Out of the Study and Into the Field: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology 9781845458430

Citation preview

OUT OF THE STUDY AND INTO THE FIELD

Methodology and History in Anthropology General Editor: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford Volume 1 Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen Volume 2 Franz Baerman Steiner: Selected Writings Volume I: Taboo, Truth and Religion Franz B. Steiner. Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 3 Franz Baerman Steiner: Selected Writings Volume II: Orient politik, Value, and Civilisation. Franz B. Steiner. Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 4 The Problem of Context: Perspectives from Social Anthropology and Elsewhere Edited by Roy Dilley Volume 5 Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach By Timothy Jenkins Volume 6 Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch

Volume 12 An Introduction to Two Theories of Social Anthropology: Descent Groups and Marriage Alliance By Louis Dumont. Edited and Translated by Robert Parkin Volume 13 Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau By Henrik Vigh Volume 14 The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice Edited by Jacqueline Solway Volume 15 A History of Oxford Anthropology Edited by Peter Rivière Volume 16 Holistic Anthropology: Emergence and Convergence Edited by David Parkin and Stanley Ulijaszek Volume 17 Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches Edited by David Berliner and Ramon Sarró Volume 18 Ways of Knowing: Anthropological Approaches to Crafting Experience and Knowledge Edited by Mark Harris

Volume 7 Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research Edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin

Volume 19 Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology By David Mills

Volume 8 Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social By N.J. Allen

Volume 20 Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification By Nigel Rapport

Volume 9 Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition By Robert Parkin

Volume 21 The Life of Property: House, Family and Inheritance in Béarn, South-West France By Timothy Jenkins

Volume 10 Categories of Self: Louis Dumont’s Theory of the Individual By André Celtel Volume 11 Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects By Michael Jackson

Volume 22 Out of the Study and Into the Field: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology Edited by Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

OUT OF THE STUDY AND INTO THE FIELD

Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology

Edited by Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Parkin & DeSales text_v4:Layout 2

5/25/10

4:51 PM

Page iv

First published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2010 Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Out of the study and into the field : ethnographic theory and practice in French anthropology. p. cm. -- (Methodology and history in anthropology vol.22) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-695-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Anthropology--France--Philosophy. 2. Anthropology--France--Field work. 3. Anthropology--France--Methodology. I. Parkin, Robert, 1950- II. Sales, Anne de. GN585.F8O88 2010 301.010944--dc22 2010018543 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-84545-695-5 (hardback)

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

vii

List of authors discussed in this volume

ix

Preface

xi

Introduction: ethnographic practice and theory in France Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

1

1.

2.

3.

‘Keeping your eyes open’: Arnold van Gennep and the autonomy of the folkloristic Giordana Charuty

25

Canonical ethnography: Hanoteau and Letourneux on Kabyle communal law Peter Parkes

45

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary: Jean Rouch, shared anthropology and the ciné-trance Paul Henley

75

4.

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork Margaret Buckner

103

5.

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet? Laura Rival

125

6.

Alfred Métraux: empiricist and romanticist Peter Rivière

151

7.

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’ Stefania Capone

171

8.

The art and craft of ethnography: Lucien Bernot, 1919–1993 Gérard Toffin

197

9.

André-Georges Haudricourt: a thorough materialist Alban Bensa

219

Contents

vi 10. Louis Dumont: from museology to structuralism via India Robert Parkin 11. Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up? Four anthropologists in search of an ancestor Jeremy MacClancy

235

255

Notes on contributors

273

Subject index

277

Name index

289

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 1.1. Arnold van Gennep, aged 80, lighting a bonfire on the summer solstice (21 June 1953), also the saint’s day of St John the Baptist.

26

2.1. Commandant Adolphe Hanoteau at Fort-Napoléon, 1861.

47

2.2. Opening column of qanun rulings transcribed in Arabic with French translation by Captain Alphonse Meyer, military interpreter at Dellys, 1864. 50 2.3. Dedication of Ait Iraten qanun rulings submitted to Hanoteau by Si Mula, ca. 1859/60.

52

2.4. Submission of the Kabyle tribes to Marshall Randon in 1857.

64

2.5. Hanoteau and two Tuareg, 1858.

65

3.1. Jean Rouch shooting in a market in the Gold Coast in 1954.

76

4.1. Eric de Dampierre at Madabazouma, thirty kilometres from Bangassou, Central African Republic.

104

5.1. Paul Rivet.

126

6.1. Alfred Métraux, seated second from right, doing fieldwork among Chipaya in Bolivia, 1931 or 1932.

152

7.1. Roger Bastide, seated left on bench, Ifanhin, Bénin, 1958.

172

8.1. Lucien Bernot, on the occasion of his being honoured with a Festschrift at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1987.

198

9.1. André-Georges Haudricourt: ‘le maître à la recherche de la petite bête ou le maître dans l’exercice de ses fonctions’, June 1972.

220

10.1. Louis Dumont, taken by himself, among the Kallar, Tamil Nadu (India), with his chief informant, Muttusami Tevar, 1949.

236

11.1. Maurice Leenhardt (back row, centre), with Melanesian pastors during a conference, Nouvelle Calédonie 1916.

256

LIST OF AUTHORS DISCUSSED IN THIS VOLUME Authors dealt with in this volume, their dates and main fieldwork area(s) and/or peoples of interest. Author

Dates

Roger Bastide

1898–1974

Lucien Bernot

1919–1993

Eric de Dampierre

1929–1997

Louis Dumont Adolphe Hanoteau André-Georges Haudricourt Aristide Letourneux Maurice Leenhardt Alfred Métraux

1911–1998 1814−1897 1911–1996 1820−1890 1878–1954 1902–1963

Paul Rivet Jean Rouch Arnold van Gennep

1876–1958 1917–2004 1873–1957

Main fieldwork area(s) and/or peoples of interest Afro-Brazilians (northeast Brazil) Marma, Cak (Bangladesh, Myanmar) Nzakara (Central African Republic) India Kabyle (Algeria) Vietnam Kabyle (Algeria) New Caledonia Argentina and other South America, Haiti, Easter Island Ecuador, Colombia Songhay (Niger) France, Europe

PREFACE

The present volume originated in a conference, ‘Out of the Study and into the Field’: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology, held at the Maison Française d’Oxford on 22–24 April 2005. It does not, however, represent the formal proceedings of the conference, since some of the original contributors have not been able, for a variety of reasons, to submit the papers they gave on that occasion for inclusion here. Conversely, the chapters by Buckner, Capone and Parkin were written subsequent to the conference especially for this volume. The chapters by Bensa, Capone and Charuty have been translated from the French, the first by Amy Jacobs, the second and third by the editors. Quotations from texts originally written in French have either been translated by the authors of those chapters or the editors, or else replaced by the equivalent passage from an existing published English translation. Due to the rarity of some of the original French texts in Rivière’s paper, there the original French texts have been retained in footnotes. The editors wish to thank the contributors to both the original conference and the present collection, where these are different, as well as the staff and management of the Maison Française for providing the conference venue and refreshments. The conference was supported by a grant from the British Academy, which is gratefully acknowledged. We also thank the publishers of this collection, Berghahn Books, especially Marion Berghahn, as well as Prof. David Parkin, the series editor, for their support of this project. We are also grateful to those contributors who commented on the introduction to the volume, and to the two publishers’ reviewers for their very useful reviews of the whole volume, even though we have not felt able to incorporate all their observations. The editors are also grateful to the following organisations and individuals for helping them obtain the plates used in this volume: L’Agence photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux (France) for the portrait of van Gennep; Harold Prins for the portrait of Métraux; Alex Baradel, Fundação Pierre Verger (Brazil), for the portrait of Bastide; Jean-Claude Galey, for the portrait of Dumont; and Christophe Dervieux, Archiviste, Direction des affaires culturelles et coutumières, Service des archives, Noumea (Nouvelle Calédonie), for the portrait of Leenhardt.

xii

Preface

Last but not least, this whole project has proved to be a smooth and convivial joint venture between British and French anthropology, represented here by the respective editors, who both feel they have a reasonable knowledge, understanding and appreciation of each other’s national anthropological traditions and have enjoyed working together. They would therefore like to take this opportunity of thanking each other. Robert Parkin Anne de Sales Oxford, October 2009

Introduction

ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE AND THEORY IN FRANCE Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

Introduction Rather like the nations they represent, there is a sense in which what pass as the British and French schools of anthropology really are each other’s Other: on both sides of the Channel, there is a wary awareness of the other’s alleged achievements and failings, perpetually shaped by a strong feeling of, and for, difference and distinctiveness. Perhaps this sense of respectful rivalry was first expressed aptly back in the late sixteenth century when, in a passage from Astrophel and Stella describing what appears to be a joust, a minor but very English Elizabethan poet, Sir Philip Sidney, referred to ‘that sweet enemy, France’. Be that as it may, it is clear that British anthropologists have a long history of being influenced by their French colleagues in a whole series of disciplines, often despite themselves, and often in reaction to them rather than accepting their teachings wholesale. The list is long: even a partial one would have to include at least Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, Ricoeur, Dumont, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard, Derrida, and more recently de Certeau and Latour. However, as this collection is intended to demonstrate, some powerful but often distorting stereotypes have been at work here. This gaze from across the English Channel has given rise to two common linked impressions about French anthropology among the British.1 The

2

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

first is that it is dominated by theory based mainly on rationality and deductive reasoning. Secondly, and conversely, it is commonly said not to be very concerned to derive general principles inductively from ethnographic facts. The latter, of course, is often thought to be the strength of the British tradition in particular, which also likes to think of itself as cultivating a healthy scepticism of theory. Indeed, it is hard to think of a major British contributor to theory who has not been, at some time or other, a fieldworker too. This is far less true of the French school, notwithstanding, for example, Lévi-Strauss’s travels around the Amazon. However, this is less because the French are all theorists than because, au contraire, a good many of them are ethnographers obsessed with the facts and dismissive of theory, to the extent that they might be described as ‘ethnographic essentialists’. Accordingly, we argue that there is a sharper distinction, and disjunction, between theory and ethnographic practice in France than in Britain, where, as just noted, many anthropologists have seen it as their task to contribute to both simultaneously. The British editor of this volume still remembers being struck by the novelty of this discovery, which came as a revelation after years of his viewing French anthropology as excessively theoretical and almost anti-empirical, in accordance with the prevailing British stereotype.2i Indeed, so-called ‘British empiricism’ is frequently trumped by the ethnographic essentialism purveyed by many of the figures treated in this collection. Is not the conventional British view of French anthropology therefore seriously distorted? Are not the grand theorists, who are mostly anyway associated with other disciplines, falsely and perversely seen as being more representative of French anthropology than those who have pursued their profession in the field as much as in the study, if not more so? These are the main questions we are asking in this volume. We fully acknowledge that this situation has nothing to do with any lack of theoretical awareness or competence generally among French ethnographers, as Lucien Bernot showed in his brief but pungent dismissal of structuralism (discussed below). Moreover, the quality of their ethnographic work is undoubtedly as high as in other traditions. Nor do we wish to exaggerate this tendency in France, far less claim that it has been the only approach to fieldwork there, nor indeed suggest that it is entirely absent outside the country. Dumont, as well as the French Marxist anthropologists – both those who were influenced mainly by Althusser, such as Emmanuel Terray, Claude Meillassoux and Pierre Philippe Rey, as well as Maurice Godelier, famous for his attempts to combine Marxism with structuralism – all did fieldwork and had a clear

Introduction

3

theoretical framework within which to do so (which, however, was often seen by others as directing, rather than reflecting, the search for facts). Similarly, the research team set up by Louis Dumont and later taken over by Daniel de Coppet brought together a number of French and international anthropologists who had done fieldwork in different parts of the world and asked them to frame their work in relation to Dumont’s theoretical notions of hierarchy, value and hierarchical opposition. Yet even Dumont, who perhaps comes closest to what we see as typical British practice, liked to present himself first and foremost as a craftsman or technician (Delacampagne 1981: 4). We therefore argue that ethnographic essentialism represents a distinct but not exclusive trend in French anthropology, one based not just on a simple disinterest in theoretical positions but a positive rejection of them. In fact, this tendency seems every bit as characteristic of the French school as the theory-heavy ruminations of those thinkers we have all learned to know and, sometimes, even love so well. What are the reasons for this? Any assessment has to be based on the history of fieldwork and of field enquiries generally in French anthropology. In the rest of this introduction, we provide a brief survey of this history, starting with the early nineteenth century and proceeding to the heyday of structuralism.3 As we shall see, one trajectory of significance here is a series of shifts from learned societies to museums to research and training institutes, only finally reaching the universities at a relatively late stage. We then proceed to provide a brief overview of each chapter before considering what commonalities and differences can be discerned in the lives, careers and works of these subjects.

Fieldwork in French anthropology: a brief history An interest in field enquiries in France can be traced back to around 1800, when the short-lived Société des Observateurs de l’Homme promoted the use of anthropological questionnaires by travellers to other parts of the world and issued guidelines for anthropological enquiries. This was the era of antiquarian and other learned societies in France, as elsewhere in Europe, that is, of amateur intellectuals and collectors working in an intellectual environment that was only then beginning to institutionalise itself. At this early stage, French universities were hardly involved directly at all in either teaching or research in anthropology, and it was a museum, the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, that established the first chair in anthropology in 1855, in cultural as well as physical anthropology (Gaillard 2004: 85). Later in the nineteenth century, however, in 1878, the first anthropological museum was

4

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

founded in France, namely the Musée d’Ethnographie, housed in the Trocadéro, by which name it was commonly known.4 Although initially focused on pre-Columbian New World artefacts − the chief interest of its first curator, Ernest-Théodore Hamy − the expansion of the French Empire soon encouraged collection elsewhere and, along with it, basic fieldwork yielding highly factual ethnographic monographs. This promoted rather than initiated such activities, which were already going on, for example, in Senegal in the 1850s, where General Faidherbe was already busy producing anthropological and linguistic studies of its indigenous peoples (Gaillard 2004: 86). In addition, many missionaries were also active in this period in various parts of the world, such as Jean Kemlin, who went out to the Bahnar in Vietnam in the same decade, long before French rule had been established there. Apart from a crude colonial-style evolutionism, none of this work can be considered theoretically informed. However, methodologically attempts were already being made to supplement earlier, purely biological approaches to the study of humankind with a specific perspective on culture (promoted, among others, by Hamy and his colleague in setting up the Trocadéro museum, Armand de Quatrefages), as well as to treat the collection and display of anthropological objects as scientific, not artistic, in character. Even at this early stage, therefore, a certain separation between ethnography and theory can be discerned in France. Other currents in the nineteenth century can be linked to France itself, or at any rate Europe, rather than growing overseas empires. In early sociology of the mid-nineteenth century, Frédéric Le Play’s surveys, made as part of his roving work as a mines inspector, produced insights into, or at least theories concerning, the nature, evolution and sustainability of family forms. Perhaps of greater influence were studies into the folklore of France in this period and later. Though dating back well into the nineteenth century, like early anthropology, folklore studies were also stimulated subsequently by the founding of a museum, this time the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, by Georges-Henri Rivière and André Leroi-Gourhan in 1937. A good example is Louis Dumont’s study La Tarasque, a festival in southern France (Dumont was at one time an employee of the aforesaid museum). The main figure here, though, is Arnold van Gennep, a highly active fieldworker whose major work in sheer scale was his multivolume Manuel de folklore française contemporaine (1938–1958). However, as can be seen from Giordana Charuty’s chapter in this volume, van Gennep is really a transitional figure who attempted to transform the folklore of France from a concern with origins and survivals to synchronic studies that were more in tune with postevolutionist trends in anthropology more generally. In doing so, he

Introduction

5

resisted the attempts of the French political right to enlist folklore for its own nationalist agenda, as well as becoming almost a structuralist avant la lettre in his most famous work, Les rites de passage (1909; on ritual forms in the world in general). For Susan Rogers, this fusion of folklore and anthropology still informs the anthropology of France itself, partly because of a desire to challenge sociological studies of the death of rural France by stressing the uniqueness and continued viability of such communities (2001: 490–91). Indeed, some of the figures treated in this volume took part in studies of French communities before moving on to fieldwork in other parts of the world (Bastide, Bernot, Dampierre, Dumont). But also, writers like Françoise Zonabend and Martine Segalen used a combination (variously) of material culture, historical documents, oral histories and literatures, and anthropological fieldwork in their histories of the family in different parts of France – an interest that can be traced back to Le Play’s surveys. Yet even in Les rites de passage, what we have just called van Gennep’s structuralism was adventitious rather than programmatic, and facts predominate over grand theory in the bulk of his work, apart from an interest in the experience of fieldwork itself. This practice of separating fieldwork and theory persisted into the twentieth century in France, where anthropology as a distinct discipline developed differently than it did in Britain and America, especially in turning to professional fieldwork rather later. In the early twentieth century, however, fieldwork by amateur missionary and administrator ethnographers still continued. One representative figure is Léopold Sabatier, active in producing legalistic coutumiers, or compendia of tribal custom, in the highlands of Vietnam. Work in this part of the French Empire was supported by the École Française d’Extrème-Orient, set up in Hanoi in 1898 as a research institute. Perhaps the most famous figure here, however, is Maurice Leenhardt (see MacClancy, this volume), though he is not entirely typical: in returning to France and teaching anthropology as part of Mauss’s circle between the wars – after living in and writing on New Caledonia for many years – he, at least, can be said to have made the transition from amateur to professional status in his career.5 Nonetheless, in the main, fieldwork by professional academics came to France later than in Britain or America. One factor here was obviously the dominance of Durkheimian sociology, which for a long time was deeply suspicious of the term ‘anthropology’ and anyone or anything to do with it. First, it was seen as having been discredited by the speculations of the nineteenth-century British intellectualists-cumevolutionists – for Durkheimians, one of the main examples of wrongheadedness in the social sciences of the time. Secondly, it was too closely

6

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

connected with amateur, antiquarian folklore. This attitude is reflected in the group’s hostility to van Gennep, who sullied his reputation still further in their eyes by using ethnography to criticise Durkheim’s views on totemism (van Gennep 1920). It may also be found in the criticism that Robert Hertz, a leading Durkheimian scholar, faced from his own colleagues after conducting a brief period of fieldwork on the cult of St Besse in northern Italy in 1911 (Parkin 1996: 12, MacClancy and Parkin 1997). Consistently, even in the case of what had already long been a central anthropological topic like religion, the Année sociologique group saw their work as sociology, not anthropology, despite their increasing use of ethnography. After his uncle’s death, though, Mauss eventually overcame these scruples, at least in part. Conscious that French anthropology was falling behind British in this regard, he encouraged others to do longterm fieldwork in the 1930s without participating in any himself.6 This was reflected in, and perhaps also reinforced by, Mauss’s and others’ activities in teaching the virtues of ethnography to French colonial officers and trainees for administrative positions. Such activity, one assumes, would not give emphasis to theory. Mauss taught these courses at the Institut d’Ethnologie, which had been set up for the purpose by his friend Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and with which a whole range of key figures in the history of French anthropology were involved, including Leroi-Gourhan, Paul Rivet and Maurice Delafosse. Mauss’s Manuel d’ethnographie (1947), which has recently been translated (2007), was also linked to these activities (having been used for lecturing prior to publication). In fact, a scrutiny of some of his more programmatic statements indicates that he, more than anyone else except perhaps Marcel Griaule, was the probable source of the widespread focus on the facts and on ethnography in much French anthropology after the First World War. In the Manuel, Mauss calls ethnology ‘a science of facts and statistics’, its aim being ‘the knowledge of social facts’ (2007 [1947]: 7). Further, ‘comparative ethnography’ should be ‘based on comparison between facts, not between cultures’ (ibid.: 8). Earlier too, in an ‘Intellectual self-portrait’ evidently written to support his candidature to the Collège de France in 1930 (Mauss 1998), he states repeatedly that ‘the facts’, or alternatively ‘description’, have enjoyed the priority in his work over theory. Thus right at the start of this self-evaluation, he describes himself as ‘a positivist, believing only in facts’, and asserts that ‘descriptive sciences attain greater certainty than theoretical sciences’ (1998: 29). Similarly, in contrast to some of his other activities, at the Institut d’Ethnologie, ‘I have always confined my teaching to the purely descriptive’ (ibid.: 32). The main aim of himself and his collaborators over the past four years has

Introduction

7

been ‘to promulgate and often to establish the facts deriving from unclassified civilizations’ with a view to classifying them (ibid.: 34).7 Finally, ‘the only objective of the discipline to which I have devoted myself ’ has been to show ‘the place of social life ... in the life of humanity’ through ‘sensitive contact with the facts’ (ibid.: 42). Perhaps the admission that ‘discoveries and novelties were a constant delight’ (ibid.: 36), with the hint that processing them further through classification and theory were less exciting, had something to do with the development of this attitude. Certainly, in reading these formulations from Mauss’s pen, one acquires a distinct feeling that theory is secondary in his view of his own work and its aims – a surprising realisation, in the light of his long and intimate association with one of the supreme sociological theorists, his uncle Durkheim.8 Apart from Mauss’s teaching, another stimulus to anthropology in this period was the Colonial Exhibition, organised by Marshal Lyautey, a key French Empire-builder, and held at Vincennes outside Paris in 1931. A celebration as much as exhibition of the French Empire and its cultural variety, it attracted millions of visitors and stimulated both an interest in anthropology in the general public and a desire to do more fieldwork among a growing class of professional ethnographers (see L’Estoile 2003, 2007). Yet, this was also the period of expeditions and ethnographic travel at least as much as fieldwork in the Malinowskian sense, the former method sometimes being allied with diffusionism, as had been the case about a quarter of a century earlier with, for example, the Torres Straits expedition in Britain. Thus the famous Dakar-Djibouti expedition of the early 1930s, led by Marcel Griaule, was soon followed by Lévi-Strauss’s travels around the Amazon later in the decade, though the latter, of course, were put to the service of structuralism. As for Griaule, he did much to popularise anthropology in France, both before and after the Second World War, partly through his own charisma as a teacher and partly through the quite large cohort of his colleagues and students he gathered around him. Many of these were significant figures in their own right, such as Michel Leiris (who soon broke with him), but also Marcel Delafosse, Germaine Dieterlen, Denise Paulme and Jean Rouch (on the latter, see Paul Henley, this volume). Although Griaule himself has been accused of exploiting informants in questionable ways and of indulging in cultural reproduction rather than ethnographic reporting by deliberately staging ritual events, he abandoned his early diffusionism in favour of a focus on the field and a theorising of field methods.9 And under Griaule’s influence, members of this group at least spoke up for the validity of indigenous ideas and ways of life, often comparing them favourably with ‘Western civilisation’.

8

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

Although Griaule’s influence persisted after the Second World War, there was certainly a change of emphasis with the arrival of structuralism. This was a method rather than a theory in Lévi-Strauss’s own view, though not one specifically directed towards fieldwork. Nonetheless it rapidly came to be treated as a theoretical tendency, if not a school. Lévi-Strauss’s influences were many and varied, and were not conspicuously dominated exclusively by previous periods of anthropology in France. Of course, the Année sociologique school, especially Mauss, was a key influence, but so were the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobsen. In addition, the cultural anthropology, if not entirely the cultural relativism, of the Boas school influenced Lévi-Strauss, who had been exposed to it during his wartime exile from France at the New School of Social Research in New York. In his critiques too, his target was British structuralfunctionalism more than anything else in anthropology. Above all, his aim of creating a science of culture on the model of structural linguistics was explicitly a break with the past. This was also a period in which anthropology became more rooted in the universities in France, together with research groups in, for example, ORSTOM (Organisation pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technique de l’Outre-Mer)10 and, perhaps most importantly, CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Lévi-Strauss himself was, of course, at the opposite extreme to ethnographic essentialism, using structuralist theory to explain ethnographic facts rather than vice versa (he is perhaps the most explicitly deductive of all major international anthropologists). His influence was such that the fieldwork of others and the facts they collected began to be shaped and organised in relation to his theoretical ideas. Key figures here, who all did proper fieldwork in relation to various theoretical agendas, include Luc de Heusch, Françoise Héritier and Philippe Descola. As already noted above, in tandem and, through Maurice Godelier, even overlapping with structuralism was the work of mostly Althusser-inspired Marxists like Terray, Meillasoux and Rey, chiefly on West Africa. Here too, theory (Marxist this time) was used to explain ethnographic facts rather than vice versa. With structuralism and Marxism, therefore, French anthropology converged more with practice in other national traditions of anthropology in intimately uniting theory and practice, and even in subordinating the latter to the former. However, we should not forget that both structuralism and Marxism co-existed with other intellectual currents: the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan; the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre; the historical sociology and philosophy of Michel Foucault; the contemporary sociologies of Georges Gurvitch and Pierre Bourdieu; postmodernism; archaeology and material culture; the alternative, non-structuralist anthropologies

Introduction

9

of Georges Balandier or Eric de Dampierre; the cognitive anthropology of Dan Sperber and the continuance of ethnographic essentialism in such figures as Rouch, Lucien Bernot, André-Georges Haudricourt (all treated in this volume) and Georges Condominas.

French studies of fieldwork in French anthropology To what extent have these issues − namely the part fieldwork has played in the history of French anthropology and its relationship to theory − been addressed in France itself? In fact, several important publications have recently tackled these issues from various points of view. Thus Claude Blanckaert has produced a historical perspective on the transformation of the status of the observer in the course of the past three centuries in a collection of studies of texts, basically French, which enact research directives and codify the empirical work of travellers and, after them, researchers (Blanckaert 1996). Daniel Céfaï has brought together fourteen classic British and American texts, translated into French, on the subject of the field, participant observation and ethnographic description, with an important postface devoted especially to French works on these questions (Céfaï 2003). Four manuals directed at students on methods of enquiry have also appeared.11 Moreover, the last ten years have seen a revival of studies on the social sciences in colonial situations which take the view that colonialism was ‘constitutive’ of these disciplines rather than ‘disqualifying’ them as legitimate modes of intellectual enquiry. Thus four recent studies deal with the research actors, colonial administrators, indigenous scholars, official and unofficial researchers, and institutions involved in colonial research.12 In plunging actors into the heart of colonial realities, the field appears as a crucial experience to be taken into account in reconstructing the history of the social sciences. Benoît de L’Estoile in particular (see notes 4 and 12) has focused on the links in France between anthropological museums, anthropology as a ‘scientific’ discipline and the politics of empire and, more recently, on global multiculturalism and the place of France within it. His period therefore begins with the Colonial Exhibition of 1932 and the creation of the Musée de l’Homme six years later, and ends with the transfer of the latter’s collections to the new Musée du Quai Branly in 2005. He is especially critical of claims that such museums are all about displays of alterity, pointing out how, instead, they really represent western ideas of the Other rather than the Other itself, and also seeing continuity, not a break, in the transition from the Trocadéro to the Quai Branly. This, of course, is a dilemma for anthropology generally, and it is especially significant in fieldwork, where not only are facts and impressions

10

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

collected, but also the Other is confronted on a human level of mutual comprehension and incomprehension. For L’Estoile, therefore, museums should be sites for the display of relations between collectors and collected, and avoid either an explicit focus on the Other or a concealed focus on western perspectives of the Other. These works have done something to make good the lack of any French histories of French anthropology, a lack highlighted, for example, by Jean Jamin in the introduction to a collection (Copans and Jamin 1994 [1978]) of very early texts produced under the auspices of the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mention should also be made of the series Terre Humaine, published in Paris by Plon over many years, the focus of which was precisely the publication of ethnographies in French.13 Nonetheless, all this is still something of a closed book to the world outside France. While we do not engage directly with these texts here, we do seek to supplement them with a wholly English-language perspective on the particularities of the relationship between ethnographic practice and theory in French anthropology.

The present collection The approach adopted in addressing this question was to ask French and British anthropologists to compose intellectual biographies of French anthropologists, some of them little known, if at all, to the Anglo-Saxon public, yet who offer particular potential in exploring the relationship between ethnography and theory. We chose to focus on actual practitioners of anthropology rather than on movements or schools, meaning that, in relation to his or her subject, each contributor has had to make more complex a picture that the ‘international commerce of ideas’ (Cusset 2008 [2003]) tends to simplify, even to caricature. Hence the eclectic character of this gallery of portraits when compared to either a manual of ethnographic practice or a history of the discipline. Also, despite Rivet’s involvement with the Trocadéro and the interests of some of those featured here in material objects (especially Bernot and Haudricourt), this is not a volume about French museology. Thus the present collection is selective rather than comprehensive. It is unfortunate that there is no chapter on a female French anthropologist. This partly reflects the principle we chose to adopt of not featuring any living anthropologists in this collection, which restricted us in large measure to the middle and early histories of French ethnography – and these periods in France appear to have had even fewer women fieldworkers than the British and American schools. Many

Introduction

11

French women ethnographers, now deceased, such as Germaine Dieterlen and Denise Paulme, were linked to Griaule, a circle represented here by Jean Rouch. Outside this circle was Germaine Tillion, a much discussed figure in France itself in recent years for her fieldwork in the Aurès area of Algeria and her political activism as a supporter of and mediator for the resistance movement against French rule, as well as having been a resistance fighter earlier against the Germans in the Second World War (see Todorov and Bromberger 2002, Todorov 2007). A main thrust of these chapters is therefore historical. Is the ethnographic essentialism of many of the figures dealt with in this volume now similarly historical? In fact, given what has been identified as the general tendency for anthropologists to refrain from large-scale comparisons and theoretical statements today (Gingrich and Fox 2002), with a concomitant concentration on the facts of specific ethnographic situations, ethnographic essentialism appears rather to be alive and kicking in at least some quarters. In addition, of course, it cannot be said that the fundamental problems of doing fieldwork have gone away, nor that the basic process itself has changed markedly since the time those discussed in this collection were themselves in the field, despite the distinctive attitudes of many of them to fieldwork. The time therefore seems right to draw attention to this tendency once more in the context of the past practices of some though not all adherents of the French tradition, in the belief that, in a more general way too, their experiences and their own telling of them remain very relevant to contemporary anthropology. A review of the chapters follows, which are arranged broadly according to the ethnographic areas in which their subjects mainly or wholly worked. The first chapter in the collection focuses on a key figure in the transition from folklore to a recognisable anthropology of symbolism and ritual, Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957). Charuty shows that van Gennep did not accept his dismissal by the Durkheim school as a ‘mere folklorist’ lying down. Indeed, it produced a reaction in him which conceded nothing to the theoretical peculiarities of his rivals, while outperforming them in relation to his greater ‘feel’ for ethnographic realities and the problems involved in both eliciting and reporting these problems in the field. Being almost entirely armchair anthropologists, his rivals were especially vulnerable to attacks of this kind. Much of this reaction was formulated in the Chroniques pages of the Mercure de France, but these pages were not only critical of others, they also put forward a prescription for how fieldwork in a literate or semi-literate society should be carried out. Thus neutral observation should be coupled with informants’ memories and life histories; as a fieldworker, one should maintain an intellectual distance, while also being exposed fully to the

12

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

exotic world one is examining; and such experiences should be embodied in one’s own self, in a manner that almost suggests a form of phenomenology. Also, van Gennep addressed the often problematic status of fieldwork questions, answers and other methods. For example, in talking about ‘fake rituals’ – that is, performances in the form of festivals put on to support conservative nationalist agendas in rural France – he came close to the idea of the ‘invention of tradition’ (for van Gennep, only the rituals the people put on for themselves were ‘authentic’). Charuty points out the centrality of the rite in van Gennep’s approach to the whole ethnographic project. For him ritual is, among other things, a manifestation of universal structure, marked not only by the famous three stages, but also by transition and by the marginality of the central, liminal stage. It is hard, therefore, to avoid remarking on the double irony that van Gennep himself represents not only intellectual transition in his work, but also marginality in respect of his own institutional destinies. In his chapter, Peter Parkes examines the contribution of two colonial functionaries, Adolphe Hanoteau and Aristide Letourneux, to the early ethnography of the Kabyle Berbers of Algeria and to the distinctive genre of what Parkes calls ‘canonical ethnography’ (indigenous juridical documentation and its analytical interpretation). This was based on legal ‘canons’ or qawanin, a neglected but valuable form of early ethnographic documentation, and the prototype of later administrative ethnographies in sub-Saharan Africa. The work of these two officials, comprising a gazetteer of general information about the area and its people, together with their legal customs and social systems, was collected through a peculiarly intensive kind of ‘dialogical’ fieldwork in the 1860s and published in the early 1870s. Significant here was their key informant, Si Mula, a Sayyid ‘alim or religious scholar and Hanoteau’s khoja or interpreter-cum-secretary at Fort-Napoléon in Kabyle. Si Mula became, in Parkes’s words, ‘at least an equal co-author’ with the two Frenchmen, though they do not openly credit him as such. Parkes describes the ‘canonical ethnography’ of Hanoteau and Letourneux as severely factual or documentary, largely eschewing historical contextualisation. Nonetheless Hanoteau, the main author, was well aware of the extent to which French conquest and military rule had already disrupted Kabyle society, an account of whose traditional social organisation he was therefore keen to draw up. In effect, therefore, while historical or reconstructive in intent, the treatment is paradoxically synchronic in presentation, describing an independent Kabyle society on the eve of its conquest. Although the two authors’ juridical approach would be displaced by Maussian transactional ethnographies of the inter-war period, not even

Introduction

13

Bourdieu was able to escape their influence entirely, despite his surface criticism of their ‘legalistic’ prejudice. Indeed, as Parkes finally notes, there is reason to believe that some, at least, of Bourdieu’s fundamental ideas as perhaps the most famous ethnographer of the Kabyles were originally forged in reactive opposition to the rule-based ‘canonical ethnography’ of Hanoteau and Letourneux – a ‘theory of practice’ that both complements and contrastively highlights the significance of the juridical fieldwork they pioneered. Paul Henley’s chapter deals with a figure who is probably the most famous ethnographic film-maker of them all, Jean Rouch (1917–2004). Seen already as somewhat passé in France by the 1980s, it was precisely at this time that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ anthropology began to discover Rouch as a precursor of post-modernism. As Henley makes clear, however, this is not entirely what it seems, and in many respects Rouch actually belongs to a specifically French tradition of ethnography dating back to the surrealists as much as to Mauss, but also reflecting the strong though not overwhelming influence of his doctoral supervisor, Marcel Griaule. Henley discusses the ways in which the experience of working with Griaule did and did not influence Rouch. While Rouch refrained from deliberately antagonising informants in the way that Griaule frequently did, and stressed their co-authorship with him in what he saw as a genuinely collaborative effort (the source of his later being claimed as a prophet of ‘dialogical anthropology’), he also relied on provocation in the ethnographic encounter – but only by the camera itself. For Rouch, the fact of it not being possible to hide the camera’s presence was creative, not disadvantageous, since what it provoked in the informant was a reaction different from, but at the same time deeper than, normal behaviour, uncovering the truth underlying the superficiality of the everyday world. Henley also shows, though, that Rouch took his ideas about the impact of the camera a great deal further than the simple claim that it is provocative to the subjects. Filming also allows the film-maker to immerse him- or herself in the culture. If film can provoke trance in the natives, as Rouch claimed it actually did in at least one case, the filmmaker him- or herself can also be provoked by the act of filming to enter a trance. Hence Rouch’s famous ciné-trance, conceived as a metaphor for the film-maker’s own cultural creativity. At the very least, just as, for the Songhay, spirit possession changes the medium’s experience of the world, so for Rouch the film-maker is changed by filming it. In other words, in Rouch’s conception, these processes of collaboration between author and subjects involved a performative element that goes beyond the merely verbal exchange implicit in the conventional Anglo-Saxon conception of ‘dialogical’ anthropology.

14

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

Margaret Buckner’s chapter on Eric de Dampierre (1928–1997) is one of a minority in this collection in which the pupil discusses the work and career of the master (also Toffin on Bernot). Like Bernot, Bastide and Dumont, Dampierre began his career with a study of a French rural community, in his case as part of a multi-disciplinary social-science research team. His life-long fieldwork, from 1954 to the late 1980s, was among the Nzakara, in what is now the Central African Republic. As a French aristocrat, he was clearly comfortable living in a highly stratified and class-conscious African society, while recognising that they seemed less able to cope with the consequences of colonialism and modernity than their close neighbours the Zande, otherwise a very similar society, made famous through Evans-Pritchard’s earlier work among them. Dampierre’s work therefore provides us with a little-known but very valuable French counterpart to Evans-Pritchard’s famous monograph (1937). Dampierre identified what he called ‘thinking in the singular’ as a key aspect of Nzakara thought, this being perhaps the most original of his findings, which he saw as pervading all domains of Nzakara life, from politics to music. It stresses the unique, the incommensurability of any two beings, so that, for example, one cannot count people, nor classify them, for fear of treating them all the same. Although, in his sophisticated attempt to define this mode of thought, he may have turned to Greek philosophy, it was still his experiences among the Nzakara, his observations of their practices, discourse and material culture, that had launched his research in the first place. The Lévi-Straussian flavour of the title of his last work, Une esthétique perdue (Dampierre 1995), links Dampierre with that generation of anthropologists who had the feeling that they were living at the end of an era, the traces of which they wanted to preserve as lucidly and faithfully as possible. Not the least of Dampierre’s legacies, however, is his founding and support of the Department of Ethnology and Prehistory in the University of Paris-X at Nanterre, to the west of the city, perhaps the major university department dedicated to anthropology and to training anthropologists in the whole of France, where one of the present editors received her own training and with which she continues to be associated. Laura Rival’s chapter on Paul Rivet (1876–1958) discusses a now neglected figure who was one of the key figures institutionally in the anthropology of France in the inter-war period. His work with the Institut d’Ethnologie and later at the Trocadéro (including the Musée de l’Homme) gave him a pivotal role in the organisation of anthropology in France between the two world wars, not far behind those of Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl, with both of whom he cooperated closely and shared many aims for the promotion of French anthropology.

Introduction

15

A pupil of literature and philosophy at school who then trained as a doctor, Rivet spent five years in the early twentieth century conducting polymathic fieldwork and collecting as part of a French geodesic expedition to Ecuador, with which, together with Colombia, he was to be associated for the rest of his life. Rivet can hardly be described as an exemplary fieldworker from the point of view of post-Malinowskian anthropology. This was basically because he had no direct contact with the native population, but used what Rival calls ‘indirect’ methods of enquiry, interviewing intermediaries who were in the happy but selfdeceptive position of ‘knowing’ the natives without having to question them about anything. In many respects, Rivet seems to have been mainly an observer, ‘collecting, classifying and comparing’, in Rival’s words. He rarely if ever asked questions about native meanings or ideas – he had little interest in religion, for instance, except to see in it an example of the ignorance that was holding the natives back. Here we have the Third-Republic scientific mind finding fault with Amerindian society – especially for its ignorance born of religious mysticism and superstition – while at the same time rejecting race as an explanation for difference in favour of a humanism that unites us all as equal and equivalent. In view of what has been said about the links between modern French identity and a generalised humanity (e.g. Dumont 1986), it is perhaps not surprising that we also find a focus in Rivet’s work on the generic human condition rather than the specifics of different cultures. Although Alfred Métraux (1902–1963) was born in Switzerland, brought up largely in Argentina and later became an American citizen, he belongs to the French tradition of anthropology primarily by virtue of the institutional side of his training: taught by Mauss and Rivet in the 1920s, his theses on the TupÍ-GuaranÍ of Brazil were submitted in Paris. However, as Peter Rivière notes in his chapter on him, he was hardly influenced intellectually by Mauss, nor even by Rivet, who supported him in his career early on. Instead Métraux fell under the spell of the Swedish ethnologist Nils Erland Nordenskiöld, adopting especially the latter’s tracing of trait distributions across one or more ethnographic regions and his theoretically uncontextualised treatment of ethnographic data. Rivière argues that Métraux saw himself primarily as a collector of facts, retaining a strict and almost nineteenth-century demarcation between this activity and the wider comparison or theorising done by others in the library or study. As a result, there is little or no contextualisation or analysis in his own writings, which are rather of the nature of compilations. This apparent hostility to theory indicates a mind that is not prepared to speculate over what cannot be known concretely. Yet

16

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

Métraux’s attitude to fieldwork and the collection of data through it was not entirely straightforward. On the one hand, he doubted whether the collection of ethnographic facts could ever be truly scientific, mainly because he felt that the civilised mind cannot readily grasp them. At the same time, not only did he frequently complain about local conditions in the field, he felt that ethnographers – including himself implicitly – were essentially misfits in their own societies. He was clearly somewhat prone to romanticising the people he studied, in a manner which seems to have been fashionable in French anthropology for a time (Rivière mentions Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques, and some of Pierre Clastres’ work is in a similar vein; cf. Colchester 1982). Like Lévi-Strauss, Métraux praised what he saw as the neolithic in the native South American, which he also considered as in some sense the end point of human happiness in human evolution, not least because he saw it as being on the verge of disappearing. Perhaps it was this feeling of witnessing the disappearance of a way of life he much admired, as much as the sense of his having received little recognition for his life’s work, that led him apparently to take his own life in 1963. Like some other figures dealt with in this book (Dumont, Bernot, Dampierre), Roger Bastide (1898–1974) took part in an early study in France itself, this time on Armenian immigrants in the town of Valence. However, being already interested in mysticism, and in 1938 finding himself a professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil in succession to Lévi-Strauss, he embarked on a long-term though intermittent study of candomblé in the northeast of the country. This brought him into contact with Pierre Verger, who became a life-long friend and collaborator. Bastide and Verger shared a belief in the importance of experience in fieldwork, including the idea that one could not understand something like possession without going through it oneself. In addition, they both rejected the standard view of northeast Brazilian culture being an original form born of acculturation and religious syncretism: Verger’s life-long concern in particular was to prove to AfroBrazilians the Africanness of their cultic practices. Although it was mysticism that was the focus of Bastide’s interest, it was ironically the sceptic Verger who went furthest into the candomblé as a religious experience: Bastide stopped halfway out of fear for his own sanity if he were to allow his grip on reality to be loosened by continuing. Nonetheless Bastide felt able to proclaim ‘Africanus sum’, and, as with Griaule’s defence of African religion as represented by the Dogon, he developed a view of Afro-Brazilian religion as being comparable in its sophistication to any of the religions of ‘civilisation’. Moreover, there is something similar here to the Rouchian ciné-trance described by Henley (this volume): in both cases, the trance state affects the ethnographer as

Introduction

17

much as the people he is studying. Bastide’s subsequent return to Paris in 1954 to work with Georges Gurvitch exposed him to yet more influences, though academic this time, including Marxism, a renewed view of Mauss, and Gurvitch’s own ‘depth sociology’. Between them, they became a sort of ‘opposition’ to Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, which was just then taking off in France. Despite the support given to him at key points in his career by LéviStrauss, Lucien Bernot (1919–1993) was no structuralist. Indeed, he once remarked that, while ethnographic monographs could always be treated structurally, structuralism was quite incapable on its own of reconstructing the original ethnography. He was also of the view that, in always being available to later generations of anthropologists, the ethnographic monograph invariably outlasts theory, which is subject to changes in intellectual fashion. His main influence was therefore the anti-structuralism and ethnographic essentialism of Leroi-Gourhan and some of his own more exact contemporaries among French Southeast Asianists, in particular André-Georges Haudricourt, but also Georges Condominas. Toffin describes Bernot as an acute fieldworker when it came to meticulous observation of what people do. Bernot advocated a focus on small-scale communities of 200–300 people, since he felt that in these cases the ethnographer could come to know everyone within them. His main focus was on technology and its relation to society, and later on ethnobotany (reflecting Haudricourt’s influence). This factual concentration in his work recalls Rivet and is similarly diffusionist in its methods, if not explicit theoretical orientation. This aspect is perhaps reflected mainly in the ethnolinguistic atlases Bernot created, which traced the distribution of key words across vast swathes of Southeast Asia, but also in his use of written sources for purposes of historical reconstruction and his frequent citation of diffusionist geographers. Fundamentally, though, he was what Toffin describes as a ‘ruralist’ by both upbringing and professional interest, that is, a specialist in rural, agricultural communities, which, the world over, had similarities that link them and distinguish them from urban society: thus the people of Nouville (northeast France) have more in common with Burmese peasants than with Parisians – one respect in which he disagreed with his friend Haudricourt’s stress on the differences among rural communities in the world at large. André-Georges Haudricourt (1911–1996) was nonetheless another ‘ruralist’, a country-born child who, because of ill health, was educated first by his mother and subsequently by himself. Based on observational habits learned during his upbringing, combined with the experience of early fieldwork in Vietnam, Haudricourt developed not only an extreme focus on the facts, but what Bensa calls a ‘hyperrealist’ view of facts as

