ABSTRACT
In 1972, Israël and Tajfel edited a book documenting a malaise in social psychology. In his chapter, Tajfel criticized social psychology thought as taking place in a vacuum. For him, social phenomena occur in institutional, cultural, and historical settings that have to be taken into account. Actually, during a walk through Bristol, he told me that he was learning more from books outside, rather than inside, of social psychology. Like Tajfel, I found later on that I needed to read beyond social psychology to better grasp what I was studying. In my research, I tend to use different paradigms, many of them inspired by other psychological disciplines than social psychology. The core ideas of this research, however, are often found among historians, anthropologists, and political scientists. Interested in racism, I read books of these scholars and try to find ideas that have not yet been (much) developed in social psychology. In the following paragraphs, I illustrate some of these sources of inspiration. I regret that lack of space prevents me from citing the work of (rare) colleagues who have investigated topics related to the ones I will speak of.
