Abstract EN:

For the African continent, the rise of digital information technologies raises a lot of hope, especially that of improving the economic conditions of a whole continent. This boom also attracts a lot of media and cognitive attention, including researchers in many disciplines. In such a general context, this thesis main concern is the communicative, anthropological and cultural scope of digital and analog interaction situations in wolof ethnic milieu in Senegal. For the author, it is meant to study how the Internet and the mobile phone, as socio-technical tools, have been able and can influence and modify through their uses, some forms of “wolofian” community cultural sociability. This thesis focuses mainly on the interrelations between digital communication technologies and sociocultural dynamics in the private sphere of Wolof society. The author has favored the study of the wolof ethnicity because of its predominance on the national territory. To build the field of research, the question of cultural categorizations is raised, by mention of some of the debates on the concept of ethnicity. The author opts for a multidisciplinary theoretical approach (how ICS can mobilize some of the contributions of microsociology, anthropology, social psychology in particular) and a methodological pluralism (comprehensive approach, corpus analysis and participatory approach) also marked by a posture of immersion of the researcher. The interrelations and tensions between “detraditionalization” and renewal of tradition (cultural, social, religious, etc.) are becoming more complex.