CRS-NDI laboratories

The emblematic laboratory of the CRS-NDI is the one founded by the theologian Barthélemy Adoukonou in memory of the Community Intellectual Sage Daa René Akanzan (Laboratory of Anthropology and Historiography of the Community Intellectual Sage – LAHSIC). Composed of the managers of the African tradition, it not only carries out empirical research on the data of the traditional culture, but also implements the endogenous hermeneutic resources for their interpretation and their theological recovery. The form of theology which thus unfolds in the school of the community intellectual is therefore not only a theology fromsensus fidelium but a theology that claims an academic character according to the canons of rationality in a traditional context of orality. This laboratory therefore works to promote the traditional epistemological model promoted by Daa René Akanzan and his peers within the inculturation movement "Mewihwendo" (Le Sillon Noir).

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A second laboratory has gradually been set up around the cultural figure of the heirs of the African tradition and the scientific and technical rationality promoted by the West. The issue that set him on the road in the 1990s, in the crucible of the Center du Quartier de l’intellectuel communautaire (Centre Q.I.C.), was that of interculturality. This problem then opened up, in the 2000s, through methodological and interdisciplinary seminars conducted with budding researchers from various faculties and schools of the University of Abomey-Calavi (Letters and human sciences, agronomy, environment, economics and management) to the issue of social changes underway in Africa. A last segment was finally brought to this research by the debates around the encyclicalLaudato si (2015), which makes the ecological question an unavoidable issue in the training or research units of Catholic universities and centers.

To explore this triple thematic axis of interculturality, social change and integral ecology, the second CRS-NDI laboratory has structured itself into collaborative research teams for social intelligence, hence its name: Intercultural Laboratory of Collaborative Research in Social Intelligence (LIRCIS). As such, he is trained by university researchers as well as by andragogues, facilitators of youth vocational training centers, health workers, entrepreneurs, members of civil society, religious leaders, etc.  

The LIRCIS, by researching for all the themes studied the way in which social intelligence apprehends them, represents a hinge model between the community intellectuality of African traditions and the artificial intelligence promoted by techno-science.