18

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

being restricted to what can be known through the senses alone. He accordingly accepted no psychological, sociological or intellectual interference with our own direct exposure to the world and experience of it, and he rejected notions such as the autonomy of representations and ideas (Durkheim), the social being projected on to nature (Durkheim and Mauss 1963 [1903]) or the symbolic transformation of nature by culture (Lévi-Strauss). The structuralist’s dualism of nature and culture is replaced by a close symbiosis between them in which they often imitate each other, though the latter is always rooted in the former, not vice versa. Haudricourt’s extended comparison between the Middle East and Far East in part relies on a distinction between the cultural predominance given respectively to plant and animal breeding, but nonetheless it is the different plant and animal ecologies of both areas that are ultimately the bases of the distinction. Thus in the Middle East, animal herds and wheat both originated outside human environments and had to be subdued and controlled by humans, whereas in the Far East (actually in this example Melanesia) there was a situation in which humans, plants and animals started out living symbiotically in the same environment. From this distinction, Haudricourt derives different ideas of religion, social authority and hierarchy: thus in the Middle East the gods are remote, but in Melanesia they are all around one. Bensa uses the term ‘functional historicism’ to characterise Haudricourt’s focus on origins and history, by which is meant both the biological history of particular species and the histories of distinct human populations in distinct environments. And, as with some other ethnographers discussed in this introduction, such as Bernot and Rivet, the focus on the facts stresses the particular over the general, the ethnographically specific over the universal. In contrast to many of the other anthropologists featured in this volume, Louis Dumont (1911–1998), an exact contemporary of Haudricourt, discussed here by Robert Parkin, is known for his theoretical contributions and more literature-based writings at least as much as for his fieldwork. Nonetheless his fieldwork in south India formed a significant part of his own intellectual development and led to one of the classic ethnographies of the region. Dumont’s subsequent sojourn in Oxford under Evans-Pritchard influenced his anthropology quite profoundly, and in many ways he is the most ‘Anglo-Saxon’ of the figures treated in this collection. Yet the earlier influence of Mauss remained strong, while the Tamils, whom he regarded as ‘born sociologists’, influenced him in developing his view that a form of structuralism was the key to understanding Indian society and culture. His use of pure/impure as a key ‘hierarchical’ opposition in the values

Introduction

19

of the caste system ultimately replaced the simple binary oppositions of Lévi-Strauss, being focused on values as more important than symbolism, and recognising the significance of social action while still subordinating it to ideology and structure. These ideas were enshrined especially in his most famous work, Homo hierarchicus, on the Indian caste system (Dumont 1966, 1980). After India and Oxford, Dumont returned to Paris to pursue comparisons between India and the West, which also involved contrasts between hierarchy and egalitarianism, holism and individualism, and indeed two sorts of individual, the individual-outside-the-world and the individual-within-the-world. This move was also a shift from fieldwork to writings, from observation to ideas, and in its approach it reflected the influence of Mauss in the latter’s writings on such themes as the gift and the person, where world history was the framework within which both the topic and the related arguments were set. Finally, in his last major work on German ‘ideology’ (Dumont 1994 [1991]) or, as we might say today, ‘identity’, he demonstrated that even in the West individualism was not all of a type: in particular, the German stress on personal self-development being subordinated to a holistic state is opposed to the ‘individual-against-the-state’ model of Anglo-Saxon and French libertarian philosophies. Jeremy MacClancy’s chapter on Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954) is a little different from some of the others in this volume, since it discusses this quasi-iconic, early, pre-Malinowskian fieldworker through the eyes of his later commentators. Born at Montauban in 1878 into a French Protestant family – the latter circumstance he shares with Roger Bastide – Leenhardt wrote an early thesis on the ‘Ethiopian’ church movement in southern Africa. However, he spent most of his career until well into the 1920s as a Protestant missionary in New Caledonia. Leenhardt’s interests were many, but they included especially Melanesian languages in and around New Caledonia and – what he is most famous for – his very striking and imaginative analyses of personhood and myth. As MacClancy shows, he has been claimed successively as a post-structuralist in the manner of Clifford and Marcus, a Jungian phenomenologist, a Heideggerian existentialist and a Strathernian advocate of the decentred nature of personhood in Melanesia – the first and last, at least, very much ‘before his time’. More likely though, as MacClancy himself suggests, he was basically just a man of his own time. One can argue that his patent sympathy for the indigenes was romantically inclined towards his primitivist vision of their way of life, rather than concerned with their progress as such (cf. Métraux or Clastres), while his intellectual perspective was fundamentally

20

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

evolutionist, despite his awareness of Maussian holism. If he seems anti-structuralist, therefore, it is because of his already outmoded intellectual position.14

Unity in diversity? What common features emerge from a comparative reading of the chapters in this collection? First, as already noted, it is striking how many of these figures can be considered anti-theoretical fact-gatherers and compilers, at least in their own view of their activities. Certainly Hanoteau, Rouch, Rivet, Métraux, Bernot and Haudricourt, in their very different ways, exemplify this tendency. Yet theory is not necessarily so very far away, even in these cases. For example, given their interests in the distribution of words in particular, Rivet and Bernot can be seen as being informed by diffusionist methods and assumptions in their handling of the facts they collected. Moreover, the very emphasis on ethnographic essentialism can be regarded as a theoretical or at least philosophical position in itself, as it clearly was for Haudricourt. As we have remarked already, van Gennep, with his project of converting folklore into anthropology; Dampierre, whose non-structuralist approach was informed at least in part by his background in sociology; and Dumont, with his revisionist structuralism, all had their own particular theoretical focuses. It is also remarkable how many of these fact-gatherers seem to have had rather limited abilities as fieldworkers: thus Hanoteau, Rouch, Rivet, Métraux, Bastide and Bernot had to rely largely on interpreters, Rivet and Bastide on local intellectuals and other sorts of intermediary too, while Métraux seemed to spend a lot of time complaining about actual fieldwork conditions. Nonetheless most of the figures treated here spent long periods of their lives in the field, though Dumont and Bastide perhaps least of all. Moreover, arising out of this dedication to the collection of facts are also a number of real commitments on the part of many of these figures to the peoples they encountered, to the latter’s contemporary circumstances and conditions, and to their relations with them. There is a whole range of attitudes here, from the relatively passive and neutral to genuine if selective political activism. At one end of the scale is Dumont, whose commitment was fundamentally restricted to achieving ethnographic understanding with the aid of particular theoretical frameworks within an overall ethos of intellectual neutrality. For example, in defending this principle in relation to phenomena that may shock western sensibilities in field situations elsewhere in the world, Dumont frequently argued that to

Introduction

21

seek to understand, say, the caste system in India or female circumcision in parts of Africa did not necessarily mean that one approved of them (e.g. Dumont 1979). Although Bernot and Rouch clearly developed close and mutually supportive personal relationships with their principal subjects and greatly admired their cultural traditions, neither evinced any deep political commitment to their respective peoples. Métraux hardly goes beyond a nostalgia for the neolithic, which Amerindians represented for him, though as Peter Rivière points out (personal communication), later in life he became somewhat more sympathetic to the peoples he encountered through his activities in assessing war damage in Germany and his involvement with UNESCO. Conversely, while Dampierre merely seems to record the changes associated with colonialism among the Nzakara, albeit with a tinge of nostalgia, others – like Hanoteau among the Kabyle and Leenhardt in New Caledonia – tried to protect the native population from the worst consequences of colonialism. At the other end of the scale is Rivet, the only figure here actually to become a politician – not in South America against colonialism, but in France in the 1930s, against fascism. Otherwise his self-appointed role was to affirm the positive in the practice and status of métissage and to record and discuss the conditions of the Amerindians he encountered from the ‘scientific’ perspective of a social scientist of the Third Republic, even though his direct personal contact with them, because of his habitual use of intermediaries, was minimal. Finally, both Rouch and Bastide hailed the experience of the (ciné-)trance as a fulfilment of the ethnographic experience that was almost mystical for them; yet the fulfilment they sought was strictly their own, rather than intended to be of any use to those whose cults they were taking part in and recording. Exposure to the field, and even one’s personal bodily experience of it, was also important to van Gennep, though as a tool of ethnographic enquiry rather than a means of personal discovery. Nonetheless it was perhaps this more personal and/or political commitments that replaced theory as a goal of fieldwork in the minds of some of these figures. At all events, we argue that, while some French ethnographers are scarcely any different from their colleagues elsewhere when it comes to relating facts to theory, very many others have dedicated themselves to the former to the exclusion, in whole or in part, of the latter. There can be no question, of course, of the tremendous contribution of French intellectuals in many disciplines to the enrichment of anthropological theory and model-building worldwide. Yet ethnographic practice informs anthropology in France too, often overshadowed by the theorists or neglected entirely, especially abroad, but involving a variety of genuine commitments to data

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

22

collection, exotic cultures, ethnographic subjects as fellow human beings, one’s relations with them or just the personal experience of fieldwork. Amongst other things, this makes the study of fieldwork a perfectly valid and highly productive way of approaching the history of French anthropology generally. That is because France is distinct not just for its theories and model-building but because, in explicit opposition to them, many a practical fieldworker has theorised away theory itself so that the facts of the ethnography can shine forth in all their splendour.

Notes 1. See also Cusset (2008 [2003]) on the invention of ‘French theory’ in America. 2. His epiphany has already been hinted at in print (Parkin 2005), where an attempt at a potted history of the whole of French anthropology can also be found. These originated in lectures given at the official opening of the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, in June 2002. 3. For a more extended account of these events, see Parkin (2005), in which key references can also be found. More recently, see also Sibeud (2008). 4. In 1938 the Trocadéro was transformed into the Musée de l’Homme by Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri Rivière. Its collections have since been transferred to the new Musée du Quai Branly (see l’Estoile 2003, 2007). 5. Jacques Dournes, sometimes known under his Sre name of Dam Bo, made a similar shift somewhat later (the Sre are located in the Vietnamese highlands). 6. We stress the long-term: Mauss did undertake one brief field trip to witness dances in Morocco. 7. Allen describes this as ‘a longstanding preoccupation that originated in part with the question of how to organise the Année sociologique’ (2007: 2), the house journal of the Durkheim group, in terms of the rubrics into which it should be divided. 8. It is hard to be sure whether, in talking about the facts, Mauss necessarily has in mind his uncle’s idea of the ‘social fact’ as defined quite narrowly (though also discussed at some length) in Chapter 1 of the Rules of sociological method (Durkheim 1982 [1895]). Nor is it clear to what extent Mauss was concerned with the construction of ‘facts’ in the epistemological sense. Mauss’s usage often seems to be purely normative in these passages. 9. The more questionable aspects of Griaule’s methods were the main reason for Leiris breaking with him; see Leiris (1934). A good account of Griaule in the field is Clifford (1983). 10. Now l’Institut pour la Recherche et le Développement (IRD). 11. In order of appearance, these include Laplantine (1996), Beaud and Weber (1997), Copans (1998) and Berger (2004). 12. In Revue d’Histoire des Sciences humaines, No. 10, 2004. For an innovative analysis, from a similar perspective, of the genesis of different ‘national anthropologies’ in Europe, the Americas and South Africa, and the linkage between them, see L’Estoile et al. (2005). 13. The second book in this series, which was founded by Jean Malaurie in 1955, was Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (1955) – not a conventional ethnography, any more than its author was an ethnographic essentialist, let alone a willing ethnographer;

Introduction

23

more typical, perhaps, of the genre is Georges Condominas’s L’exotique est quotidien: Sar Luk, Vietnam (1965). On this important series, see Aurégan (2001). 14. Laura Rival adds the information that ‘post-structuralist Amazonianist anthropology makes much of Leenhardt, especially the oft-quoted anecdote about the missionaries bringing to the Canaques not the soul but the body’ (personal communication).

References Allen, N.J. 2007. Introduction, in M. Mauss, Manual of ethnography, New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Aurégan, P. 2001. Des récits et des hommes: Terre humaine – un autre regard sur les sciences de l’homme, Paris: Nathan. Beaud, S. and F. Weber. 1997. Guide de l’enquête de terrain, Paris: La Découverte. Belmont, N. 1979. Arnold van Gennep: the creator of French ethnography, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Berger, L. 2004. Les nouvelles ethnologies, Paris: Nathan. Blanckaert, C. (ed.). 1996. Le terrain des sciences humaines: instructions et enquêtes (XVIII– XXème siècle), Paris: L’Harmattan. Céfaï, D. (ed.). 2003. L’enquête de terrain, Paris: La Découverte. Clifford, J. 1983. Power and dialogue in ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s initiation, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Observers observed: essays on ethnographic fieldwork, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Colchester, M. 1982. Les Yanomami, sont-ils libres? Les utopies amazoniennes, une critique: a look at French anarchist anthropology, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 13(2): 147–64. Condominas, G. 1965. L’exotque est quotidien: Sar Luk, Vietnam, Paris: Plon. Copans, J. 1998. L’enquête ethnologique de terrain, Paris: Nathan. Copans, J. and J. Jamin. (eds). 1994 [1978]. Aux origines de l‘anthropologie française: les mémoires de la Société des Observateurs de l’Homme en l’An VIII, Paris: Jean-Michel Place. Cusset, F. 2008 [2003]. French theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and co. Transformed the intellectual life of the United States [French theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze et Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis] (tr. J. Fort), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dampierre, E. de. 1995. Une esthétique perdue, Paris: Presses de l’ENS. Delacampagne, C. 1981. Louis Dumont and the Indian mirror, Royal Anthropological Institute News, 43: 4–7. Dumont, L. 1966. Homo hierarchicus: essai sur le système des castes, Paris: Gallimard (English trans. 1972, London: Paladin). ——— 1979. The anthropological community and ideology, Social Science Information, 18: 785–817. ——— 1980. Homo hierarchichus: the caste system and its implications (2nd ed.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ——— 1986. Essays on individualism: modern ideology in anthropological perspective, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ——— 1994 [1991]. German ideology: from France to Germany and back, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, É. 1982 [1895]. The rules of sociological method, London: Macmillan. Durkheim, É. and M. Mauss. 1963 [1903]. Primitive classification, London: Cohen & West. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

24

Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

Gaillard, G. 2004. The Routledge dictionary of anthropologists, London and New York: Routledge. Gingrich, A. and R.G. Fox (eds). 2002. Anthropology, by comparison, London and New York: Routledge. Laplantine, F. 1996. La description ethnographique, Paris: Nathan. Leiris, M. 1934. L’Afrique fantôme, Paris: Gallimard. L’Estoile, B. de. 2003. From the Colonial Exhibition to the Museum of Man: an alternative genealogy of French anthropology, Social Anthropology, 11(3): 341–61. ——— 2007. Le goût des autres: de l’Exposition colonial aux Arts premiers, Paris: Flammarion. L’Estoile, B., F. Neiburg and L. Sigaud (eds). 2005. Empires, nations and natives: anthropology and state-making, Durham: Duke University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1955. Tristes tropiques, Paris: Plon. MacClancy, J. and R. Parkin. 1997. Revitalization or continuity in European ritual? The case of San Bessu, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3(1): 61–78. Mauss, M. 1998. An intellectual self-portrait, in W. James and N.J. Allen (eds), Marcel Mauss: a centenary tribute, New York and Oxford: Berghahn. ——— 2007 [1947]. Manual of Ethnography (tr. D. Lussier), New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Parkin, R. 1996. The dark side of humanity: the work of Robert Hertz and its legacy, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. ——— 2005. The French-speaking countries, in F. Barth et al., One discipline, four ways: British, German, French, and American anthropology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rogers, S. 2001. The anthropology of France, Annual Review of Anthropology, 30: 481– 504. Sibeud, E. 2008. The metamorphosis of ethnology in France, 1839–1930, in H. Kuklick (ed.), A new history of anthropology, Oxford: Blackwell. Todorov, T. (ed.). 2007. Le siècle de Germaine Tillion, Paris: Seuil. Todorov, T. and C. Bromberger (eds). 2002. Germaine Tillion: une ethnologue dans le siècle, Paris: Actes Sud. van Gennep, A. 1909. Les rites de passage, Paris: Nourry. ——— 1920. L’état actuel du problème totémique, Paris: Ernest Letroux. ——— 1938–58. Manuel de folklore français contemporain, Paris: Picard, 9 vols.

Chapter 1

‘KEEPING YOUR EYES OPEN’: ARNOLD VAN GENNEP AND THE AUTONOMY OF THE FOLKLORISTIC Giordana Charuty

Introduction The intention of the exhibition and its catalogue, Hier pour demain, held at the Grand-Palais in Paris between June and September 1980, was to make the general public aware of the French ethnographic heritage on the precise occasion of l’Année du Patrimoine or the Year of the Patrimony (Cuisenier 1980). In the exhibition, a chronology of ethnographic precursors identified a succession of moments, from the mid-eighteenth century of L’Encyclopédie up until 1937, marked by two ‘monuments’. One was the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires. The other was the beginning of the publication of the Manuel de folklore français contemporain by Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957), an author in whom one recognises a double status: the last of the folklorists in the manner of the nineteenth century, and the first of contemporary ethnographers.1 However, certain other readings, recent and not so recent, have restored a greater degree of complexity with respect to the academic training, initial theoretical interests and intellectual sites that permitted van Gennep to work without respite for the recognition of a disciplinary field in the first half of the twentieth century (see Belmont 1974, Chiva 1987, Fabre 1992, Velay-Valentin 1999). After some schooling away from Paris, he received training in linguistics and the history of religions at the Ecole des Langues Orientales and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which he attended at the same time as Marcel Mauss. With Léon Marillier in particular, he discovered there the ethnographies of remote

26

Giordana Charuty

Figure 1.1. Arnold van Gennep, aged 80, lighting a bonfire on the summer solstice (21 June 1953), also the saint’s day of St John the Baptist. Taken by Pierre Soulier. Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée.

worlds and learned the art of rigorous criticism of ethnographic documents. However, while he shared the same intellectual interests and the same knowledge as British anthropologists, his relations with those who collaborated in L’Année sociologique were more conflictual. In the journal, his Mythes et legendes d’Australie of 1906, which he presented as a ‘study in ethnography and sociology’, was subjected to a critique, signed by Mauss, that was at least as severe as that of the sole work of van Gennep’s that British anthropology was to retain, namely Les rites de passage of 1909 (Mauss 1908, 1909). In response, the Mercure de France and the Revue de l’histoire des religions provided him with a platform to object to the use that Emile Durkheim had made of Australian ethnographic data in the latter’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912): I fear that M. Durkheim, despite his apparent care with ethnographic facts, only possesses a metaphysical sense, or, even more so, a scholastic sense; he accords a genuine reality to both concepts and words. Not having any sense

‘Keeping your eyes open’

27

of life, that is, any biological or ethnographic sense, he turns living phenomena and living beings into plants that have been dried scientifically, as in a herbarium. (2001: 94 )2

He repeated this criticism in his Etat actuel du problème totémique of 1920, to which Lévi-Strauss paid homage in his La pensée sauvage, saluting simultaneously his ‘innovatory audacity’ and his limitations for having remained, in his turn, the prisoner of ‘a traditional carving up’ of social institutions (1962: 213–15). Nonetheless, in the same period Mauss and van Gennep conducted similar diagnoses of the stagnation, in France, of the ethnography of the French domain or of remote worlds: fieldwork, museums, archives, teaching – none were worthy of the name. However, while the former entered the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at a very young age, the latter never obtained any university post apart from a few brief years, between 1912 and 1915, when he occupied the chair of ethnography at Neuchâtel. Here he reorganised the museum and arranged the first ethnographic congress in 1914, before being expelled for his lack of political discretion by casting doubt publicly on Switzerland’s neutrality during the war. What does one live off when one has no university position? In 1896, aged 23, van Gennep left France for four years to teach French in Poland. On his return to Paris in 1901, he entered the Ministry of Agriculture as head of translations – he mastered a dozen or so languages – and he lived materially from his contributions to journals and his translations. This did not prevent him from conducting a fivemonth enquiry in Algeria between 1911 and 1914 to make an inventory of the techniques and styles of Kabyle pottery, nor from publishing several theoretical essays, including the future, much celebrated Rites de passage (1909). Between 1904 and 1914, and again on the eve of the Second World War, he ran several journals ‘of ethnography and sociology’, ‘living folklore’ and ‘popular traditions’, as well as providing contributions to a large number of specialist journals on his own account, which still remain to be studied. Prefacing his 1967 English translation of Les demi-savants (van Gennep 1911, Needham 1967), Rodney Needham was the first to suggest that the publication of this brief pamphlet in 1911, a parody of the academic world, may not have been unconnected with this lack of institutional recognition. The hypothesis was taken up again in 1992 by Alan Dundes (1992: 4), who identified at least one amateur folklorist among these ‘semi-scholars’. Since then, other explanations have been suggested, which may be summarised quite briefly. The struggle that arose in France after 1925 for ethnology to be fully recognised as a university discipline produced a division into two

28

Giordana Charuty

camps. On the one hand, there was a conservative anthropology, the heritage of Le Play and de Broca, promoted by Louis Marin through several learned societies and two journals, L’Anthropologie and L’Ethnographie. Opposed to this was the Institut d’Ethnologie, with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Mauss, Marcel Cohen and Paul Rivet, which provided training for future researchers, travellers and colonial officers, while seeking to take over the university. This enterprise succeeded through the creation of degree certificates at the Sorbonne, the naming of Paul Rivet as Professor of Anthropology at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and Director of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and Mauss’s nomination to the Collège de France in 1931. A stranger to the Durkheim circle, van Gennep also remained on the margins of an analogous circle of ethnologists of France. Although he had played an essential role in the Congress of Popular Art organised in Prague in 1928 by the Société des Nations and the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, the following year he was kept away from the creation of the Société de Folklore Français and its journal of the same name, and in particular from the management of the Musée de Trocadéro, whose restoration Paul Rivet entrusted to Georges Henri Rivière. This activity prefigured the creation of the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires and from 1938 was continued by the teaching of the history of popular arts and traditions at the Ecole du Louvre. Building on the evidence already provided by Nicole Belmont (1974) and Isaac Chiva (1987), Daniel Fabre argues (1992) that van Gennep’s removal should lead one to reject the convergence, accepted up to that point, between the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires and van Gennep’s Manuel de folklore français contemporain, which instead he proposes to read as an ‘inverted monument’ with a highly polemical relationship with the principles that governed the ethnography and museography of the Musée. This reversal of perspective is supported by the discovery of another intellectual site where van Gennep published with great regularity between 1905 and 1949, namely his Chroniques in the journal the Mercure de France (see below). These have just become the object of a very useful if partial republication, which permits us to pursue alternative readings (van Gennep 2001). The work he produced in Mercure de France reveals the demands, difficulties and ambiguities of what would later be called ‘ethnology at home’. It was the author Rémy de Gourmont who in 1904 introduced van Gennep, then thirty years old, to the director of this cultural review, whose aim was to oppose all academic theories. The publication of van Gennep’s thesis, Tabou et totémisme à Madagascar (1904), had attracted the editor’s attention, and his bi-monthly Chroniques were to become one of the sites, on the margins of the university, of the definition and recognition of a

‘Keeping your eyes open’

29

discipline – which he continued, after many hesitations, to call ‘folklore’ – in its relations with the ethnography of non-western societies, the history of religions, prehistory and physical anthropology. These were not just reviews of recent publications but also, as Jean Marie Privat has stressed (2001), a weapon in the struggle to win autonomy with respect to other, better established scientific disciplines in order to train practitioners and distinguish good and bad academic practices in this discipline. There is also, like a watermark, a kind of intellectual biography which can be read through the memories of experiences, encounters, readings, research projects and hesitations over the methods and instruments to be preferred. This reveals, in the course of time, difficulties in reconciling a multiplicity of positions, which are not necessarily as opposed to one another as has been said, to the limits and impasses of ethnography in the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires.

The ethnographic position Van Gennep never ceased to repeat: ‘It therefore remains the case that ethnography, folklore, and popular traditions are no longer ethnic or political in kind, but designate the study of the mores and customs of all peoples, ancient and modern, and of all forms of civilisation’ (2001 [1947]: 220). In fact, in the early years, the Chroniques in Mercure de France put forward this universalist aim by making ethnographies of the African, Australian, Amerindian and European worlds converge, since, wherever the enquiry takes place, providing the conceptual categories of a rigorous description forms part of a general theory of culture. But although the reader is invited to approach the popular life of a French province and the life of the Nandi or the Masai with the same curiosity, the conversion of gaze required of the western observer in order to reconstitute the diversity of rural societies in Europe in a comparative manner can in no way be taken for granted: the requirement of descriptive objectification presupposes systematic submission to a unique form of lived experience in order to be able to produce alterity at home. ‘Keeping your eyes open’ Dispersed among these Chroniques can be found several narratives of the genesis of an ethnographic posture in van Gennep’s childhood. To begin with, there is his passion for collecting objects whose significance must be brought out as if they were the traces of previous periods and remote cultures, later known as prehistoric objects. On the other hand, when van Gennep was fifteen his father, a laryngologist, entrusted him with microscopic specimens; and even though the young van Gennep

30

Giordana Charuty

did not gravitate towards medical studies as his father had wished, he reported having retained his passion for biology. Finally, while a pupil at the lycée at Nice, he spent most of his time ‘doing bush school’, that is, actually experiencing a different way of conveying knowledge through elective affinities between boys of different ages. But the passage to ethnography – one of the numerous paradoxes in this itinerary – came after attempting the theoretical conceptualisation of totemism and above all of ritual activity, of which he was to say repeatedly that it constituted a sort of ‘internal illumination’ which permanently transformed his relationship with daily life. To see the most familiar things differently involves a double movement of removing oneself from the common sense of ordinary life and incorporating strictly localised ways of living and speaking by distancing oneself from them. Initially it was in Savoy, during his holidays as a child and an adolescent, that van Gennep busied himself with this exercise. Moreover, during the period of the Manuel, leading every informant through his memories and his juvenile experiences was to be erected into a principle of ethnographic enquiry. For the time being, ‘keeping one’s eyes open’ designated the first step, which he described in a Chronique of 16 October 1909, when he had just passed the summer doing fieldwork, having installed himself in the little town of Bonneville: And, with the thought of being useful to others who were busying themselves with regional ethnography, I will indicate here the method required: I situate myself with regard to the Savoyards as if they were savages and their land were located in the heart of Africa. I assume that nothing is known about them, and that I myself in particular am entirely ignorant of their language, houses, legends, etc. This amounts to keeping one’s eyes open all the time, to wonder at everything, to wish everything to be new and to take note of every observation. It will then suffice to check one’s personal observations against those of others and to let go of any useless ballast. In brief, it is necessary to put oneself in the right frame of mind, use the methods of an explorer thrown right into the middle of black or yellow populations, and to arrange one’s observations rigorously in series. (2001: 68)

The second step, that of apprenticeship, is objectivised in the same Chronique of 16 October 1909: As a temporary citizen of Bonneville, Haute-Savoie, I found myself shaking with laughter [je m’y suis gondolé] repeatedly that summer, as was appropriate. For you must realise that Bonneville is built in triangular fashion around a square which, according to the locals, has the form of a gondola [gondole]. At the centre of the square is an alley with beautiful plane trees and an old fountain; surrounding the plane trees, a triangle of wide paths, cleanly maintained; and making a tour of the square untiringly for

‘Keeping your eyes open’

31

some hours, going right down the middle of these paths, is to shake with laughter [se gondoler]: oh, the joys of small towns! (ibid.: 67)

In summary, it is a matter of testing very physically, in his body, his emotions, his thoughts, the impact of a landscape or a piece of architecture, of other ways of living in a place and the categories of thought borne by another language (a patois), as well as the attribution of intentionality to other beings than just humans. This is a position that connects the insistent interrogation of literary or aesthetic avant-gardes – ‘Where is one primitive? When is one primitive?’ – to the existence of other psychic states and other ways in which social life may function which are no longer linked to another place or a remote past, but identified very near to us, within ourselves. The claim of the specificity of this knowledge, derived from a double movement – establishing a distance while at the same time reincorporating local micro-societies’ own usages – was to be a constant feature of all these Chroniques. Reviewing the Manuel de folklore of P. Saintyves on 1 April 1937, he again wrote: It must be admitted that everyone has the right to consider the facts from the angle that pleases him the most; it would be ungracious of me – just because my temperament pushes me to take facts and people in hand, to massage them, and to have a horror for the fluid phraseology or the uncoiled metaphysics – to reproach someone else for preferring them … [But] I consider it inauspicious for a science of direct observation like ours to immure it in a verbal system and a study, when this requires fresh air, the bottle of white wine, disdain for what one is told, the diffusion of oneself among the mass, yet also the maintenance of the self as individualised as possible, without contempt for anything whatever, and without the idea that bookish instruction represents a superior human value. (ibid.: 189)

Apart from his criticism of de Saintyves there are other disagreements, those that opposed van Gennep to the Durkheimian sociologists from the outset. Saluting some years earlier, in 1931, the reissue of some of Robert Hertz’s papers by L’Année sociologique in Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et folklore (1928), van Gennep recalled the part he had played in the genesis of Hertz’s enquiry into the cult of St Besse: … one day I said to Hertz that to write [faire] a thirteenth book on the basis of [avec] twelve others was unworthy of him and that, reserving Savoy to myself, I advised him to ‘do’ Piedmont and go and live with the Alpine peasants before reconstructing the psychology of the Australians! […] Whoever wishes to learn what sociology could become in the hands of Robert Hertz, freed from the dogmas of the school, must read this volume. (2001 [June 1931]: 310)3

Giordana Charuty

32

Off the beaten track Roaming around the countryside, either chancing encounters or shifting methodically from village to village while knowing ‘by heart’ which items to document; sharing in the informal sociability of rural life while ridding oneself of bourgeois value hierarchies; paying attention to the determining role of highly individualised actors, as well as the sexual division of competences and knowledge; submitting oneself to a technical apprenticeship in the arts one intends to describe – these pieces of advice, distributed throughout the Chroniques and systematised in the Manuel, are insufficient to characterise a good ethnography. Whether one’s interlocutor is literate or not, the account of an enquiry must favour the same lifting of internalised forms of social distance and intellectual censure to reach, as in psychoanalysis, the unconscious cultural memory: In folkloristic practice, this means that it is not necessary to submit witnesses to a methodical interrogation as a judge would do. However, it is necessary to let them take short cuts and yield themselves up to reminiscences, which may seem only digressions, but which have the value of mnemotechnical prompts through associations of ideas. (van Gennep 1943, I: 60)

One can assess how innovative this method, which seems so familiar to us today, was then when one recalls the inquisitorial form of questioning, which, fifteen years earlier, Marcel Griaule had recommended in his instructions for researchers on the Dakar-Djibouti expedition.4 For van Gennep, as for modern anthropology, this mode of interaction is directly governed by the particular regime of thought which governs the facts of folklore, that is, ‘mores and customs’, a regime which he does not yet describe in terms of a symbolic logic but for which he accepts permanence and universality, while rejecting any theory of survivals: In folklore especially, it is necessary to take care not to presuppose scales of value, nor that participation is prior to logic. In reality, always and everywhere, people have used these two ways of thinking, and they continue to use them sometimes in certain moments or circumstances, sometimes in others. The two ways of reasoning and concluding, and as a consequence the two modes of action, are elements that are equally constitutive of and normal in the thought of the whole human species. (van Gennep 1943: 97)

Training the collectors The Chroniques respond to a pedagogical need on several levels. The readers of the Mercure de France are invited to become informants temporarily. But in addition, lacking the power to train university researchers, van Gennep seems to have dreamt of a regionalised national organisation, and to begin with he sets himself the task of

‘Keeping your eyes open’

33

stimulating literate amateurs to adopt rigorous methods of enquiry, as well as to identify learned societies and scholars who are already engaged in the practice of collecting, so as to transmit to them his requirements and experience. To both, the same advice returns like a leitmotiv: distrust exhaustive questionnaires, pay attention to details and beware of generalities that have no scientific utility. In addition, citing his own experience while reviewing the Ethnographic Congress of Neuchâtel: After trials, I have come to prefer to draw up questionnaires that are restricted, for example, just to the house, or to birth and death ceremonies, or to fairies, revenants and sorcerers, etc. It is better to do them several times, but then in great detail. (2001 [1 August 1914]: 105–9)

Beyond this attempt, there is a cartographic concern: being able to transfer all the ritual variants, hamlet by hamlet, on to a map of a scale of eighty to a thousand in order to draw up ‘a great descriptive work of rural, popular France’. But this attention to detail, this concern to keep one’s eyes open, also proceeds via an encouragement to multiply the descriptive instruments – notably drawing and photography – with precise instructions for the visual documentation of rituals, thus acknowledging that the image has descriptive powers beyond those of writing. Likewise, the quality of illustrations in publications – drawings, engravings, water colours – are the object of very careful remarks in his reviews, for, undoubtedly more than writing, they constantly risk being pervaded by stereotypes of rurality that screen out the actual diversity of modes of life. However, does not training amateur collectors, for want of training the professionals, amount to confirming a division of labour that partly contradicts the principle of the personal experience of defamiliarisation by reintroducing a cleavage between the point at which data are collected and that of their treatment? The rejection of regionalism The rejection of regionalism and the emblematic use made of cultural traits leads van Gennep to stimulate all Mercure de France’s readers to develop in their turn a different way of looking at and listening to ordinary life and its significant details as a mode of opposition to the forms of celebration of ‘traditionalism’. Reviewing a book entitled La Bretagne des druides, des bardes et des légendes in 1931, he affirms quite simply: This is probably a little book of propaganda like hundreds of others already in the literature called ‘regionalist’, which does more harm than good to folklore. For this is usually just a retarded folklore as adulterated as the chemical aperitifs we have these days. (2001: 311)

Giordana Charuty

34

And the brochure ‘Art populaire et loisirs ouvriers’, presented by the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle for the 1937 Exhibition, incurs, retrospectively, a double condemnation for its incompetence and reactionary ideology: Little by little, exhibitions of regional costumes, more or less faked, have been organised; and each year now, one sees filing through different towns, and right up to the cinema in Bourg-la-Reine, troupes of actors in costume representing the ‘French provinces’. These troupes sing arranged popular songs, invariably with accompaniment, which deprives these songs of their strictly vocal character; they dance rounds, farandoles, carols, rigaudons, bourrées and God knows what, on the boards, in a closed room, or on the Promenade des Anglais, without the prior stimulus of the work of haymaking or of harvesting, in the bawdy atmosphere of the wedding day, without the iridescent light of the barns hazy with dust, or the smokeblackened light of the rooms below. In brief, as the common people say, it’s a carnival, all right, but not so much fun as the proper one. (2001: 372)

Thus a militant position is affirmed, supported by its adherence to the non-Marxist left, in order to dissociate a culturally authentic popular heritage from conservative values which encourage the performance of rural customs that conform to clerical morality. But why, then, the regret that the leisure time activities of the peasants and workers should henceforward be directed towards the songs of the café or the radio?

Disciplinary frontiers To make people aware of ethnographic knowledge as a scientific discipline was all the more necessary, given that in the 1930s rural societies were made the objects of collective enquiries into social history, sociology and human geography, which van Gennep could not ignore. A concern for cartography formed a part of this project as a visual tool providing a demonstration of the autonomy of the ‘folkloristic’ that social anthropology would later recognise as the autonomy of the ‘symbolic’. Reviewing his own Folklore du Dauphiné (van Gennep 1932– 33) on 15 August 1933, he identified a general property: … those collective phenomena that are called folkloristic evolve according to an autonomous plan that is independent of geography, political organisation, diocesan organisation, economic differentiation or dialect, which obey laws that one might summarily call sociological, although uniquely nuanced. […] I have used ten or so methods simultaneously (experimental, statistical, cartographic, psychological, comparative etc.), and the image one thus obtains of a group like that of the peasants of Isère

‘Keeping your eyes open’

35

differs enormously from that which geographers, historians or novelists are able to give us, since the geographer subordinates man to the land, the historian the present day to the past, the romantic the normal to the abnormal. (2001 [15 August 1933]: 372)

This method has a demonstrative value when it allows the limited range of variants of a ritual designation or performance to be reconstructed. However, what had been a heuristic tool at a point in the foundation of the discipline would suddenly cease to be so once it had become an end in itself, precisely because of its failure to lead to a conceptualisation of the relational character of symbolic thought. The multiplication of points of enquiry simply led to a confirmation of the chance dividing up of differences and the superposition of internal boundaries. This method, born in Switzerland, did not lead to the preparation of a national ethnographic atlas in France. However, through spatial projection, it profoundly influenced the treatment of ritual or technical facts, a treatment which ought to have deconstructed the national territory in favour of a social description of the ‘regions’, a genuine measure of the understanding of the differences which are the object of ethnography. What always seemed relevant, on the other hand, was the examination of relations with another field of knowledge, namely literary studies. Van Gennep’s ties with philologists and specialists in the Romance languages determined his concern to insist on normalised forms of description in taking account of oral narrative materials. By constantly putting collectors of stories on their guard against any literary transposition, which could only provide ‘fake’ documents, it was especially the typological and philological concept of the catalogue, such as would impose itself in the 1950s, that he promoted, in opposition to the quest for a literary form of writing or the reassertion of regional languages. Nevertheless, alongside the identification of genres and typical plots, attention became more focused on less formal narrative discourses, performances and social institutions, in which were inscribed the words of the storytellers or singers, all objects that ethnographers would only later place at the centre of their analyses. Finally, his reflections on the relations between ethnography and literature were more complex than just the concern to establish ‘reliable documents’. Certainly van Gennep busied himself in decoding novels and short stories as a source for historical ethnography, within a logic of the extraction of documents. For example, this led him to unpack in meticulous detail the ‘ethnographic illusion’ of novels set in the countryside, notably those of George Sand. But he is also attentive to identifying the subtle interactions in dialect and literary writings by means of unexpected comparisons. For example, his Chronique of 15 February 1935, ‘A precursor of Stendhal: B. Chaix, a statistician from the Hautes-Alpes’, begins as follows:

36

Giordana Charuty

There is, in Stendhal’s prose, the Stendhal of Henri Brulard and the Letters, a rhythm and rubbing together of words, which I have always experienced as pertaining to the Dauphinois patois when translated, but which Remy de Gourmont, a Norman critic, commentators on other provinces and above all professors of literature have regarded as a matter of ‘style’, that is, as an intentional form of expression, not at all spontaneous … The texture of Dauphinois when heard, but not necessarily read, is quite different from Savoyard or Provençal, its neighbours. It is more pounding, drier, and in its syntax readily suppresses all redundancy. Gourmont smiled at what he judged to be only a theory, and I do not know to what extent Paul Léautaud or L. Royer, who, however, lives in Grenoble, would take seriously my affirmation that the real Stendhal – not tidied up for the Paris salons, nor for the literary esteem of his time and afterwards (let us say, with him, around 1880) – represents the Dauphinois patois preserved since his childhood and imposed on the dulled French of good company. However, the chances of my folkloristic researches have brought me an unexpected proof. I do not know whether or not it has escaped Stendhal’s followers, and I do not have the leisure to find out. But I doubt whether any of them are far-seeing enough to find literature in reading any Dauphinois statistical treatise. (2001 [15 February 1935]: 346–47)

There follows an account of this treatise, Préoccupations statistiques, géographiques, pittoresques et synoptiques des Hautes-Alpes of 1845, and its author, who was sub-prefect of Briançon from 1800 to 1815. Then, citing long extracts from passages, van Gennep comments on the jerky writing, the compressed turns of phrase, the rhythmic variations, the ‘verbal cascades’ which juxtapose incidents without repeating grammatical subjects, which substantivise participles: ‘this is genuine Stendhal, but also genuine Dauphinois patois’. He concludes that the Baron would have done better to write short stories, even a novel, on the lives of these Dauphinois, whom he knew so well because he could speak their tongue. Thus he was quite ready to admit specifically that certain novelists possessed an ethnographic gaze that had escaped contemporary folklorists. When novelistic writing articulates the disparate elements of the social, not in a folkloristic reconstruction but in a biographical experience, it might even constitute the best means of accessing ethnographic knowledge. These statements are not reserved for the readers of the Mercure de France: one finds similar remarks in the first volume of the Manuel, where van Gennep states that infantile customs – in particular those of one’s ‘second childhood’ – are described better by novelists than by ethnographers, and he cites in support of this assessment the autobiographical accounts of Renan, Vallès, Mistral and Pergaud (1943, I: 169, 174).

