲人。它是否显着地暗示 Sembène 对民族志的怀疑扩展到了下半个世纪由民族志学家或人类学家撰写的所有内容？似乎是这样，尽管从历史上看，该评论可能同样被解释为对一种法国“非洲主义”殖民民族志或一种民族志电影的反应；即使在 1965 年，Sembène 也将 Rouch 的 Moi，un noir 排除在他的限制之外。1 这一开场白为“法登的人类学强调优先考虑社会科学中的经典问题“亲属关系”和“盗贼统治”等主题的陈述奠定了基础。什么是替代方案？Xala 是一个商人的故事，他娶了比他大女儿还大的第三任妻子，却发现自己阳痿。起初，他将自己的痛苦归咎于妻子的嫉妒，但最终被迫承认他的男子气概已被他的亲属“捆绑”，以报​​复他们的盗窃行为，这使他走上了成为富翁的道路一夫多妻。最后，他在商业委员会的席位将由一个小偷来取代。所以，很难理解为什么在一部明确的介绍性作品中阐明这些“问题”反映了社会科学的关注，而忽略了社会主题，而 Sembène 选择根据这些主题来制作一个在亲密关系和国家关系中交织道德的故事情节. 民族志和人类学被设置为其他领域的陪衬，后来被确定为文学和电影研究。Repinecz 建议我已经“声称获得了创作许可”，因此这部作品“享有一定程度的引用自由，这有时似乎是没有根据的”；'[这本书的]许多未归因的声明已被先前的奖学金所涵盖。这个事实值得承认。如果这是“事实”，那么这是一个严重的指控，我们给出了两个例子。第一个也是最详细的是我没有引用 Kenneth Harrow 的 2013 Trash：非洲电影自下而上，讨论“似乎非常感谢”。提供了哪些债务证据？一位“勤奋的读者”，借用审稿人的自我描述，会注意到我的“第一个词”的日期是2013年4月和2014年4月，达喀尔——这是两个完成的地方和时间