Jean-Loup Amselle is a French anthropologist and ethnologist. He is director of studies emeritus at EHESS and former editor-in-chief of the . Trained in social anthropology and in ethnology, Jean-Loup Amselle had realized several works in the field in Mali, in Côte d’Ivoire and in Guinea. He is the inventor of an anthropology of connections (the way that a society feeds of different influences) and pursues research about themes like ethnicity, identity, interbreeding, but also about contemporary African art, and about multiculturalism, postcolonialism and . In 1998, he led, with , a work dealing with Maurice Delafosse, one of the pioneers of French Africanist ethnology.