‘Keeping your eyes open’

37

From folkloristic to symbolic autonomy The rejection of folklore by social anthropology during the 1960s came about through a re-centring of analysis on the principles of reproduction and the exercise of power within localised societies. But it was also done by passing from ‘folkloristic’ autonomy in van Gennep’s sense – ceremonial customs, rites, ways of speaking and believing – to symbolic autonomy in Mauss’s sense, as reinterpreted by Lévi-Strauss. In passing from the ethnography of remote worlds to that of nearby societies, van Gennep always maintained as central the general question of ritual, which he revived on the theoretical level before even undertaking that vast description of rural France, which was never completed. We know that the notion of a ‘ceremonial sequence’ governs the idea that rites of separation, liminality and reincorporation project the moments of passage into space by dramatising the change for the individual ‘who is passing’, as well as for the social group being affected by this change. First in Italy, then in France, another interpretative move was created by refusing to reduce this conceptualisation simply to function and form, and by abandoning the interpretative categories of a Frazer or a Lévy-Bruhl that are preserved in the Manuel in order to assimilate ritual efficacy to the processes of magical action. But, in both cases, the debt to the Manuel is evident on the part of researchers confronted for the first time with the recurring question of the place and legitimacy of an ethnology of Europe within general anthropology. The readings of de Martino We owe an initial metamorphosis of van Gennep’s conceptualisations not to a highly Durkheimian French anthropology, but to Italian religious anthropology as relaunched by Ernesto de Martino on the eve of the Second World War. De Martino did not hesitate to turn the Manuel de folklore français into a tool with which to oppose an indigenous approach to the British intervention in ‘the Mediterranean’, as well as to American-inspired studies in applied anthropology. In particular, the methodological reflections of the French ethnographer served to guide de Martino – who was trained in the same fashion in the history of religions and was also a critic of Durkheim – in passing from knowledge constructed through an exclusive familiarity with ancient texts and the works of missionaries to the ethnographic observation of the religious practices of southern Italy. The preparatory notes of all de Martino’s initial enquiries in Lucania at the beginning of the 1950s, undertaken to revive strictly economic ways of understanding the southern question in Italy, document an attentive reading of van Gennep’s work in order to define the proper

38

Giordana Charuty

method of enquiry: the necessity of distinguishing informants according to whether they belong to a literate or a popular culture; the need not only to collect accounts, but also to witness gestures in action; methods of criticising and classifying ethnographic documents; and the requirement for comparativism. The first collective enquiry used several questionnaires from the Manuel, on life-cycle rites, popular songs and dances, magic, the church and the clergy. The use made of these is all the more surprising because, ten years later, de Martino was to have two favourite expressions for deriding the ‘folkloristic’ position: ‘the people sing’, and ‘from cradle to tomb’ (see Gallini 1995: 52). But running through different unpublished versions made in preparation for the editing of Sud e magia (de Martino 1959), one sees the category of the rite of passage being progressively abandoned in favour of an existential type of interrogation of the historicity of the person and another definition of the critical moments of individual existence – no longer the passage from one social state to another, but the confrontation of the individual with the historical development of his or her society. As for the notion of ‘magic’, this will be restricted solely to the therapeutic techniques that use ritual gestures and mythical accounts, while excluding all the customary prescriptions of which life-cycle rites consist. However, the concern to historicise these usages and to restore cultural flows between learned cultures and peasant cultures from a sociological perspective systematises an aim that is present everywhere in the Manuel. A large number of practices, pieces of knowledge and ways of speaking grasped while the enquiry is taking place can only be integrated into sets of significant relations by taking into account the temporal depth evidenced by the traces and indications that are present in a great variety of documentary collections. These include archives of administration and power, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, ecclesiastical and medical enquiries. For these collections, it is appropriate, depending on the case, to explain the normative constraints that have informed the description. There is a more hidden affinity, perhaps, that links the two authors: the importance accorded to the regimes of temporality of peasant cultures that are modelled on Christianity. With van Gennep, the introduction of the notion of a ‘ceremonial cycle’ in the 1920s served to distinguish, alongside biographical time, the festive cycles based on seasonal variations, the official solar calendar, the Christian calendar of the saints, and the rhythms of agricultural and pastoral activities. Unlike human geography or Marxist-inspired social history, this involved not separating material culture from the symbolic elaboration that gives it meaning by recognising the uniqueness of the social construction of time – the existence of a cyclical time produced by the ritual, unlike

‘Keeping your eyes open’

39

events or history – which was particularly pregnant in the rural societies of the nineteenth century, and right up to the Second World War. Having become a sort of commonplace, this notion of a ‘ceremonial cycle’ became fixed within an unsurprising functional reading. De Martino, on the other hand, revived this question by treating Christianity as an idea of time imbued with a tension between two models, one linear, the other cyclical, which anticipated more recent analyses of Christianity as a ‘religion that has left religion behind’. But one recalls that van Gennep’s work served above all as an ‘eye-opener’ to the complexity of the cultural history of southern Italy and of perceiving the procedures of mythico-ritual symbolism that gave meaning to the cultural idiom of Apulian tarentism (de Martino 2005 [1961]).5 The French heritage In France at the end of the 1960s, two opposed attitudes marked the relaunching of the discipline. One was to reject the ethnography of van Gennep as that of a folklorist, which would return the rural world to assimilation into the domain of superstition and mental retardation. Such was the aim of Jeanne Favret-Saada, who, analysing the logic of sorcery in the Norman Bocage, initially isolated a domain of social activity – rituals to remove sorcery – as an expression of an indigenous theory of magical efficacy that the anthropologist could not make his or her own (Favret-Saada 1981). The other approach was to use regional monographs and the Manuel as a sort of cultural memory to adopt other forms of seeing and listening to contemporary societies that at first sight have none of the ceremonial richness of earlier rural societies. This was, to begin with, the aim of Yvonne Verdier in a research team led by Lévi-Strauss, on Minot in the Bourgogne. Alongside Françoise Zonabend, Tina Jolas and Marie Claire Pingaud, she worked to link an ethnography in the present with van Gennep’s theoretical enquiry regarding rites of passage and the impressive cultural materials collected by ethnographers since the last third of the nineteenth century. The study she devoted to the cycle of exemplary lives – the washerwoman, the seamstress, the cook – which leads to an encounter with other village lives at the most crucial moments in their existences in order to ‘make custom’ (Verdier 1979), represents a profound transformation of van Gennep’s model on the basis of a double methodological choice. One is to adopt the point of view of the women, their knowledge, their techniques and the world of prescriptions and prohibitions that govern representations of feminine physiology by conditioning fertility or sterility, in order to reveal ‘the lives of young girls’, with their rules, rights and duties. The other is to identify semantic codes, in the Lévi-Straussian sense, that construct the symbolic logic of ritual action. One example will suffice to illustrate the renewal of the analysis that derives from this. Van Gennep devoted almost an entire volume of his

40

Giordana Charuty

Manuel to marriage rites (Vol. 1, part 2, 1946), marked simultaneously by a succession of highly stable sequences and a considerable proliferation of local variants. One of these enigmatic moments, the rôtie,6 particularly caught his attention. Van Gennep rightly recalls the great historical depth of this culinary rite, attested since the medieval period, its generalisation and its resistance in the face of all attempts to ban it, since it regularly became the object of disorder, a desire for its abolition and the condemnation of its scandalous nature. He also notes that the principal actors in this case are the young people, assisted by close relatives, godfathers and godmothers. And he comments at length on the transformation of culinary materials and objects in order to conclude that the scatological form which became dominant during the 1930s stresses an aspect of parody that was absent from usages attested earlier. Finally, the cartography of the variants gives way here to an interrogation of the rite’s meaning. According to him, the indigenous exegesis bears witness to the permanence of ‘very primitive ideas’ regarding fertility. He rejects any interpretation along the lines of a simple decoding of symbols, but concludes, in a manner that is very likely to disappoint today, with a ‘rite of the socialisation of marriage’. For Verdier (1979), adopting a structuralist position consists in making explicit all the semantic relations, which, in the contemporary or 1970s form of the rite, underlie what van Gennep traced back to the remote past of hypothetical primitive ideas about fertility. The rite uses a culinary code, that of sugar and spices, for an action which is equivalent to a ‘seasoning’ of the bride that is equivalent, from the masculine point of view, to a sexual act, public and shared, and one with procreative value. On the other hand, however, the exploration of the vocabulary illuminates the rules of the transmission of procreative powers between female generations. Thus, one might add, by imposing a language that is virile or scatological, the young people appear to be diverting the female cook’s role of guide [passeuse] to the extent that the value of marriage itself has changed, namely to perpetuate not a house any longer, but a couple for whom the language of desire prevails (see Fabre’s review, 1980). The work carried out in the 1980s and 1990s at the Centre d’Anthropologie de Toulouse (EHESS-CNRS-Toulouse-Le Mirail), directed by Daniel Fabre, expanded this perspective by departing from the framework of monographic enquiry to pursue a re-description of the social institutions and symbolic logics characteristic of Christian societies. To begin with, it is to the observer sensitive to linguistic differences between ‘countries’ that we owe the attention paid to situations of diglossia as a recognition of cultural differences. By contrast to monographs that are blind to linguistic differences and the

‘Keeping your eyes open’

41

social relations that inform them, it is a matter of restoring the coherence of semantic logics modelled by the diverse dialects in which these are actually thought. Fabre has revived the analysis of social institutions so well identified by van Gennep – such as masculine youth, with its principles of organisation, its rights and duties – by taking into account its confrontations for the maintenance of a prerogative, the social control of ‘houses’. From this point on, and in opposition to their atemporal definition, the conflictual relations of village societies with certain categories of ritual, notably the political stakes of the charivari or hullabaloo, have been made evident.7 Claudine Fabre-Vassas’s exploration of all forms of expression of a ban on the consumption of pork for Christians and of a popular antisemitism made systematic use of the cultural materials collected in the Manuel: for example, the ethnography of a twelve-day cycle between Christmas and Epiphany, which reveals the metaphysical issue involved in cooking one part of the pig, namely the blood (Fabre-Vassas 1997 [1993]). Likewise the study of spiritual kinship by Agnes Fine (1994) made considerable use of customary usages ordered by the succession of life-cycle rites. To describe a ‘Christian custom’ – the discontinuous ensemble of usages, prescriptions and ritual or ceremonial activities that link biographical time with the cyclical time of a localised society modelled on a unique biography, namely the life of Christ – it is certainly necessary to call into question the categories of medicine and popular religion that organise van Gennep’s ethnography.8 Making an ethnography of two categories of disorder that are invariably thought of as belonging together, namely hysteria and epilepsy, I have myself been led to describe not an ethnopsychiatry but a metaphysics in action, that is, certain ways through which the most abstract theological notions may become the object of an experience through the senses (Charuty 1997). In Europe as elsewhere, the ‘person’ is produced by a work of modelling the body and by social interactions that link the different ages of infancy, adolescence and ‘youth’ to the gradation of the ritual operations of the clergy and customary officiants. Parallel with this, socialised trials within age groups ensure the biographical inscription of dogmatic utterances transmitted by the catechism in the fashion of impersonal knowledge. This modelling gives place to a profusion of discourse on ritual faults in the fulfilment of customary liturgical rites and prescriptions with regard to the relations to be maintained with categories of beings – souls, the deceased, the Virgin, saints – which are simultaneously deprived of corporality and credited with intentionality. And the anthropologist then discovers the significance of a category – the ‘sickness of the saint’ – properly identified by van Gennep as designating all sorts of somatic, psychic and social disorders sanctioning these transgressions, in his concern to treat Christianity as ‘a

Giordana Charuty

42

magico-religious activity’.9 Only the analysis of rituals of atonement permits the etiological thought that unifies them to be explained, namely diversified forms of dissociation of the Christian person. Thus all operations of measurement and of the manufacture of doubles, iconic and aniconic, of sick bodies to ‘revive’ them suggest a literal reading of metaphors which, in ethical discourses and devotional texts, oppose the heaviness of the ‘flesh’ to the lightness of the ‘soul’.

Concluding remarks Van Gennep’s work guaranteed a transition between the history of religions and ethnology in Italy, and between positivist ethnography and the anthropology of the symbolic in France. It is not only a turning point in the history of the discipline, fixed within a limited period – it has had the value of a ‘passage’ in the disciplinary conversion of Europeanist ethnologists of my generation, who, most often, come from other disciplines, such as literature, philosophy and history, and whose university training made them read Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski, but who failed to realise that an anthropology of themselves was conceivable. However, our understanding of van Gennep is influenced by a reading of de Martino and Lévi-Strauss, reintroducing the dimension of power to the very heart of the logic of meaning, to explore conflictual situations born of confrontation between hierarchised cultural codes, without, nonetheless, reducing the symbolic to an emblematic or expressive function of social divisions. Thus, although local societies in which our first ethnographic experiences are inscribed very often seemed dechristianised, in fact we have been led to recognise the heterogeneity of social practices capable of taking charge of religious representations. We clearly see that the treatment of the cultural materials collected by van Gennep – who became an ‘institution’ in himself – was only made possible by resuming the dialogue with historians and sociologists, while nonetheless maintaining the specificity of the questions of a general anthropology in the face of these disciplines.

Notes 1. Arnold Van Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, Paris, Picard (1938– 1958). Van Gennep had begun by publishing Volumes III and IV: Questionnaire. Provinces et pays: Bibliographie méthodique (1937) and Bibliographie méthodique (fin) (1938), then Volume I in six parts: Introduction générale. Du Berceau à la tombe: naissance, baptême, enfance, adolescence, fiançailles (1943); Du berceau à la tombe (fin):

‘Keeping your eyes open’

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

43

mariage, funérailles (1946); Cérémonies périodiques cycliques: 1. Carnaval, Carême, Pâques (1947); Cérémonies périodiques cycliques: 2. Cycle de mai, la Saint-Jean (1949); Les Cérémonies agricoles et pastorales de l’été (1951) and Les Cérémonies agricoles et pastorales de l’automne (1953). Cycle des Douze Jours (1958) was published posthumously. The introduction to each volume focuses on a particular theoretical problem. Appeared originally in Mercure de France, 16 January 1913. This somewhat cryptic passage contains an implicit criticism of the ‘armchair anthropology’ of the Durkheimian school, including, at this time, Hertz. For Michel Leiris’s criticism of this relationship of suspicion, see Jamin (1996: 38–39). This work, originally published in Italian in 1961, has recently been translated into English, with notes by Dorothy Louise Zinn and a preface by Vincent Crapanzano (de Martino 2005 [1961]). Literally ‘roasted’, this refers to a marriage rite in which drink and food is brought to the newly married couple during the wedding night. The basis of this culinary preparation, which varied according to local traditions, was for a long time bread soaked in broth or spiced and sugared wine. Practically everywhere after the First World War, this soup was replaced by a mixture of fizzy wine and chocolate carried in a chamber pot. Fabre (1986). In the same manner, Natalie Z. Davis has acknowledged her debt to van Gennep’s Manuel in analysing the practices of the charivari in the sixteenth century (see Davis 1975). For a presentation of these works, see Charuty (2001). Van Gennep devotes a separate rubric to this category in his bibliography of popular medicine by noting, correctly, that the relationship of Christians with saints is highly ambivalent, involving a power that is now maleficent, now beneficent. Contemporary anthropology shows the relevance of this remark, which has been forgotten by the historians and ethnographers of ‘popular religion’.

References Belmont, N. 1974. Arnold Van Gennep: le créateur de l’ethnographie française, Paris: Payot. Charuty, G. 1997. Folie, mariage et mort: pratiques chrétiennes de la folie en Europe occidentale, Paris: Le Seuil. ——— 2001. Du catholicisme méridional à l’anthropologie des sociétés chrétiennes, in D. Albera, A. Blok and C. Bromberger (eds), L’anthropologie de la Méditerranée/Anthropology of the Mediterranean, Paris and Aix-en-Provence: Maisonneuve and Larose/MMSH. Chiva, I. 1987. Entre livre et musée: emergence d’une ethnologie de la France, in Ethnologies en miroir: La France et les pays de langue allemande, essais réunis par I. Chiva et U. Jeggle, Paris, MSH. Cuisenier, J. (ed.). 1980. Hier pour demain: arts, traditions, patrimoine, Paris, Editions de la RMN. Davis, N.Z. 1975. Society and culture in early modern France, Stanford: Stanford University Press. de Martino, E. 1959. Sud e magia, Milan: Feltrinelli. ——— 2005 [1961]. The land of remorse: a study of southern Italian tarentism [La terra del rimorso], London: Free Association Books. Dundes, A. (ed.). 1992. The evil eye: a casebook, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Durkheim, É. 1912. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris: Alcan. Fabre, D. 1980. Passeuse aux gués du destin, Critique, 402 (November): 1075–99.

44

Giordana Charuty

——— 1986. Le privé contre la coutume, in P. Ariès and R. Chartier (eds), Histoire de la vie privée, Paris: Le Seuil, vol. 3. ——— 1992. Le Manuel de folklore français d’Arnold Van Gennep, in P. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, Les France, vol. 2: traditions, Paris: Gallimard. Fabre-Vassas, C. 1997 [1993]. The singular beast: Jews, Christians and the pig [La bête singulière: les juifs, les chrétiens et le cochon] (tr. C. Volk), New York: Columbia University Press. Favret-Saada, J. 1981 [1977]. Deadly words: witchcraft in the Bocage [Les mots, la mort, les sorts: la sorcellerie dans le Bocage] (tr. C. Cullen), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallini, C. 1995. La ricerca, la scrittura, in E. De Martino, Note di campo: Spedizione in Lucania, 30 sett.–31 ott. 1952 (ed. C. Gallini), Lecce: Argo. Hertz, R. 1928. Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et folklore, Paris: Alcan. Jamin, J. 1996. Introduction to Michel Leiris, Miroir de l’Afrique, Paris: Gallimard. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1962. La pensée sauvage, Paris: Plon. Mauss, M. 1908. Review of Arnold van Gennep, Mythes et legendes d’Australie: études d’ethnographie et de sociologie, Année Sociologique, 10: 226–28. ——— 1909. Review of Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage, Année Sociologique, 11: 200–2. Needham, R. 1967. Introduction to Arnold van Gennep, The semi-scholars, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Privat, J.-M. 2001. Preface to Chroniques de folklore d’Arnold Van Gennep: recueil de textes parus dans le Mercure de France 1905–1949, Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. van Gennep, A. 1904. Tabou et totémisme à Madagascar: étude descriptive et théorique, Paris: Leroux. ——— 1906. Mythes et legendes d’Australie: études d’ethnographie et de sociologie, Paris: Guilmoto. ——— 1909. Les rites de passage, Paris: Nourry. ——— 1911. Les demi-savants, Paris: Mercure de France. ——— 1920. État actuel du problème totémique, Paris: Leroux. ——— 1932–33. Folklore du Dauphiné (Isère): étude descriptive et comparée de psychologie populaire, Paris: Maisonneuve (2 vols). ——— 1938–58. Manuel de folklore français contemporain, Paris: Picard (5 vols). ——— 1943. Manuel de folklore français contemporain, vol. 1, Paris: Picard. ——— 2001. Chroniques de folklore d’Arnold Van Gennep: recueil de textes parus dans le Mercure de France 1905–1949 (ed. J.-M. Privat), Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. Velay-Valentin, C. 1999. Le 1er Congrès International de Folklore de 1937, Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2 (March–April): 481–506. Verdier, Y. 1979. Façons de dire, façons de faire: la laveuse, la couturière et la cuisinière, Paris: Gallimard.

Chapter 2

CANONICAL ETHNOGRAPHY: HANOTEAU AND LETOURNEUX ON KABYLE COMMUNAL LAW Peter Parkes

Perhaps never was a system of self-government more radically implemented, never has an administration relied on fewer functionaries, nor imposed less on those governed. The ideal of liberal and effective governance – whose formula our philosophers forever seek in a thousand utopias – was a living reality for centuries in the Kabyle highlands. (Hanoteau and Letourneux 1873 [1893] II: 1)

La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles by Adolphe Hanoteau and Aristide Letourneux is a unique monument of early legal ethnography. Three large volumes, amounting to fifteen hundred pages, reported a decade of intensive investigation among the Kabyle Berbers of Algeria in the 1860s. It is recognised to be a definitive account of their autonomous social organisation by a distinguished line of Maghribian ethnographers, from Émile Masqueray and Robert Montagne to Jacques Berque and Jeanne Favret. Its rare archival documentation is being redeemed by current anthropological historians of the Kabyles such as Alain Mahé and Tilman Hannemann. Yet it is generally unknown to anthropology beyond an intimate circle of Berber specialists. This neglect is readily understandable, for the monograph has the forbidding appearance of an overblown gazetteer. That was its intended purpose, compiled by an army officer and an imperial legal councillor just after the French conquest and pacification of Kabylia in 1857.1 Its encyclopaedic documentation is barely leavened by cultural or historical exegesis. The first volume is an exhaustive compendium of the topography, geology, flora and fauna of the Jurjura massif, followed by

Peter Parkes

46

tabulated population statistics and detailed synopses of traditional medicine, agriculture, crafts and industries. Its major anthropological interest lies in the remaining parts, but these appear equally daunting. A vivid but summary account of indigenous social and political organisation prefaces a vast analytical inventory of Kabyle communal laws – exactly formatted in accordance with the Napoleonic Civil Code – followed by translations or extracts of some fifty written ‘canons’ (qanun, pl. qawanin) or itemised lists of village regulations, assiduously collected from all the main tribes of Kabylia. This would never be relaxed reading for an armchair anthropologist: ‘a work of erudition, exclusively technical, reserved for specialists’ (M. Hanoteau 1923: 143). As an officially sanctioned manual for military administration it is nowadays easily dismissed by postcolonial sensibilities as a monstrous artifice of occidental arrogation. Yet it remains one of the most meticulously documented accounts of communal institutions of indigenous justice and moral order available to anthropology. It is, indeed, the canonical ethnography of early French colonial social science.2 Conceived within a decade of Morgan’s League of the Iroquois, it belongs to a foundational era of incipient field anthropology, combining classical methods of textual-philological scholarship with the inductive observational sciences. Informed by engaged and prolonged field experiences, Hanoteau and Letourneux also derived their major analytical insights from the collaborative commentaries of one primary informant – a Berber counterpart to Ely Parker among the Iroquois (Tooker 1983, Trautmann 1987: 43–50) – who was well placed to interpret their administrative and legal interests as a marabout mediator and Muslim jurist among Kabyles. This essay aspires to reconstruct their triadic field collaboration during the 1860s – assessing the respective contributions of a soldier, a magistrate and a marabout, who conjointly established an original juridical ethnography of communal law and consensual selfgovernment. It also considers the applied intentions and ambitions of these authors, in an era of precarious military rule and intrepid development planning in Kabylia, shortly before its fateful civilian colonisation under the Third Republic.

Collaborative fieldwork Over four years we neglected no available means of investigation: the study of qanun laws, reading the reports of communal deliberations (jama‘a) and the decisions of clerics (‘ulama), with daily examination of public and private practices, together with information taken from those actively involved in these affairs prior to the French occupation [of 1857]. (I: v)3

Canonical ethnography

47

Figure 2.1. Commandant Adolphe Hanoteau at Fort-Napoléon, 1861. Source: Bernard (1930: 325).

A one-page preface to La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles scarcely advertises its peculiar conditions of collaborative fieldwork. However, a more detailed memoir was published fifty years later by Maurice Hanoteau (1923), who witnessed its last moments of compilation as a schoolboy of twelve, visiting his father in Kabylia during the summer holidays of 1868. Hanoteau’s family also assisted two subsequent scholars of Berber customary law, Augustin Bernard and Louis Milliot (1933), whose access to his home archives enabled them to reconstruct his longstanding project.4 This project began within a decade of Hanoteau’s posting as a military engineer to Algiers in 1845. A graduate of the École Polytechnique, he was earmarked for service within the Bureau Politique des Affaires Arabes (or bureaux arabes), the elite military department of indigenous administration in Algeria.5 Its director was Colonel Eugène

48

Peter Parkes

Daumas, a soldier-scholar who had earlier campaigned in Kabylia and who was then completing its first regional history (Daumas and Fabar 1847). Hanoteau also saw military action in Kabylia during the 1850s, but most of this decade was devoted to his linguistic training in Algiers. Under Daumas’s patronage, he became associated with the distinguished Arabist William de Slane, translator of Ibn Khaldun’s Histories of the Berbers, and with other soldier-scholars engaged in writing up early field reports on the Kabyles (e.g. MacCarthy 1847–48, Carette 1848). Hanoteau soon published a pioneering series of philological studies: original grammars of Kabyle and Tuareg Berber languages (1858a, 1860), and a remarkable anthology of Kabyle oral poetry (1867).6 His envisioning of a similar compilation of customary law stems from this linguistic scholarship, for Hanoteau had already transcribed a qanun ‘village charter’ as a speciment text of Kabyle dialect (1858a: 324–38, 1858b). The existence of these written rulings – inscribed in Arabic by marabout clerics at village assemblies – had only just been discovered. Apart from their historical value, these rare village records offered an invaluable means of examining underlying principles of communal government, necessary for indirect military administration, since an official policy of non-interference with traditional social organisation had been proclaimed by Marshal Randon on the defeat of insurgent Ait Iraten Kabyles in 1857. There was therefore widespread interest in having further qanun rulings collected throughout Kabylia.7 In January 1859 Hanoteau was appointed to command a bureau arabe outpost at Dra el-Mizan (western Kabylia), and in the following year he was posted to Fort-Napoléon, in the tribal heartland of the Ait Iraten. As Maurice Hanoteau recalled: Commandants enjoyed widely extended powers over indigenes. Issues that arose were numerous and diverse – political, administrative, judicial – and their resolution was always a delicate matter, since France had determined to leave intact the traditional organization of the country. To act conscientiously, to judge fairly, one needed to know in detail the people one administered and the local laws by which they governed themselves … Commandant Hanoteau scarcely obtained these details without seeing them for himself in the villages … Such information was also available at Dra elMizan, where the commandant’s office was open to all. Some came to plead an injustice or to defend themselves from a criminal accusation; some to accuse fellow tribesmen, or even a French colonist; others to make appeals for themselves, their family or their village. It would not take long to surmise from all these claimants and plaintiffs the full scope of Kabyle legal codes. (M. Hanoteau 1923: 138–40)

But despite Hanoteau’s linguistic abilities, his knowledge of the intricacies of Kabyle customary law would depend upon a khoja

Canonical ethnography

49

interpreter-secretary, the native scribe attached to each outpost. It was the khoja’s responsibility to register the public acts of communal assemblies, to prepare briefs of appeals, and to transcribe these proceedings for monthly reports. At Fort-Napoléon, this was the duty of Si Mula n Ait u ‘Amar, who is paid a handsome if cursory tribute in the preface to the monograph: We found, above all, a precious assistant in Si Moula Naït Ameur; his education, as advanced as that of any Kabyle marabout might be, embraced Muslim law as well as customary law; and his word – in accord with his renown and the influence of his family – was respected in the councils of his tribe. (I: v)

Maurice Hanoteau again fills in the gaps in his later memoir, for on his father’s arrival at Fort-Napoléon in November 1860, Si Mula was immediately employed to collect qanun rulings throughout the district: Si Moula had problems knowing what was expected of him at first. But once he understood, he became engrossed, marshalling every effort to cooperate towards the end pursued. He would reflect on administrative and juridical questions, and if he knew of any fact – be it the judgement of a jama‘a assembly or an article of qanun law – which either confirmed or qualified a given opinion, he would readily convey it. He was one of many assistants; but he was the main informant, the most useful, and the most precious. (M. Hanoteau 1923: 142)

We shall see that Si Mula would become at least an equal co-author of La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles as Letourneux. He was a dignitary of Ait ‘Amar marabouts among Ait Iraten, resident at their village of Tamazirt near Fort-Napoléon. He was also a religious cleric (‘alim) of Sayyid descent, whose ancestors had emigrated from Turkey in the seventeenth century, renowned as teachers of Arabic literacy and Koranic education among Ait Iraten.8 In the learned tradition of his forefathers, Si Mula had studied Maliki fiqh jurisprudence at a local religious college. With a politically influential elder brother, Si Lunis, he may have assisted in the capitulation of the Ait Iraten confederation to Marshal Randon in 1857, after participating in their insurrection, for a fine two-storey house was then built for the two brothers by French army engineers at Tamazirt. Si Lunis and Si Mula would remain steadfast supporters of French officers at Fort-Napoléon, gaining the highest appointments of political and judicial authority among Ait Iraten. But in 1860, Si Mula was only beginning to acquaint himself with the collaborative potential of Hanoteau’s ethnographic ambitions. In 1862, after four years in the field, Hanoteau was recalled to a metropolitan posting in Algiers. His reports detailing the intricacies of

50

Peter Parkes

Kabyle social institutions, yet also ‘the admirable simplicity of their customary laws’, had gained widespread attention among his military and civil superiors.9 These included Louis-Adrien Berbrugger, president of the Historical Society of Algeria and founder of its Revue africaine, as well as Ismail Urbain, the famous half-Guyanese convert to Islam and Saint-Simonian advocate of pluralist democracy, who was then an influential adviser on colonial policy to Napoleon III.10 Concerted plans were made for Hanoteau to publish his field notes on Kabyle customary law as a series of articles in the Revue africaine. But these plans were superseded by a far more ambitious project: ‘The idea took shape of treating the Kabyle question on a truly scientific footing, within a comprehensive work embracing everything known about the organization of that society’ (M. Hanoteau 1923: 143).11 Relieved from other duties to concentrate on this programme, instructions were posted by Hanoteau to bureaux arabes commandants throughout Kabylia. They were to submit to him ‘as soon as possible … copies of all the main qanun laws of Kabyle villages’, ensuring that each was ‘as complete as possible, sending translations with transcriptions of the original Arabic texts’ (letter of 4 April 1864, in Bernard and Milliot 1933: 4). Within a few weeks, Hanoteau received numerous transcribed copies of qanun rulings (see Fig. 2.2). It was at this juncture that Hanoteau by chance encountered Aristide Letourneux, a magistrate at the Imperial Court of Appeal in Algiers,

Figure 2.2. Canoun des Beni Ouaguennoun. Opening column of qanun rulings transcribed in Arabic with French translation by Captain Alphonse Meyer, military interpreter at Dellys, 1864. Source: Bernard and Milliot (1933: Pl. IX).

Canonical ethnography

51

also familiar with the Jurjura highlands of Kabylia as a keen expeditionary field botanist. Hanoteau was already encountering difficulties in tackling Kabyle customary law without training in comparative jurisprudence. Letourneux, versed in French national law as well as Muslim shari‘a, would be an ideal collaborator, and he readily agreed to become co-author of the envisaged monograph.12 After two years relief from regular duties, however, Hanoteau was ordered to return to his old field command at Fort-Napoléon in February 1866. This was a back-posting he may have requested in order to re-establish his vital collaborative links with Si Mula. For Letourneux had meanwhile become distracted from the project by renewed passions for field botany that jeopardised his authorial commitment. Only during the summer legal vacation in 1868 was he persuaded to stay on at Fort-Napoléon: M. Letourneux, recovering his original fervour, then drafted the last chapters on Kabyle law … Every morning, the two authors worked together, almost always with Si Moula, but sometimes with other Kabyles too … Afternoons were devoted to copy-editing, mostly done by M. Letourneux, who occasionally verified a point in doubt by listening to Kabyles. This daily work only ended in the evening after dinner; and it would resume early next morning in the commandant’s office until it was all brought to completion. (M. Hanoteau 1923: 146f.)

The manuscript was thus ready in late September 1868 to be submitted to Marshal MacMahon, who had commissioned its publication by the Imprimerie impériale. After delays of scrutiny by a beleagured war office in Paris, its first volume was printed in 1872, the second two in 1873, acclaimed in a rapturous notice by Ernest Renan (1873).

Participant recollection Fifty years later, Maurice Hanoteau’s memoir was vigorously written to protect his father’s legacy from a damaging defamation. A colonial judge in Algiers had intimated that the monograph was a mere ‘codified compilation’ of Kabyle customary laws that had been collusively orchestrated by Si Mula and Si Lunis, and it was even suggested that the two brothers had subsidised expenses of the research, adopting Hanoteau and Letourneux as their tribal guests at Tamazirt (Luc 1917: 54f.). Although this aspersion was easily rebutted, the subsequent archival enquiries of Bernard and Milliot do indicate Si Mula’s extensive involvement in every stage of the project. They even reproduced a long letter from Si Mula in 1885,13 responding to Hanoteau’s earnest enquiries

52

Peter Parkes

about a surely improbable circumstance of Kabyle customary law: its provisions for the inheritance of property by a hermaphrodite (Bernard and Milliot 1933: 27–30, cf. Hannemann 2002: 90–93). This curiously revealing document may give us a candid impression of Hanoteau’s relentless techniques of field interrogation, here exploiting Si Mula’s expertise in Maliki Muslim jurisprudence, which he is asked to compare with Kabyle custom. It also identifies Si Mula’s fine Arabic handwriting, found to recur on all copies of qanun codes issued from Fort-Napoléon – including a presentation copy of Ait Iraten customs inscribed in elegant Andalusian calligraphy, dedicated to Hanoteau while he was still at Dra el-Mizan (see Fig. 2.3). Bernard and Milliot’s inventories of other qanun documents in Hanoteau’s archives further demonstrate that almost all were commissioned by him in the early 1860s.

Figure 2.3. To Whom we owe obedience – Serene and Perfect Knight, Upholder of the Realm, Glory of Warriors, Commandant of the Circle of Dra el-Mizan – I render these customs in use among Beni Iraten… Dedication of Ait Iraten qanun rulings submitted to Hanoteau by Si Mula, ca. 1859/60. Source: Bernard and Milliot (1933: Pl. V).

Canonical ethnography

53

Hanoteau was probably not a hyperactive fieldworker or homme de terrain in the later proclaimed Malinowskian mode. Rooted in the field, he was a studious philological ethnographer, a homme de cabinet, perhaps rarely operating off the verandah of the commandant’s office at FortNapoléon, where he would be reliant on Si Mula’s expert assistance. Despite Maurice Hanoteau’s protestations of his father’s many varied experiences of Kabyle village life, these are not mentioned in the monograph. A bureau arabe commandant would certainly visit his constituencies on regular district circuits by horseback; but these occasions, under armed escort, could have afforded few opportunities to observe the intimacies of Kabyle village affairs that are relayed in the ethnography. In any event, Hanoteau was determined to describe Kabyle social institutions retrospectively, in the years just prior to their capitulation to French authorities in 1857, for he was acutely aware of the disruptive effects of the military presence he embodied. The ethnography is thus reconstructive, yet also scrupulously synchronic. It rejects all historical speculation about a barely documented Kabyle past, reassembling its autonomous social and political circumstances within a bare decade of its composition. Every illustrative case is therefore an indirect report of some recently recalled incident, doubtless mainly relayed through Si Mula. Yet its substantiation always returns to those qanun documents, the monographs’s so-called pièces justificatives. Qanun rulings were certainly being written in Kabylia before Hanoteau’s arrival there, even if his collection seems to have been largely created in response to his own orders, for several documents were copies of prior manuscripts dated at least a decade earlier (III: 351, 447–50). A classic qanun decree would be the proclamation of an agreement about some new ruling or readjustment of customary law that had been decided by a communal jama‘a (or tajmaat) assembly. At least one such proclamation dated from the mid-eighteenth century: a confederational treaty that suspended women’s rights to inherit property in the interests of maintaining inter-tribal peace (III: 451–54, cf. Patorni 1895, Mahé 2001: 68ff.). But most qanun rulings were simpler tariffs of fines imposed for village offences, such as thefts and breaches of the peace, or cursory regulations about marital affairs and controls of sumptuary expenses. Such rulings might be collated as lists amounting to a hundred or more items. As Hanoteau realised, the qanun deeds of any community recorded only a fraction of its recognised customs (‘ada, pl. ‘awa‘id), which were otherwise committed to oral memory by illiterate village elders (II: 101).14 The genius of Hanoteau’s project was to realise that these unpromising scraps of village law might serve as reliable epigraphic foundations for reconstructing the entirety of Kabyle traditional society. Assembled in

54

Peter Parkes

sufficient quantities, one could discern recurrent themes and resonant motifs that adumbrated their underlying principles as well as their regional variants. Enigmatic qanun rulings also served as perfect elicitatory cues for more intensive field interrogations: they were undeniable agreements of communal law, whose subsequent justification and explication by enlisted informants would unravel their tacit social circumstances. These included intimate details of the vulnerable moral reputation (hurma) of a community, otherwise scarcely accessible to outside enquiry. Hanoteau would also be crucially assisted in this delicate unravelling of village morality by Si Mula, an experienced marabout mediator, who may have witnessed many qanun rulings that he later collected and copied for Hanoteau. Their colloquies at Fort-Napoléon evidently informed the monograph’s introductory sketch of Kabyle society (II: 1–134). This includes vivid portrayals of a typical village (taddart) and its sof political factions; its jama‘a public assemblies, amin president and elected council; its festivals and redistributive welfare; its complex conditions of ‘anaya protection over dependants; and its tribal or confederational leadership in peacetime and in war. All of these finely evoked details are presented just as they might have been observed by Hanoteau – until, in an abrupt concluding chapter, one is disarmingly apprised that the entire tableau vivant was artfully reconstructed. For everything had been transformed under French military rule: The autonomy of the village as a corporate body no longer exists; the political powers of its jama‘a assembly have no meaning any more, and they have all disappeared … Its administrative powers are nominally intact, but they are nonetheless subject to our governing control … The roles of the amin [assembly leader], without being officially altered, have necessarily changed along with those of the jama‘a assembly, now accountable to the French authority for all that happens in the village, being the executive agent of its orders … These, in brief, are just some of the modifications of Kabyle organization since the conquest that might be mentioned. (II: 133f.)

Hanoteau may have overstated these modifications, just as he understated his own field observations. As commandant, he would be besieged by Kabyle plaintiffs demanding his adjudication of intransigent disputes. He was therefore an engaged participant auditor of Kabyle juridical procedures, even if his own experiences were, alas, unelaborated as case histories.15

Canonical ethnography

55

Codified compilation The ethnographic introduction to the second volume was only intended to give a congenial overview to its substantive documentation: those assembled qanun rulings, whose principles of social organisation are distilled in its massive Second Section, Droit Civil. Here one would expect a major contribution from the jurist Aristide Letourneux, for the treatment of Kabyle familial institutions is all exactingly framed through the thematic grid of the Napoleonic Code civil. Even the layout of the account conforms with its codified prototype: by Title and Chapter, with subset paragraphs of terse judicial prose, as if these were the deliberated decrees of some Grand Kabyle legislative assembly. This format is easily deprecated as a preposterous imposition of a wholly alien scheme of modern legislation, un pur plaquage artificiel (Bousquet 1950c: 448). But on inspection, its imposed matrix was perhaps not inappropriate for organising the disparate qanun fragments and verbal commentaries that Hanoteau and Si Mula had assembled. Each Title thus sets out purportedly rational discriminations of natural law before considering their variable recognition in Kabyle custom; each Chapter then elaborates particular circumstances of Kabyle village institutions, with footnotes on qanun rulings indicating their concordance or divergence with Roman private law or Muslim shari‘a, indexing their equivalent numbered articles in French national law. This familiar format would facilitate an envisaged administrative application of the monograph as a field manual for adjudicating officers. But it was also a possibly felicitous framework for comprehending Kabyle customary law in this period; for it required its qanun decrees to be regarded from a relatively unprejudiced rational perspective – in the enlightened spirit of Montesquieu – more or less untainted by the speculative historicism then characteristic of ethnological jurisprudence. Some historicist speculation is unquestionably present in the monograph, notably in the introduction to its Third Section on Penal Law (III: 53–59). This is presented as having a peculiarly progressive civic morality and social clemency, overlaying an archaic bedrock of personal law condoning violent retribution. Copious footnotes cite correspondences of Kabyle legal concepts with those attested in Ancient Hebraic, Indian, Greek, Roman and early Germanic law, again intimating an evolved but arrested development of Kabyle communal morality and criminal justice.16 These erudite annotations were surely contributed by Aristide Letourneux, an acknowledged antiquarian who would be familiar with the comparative historical jurisprudence emerging from Savigny’s Rechtsgeschichte. Yet Hanoteau’s firmly imposed grid of the Code civil otherwise demanded a strictly contemporaneous assessment of Kabyle legal discriminations that were

56

Peter Parkes

evident in the qanun documentation. Such sophisticated institutions as civil contract, trust law and commercial partnerships are therefore all given due analytical scrutiny, even if they had but faint correspondences in Kabyle customary usage.17 This rigorous empirical discipline was a hallmark of Hanoteau’s philological positivism, equally characterising his earlier linguistic scholarship, and doubtless instilled by his training at the École Polytechnique (where Auguste Comte once lectured to his corps of engineers). Its principles of unadorned descriptive precision needed to be braced against the more romantic historical imagination of Letourneux: Colonel Hanoteau held definitely, with a determined will, to what might be maintained as established facts and uncontestable realities, irrespective of the past or the historical origins of the peoples he was studying. But M. Letourneux, by contrast, begged release from this harnessing of his brilliant imagination, for he would eagerly construct elaborate theories and systems. Yet his collaborator would have none of that, preferring to disencumber himself at once of all wild conjectures, whose duration tends to be ephemeral and whose scientific value would always be contestable. (M. Hanoteau 1923: 148–49)

In the last year of their collaboration, Letourneux was thus resigned to renouncing historicism. In a letter of February 1868 he declared being ‘done with all those theories that in Kabyle law are never easy to disentangle, let alone to express clearly; from now on, it shall be enough for me simply to state the positive facts as these are actually supported by the [qanun] texts’ (Bernard and Milliot 1933: 11). In fact, the idea of using the 1804 Civil Code as a translational grid for the ethnography was already being pursued by Hanoteau even before his collaboration with Letourneux. Maurice Hanoteau recalled his father’s studious examinations of French national law as a means of specifying and classifying Kabyle folk notions of legal trust, contract, fraud, tort and so on (1923: 143f.). Comparison of Kabyle customary law with Maliki fiqh jurisprudence – as rendered in the Mukhtasar commentaries of the medieval Egyptian jurist Khalil ibn Ishaq (see 1848–52 edition) – was also being pursued by Hanoteau with Si Mula before Letourneux was co-opted into the project (Hannemann 2002: 90f., 170ff.). Its anthropological peculiarity primarily consists in this persistent dialogical triangulation of the divergent yet often congruent perspectives of modern western legislation and of classical Islamic jurisprudence with respect to Kabyle tribal custom. Yet Letourneux assuredly made original contributions of his own, particularly in composing the Third Section on Criminal Law, which was his acknowledged responsibility in the final year of their

Canonical ethnography

57

collaboration. Here the Code pénal proved far less serviceable than had the Code civil for family law. The plan of this section (III: 59) was therefore more closely adapted to indigenous schemes of qanun penal tariffs. Of outstanding originality is the cumulative elucidation of a polyvalent Kabyle notion: that of ‘anaya or extended ‘protection’ against violations of physical or moral integrity (III: 77–83, 107–11, cf. Daumas and Fabar 1847: 70–75, Mahé 2001: 106–17). Hanoteau’s ethnographic sketch had indicated a shifting range of such ‘protections’ extended to vulnerable individuals by notable leaders and their kin groups, by sof factions, or by entire tribes and confederacies (II: 61ff.). Breaches of proclaimed ‘anaya protection were considered heinous offences, which justified righteous homicide, for its respected value was a precise index of the moral credit of its collective defenders. Hanoteau had even eulogised the heroic qualities of self-sacrifice it demanded: However it may operate, one can scarcely deny the moral grandeur of this institution of ‘anaya protection; it is an original form of mutual assistance, even stretched to the point of self-abnegation; and the heroic acts it inspires constitute the greatest honour of Kabyles – even if the necessity of such devotion signifies an ill-developed societal state, where the individual is obliged to step in on behalf of the law in protecting persons … (II: 63)

Treatment of anaya in the final part of the monograph, however, shows that this ‘protection’ was by no means restricted to personal or interpersonal associations. Rather, all rights of personal redress were ultimately sanctioned by the overarching ‘anaya protection assumed by a village community through the popular sovereignty of its jama‘a assembly. Any infringement of its protective public order was thus a moral affront to the community’s corporate renown (hurma), whose scales of violation are precisely gauged in qanun penal tariffs. In elucidating this complex moral notion, Letourneux acutely draws on a series of case studies, otherwise all too rarely employed as evidence. As one might expect, many cases of violent raqba feud or disputes over hurma honour were derived from the Ait Iraten around Fort-Napoléon (III: 104f., 110), and they are often ascribed to the finely narrated testimony of Si Mula n Ait u ‘Amar (III: 191f., 303f.).

Critical counterpoints We see that La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles was a curious chimaera of textual philology and field anthropology: an epigraphic ethnography. It was also an applied ethnography, even a work of indigenous advocacy; for while it archived a vanished era of former political autonomy in Kabylia,

58

Peter Parkes

it was ultimately intended to inform its future devolved administration. Hanoteau’s introduction to the second edition of the monograph even recalled his original hopes that it might underpin a constitutional codification of pan-Kabyle customary law (I: viii).18 The monograph therefore had prescriptive as well as descriptive pretensions, which may explain its carefully cantilevered evaluations: its critical counterpoints. A recurrent antithesis is thus established between an admired ‘spirit of solidarity’ invigorating Kabyle communities and the ‘selfish egoisms’ of modern Europe (II: 1, III: 296). But this congenial contrast is always quickly qualified by contrary recognition of the violent concomitants of ungoverned democracy, where ‘a spirit of equality, taken to extremes, incites insatiable envies …’ (II: 2). Admirable solidarities of patriarchal kinship are similarly counterposed with an equally rhetorical denunciation of the miserable marital status of Kabyle bartered brides (II: 148f.). Hanoteau here declared his concern to correct overindulgent portrayals of Kabylia as a primitive paradise of republican virtues: ‘As to the status of Kabyle women … one must be disabused of errors relayed by the brilliant paradoxes of our eminent writers’, who doubtless included some tactfully unnamed colleagues.19 Disparagement of tribal disrespect for women’s Koranic rights of endowment, however, surely echoed the marabout opinion of Si Mula. A copious correspondence between Hanoteau and Letourneux shows that both authors acutely apprehended the polemical dangers of overly romanticised depictions of Kabyle cultural affinities with sentimental values of French popular republicanism: what CharlesRobert Ageron would later characterise as le mythe kabyle (1960, 1968: 268–77).20 Their sober perspectives rather exemplified the pluralist and paternalist policies of Marshal Randon’s original programme of indirect rule in Kabylia. This had endorsed its traditions of village government with a view to anticipated assimilation of Kabyles to voluntary French citizenship. Qanun rulings might then be expected to converge with civil jurisdiction, cultivated by a mission civilisatrice of appropriate education and technically assisted development. Hanoteau, for example, long campaigned for a training college in industrial arts and crafts (to be instructed by officers seconded from his own corps of engineers), which he eventually established at Fort-Napoléon in 1866.21 This broader developmental programme provides a necessary context for evaluating the monograph. Its ideological underpinnings lay in the industrial-socialist doctrines of Saint-Simon, instilled among many bureaux arabes officers trained at the École Polytechnique, but propagated in Algiers by the redoubtable Ismail Urbain, the imperial adviser on indigenous affairs under the Second Empire.22 For Urbain, who eagerly promoted Hanoteau’s project, recognition of Kabyle customary law

Canonical ethnography

59

promised to vindicate his own boldly envisaged plans for a culturally and legally pluralistic assimilation of all Muslim indigenes, L’Algérie pour les Algériens (1860). Hanoteau and Letourneux may have been quizzical of Urbain’s passionate indigenophilia; but they shared his liberal preoccupation with indigenous advocacy, pitted against the rapacious encroachments of colon settlers then lobbying for civilian administration.23 The monograph’s treatment of Kabyle Muslim religion is also indicative of this truly applied anthropologie positive. A concise statement in the first volume establishes that all Kabyles were unquestionably devout and orthodox Muslims (I: 380–84). Hanoteau was determined to quash popular misconceptions that Islam was but a thin veneer of assumed faith imposed on secular or pagan cultural roots, rendering Kabylia susceptible to easy laicisation or Christian evangelisation.24 In the second volume, however, more critical perspectives are advanced (II: 83–105). These concern the role of marabout religious specialists (imrabden), insinuated as elementary teachers and adjudicators among Kabyles, whose spiritual influence was waning under French administration. Far more dangerous, therefore, were expansive religious confraternities (ikhwan) that had begun to absorb or replace this disaffected local clerisy. Such was the Rahmaniyya Sufi order in Kabylia, a pietist movement of moral reform that galvanised tribal insurgencies by declaring jihad or holy war against infidel foreign occupation.25 Hanoteau’s premonitions of impending discontent among such religious leaders again attests to the vital collaborative contribution of Si Mula, whose reports on his own Ait ‘Amar marabout lineage are cited as apt illustrations. They indicate a hereditary line of conservative religious scholars, scornful of mountbank marabouts, but more wary of the reformist pretensions of Rahmaniyya spiritual devotees, who threatened their own established position as tribal intermediaries with external powers. Formerly aligned with Turkish Beylik rulers, the clerical family of Si Mula had made overtures to the French military authorities in the 1840s, ultimately rewarded by Si Mula’s appointment as khoja interpreter at Fort-Napoléon. Unlike devotees of Rahmaniyya moral reform – who would advocate the replacement of tribal customs by shari‘a law – traditional marabout dignitaries such as Si Mula were more inclined to condone customary usages in the interests of maintaining tribal peace, albeit also deliberating on their acceptable or unacceptable divergence from orthodox Maliki Sunni Muslim law. Such tolerant conservatism conveniently dovetailed with the gradualist developmental programme envisaged by Hanoteau. The whole project of redacting village decrees as approved tribal canons may have been Si Mula’s ambition all along, initiated in his calligraphic gift to Hanoteau (see Fig. 2.3) ten years earlier. It is

Peter Parkes

60

therefore tempting to interpret many of the equilibrated opinions of the monograph as further ventrilocutions of Si Mula: a scholarly Arabic voice resounding through two French authors, who may have only partially comprehended its contrapuntal techniques of dialectical reasoning and justification for Kabyle customary usage, employing classic rhetorical methods of Islamic legal science (‘ilm i-qalam). These are apparent in Si Mula’s subsequent letter to Hanoteau (Bernard and Milliot 1933: 27–30), which also displays an adept deployment of cited references to the medieval legal commentaries of Khalil ibn Ishaq (Hannemann 2002: 90–93). But such informed juristic commentaries are evident throughout the monograph: their analytical yield would be cumulatively harvested by subsequent scholars of Berber customary law throughout the Maghrib.26

Colonial transposition The colonial deployment of the monograph would not be what any of its authors could have wished. For its composition during the 1860s coincided with the last decade of protective military administration in Kabylia, which collapsed with the fall of the Second Empire in 1870. Defeat at Sedan and a Republican colonist uprising in Algiers, matching the Paris Commune of 1871, then catalysed a final Kabyle insurrection, followed by punitive colonial reprisals and civilian reforms. These are recorded in painful detail by General Hanoteau in a long appendix to the second edition of La Kabylie (III: 455–514) written after his retirement to France: In truth, the ancient institutions of Kabylia were shattered when our army columns triumphed over the insurrection of 1871 … In a few years, the entire civil edifice of traditional liberties, which had resisted armies of conquerors over thousands of years, simply collapsed. Its ruin is now complete, and it is not without regret for a past era that lacked neither grandeur nor glory, that I inscribe an epitaph adapted from the history of another great lost nation: finis Kabiliae! (III: 462)

As Hanoteau had gloomily predicted, fears of impending civilian administration in Algeria incited revolts in its eastern provinces, taken up as a last-ditch tribal jihad by the Rahmaniyya order in Kabylia.27 Hanoteau was obliged to assist in a merciless suppression of Kabyle insurgents in the early summer of 1871, when hundreds of Rahmaniyya devotees were massacred in hopeless assaults on Fort-Napoléon. Si Mula and Si Lunis vainly tried to secure a treaty among Ait Iraten to abstain from this insurrection; but the two brothers were besieged with

Canonical ethnography

61

French officers in the fort, accompanied by pupils they had saved from Hanoteau’s new college of arts and crafts, which was set ablaze by angry rebels, as was their house at Tamazirt. Their loyalty was briefly rewarded: Si Lunis was later appointed tribal chief (amin al umana) of Ait Iraten, while Si Mula was confirmed as tribal judge (qadi) over a newly created administrative district of Fort-Napoléon, now renamed Fort-National.28 But a punitive war reparation of ten million francs was imposed on the district, allowing civilian colonists to sequester huge tracts of its indigenous territory (III: 333, Ageron 1968: 24–36, Mahé 2001: 212ff.). The new Governor-General, Admiral de Gueydon, appears to have been persuaded by Hanoteau and Letourneux to reverse an immediate plan to revoke all of Randon’s immunities of indirect rule in Kabylia. For when the monograph was published in 1873, de Gueydon abandoned his original intention to apply full French national law throughout Jurjura, conceding the benefits of retaining its village jama‘a assemblies, whose customary laws appeared as opportune bulwarks against further antagonistic Islamisation (Ageron 1968: 282). Letourneux was even asked to devise a simplified qanun codification for civilian administrators (a commission he wryly declined). The new district of Fort-National would be temporarily retained as an ‘indigenous commune’ under continuing military protection. But by 1880 almost all of Kabylia had become civilian territory under the jurisdiction of French civil magistrates (juges de paix), who struggled to adjudicate its customary laws with often baffled reference to the monograph (Ageron 1968: 284). Their courts, which denied normal appeal to shari‘a law, would be largely ignored by Kabyles, whose village affairs continued to be regulated by clandestine jama‘a assemblies well into the twentieth century.29 By then the imperial dream of indigenous assimilation had retrenched into the notorious colonial doctrine of separatist association (Betts 1961), reinforced by racism that tarnished and deformed all extant ethnography (Lorcin 1995).

Canonical ethnography La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles was the original prototype of what would shortly become a prolific genre of colonial ethnographic documentation: the tribal coutumier. By the end of the nineteenth century, there would be many comparable collations of customary law compiled by colonial officers operating on the tribal frontiers of British India, Imperial Russia and the Dutch East Indies, as by all European powers in sub-Saharan Africa.30 These dense ethnographies,

62

Peter Parkes

which underpinned a burgeoning new discipline of ethnological jurisprudence, are scarcely appreciated by anthropologists nowadays. Professional criticism, voiced ever since Malinowski (1926), highlights their neglect of quotidian disputation as a negotiable matrix of social order distinct from stipulated legislation. Colonial compilations of customary law are thus distrusted or dismissed as artefactual ‘fabrications’ of alien administrative convenience, if not darkly disparaged as collusive and divisive tools of imperial hegemonies.31 It seems easy to address such criticism to the foundational work of Hanoteau and Letourneux. Bernard and Milliot (1933: 22–25) already cast worrying doubts about the distorting effects of Hanoteau’s commissioning of qanun transcripts, which may have solicited a selective submission of ‘normalised’ regional exemplars, incipiently codified even before their analytical synthesis within the monograph (cf. Milliot 1932: 141ff.). Georges-Henri Bousquet aimed a more flamboyant diatribe, expressed with jocular pugnacity, at what he pilloried as ‘A cult to be destroyed: the adoration of Hanoteau and Letourneux’ (1950c). Pitched against the colonial canonisation of the monograph, Bousquet noted its stifling impact on subsequent ethnography, when literate Kabyle informants relied on the dead word of Hanoteau and Letourneux, even if their living practice contradicted its sanctified account. Bousquet (1950b) thence elaborated an original theory of habituated jural transactions, counterposed with the normative regulations emphasised by Hanoteau and Letourneux, which would be famously expanded by Pierre Bourdieu. Yet both Milliot and Bousquet ultimately acknowledged their profound debts to the monograph, which crucially guided their own pioneering scholarship on Islamic juridical practice and customary law in the Maghrib. The broader anthropological legacy of the monograph remains difficult to assess, although a line of inspired descent to classic ethnographies of the Maghrib is easy to trace.32 Hanoteau’s project of encouraging a constitutional recognition of customary law would be adopted more concertedly (and controversially) in the neighbouring protectorate of Morocco, stimulating further compilations of Berber legal custom there.33 Their monograph inspired similar collections of customary law in French West Africa and Indo-China; and it was evidently known to Snouck Hurgronje and Cornelis van Vollenhoven, feasibly instigating the Adatrecht school of Leiden and Batavia in the Dutch East Indies.34 It would be discussed in almost all major works of ethnological jurisprudence at the end of the nineteenth century, featuring prominently in socialistic literature on agrarian communalism.35 Yet its analytical insights and empirical documentation have only recently attracted the serious scrutiny they long deserved: notably in two magisterial surveys of Kabyle communality and

Canonical ethnography

63

customary jurisprudence over a span of two centuries (Mahé 2001; Hannemann 2002), and in current ethnography (Scheele 2008, 2009) that traces both continuities and transformations in Kabyle village organisation and communal legislation down to presently troubled times. A more occluded legacy of such early ethnographies lies in covert reactions to their former authority in later academic anthropology. For modern fieldwork was effectively ‘reinvented’ from the 1920s – by disciples of Malinowski and Mauss – in upstart denial of its established precedents (Blanckaert 1996). This subversive reaction is well displayed in subsequent ethnographies of Kabylia, such as the avowedly Maussian analyses of René Maunier (1927, 1935) and Jeanne Favret (1968), and especially of Pierre Bourdieu (1972), who all adroitly reworked the rich heritage of Hanoteau and Letourneux while subtly demoting its legitimacy. The apotheosis of this last ‘canonical transposition’ of the monograph occurs in Bourdieu’s renowned theory of practice. This denied almost any regulatory role for the normative order of consensual legislation that Hanoteau and Letourneux had documented, let alone its nuanced dialogues with Maliki Muslim law noted by Si Mula. Kabyle social order seems to emerge as a spontaneous outplay of competitive transactions, arising from a dispositional calculus of patrimonial power, whose Hobbesian brutality is barely mollified in its ritual idiom of honour and prestige. The reactive impetus of this canonoclastic vision of anomic sociality, within the congested terrain of Kabyle ethnography, is evident: When I began working as an ethnologist, I wanted to react against what I called legalism, against the tendency among ethnologists to describe the social world in the language of rules … I managed to show that in the case of Kabylia the most codified, namely customary law, is only the recording of successively produced verdicts in relation to individual transgressions, based on the principle of the habitus. (Bourdieu 1990: 76f. [1987: 94f.])

Bourdieu’s anticanonical struggle with Hanoteau and Letourneux has been of great provocative value to social theory, even if one may query his bold pretension to have deciphered a deep transformational grammar of Kabyle customary legislation: viz. ‘one can re-generate all the concrete acts of jurisprudence that are recorded in customary laws on the basis of a small number of simple principles’ (ibid., cf. Bourdieu 1977: 16f. [1972: 209f.]). Such principles were what Hanoteau and Letourneux endeavoured to delineate: yet scarcely as ‘mythico-ritual’ dichotomies (night/day, inside/outside, male/female), but rather as morally coherent rulings about communal order, underpinned by the complex jural notion of ‘anaya protection assumed by the popular

64

Peter Parkes

sovereignty of jama‘a village assemblies. These were instituted to proclaim qanun ordinances regulating social conduct according to known customary usages (‘urf, ‘ada), in variably defensible accommodation with Maliki Muslim jurisprudence deliberated by marabout clerics such as Si Mula (II: 136ff.). The habitual social practice and tactical manipulation of such usages were surely significant (and indeed not disregarded by Hanoteau and Letourneux), but so were the regulatory effects of their consensual legislation – their canonical rules, no less.36 This essay has simply narrated an extraordinary collaborative venture of early French ethnographic fieldwork, reconstructing the consonant interests and skills of three oddly combined contributors – a soldier, a magistrate and a marabout – as well as the peculiar circumstances of their cooperation in Kabylia during the last decade of the Second Empire. For all its imperial arrogance and its unwanted colonial consequence, La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles should surely be redeemed by anthropology as an exemplary ethnography of customary law-making and communal regulation, evincing a truly reflexive conscience commune. Despite its methodological reticence, it

Figure 2.4. Submission of the Kabyle tribes to Marshall Randon in 1857 (Viollet Collection).

Canonical ethnography

65

Figure 2.5. Hanoteau and two Tuareg, 1858. From Jacques Frémeaux, Les bureaux arabes dans l’Algérie de la conquête, Paris, Denoël 1993.

pioneered a painstaking hermeneutics of concerted textual and oral exegeses of tribal jurisprudence. Although defeated by adverse forces of colonial administration, its positive plans to enable a devolution of indigenous jurisdiction were not ignoble (nor impertinent to current national imperatives in Algeria that still have to accommodate regional regimes of self-government). Its dedicated project of archival documentation and elicited explication – informed by an intimate and engaged participation of indigenous experts – still begs to be emulated and elaborated today.37

Peter Parkes

66

Notes Acknowledgements I am indebted to Judith Scheele for generous encouragement, comments and corrections. This essay also relies substantially on the classic work of Charles-Robert Ageron for the colonial context, and on the specialist current scholarship of Alain Mahé and Tilman Hannemann, as cited. 1. The Jurjura mountains of Kabylia form a steep massif behind the coastline of northeast Algeria. Tribal insurgencies in these highlands culminated in their military occupation in 1857 after fierce campaigns under Marshal Randon. See Julien (1964) and Ageron (1966). i 2. Kabyle qanun is derived from Greek kanon ‘rule, law’ (via Arabic and Turkish), cognate with English (and French) canon – hence canonical ethnography in several senses explored here. On the Arabic term, see Linant de Bellefonds (1978: 566f.). On the canonical status of the monograph, see especially Berque (1956: 305ff.). i 3. Translated passages are from the second (1893) edition of La Kabylie et les coutumes Kabyles, referenced by volume and page number alone in this chapter. I have simplified Hanoteau’s francophone orthography of Kabyle Berber (taqbaylit) and Arabic terms. 4. For a general biography of Hanoteau’s career, see Poussereau (1931). On the following narrative account, compare Hannemann (2002: 80–93, 2003: li–lix). 5. On the bureaux arabes, see Ageron (1960, 1966), Julien (1964: 333–41), Perkins (1981), and Frémaux (1993); also Lorcin (1995: 79–85, 130–40). A broader background of their policies is summarised by Ageron (1991: Ch. 3). 6. On Hanoteau’s Poésies populaires de la Kabylie du Djurjura (1867), see Goodman (2002a, b). This foundational work of ethnopoetics also appears to have been largely compiled and transcribed by Hanoteau’s primary informant, Si Mula n Ait u ‘Amar (Hanoteau 1867: xii). 7. On Randon’s ‘indirect rule’ or l’organisation Kabyle, see Ageron (1968: 277f.) and Frémaux (1993: 52f.). Qanun rulings, noted by Daumas (1853: 227f.), were also published by Féraud (1862: 276, 1863: 67) and Aucapitaine (1863, 1864: 71–76). 8. These details are briefly mentioned in the monograph (II: 92). The family history of Si Mula is related in a long letter sent to Maurice Hanoteau by Si Mula’s son, Si Sultan ben Si Mula, reproduced in Bernard and Milliot (1933: 5–7). 9. The quote is from an 1860 report by Hanoteau (Hannemann 2002: 62). Earlier reports were publicised as extracts in the Revue Algérienne et Coloniale (Anonymous 1859), foreshadowing the ethnographic synopsis of the monograph (II: 1–134). 10. On Ismail Urbain and his circle, see below (n. 22), Ageron (1968: 397–414) and Lorcin (1995: 88–92). 11. The monograph would thereby crown thirty-nine volumes of the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, commissioned by a founder of the bureaux arabes, Pellisier de Reynaud, in the 1840s. Its first volume summarises their exploratory surveys of Kabylia, especially Carette (1848). 12. On Letourneux, see the affectionate sketch by M. Hanoteau (1923: 144f.); also Bernard and Milliot (1933: 10–12). A field botanist and malacologist of world renown, Letourneux’s discoveries of many new species in Kabylia are itemised (with Kabyle and Arabic nomenclature) in the first volume of the monograph (I: 49–234). A keen epigrapher of Romano-Berber inscriptions, Letourneux succeeded Berbrugger as president of the Historical Society of Algeria in 1873–76.

Canonical ethnography

67

13. Bernard and Milliot (1933: 33, Pl. I). This letter may have been intended to provide supplementary material for the second edition of the monograph, although it is not used there. Hannemann (2002: 89) surmised that its date in Arabic might be a scribal error for January 1868, but this seems unlikely since Hanoteau would then have been resident at Fort-Napléon together with Si Mula. 14. On the composition of qanun rulings, see Masqueray (1886: 57–72) and Hannemann (2002: Ch. 5). The form of oral qanun rulings in the Kabyle language is uncertain: transcripts made for Hanoteau (1858a: 324–38, Bernard and Milliot 1933: Pl. II) may be back-translations from Arabic transcribed by his interpreter at Dra el-Mizan, El Haj Sa’id u ‘Ali (Bernard and Milliot 1933: 8). The style of these decrees, itemising fines for offences, resembles those documented in rural communities throughout the Mediterranean: from Spain (Behar 1986: Ch. 7) to Albania (Durham 1928: 64–92, Hasluck 1954: 261–74, Gjeçov 1989) and the Caucasus (Leontovich 1882, Kemper 2004). See also Scheele (forthcoming). 15. Cases of Kabyle disputation are, however, summarised in reports of the bureaux arabes at Fort-Napoléon (Gouvernement Géneral de l’Algerie n.d.), which might be collated with the monograph. Cf. Hannemann (2003: xxxv–l), Perkins (1981: 67–75). 16. An often cited source on early Germanic law is Jules Michelet’s Origines du droit français (1837). Such comparisons had already been suggested in Hanoteau (1858b) and Aucapitaine (1863); they would be elaborated by Masqueray (1886). 17. Kabyle regulations of commerce were pertinent to their extensive engagement in petty trade, outlined in the first volume of the monograph (I: 498–508). Cf. Mahé (2001: 29–39). 18. Letourneux also wrote excitedly to Hanoteau of this prospect: ‘a unified and codified Kabyle coutume will be accepted by a million Berbers, even by French magistrates; our idea shall make its way …’ (letter of 1869 in Bernard and Milliot 1933: 25). 19. E.g. Daumas (1853) and Aucapitaine (1864), who had eulogised Kabyle matriarchy. Cf. also Hanoteau (1867: 287–94). The position of Kabyle women has always been contested (Lorcin 1995: 64–67): their brideprice would be similarly deprecated by Hacoun-Campredon (1921), Morand (1927) and Lefèvre (1939). 20. On this Kabyle myth, contrasting assimilable Berbers with disparaged Arabs, cf. Lazreg (1983), Lorcin (1995) and Mahé (2001: 147–57). 21. Ageron (1968: 323f.). On other technical and agricultural innovations introduced by bureaux arabes officers, see Perkins (1981: 131–48) and Lorcin (1995: 83). Hanoteau also encouraged Si Mula and Si Lunis to establish the first secular primary school in Kabylia, which opened at Tamazirt in 1873 (Ageron 1968: 333). His elaborate plans for a credit association to support Kabyle enterprise are detailed by Poussereau (1931: 80–82). 22. On Saint-Simonism in Algeria, see Emerit (1941) and Lorcin (1995: Ch. 5). On the colourful career of Ismail Urbain and his campaigns for indigenous Muslim rights of citizenship, see Ageron (1968: 397–414) and Levallois (1989, 2001). 23. On this conflict between civilian and military authorities, see Ageron (1960, 1966, 1968) and Lorcin (1995: Ch. 4). Hanoteau’s anti-colon sentiments were strongly stated: ‘What our settlers dream of is a bourgeois feudalism, in which they will be the lords and the natives their serfs’ (Ageron 1991: 39f.). 24. On Hanoteau’s prolonged battles against Christian missionaries in Kabylia, notably Archbishop Lavigerie, see Ageron (1968: 273f., 279f.) and Mahé (2001: 180–82). 25. On these religious orders, Hanoteau relied on an earlier study of de Neveu (1845), although his disparaging account of Rahmaniyya education was based on a visit to their ma‘mara college (II: 91–95). On the Rahmaniyya order in Kabylia, see ClancySmith (1994: 39–45) and Mahé (2001: 46–54, 193–99) citing Salhi (1979). 26. Notably Milliot (1932), Marcy (1939, 1949), Berque (1953, 1955) and Bousquet (1950b, 1956). See now Hannemann (2002, 2005).

68

Peter Parkes

27. The Moqrani insurrection in Kabylia was documented by Rinn (1891) and Robin (1902). Cf. Julien (1964: 453–500), Ageron (1968: 3–7) and Mahé (2001: 190– 99). The following details on Fort-Napoléon are mainly derived from the account of Si Mula’s son, Si Sultan ben Si Mula (Bernard and Milliot 1933: 6f.). 28. They were soon divested of these posts under Camille Sabatier’s maladroit regime at Fort-National in the early 1880s (Ageron 1968: 287 n.1, Mahé 2001: 250f.). Si Mula then transferred his services as a qadi judge to a neighbouring district. He died in Algiers in 1890 (Bernard and Milliot 1933: 7), as did Letourneux. Close relations persisted thereafter between the lycée-educated sons of Si Mula and General Maurice Hanoteau, who followed his father’s career as a military engineer in Algeria. 29. On administrative reforms in the 1880s, including bungled attempts to restore a modified form of indirect rule around Fort-National by Camille Sabatier, see Ageron (1968: 285–92) and Mahé (2001: 245–51). Qanun codes up to the 1920s (some written in French) were documented by Milliot (1926) and Bousquet (1936, 1949). 30. Similar compendia of tribal-Muslim adat laws were C.L. Tupper’s Punjab Customary Laws (1881) and F.I. Leontovich’s Adaty Kavkazskikh Gortsev (1882–3). 31. On colonial ‘fabrications’ of customary law, see Snyder (1981), Chanock (1985), Moore (1986) and Salemink (1991); for darker Foucauldian suspicions, see Mamdani (1996), Burns (2004) and Le Cour Grandmaison (2006). On comparative codifications of customary law a still useful collection is Gilissen (1962). 32. Via Masqueray (1886) to Montagne (1930) and Berque (1955). On Masqueray’s ethnography, following respectfully in the footsteps of Hanoteau and Letourneux, see Colonna (1983) and Ould-Braham (1996). On this distinct ethnographic lineage, see Berque (1956: 305ff.), Favret (1968: 18f.), Roberts (2002), and Mahé (2003: ii). 33. See Burke (1973: 189–99), also treating the controversial dahir berbère decree of 1930. General Lyautey’s programme of collating Berber izerf customary law in the Middle Atlas from 1913 was exactly modelled on Hanoteau’s earlier project (Surdon 1938: 105ff., cf. Bousquet 1950a and Ageron 1971). See now Kraus (2005) and Burke (2007). 34. On Kabyle models in French West African judicial policy, see Christelow (1982: 14ff.) and compare Sibeud (2002) and Shinar (2006). On coutumiers in Indo-China, see Salemink (1991) and Parkin (2005: 201); on the Leiden Adatrecht school, see Ter Haar (1948) and Holleman (1981). 35. La Kabylie is cited in classic compendia on comparative customary law by A.H. Post, J. Kohler and S.R. Steinmetz. For socialistic references, see Laveleye (1874: Ch. 5, with note 3), Kovalevsky (1879: 200ff.) and Kropotkin (1902: Ch. 4, notes 33–35). Much has been made of its citation (with Masqueray 1886) in Durkheim’s De la division du travail social (Ch. 6 with note 6, see Gellner 1985); but there is little evidence that it was seriously studied by Durkheim (see Roberts 2002: 117ff.). 36. On Bourdieu’s antinomian problems with such rules, see Just (2005); for his deep familiarity with the monograph, compare Bourdieu (1958: Ch. 2). The delegitimation of Kabyle village assemblies at the end of the nineteenth century had discernible consequences of anomic anarchy and notorious banditry (Mahé 2001: 215ff.). See also Mahé (2000) and Scheele (2008, 2009) on recent struggles to revive village legislative powers in Kabylia. 37. An urgent archival ethnography of customary law throughout the Muslim Mediterranean has long been advocated by Frank Stewart (1987, 1989–90; cf. also Dresch 2007. Recent collections (e.g. Dostal and Kraus 2005, Kemper and Reinowski 2005) point to a resurgent anthropology of legal pluralism in Islam, which Hanoteau and Si Mula pioneered.

Canonical ethnography

69

References Ageron, C.-R. 1960. La France a-t-elle eu une politique kabyle? Revue historique, 226: 311–51. ——— 1966. La politique kabyle sous le Second Empire, Revue française d’histoire d’OutreMer, 53: 67–105. ——— 1968. Les Algériens musulmans et la France (1871–1919), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (2 vols). ——— 1971. La politique berbère du protectorat marocain, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 18: 50–90. ——— 1991 [French edn. 1964]. Modern Algeria: a history from 1830 to the present (tr. M. Brett), London: Hurst. Anonymous [after A. Hanoteau] 1859. Constitution sociale de la Kabylie: extrait d’un rapport du général commandant la division territoriale d’Algér, Revue Algérienne et Coloniale, 1: 1–20. Aucapitaine, H. 1863. Kanoun du village de Thaourirt Amokran chez les Aith Iraten (Kabilie), Revue africaine, 7: 279–85. ——— 1864. Études sur le passé et l’avenir des Kabyles: les Kabyles et la colonisation de l’Algérie, Paris: Challamel. Behar, R. 1986. Santa María del Monte: the presence of the past in a Spanish village, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bernard, A. 1930. Histoire des colonies françaises et de l’expansion de la France dans le monde, in G. Hanotaux and A. Martineau (eds), 2: L’Algérie, Paris: Plon. Bernard, A. and L. Milliot. 1933. Les qânoûns kabyles dans l’ouvrage de Hanoteau et Letourneux, Revue des Études Islamiques, 7: 1–44. Berque, J. 1953. Problèmes initiaux de la sociologie juridique en Afrique du Nord, Studia Islamica, 1: 137–62. ——— 1955. Structures sociales du Haut Atlas, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ——— 1956. Cent vingt-cinq ans de sociologie maghrébine, Annales ESC, 11: 299–331. Betts, R.F. 1961. Assimilation and association in French colonial theory, 1890–1914, New York: Columbia University Press. Blanckaert, C. 1996. Histoires du terrain: entre savoirs et savoir-faire, in Le Terrain des sciences humaines (XVIIIe–XXe siècle), Paris: L’Harmattan. Bourdieu, P. 1958. Sociologie de l’Algérie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ——— 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. R. Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, Geneva: Librairie Droz.] ——— 1990 [1987]. In other words, tr. M. Adamson, Cambridge: Polity Press. [La codification, In Choses dites. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.] Bousquet, G.H. 1936. Un qanoun kabyle contemporain, Revue africaine, 79: 867–72. ——— 1949. Documents contemporains curieux relatifs au droit en Kabylie, Revue algérienne, tunisienne et marocaine de législation et de jurisprudence, 1: 93–96. ——— 1950a. Islamic law and customary law in French North Africa, Journal of the Society for Comparative Legislation, 32: 57–65. ——— 1950b. Justice française et coutumes kabyles, Algiers: Imprimerie Nord Africaine. ——— 1950c. Un culte à détruire: l’adoration de Hanoteau et Letourneux, Revue de la Méditerranée, 8–9: 441–54. ——— 1956. Le droit coutumier de Aït Haddidou, des Assif Melaoul et des Isselaten (Conféderation des Aït Yafelmane): notes et reflections, Annales de l’institut d’études orientales de l’université d’Alger, 14: 113–230. Burke, E. III. 1973. The image of the Moroccan state in French ethnological literature: a new look at the origins of Lyautey’s Berber policy, in E. Gellner and C. Micaud (eds), Arabs and Berbers, London: Duckworth.

70

Peter Parkes

——— 2007. The creation of the Moroccan colonial archives, 1880–1930, History and Anthropology, 18: 1–9. Burns, P. 2004. The Leiden legacy: concepts of law in Indonesia, Leiden: KITLV. Carette, E. 1848. Études sur la Kabilie proprement dite, Paris: Imprimerie Royale (2 vols). Chanock, M. 1985. Law, custom and social order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Christelow, A. 1982. The Muslim judge and municipal politics in colonial Algeria and Senegal, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24: 3–24. Clancy-Smith, J.A. 1994. Rebel and saint: Muslim notables, populist protest, colonial encounters, Berkeley: University of California Press. Colonna, F. 1983. Présentation: introduction to the reprint of É. Masqueray [1886] Formation des cités chez les populations sédentaires de l’Algérie: Kabyles du Djurdjura, Chaouïa de l’Aurâs, Beni Mazab, Aix-en-Provence: Édisud. Daumas, E. 1853. Moeurs et coutumes de l’Algerie, Paris: Hachette. Daumas, E. and P. Fabar 1847. La Grande Kabylie, études historiques, Paris: Hachette. Dostal, W. and W. Kraus (eds). 2005. Shattering tradition: custom, law and the individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, London: I.B. Tauris. Dresch, P. 2007. The Rules of Barat: tribal documents from Yemen, Sanaa: Centre Français d’Archaeologie et de Sciences Sociales. Durham, M.E. 1928. Some tribal origins, laws and customs of the Balkans, London: George Allen and Unwin. Emerit, M. 1941. Les Saints Simoniens en Algérie, Paris: Belles Lettres. Favret, J. 1968. Relations de dépendance et manipulation de la violence en Kabylie, L’Homme, 8: 18–44. Féraud, L.-C. 1862, 1863. Moeurs et coutumes kabyles, Revue africaine, 6: 272–83, 429– 41; 7: 67–84. Frémaux, J. 1993. Les bureaux arabes dans l’Algérie de la conquête, Paris: Denoël. Gellner, E. 1985. The roots of cohesion, Man (n.s.) 20: 142–55. Gilissen, J. (ed.). 1962. La rédaction des coutumes dans le passé et dans le présent, Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles, Études d’histoire et d’ethnologie juridique 3. Gjeçov, S. 1989. Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit (tr. L. Fox), New York: Gjonlekaj. Goodman, J.E. 2002a. The half-life of texts: poetry, politics and ethnography in Kabylia, Algeria, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 12: 157–88. ——— 2002b. Writing empire, underwriting nation: discursive histories of Kabyle Berber oral texts, American Ethnologist, 29: 86–122. Gouvernement Géneral de l’Algérie. n.d. Série I, Bureaux arabes, cercle de Fort-Napoléon puis Fort-National, rapports, 1857–1880. Ss. 42I 1–7, 43I 1–7. 71 MIOM 288–91, 294. Archives d’Outre-mer d’Aix-en-Provence, France. Hacoun-Campredon, P. 1921. Etude sur l’évolution des coutumes kabyles, Algiers: Carbonel. Hannemann, T. 2002. Recht und Religion in der Grossen Kabylei (18/19 Jahrhundert): zu rechtskulturellen Wandlungsprozessen des tribalen Gewohnsheitsrechts, PhD dissertation, University of Bremen (internet publication 2004). ——— 2003. La mise en place du droit kabyle dans l’Algérie coloniale (1857–1868). Introduction to the reprint of Hanoteau and Letourneux (1893), Paris: Éditions Bouchène. ——— 2005. Gewohnheitsrecht in einer islamischen Rechtsumgebung: theoretische Vergleichperspectiven aus der Grossen Kabylei, in M. Kemper and M. Reinkowski (eds), Rechtspluralismus in der islamischen Welt: Gewohnheitsrecht zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft, Berlin: de Gruyter. Hanoteau, A. 1858a. Essai de grammaire kabyle …, Algiers and Paris: Bastide/Challamel. ——— [unsigned] 1858b. Une charte kabile, Revue africaine, 3: 75–80. ——— 1860. Essai de grammaire de la langue tamachek …, Paris: Imprimerie Impériale. ——— 1867. Poésies populaires de la Kabylie du Djurdjura, Paris: Imprimerie Impériale.

Canonical ethnography

71

Hanoteau, A. and A. Letourneux. 1872–73 [1893]. La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale (2nd ed.) 1893. Hanoteau, M. 1923. Quelques souvenirs sur les collaborateurs de ‘La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles’, Revue africaine, 64: 134–49. Hasluck, M. 1954. The unwritten law in Albania, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holleman, J.F. 1981. Van Vollenhoven on Indonesian adat law, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Julien, C.-A. 1964. Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine: la conquête et les débuts de la colonisation, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Just, R. 2005. In defence of rules: Pierre Bourdieu en Grèce, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 15: 1–24. Kemper, M. 2004. Communal agreements (ittifaqat) and ‘adat-books from Daghestani villages and confederacies (18th–19th centuries), Der Islam, 81: 115–51. Kemper, M. and M. Reinkowski (eds). 2005. Rechtspluralismus in der islamischen Welt: Gewohnheitsrecht zwischen Staat and Gesellschaft, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Khalil ibn Ishaq, al Jundi [Sidi Khalil]. 1848–52. Précis de jurisprudence musulmane, ou Principes de législation musulmane civile et religieuse, selon le rite Malékite par Khalil, traduit de l’Arabe par M. [Nicolas] Perron, Paris: Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, sciences, histoires et geographies, vols 10–15. Kovalevsky, M.M. 1879. Obshchinnoye zemlevladenie, Part 1, Moscow: F.B. Miller. Kraus, W. 2005. Tribal law in the Moroccan High Atlas: pre-colonial legal practice and its transformations, in W. Dostal and W. Kraus (eds), Shattering tradition, London: I.B. Tauris. Kropotkin, P. 1902. Mutual aid: a factor in evolution, London: Heinemann. Laveleye, E. de. 1874. De la propriété et de ses formes primitives, Paris: Librairie G. Baillière. Lazreg, M. 1983. The reproduction of colonial ideology: the case of the Kabyle Berbers, Arab Studies Quarterly, 5: 380–95. Le Cour Grandmaison, O. 2006. The exception and the rule: on French colonial law, Diogenes, 53(4): 34–53. Lefèvre [Bousquet], L. 1939. La femme kabyle, Paris: Sirey. Leontovich, F.I. 1882–3. Adaty kavkazskikh gortsev, Odessa: G. Ulrikha (2 vols). Levallois, M. 1989. Ismayl Urbain: éléments pour une biographie, in M. Morsy (ed.), Les Saint-Simoniens et l’Orient: vers la modernité, Aix-en-Provence: Édisud. ——— 2001. Ismaÿl Urbain: une autre conquête de l’Algérie, Paris: Maisonneuve. Linant de Bellefonds, Y. 1978. Kanun, Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), 4: 556–57. Lorcin, P.M.E. 1995. Imperial identities: stereotyping, prejudice, and race in colonial Algeria, London and New York: Tauris. Luc, B. 1917. Le droit kabyle, Paris: Challamel (2nd ed.). MacCarthy, O. 1847–48. La Kabylie et les Kabyles: études économiques et ethnographiques, Revue de l’Orient et de l’Algérie 1: 345ff., 2: 28ff., 137ff. Mahé, A. 2000. Les assemblés villageoises dans la Kabylie contemporaine: traditionalisme par excès de modernité ou modernisme par excès de tradition? Études rurales, 155– 156: 179–212. ——— 2001. Histoire de la Grande Kabylie, XIXe–XXe. Siècles: anthropologie historique du lien social dans les communautés villageoises, Paris: Éditions Bouchène. ——— 2003. Entres les moeurs et le droit: les coutumes. Remarques introductives à La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles, Introduction to the reprint of Hanoteau and Letourneux (1893), Paris: Éditions Bouchène. Malinowski, B. 1926. Crime and custom in savage society, London: Kegan Paul. Mamdani, M. 1926. Customary law: the theory of decentralized despotism, in Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marcy, G. 1939. Le problème du droit coutumier berbère, La France méditerranéenne et africaine, 2: 7–70.

72

Peter Parkes

——— 1949. Le droit coutumier zemmour, Algiers: Carbonel. Masqueray, É. 1886. Formation des cités chez les populations sédentaires de l’Algérie: Kabyles du Djurdjura, Chaouïa de l’Aurâs, Beni Mazab, Paris: Ernest Leroux. Repr. (1983 Aix-enProvence: Édisud.) Maunier, R. 1927. Recherches sur les échanges rituels en Afrique du Nord, L’Année Sociologique (n.s.), 2: 11–97. ——— 1935. Coutumes algériennes, Paris: Domat-Montchretien. Michelet, J. 1837. Origines du droit français cherchées dans les symboles et formulas du droit universel, Paris: Hachette. Milliot, L. 1926. Les nouveaux qanoun kabyles, Hespéris, 6: 365–418. ——— 1932. Les institutions kabyles, Revue de Études Islamiques, 6: 127–74. Montagne, R. 1930. Les Berbères et le Makhzen dans le sud du Maroc, Paris: Alcan. Moore, S.F. 1986. Social facts and fabrications: ‘customary’ law on Kilimanjaro 1880–1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morand, M. 1927. Le statut de la femme kabyle et la réforme des coutumes berbères, Revue des Études Islamiques, 1: 47–94. Neveu, E. de. 1845. Les khouan: ordres religieux chez les musulmans d’Algérie, Paris: Guyot. Ould-Braham, O. 1996. Émile Masqueray en Kabylie (printemps 1873 et 1874), Études et documents berbères, 14: 5–74. Parkin, R. 2005. The French-speaking countries, in F. Barth et al., One discipline, four ways: British, German, French, and American anthropology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Patorni, F. 1895. Délibération de l’année 1749 dans la Grande Kabylie, Revue africaine, 39: 315–20. Perkins, K.J. 1981. Qaids, captains, and colons: French military administration in the colonial Maghrib, 1844–1934, New York: Africana. Poussereau, L.-M. 1931. La carrière d’un officier nivernais en Algérie: le général A. Hanoteau (1814–1897), in A. J. Parès (et al.), Mémoires sur l’histoire de l’Algérie au XIXe siècle, Paris: Rieder. Renan, E. 1873. La société berbère: exploration scientifique de l’Algérie [review of Hanoteau and Letourneux 1872–73], Revue des deux mondes 107: 138–57. Rinn, L. 1891. Histoire de l’insurrection de 1871, Algiers: Jourdan. Roberts, H. 2002. Perspectives on Berber politics: on Gellner and Masqueray, or Durkheim’s mistake, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 107–26. Robin, J.N. 1902. L’insurrection de la Grande Kabylie en 1871, Paris: Lavauzelle. Salemink, O. 1991. Mois and Maquis: the invention and appropriation of Vietnam’s Montagnards from Sabatier to the CIA, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Colonial situations: the contextualisation of ethnographic knowledge, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Salhi, M.B. 1979. Étude d’une confrérie religieuse algérienne: la Rahmania à la fin du XIXe siècle et dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. PhD dissertation, Paris: EHESS. Scheele, J. 2008. ‘A kind of savage Switzerland’: local law-giving in Kabylia (Algeria), in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50(4). 2009. Village matters: knowledge, politics and community in Kabylia, Oxford: James Currey. Shinar, P. 2006. A major link between France’s Berber policy in Morocco and its ‘policy of races’ in French West Africa: Commandant Paul Marty (1882–1938), Islamic Law and Society, 13: 33–62. Sibeud, E. 2002. Une science impériale pour l’Afrique? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878–1930, Paris: EHESS. Snyder, F. 1981. Colonialism and legal form: the creation of customary law in Senegal, Journal of Legal Pluralism, 19: 49–90. Stewart, F. 1987. Tribal law in the Arab world: a review of the literature, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 19: 473–90.

Canonical ethnography

73

——— 1988–90. Texts in Sinai Bedouin Law, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasowitz (2 vols). Surdon, G. 1938. Institutions et coutumes des Berbères du Maghreb, Tangiers: Editions Internationales. Ter Haar, B. 1948. Adat Law in Indonesia, New York: Institute of Pacific Relations. Tooker, E. 1983. The structure of the Iroquois League: Lewis H. Morgan’s research and observations, Ethnohistory, 30: 141–54. Trautmann, T.R. 1987. Lewis Henry Morgan and the invention of kinship, Berkeley: University of California Press. Tupper, C.L. 1881. Punjab customary laws, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendant of Government Printing (3 vols). Urbain, I. [under pseudonym G. Voisin] 1860. L’Algérie pour les Algériens, Paris: M. Levy.

Chapter 3

POSTCARDS AT THE SERVICE OF THE IMAGINARY: JEAN ROUCH, SHARED ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CINÉ-TRANCE Paul Henley

Introduction The very nature of ethnographic cinema – how it is practised, how it is talked about, where its limits are deemed to lie – has been profoundly shaped by the work of the late Jean Rouch, who died tragically in a road accident near Tahoua, Niger in February 2004. In the course of a sixtyyear career, beginning with his first tentative ethnographic reports published in a French colonial journal in the early 1940s and ending with his last film, poignantly entitled Le rêve plus fort que la mort and released in 2002, Rouch produced over a hundred completed films and almost as many published texts. While a handful of the films have been widely distributed, reaching far beyond the confines of academic anthropology, the great majority remain little known and extremely difficult to see, particularly in the English-speaking world. In France, Rouch’s reputation was probably at its peak in the early 1960s. He was not only well known among anthropologists, but he was also a national figure in French cinema and his films were regularly reviewed in the avant-garde screen studies journal, Cahiers du Cinéma (Prédal 1996). In contrast, at this time his work was virtually unknown in what the French like to call the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world.1 From the early 1970s, Rouch’s star gradually began to wane in France and by the early

Paul Henley

76

Figure 3.1 Jean Rouch shooting in a market in the Gold Coast in 1954. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, ref. 28464.

1980s, his profile was significantly diminished, both in anthropological and cinema circles. Ironically, it was precisely at this time that he came to be discovered by Anglo-Saxon visual anthropologists, since his views about anthropology and cinema, and the relationship of both to empirical reality, struck a chord with the postmodernist tendencies that were then sweeping through Anglo-Saxon anthropology, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic.2 But although Rouch may have been hailed as a prophet of postmodernism in Anglo-Saxon anthropology – much to his surprise and amusement – his approach was deeply rooted in a distinctively French intellectual tradition.

The surreal encounter Rouch first became attracted to anthropology through a prior engagement with surrealism while he was still a teenager. There is a story that he liked to tell about this first encounter, which involved, it seems, something of a Damascene conversion, complete with blinding light. It happened one spring afternoon in 1934, when the seventeenyear-old Rouch passed a bookshop in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. There, in the window, in a pool of light cast by the setting sun,

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

77

was a display of two juxtaposed double-paged spreads from recent editions of Minotaure, a journal which published the work both of the leading surrealists of the day and anthropologists. One of these spreads, from the second edition, showed some funerary masks worn by the Dogon of the Bandiagara Cliffs in what is now eastern Mali, but which was then the colony of the French Soudan. This image was but one of many illustrations accompanying the principal subject matter of that edition of the journal, namely a special report on the celebrated DakarDjibouti Expedition of 1931–1933, written by its leader, Marcel Griaule. The other spread included a reproduction of a painting of two figures in a dream-like landscape by Giorgio de Chirico, a painter much admired by the surrealists. In the mind of the young Rouch, the two images became inextricably associated and the Bandiagara Cliffs took on the character of a fabled landscape to which he dreamed that one day he too would be able to travel (Rouch 1995c: 410). The many connections between ethnology (as the study of social or cultural anthropology was then known in France), surrealism and l’art nègre – the latter embracing everything from traditional African masks, such as those featured in Minoature, to jazz, the dancer Josephine Baker and black American boxers – have been extensively commented upon by James Clifford, Christopher Thompson and others, as well as by Rouch himself on a number of occasions.3 The distinguished historian of anthropology in France, Jean Jamin, has questioned the true extent of the connections between ethnology and surrealism, suggesting that it was more a question of two activities occupying adjacent intellectual spaces rather than being involved in a genuine exchange. While the ethnologists were committed to the detached observation and rigorous analysis of cultural phenomena, the surrealists sought a highly subjective immersion in other cultural realities, hoping to tap into the primitive creative life forces which they imagined to be inherent in such cultures, particularly those of Africa. According to Jamin, although there may have been certain ‘complicities and affinities’ between ethnology and surrealism, there was no long-term or systematic transfer of methods and concepts (Jamin 1991: 84). But while this may have been generally true, it certainly does not apply to Rouch, whose film-making methods continued to be informed by the precepts of surrealism right until the end of his film-making career, long after these ideas had not only lost whatever currency they might have once had in ethnology, but had also fallen out of fashion in the worlds of the plastic arts and poetry. The oeuvre of Jean Rouch as a film-maker is not only remarkably large but also remarkably eclectic. Although the great majority of his films were shot in West Africa, or failing that in Paris, they include both fullscale feature-length documentaries and short documentation films.

78

Paul Henley

Films about large-scale African ritual events alternate with intimate portraits of Rouch’s friends, and promotional films for West African development agencies sit side by side with ‘ciné-poems’. A major strand of this oeuvre consists of fictional feature films, though true to Rouch’s surrealist leanings, these did not generally involve any kind of formal script but relied instead on spontaneous improvisation around a series of ideas that Rouch and his protagonists made up as they went along. Initially these fiction films were anchored in Rouch’s ethnographic research, but they became progressively more fantastical and surrealist as his career developed. In an allusion to the ethnographic origins of his earlier work in this mode, Rouch himself referred playfully to his fiction films as ‘science fiction’, though third-party commentators on Rouch’s work have tended to prefer the somewhat debatable term ‘ethnofiction’. Rouch was a man of great energy, but even he could not have been so productive a film-maker had it not been for his particular professional circumstances. In 1947, while still engaged in doctoral research on the religious life of the Songhay of the middle reaches of the Niger river, he was admitted to the CNRS. Apart from a brief interlude in 1951–53, when he was temporarily expelled for not having completed his thesis – largely due to competing film-making activities – this research position enabled him to go to West Africa almost every year for the rest of his career and shoot a number of films, unencumbered by any heavy teaching obligations. Not every one of the films that he shot on these almost annual fieldwork ‘missions’ was a masterpiece. Many were unpretentious descriptive accounts of religious ceremonies, notably of spirit possession rites in which he had a particular interest and which he himself estimated to feature in some fifty of his films (Taylor 2003: 140). Quite a number of his films remained unfinished and to this day exist only as rushes or unmarried prints. Some were experiments that failed. But even if all these minor, incomplete or unsuccessful works are discounted, it remains the case that Rouch was and is by far the most productive film-maker, living or dead, to have made ethnographic films. The films that he made in the early part of his career, especially those he made in a particularly creative period between 1950 and 1960, established a new standard in the history of ethnographic film-making that continues to inspire ethnographic film-makers the world over.

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

79

The joking relationship Although Rouch was entirely self-taught as a film-maker, he did receive a formal anthropological training. In the academic year 1940–1941, with Paris already under the German occupation, Rouch enrolled on an extramural course given by Marcel Griaule in the basement of the Musée de l’Homme. Germaine Dieterlen, Griaule’s partner in both personal and professional life, supported the lectures with a series of ‘magic lantern’ slide shows. At the time, Rouch had no formal involvement with either anthropology or film-making. In fact, he was in his final year as an engineering student at the elite grande école, Ponts et Chausées, but the memory of the episode in front of the Montparnasse bookshop evidently still burned brightly in his mind. The relationships that he formed with Griaule and Dieterlen through this course would be of crucial importance in the shaping of his future career as both anthropologist and film-maker. Shortly afterwards, in order to fulfil his dream of travelling to West Africa as well as to escape from wartime France, Rouch took a job as a road-building engineer in Niamey, capital of the French colony of Niger. Here he came across spirit possession first-hand among his labourers and began his first ethnographic research of the phenomenon, aided by a questionnaire prepared for him by Dieterlen and sent out to him by a roundabout route. Later, in 1944–45, after a couple of years combining engineering work and private study in the Institut français d’Afrique Noire in Dakar, he joined the Free French forces in Africa and participated in the liberation of France and invasion of Germany. After the war, he returned to France and enrolled at the Sorbonne to study for a doctorate in anthropology under the supervision of Griaule. In the immediate post-war period, Griaule was under something of a cloud. Unlike most leading anthropologists, many of whom had taken refuge abroad during the war, Griaule had chosen to remain behind and co-operate with the Vichy government. He not only accepted a Chair at the Sorbonne but also, having been an aviator in his youth, a commission as a colonel in the air force. However, despite his personal aversion to everything associated with the Vichy regime, Rouch elected to study under Griaule because, he claimed, Griaule and his group simply ‘had more fun’ than the other leading Africanists with whom he might have worked.4 There were probably some more pragmatic reasons too: Griaule was the leading French authority on the middle Niger where Rouch wanted to work and, with Dieterlen, he had supported Rouch’s own first amateur ethnographic research during the war years. It could also have been important that Griaule was sympathetic to film-making, as he had made two films among the Dogon in the 1930s.5

80

Paul Henley

Yet although there may have been a number of good reasons for Rouch to study with Griaule, there always remained a certain ambiguity in Rouch’s attitudes towards his mentor, involving a curious mixture of disdain and respect. Rouch liked to present this as an extrapolation of the traditional joking relationship between the cliff-dwelling Dogon, whom Griaule had studied, and the Songhay and the other peoples of the lowland fluvial plains of the Niger whom he himself had worked with. But it seems very likely that it was also the result of a certain dissonance in their political views, not only in relation to collaboration during the war years, but also with regard to the French colonial project in Africa.6 Griaule passed on to Rouch his particular take on the intellectual inheritance that he had received from his own mentor, Marcel Mauss. As Clifford has described, from a methodological point of view, Mauss’s approach involved a clear differentiation between the process of ethnographic description and the process of theoretical explanation. In the Maussian methodology, the first stage in any research project should consist of the systematic accumulation of large numbers of ‘documents’, namely bodies of ethnographic data. These ‘documents’ could be culled from a broad variety of sources, both historical and anthropological, textual as well as verbal. Indeed, everything and anything could be grist to the ethnographer’s mill, for, as Germaine Dieterlen once remarked, the most clumsy design scratched on a wall with a fingernail could provide a clue to ideas about the structure of the universe (Dieterlen 1988: 252). This process of accumulating ‘documents’ should be as objective as possible and free from a priori explanatory concerns. The ‘documents’ could then be subjected to rigorous scholarly exegesis within the framework of indigenous concepts and linguistic categories. But the elaboration of exogenous theoretical explanations or arguments in terms of comparative ethnography were processes that should happen later, a posteriori, rather than in the process of accumulating the ‘documents’ in the first place. Although some of the theoretical conclusions that Mauss drew from the minute analysis of ethnographic ‘documents’ have been the source of great inspiration to subsequent generations of anthropologists, contemporary accounts suggest that, in his lectures, Mauss often got so immersed in the ethnographic detail that he never quite arrived at the elucidation of the theoretical conclusions (Clifford 1988a: 123– 25). Rouch’s recollection of Griaule’s lectures as a series of disaggregated ethnographic titbits suggests that they too may have suffered from the same shortcomings (Rouch 2003b: 103–4). More generally, in this particular anthropological school, it seems that there was a distinct tendency for detailed ethnographic description to be prioritised and appreciated for its own sake, while theoretical

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

81

explanation and generalisation were treated as matters of a second order of elaboration that in the ideal case should eventually follow, but in actual practice might not do so. Certainly this was true of Rouch’s textual anthropology. His doctoral dissertation on the Songhay was submitted in 1952 and later published under the title La Religion et la magie songhay, first in 1960, and then in a substantially annotated second edition in 1989. The original dissertation was completed shortly after the publication of Dieterlen’s classic work, Essai sur la religion bambara, and it was clearly heavily influenced by this model.7 Not only the general approach, but even the structure and layout of Rouch’s work follow those of Dieterlen’s work very closely. That is, Rouch provides a highly detailed but entirely descriptive account of Songhay beliefs in which each element or aspect of Songhay traditional religion is described sequentially and in isolation – the general cosmology, the myths of origin associated with particular cult activities, the various roles or offices involved, the ‘texts’ chanted, the forms of dance, the types of musical instrument and so on. The only explanations that are offered for these practices are in terms of local legends or beliefs, often quoted verbatim. At the end of the book, in a ‘conclusion’ of less than three pages, Rouch makes no attempt to identify any general theoretical consequences of his study. He declines to present Songhay religious ideas and practices as ideologically related to particular social or political structures. Analyses in terms of either the comparative ethnography or history of West Africa as a whole are not merely eschewed but ridiculed, albeit humorously. Instead, Rouch chooses to celebrate – in defiance of considerable evidence to the contrary, to which he himself even alludes – the original and unique character of Songhay religion.8 But if Rouch’s general intellectual formation can be traced back ultimately to Mauss, his ideas about the actual practice of anthropology in the field were more directly influenced by the methodology of Griaule himself. For although Mauss actively advocated fieldwork, his own investigations were entirely bibliographic. Griaule, in contrast, was highly committed to fieldwork in practice as well as in principle. His ideas about how to conduct fieldwork are laid out very explicitly in his Méthode de l‘ethnographie. This slim handbook was not published until 1957, the year after his death, but it draws on his experiences in working with the Dogon since the 1930s. The approach that Griaule proposes here is very different from that developed around the same time by Anglo-Saxon anthropologists, notably by Bronislaw Malinowski, which, since the 1960s, has become the orthodoxy in social and cultural anthropology generally, even in France. Whereas Malinowski proposed that the fieldworker should ‘plunge into the life

82

Paul Henley

of the natives’, usually alone, becoming a relatively unobtrusive ‘participant-observer’ engaged in the day-to-day life of a community, Griaule advocated the formation of teams of fieldworkers, organised along quasi-military lines who would not only maximise the collection of data within any given time period but at the same time triangulate the results that they were obtaining. Far from the discreet observation of life as it is lived with minimal interference, as in the Malinowskian approach, Griaule’s method was highly pro-active, involving intensive interrogatory interviews based on systematic questionnaires. Rather than observing the subjects interacting among themselves, Griaule preferred to work with a select group of elite informants, using bilingual intermediaries rather than the native language.9 Rouch gives a rather droll account of the fieldwork routines of Griaule and Dieterlen as he observed them while visiting their camp at Sanga, at the foot of the Bandiagara Cliffs, in 1950. First thing in the morning, Griaule would give all members of the team their tasks for the day. While he and Dieterlen worked through questionnaires with their established informants and other researchers in the team were dispatched elsewhere, groups of traditional musicians would be summoned to perform so that they could be filmed by Rouch and his film-making partner and sound-recordist on this particular expedition, Roger Rosfelder, also a student of Griaule. Alternatively, Rouch and Rosfelder would be sent off to film daily routines in a nearby Dogon village. At noon, the whole team would meet up in the company of the Dogon informants and interpreters and exchange the information gathered in the morning. On the basis of these discussions – in which, Rouch emphasises, the Dogon played an active part – Dieterlen would typically develop an inspired series of further hypotheses which Griaule would then order into a new series of questionnaires to be used in the afternoon. With perhaps just a touch of irony, Rouch compares this approach to the Socratic method of successive dialogical approximations to philosophical truth.10 The fieldwork approach that Rouch himself would develop as both a film-making and a text-making anthropologist shared certain similarities with that of his mentor. Like Griaule, Rouch returned faithfully to the same field sites in West Africa over a prolonged period. Indeed, Rouch liked to quote Griaule and Dieterlen’s view that one needed at least twenty years of first-hand experience of a given society before one could begin to achieve a ‘deep knowledge’ of its systems of thought (e.g. Rouch 2003b: 111). Like Griaule, Rouch tended to rely on a key group of informants and worked largely through the medium of French, perhaps because, as he himself confessed, he was ‘not very good at languages’.11 In his ‘straight’ anthropological fieldwork, he often used formal questionnaires,

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

83

both during his doctoral research and in the migration studies that he carried out in West Africa in the 1950s (Rouch 1956: 37). Also like Griaule, Rouch tended to focus his attention on what might be called the public cultural rhetoric of the groups whom he studied ethnographically. That is, the great majority of his films are about public ceremonial performances of one kind or another, and there is very little emphasis on private domestic life and the routines of the everyday. Partly for this reason, Rouch’s films mainly concern the public world of men, the more domestic world of women being relatively neglected.12 Although Rouch never used interviews of any kind in his films, one can also perhaps detect, as Clifford has done, a certain continuity between, on the one hand, what he calls Griaule’s ‘dialogical method’, in which interrogatory questions were aimed at provoking the subjects into revealing answers, and on the other, Rouch’s idea that the camera could act as a catalyst to provoke his subjects into revelatory performances (Clifford 1988b: 77). Indeed, it is tempting to argue that, in the same way that Griaule’s pro-active methods contrasted with the more passive participant observational methods of Anglo-Saxon anthropology, so too did Rouch’s pro-active cinematographic methods contrast with the more low-key methods of direct or observational cinema as practised by his Anglo-Saxon film-making contemporaries.13

Shared anthropology If there were certain similarities between Griaule’s and Rouch’s fieldwork methods, though, there were also profound differences, mainly related to their very different attitudes towards their subjects. For Griaule’s ‘dialogical method’, notwithstanding the positive connotations of this way of describing it, was essentially antagonistic, being based on the initial working assumption, stated repeatedly in the methodological handbook, that the informant was lying. In an extended legal analogy, Griaule suggests that the informant should be considered the equivalent to the ‘guilty party’ in a court of law, while the remainder of the society should be considered his ‘accomplices’. In order to combat an informant’s congenital tendency to lie, Griaule recommended that the researcher – compared variously to a prosecution lawyer, judge and even a bloodhound – should use whatever trick or stratagem was necessary to circumvent the informant’s defences. Although Griaule may have developed a profound respect for African culture, coming to regard Dogon cosmology as the equal of that of ancient Greece, his methodological recommendations suggest that he had no respect for the Africans themselves as individuals.14

84

Paul Henley

Griaule’s aggressive and unscrupulous attitude, shocking to a modern sensibility and undoubtedly the product of a colonial mentality whereby all indigenous knowledge was fair game, could not be further from Rouch’s own attitudes. Shortly after his arrival in Niger to take up the post of roads engineer in December 1941, and in defiance of the Vichy governor’s disapproval of familiarity with Africans, Rouch became friendly with a young local man, Damouré Zika, and appointed him as his assistant. Damouré was a member of the Sorko sub-group of the Songhay, whose specialist metier was fishing the waters of the Niger. It was he who first introduced Rouch to spirit possession through his grandmother, Kalia, a priestess of one of the local spirit possession cults. Damouré was the first and most significant of a group of Africans whom Rouch subsequently gathered around himself and who accompanied him whenever he went to Africa. Later additions to this group included Lam Ibrahim Dia, a Fulani cattle-herder, Illo Gaoudel, also a Sorko fisherman, and Tallou Mouzourane, a Bella cattle-herder and general ‘go-fer’. Somewhat later, Moussa Hamidou, who was from the Zerma, a group closely related to the Songhay, also joined the ‘gang’. These men helped Rouch in a variety of different ways: they conducted surveys for his migration studies, crewed on his documentaries and took a leading part as actors in his ethnofictions. They also drove his Land Rover, carried his equipment and generally acted as his local fixers. In return, Rouch not only paid them salaries while they worked for him but shared the profits of his films on a fifty-fifty basis. He also supported them in many other ways: he arranged for Damouré to be trained as a medical auxiliary and later as a pharmacist, which allowed him, in local terms, to achieve great wealth and status; Lam became a professional driver after having learnt to drive with Rouch and used his part of the income from the films to buy himself vehicles; through his cinema work with Rouch, Moussa was able to pay for all his sons to be educated as professionals; when Rouch met Tallou, he was an orphan suffering from leprosy, so Rouch arranged for him to be cured and then took him under his wing, supporting him for the rest of his life.15 When Rouch died in the tragic road accident in February 2004, travelling in the same car with him, though fortunately not seriously hurt, was Damouré, still accompanying Rouch some sixty-two years after they first met. These attitudes of respect for and engagement with his subjects were made manifest in various ways in Rouch’s works, both textual and visual. Thus, in the introduction to his doctoral thesis, Rouch advises the reader that he has omitted some of the secret knowledge to which he felt privileged to have been made party since he had promised the Songhay that he would not divulge it. ‘The ethnographer is not a policeman who extorts matters about which there is a desire neither to tell him nor show him’ (Rouch 1989: 17–18). This is certainly a far cry

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

85

from Griaule’s analogy of the ethnographer as a bloodhound of the social fact, desperate to break down his informants’ resistance by whatever means necessary. Similar attitudes are evident in Rouch’s film-making methods. In the early 1950s, he began making a point of regularly screening his films to their subjects. Rouch liked to trace this ‘feedback’ practice back to the example set by Robert Flaherty, the so-called ‘father’ of ethnographic documentary, who, during the making of Nanook of the North in the early 1920s, had screened his rushes to his subjects in order to decide what they should film the next day. But Rouch went very much further than this, giving his African collaborators a much greater role in devising the content of his films than Flaherty ever gave to Nanook and his companions. Flaherty asked the Inuit to adjust their house constructions, subsistence activities, their costumes and even their personal identities to the requirements of his film. In contrast, Rouch was reluctant to ask his subjects to dress up or behave in any special way. Instead he would simply ask them to improvise along whatever lines they themselves thought fit (Colleyn 1992: 46–47, Rouch 1995a: 88). Rouch’s feedback procedures were also much more elaborate than those of Flaherty. He did not merely screen his rushes to his subjects in order to plan the next day’s shooting: instead, feedback screenings became the very cornerstone of his way of working. Often he would return, months or years later, not with the rushes, but with the completed film and screen that to his subjects. Like Flaherty, Rouch appreciated the pragmatic advantages that could arise from such screenings. When he first began his ethnographic research, Rouch had tried giving his written works to the Songhay, but had quickly discovered that they had no use for them, even when they were read out loud by the village school-master. On the other hand, when he started screening his films, not only did the Songay understand his objectives more clearly, they became his active collaborators (Rouch 1995b: 224). At the simplest level, this collaboration merely consisted of commenting on the ethnographic content of the films. This proved particularly valuable many years later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Rouch and Dieterlen came to make their series of films about the Dogon Sigui festival and had very little idea about what was going on in the actual moment of shooting. By listening to the comments of the subjects during the feedback screenings, as well as to those of a ritual specialist, Amadigné Dolo, whom they took back to Paris to work with them in the editing suite, they learnt a great deal about the symbolic significance of particular forms of dancing, the many items of ritual paraphernalia, the reasons for particular sequences of events and so on, none of which they would otherwise have understood.

Paul Henley

86

However, although Rouch readily acknowledged the pragmatic advantages to be gained from screening his films, he also thought of them in ethical terms, believing that ethnographic film-makers had an absolute duty to screen their films to their subjects. He liked to think of these screenings as a form of ‘audiovisual countergift’ – a very Maussian term – offered in exchange for the support he had received from the subjects during the production process. In this way, he suggested, ethnographic film-makers could avoid acting as if they were ‘entomologists’ capturing exotic specimens.16 Instead, their work could form the basis for promoting mutual understanding and respect between observer and observed: This is the start of what some of us are already calling ‘shared anthropology’. The observer is finally coming down from his ivory tower; his camera, tape recorder, and his projector have led him – by way of a strange initiation path – to the very heart of knowledge and, for the first time, his work is not being judged by a thesis committee but by the very people whom he came to observe (Rouch 1995a: 96).

However, these feedback screenings were only the start of a longer-term process since the ‘shared anthropology’ that Rouch practised involved not merely the ‘audiovisual countergift’ of screening the films to the subjects, but also their direct engagement in the process of making the films themselves. Much more important than the feedback per se – a relatively passive activity – was the highly active collaboration that followed thereafter. For Rouch discovered that, at the end of a feedback screening, one or more members of the audience would often come up to him and suggest an idea for a new film. These could be people who had been directly involved in the first film, or other members of the audience who had concluded that a film about their activities would be even more interesting than the film that Rouch had just shown. In this way, the screening of one film could lead to the making of another in which the subjects who proposed the idea were not merely protagonists but, as we might say today, ‘stakeholders’ in the making of a new film.

Postcards of the imaginary This commitment to the idea of a ‘shared anthropology’ as far back as the 1950s (even if he did not give it precisely this name until the early 1970s) anticipated by more than two decades the ‘dialogical anthropology’ that, under the influence of postmodernism, became fashionable in Anglo-Saxon anthropology from the late 1970s onwards. But although Rouch’s methodology was certainly marked by

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

87

this and a number of other apparently postmodern traits – and although he firmly rejected the great twentieth-century metanarratives of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism – he had arrived at these positions not through antipathy to modernism as such but by a series of quite different routes.17 As a result, although there were certainly some similarities between Rouch’s practices and those advocated by Anglo-Saxon postmodernists, there were also some significant differences. As far as the technology of film-making itself was concerned, Rouch was actually very modernist in his ideas, believing enthusiastically in the potential of technological advance to transform human experience for the better. In the early part of his career, drawing on his own engineering background, he collaborated actively with camera and sound-recording design engineers to develop a system of mobile, lightweight cameras and portable audio tape-recorders that could operate in tandem with one another in such a way as to produce images in which actions and sounds would be perfectly synchronised. Nowadays, such synchronised images are entirely commonplace since they are achieved automatically by video technology. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the achievement of synchronised images using portable equipment became a sort of holy grail for many documentarists, and many technical experiments took place, not only in France among Rouch and his associates but also in North America, notably among the so-called Direct Cinema group of documentarists headed by Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, as well as among a group of film-makers working for the National Film Board of Canada (Rohmer and Marcorelles 1963: 16–22, Mamber 1974). Prior to the development of this new technology, the only way to realise full synchronisation of sound and image – particularly of speech, which was by far the most difficult form to achieve – was by means of equipment that was far too heavy to be portable. Therefore, if a film-maker wanted ‘synch sound’, he or she had to bring the subjects to wherever the equipment was located and ask them to perform there, with obvious negative consequences for the spontaneity, authenticity and range of the behaviours that could be filmed. Following the development of portable synch sound systems – achieved more or less simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1960s, albeit using slightly different technologies – documentary film-makers were able to follow their subjects as they moved around their particular private social worlds, allowing them to decide for themselves exactly what they should say or do in front of the camera. In North America, the documentarists of the Direct Cinema group sought to use this new portable technology to maximise their own

88

Paul Henley

effacement while shooting, interfering as little as possible in the behaviour of their subjects. In this way, they hoped that they would be able to film their subjects behaving just as they would have behaved had the camera not been there. Rouch’s attitude to the new technology was very different. Although he appreciated the greater indexicality that fully synchronous sound brought to his images and also the greater possibility for spontaneity on the part of the subjects that the new technology allowed, he certainly did not aspire to self-effacement, nor hope to film his subjects behaving as they would have been had his camera not been there. On the contrary, Rouch believed that the presence of the camera would inevitably affect the performance of the subjects, however discretely it was operated. But far from devaluing the quality of the material that was filmed, he thought that this provocation of extraordinary behaviour increased its value. This was because, in putting on a special performance for the camera, the subjects would reveal more about themselves, and particularly about the inner thoughts, dreams and fantasies of their imaginaries. ‘What has always seemed very strange to me’, he commented in an interview he gave in 1964, ‘ is that contrary to what one might think, when people are being recorded, the reactions that they have are always infinitely more sincere than those they have when they are not being recorded’ (Blue 1996: 268–69). This idea that, beneath the surface of social behaviour, there is another and more significant reality to be discovered in the minds of the subjects is consistent with a long tradition of thought in French anthropology. This intellectualist strand can be traced back through Griaule and Dieterlen to Mauss, but it is also expressed in the priority given to langue over parole in structuralist thinking. But while this tradition might certainly have influenced Rouch, the primary inspiration for this idea appears to have been his youthful encounter with surrealism. For, paradoxically, although the new technological advances greatly increased the fidelity of the copy of the world offered by the cinematographic apparatus, it was its ability to bring to the surface what was normally hidden that was most appreciated by Rouch. As he put it in a 1967 interview: For me, cinema, making a film, is like surrealist painting: the use of the most real processes of reproduction, the most photographic, but at the service of the unreal, of the bringing into being of elements of the irrational (as in Magritte, Dalí). The postcard at the service of the imaginary. (Fieschi and Téchiné 1967: 19)

However, it was not only its capacity to provoke a spontaneous performance on the part of the subject that Rouch appreciated about the new technology: he also appreciated the fact that, by its very

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

89

mobility, it allowed a much greater subjective immersion on the part of the film-maker in the world of the subject. In this connection, Rouch enthusiastically endorsed the analogy drawn by Edgar Morin, the codirector of Chronicle of a summer, who suggested that, with the aid of the new technology, Rouch could become a sort of ‘filmmaker-diver’ who, unencumbered by equipment, could ‘plunge into real-life situations’. Here, he could discover ‘virgin territory, a life that possesses aesthetic secrets within itself ’.18 However, for Rouch this subjective immersion in the world of the subjects was not just a straightforward technical-operational strategy: it also involved a transformation in the state of mind of the film-maker. If film-making had the power to provoke the subjects into entering the world of their imaginaries and revealing their innermost secrets, it could also lead the film-maker to immerse himself in the world of the imaginary and produce a performance of his own. The key to Rouch’s views on this matter was his notion of the ciné-trance.

The ciné-trance Rouch’s most systematic discussion in print of the notion of the cinétrance is in an article that was first prepared for a celebrated CNRS conference, La Notion de personne en Afrique noire, that took place in 1971. Here he discusses a series of ideas that had come to him earlier that year in the course of making a short film, Les Tambours d’avant: Tourou et Bitti.19 This film was shot in a Zerma village about fifty miles north of Niamey, capital of Niger. It consists almost entirely of a single ‘sequence shot’ – an unbroken take of approximately eleven minutes lasting the full duration of a 16mm film magazine. The subject of the film is a spirit possession ceremony in which the villagers seek the aid of the spirits in preventing locusts from destroying their new millet crop.20 Arriving at the village on what was already the fourth day of the ceremony, Rouch and his soundrecordist Moussa Hamidou discovered that the mediums had not been able to go into trance. This was despite the strenuous efforts of the musicians to attract the spirits by playing their signature music on the monochord violin and various types of percussion instrument. The latter included the traditional drums alluded to in the title of the film, the tourou and the bitti, which the spirits were known to favour particularly. By four pm, as the light was beginning to fade, Moussa suggested to Rouch that they should at least take the opportunity to film the tourou and the bitti since these drums were played with increasing rarity. After a couple of preliminary shots outside the village, the sequence shot begins on the sun and then pans down to enter the village, passing

90

Paul Henley

a herd of tethered sacrificial goats on the left and, on the right, a disconsolate male medium still awaiting inspiration, before crossing the small earthen plaza and approaching the orchestra. The musicians redouble their efforts as the camera glides over them, revealing the range of their different instruments, one by one. At this point, the music begins to peter out and the camera starts to withdraw, when suddenly there is a sudden cry of ‘Meat!’ and the medium goes into trance as he is possessed by the spirit of Kure the Hyena. The priests of the cult, the zima, then approach and engage Kure in a bantering dialogue, offering him ‘meat’ in the form of sacrificial animals, in exchange for ‘grass’, a good harvest. At this point, with the camera still turning, an old woman hops across the plaza, shivering all over because she has been possessed by the spirit of Hadyo the Fulani slave. The zima continue their negotiations with Kure, who is now threatening to leave unless he gets ‘blood’. But, as it is nearing the end of the magazine, the camera withdraws to the edge of the plaza. From here, it ends on a wide shot showing the young people looking on, before finally panning up again to the now-setting sun. A number of different elements of Rouch’s film-making praxis come together in this short film. Although he began to shoot with merely descriptive ethnographic objectives, the action develops into something much more interesting as a result of the presence of the camera. For, Rouch claimed afterwards, it was the fact that he was shooting a film that served to provoke the adepts to go into a trance state. 21 As such, the film represented a good example of the positive benefits that can arise from the change in reality brought about by the presence of the camera. However, the film also exemplifies Rouch’s understanding of the play between subjectivity and objectivity that is involved in making a film in his particular way. Close to the beginning, over one of the preliminary shots outside the village, he explains on the commentary track that the film is ‘an attempt to practise ethnographic cinema in the first person’. This is followed by a cut to black with the title ‘un film de Jean Rouch’ discreetly displayed in one corner. Only then does the sequence shot proper begin, starting off in travelling-shot mode with Rouch commenting over it, ‘To enter into a film is to plunge into reality, and to be, at once, both present and invisible’. Thus the film is presented as an unexpurgated slice of time involving a ‘plunge’ into reality, but at the same time as a view of this reality that is both intensively subjective (‘ethnographic cinema in the first person’) and authored (‘un film de Jean Rouch’). It was directly as a result of shooting Tourou et Bitti that Rouch first began to develop his concept of the ciné-trance. He later described how, when he and Moussa Hamidou put down their equipment at the end of the take, they were trembling with exhaustion, aware that they had just

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

91

been through a powerful experience. However, Rouch did not attribute this to the physical exhaustion that might reasonably follow from concentrating intensively on shooting a ten-minute sequence shot. Rather, he thought that it was due to the fact that the engaging rhythm of the tourou and bitti drums had not merely sent the two adepts into trance but the two film-makers as well. While the adepts had been possessed by the spirits Kure and Hadyo, he and Moussa had gone into a ciné-trance, possessed by what he would later describe as a sort of ‘enthusiasm which cannot be defined but which is essential to poetic creativity’. This was comparable, he suggested, to the German concept of Stimmung, a term which literally means ‘humour’, in the sense of ‘a frame of mind’, or ‘a tuning’ as of a musical instrument, but which, Rouch claimed, defies translation in this more poetic sense.22 On other occasions, he referred to this state as a form of ‘grace’, a condition that he associated not with any Christian notions but with Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian – namely creative activity that is spontaneous and intuitive rather than rational. This condition cannot be guaranteed, he suggested: in fact, it is relatively rare. If it is not present, Rouch believed, one might as well give up filming because nothing truly significant is going to be revealed (Fulchignoni 1981: 8– 9, also Fulchignoni 2003: 150). But on the basis of his own experience, Rouch claimed that when one entered this state, one was liberated from the weight of anthropological and cinematographic theory and became free to rediscover what he called ‘la barbarie de l’invention’ – a phrase that also defies any simple, literal translation but which one might render here as ‘raw creativity’ (Rouch 1997: 226). In effect, then, in Rouch’s view, film-making could only be truly successful if it involved performances on both sides of the lens: while the subjects were provoked by the circumstances of film-making into a performance revealing the contents of their imaginaries, the film-maker entered a trance-like state in which his most elemental creative abilities would be released. Moreover, these performances had to be in harmony with one another. Over the years, Rouch used many different analogies to describe this harmonisation of performances between film-maker and subject. Sometimes he compared it to a ballet, at other times to a matador improvising his passes before the bull (Rouch 1995a: 89–90). In the ideal case, the conjunction of these performances produced something greater than the sum of their parts, similar, Rouch suggested – in a characteristic clutch of metaphors – to the transporting moments of a jam session between Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong or, perhaps even closer to his heart, the flashes of revelation that could arise from the electrifying effects of an encounter between strangers, as described by the surrealist poet, André Breton (Fulchignoni 1981: 31, also Fulchignoni 2003: 186).

Paul Henley

92

Privileged truths There was also another, very different ingredient to Rouch’s notion of the ciné-trance. The fact that he refers to this trance-like state not just as a trance, but as a ciné-trance is a sign of the influence on his thinking of the ideas about the nature of cinematographic reality associated with the Polish-Russian film-maker, Dziga Vertov. Best known for his 1929 film Man with a movie camera, Vertov’s work appears to have been an enthusiasm that Rouch first took up in the course of making Chronicle of a summer with Edgar Morin in 1960–1961.23 Rouch seems to have found in Vertov’s work an endorsement of his own view that the cinematographic apparatus offered a new and privileged way of representing the world: Dziga Vertov … understood that the cinematographic way of looking was highly distinctive, employing a new organ of perception, the camera, which bore little relation to the human eye, and which he called the ‘ciné-eye’. Later, with the appearance of sound, he identified a ‘radio-ear’ in the same way, as an organ specific to recorded sound … Taken as a whole, he called this discipline cinéma-vérité (cinema-truth), which is an ambiguous expression since, fundamentally, cinema cuts up, speeds up, slows down, thereby distorting the truth. For me, however, ‘cinema-truth’ has a specific meaning in the same way that ‘ciné-eye’ does, designating not pure truth, but the truth particular to recorded images and sounds: ‘ciné-truth’. (Rouch 1997: 224)

The term cinéma-vérité has a chequered history in the literature on documentary film-making. For a period, in North America particularly, it was understood to denote a documentary-making practice that aspired to reveal an entirely objective truth about the world. As such, it came to be used to refer to the work of the Direct Cinema film-makers, who, as described above, aspired to use the new synchronous sound technology to reduce their effect on the action that they were filming to a minimum, so as to provide their audiences with an account of the world that was as objective as possible. What exactly was meant by the term cinéma-vérité when applied to this North American group continues to be a matter of debate, but as far as Rouch is concerned, the passage quoted above makes it quite clear that, for him at least, the denotatum of this term was never some chimerical objective or absolute truth but rather a distinctive form of truth that was particular to the cinema. But while Rouch and Vertov may have shared this view about the nature of cinematographic reality at a very general theoretical level, at the level of actual practice, there seems to be very little in common between their respective approaches to film-making. Where the visual

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

93

aesthetic of Rouch’s films was generally realist and, once the technology allowed, based on the long take and a ‘normal’, progressive chronology, Vertov’s approach, at least as represented by Man with a movie camera, was based on the flamboyant use of montage and a complete disregard for any conception of realism or a ‘normal’ chronology. Another fundamental difference concerned the circumstances of shooting. Both Rouch and Vertov laid great emphasis on recording life sur le vif, that is directly as it is lived. But whereas there is an almost voyeuristic quality to Vertov’s praxis, with the camera often intruding clandestinely on the privacy of its subjects, in Rouch’s case, the process of filming normally took place within a well-established relationship with his subjects. But the difference between Rouch and Vertov that is perhaps the most significant in this context concerns the precise nature of the truth made possible by the ‘ciné-eye’. For Vertov, the term cinéma-vérité referred primarily to the process of perceiving the world: the ciné-eye could go anywhere and see anywhere. It could fly in the air with aeroplanes, watch from beneath as a train thundered overhead,pry into a lady’s boudoir. In the editing suite, these images captured by the cinéeye could then be transformed in all manner of ways: they could be cut up, speeded up or slowed down. In this way, humanity’s vision of the world was transformed. For Rouch, on the other hand, it was not so much the perception of the world but the world itself that was transformed by the cinematographic process as the presence of the camera provoked the subjects into revelatory performances that were different from their normal forms of behaviour. Rouch seemed either not to notice these fundamental differences, or to believe that they were not as significant as they might appear. For, in the article presented at the CNRS conference, he theorises his notion of the ciné-trance through an extraordinary fusion of Vertovian ideas about cinematographic reality with Songhay-Zerma ideas about soulmatter and the transformations that this undergoes when a person is possessed by a spirit. Rouch explains that the Songhay-Zerma believe that every individual has a quality known as bia, variously glossed by the Songhay themselves as ‘reflection’, ‘shadow’ or even ‘soul’. Rouch, on the other hand, refers to it as a ‘double’, a term often used in the anthropological literature of West Africa to describe this phenomenon which, in a variety of different forms, appears to be a common feature of the religious belief systems of the region.24 In death the double, which is immortal, leaves the body, but even in life it can take off on its own while its owner is dreaming or under certain other circumstances. In the course of possession, the adept’s double is displaced or submerged by the double of the spirit. While possessed, adepts are no longer themselves

94

Paul Henley

but become like the spirits that have possessed them, dancing in ways that are suggestive of particular attributes or behaviours that are conventionally associated with those spirits. In effect then, they become the physical incarnation, literally, of the double of a spirit. Rouch suggests that there is an analogy here between the condition, on the one hand, of adepts submerged by the double of the possessing spirit and, on the other, of film-makers who carry the ciné-trance to its ultimate conclusion, becoming completely immersed in the reality they are filming and thereby entering their own trance of creativity. In the same way that the Songhay adepts possessed by a spirit imagine themselves to be entering a world that is different to that of everyday experience, so too do ‘possessed’ film-makers enter a different reality when turning on the camera. Whereas the adept’s ‘double’ is taken over by the ‘double’ of a spirit, the film-maker is taken over by Stimmung, poetic creativity. It is this analogy that Rouch is alluding to when he refers to cinema as the ‘art of the double’, suggesting that, just as in the case of spirit possession, it similarly involves a transition from the world of the real to the world of the imaginary (Fulchignoni 1981: 28–29, also Fulchignoni 2003: 185). It is also here that Rouch discerns a connection with the Vertovian notion of cinéma-vérité. He suggests that this alternative reality, this domain of poetic creativity into which the ‘possessed’ film-maker enters when in the ciné-trance, is none other than the world of cinema truth. When the film-maker is in the ciné-trance, everything he or she does is determined by the particular qualities of this distinctive world. For this reason, in describing his own actions while in a state of ciné-trance, Rouch attaches Vertovian prefixes to all the verbs. Thus when he films he ‘ciné-looks’, when he records sound he ‘ciné-listens’ and while editing he ‘ciné-thinks’ as he ‘ciné-cuts’. In fact, he becomes totally identified with this ciné-persona: With a ciné-eye and a ciné-ear, I am ciné-Rouch in a state of ciné-trance engaged in ciné-filming ... That then is ciné-pleasure, the joy of filming … (Fulchignoni 1981: 8, also Fulchignoni 2003: 150).

Moreover, as this ideal state of ‘grace’ can only be achieved if there are effective performances on both sides of the lens, his film subjects too should become involved in this world. Rouch claimed that since his subjects understood perfectly well what he was doing as a result of his many feedback screenings, they reacted to his film-making as they would do to those who are possessed by spirits, namely by lending themselves to the performance on its own terms. Thus, as he ‘cinéobserves’, they allow themselves to be ‘ciné-observed’ (Rouch 1997: 224–25). In the most extreme case – as he suggests may have happened in the filming of Tourou et Bitti – in response to the film-makers’ cinétrance, the subjects may go into their own kind of trance.

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

95

Shared anthropology and the ciné-trance reconsidered As we have seen in this chapter, Jean Rouch’s practice of ‘shared anthropology’ took two forms: one, relatively passive, involved ‘feedback screenings’ at which the subjects would provide ethnographic comment and, ideally, suggest ideas for new films: the other, more active, involved direct collaboration in the making of the films and, in the ideal case, the orchestration of performances between film-maker and subject so as to bring to the surface of experience a privileged domain of truth. There is certainly a common ground between the collaborative approaches to anthropology generally advocated by Anglo-Saxon postmodernists from the 1980s onwards and Rouch’s idea of ‘shared anthropology’ when considered in its relatively passive form, namely the dialogical exchanges around the feedback screenings. But in its active form there is an extra, performative dimension to Rouch’s idea of ‘shared anthropology’ that is absent from most Anglo-Saxon understandings of ‘dialogical anthropology’. For, in the conventional Anglo-Saxon formulation, ‘dialogical anthropology’ consists of a process in which researcher and subjects engage in a verbal dialogue in order to arrive at some commonly agreed construction of the subjects’ social world in which the political, intellectual or cultural biases that either or both parties might have brought to the fieldwork encounter have in some sense been negotiated. In the Rouchian formulation, on the other hand, both parties are conceived as undergoing a transformation as each puts on an almost theatrical performance for the other, thereby creating a particular kind of knowledge that is a direct result of the encounter itself. Moreover, for Rouch, this orchestration of performances could occur whether or not the researcher was armed with a camera: Once in the field, the simple observer undergoes a change. When he is at work, he is no longer the person who greeted the Elders at the entrance to the village. To resort to the Vertovian terminology again, he ‘ethno-looks’, he ‘ethno-observes’, he ‘ethno-thinks’, while those before him undergo a similar change once they have come to trust this strange visitor who keeps returning: they ‘ethno-show’, they ‘ethno-speak’, they might even ‘ethnothink’ ... (Rouch 1997: 227)

In Rouch’s view, the knowledge that arises in such situations – far from being dismissed as false because it is an artifice of the encounter, as it might be by Anglo-Saxons of a classically empiricist persuasion – should be considered more privileged and more valuable than any form of objective, detached observation that only reveals the surface of things. This extra dimension to the active form of Rouch’s understanding of ‘shared anthropology’, to which the ciné-trance is central, can be traced,

96

Paul Henley

I would suggest, to Rouch’s early encounter with surrealism. For although he may have chosen a Vertovian vocabulary to describe the ciné-trance, the idea that in order to gain access to an otherwise hidden, privileged domain of truth, it is necessary to free oneself from intellectual preoccupations, put one’s trust in chance inspiration and reconnect with some more deep-seated, primitive well-spring of creativity has clear echoes with a number of key surrealist ideas and methods, of which automatic writing is merely the best known. But whether we consider the pedigree of the ciné-trance to be surrealist or Vertovian, in either case it is an idea that stems from the 1920s. Does it then represent a method that is still relevant to anthropology today, some eighty years later? Any experienced documentary film-maker will probably recognise, at least to some degree, the state of mind that Rouch describes by the term ‘ciné-trance’. Some film-makers may even be able to identify with the joyful sense of unbridled creativity – perhaps of Stimmung or Dionysian ‘grace’ – which Rouch associates with this condition. I am certainly aware from my own experience of a similar state of mind that can arise when one has been filming an event over a prolonged period, particularly a long and repetitious ritual event, in a situation in which one knows the protagonists well and feels confident of one’s role as a film-maker. Under these circumstances, banal considerations of both technique and theory can fall away, and everything can seem almost miraculously to ‘work’, including not just one’s own handling of the equipment but also the movements and reactions of the subjects within the frame. A certain complicity is established between film-maker and subjects, giving rise to a sense that both parties are conspiring to produce a sequence that is not only well-executed, but also reveals certain things about the ideas or attitudes of the subjects that had previously remained hidden. But even though one might freely admit that the notion of the cinétrance refers to an entirely recognisable condition, the idea that one can arrive at a privileged truth by this means is a proposition that is very difficult for any anthropologist formed in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, myself included, to accept. The ciné-trance may indeed generate performances on both sides of the lens that give rise to revelatory snapshots or ‘postcards’ of the inner state of mind of the subjects. But, in common with many other Anglo-Saxon anthropologists, I would argue that in order to be truly valuable to anthropology these revelations cannot be taken at face value but rather must be located and interpreted – not immediately perhaps, but eventually – as ideological manifestations of a particular network of social relations and cultural understandings.25 One should also be wary of uncritically saluting the politically progressive nature of Rouch’s idea of ‘shared anthropology’, be it in the

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

97

active or the passive form. Some African film-makers associated with Rouch, even some of those whom he supported early in their careers, have been critical of his work, considering it irredeemably colonialist, even if in a largely benign paternalist manner (Haffner 1996, Hennebelle 1996). Clearly, these views have to be understood within the complex entanglements of the last period of the French colonial presence in Africa. But they should make one wary of laying too great a burden of expectation on the notion of ‘shared anthropology’. At the end of the day, although his collaborators may have played a highly active part in creating the films, Rouch remained the overall author: they may have received screen credits, but the films still bore the legend ‘un film de Jean Rouch’. Although Rouch always preferred the term ‘filmmaker’, so as to avoid the title ‘director’, with all that this implied in terms of directing the activities of a team, in actual practice his collaborators ended up being the protagonists or the technicians, while he remained the director in the sense that it was he who organised the films, gave shape to them and distributed them afterwards. As Jean-Paul Colleyn commented in his obituary of Rouch, within the inequalities of North–South relationships the idea of an entirely ‘shared anthropology’, based on a genuinely collective authorship, was always going to be something of a fiction and continues to be so, even under present circumstances, almost half a century after the formal end of European colonialism in West Africa (Colleyn 2004: 540, also Colleyn 2005). But even while we should recognise this in more sober moments, we should be careful not to be too presentist in our assessment of Rouch’s work. We should not underestimate the hurdles of both a cultural and political nature that Rouch had to overcome to make collaborative films with Africans of relatively marginal status in the still-colonial era of the 1940s and 1950s. Nor should we forget that the idea of surrendering any degree of authorship to the subjects of study was far ahead of the practice of the majority of even the most progressive of his anthropological contemporaries, in both France and the AngloSaxon world. In short, even if Rouch’s ability to practise a fully shared anthropology was limited by the particular conjuncture of political conditions under which he was working, this does not diminish the challenge that his example still poses to the film-makers of today.

Paul Henley

98

Notes 1. See Forbes (1996). By ‘Anglo-Saxon’, the French generally mean those who are both English-speaking and of European extraction, i.e. primarily people from the US, Britain, southern Africa and Australasia. This classification does not take into account the personal, cultural or ethnic affiliation of individuals, so someone who is, say, a Scottish Jew would also be ‘Anglo-Saxon’. In the context of academic anthropology, even the Polish-born Bronisław Malinowski can be placed in the category ‘Anglo-Saxon’ because he was European, mostly published in English and spent most of his career in Englishspeaking countries. I shall retain the term here in that sense. 2. Mick Eaton’s early edited collection of articles played an important role in introducing Rouch to English-speaking audiences (1979) as did the special editions of the journals Studies in visual communication vol. 11, no. 1 (1985) and of Visual anthropology vol. 2, nos. 3–4 (1989), edited by Steven Feld and Jay Ruby respectively, and, somewhat later, Paul Stoller’s monograph, The cinematic griot (1992). 3. See, for example, Clifford (1988a, 1991), Price and Jamin (1988), Richardson (1993), Thompson (1995), Douglas (1995), de Huesch (1995), Bate (2007) and also Rouch (1995c). 4. See Rouch (2003b: 110). Rouch often referred to the Griaule’s ‘smile’ and once compared studying ethnography with him as being like a game of blind-man’s-buff that made him laugh so much, it almost made him ill (Rouch 1989: 10). 5. Piault (2000: 114–16). Griaule was also a very talented photographer, as evidenced by the magnificent photographs in the appendix to his major work, Masques dogons. He had also played an active part in the development of aerial photography (Bate 2007). 6. In contrast to the ambiguity in his attitudes to Griaule, Rouch always retained the highest regard for Germaine Dieterlen. When they were both in Paris, they spent a great deal of time in one another’s company, particularly after Rouch’s first wife, Jane, died in1987. When Dieterlen herself died in 1999 at the age of 95, Rouch’s closest associates report that he was cast into a deep depression and never quite recaptured his celebrated joie de vivre again. 7. Dieterlen (1988). This book was first published in 1950 and was based on her doctoral thesis. 8. Rouch (1989: 320–1). These ideas concerning the primary importance of collecting ethnographic ‘documents’ in as objective and rigorous a fashion as possible would later come to influence an important strand of Rouch’s film-making methodology, particularly when he worked with Dieterlen in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the production of a series of films about the Sigui, the major ritual cycle of the Dogon (see Henley 2007). 9. See Griaule (1957). The locus classicus for Malinowski’s fieldwork method is the Introduction to his Argonauts of the Western Pacific, first published in 1922. 10. Rouch (2003b: 112). See also the first few pages of Dieu d’eau (1988, originally published in 1948), in which Griaule describes the scene as he and his three colleagues pursue their interrogatory investigations in the immediate vicinity of their field station, first thing in the morning on the day after their arrival. 11. Rouch (1995b: 228); see also Taylor (2003: 140–41). 12. When challenged about the relative absence of women in his films, Rouch explained that he had found it quite impossible for a European man to film African women, since this would not be permitted by the local people (Georgakas et al. 2003: 217). 13. For a discussion of ‘direct cinema’, see Mamber (1974) and Winston (1988, 1995); for a discussion of ‘observational cinema’, see Young (1995) and Henley (2004). 14. See particularly Griaule (1957: 59). Clifford (1988b: 80ff.) suggests that, having been initiated into the arcane parole claire in the latter stages of his work among the Dogon,

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

99

Griaule underwent some sort of conversion, becoming more respectful of the Dogon and considering them to be sage ‘doctors’ rather than base liars. However, Griaule’s handbook was published some ten years after his supposedly transformative encounter with the blind hunter Ogotommêli. 15. See Jutra (1960: 40) on Rouch’s support of Tallou. Otherwise, most of this information comes from the two excellent films on Rouch’s African associates: Rouch’s gang (1993) by Steef Meyknecht, Dirk Nijland and Joost Verhey; and Friends, fools, family: Rouch’s collaborators in Niger (2005) by Berit Madsen and Anne Mette Jørgensen. In addition to this immediate ‘gang’, Rouch also helped the careers of many other African associates of his: Oumarou Ganda, Moustapha Alassane and Safi Faye, all of whom became significant figures in West African cinema, were not only first introduced to cinema by acting in Rouch’s ethnofictions but were also encouraged by him in their later careers to become film-makers in their own right. 16. Rouch (1995a: 96). The reference in this passage to ethnographic film-makers acting as ‘entomologists’ is probably an allusion to a celebrated remark by Sembène Ousmane, the Senegalese feature film director, who, in a debate that took place in 1965, claimed that Africanists such as Rouch ‘look at us like insects’ (see Cervoni 1996). 17. Rouch disdained both Marx and Freud on the grounds that they were thinkers who exploited other peoples’ dreams rather than being dreamers themselves (Taylor 2003: 132; see also Rouch 1995c: 411–12). 18. Morin (2003: 230–231, 264 n. 3). There is an intriguing echo here of Malinowski’s famous observation in his methodological preface to Argonauts of the Western Pacific that it was through his ‘plunges into the life of the natives’ that he discovered that ‘the behaviour, their manner of being ... became more transparent and easily understandable than it had been before’ (1932: 22). 19. The article was first published in the proceedings of the conference in 1971. Convenient republications are to be found in the second edition of Rouch’s major work on Songhay religion (Rouch 1989: 337–49) and in the more recent collection of his ethnographic essays (Rouch 1997). An abbreviated version is added to his interview with Enrico Fulchignoni, published in 1981 (Fulchignoni 1981). Both the original article and the Fulchignoni interview have been translated and republished by Steven Feld (see Fulchignoni 2003: 182–85, Rouch 2003a). 20. In the film commentary, Rouch refers to sauterelles, grasshoppers, as causing the problem, though in describing the film elsewhere he says that it was chenilles processionnaires, army caterpillars (Rouch 1989: 185–86n). It is only too likely that the unfortunate villagers were suffering from both. 21. Rouch (2003a: 101). But see also his somewhat more sceptical discussion in Colleyn (1992: 41–42). 22. Rouch (1989: 186n). Rouch explains that this term was used by such diverse artistic figures as the early nineteenth-century German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the early twentieth-century surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico, creator of the image that had been part of Rouch’s own Damascene encounter with anthropology. See also Fulchignoni (2003: 186). 23. Rouch (1968, 1995a: 82–83). By the 1960s, Vertov was a largely forgotten figure, even though he had died only in 1954. However, the publicity given to his ideas by the French cinema historian Georges Sadoul served to revivify an interest in his work (see Sadoul 1963). 24. See Rouch (1989, especially pp. 38–39), also Stoller (1995, passim). 25. Although I have attributed these sceptical views, obviously stereotypically, to AngloSaxons, it was evident at the conference out of which this volume arose that many of the French participants had similar reservations about this aspect of the Rouchian

Paul Henley

100

approach. Equally, there are certain ‘Anglo-Saxon’ anthropologists who might disagree with the view that I propose here: see, for example, Paul Stoller’s arguments about Rouch as a radical empiricist (1992: 202–18).

References Bate, D. 2007. Everyday madness: surrealism, ethnography and the photographic image, in J. ten Brink (ed.), Building bridges: the cinema of Jean Rouch, London: Wallflower Press. Blue, J. 1996. Jean Rouch: interviewed by James Blue, in K. Macdonald and M. Cousins (eds), Imagining reality: the Faber book of documentary, London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Originally appeared in Film Comment 2 (2), 1964 Cervoni, A. 1996. Une confrontation historique en 1965 entre Jean Rouch et Sembène Ousmane, in R. Prédal (ed.), Jean Rouch ou le ciné-plaisir: CinémAction, 81: 104–6. Éditions Corlet. Clifford, J. 1988a. On ethnographic surrealism, in J. Clifford, The predicament of culture: twentiethcentury ethnography, literature, and art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— 1988b. Power and dialogue in ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s initiation, in J. Clifford, The predicament of culture: twentieth century ethnography, literature, art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— 1991. Documents: a decomposition, Visual Anthropology Review, 71: 62–83. Colleyn, J.-P. 1992. Jean Rouch, 54 ans sans trépied, CinémAction, 64: 40–50. ——— 2004. Jean Rouch, presque un homme-siècle, L’Homme, 171–172: 537–42. ——— 2005. Jean Rouch: an anthropologist ahead of his time, American Anthropologist, 1071: 112–15. de Heusch, L. 1995. Pierre Mabille, Michel Leiris, anthropologies, in C.W. Thompson (ed.), L’Autre et le Sacré: surréalisme, cinéma, ethnologie, Paris: L’Harmattan. Dieterlen, G. 1988. Essai sur la religion bambara (2nd ed), Brussels: Éditions de la Université de Bruxelles. Douglas, M. 1995. Réflexions sur le renard pâle et deux anthropologies: à propos du surréalisme et de l’anthropologie française, in C.W. Thompson (ed.), L’Autre et le Sacré: surréalisme, cinéma, ethnologie, Paris: L’Harmattan. Eaton, M. (ed.). 1979. Anthropology, reality, cinema: the films of Jean Rouch, London: British Film Institute. Fieschi, J.-A. and A. Téchiné. 1967. Jean Rouch: ‘Jaguar’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 195: 17–20. Forbes, J. 1996. Jean Rouch et la Grande-Bretagne, in R. Prédal (ed.), Jean Rouch ou le cinéplaisir: CinémAction, 81: 136–37. Éditions Corlet. Fulchignoni, E. 1981. Entretien de Jean Rouch, in P.-E. Gallet (ed.), Jean Rouch: une rétrospective, Paris: Ministère des Relations Extérieures and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. ——— 2003. Jean Rouch with Enrico Fulchignoni: ciné-anthropology, in S. Feld (ed.), Ciné-Ethnography, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Georgakas, D., U. Gupta and J. Janda. 2003. The politics of visual anthropology, in S. Feld (ed.), Ciné-Ethnography, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Reprinted from Cinéaste, 8: 4 (1978). Griaule, M. 1957. Méthode de l’ethnographie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ——— 1985. Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli, Paris: Fayard. First published in 1948. Haffner, P. 1996. Les avis de cinq cinéastes d’Afrique noire, in R. Prédal (ed.), Jean Rouch ou le ciné-plaisir: CinémAction, 814: 89–103. Éditions Corlet.

Postcards at the service of the Imaginary

101

Henley, P. 2004. Putting film to work: observational cinema as practical ethnography, in S. Pink, L. Kurti and A.I. Afonso (eds), Working images: methods and media in ethnographic research, New York and London: Routledge. ——— 2007. Jean Rouch and the legacy of the ‘pale master’: filming the Sigui, 1931– 2003, in J. ten Brink (ed.), Building bridges: the cinema of Jean Rouch, London: Wallflower Press. Hennebelle, G. 1996. Jean Rouch et l’éthique du cinéma ethnographique, in R. Prédal (ed.), Jean Rouch ou le ciné-plaisir: CinémAction, 81: 76–79. Éditions Corlet. Jamin, J. 1991. Anxious science: ethnography as a devil’s dictionary, Visual Anthropology Review, 7(1): 84–91. Jutra, C. 1960. En courant derrière Rouch I, Cahiers du Cinéma, 113: 32–43. Malinowski, B. 1932. Argonauts of the western Pacific: an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mamber, S. 1974. Cinema verite in America: studies in uncontrolled documentary, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Morin, E. 2003. Chronicle of a film, in S. Feld (ed. and tr.), Ciné-Ethnography, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Piault, M.-H. 2000. Anthropologie et cinéma: passage à l’image, passage par l’image, Paris: Éditions Nathan. Prédal, R. 1996. Bibliographie, in R. Prédal (ed.), Jean Rouch ou le ciné-plaisir. CinémAction, 81: 227–36. Price, S. and J. Jamin. 1988. A conversation with Michel Leiris, Current Anthropology, 29(1): 157–74. Richardson, M. 1993. An encounter of wise men and cyclops women, Critique of Anthropology, 13(1): 57–75. Rohmer, E. and L. Marcorelles. 1963. Entretien avec Jean Rouch, Cahiers du Cinéma, 144: 1–22. Rouch, J. 1956. Migrations au Ghana (Gold Coast): enquête 1953–1955, Journal de la Société des Africanistes, 26: 33–196. ——— 1968. Le film ethnographique, in J. Poirier (ed.), Encyclopédie de la Pléiade: ethnologie générale, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1989. La Religion et la magie songhay (2nd ed.), Brussels: Éditions de la Université de Bruxelles. ——— 1995a. The camera and man, in P. Hockings (ed.), Principles of visual anthropology (2nd ed.), Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ——— 1995b. Our totemic ancestors and crazed masters, in P. Hockings (ed.), Principles of visual anthropology (2nd ed.), Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ——— 1995c. L’autre et le sacré: jeu sacré, jeu politique, in C.W. Thompson (ed.), L’Autre et le Sacré: surréalisme, cinéma, ethnologie, Paris: L’Harmattan. ——— 1997. Essai sur les avatars de la personne du possédé, du magicien, du sorcier, du cinéaste et de l’ethnographe, in J. Rouch, Les Hommes et les dieux du fleuve: essai ethnographique sur les populations songhay du moyen Niger 1941–1983, Paris: Éditions Artcom. ——— 2003a. On the vicissitudes of the self: the possessed dancer, the magician, the sorcerer, the filmmaker, and the ethnographer, in S. Feld (ed.), Ciné-Ethnography, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. ——— 2003b. The mad fox and the pale master, in S. Feld (ed.), Ciné-Ethnography, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published in French in 1978. Sadoul, G. 1963. Actualité de Dziga Vertov, Cahiers du Cinéma, 144: 23–34. Stoller, P. 1992. The cinematic griot: the ethnography of Jean Rouch, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

102

Paul Henley

——— 1995. Embodying colonial memories: spirit possession, power, and the Hauka in West Africa, New York and London: Routledge. Taylor, L. 2003. A life on the edge of film and anthropology, in S. Feld (ed.), CinéEthnography, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published in Visual Anthropology Review, 71: 92–102 (1991). Thompson, C. 1995. De Buñuel à Rouch: les surréalistes devant le documentaire et le film ethnographique, in C.W. Thompson (ed.), L’Autre et le Sacré: surréalisme, cinéma, ethnologie, Paris: L’Harmattan. Winston, B. 1988. Direct cinema: the third decade, in A. Rosenthal (ed.), New challenges for documentary, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. ——— 1995. Claiming the real: the documentary film revisited, London: British Film Institute. Young, C. 1995. Observational cinema, in P. Hockings (ed.), Principles of visual anthropology (2nd ed.), Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Chapter 4

ERIC DE DAMPIERRE AND THE ART OF FIELDWORK Margaret Buckner

The aim of this chapter is not to circumscribe the work of Eric de Dampierre – that would be a task too daunting for this author – but to shine a light on some of its various aspects, especially those that are related to his fieldwork in Africa. In order to limit the danger of reducing his thought, I will use his words – albeit translated into English – to let him speak for himself. My personal acquaintance with Dampierre began in 1982, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Bangassou, Central African Republic, the town where Dampierre carried out his fieldwork. By the time my three-year Peace Corps stint was up, I had enrolled at the University of Paris-X (Nanterre) to pursue graduate studies in ethnologie under his direction.

Early life Eric de Dampierre was born on 4 July 1928 to an aristocratic family. His father was French, his mother Belgian, and he had an older sister. He must have been very gifted as a student, for he graduated from secondary school as a bachelier in philosophy when he was sixteen years old, received his license ès lettres (the equivalent of an American Bachelor of Arts) at age eighteen and a second license en droit at age nineteen, and then graduated from the l’Institut d’études politiques of Paris (‘Sciences Po Paris’) as a twenty-year-old. He was a prolific reader, not only in French, but also in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek. He read literature, the classics, philosophy, history, sociology,

104

Margaret Buckner

Figure 4.1. Eric de Dampierre at Madabazouma, thirty kilometres from Bangassou, Central African Republic. Date unknown. Courtesy of Laboratoire de l’ethnologie et de la sociologie comparative (UMR 7186, CNRS), Université Paris-Ouest.

political science and anthropology, among others. In 1948–49 he completed his compulsory military service, first in Casablanca, then in Villacoublay (France). At twenty years of age, he published his first article, ‘Sociométrie: note étymologique’ (Dampierre 1948). The paper explored the origin of the word ‘sociometry’, which a certain Dr Moreno claimed to have coined in 1943 (Moreno 1943). Dampierre, however, traced it to an

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

105

Austrian, F.X. de Neumann-Spallart, who used the term during a session of the International Institute of Statistics in Rome in 1887. Dampierre then cited August Chirac, who said he had invented the word first, and who developed his ideas in a published article (Chirac 1897). This first publication, at age twenty, showed Dampierre’s extremely conscientious use of terms, and also his meticulous care in finding and critiquing the original sources. He continued to trace words and concepts even – or rather, especially – after he went to Africa. For example, in 1984 he wrote an extremely detailed study of the word nguinza, now meaning ‘money’, concluding it was probably brought to Central Africa by Senegalese riflemen (Note de recherche n° 17).1 By 1949, he had become involved with UNESCO, probably thanks to his acquaintance with Alfred Métraux, who at that time was director of the Department of Social Sciences at UNESCO. Dampierre participated in an interdisciplinary study of a French commune in the Paris suburbs and he wrote the report in 1949; it was published in 1956 under the title ‘Malvire-sur-Desle: Une commune aux franges de la région parisienne’ (Dampierre 1956). The study resulted from a conference held at the Royaumont Abbey in September of 1948 on the comparative method in social sciences, and a follow-up meeting in May 1949. The researchers were trained in history, sociology, philosophy, psychology and social psychology. The report is a classic example of community studies carried out at the time. It describes ‘Malvire-sur-Desle’ (a fictional name) in all its social, economic and political complexity, and shows how the various factions in the community interacted – or not. In the methods section, Dampierre explains that the research team basically moved into the village, frequented cafes and bars, attended religious services, went to the movies and dances, and helped organise local festivals. Two months later, when the study officially began, residents were accustomed to seeing the researchers, and were inviting them to their homes for meals. The sociologists worked both with written documents and by carrying out ethnographic fieldwork. Dampierre, in this report and in others, does not treat sociology any differently from anthropology, and shows that good fieldwork can and should be carried out in both fields.2 In 1950, at age twenty-two, he left for the United States as an Exchange Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought. There he interacted with scholars such as Leo Strauss, Robert Redfield and John Nef. He also rubbed shoulders with the anthropologists there and was impressed by the fourfield approach of American anthropology, as opposed to the divisions in France between ethnology, (physical) anthropology and prehistory. One of his earliest manuscripts, dated September 1951, perhaps written while he was in Chicago, is entitled ‘Sur deux différents types d’hérétiques’ (On two different kinds of heretic). In stark contrast to all

106

Margaret Buckner

of his other papers, this one has not a single footnote, citation or reference. Thus Dampierre writes: Man, the first animal to want to discover his place in the universe and to search relentlessly for the meaning of his existence, uses in that search two types (Ideal-Typus) of thinking: dogmatic thinking and scientific thinking. ... In dogmatic thinking, truth is already there at the start, before it is discovered by man. It could be a revelation from God, ... a rational essence, ... or the meaning of history. In all these cases, man needs the key to the treasure; it is either given to him, or he must find it, or he must make it. In scientific thinking, there is no dogma. To continue with the metaphor, man must seek not the key to the treasure, but the treasure itself, though it never appears to him immediately. He constructs it himself, by abstracting it from reality and mentally organizing it. That is scientific theory. While dogma is the truth that is given to me, science is the truth that I verify, and thus that I create. ... Dogma is by its very essence unchangeable, perfect, and finite ... The dogmatic heretic is burned at the stake. [Progression is possible, but it is progression in the revelation of the truth.] ... Science is, on the contrary, imperfect, cumulative and infinite. The scientist does not seek to translate reality, he abstracts it to master it. ... He invents concepts, and the richer his imagination, the stronger his power of abstraction, the better his theory. ... Progress is inevitable. ... The scientific heretic inaugurates new theory. ... The heretic of yesterday is the doctor of tomorrow. (1951, passim)

Thus, well before Robin Horton and others, Dampierre described in his own way how a traditional worldview differs from modern scientific thinking. Back in France in 1952, he resumed his studies and research under the direction of the sociologist Raymond Aron. Aron ‘defines the aim proper to sociology as the combination and reunion of the study of the part with the study of the whole’ (Aron 1968: 10). It was this aim that Dampierre followed. He was interested in how each society organises itself, based on its own principles, and in how societies hold together, how all the different participants play their respective roles. His goal was to understand Society by discovering how societies work, how individuals form a society, what holds the group together and what keeps it going. In 1952, Dampierre became a researcher for the CNRS (Centre national de recherche scientifique) and was assigned to the Centre d’études sociologiques in Paris. In that same year, he launched and edited for Plon, a well respected publishing house in Paris, the series Recherches en sciences humaines. Over the next twenty years or so, a total of thirty-three books were published in the series under Dampierre’s direction, which included the first French translations of such scholars as Max Weber and Leo Strauss. And so, by the time he made his first trip to Africa in 1954 at age twenty-six, he was extremely well read in several languages and in

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

107

several disciplines, had earned several university degrees, had published articles and edited journals and books, had hobnobbed with leading social scientists in Chicago, had worked closely with sociologists and Africanists in Paris (for example, Michel Leiris, André Schaeffner and Denise Paulme) and had carried out interdisciplinary projects in the field.

Fieldwork in Central Africa In the preface to Un Ancien Royaume Bandia (1967), Dampierre writes about his first mission to Bangassou, a town in the east of what is now the Central African Republic: In 1954, a French government agency asked myself and a colleague to go find out why the Nzakara, who were thought to have been dying out over the past half-century, were having so few children. It was a time when government administrators, who often had difficulty posing the right questions, still didn’t know the answer. It was also a time when sociologists, unaware of their limits, wouldn’t think of turning down an opportunity to work, no matter how uncertain the resources of their discipline. Nzakaraland had never known researchers before us. It is no longer very common to be the first researchers to arrive anywhere in Africa. We had to scout things out before we could build a research project. That first year, we never took our boots off. And we still had to answer the question. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that there is no greater, more difficult or complex problem to address, whose meaning escapes us so mercilessly, than the problem that touches the meaning that humans attach to giving life. At the end of our first period of fieldwork (1954–1955), we were not able to satisfy those who had sent us, and, besides, their interests had already shifted to other matters. Whether the difficulties were resolvable or not, we learned much by addressing them. Moreover, I developed respect for the way this old Zande society worked and affection for its political warriors, its intrepid poets, its witches, its noble diviners. (1967: 11)

Dampierre was hooked from the start, and returned to Bangassou in 1957–1958. He surmised that the Nzakara were in no way practising collective suicide by refusing to have children, as some had suggested. He asked that a physician go to Bangassou to explore medical reasons for the drop in natality. That physician was Dr Anne Laurentin, who in 1960–61 discovered that venereal diseases were probably causing infertility. She also took up ethnographic studies of her own. That first trip to Bangassou, commissioned by ORSTOM (Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique d’Outre-Mer), was the maiden

108

Margaret Buckner

mission of the MSHO (Mission sociologique du Haut-Oubangui or Sociological Mission of the Upper Ubangui). The EPHE (Ecole pratique des hautes études) and then the CNRS financed successive periods of fieldwork for the MSHO in 1957–1958 and 1964–1965, then annually from 1966 to 1979, and again annually from 1981 to 1987. Dampierre also went to Bangassou in 1960–1961. The MSHO had an office in the basement of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, next to the office of Michel Leiris and other Africanists. In the early 1980s, the MSHO joined the Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative on the campus of the University of Paris X-Nanterre. The MSHO had a post office box (number 98) at the Bangassou post office at least until the mid-1990s. Dampierre established a research station on the outskirts of the town of Bangassou, at the home of a former plantation owner, Godeste, which also became the name of the station. The house, which sat in a clearing surrounded by forest, was made of stone, with a thatched roof; it had two large rooms and a small annex for washing. About twenty yards from the house, there was a smaller, round house that had a spare bedroom and a large shady porch that served as dining area. The station became Dampierre’s second home, and he returned regularly for periods of several months until the late 1980s. He more or less adopted an extended Nzakara family to help run the research station, including a housekeeper, a cook, a driver, a mechanic, a groundskeeper and a few others. He would stop in at their village on the way to Bangassou, load them all into his Land Rover and drive them to Godeste, where they would make themselves at home for the season. An aristocrat, he felt at home among the class-conscious Nzakara, a people who shared his interest in making living an art. With Godeste as his home base, Dampierre travelled the length and breadth of Nzakaraland, stopping in at villages and getting to know especially the elders who lived there. He also made excursions into Zandeland, going at least as far east as Mboki. On a few occasions, he would bring elders and musicians to the Godeste research station. One such festival of music and poetry took place on 19 November 1971; he supplied transport, room, board and drink to several renowned Nzakara harpist-poets so they could all relive the music, language and courtly ambience of yore. Dampierre involved as many researchers as possible from other disciplines and backgrounds, inviting them to spend time at Godeste. The list of guests and colleagues includes botanists, a geologist, a musicologist and a linguist, as well as other anthropologists. But fieldwork was not enough. He had to join in people’s lives and build relationships; people were not just objects of study but collaborators, friends and family, and he felt quite comfortable among them. In an

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

109

earlier publication (Dampierre 1956), he had listed getting to know the locals and participating in village life as a technique to gain better knowledge about them. In Africa, it no longer seemed that establishing a warm relationship with one’s fellows was a means to an end; it became, instead, an end in itself. He was already ready to help, both monetarily and logistically; in emergencies his Land Rover often served as the local ambulance. He taught sporadically at the lycée at Bangassou; he encouraged students there to pursue studies in sociology and ethnology, and sought financial backing for them to continue their studies in Bangui and eventually Paris.

Fieldwork philosophy For Dampierre, ethnology and sociology are really one and the same. He studied French villages and Nzakara villages using the same techniques and methods: a combination of historical documents, interviews and conversations with local people about their past and present, and detailed observation of behaviour, practices, and institutions. All three (historical documents, oral history, ethnography) reinforce each other. He had always been interested in social dynamics, in how and why societies change over time. To understand social and cultural processes and dynamics, a historical perspective is essential. Many, if not most, of his descriptions of Nzakara society of the nineteenth and early twentieth century are based on historical documents. His major work, Un Ancien Royaume Bandia, has a 70–page review of historical sources (Étude critique des sources). But he combined historical accounts with an understanding gained from living among the Nzakara, learning their language, listening to their poets, learning their proverbs and observing their customs and traditions. In his dissertation defence, Dampierre explains: The method I used in this work is perhaps not completely recommended. Our British colleagues, who rightly insist that the ethnologist should observe behavior rather than listen to what people say or read old texts, warn us not to read the past into the present or read the present into the past. But that is exactly what I have done, while taking special precautions. The first, and the most important, is to do fieldwork before reading historical documents. One is often surprised to find, after five or ten years, new meaning in documents that at first seemed absurd, wrong, or crazy. One must, of course, make the necessary transpositions, and, from the very beginning, understand how such or such behavior would have appeared to the innocent explorer or administrator. To that first effort I have added a second: to treat the European context and the African context in counterpoint. The contrasting interpretations of the treaty between [King] Bangassou and

110

Margaret Buckner

Vangele [Belgian explorer] provide a good example. Furthermore, one must spend a long time in a place in order to grasp the African reality behind the administrative accounts (1968: 1–2).

He wove together written history and oral history to piece together the past, to sketch out past events that led to current social organisation. He had faith that oral history, properly gathered and interpreted, could be more reliable than second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts recorded by European travellers and administrators. In a very slim book, Des ennemis, des arabes, des histoires (1983), Dampierre refutes the generally accepted historical account that the Arab slave-trader Rabih invaded the Nzakara kingdom twice, vanquished the royal army and pillaged the territory. He demonstrates that skilfully gathering oral traditions yields better results than consulting the frequently erroneous accounts of European explorers. His concluding paragraph summarises the role of the ethnographer or oral historian: I have attempted here, after critically reviewing the sources, as all good historians should, to reconstruct the collective experience of partial testimonies, scattered in space and time, and to understand that experience through its reflection in the mirror of the outsider. In a society without writing, asking piecemeal questions in privacy gets only useless information or answers that most please the interrogator. That is why continuously questioning the elders can only be useful over a lifetime and done in public. One must learn to get old. Contrary to what one often feels obliged to write, bringing that experience to the surface has nothing to do with tradition. That very action, for the society that wants or accepts it, can actually preserve tradition. We need to know how to use tradition to uncover what refutes it. Such is the work of the mandrels, those modest intermediaries. (1983: 41)

Like Nzakara poets, Dampierre uses a metaphor to describe his role in the process: that of a mandrel. A mandrel is a cylindrical, rotating shaft that serves as an axis for a larger rotating part. He saw himself as a tool allowing the various partial memories of Nzakara experience to take shape in a coherent history, thus enabling the Nzakara to solidify their tradition. Dampierre emphasised his point about the necessity of long-term fieldwork by offering a counterexample, in the form of an epigraph, on the same page: ‘We were so successful that at the end of two hours, the Pygmy had been sketched, measured, feasted, showered with gifts and submitted to a detailed interrogation’ (Schweinfurth 1875: 113). Using documents and texts from individual perspectives is something he had long thought about. In an early publication, ‘Le sociologue et l’analyse des documents personnels’ (1957), Dampierre proposed that using ‘personal documents [autobiographies, personal letters, diaries, drawings, unguided interviews faithfully transcribed], for the same time

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

111

and effort, provide much richer material than most other techniques used in social science’ (1957: 444). One must remember, he continued, that personal documents may not be sincere, may not be pertinent and may be affected by direct stimulation or solicitation. They also represent only one point of view. But they can be useful to ethnologists who are trying to reconstruct an indigenous culture from the inside. In the same paper, Dampierre offers instructions on how to use such documents fruitfully, while avoiding the traps. In the field, he collected many kinds of personal documentation, both written (for example, by school-age Zande refugees living at the refugee camp in Mboki) and tape-recorded (especially life histories and historical narratives). Dampierre learned the language – one of the first French ethnographers to do so – and he learned it well. People told me that he spoke Nzakara like an elder, which was a compliment indeed. Dampierre was versed in phonology and linguistic theory, and he set about compiling a Nzakara dictionary. His understanding of the language allowed him not only to question and converse with the Nzakara but also to pay attention to people’s unsolicited, spontaneous comments, to how they formulate their ideas and to their choice of phrases and figurative expressions. Many of his findings are based on what he heard people say, as well as what they never said. For example, when discussing musical instruments, he states, ‘To have been made by a child is a way for an object not to exist’ (1995: 68); in other words, saying that something was made by a child is saying that it is irrelevant. Besides being a means to an end, Dampierre also considered the language as an end in itself. The language serves as a window into the culture. He used features of the language to support his ideas about the Nzakara mode of thought and aesthetic. In a paper written in 1983 (Note de recherche n°12), he exposed the Nzakara catégories de l’entendement in a structured table similar to studies of Greek categories. We would spend hours discussing possible English, French and other translations for Zande words, always flitting through the pages of the Lalande Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie. Dampierre was drawn to the poetry and music of the Nzakara and Zande harpists. He travelled the length and breadth of Nzakara country to record the best harpists, lugging the Nagra, and later the Uher, tape recorders, along with microphones, batteries, cables, extra reels and so on. He often encountered obstacles, such as technical malfunction, poor weather, illness, absences and funerals. He learned Nzakara poetry inside out, the ‘double speech’, the allusions, the idiomatic expressions, the figures of speech. Many of the examples in the dictionary he was compiling come from the poems. Throughout his books and articles, he refers to snatches of song that, through allusions and proverbs, reveal

112

Margaret Buckner

the inner workings of Nzakara society. Dampierre himself used language poetically. It is evident in his translations of ‘oral literature’ and texts, as well as in his writings. He published two volumes of Nzakara poetry (1963, 1987),3 which he rendered into French poetry. As anyone who worked with him knew, Dampierre was extremely observant, down to the finest details. Nothing escaped his interest. His observations were eclectic, all-inclusive, involving every facet of discourse and behaviour, from greetings to building houses to playing the harp to fighting battles. No person, practice, technique or word was irrelevant. He talked with all members of society, commoners and nobles, young and old, men and women; studying them in isolation is pointless, for their interaction is what holds a society together. Though he had tremendous admiration for Evans-Pritchard, Dampierre bemoaned the fact that he had not been able to include women in his fieldwork.4 He sought guiding principles that held through different practices and institutions. For example, in Note de recherche no. 1 (1974), he argues that playing kisoro, a Zande and Nzakara board game, actually re-enacts the strategy and tactics of Zande armies as described by Evans-Pritchard (1971). The game board consists of four rows of eight holes; each adversary has two rows and thirty-two ‘men’. Among the principles: territory is never conquered by force. Victory belongs to the side that weakens the enemy to the point of having no more warriors. Both sides play at the same time; there is no handicap at the start of a battle, and each side has an equal chance to win. The manoeuvres are parallel, but each adversary moves his men independently of the other’s movements. Captured men are immediately incorporated into the captor’s army. Strategy involves taking advantage of the imbalances of the opposing army in order to capture the most men, while at the same time not exposing one’s own army to attacks of the adversary. The best tactic is to move the most men quickly, which tends to re-establish the starting positions by redistributing one’s army, and to take the most men to increase the size of one’s army. Thus, studying the way the Nzakara played kisoro also involved studying Nzakara and Zande military tactics. Similarly, he saw an analogy between the keys on a sanza (‘thumb piano’, an idiophone) and kinship (1982). As he watched a sanza-player work, he asked him questions and listened thoughtfully to his responses. Through these technical conversations there gradually emerged a representation of the sounds and the scale. The series of keys is called the lineage. The bridge (chevalet) is called ‘the mother-in-law carrying children’. The six keys on one side are all slightly lower than the six keys on the other side: the elder and younger lineages. The keys are named: the fathers (one on each side), the mothers (three on each side, including the favourite, the head wife, the ‘big wife’ who works for the

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

113

head wife, and two lesser wives; then four children, in birth order. Gilbert Rouget (1982) then studied the intervals between the key’s notes, and found that key number 7, the ‘big wife’, the one who always does whatever she likes, also sticks out musically, being asymmetrical.

Political organisation of the Bandia kingdoms Not surprisingly, since he was a graduate of the Institute of Political Science, Dampierre’s early research focused on the political organisation of the Bandia kingdoms in the upper Ubangui and Uele basins. His main question was the social foundations of political authority. He was well acquainted with Max Weber’s three types of legitimate rule: legal or rational authority, charismatic authority and traditional authority (Weber 1958 [1922]). He seemed to use the Bandia kingdom in Nzakaraland as a living example of Weber’s traditional authority. He was especially interested in how the Bandia clan, foreigners in Nzakaraland, established their political power, and in how they made the Nzakara need them. He addressed this question in his dissertation defence: Every once in a while, we see appear in history what historians call a military autocracy. Not long ago, P. de Vaux (1967) described the secret of the Horites in Genesis: ‘Once they infiltrated Palestine they seized power in the principal Palestinian cities and, without imposing their language or their customs, they quickly assimilated into the native populations.’ Those are people who resemble our Bandia. But how did it happen? By what mechanisms, by what needs, by what liberties? Can one truly explain power without analysing dependence? For power is in part violence, and the exercise of violence, like the exercise of war, is not an easy object of sociological study. Looking through the other end of the telescope is, I feel, more fruitful. How are the bonds of dependence in a given society woven, organized and hierarchized? That indeed makes a good object of study. (1968: 3)

Evans-Pritchard (1971) had studied the political organisation of the Vungara dynasties in central and eastern Zandeland. Dampierre analysed the political organisation of the three Bandia dynasties in western Zandeland and Nzakaraland, and, in particular, the kingdom of Bangassou. Out of ten or so Zande kingdoms, Evans-Pritchard studied the one farthest east (that of King Gbudwe, Vungara) and Dampierre studied the one farthest west (that of King Bangassou, Bandia); between them, they thus covered the two ends of the geographical spectrum.

114

Margaret Buckner

Ethnically, the Zande and Nzakara are very closely related; the two groups are so close that early explorers called the Nzakara ‘the Western Zande’. They have virtually identical kinship systems, social and political organisation, and belief systems (witchcraft, oracles, magic and diviners). The Nzakara and Zande languages are still close enough to be mutually comprehensible for some native speakers; it is estimated that they diverged no more than 500 years ago. Between the Nzakaraspeaking kingdom of Bangassou and the western-most Zande-speaking kingdom, Rafai, the language boundary is fuzzy, with many bilinguals; there is also much intermarriage. Though the Zande and Nzakara shared a similar social and political organisation, there was a crucial structural difference between the two ruling dynasties. The Vungara were a native Zande clan who grew to dominate their own people and then expanded eastward to incorporate and Zande-ise foreign peoples. Conversely, the Bandia were foreign Ngbandi-speakers who came north and adopted the Nzakara and Zande language and customs even as they established political domination. In a nutshell, the Vungara moved out, the Bandia moved in. This inversion led to further distinctions between the two dynasties. For example, the Vungara kingdoms were very unstable; a twenty-year period saw a new set of kingdoms. The Bandia, on the other hand, had three very stable kingdoms. The Vungara princes, especially in the newer, easternmost regions, were each others’ worst enemies, while among the Bandia there was much less royal fratricide. While the Zande kingdoms (especially the eastern ones) were made up of diverse peoples, the Nzakara and western Zande were more homogenous. In Azande History and Political Institutions (1971), Evans-Pritchard argued for the classic progression from hunters and gatherers to agriculture, which produced a surplus; the surplus was used by the Vungara for political advantage. The Vungara kings and princes, by using permanent battalions of young warriors and the temporary labour of adult men to work their fields, and also by receiving tribute from the surrounding area, were able to control very large amounts of food, which they then redistributed in a way that strengthened their authority. The Vungara courts also assured stability, military protection and justice for peoples who until then had been small-scale, autonomous groups. Food was given generously to feed the courtiers, the battalions and their leaders, and the people who came to the court for redress of wrongs or with requests of the king. Evans-Pritchard states that the king gave bridewealth (in the form of marriage spears) to anyone who asked. He also gave wives to loyal governors, military leaders and others who had shown him great service or loyalty. The number of subjects of a given king was directly related to the king’s

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

115

hospitality, military strength and justice. Wars were fought to acquire subjects, who would contribute to the king’s stores and his labour and military pools. Dampierre, however, in Un ancien royaume bandia (1967) and another publication (1971), describes a very different scenario for the Bandia conquest. In ancient Nzakara (and Zande) society, lineages were equal and wives were exchanged between lineages. No lineage was any better than any other. The circulation of women was strictly limited to marriage transactions. Families exchanged sisters and became allies. Each lineage was simultaneously wife-giver and wife-taker. In this system, a régime de la parentèle, allies were assured (1971: 267). When the Bandia arrived, they adopted the Nzakara and Zande system of kinship and alliance, but they co-opted the system and used it to their advantage. The Bandia were foreigners and needed to get into the good graces of the local Nzakara and Zande population. They did this by supplying wives not to their relatives but to their clients (subjects). Women went from being exchanged by lineage elders to being distributed by Bandia rulers. No longer was equality at the heart of the exchange. By controlling the circulation of women, the Bandia developed clienteles at the expense of the traditional, egalitarian lineage system. ‘A surplus of women and their distribution by the dominant clan are the keys of the new system, which, though it creates allies, is much better equipped to create subjects’ (1967: 294–95). Gradually, allegiance replaced alliance. Residence was no longer based on kin groupings, but on client groupings. To continue to be givers of wives, the Bandia needed a surplus of women. Annual wars were fought not to expand territory or to incorporate more subjects into the kingdoms, but to bring back women and girls to give away as wives to subjects as the Bandia pleased. Dampierre was explicit about the reasons for the wars: ‘The maximum acquisition of women became the means of government and renewed the symbolic pomp of power’ (1967: 273). When the Europeans arrived, the well dried up. There were no more wars to capture women to distribute. And because the Europeans upheld the right of women to be married by compensation only, the Bandia were no longer able to distribute women as needed to maintain their authority; they lost their clients, without whom they ceased to be patrons. A later paper, ‘Les idées-forces de la politique des Bandia à travers les propos de leurs souverains (1870–1917)’ (1998), further contributes to our understanding of the Bandia kingdoms. In it, Dampierre examines the kings’ own words to see how they themselves regarded their power. For example, King Djabir said to Commandant Francqui, ‘I cannot yet tell you which of my two sons will be designated by my people

116

Margaret Buckner

to succeed me; certainly the best will be chosen, and whatever my people decide will be for the best’ (1998: 7). In his commentary, Dampierre explains that the king is chosen by a royal council, approved by the royal family and acclaimed by an assembly of adult men. Second, King Bangassou said he is ‘the master of people, not the guardian of borders’ (ibid.). Dampierre comments that the notion of borders is totally foreign to African political life. In a third example, King Bangassou said to Bonnel de Mézières: ‘You see the Kengu [Mbomu] River? It is big because the other streams flow into it. It is the same with my chiefs: if they didn’t need my gifts, they would no longer come to me and I would be nothing’ (ibid.: 8). Dampierre explains that the power of a Bandia king only becomes authority when he renounces violence and sets about meeting the needs of those who have sworn him allegiance. In other words, the king commands only because he redistributes food, goods and especially wives. Dampierre was as interested in the demise of the Bandia kingdoms as in their origin, and he also traced the breaking up of traditional Nzakara society. He once observed that the Zande, because they adopted new practices so readily, ‘bent’ as they adapted to the modern world, whereas the Nzakara, intent on defending their traditions, resisted and ‘broke’. He was saddened by the rupture he observed taking place between Nzakara elders and Nzakara youth, especially those who went to school. In his article ‘Coton noir, café blanc’ (1960), he describes in detail how the introduction of the plantation system was apparently the most immediate source of conflicts and of the breaking up of traditional society. The paysannat system (used for coffee cultivation) brought about important changes in cultural practices and modifications in the network of daily social relations. Traditional grouped fields were replaced by the strip plantation system. The new system accentuated the ‘injustices’ of the gendered division of labour: men had nothing left to do, since, traditionally, women did the work in the fields. The new plantation system also upset the time frame for rotating fields: traditionally plots were planted for three or four years, then left fallow until the seventeenth year. Now, new plots would be cleared and planted each year, and would not be used again for seventeen years. Finally, Dampierre commented on a more subtle aspect of the change: a paysannat system implies the existences of paysans, or peasants, in other words, farmers who grow a surplus that will be sold in a market. But there can be no peasants until there are citizens (residents of a city); there can be no countryside without a city, since they are indissolubly tied together by a double flow of exchanges. The countryside cannot do without the city, and the city cannot do without the countryside. Populations in the Mbomu did not yet have needs. The Nzakara did not

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

117

produce more than they needed for their own subsistence, their traditional obligations and their taxes. Moreover, they often left some of their crops unharvested. The products of the city reached them only in the form of cloth and aluminium basins. Why would they want to double their income? In this paper and others (for example, the chapter in Un ancien royaume bandia entitled ‘A model pillage economy’), Dampierre analyses in detail the motives and practices of the colonial powers and the trading companies, in particular the Société des Sultanats, which sucked the land dry. He shows once again that a process or situation cannot be understood without considering the historical context and all the actors involved. In fact, in his dissertation defence (1968), he even considers the reasons for colonisation in the first place, and especially the specificity of the French colonial context, by citing philosophers such as Renan and colonial administrators such as Jules Ferry. The French colonist, according to Ferry (1892), ‘believes he is carrying out an act of civic virtue by leaving the land of his birth, and sees his motherland less as a benefactor than as having an obligation’ (cited in Dampierre 1968: 5). On the other hand, as Aron (1951: 70) says, the characteristic that all imperialist policies have in common is that they find their origin in the ‘political ambitions that chancelleries camouflaged (or rationalised) by invoking realistic motives’ (cited in Dampierre 1968: 6).

Nzakara poetry As mentioned earlier, Dampierre was drawn to the musical poetry of the Nzakara and Zande. That society’s music and oral art became a second research theme. At first, he collected texts of the poems – sung by harpists as they played – to learn the language better and work on a Nzakara glossary, but the poetry appealed to him in its own right. Each song is a unique event, improvised on the spot, without recognisable beginnings or endings. The poets were often minstrels at royal courts; their social and political commentary was keen. The poems are full of word-play, humour, irony, satire and stinging criticism veiled in metaphor. They also express the complaints and the desires of everyday life. Finally, they are a chronicle of court life. He published Poètes Nzakara (1963) after spending many long months perfecting the translations of the harpists’ songs with the help of his Nzakara collaborator Robert Bangbanzi; it was the first collection of texts to be published in the Nzakara language. The translations were all the more difficult in that French and Nzakara are very different languages, and in addition the texts were poems.

Margaret Buckner

118

Besides the words of the songs, Dampierre bent his interest to the music itself, and to the instrument. He spent several years tracking down Zande harps that had found their ways into European museums. He corresponded with lute-makers, art historians and curators around the world. His two last books, Harpes zande (1992) and Une esthétique perdue (1995), are dedicated to harps, harp music and harpists, and have received enthusiastic reviews from international specialists.

‘Thinking in the singular’ A truly overarching theme that seemed to anchor Dampierre’s fieldwork is the Nzakara-Zande way of seeing and thinking the world in terms of the singular, in terms of more or less. In his 1984 book, Penser au singulier, he proposed that the Nzakara ‘pensent au singulier’ – think in the singular. ‘Everything on earth has a singular existence. Nothing is identical, or equal, to anything else. Each thing or being is viewed in its difference’ (1984: 11). The Nzakara language cannot express identity. In other words, A and B cannot be identical, or equal, though they can be similar. Thus, two shadows made by the same person are aberrant and signs of disorder. No two people are identical, or equal. Among other things, this explains why the birth of twins – two ‘identical’ beings – is such a disruptive event. It also explains why counting human beings is rude. It implies they are interchangeable, that each has the same value and characteristics as another. King Bangassou knew how many battalions he had, but not how many men fought in them. Lengths, distances, volumes and periods of time are not measured using abstract measurements. Distances are described in terms of days of walking, or number of streams crossed. Time is described by using points (sunrise, noon, sunset and so on). Quantities and surfaces are never divided into equal parts, for there must always be a remainder. Symmetry is avoided. Besides being different, or as a result of being different, each thing or being is ranked or ordered. Notes on a musical scale, lineages, brothers, wives ... each occupies a place on an ordered scale and is thought of in that order. He observed this way of seeing the world in everyday life: women selling palm oil at the market (the ‘remainder’ was their profit), dividing a piece of food, building a roof or teaching mathematics at the lycée. Dampierre observes that ‘thinking in the singular’ permeates the Zande-Nzakara aesthetic in rhythms, voice, musical scales, sculpture and performance. Harpists, singers and sculptors look for asymmetry, for individual, ‘singular’ performances, for ‘remainders’ rather than for symmetry and regular rhythms, intervals or features. And, perhaps especially, no two harps or performances should ever be identical.

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

119

In Une esthétique perdue (1995), one of his last publications, he calls the Nzakara (and Zande) a ‘society of irreducible individualists’. He emphasises that this same way of thinking in the singular influences all Nzakara (and Zande) thought, discourse and practices. He asks: ‘isn’t an aesthetic, whatever its source, necessarily totalizing (totalisant)?’ He seeks to describe ‘an aesthetic of the singular, which I think is at work in several areas: rhetoric, sculpture, music’ (1995: 14). From morning to night, all Nzakara thinking heads think in terms of more and less, of excess and deficiency (... and also elder and younger, father and son, head wife and favorite), just as pre-Socratics who would have understood why Plato replaced the One and the Infinite of Pythagorus with the One and the Dyad of the Greater and the Lesser (1995: 16).

In ‘Accord entre deux harpes, accord entre deux voix en Afrique équatoriale’ (Note de recherche n° 29, 1994), he relates this principle to the voice, especially in chantefables, the cycle of Trickster tales that alternate sung parts and spoken narrative: Not only does the singing voice oppose the speaking voice, but it is sung at an octave of the normal speaking voice. [...] The ‘head voice’, sometimes a falsetto (throat voice, voix de faucet), is opposed to the chest voice. [...] In chantefables, this head voice designates the intervention of a supernatural operator, either to transpose the action from the everyday world to a special world of marvels, or to bring the action back to the everyday world. [...] Head voice and falsetto could be considered variants of an octave voice, though it is more complex. An ‘octave voice’ alone would be considered ‘the same’ as a normal voice. I would propose the following hypothesis: with regard to Nzakara court music, the conscious discussion among musicians keeps coming back to an antinomy between the ‘impossible’ unison and the ‘obvious’ antiphony (octave consonance), between the impossible same and the Other that passes for the same. To escape this unsolvable antinomy, the best solution is the Dyad of more and less, of Excess and Deficiency. (1994: 2–3)

A footnote ties the Nzakara to the Greeks (something he did often); he cites Aristotle’s comment that ‘mixed is always more agreeable than homogenous’. He also tied ‘thinking in the singular’ to rhythms: there is always something left over; rhythms are staggered, they always have a gap, a lag, an irregular interval. For the Nzakara and Zande, the distinction is there, in the fine analysis of the repetitions. But distinction is not difference, distinction is not a relationship, because all true relations imply the analysis of the particular and would

120

Margaret Buckner

reveal some level of participation of the being. We remain faced with the Dyad to create formulas, fleeing all strictly equivalent relations. That notion, described in the mind of a [Greek] philosopher, is found again, in the societies of the Upper-Ubangui, shaping the daily, lived experience, starting with that of musicians. (ibid.: 18)

Then, in one of his last papers, ‘Le reste épimore’ (Note de recherche n° 33, revised version, 1996), he makes perhaps his clearest description of ‘thinking in the singular’: I continue searching for the basis of the practices described in Penser au singulier and Une esthéthique perdue concerning the rejection of equal sizes, the rejection of symmetrical areas and the rejection of commensurate durations. The rejection correlates with the emphasis put on ‘remainders’, which are not truly remainders since no exhaustive procedure to reach a limit was sought. These ‘remainders’, which make calculations troublesome, are conceived of by Zande and Nzakara as a privileged property of nature that only human will can, in certain cases and under certain conditions, get rid of. These practices in the Upper-Ubangui, which lead to the explicit formulation of ‘thinking in the singular’, render vain – illusory, even scandalous by nature – all relations of identity, whatever they may be. (1996, passim)

Finally, in ‘Les idées-forces de la politique des Bandia à travers les propos de leurs souverains (1870–1917)’ (1998), Dampierre shows how the singular had been enacted politically and how it came to an end by a political act. Here he summarises the important change that was brought about consciously by Bandia rulers: In the 1880s, Bangassou declared by an oath before the shrine Bendo – and not at the ancestors’ shrine – that from now on he would reign over an immense people, made up of foreigners from all over. It was a historic moment: the oath before Bendo is the equivalent of a reform of Clisthenes. The sovereign solemnly renounces the ancestral foundations of his authority. He renounces treating people in the singular organized by descent and alliance, kin ties and clienteles. Lineage affiliation will no longer be the organizing principle of his people. [...] Bendo is the refusal of natural determinism, the subversion of superdetermined order. It is the inauguration of civil society. The lineages rebelled. The king’s own sister turned the Bendo shrines upside-down, ‘to save the throne of her father, Mbali’. This inversion of accepted values could only have been carried out by the king. The decision created identical subjects, and, in particular, treated Arabs, Whites, and Blacks on the same level. Bendo, the friend of women, the protector of harvests, had presided over the identification of everyone

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

121

with everyone. A universalist rule had appeared. The singular, which is ignorant of the distinction between the particular and the universal, had lived politically. (1998: 13–14)

It is this idea of ‘thinking in the singular’ that guided Dampierre’s research and writing since the early 1980s. The idea was born of and borne out by his observations and experiences during long, repeated periods of fieldwork among the Nzakara.

Dampierre’s legacy First and foremost, thanks to his skilled, intense, long-term fieldwork, Dampierre helped preserve the history, language, knowledge and music of the Nzakara for the Nzakara themselves. He showed that he was conscious of that contribution in the introduction to Un ancien royaume bandia (1967): Akabati, Zangandu, Nukusa, Kaali, Gbesende, Vugba, Sayo and others who offered me hospitality have now died without knowing that, in talking with me, they were also writing their people’s history. Their sons, all too conscious of their past because they want to be someone else, are reclaiming that history out of fear of never knowing it. If, nevertheless, this book, by some dreadful trick of history, could transmit to the sons the knowledge of their fathers, it would take its place among the uncertain fruits of those few, very rare years in human history: those few years in which our common civilization – impoverished because become one, but infinitely rich in a history it endlessly recreates while at the same time making a project of its future – encounters and immediately but impertinently relates the complex splendour of societies that live in the present, content with their origins, but discovering, for the first and the last time, the face of the outsider in the hearts of their children. (1967: 12)

Dampierre laid the groundwork for us to follow. In the preface of Une esthétique perdue, he challenges us to continue to search for what makes the Nzakara and Zande society so distinct: We hope that these [...] projects will be completed. As of now, it clearly seems that the ideas elaborated elsewhere to explain the sculpture and music of central Africa do not allow us to understand the particularity/uniqueness of Zande society. That should not be surprising: different analyses for different societies. It must be said that, after a century of work, the deepest workings of this society of irreducible individualists still escape us. [...] We must one day undertake head-on a study of Nzakara and Zande rhetoric. It goes without saying that what is said must be qualified by the discourse

122

Margaret Buckner

situation and context. But we must also ask ourselves a less obvious question: can an entire society wish daily for the same and its contrary in order to escape the vicissitudes of human life? [...] This edited collection, preceded and followed by other works, is only a milestone on a very difficult road, on a wild goose chase whose first entrant was E. E. Evans-Pritchard. [...] We know that others will have to join us, others that the generous and rigorous analysis of the ways of African aesthetics also sometimes keep from sleeping. (1995: 10–11)

The office of the Mission Sociologique du Haut-Oubangui, currently attached to the Laboratorie d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative at the University of Paris-X (Nanterre), is one of Dampierre’s most impressive legacies and is a monument to his fieldwork. He collected published and unpublished works dealing with the general area of the Upper Ubangui as well as neighbouring peoples. He deposited there for the use of interested researchers miles of recorded tapes (both music and narrative, in Nzakara, Zande and, more rarely, Sango), hundreds of photographs (both historical and those he himself took in the field), the complete genealogical records of the various lineages of the Bandia clan going back some fourteen generations, a map collection, a plant collection, a French-Nzakara dictionary and dozens of indexed field notebooks. Because he used historical sources so painstakingly yet successfully, he was very much aware of the importance of leaving proper records of his own observations and experiences; his field notebooks – all fifty or so of them – are numbered, paginated, indexed and cross-referenced, furnishing evidence and examples for his published works and unpublished papers. Finally, Eric de Dampierre will be remembered for and by his students and colleagues at both the Department of Ethnology and the Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie at the University of Paris X. As director of those institutions, and then as an ‘elder’, he instilled in all of us the importance of thorough, careful fieldwork. Long, repeated periods in the field were crucial, as was learning the language. He was sceptical of ethnographers who went only once to the field, did not stay long, and did not learn the language well. His principles were passed on through his graduate seminars and supervision of dissertations. The emphasis on fieldwork that he instilled in ethnology at Nanterre lives on. As the Nzakara would insist, he was a man hors par – without equal.

Eric de Dampierre and the art of fieldwork

123

Notes 1. Dampierre wrote a total of thirty-eight notes de recherche (‘research notes’) of varying lengths and on a variety of subjects. Six were later revised and published. They are located in the office of the Mission sociologique du Haut Oubangui, at the University of Paris-X (Nanterre). 2. Dampierre continued working on UNESCO projects even after he began carrying out fieldwork in Africa. In 1959, he was named programme specialist at UNESCO and was responsible for the section on human rights and the struggle against racial discrimination. In 1960, he travelled to Jerusalem and to the Negev for UNESCO to undertake sociological research on irrigation in arid zones. 3. Poetes nzakara (2 volumes, 1963, ms.; Poetes nzakara II is a finished manuscript but was not published); also Satires de Lamadani (1987, text and cassette). 4. Dampierre had only compliments for Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of ‘the Zande society, which has been so magnificently studied since 1927 by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, whom I could not sufficiently praise for his scrupulous exactitude’ (1967: 247). He read everything Evans-Pritchard had written about the Zande. He sent Evans-Pritchard a draft of at least some chapters of his dissertation, and he visited him on at least a few occasions.

References Aron, R. 1951. Les guerres en chaîne, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1968. Main currents in sociological thought I, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company. Translation of first half of Les étapes de la pensée sociologique, Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Chirac, A. 1897. Sociométrie, Revue Socialiste, 6(34) (October). Dampierre, E. de. 1948. Sociométrie: note étymologique, Echanges sociologiques, 2: 63–66. ——— 1951. Sur deux different types d’hérétiques, unpublished ms., 5 pp. ——— 1956. Malvire-sur-Desle: une commune aux franges de al région parisienne, L’Information géographique, 20: 68–73. ——— 1957. Le sociologue et l’analyse des documents personnels, Annales, 12: 442– 54. ——— 1960. Coton noir, café blanc, Cahiers d’études africaines, 2: 128–47. ——— 1963. Poètes nzakara, vol. 1, Paris: Julliard. ——— 1967. Un ancien royaume Bandia du Haut-Oubangui, Paris: Plon. ——— 1968. Présentation de theses soumises à la faculté des letters de l’Université de Paris en vue du grade de docteur ès letters, unpublished manuscript. ——— 1971. Elders and youngers in Nzakara kingdom, in Kinship and culture, F.L.K. Hsu (ed.), Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 246–70. ——— 1982. Sons aînés, sons cadets, Revue de musicologie, 68: 325–9. ——— 1983. Des ennemis, des arabes, des histoires, Paris: Société d’Ethnographie. ——— 1984. Penser au singulier, Paris: Société d’Ethnographie. ——— 1987. Satires de Lamadani, Paris: Armand Colin (2 vols, with cassette). ——— 1992. Harpes zandé, Paris: Klincksieck. ——— 1994. Accord entre deux harpes, accord entre deux voix en Afrique équatoriale, Note de recherche, no. 29, 1–4. ——— 1995. Une esthétique perdue, Paris: Presses de l’ENS. ——— 1996. Le reste épimore, Note de recherche no 33, 1–3. ——— 1998. Les idées-forces de la politique des Bandia à travers les propos de leurs souverains (1870–1917), Africa, 53(1): 1–16.

124

Margaret Buckner

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1971. Azande, History and Political Institutions, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ferry, Jules 1892. Rapport sur l’organisation et les attributions du gouverneur general de l’Algérie, Paris: Imprimerie nationale. Moreno, Dr. 1943. Sociometry and the cultural order, Sociometric Monograph, 2: 318 (cited in Dampierre 1948). Rouget, G. 1982. Note sur l’accord des sanza d’Ebézagui, Revue de musicologie, 68: 330–44. Schweinfurth, G. 1875. Au coeur de l’Afrique, 1868–1871: voyages et découvertes dans les régions inexplorées de l’Afrique centrale, vol. 2, Paris: Hachette. Vaux, P. de. 1967. CR [Compte rendu?], Academie inscr. et belles-lettres (cited in Dampierre 1968). Weber, M. 1958 [1922]. The three types of legitimate rule, Berkeley Publications in Society and Institutions 4(1): 1–11.

Chapter 5

WHAT SORT OF ANTHROPOLOGIST WAS PAUL RIVET? Laura Rival

Few anthropologists today know who Paul Rivet was. Even in France, where he played a central role in shaping the discipline during the interwar years, the name of Paul Rivet evokes only vague memories: ‘Rivet, the Director of the Museum of Mankind?’ ‘Rivet, the Americanist?’ ‘Didn’t he write that controversial book on the origins of American Indians?’ The name is known, but no one seems to remember Rivet’s theoretical contribution or teaching. Rivet was a medical doctor, military officer, field naturalist, collector, physical anthropologist, ethnologist, linguist, a builder of academic institutions and a politician – indeed, a success in all these professions. He became an anthropologist while working in the field in the Ecuadorian Andes. His five years of fieldwork little resembled the classic ethnographic fieldwork that Malinowski was to undertake in the Trobriands ten years later, but they nevertheless determined the range of issues, methods and theoretical questions he was to explore throughout his long career. Even though he may have been practically erased from the discipline’s collective memory today, Rivet’s work shaped and influenced the development of post-Second World War social anthropology in France, including Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. Moreover, his holistic and humanist vision of anthropology as the science of humankind, as well as his political commitment to educating the public about the value of cultures other than their own, are surprisingly relevant today. Indeed, as I suggest in the conclusion, they are perhaps even more relevant today than at any time since his death in 1958.

Laura Rival

126

Figure 5.1. Paul Rivet. From obituary in Journal de la Société des Americanistes, 1959.

Paul Rivet’s multi-stranded career The second of six children, Paul Adolphe Rivet was born on 7 May 1876 in Wasigny, a small village in Lorraine.1 He started school near Nancy, in the village of Blénod-les-Toul, where his father, a soldier who had lost his right arm during the Franco-Prussian war, worked as a tax collector. From him, Rivet learnt to be a fervent patriot deeply committed to equality of citizenship and human rights (Dussán de Reichel 1984: 70). His primary education completed, Rivet enrolled in the grammar school at Nancy, where he excelled in literature and poetry and passed the baccalaureate in philosophy with distinction (d’Harcourt 1958, Pineda Camacho 1985, Zerilli 1991–93). Despite

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

127

his obvious talent for literature and philosophy, this son of a modest provincial family decided against preparing the entry exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Laurière 1999: 109). Although he was not particularly attracted to medicine and had no ambition to serve in the French army as his grandfather, uncle and father had done before him, he chose, mainly for financial reasons, to become a military doctor (Chevasse 1958: 106). Rivet’s unusual twin training in French humanism and medical science gave him the encyclopaedic breadth he was to deploy so fruitfully throughout his long academic career. One can also assume that his employment as medical warrant officer in the Paris cavalry from 1898 to 1901 helped him develop the discipline and organisational skills for which he later became so famous, not least as Director of the Musée de l’Homme. As is often the case in anthropological careers, serendipity played a large part in Rivet’s choice of Ecuador as the country in which he would conduct field research. By pure chance he was given an opportunity to accompany the second French geodesic mission, charged with remeasuring the equatorial meridian. As the mission involved collaboration with the Académie des Sciences de Paris, Rivet was able to receive some scientific training at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) before departing, especially in anthropometric methods. Far from being unusual, Rivet’s expertise in comparative anatomy and his passion for natural history were shared by other members of the geodesic mission, and, indeed, by many early twentiethcentury anthropologists (Stocking 1992b: 17–32). León (1958: 307) nicknames them ‘science missionaries’. In Ecuador, where he was to spend the next five years of his life, Rivet travelled indefatigably, attending patients and collecting numerous and diverse materials. Free medical services were obviously very popular and were consciously used by the geodesic mission as an efficient means of enlisting the locals’ goodwill. A zealous field naturalist, Rivet collected plant and animal specimens, archaeological finds (bones, pottery and so on), indigenous artefacts, oral traditions and vocabularies of many of the languages spoken in Ecuador at the time, and took anthropomorphic measurements. In the first two years of his stay, Rivet mainly collected species for the MNHN, contributing equally to entomology and botany. The specimens were sent for identification to leading scientists based in France, elsewhere in Europe or the United States. The breadth of his collections is reflected in the fact that more than thirty animal species were named after him.2 His botanical collections also contained many new species and varieties. Very soon, the anthropological collections he sent back to Paris roused the interest of scholars at MNHN. However,

128

Laura Rival

Rivet had to fight hard not to have them treat him as a simple field surveyor and collector. He had personally funded the expeditions, and the collections were the fruit of his personal efforts. He aspired to the status of full researcher, and was determined to be the one who would classify, study and analyse the objects now stored at the MNHN, which, as far as he was concerned, belonged to him (Laurière 2006: 236–39). In July 1906, having won the battle, he was officially detached from the Army’s geographical services to work at the MNHN as an independent scholar under the supervision of René Verneau and Ernest-Théodore Hamy. He soon became a member of the Société des Américanistes de Paris (in 1907), even serving as its general secretary for several months the following year, a post to which he was to be formally elected in 1922 and which he was to occupy for more than thirty years, until his death in 1958. He received much praise and scientific recognition in 1908 for his collections, exhibited in the zoology galleries of the MNHN. In 1909, when Verneau took up the Chair of Anthropology at the MNHN in succession to Hamy, Rivet became his research assistant. Soon after, Rivet published one of his most important scientific papers,3 which offers a systematic refutation of the theories and methodologies that defined physical anthropology at the time. While in the field, he had collected complete anthropometric measurements for 300 Indians (mainly adult men) and had also measured at least 60 skeletons in cemeteries. His ancient bone collection comprised 350 skulls and about 500 bones, including 400 long ones. Back in Paris, his intention had been to write a substantial anthropological study of the American Indian race with his MNHN colleague, Raul Anthony. The paper was to explain the scope, origin and history of the internal diversity of the race. However, the systematic study of the empirical data he had gathered led him instead to reject the premises of anthropometry. Skull measurements, he concluded, lead to the arbitrary classification of humans in entirely fictitious groupings. The human types so determined have nothing real in common, only the arbitrary trait used as a basis for their classification. In 1910, ideological disagreements between the MNHN and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris over anthropometric measurements and the scope of anthropological research reached crisis point, which prompted Rivet and Verneau to resign. A year later, Rivet created a new learned society based at the MNHN, the Institut Français d’Anthropologie, of which he became the archivist-librarian. Durkheim, Hertz, Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl and many others immediately joined the new Institut, which sought to redefine anthropology ‘in its widest sense’. No longer a mere synonym for physical anthropology, anthropology was to

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

129

be based on a federative integration of all the disciplines involved in explaining ‘the human phenomenon’, chiefly linguistics and ethnography (Dias 1991: 246–50). The Institut’s main function in the eyes of its members was to fight against sterile specialism and to facilitate the circulation of new ideas and knowledge in all the domains that interested broad-minded anthropologists (Laurière 1999: 111). Published in 1912, L’Ethnographie ancienne de l’Équateur,4 ostensibly co-authored by Rivet and Verneau, but in reality very much Rivet’s work, was awarded several prizes. Based on an abundance of sources – which are not simply listed but also commented on and integrated fully into the text – the book provides a comparative analysis of the large archaeological collections that Rivet brought back from Ecuador. It is still widely regarded as a masterpiece of rigour in the methodical description of pre-Colombian material culture. Rivet’s subsequent publication plans were curtailed by the outbreak of the First World War.5 Throughout the war, he worked with the same energy, method, discipline and sense of organisation, this time to reform the medical care of wounded soldiers and, later on, the running of a military hospital in Salonika, where he also managed to find the time to organise scientific expeditions and prepare naturalist collections for the MNHN. After the war,6 Rivet almost resigned from the Société des Américanistes de Paris over political issues. A number of its French members wanted to see German-speaking scholars banished from the Société’s membership list. Rivet, who strongly believed in international scientific cooperation and knew how much America owed to German and Austrian scientists, fought hard against the motion and won.7 In the 1920s, Rivet increasingly turned his attention to linguistics. He had already authored or co-authored 22 communications on South American indigenous languages between 1907 and 1919, but the 21 works published between 1920 and 1925 are more comparative and more ambitious in scope, especially the chapter on American languages he wrote for Meillet and Cohen’s Langues du monde (Rivet 1924). On 6 August 1925, after months of preparatory work and lobbying by Lévy-Bruhl, the French ministry for colonial affairs agreed to fund the creation of an Institut d’Ethnologie within the University of Paris. Rather like the British government, the French government institutionalised and funded modern anthropology when it became convinced that anthropology could play a positive role in the administration of the colonies. Lévy-Bruhl invited Marcel Mauss and Rivet to become the institute’s general secretaries. The Institut’s role was to train ‘professional ethnologists’,8 introduce anthropological findings to civil servants assigned to the colonies and educate the public about the invaluable contribution to civilisation made by the

130

Laura Rival

populations, societies and cultures found in the French colonies and beyond. According to Laurière (1999: 114), Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss delegated to Rivet the task of organising and administering the Institut. The close collaboration between the three men, who shared the same socialist political ideals and humanist values (Pineda Camacho 1985: 8, Jamin 1989: 282), led to the institutional association of three Parisian research and teaching centres: the Sorbonne (under LévyBruhl), the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (under Mauss), and the MNHN (under Rivet). Through their association, the three scholars hoped to facilitate the federation of three complementary theoretical approaches to the study of mankind, or sciences de l’homme as they are still referred to in France: philosophy (under Lévy-Bruhl), sociology (under Mauss) and anthropology (under Rivet). This they saw as a necessary condition for strengthening a modern French anthropological project firmly anchored in a common methodology, namely ethnographic fieldwork (Allen 2000).9 In 1928, Rivet was elected to the MNHN Chair in Anthropology, the title of which he immediately attempted to change to that of the Chair of the Ethnology of Modern and Fossil Men. Rivet’s appointment revived the muted, yet persistent intellectual dissensions between those who favoured a broad, holistic anthropology programme and those who were eager to maintain physical anthropology as a separate, if no longer hegemonic discipline. The following year Rivet, who had obtained agreement that the Trocadéro be attached to his chair, became the director of the museum, where he created a library of ethnology. Faced with the challenge of holding so many different offices simultaneously,10 Rivet chose to concentrate on the MNHN and the Trocadéro, leaving Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl fully in charge of the Institut d’Ethnologie. By then, and perhaps as a result of this unintended division, it was decided that the University of Paris would offer two different qualifications in anthropology, a certificate in ethnology awarded by the Science Faculty (Faculté de Sciences), and another awarded by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Faculté de Lettres).11 Rivet, who continued to advocate ethnology as a total science giving equal importance to physical anthropology, linguistics and ethnography (defined as the study of past and present material culture), became increasingly convinced that such a project required the upgrading of the old Trocadéro Museum, which he finally achieved in 1937 with the creation of the Musée de l’Homme. As Jamin (1989) and Laurière (2006: 518), who refer to Rivet as a ‘scholar and a politician’, both note, the various aspects of Rivet’s multifaceted career and his different projects – to develop Americanist studies on an international scale, participate actively in progressive politics and

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

131

popularise anthropology as a science in the service of universal civilisation, that is of a true humanism – became increasingly merged from the mid-1930s onwards. Having responded favourably to Lévy-Bruhl’s offer to join the Socialist Party (SFIO), Rivet soon involved himself in formal politics. In 1934, he founded the Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes with the physicist Langevin and the philosopher Alain, and acted as its first president. A year later, in 1935, Rivet became the first politician to be elected on a Popular Front list as councillor for the City of Paris and the Regional Council of the Seine (Lottman 1982: 78), inaugurating a long and distinguished political career. Rivet also continued to contribute to the expansion of the Société des Américanistes. Under his presidency, various collaborative projects with European and North American Americanists were planned or undertaken, and links with researchers, informants and correspondents multiplied throughout South America, where he travelled and taught with increasing regularity. In her biography of Julian Steward, Kerns (2003: 224) mentions that Rivet was involved with Lowie as early as the late 1920s in an encyclopaedia project on America’s cultures and societies.12 By the time US funding became available in the early 1940s, France could no longer, for obvious reasons, participate in the project, which became exclusively associated with its sponsor, the Smithsonian Institution. If Julian Steward became the encyclopaedia’s general editor, it was a former student of Rivet, Alfred Métraux, who wrote many of the ethnological entries. When the Vichy regime fired him from the directorship of the Musée de l’Homme in 1941, Rivet accepted an invitation from the Colombian president, allowing him to escape from the Gestapo just in time. Between 1941 and 1943, he helped develop the National Institute of Ethnology (Instituto Etnológico Nacional),13 the Ethnological Institutes of the Universities of Cauca, Antioquia and the Atlantico, and the Colombian Society of Ethnology (Sociedad Colombiana de Etnología). He also trained the first Colombian social anthropologists (including Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff), participated in the foundation of Bogotá’s ethnographic museum, mounted several fieldwork expeditions (de Friedemann 1984) and worked closely with Paulo Duarte, the leading Brazilian archaeologist, who had been his student. Rivet’s best-known book, Les origines de l’homme américain, was published in 1943, and his major Bibliographie des langues aymará et kicua completed in 1954, four years before his death. The Musée de l’Homme, which he considered to be his most important scientific achievement, survived him for nearly five decades, until the creation of the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006. Rivet was in many ways stimulated by the Victorian ambition of using anthropological knowledge to

Laura Rival

132

reform society (Stocking 1987: 324–29), and the museum he directed constituted, in his eyes, a perfect synthesis between research, education and politics. Aimed at popularising ethnological science in a way that would valorise the material cultures of so-called primitive societies and elevate them to the rank of civilisations, the collections of the Musée de l’Homme were designed on the one hand to educate the French public against racist ideologies and prejudice, and on the other hand to signal to officials and elites that the duties and responsibilities of good government equally apply to all citizens.

Paul Rivet’s fieldwork In line with much of the anthropological writing of his time, Rivet’s early work deals essentially with the questions of origins and historical change. The almost complete absence of concern for issues of structure, function or meaning is striking. Yet even though he uses his observations of contemporary indigenous cultures more as a source of facts to extrapolate about the ‘aboriginal’ past than as a basis from which to examine particular forms of social organisation, the ethnographic interest in the diversity of human ways of life is never entirely absent from his writings. An examination of his first field study of indigenous people (Rivet 1903), his essay on the Jibaros (Rivet 1907– 8), and his 1906 programmatic report will illustrate both his anthropological interests and his methodological approach. The Quechua Indians of Riobamba (1903) A medical doctor14 doubling as a field naturalist, Rivet came into contact with many patients during his two first years in Ecuador. As a matter of policy, he treated not only the geodesic mission staff but also many influential Ecuadorians, local scholars and, on occasion, indigenous people and mestizos from the rural communities he visited during his collecting trips (Dussán de Reichel 1984: 70–71). He talked to many people, but never directly to the Indians themselves. Although he did interact with indigenous contracted labourers and patients, most of his ethnography comes from observing the Indians at a distance through layers of stereotypes. What kind of ethnographic observations did he make, then, in the highlands of Ecuador? An examination of his first field study with indigenous people, the Quechua Indians of Riobamba (Rivet 1903), gives us some clues. The article starts with a detailed geographical description of the Riobamba region, followed by a discussion of whether ‘the Indians of the Riobamaba region’ actually are an adequate unit for anthropological

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

133

analysis. What differentiates these Indians from their neighbours? Rivet argues that, although a full study of their customs and physical makeup (through anthropometric measurements) would be needed to conclude with certainty that they indeed form a distinguishable biocultural unit, they seem to possess enough traits in common to be treated as a separate group. ‘Group’ here is not used in the social or political acceptation of the term, but rather to refer to a population made up of individuals sharing a common physical appearance, due partly to their shared biology and partly to their shared material culture. Rivet proceeds to describe systematically and with clinical accuracy the physical appearance of men and women (clothing, adornment, hairstyle), dwellings (including furniture, tools and sleeping arrangements) and the yards around them, where children play and domesticated animals live. He observes that compounds are fenced and gives the scientific names for all the plant species making up the hedges. The different species of animals found are also listed. He then goes on to describe the people’s food preferences, the ways in which food is prepared and consumed, and women’s work, in particular the preparation of maize beer. The detailed description is followed by a diagnosis: these Indians live an extremely impoverished way of life, which has been forced upon them by history. Their amenities are basic and rustic, the pervasive filth and lack of hygiene a constant source of illness, but their diet is frugal and healthy. In this early ethnographic experience, Rivet’s training as a medical doctor clearly shapes and channels his field observations, guiding his assessments of local health conditions, remedies and attitudes to western medicine. He shows a great interest in and appreciation of indigenous cultural achievements: their physical endurance, their capacity for hard work, their local knowledge of plant remedies. If the Indians of Riobamba are not resistant to malaria or smallpox and die at a young age, it is because they refuse to be vaccinated, live far from medical centres and do not look after themselves properly. They use harmful treatments such as throwing themselves into icy cold rivers when they have a high fever, or rubbing guinea pigs onto their bodies for purposes of ritual cleansing. Their witch doctors are charlatans who exploit their ignorance and part them from the little cash they are able to earn. Here ends the ‘individual ethnography’, as he calls it (Rivet 1903: 64), of the Indian of Riobamba, who, despite the abject poverty in which he is forced to live, manages – just about – to retain some human dignity. The second section of the article deals with the regional configuration created by the two co-existing, but not mixing, biocultural populations found in the Riobamba valley. Before examining the social networks that unite the Indians, Rivet examines the reasons

134

Laura Rival

for the profound chasm that exists between the Indians and the whites (1903: 64–65). What amazes him most is that, while the Incas succeeded in imposing their language and customs on the local indigenous population in less than fifty years, Spanish culture, even after three centuries or more, has not fully penetrated, much less replaced, the Indian cultural heritage. The two ‘races’ live side by side, but without mixing and with minimal communication, the whites concentrated in the urban centres, the Indians dispersed throughout the countryside. The Indians may have adopted Catholicism, but their animistic way of practising the Old World religion has very little to do with what the priests and missionaries intended to teach them. He then outlines the different types of political organisation found in the valley, compares hacienda-bonded and free communities, and discusses the power and authority of self-appointed chiefs (he names a few). Here, the reader is left to wonder how much his own childhood, spent on the historically disputed border between France and Germany, which is rife with cultural and political divisions, and his military training have influenced his ethnographic understanding. The unfamiliar landscape and the human settlements are looked at strategically, and political alliances and divisions mapped out. At several points in the text, Riobamba indigenous customs and institutions are compared with Arab practices. Rivet goes on to examine the patterns of authority within the family before describing family life (1903: 65–67), for instance the affectionate ties between husband and wife. Pre-marital sexual life, marriage negotiations, wedding rites and various family relations are then described succinctly. Stress is put on the common human desire to found a family, and cultural differences are played down. This passage demonstrates again Rivet’s sharp observational skills (for instance, his penetrating description of how women care for their drunken husbands), but also his almost total lack of interest in any ‘why’ question. Although exotic practices are accurately noted and exposed without a trace of moral judgement, they never become a source of wonder. It is the generically human experience that retains Rivet’s attention throughout. The style in which the third section is written is entirely different. It is as a socialist that Rivet analyses the category ‘Indian’ as a political construction inherited from the colonial order. The analysis is aimed at uncovering the particular political and economic relationships, not between humans pertaining to different ‘races’ but rather between landowners and labourers. Three categories of Indians are differentiated and analysed, and the Spanish terms (concierto, apegado and suelto or libre) defined. Concierto Indians, the most exploited (Rivet actually says

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

135

‘unfortunate’), are debt-bonded to large hacienda landowners. The debt contract is described, as are the working conditions. Although legally freer than concierto Indians, apegado Indians in fact live almost as precariously and inhumanly as their debt-bonded brothers, for they have no way of themselves producing or selling the products of their labour on the market. Suelto Indians sell not only their labour force but also farm products (e.g. crops, eggs, cheese), products they collect (e.g. firewood or grasses, whose scientific names are given) and the artefacts they make (e.g. ropes made with the fibre of certain plants, whose scientific names are also listed). If they are not much better off economically than the Indians in the two other categories, it is because suelto men end up wasting all the cash they earn. The last section is dedicated to indigenous religiosity. Rivet starts with the assertion that, in their religious practices as in their linguistic behaviour, the Indians, although a vanquished race, have successfully resisted the victors (1903: 74). The sketchy mention of religious beliefs, superstitions, funerary rituals, the cult of the dead and life-cycle rituals that follows is aimed at supporting the general argument that, despite missionisation and colonisation, the Indians are essentially pagans who still believe in mountain spirits, assimilate the figure of Christ to the hacienda landlord and let the priests exploit and oppress them shamelessly (ibid.: 74–75). Unsurprisingly, it is in the treatment of religious beliefs, where the native point of view and the indigenous symbolic meanings must form the central focus of the inquiry, that Rivet’s lack of ethnographic empathy is most disturbingly evident. The problem is not so much that Rivet did not talk directly with Indian informants about their religious ideas and practices (he had no means of establishing the necessary relations of trust without total immersion) but rather that he is incapable of imagining that the Indians of the Riobamba valley may have their own reasons to believe what they believe in, or to act the way they act. To him, they are simply superstitious, ignorant people living in a backward and profoundly racist country. With his naïve and simplistic conclusion that religion is a powerful ideology used to keep the Indian masses in servility, Rivet fully reveals himself as the Third Republic thinker he is, totally imbued with the superiority of his scientific aspirations to rationality, progress and enlightenment. Scientific knowledge is a weapon against not only religious mystification and ignorance but also poverty and inequality. The destitution and social immobility in which the Indians live, he concludes, should in no way be attributed to racial inferiority, for they result from three centuries of harsh treatment and enslavement (ibid.: 78). Rivet’s primary interest in the human condition, wherever he happened to find it, comes across vividly in this first study, perhaps even

Laura Rival

136

more so in the absence of an interest in cultural difference. Rivet may have lacked cultural empathy, but certainly not social empathy. He did not choose to research a complex and depressing situation, but simply tried to analyse it as a witness, without exoticising the very poor Indians he knew.15 This first study also shows Rivet’s unusual interest in the complex history of mixed-race and acculturated populations, or what today would be called in France les métissages culturels, or the ‘mestizo mind’ (Gruzinski 2002, Castelain et al. 2006). The Jibaro Indians (1907–8) Rivet organised expeditions apart from those of the geodesic mission and travelled to the eastern and western slopes of the Andes, where he met and studied independent and isolated Indian populations such as the Tsachilas (Rivet 1905). Like any other traveller, he became fascinated with the famous ‘Jibaros’ and planned to spend at least nine months in their territory, a project he ultimately could not carry out (Laurière 2006: 192). He nevertheless wrote a substantial essay on Jibaro culture, mainly based on secondary sources, and on the few direct observations he had made himself while measuring and interviewing travelling Jibaros. The study, which compiles approximately thirty references in various languages and includes a number of personal observations, as well as answers to questionnaires Rivet sent to missionaries and traders, is justified on the ground that, even though the Jibaros are universally known among travellers as a ‘fiercely independent, pure and original Indian race’, no ethnographic synthesis of their culture exists as yet (Rivet 1907: 338, 349). After a brief exposition of the facts justifying the treatment of Jibaro culture as a separate, distinct and homogeneous biocultural unit, Rivet presents the highly detailed data he compiled in nine different sections: historical background, geographical distribution, census data, physical anthropology, material culture, family life, social life, religious life and psychic life. Material life is subdivided into the house, agriculture and husbandry, food, weapons, musical instruments, daily life, and hunting and fishing; family life into gender relations, children’s education, marriage, birth and death; social life into social organisation, commerce and warfare; religious life into traditions, divinities, witchcraft, afterlife, totemic beliefs, celebrations, superstitions and medicinal recipes; and finally, psychic life into general knowledge, counting, arts, moral life, cultural personality and reflections on the race’s future. The historical section is based almost entirely on Federico Gónzalez Suárez’s Historia General de la República del Ecuador.16 In Rivet’s characteristic ethnographic style, direct observations are complemented

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

137

with descriptions of collected materials and annotated summaries of secondary sources. Archaeological data are used to complement or illustrate historical works, and direct field observations juxtaposed with responses to questionnaires sent to ‘intermediary informants’. Often, questionnaires are used to expand the ethnographic inventory by covering facts on which no direct observation was possible, instead of being used to offer a complementary perspective on the same object of analysis. This leads to a problematic division of labour between direct and mediated observation: whereas the ethnographer (Rivet) specialises in the direct observation and collection of concrete material items, the intermediary informant, being deemed more intimately familiar with the Indian, is asked to contribute the sociological, intellectual, moral and symbolic data. The stereotypical generalisations offered in the sections on the family, social institutions, religious beliefs and Jibaro personality are drawn from what people who ‘know’ the Jibaros told Rivet. Except for a few corrective comments, where Rivet uses his direct knowledge to correct stereotypes that he finds erroneous or exaggerated (1907: 608– 9), there is no questioning of the sources. Moreover, and perhaps more disturbingly, wonderful ethnographic facts are noted in the course of descriptions of material culture or daily life – and just left at that. These facts, so fascinating for the modern ethnographer, are never commented upon or analysed. There is absolutely no attempt on Rivet’s part to raise a question or to call upon the native point of view; ethnographic facts do not awaken his imagination. For instance, he states in passing (ibid.: 601) that Jibaro men put their left fist in their mouths each time they tell myths or tribal war stories. A beautiful, very graphic drawing by one of his colleagues from the geodesic mission even illustrates the scene (ibid.: 600). The same indifference greets other facts, such as the magical practices surrounding the sale of a gun to a white trader (ibid.: 602) or the high rate of female suicide among the Aguaruna (1908: 239). In contrast with his manifest disinterest in cultural aspects that cannot be catalogued, Rivet is unstoppable when it comes to giving the scientific names of the plants used, describing artefacts or praising techniques, technologies, bodies of practical knowledge and other types of indigenous material achievement.17 The same goes for his expert appreciation of the Jibaro’s diet, physical beauty, strong constitution, economic self-sufficiency and preventive measures against smallpox epidemics. He has, of course, no time or sympathy for remedies grounded in superstition or beliefs in witchcraft. Zerilli (1991–93: 390) sees in this essay the richest and most ethnographic of all Rivet’s works. Laurière does not share this point of

Laura Rival

138

view (2006: 193), nor do I. What this essay illustrates so well, however, is the ways in which the ‘natural scientist-cum-anthropologist’ (Stocking 1992b: 20) used ‘indirect informants’ in the collection of ethnographic data (Rochereau 1958, Pineda Camacho 1996). While still employed by the geodesic mission, Rivet had no choice but to rely on the information he could obtain from priests, military officers, local scholars or traders. What started as a practical way of gathering data on places and people he was curious about but could not visit himself became a way of working, even a methodology. Like his predecessors (cf. Dias 1991: 82–83), Rivet thought that good ethnography did not depend on field professionals, and that good questionnaires filled in by knowledgeable correspondents were sufficient. Observation and classification could remain two separate activities as long as the anthropologist had a vast network of secondary informants with whom he could correspond regularly. Rivet’s pragmatic methodological approach was particularly successful for researching Amerindian languages. He not only amassed great quantities of linguistic data (mainly vocabulary lists) but also co-authored scores of publications with indirect informants and co-researchers formally trained in linguistics. As we know today, what works for the collection of material items and factual information may be totally inappropriate for both ‘the sociological study of systems of action’ (Leach 1957: 119) and the reconstruction of psychic life ‘fixed in language, art, myth and religion’ (Stocking 1992b: 37). However, Rivet was not studying indigenous social classifications: his task, as he saw it, was to survey the field by gathering basic ethnographic descriptions that could be mapped onto the South American continent and methodically classified. That Rivet remained uninterested in the general structure of society and the native point of view until the end of his life explains why his 1941–1942 field research in Colombia was similar in almost every respect to the fieldwork he had carried in Ecuador at the beginning of his anthropological career. Accompanied by his Colombian students, he sailed through various remote regions to collect anthropometric measurements, blood samples, archaeological artefacts, numerous items of material culture and vocabulary lists (Pineda Camacho 1996, Laurière 2006: 817–18). Here too, fieldwork was aimed at constituting the material archives of disappearing cultures. Origins and migrations of the ‘American Man’ Rivet’s early publications, authored in his capacity as a ‘medical doctor attached to the French geodesic mission’, well illustrate both his anthropological interests and his methodological approach. They touch on many burgeoning domains (from studies of prehistoric skeletal remains, to studies of diseases, indigenous languages, religious beliefs,

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

139

artefact use and economic activities, and physical features or biomedical conditions), and combine field data reports or syntheses of previously published work (often in Spanish) with comparative analyses. Of the nineteen articles written between 1901 and 1908 (as listed by León 1958), eleven deal with contemporary groups and customs, three concern pre-Columbian cultures and five involve general comparative discussions. These early publications give a good indication of how Rivet decided, under Mons. Gónzalez Suárez’s influence, to stop surveying the natural environment and start studying the origins of South America’s aboriginal populations, as well as the trajectory of preColumbian civilisations, which involved researching the continent’s archaeology, physical anthropology and folklore. As Uribe (1996: 52) remarks, Rivet thus shifted his interests from natural history to human culture, but without changing his basic methodology: collecting, classifying and comparing. His foremost interest in origins and migrations is clearly stated in the 1906 programmatic report (Rivet 1906: 236), which starts with several pages dedicated to the geography and history of the Andean region, where the geodesic mission had taken the majority of its measurements. In fact, twice as much space is dedicated to history as to geography, while just a few pages towards the end provide some ethnographic information. Why so much importance given to history? Because, replies Rivet (ibid.: 232), the traveller can easily reconstruct, beneath the cultural manifestations of Inca civilisation, the traces of anterior and original local civilisations, as the bewildering diversity of ancient burial arrangements existing in the Ecuadorian Andes testifies. Spanish empire-building, exactly like Inca empire-building, took place in the inter-Andean valley, where, as a result, the population is racially mixed, in contrast with the lowlands, where ‘racial purity is almost absolute’ (ibid.: 233, my translation). The ethnological problem, concludes Rivet, is therefore far more complex (and more interesting) on the high plateaus. The ethnological research summarised in the rest of the article consists in numerous archaeological excavations and anthropometric measurements – more than two hundred subjects of both sexes and all ages. These two different modes of direct empirical data collection – one aimed at reconstructing the past of human and cultural diversity, the other at understanding the nature of contemporary diversity – are complemented by two types of secondary sources: the published work of historians, and interviews with outsiders in daily contact with the Indians, essentially priests, military officers and traders. The ‘American Man’ was, from the beginning, Rivet’s most systematic ethnological concern. He asks in the 1906 report the questions he will answer in Les

140

Laura Rival

origines de l’homme américain: What can today’s diversity of physical appearance, language and material culture tell us about the origins of indigenous cultures? Where did the American Indians come from originally? Although he cannot address these questions fully as yet, he tries to account for what he is already calling métissage. For him, hostility between the two races (conquerors and vanquished) explains why Andean Indians have not lost their identity, despite centuries of Hispanic influence. The ‘races’ have mixed biologically, but not culturally. Civilised by the Incas and still speaking their Quechua language, the mixed-blood Indians continue to resist hispanisation stubbornly (1906: 233). The continuities in Rivet’s intellectual development are noteworthy. Even earlier, in the journal he kept during the transatlantic cruise from France to Ecuador (Zerilli 1991–93), Rivet revealed his curiosity about the mechanics of intercultural communication. The facts he observed, described and meticulously recorded during stopovers in the Caribbean illustrate his profound interest in biological and cultural hybridity, as well as their social and political consequences. In Martinique, for example, he reflected on the condition of Christianised blacks, who have remained fetishist at heart (‘les nègres catholiques restés fétichistes’). And until the end of his life, for instance in the teaching he delivered in Colombia (a country even more racist and conservative than Ecuador) on the remarkable civilisational achievements of indigenous cultures, he continued to develop with passion and eloquence the themes of universal humanism and racial equality (Dussán de Reichel 1984), two ideals he saw as inseparable from an anthropological reflection on métissage. That Rivet was a diffusionist is clearly revealed by his fascination for origins, his interest in historical migrations, miscegenation and linguistic diversity, and his (over-) use of historico-comparative methodology. Whereas most diffusionists, especially those associated with the Vienna School of ethnology (Haekel 1956), emphasised a people’s historicity with reference to their spatial distribution and the spatial and temporal diffusion of their material culture, Rivet chose to classify people in terms of linguistic distribution, which he saw as scientifically more accurate and more rigorous. His analysis of South American languages was modelled on the philological work produced by the linguists who had reconstructed the Indo-European family. Boas, who had adopted the same model at the start of his research on North American languages, soon departed from it, as Stocking explains: ‘By 1920 [Boas’] position ... had changed drastically, and he was inclined to believe that diffusion of morphological traits could modify the fundamental structural characteristics of a language’ (Stocking 1992a: 86).

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

141

The legacies of Paul Rivet’s vision for anthropology As I have tried to show in the previous section, Rivet was not simply a ‘frenetic empiricist’, as Claude Lévi-Strauss called ethnologists from previous generations to highlight the unique nature of his own conception of fieldwork as a revelatory experience of ‘radical displacement’ (Johnson 2003: 9, 169). Nor was his way of doing fieldwork simply the result of circumstantial constraints or lack of maturity, as his last spell of fieldwork in Colombia amply demonstrates. Rivet was bent on collecting a certain kind of empirical data in the field, as a result of both his training and his own understanding of anthropology. A careful reading of Dias (1991) amply supports a view of Rivet’s work as being entirely in line with previous attempts in France: firstly, to define anthropology as broadly as possible; secondly, to oppose racist rankings of human cultures by showing that languages are better guides to the study of lasting cultural differences than physical traits are; thirdly, to have museum collections accepted as major research tools and to treat material culture as the embodiment of a people’s cultural creativity and technological achievements; and fourthly, to demonstrate through a range of scholarly studies that great civilisations had developed in the New World, a continent of which so little was known. Like Boas, Rivet fully embraced physical anthropology and mastered anthropometric measurement techniques, only to use them against the analyses and conclusions reached by phrenologists bent on proving the genetic existence of separate human races and their hierarchical ordering (cf. Pineda Camacho 1996: 65). The relationship between Rivet’s Ecuadorian field experience and his thesis that persisting differences between human groups are cultural and linguistic rather than biological, and therefore that ‘race’ is a vacuous concept, has been examined by both Zerilli (1991–93, 1998) and Laurière (2006). The two authors may give too much importance to the construction of scientific discourse and not enough to Rivet’s own life experience. A medical doctor with a passion for bettering human health through a greater knowledge of anatomy, biology and epidemiology, a keen observer of all things natural and human, and a firm believer in a universal, enlightened civilisation, Rivet soon connected facts collected in the field or learnt in libraries in a novel way, which led him to oppose firmly the notion of racial inferiority and propose instead the theory of métissage. What struck Rivet upon arriving in Ecuador was the bewildering phenotypic diversity found in the country, both within and between ethnic groups. The co-occurrence of intra-ethnic phenotypic diversity and inter-ethnic linguistic diversity fascinated him. After four centuries

142

Laura Rival

of Quechua and Spanish imposition, and despite the intermingling of races, Ecuador had remained an ethnic and linguistic mosaic. Human languages and human biology, he concluded, do not change at the same rate, nor in the same direction. Whereas human bodies are prone to mixing, linguistic differences persist over time. Moreover, the intermingling of races, far from being a cause of generation, as so many of his contemporaries believed, was a source of biological vitality and cultural progress. European and American societies were both racially mixed. The purpose of physical and biological anthropology, including anthropometric measurements and the study of blood groups, was therefore to measure the historical process of métissage (Pineda Camacho 1996: 65). Finally, it is by sharing the lives of Ecuadorian indigenous peoples that Rivet could fully measure the gap existing between their intelligence and cultural creativity, and the racist stereotypes held by Latin American elites and authorities of the ‘savages’. The fact that all human societies contributed equally to the general development of humankind could be demonstrated through the study of indigenous material culture and technology, for instance pre-Columbian metallurgy and gold smelting. It is in Ecuador, a country of entrenched paternalism and deep racial prejudice, that Rivet learnt to feel the human dimension of his indigenous informants, to lift the barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ once and for all, and to reach a profoundly anti-racist and antiethnocentric vision of humanity (Dussán de Reichel 1984: 71). Although Rivet’s linguistic studies were made to serve his diffusionist thesis, they nevertheless contributed to a better knowledge of South American languages. Not only did he pioneer a vast new field of research, he also helped improve the classification of the numerous languages in this region (Pineda Camacho 1996: 59), even if, in the urgency of data collection and comparison, his attempt to reduce the number of isolates led to incorrect affiliations (Campbell 1997: 80–81). Sometimes he rushed to conclusions too quickly and his methodology was not sufficiently rigorous, but many of his bold and brilliant intuitions were confirmed by later research, and some of his hypotheses are still guiding current research (Landaburu 1996). A number of Andean specialists still consider his Bibliographie des langues aymará et kicua (1951–54) an important work of reference.18 More controversial was his application to South American languages of genetic approaches specifically developed by philologists to reconstruct Indo-European languages. Boas, who tended to explain language similarities in diffusional rather than genetic terms (Stocking 1992a: 74, 86), was critical of Rivet’s linguistic studies, particularly his 1924 Langues américaines.19 Rivet’s diffusionist search for correlations between the movements of material objects and languages led him to put forward a range of

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

143

hypotheses, some more insightful or audacious than others, but all hotly debated among Americanists. For example, his proposition that the cultural influence of Amazonian civilisations on Andean societies could be demonstrated on both archaeological and linguistic grounds literally enthused Nordenskiöld in 1913. Rivet’s main thesis, first formulated in 1924 and perfected in 1943, that the American continent had received not only Asian migrants entering through the Bering Straits but also Malayo-Polynesian and Australian migrants arriving by sea at different times during pre-Columbian history was received with more circumspection, especially in Anglo-Saxon circles (Pineda Camacho 1996: 62).20 However, the 1943 publication of Les origines de l’homme américain in Spanish, which came out just a few months after the French Canadian edition, was received with great enthusiasm in Latin America. Based on the biological hybridisation hypothesis and the sociological law of substitution,21 Rivet’s métissage theory helped Creole intellectuals valorise their mestizo heritage. Thanks to Rivet, they could now form a positive image of their multi-stranded national identities, rooted in a long history of mixed ethnic origins and cultural achievements, and see these as contributing to the universal cultural heritage of humankind (Rival ms). It is worth noting that Claude Lévi-Strauss immediately wrote a very favourable review of Les origines de l’homme américain for Renaissance22 in which he lauds Rivet’s erudition, lucidity and ‘positively audacious will to speculate’, as well as his critical stand against ‘timorousness and orthodoxy’. Pineda Camacho (1996: 60) remarks that Rivet’s thesis on the multi-ethnic peopling of the American continent, far from being an eccentric flight of fancy, was a logical diffusionist hypothesis that had first been formulated by the Vienna school. Interestingly, various authors (for instance, Bellwood 2005, Hornborg 2005) are currently working on grand syntheses of the kind proposed by Rivet and putting forward new hypotheses about cultural identity and migratory movements, which Rivet would doubtlessly recognise as akin to his own theoretical efforts. The legacies of Rivet’s work are diffuse and varied. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the most fascinating and striking fact is that, whereas Rivet is treated as an anthropological ancestor in Colombia and remembered with much respect, admiration and gratitude in various other Latin American countries, he has been almost entirely erased from the collective memory of the French anthropological community today, despite the fact that he was French anthropology’s chief guiding spirit for more than three decades. Whether trained in Paris, Ecuador or Colombia, Rivet’s former Latin American students have left a wealth of testimonies, which speak in surprisingly similar terms about his teaching style, theories and vision

144

Laura Rival

of anthropology.23 Although more research is needed on this point, what these testimonies seem to suggest is that Rivet’s anthropology, as he taught and expounded it in his academic writing and as it informed his politics, resonated profoundly with the ideals and values of Latin American Creole intellectuals of the time. And if there is such a match between their mestizo consciousness and Rivet’s anthropology, it is not simply because they broadly shared the same political culture but also, and more importantly, because Rivet’s anthropology was in many ways their anthropology as well (Rival ms). Rivet’s humanism resonated with the humanism of the friends he made in the field. With them, he debated not only the history of Ecuador but also the concepts of progress, welfare and commonwealth, the good society, the human condition, and many other issues that engaged anthropology publicly as a new form of humanism. Rivet could take part in a fruitful two-way anthropological dialogue with his ‘secondary informants’ and friends, for there was no obvious colonial impediment to such conversations. Progressive Creoles and mestizos were as interested as he was in what humans have in common, their common needs or common psychic unity, independently of their social condition or geographical location. For them as for him, the aim of anthropology was to teach the history of mankind, that is the ways in which humans had moved around the world, exchanged ideas and goods, learnt from each other and intermarried to create better societies. In this sense, Rivet’s humanism also represented a Latin American aspiration to humanism.24 Rivet’s objective studies of the material aspects of human life demonstrated to his Latin American audience that their heritage contributed directly to humankind’s global heritage. Put differently, Rivet’s humanism and that of his progressive Latin American intellectual friends were inseparable from a ‘civilisation politics’, a politics deeply rooted in modernist humanistic values, which led him (like Boas) to embark on an empirical and moral critique of racism. Rivet, whose broad vision of anthropology gave equal importance to material culture (contemporary and past), linguistics and what we would today call physical and biological anthropology,25 would have agreed with Lévi-Strauss’s definition of ethnology as ‘neither a separate science, nor a new one. It is the most ancient, most general form of what we designate by the name of humanism’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978: 272). As Johnson (2003) reminds us,26 structural anthropology was born from Lévi-Strauss’ epistemological battle to define the nature and scope of anthropology and its relationship to other academic sciences. However, as they both ignore the debates that shook French anthropology before Lévi-Strauss’s ascent, they cannot appreciate the fact that the latter’s battle had been preceded by Rivet’s battle, nor that

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

145

both men’s battles were directly linked to their respective claims that anthropology was a new kind of humanism, as the change of name from anthropology to ethnology and back to anthropology (although structural this time) amply reveals (see endnotes 8, 13). It is not difficult to find lines of continuity between the two French scholars, both Americanists and admirers of Boas, both equally extolling the value of linguistic studies and the importance of artefacts, and both equally concerned with the relationship between history and the production of cultural difference. Whereas one provided French anthropology with the institutional framework it needed to start existing as an independent, nationally and internationally recognised field of investigation, the other gave it the coherent and rigorous theoretical framework it lacked. Much more, of course, will need to be said on the matter. In a way, structural anthropology would not have existed without Rivet’s ethnology, for Rivet asked the questions that Lévi-Strauss tried to answer: Where do the natural sciences end and the cultural sciences begin? How best to unify natural and cultural determinisms methodologically? To what extent can the methodological approaches used in the natural sciences be applied to the social sciences, and vice versa? What do we all share as members of the same human species, and what makes us culturally different? It is also not difficult to see what impelled Lévi-Strauss to create a distance between his ‘field philosophy’ and Rivet’s twin concern with the natural history of humankind and the history of societies. As we saw earlier, Rivet’s fieldwork was emphatically not sociological: he preferred to classify, order and organise, rather than take stock of native significances. The most important task for (structural) anthropology, as Lévi-Strauss envisaged it, was to make historians, philosophers and the public at large accept that there is more than one way of conceiving humanity and its relationship to the world. As Dias (1991: 242) puts it, anthropology has always been a ‘domain of research torn apart’ (‘un domaine de recherche écartelé’). And as anthropology finds itself yet again at a crossroads, unsure of its epistemology, its field research methodology, its intellectual mission or the kind of humanism it should be defending (Piña Cabral 2005, 2006; Bloch 2005), there is much to be learnt, as I hope to have shown in this essay, from Paul Rivet’s humanist positionings and visions for the common ground.

Laura Rival

146

Notes 1. This reconstruction of Rivet’s life owes much to Christine Laurière’s fine intellectual biography (Laurière 2006), which I read after having completed my own research. I would also like to thank all the French and Ecuadorian colleagues who shared with me their memories of Rivet’s life and their knowledge of his work. 2. See León (1958: 312–14) for an exhaustive list of scientific names incorporating the word ‘riveti’. Rivet’s first collections included parasites dangerous to humans and domesticated animals, and insects involved in propagating a range of diseases and plagues (ibid.: 309). These collections allowed him to produce the first entomological studies ever realised in Ecuador (Aráuz 1958: 75–76). 3. ‘Recherches sur le prognathisme’, published in L’Anthropologie 21 (Rivet 1909). 4. The term ‘ancient ethnography’, coined by Rivet, was only used by himself and a few associates (Laurière 2006: 146, 155). 5. He was never to publish, for example, his study of the remarkable collection of 800 pre-Columbian ceramics he had brought back from Ecuador. This collection, currently stored in the Musée du Quai Branly, has never been studied or exhibited. However, Rivet continued to write about pre-Columbian gold smelting after the war. 6. Rivet received an impressive number of military decorations for his services to the nation during the First World War (Araúz 1958: 31–32), and almost left academia after it (Laurière 2006: 454–79). 7. From 1909 to 1941, Rivet wrote in French to Boas, and Boas replied in English. The letters cover a wide range of topics, from linguistics, politics, the development of international Americanism, anthropology and racism, the rise of fascism in Germany, nationalism and internationalism, fund-raising for publishing, and more. In a fascinating exchange of letters written during 1919, we learn that Rivet invited Boas to contribute an article to the Journal de la Société des Américanistes. Boas replied that he would, but in German. Rivet wrote back saying that he could not accept an article in German under present circumstances, as every one knew that Boas spoke and wrote fluently in both English and Spanish. It would just be too provocative, and stir up hatred among those whose motion he had just defeated. See archived letters in the Musée de l’Homme: 14/08/1919 [FB to PR]; 04/09/1919 [PR to FB]; 09/10/1919 [FB to PR]. 8. See Dias (1991) and Laurière (2006) for a discussion of the changing meanings of ‘anthropology’, ‘ethnology’, and ‘ethnography’ in France in the pre-Lévi-Straussian era. Johnson (2003: 12), who does not seem to be aware of this most central debate in the history of French anthropology, attributes Lévi-Strauss’s reworking of the three modes into three different stages of anthropological enquiry to the latter’s effort to reposition anthropology in relation to other human sciences, in particular history and philosophy. 9. The series Travaux et mémoires de l’institut d’ethnologie (Laurière 1999: 114) was founded the following year, in 1926. See Dias (1991: 71–72) for an outline of what was taught by Mauss and others at the turn of the century. Very little is known about the professional relationships or intellectual affinities between Rivet, Mauss and LévyBruhl, or about the discussions they must have had while designing the first teaching programme. Laurière (2006: 496–97) found letters of students comparing the esoteric, hard-to-follow teaching of Mauss with the limpid, structured quality of Rivet’s lectures. There are no records of Lévy-Bruhl’s teaching. 10. On 3 December 1928, Rivet wrote to Boas (on official MNHN headed paper): ‘I feel emasculated by the reorganisation of the lab at the MNHN and that of the Trocadero. Add to this the directorship of the Institute of Ethnology and that of the Journal of

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

147

the Americanist Society of Paris, and you’ll understand why my days fill so quickly’ (my translation). 11. This arrangement was to last until the great university reforms of 1968. The Musée de l’Homme, successor to the Trocadéro, became a research unit (‘laboratory’) of the MNHN, which continued to have two anthropology chairs, one in prehistory and one in ethnology, the latter being held by the director of the Musée (Michel Izard, personal communication, December 2004). 12. I found a letter from Rivet to Boas sent on official Société des Américanistes-headed paper dated 23 February 1924, which might be the first mention of a joint FrancoNorth American encyclopaedia project. After congratulating Boas on the Handbook of American Indian Languages, which he judges ‘absolutely essential reading’, and expressing the hope that the Smithsonian Institution will fund the publication, despite current economic difficulties, Rivet adds: ‘I would also like to take advantage of the next Americanist congress to ask the Smithsonian delegates whether they would consider favourably the proposal to produce a handbook of Central and South American Indians, very much in the same style as that produced by Hodge for North America. I am convinced that many European scholars (Nordenskiöld, KochGrünberg, Lehmann, Preuss, Krickeberg, Karsten, myself) would readily and happily collaborate. We could also ask a few South American colleagues to contribute. What do you think?’ (my translation). 13. Renamed the National Institute of Anthropology after Rivet’s death. 14. Rivet wrote his early publications in his capacity as ‘a medical doctor attached to the French geodesic mission’. 15. Laurière (2006: 101) quotes an unpublished document in which Rivet powerfully summarises his view: ‘rags are not picturesque’ (‘le haillon n’est pas pittoresque’). Pineda Camacho (1996: 61) mentions letters Rivet wrote to the Colombian government, urging officials to act against the dire poverty in which the country’s indigenous population was living, a remedy without which no truly national integration or democracy could develop. Analytical tensions between ‘culture’ and ‘poverty’ still pervade much contemporary work on Amerindians (see, for instance, Hall and Patrinos 2006, Kalt et al. 2008). 16. Rivet’s medical profession opened many doors to him (Zerilli 1991–93: 358), in particular that of Mons. Gónzalez Suárez, Archbishop of Ibarra, a colonial city north of Quito. This scholar-priest, who had a remarkable knowledge of Ecuador’s history and prehistory, became Rivet’s friend (Aráuz 1958: 77–78) and informal teacher, advising him on practically all his wide-ranging interests: linguistics, physical anthropology and pre-Columbian material culture. Rivet publicly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Gónzalez Suárez (ibid.: 15–17), including an article for the Journal de la Société des Américanistes in 1919. I doubt that Rivet would have agreed with León’s assertion (1958: 316) that he (Rivet) was the founder of anthropology in Ecuador. He would have demanded that the title be shared with Mons. Gónzalez Suárez and with another of his Ecuadorian friends, the historian Jacinto Jijón Caamaño. 17. For example, he enthusiastically describes fire-making and other techniques to light houses at night (1907: 588–89), giving the impression that, in addition to having witnessed these techniques, he tried them out himself. 18. This, inter alia, is the opinion of Olivia Harris and of Carmen Bernand (personal communications, July 2005, December 2006), the latter adding: ‘his four volumes on the Quechua language are remarkable. No one has done better since’ (my translation). 19. Rivet was much more admiring of Boas, whom he treated as a master (Rivet 1958), than Boas was of Rivet, whose work Boas hardly referred to.

Laura Rival

148

20. In a hand-written letter sent by Rivet to Boas from the MNHN anthropology lab on 13 February 1925, Rivet expresses his regret that Boas had not accepted his conclusions regarding the genetic links between Malayo-Polynesian, Australian and Amerindian languages: ‘Of all those who saw the evidence I have marshalled to support my thesis, you are the only one who is raising doubts […] I still hope to convince you in the near future with the publication of more detailed studies, especially on the Yuma group’ (my translation). Although Rivet (1932) was invited to give the Frazer Lecture in Oxford in 1930 on Les Océaniens, no one in Britain was convinced by his demonstration that the Australian Aborigines, Tasmanians, Melanesians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians, Munda and Khmer formed a single ethnic complex sharing a common linguistic stock. 21. Cultures do not merge into or mix with each other, but one replaces, that is takes over, the other. See Jamin (1989: 288). 22. Reproduced in its entirety in Laurière (1999: 127). 23. See, for instance, Araúz (1958: 39), Pineda Camacho (1985: 11–12), Larrea (in Araúz 1958), Dussán de Reichel (1984), Duque Gómez (1958), Valera (in Araúz 1958), Santiana (in Araúz 1958) and Chevasse (in Araúz 1958). Carmen Bernand (December 2006), another Latin American citizen and anthropologist, mentions that: ‘It is while reading The origins of the American man as a young student in Buenos Aires that I decided to become an anthropologist’ (my translation). 24. Wilder (2005), of course, was to look at Rivet’s project in terms of his defence of ‘tempered colonialism’ in Africa and other regions of the Third World. 25. In a letter he sent to Boas on 14 February 1936, he said that he was preparing a volume on ethnology for a French encyclopaedia, adding: ‘that is, all the sciences of mankind, anthropology, ethnography, sociology and linguistics’ (my translation). 26. Perhaps as a result of being under the spell of the received wisdom that there is ‘a before and an after Claude Lévi-Strauss’, as Michel Izard told me in an interview, thus stressing the epistemological break, or radical discontinuity, initiated by structuralism. Bertholet (2003), like Johnson, and almost certainly for similar reasons, presents an ahistorical version of history in which Lévi-Strauss appears as a total outsider to French anthropology, someone who learnt the trade in the USA. For Bertholet, LéviStrauss – who was first recognised professionally not in France but in the USA – is a true heir to Boas. More anecdotal, yet revealing, is Bertholet’s (2003: 148–50, 173) narration of the famous New York dinner during which Boas died. Told in a way that stresses the direct lineage between Lévi-Strauss and Boas, the story hardly mentions Rivet at all. Having similarly heard many French colleagues tell me, overwhelmed by the symbolic power of the image, that Boas died in Lévi-Strauss’ arms, I did not pay attention to Bertholet’s version until I re-read De près et de loin, where Lévi-Strauss (1988: 57–58) clearly states that the dinner had been organised in Paul Rivet’s honour and that, when Boas felt unwell, he was attended by Rivet, who, after all, was a medical doctor. The power of myth is indeed … overpowering.

References Allen, N.J. 2000. Categories and classifications: Maussian reflections on the social, Oxford: Berghahn. Aráuz, J. (ed.). 1958. Homenaje a Paul Rivet, Special issue of the Boletin de las Secciones Científicas de la Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 10 (86). Bellwood, P. 2005. First farmers: the origins of agricultural societies, Oxford: Blackwell. Bertholet, D. 2003. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Plon.

What sort of anthropologist was Paul Rivet?

149

Bloch, M. 2005. Essays on cultural transmission, Oxford: Berg. Campbell, L. 1997. American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castelain, J.-P., S. Gruzinski and C. Salazar-Soler (eds). 2006. De l’ethnographie à l’histoire. Paris-Madrid-Buenos Aires: Les mondes de Carmen Bernand, Paris: L’Harmattan. Chevasse, P. 1958. Las grandes realizaciones francesas: Paul Rivet y el museo del hombre, in J. Araúz (ed.), Homenaje a Paul Rivet, Special issue of the Boletin de las Secciones Científicas de la Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 10(86): 105–8. d’Harcourt, R. 1958. Paul Rivet, 1876–1958, Journal de la société des américanistes, 47: 1–20. de Friedemann, N.S. 1984. Etica y politica del antropologo: compromiso professional, in J. Arocho and N.S. de Friedemann (eds), Un siglo de investigación social antropologica en Colombia, Bogota: Etno. Dias, N. 1991. Le musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878–1908): Anthropologie et muséologie en France, Paris: Editions du CNRS. Dussán de Reichel, A. 1984. Paul Rivet y su epoca, Correo de los Andes (Bogota, MayoJunio), 26: 70–76. Gónzalez Suárez, F. 1969 [1890–1903]. Historia General de la República del Ecuador, Quito: Edit. Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana. Gruzinski, S. 2002. The mestizo mind: the intellectual dynamics of colonization and globalization (tr. D. Dusinberre), New York and London: Routledge. Haekel, J. (ed.). 1956. Die Wiener Schule der Völkerkunde, Vienna: F. Berger. Hall, G. and H.A. Patrinos (eds). 2006. Indigenous peoples, poverty and human development in Latin America, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave (Macmillan). Hornborg, A. 2005. Ethnogenesis, regional integration, and ecology in prehistoric Amazonia: toward a system perspective, Current Anthropology, 46(4): 589–620. Jamin, J. 1989. Le savant et le politique: Paul Rivet (1876–1958), in C. Blanckaert, A. Ducros and J.-J. Hublin (eds), Histoire de l’anthropologie: hommes, idées, moments, Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1(3–4): 277–94. Johnson, C. 2003. Claude Lévi-Strauss: the formative years, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kalt, J.P. (and other members of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development) 2008. The state of the native nations: conditions under US policies of selfdetermination, New York: Oxford University Press. Kerns, V. 2003. Scenes from the high desert: Julian Steward’s life and theory, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Landaburu, J. (ed.). 1996. Documentos sobre lenguas aborígenes de Colombia del archivo de Paul Rivet, Volumes I and II, Santa Fe de Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes. Laurière, C. 1999. Paul Rivet, vie et oeuvre, Gradhiva, 26: 109–28. ——— 2006. Paul Rivet (1876–1958): le savant et le politique, unpublished doctoral thesis, Paris, EHESS. Leach, E. 1957. The epistemological background to Malinowski’s empiricism, in R. Firth (ed.), Man and culture: an evaluation of the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. León, L. 1958. Contribución del doctor Paul Rivet al conocimiento científico de la república del Ecuador, Miscellana: Acts of the 31st International Congress of Americanists, Vol. 1, Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 305–21. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1978. Structural anthropology II, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— 1988. De près et de loin: entretiens avec Didier Eribon, Paris: Odile Jacob. Lottman, H. 1982. The left bank: writers in Paris from Popular Front to Cold War, Heinemann: London. Piña-Cabral, J. 2005. The future of social anthropology, Social Anthropology, 13(2): 119–28.

150

Laura Rival

——— 2006. ‘Anthropology’ challenged: notes for a debate, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12(3): 663–73. Pineda Camacho, R. 1985. Paul Rivet y el Americanismo, Texto y Contexto (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá), 5: 7–19. ——— 1996. Paul Rivet: un legado que aún nos interpela, in J. Landaburu (ed.), Documentos sobre lenguas aborígenes de Colombia del archivo de Paul Rivet, Santa Fe de Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, vol. 2: 53–74. Rival, L., ms. Land and people in the Ecuadorian Chocó: three political visions. Rivet, P. 1903. Etude sur les Indiens de la région de Riobamba, Journal de la Société des Américanistes (n.s.), 1: 58–80. ——— 1905. Les Indiens Colorado: récit de voyage et étude ethnologique, Journal de la Société des Américanistes (n.s.), 2(2): 177–208. ——— 1906. Cinq ans d’études anthropologiques dans la république de l‘Equateur: résumé préliminaire, Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 3: 229–37. ——— 1907. Les indiens Jibaros: étude géographique, historique et ethnographique, L’Anthropologie, 18: 333–68 (1st part), and 583–618 (2nd part). ——— 1908. Les indiens Jibaros: étude géographique, historique et ethnographique, L’Anthropologie, 19: 235–59 (3rd part). ——— 1909. ‘Recherches sur le prognathisme’, L’Anthropologie, 21: 505–18, 637–69. ——— 1912. L’Ethnographie ancienne de l’Equateur: Mission du service géographique de l’armée en Amérique du Sud, Paris: Gauthier-Villars. ——— 1924. Langues américaines, in A. Meillet and M. Cohen (eds), Les langues du monde, Paris: Edouard Champion, pp. 597–712. ——— 1932. Les Océaniens, in W. Dawson (ed.), The Frazer Lectures (1922–1932), London: Macmillan. ——— 1943. Les origines de l’homme américain, Montréal: Les Editions de l’Arbre. ——— 1951–54. Bibliographie des langues aymará et kicua, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie. ——— 1958. Tribute to Franz Boas, International Journal of American Linguistics, 24(4): 251–52. Rochereau, H.J. 1958. El professor Rivet y sus corresponsales, in L. Duque Gómez (ed.), Homenaje al Profesor Paul Rivet, Bogotá: Editorial ABC, 2–7. Stocking, G. 1987. Victorian anthropology, New York: Macmillan Press. ——— 1992a. The Boas plan for the study of American Indian languages, in G. Stocking (ed.), The ethnographer’s magic and other essays in the history of anthropology, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. ——— 1992b. The ethnographer’s magic: fieldwork in British anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski, in G. Stocking (ed.), The ethnographer’s magic and other essays in the history of anthropology, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Uribe T. and A. Carlos. 1996. Entre el amor y el desamor: Paul Rivet en Colombia, in J. Landaburu (ed.), Documentos sobre lenguas aborígenes de Colombia del archivo de Paul Rivet, Santa Fe de Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, vol. 1: 52–73. Wilder, G. 2005. The French imperial nation-state: negritude and colonial humanism between the two world wars, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Zerilli, F. 1991–93. Il terreno ecuadoriano di Paul Rivet: antropologia, linguistica, ethnografia, Annali della facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia 2: Studi Storico-Antropologici, 29– 30: [n.s. 15–16, 1991/92–1992/93]: 353––96. ——— 1998. Il lato oscuro dell’etnologia: il contributo dell’ antropologia naturalista al processo di instituzionalizzazione degli studi etnologici in Francia (D.E.A. 10), Rome: CISU.

Chapter 6

ALFRED MÉTRAUX: EMPIRICIST AND ROMANTICIST Peter Rivière

Although Alfred Métraux was of Swiss nationality, I think it is correct to say that most people think of him as a French anthropologist and ethnographer. He was born in Lausanne in 1902 but spent much of his childhood in Mendoza, Argentina, where his father, also Alfred, practised as a surgeon from 1907 to 1954. He received all his secondary education in Europe, firstly in Switzerland and then in France. In 1921 he enrolled at both l’École des Chartes and l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des Sciences Religieuses. In 1922, aged twenty, he obtained eight months’ leave of absence and returned to Argentina to undertake his first fieldwork. He spent the time studying the Calchaquí, a subgroup of the Diaguita, in northwest Argentina, as well as travelling in Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Back in France by late 1922, in January or February 1923, he admitted to Georges Bataille his intention of becoming an ethnologist specialising in South America (Le Bouler 1992: 136). In 1925 he obtained a degree at l’École des Langues Orientales, in the Section des Langues Africaines, and two years later he was back at l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he studied with Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet. At this time he also went to study in Sweden, at Gothenburg, under one of the leading Americanists of the time, Baron Erland von Nordenskiöld, who seems to have had a far stronger influence on him than either of the French anthropologists. The thesis which he submitted for his degree at l’École Pratique des Hautes Études was La civilisation matérielle des tribus tupi-guarani (1928a). He obtained his Docteur ès-Lettres from the Sorbonne in 1928 with a thesis on La religion de Tupinamba et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus tupi-guarani (1928b).

152

Peter Rivière

Figure 6.1. Alfred Métraux, seated second from right, doing fieldwork among Chipaya in Bolivia, 1931 or 1932. Courtesy of Harold Prins.

In 1928 he was invited to the National University of Tucumán in Argentina, where he founded the Instituto de Etnología and served as its director until 1934. During those years he was able to carry out extensive fieldwork among the peoples of the Gran Chaco, the Chiriguano, Mataco and Toba, extending his work in 1932 to the UruChipaya of the Bolivian Altiplano. At the beginning Métraux was happy at Tucumán and in December 1930 was able to write: ‘My institute and my journal1 are the sole living organisms in this university, and my activity is regarded as a good element of propaganda’.2 But only seven months later he complained: ‘My situation is far from being as brilliant as last year because of the frightful economic disaster in Argentina’.3 He finally gave up in 1934, writing the following year: ‘I have left Argentina, where, as a consequence of the idiosyncratic nature of the country, my activity risks becoming completely paralysed. I have escaped the most appalling stagnation’4 (Auroi and Monnier 1996: 14–17). In 1934–35 he participated, at the invitation of Mauss and Rivet, in a Franco-Belgian expedition to Easter Island. On his return journey, he visited various Pacific islands, including Hawaii. Between 1936 and 1938 he was back in Hawaii with an appointment at the Bernice Bishop Museum, Honolulu. In 1938 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of California and during 1939–1941 he was based at Yale, returning for fieldwork to Argentina and Bolivia, as well as being involved with the Human Relations Area Files. In 1941 he joined the

Alfred Métraux

153

staff of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and for the next four years was busy helping with the production of the Handbook of South American Indians (hereafter HSAI). During this period he was also Visiting Professor at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City in 1943 and made two visits to Haiti (1941 and 1942). At the end of the Second World War (he had become a United States citizen before the country entered the war), he went to Europe as a member of the United States Bombing Survey. It may have been his experiences on this that turned his attention to applying anthropology to intercultural and interracial understanding. He joined the United Nations Department of Social Affairs in New York in 1946, being seconded to UNESCO in Paris the following year and joining that organisation in 1950.5 He remained with UNESCO until his retirement in 1962. During this time he travelled widely, to Africa and India as well as the New World. He was engaged in various research projects, including the Hylean Amazon Project in 1947–48, research into setting up basic rural education in Haiti from 1948 to 1950, into race relations in Brazil in 1950–51, and in 1954, in conjunction with the International Labour Office, into Aymara and Quechua Indian migrations in Bolivia and Peru. He was appointed Professor of the Anthropology of South American Indians at L’École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1959. He died, by his own hand, near Paris, on 12 April 1963. It is worth considering here whose ideas most influenced Métraux’s work. It would be difficult to argue that Mauss left any lasting impression on it. I have found no reference to Mauss’s work in any of Métraux’s, and his method is very far from being Maussian. Although La religion de Tupinamba is dedicated to Mauss, it is difficult to imagine the latter putting so much work into a topic and producing no more than a compilation from literary sources. Perhaps one brief Maussian moment, an echo of Le don, is a very short notice (1929b) drawing attention to two little-known historical texts on the potlatch in Florida and the Gran Chaco. Except very early in Métraux’s career, Paul Rivet does not seem to have had much influence on him either. Rivet held that South America was peopled by Malayo-Polynesian and Australian peoples in relatively recent times, and this may well explain an early article by Métraux, ‘Le bâton de rythme: Contributions à l’étude de la distribution géographique des éléments de culture d’origine mélanésienne en Amérique du Sud’ (1927a). Rivet clearly thought highly of Métraux and wrote a glowing reference for him when he went to the university at Tucumán. He was Mauss’s and Rivet’s choice to go on the FrancoBelgian expedition to Easter Island, and Rivet, who edited Volume 7 of Encyclopédie Française in the early 1930s, chose Métraux to contribute

154

Peter Rivière

three articles. It would appear, however, that they later fell out, for Métraux was to write to Lowie in 1940 that, ‘Whatever my past conflicts with him [Rivet] have been, I thought it my duty to do my very best to help him leave France and come here’ (Auroi and Monnier 1996: 46). It is not clear what these conflicts were about, but in 1938 Métraux had published an article, ‘The Proto-Indian script and the Easter Island tablets. (A critical study)’, in which he had firmly refuted an argument put forward a decade earlier by Guillaume de Hevezy that there is a close connection between the script found during excavations in the Indus Valley and signs on Easter Island tablets. Various other authors, including Rivet, had supported Hevezy’s position, which was effectively, and with a degree of mockery, dismissed by Métraux. According to Wagley (1964: 604), Father John Cooper also greatly influenced Métraux’s anthropological career. One of Cooper’s main concerns was with questions of cultural distribution and historical reconstruction, and in his 1942 article, ‘Areal and temporal aspects of aboriginal South American culture’, he was the first to divide the cultures of the area into three: marginal, silval and sierral. Métraux discusses this schema in his ‘La civilisation Guyano-Amazonienne et ses provinces culturelles’ (1946b) and, while pointing out the difficulty of fitting many tribes into it, later referred to Cooper’s article as ‘his most important theoretical contribution’ (1950: 43). Cooper’s schema was adopted as the structure of the HSAI, in whose preparation Métraux was closely involved, as Marginal, Tropical Forest and Andean, to which was added a fourth type, the Circum-Caribbean. The figure from Métraux’s formative years who probably had the most powerful influence on him was Nordenskiöld. As has already been mentioned, Métraux had worked with him in Gothenburg while still a student in Paris in the 1920s. The influence that Nordenskiöld exerted was not so much because he had worked among the peoples of the Gran Chaco, who were to form the focus of Métraux’s earliest research, but because of his method of reconstructing cultural history. This is exemplified by his ten-volume series, Comparative ethnographical studies (1919–1938), in which, using his own data and literary sources, he plotted a huge range of Amerindian culture traits. For example, in Volume 1 of the series, entitled An ethno-geographical analysis of the material culture of two Indian tribes in the Gran Chaco, his method involves examining where cultural items, such as dwelling places, beds, cultivated plants, agricultural tools, hunting weapons, fishing tackle and many others, found among the two Mataco groups in question, the Choroti and Ashluslay (or Nivacle), are distributed through South America. The text is supported by 44 distribution maps covering such objects as wooden spades, bowstrings made from animal material and

Alfred Métraux

155

bird arrows and slings. Although not employed to the same extent, identically constructed maps are found in many of Métraux’s early works. It is also clear that when Métraux uses the terms ‘analytic’ and ‘comparative’, it is very much in the sense employed by Nordenskiöld. This is well illustrated by his 1937a article, ‘Easter Island sanctuaries (analytic and comparative study)’, in which he describes variations in the form of ritual stone platforms and examines their distribution elsewhere in Polynesia.6 Métraux’s publications are numerous, and looked at chronologically they reflect his contemporary research interests, with, for example, the focus on the Gran Chaco, Easter Island and Haiti predominating at certain periods. His main declared interest in myth, magic and religion is well borne out in the list, but he also wrote about a wide range of other topics.7 Whereas most of his articles appeared in academic journals, he also occasionally published in more popular publications, such as La Revue de Paris, Paris-Soir and Natural History.8 The main bulk of Métraux’s publications falls naturally into two main divisions: those pieces based on his own field research, and those on literary sources. This division is well illustrated by his collection of essays entitled Religions et magies indiennes d’Amérique du Sud. Although published posthumously in 1967, he had started work on it before his death, had chosen six of the nine chapters and had undertaken some editorial work on four of them. The blurb quite explicitly states that the book exhibits two essential aspects of Métraux’s work, those based on literary sources, and those deriving from his own field data. I have a personal interest here, for it so happens that this collection was one of the first books that I reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement (Rivière 1967). I still have the notes I made when preparing the review. On the library-based essays, I quoted the author himself, who wrote: ‘the aim is not to provide new facts, but to bring together scattered data and present them in an order that facilitates understanding’. I noted that the pieces in the collection based on Métraux’s own field research consisted of little more than ethnographic reportage, almost devoid of any theoretical or interpretive framework. Conclusions, where they exist, are little more than a summary of the facts that have gone before. It is worth looking at these two aspects of Métraux’s production in a little more detail. For many South Americanists, Métraux is best known for his publications compiled from the existing historical and ethnographic literature. He himself rated such work highly and, in an obituary for Father Cooper, he wrote: The particular conditions of South American ethnography are such that a researcher who has never been in the field can, nevertheless, undertake original research likely to advance the science, if he has a taste for

156

Peter Rivière

scholarship and a critical sense. There exists in fact, on the extinct Indian cultures and on those which still subsist, an enormous body of information often of the highest order, which is scattered through travel narratives, the relations of missionaries, and historical documents. In patiently collecting these texts and in interpreting them in the light of modern ethnography, it is possible to penetrate very deep into the American past and to resolve extremely important problems. Furthermore the accumulation of documents on indigenous cultures is justified only if it provides material for wider and wider synthesis. (1950: 39–40)

His most quoted works appear to be his numerous contributions to the HSAI. That he played a central role in its production is acknowledged by the editor, Julian Steward, who, at the end of the introduction to Volume 1: The marginal tribes, wrote: A special word of gratitude, however, is due to Dr. Alfred Métraux. The extent of his contribution is by no means indicated by the large number of articles appearing under his name.9 With an unsurpassed knowledge of South American ethnology and ever generous with his time, his advice and help to the editor and contributors alike have been a major factor in the successful completion of the work. (1946: 9)

On the other hand, probably the most influential of such publications was one of his earliest, his thesis on Tupinamba religion (1928b). It is the chapter in this on Tupinamba cannibalism that started a line of interest and argument that can be traced via Florestan Fernandes (1963) and many other authors to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of the symbolic economy of predation, later revised to alterity, and perspectivism – the latest position in Amazonian ethnography. I found Métraux’s ethno-historical study of Tupí-Guaraní migrations (1927b) extremely useful when conducting a literature survey of Guianese ethnography in 1962, and Pierre Grenand credits it with opening ‘the contemporary path to research on the lowlands’10 in his ethno-historical study of the Wa api (1982: 45). In the 1940s, there were a whole series of works of synthesis in which Métraux put together a great deal of information on specific topics. These included Auraucanian shamanism (1942), tropical South American shamanism (1944b), the cause and magical treatment of sickness among Tropical Forest people (1944a), shamanism in the Gran Chaco (1945), supreme gods and culture heroes (1946d), mourning rites and burial forms (1947), and the distribution of certain mythic motifs (1948a). These have proved rather less successful insofar as, unlike his work on Tupinamba cannibalism, they have gone virtually unnoticed by subsequent writers on these subjects. Perhaps the reason for this is that these topics are – unlike Tupinamba cannibalism, which no longer exists – still there to be studied, and are studied.11

Alfred Métraux

157

Just before we turn to consider Métraux’s field research, it might be worth noting that in his obituary of Métraux, Charles Wagley remarks that while he, Métraux, ‘valued field ethnography more than theory’, in Wagley’s opinion, ‘His great strength was ... synthesis and historical research’, and he refers to his two works on the Tupinamba as ‘classics’ (1964: 606). Métraux’s fieldwork and the publications based on it will now be dealt with in greater detail, for that is the focus of the present volume. As already mentioned, Métraux undertook a great deal of field research in a wide range of different places. There are two points about his field research which might be made here. First, he rarely worked alone; more often than not he had at least one companion, and often more. Secondly, nowhere did he undertake any period of extended fieldwork, five or six months being the longest. In fact, Wagley ‘felt that he was too restless and too eager to be on his way to produce detailed and lengthy field reports’ (1964: 606). Some field research consisted of little more than short visits, but even so he published, at least briefly, on most of them.12 For the purposes of this assessment of Métraux as ethnographer, I shall concentrate on three areas: his work in the Gran Chaco and neighbouring regions, his visit to Easter Island, and his study of Haiti. His earliest fieldwork in Argentina, as already mentioned, was in 1922 among the Calchaquí, and the information obtained on that expedition was published in the first volume (1929a) of his Revista, where also appeared the main accounts resulting from the field research undertaken among the Chiriguano, Mataco, Pilaga and Toba of the Gran Chaco during his years at Tucumán. These included ‘Études sur la civilisation des Indiens Chiriguano’ (1930) and ‘Les hommes-dieux chez les Chiriguano et dans l’Amérique du Sud’ (1931), both based on fieldwork carried out between February and June 1929. In the southern summer of 1930–31, he visited the Chipaya, an Uro-speaking people of the Bolivian Altiplano, and consequently published ‘La religión secreta y la mitologia de los Indios Uro-Chipaya de Carangas (Bolivia)’ (1935c) and ‘Civilización material de los Indios Uro-Chipaya de Carangas (Bolivia)’ (1935a). His publications from this period of his life were by no means restricted to Revista. He published regularly in Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, ‘Contribution au folk-lore andin’ (1934) being an example; and in other Argentinian journals such as Revista del Museo de La Plata, where ‘Mitos y cuentos de los Indios Chiriguano’ (1932) appeared. He undertook further fieldwork in 1932 among the TobaPilaga, which gave rise to ‘Études d’ethnographie Toba-Pilaga (Gran Chaco)’ (1937b). He also made collections of myths, publishing 123 Mataco myths (1939), and 106 Toba and Pilaga myths (1946a). It should be emphasised that, although these are journal articles, they often approximate in size to an ethnographic monograph. ‘Études sur la

158

Peter Rivière

civilisation des Indiens Chiriguano’ runs to 189 pages plus 141 figures and 93 whole plates. However, ‘La civilisation’ of the title in his earliest works is restricted almost exclusively to subsistence and material culture. Only the last of the fourteen chapters into which it is divided, that on the treatment of illness, does not fit this pattern. A sample of the titles of other chapters gives a flavour of the work: ‘L’agriculture’, ‘La cuisine et l’alimentation’, ‘Outils des Chiriguano’, ‘Les calebasses’, ‘Le tissage’ and so on. Many of the items and techniques described are fully illustrated. There is nothing about kinship, residence, social organisation or any other sociological matter. The only deviation from straight description is to be found in the chapter on basketwork where there is a discussion of the distribution of a certain technique in a manner reminiscent of Nordenskiöld’s work. The latter method also occurs in his article on the Calchaquí (1929a) with reference to the distribution of subterranean and semi-subterranean huts in South America. There is a brief reference to Frazer’s ideas in his ‘Les hommesdieux’ (1931: 63), but this is a unique exception. The overall result is meticulously detailed but rather old-fashioned ethnography. Within a few years, however, a change is noticeable and the emphasis is increasingly on social institutions. His ‘Les Indiens UroChipaya de Carangas’ (1935d) contains material on social organisation (post-marital residence, filiation, etc.) and even a table of kin terms, although without any attempt to see whether they formed any sort of pattern. His ethnography of the Toba-Pilaga (1937b) covers such topics as religion, dreams, puberty, pregnancy and birth, funerary rites, feasts, marriages, kin terms, authority, war, property and games. Métraux’s next field site was Easter Island (1934–35), and besides a number of journal articles – including his first piece (1936b) to appear in English (on Easter Island numerals) – the main work that emanated from this research was the substantial monograph, Ethnology of Easter Island (1940). Once again this is a work of straightforward ethnographic reportage with no attempt at analysis or interpretation, although there are a few brief attempts to compare Easter Island practices with those of wider Polynesia. The largest proportion of the text, some 150 pages out of 412, is given over to a description of subsistence activities and material culture, including, of course, stone-working. The section on sociological topics, which is given relative prominence and fifty-three pages, includes accounts of the life-cycle, social organisation, property rights, war and cannibalism. The account of religion occupies thirty-three pages mainly taken up with lists of gods, whereas the discussion of religious ritual receives just two pages. There are twenty-seven pages of ‘Tales’. As well as this detailed ethnographic report on Easter Island, he also produced a much more popular and readable work, explicitly ‘not addressed either to archaeologists or anthropologists’. The first edition of

Alfred Métraux

159

this, L’île de Pâques, was published in Paris in 1941;13 a revised and expanded edition appeared in 1951, with an English translation of a further expanded version, entitled Easter Island, in 1957. The main reason for this expansion was to take account of Thor Heyerdahl’s KonTiki voyage and his theory that Easter Island and Polynesia were peopled from the Americas, a position with which Métraux firmly disagreed.14 Finally, there is the research he conducted on Haiti. This can really be divided into his work connected with the UNESCO scheme for the introduction of basic education into rural areas and that on voodoo. I am mainly going to ignore the former here, which gave rise to a range of publications from Haïti: la terre, les hommes et les dieux (1957b),15 little more than a well-illustrated travelogue, to articles such as ‘Étude sur l’agriculture paysanne dans une vallée haïtienne’ (1948b) and ‘Droit et coutume en matière successorale dans la paysannerie haïtienne’ (1951a). These are once again straightforward ethnographic reporting although the former, which is based mainly on information supplied by the agronomist, Edouard Berrouet, concludes with eight recommendations for development in the area. When we turn to voodoo, there is a whole series of articles in academic journals covering many aspects of the topic, from the concept of the soul (1946c) through animistic beliefs in voodoo (1952) to voodoo mystical marriage (1956).16 Once again these are a matter of plain ethnographic description. There is also a monograph, Le Vaudou haïtien (1958), published in English as Voodo in Haiti (1959). This work covers most of the topics dealt with in earlier journal articles, although the style and form of presentation make it more readable than them.17 We have now briefly examined a representative cross-section of Métraux’s publications based on fieldwork across a period of thirty years. Strikingly little has changed in that time. There is from beginning to end the production of ethnographic description, but no analysis of the material of the sort that was becoming increasingly characteristic among his European contemporaries. There are, however, some changes of emphasis. The earlier concentration on material objects with copious description and illustration is gradually replaced by more attention being paid to topics such as social organisation and religion. What I find astonishing about his work is the almost total lack of reference to or concern with any of the theoretical works on these subjects other than the occasional foray into cultural history. His publications are amply backed up by references to numerous historical and ethnographic works, but with very few exceptions, these are used for the factual evidence they contain rather than for any ideas their authors might have. It would be difficult to believe that when he started his main period of fieldwork in the Gran Chaco in the late 1920s, he was not familiar

160

Peter Rivière

with the most influential works of L’année sociologique. He seems, however, to have found them and any other theoretical formulations irrelevant to his endeavours. This is evidence, perhaps, to support Wagley’s contention that he valued ethnography over theory; in fact, on occasion one is left with the impression that he consciously ignored theory. One such occasion is his contribution to Encyclopédie Française on ‘La structure sociale’ (1936a), which, in 1936, one might have expected to have had some theoretical content. In fact it has none. The article consists of factual accounts of such topics, as ‘Family and marriage’, ‘The clan’, ‘Property’, ‘Government’, ‘Law and justice’ and ‘Economy’. Although the accompanying ‘Further readings’ includes Malinowski (Crime and custom), Bouglé (on caste), Radcliffe-Brown (on Australian kinship), Lowie (Primitive society), Maine (Ancient law), Tylor (Researches into the early history of man) and van Gennep (on totemism), there is no discussion of the ideas contained in these works. Nor, during the span of Métraux’s career, is there any lack of more analytical and interpretive studies based on fieldwork by other fieldworkers which might have acted as models for him. In particular, just to limit the examples to France, there are the various works on the Dogon, such as Marcel Griaule’s Masques Dogons (1938) and Denise Paulme’s Organisation sociale des Dogon (1940), or, from the Pacific, Maurice Leenhardt’s Do Kamo (1947). These three authors directly engage, through their field data, with the ideas propounded by numerous French, American and British anthropologists. Métraux refused to go down that path, and until the end of his career he continued to report the ethnographic facts as he saw them and recorded them, without any reference to any wider theoretical notions. For example, as late as 1960, he published a collection of Kayapó myths (1960b) without a single word of introduction, interpretation or explanation of how and when he had collected them.18 On the other hand, it might be said that Métraux’s work was not entirely in vain, for one of those Kayapó myths, that on ‘the origin of fire’, is M8 in Lévi-Strauss’s The raw and the cooked (1970), the second Jê variation on M1, the Bororo key myth which starts off the whole cycle. Lévi-Strauss also later drew further for Mythologiques on Métraux’s collections of Toba-Pilaga, Mataco and Chiriguano myths, but there are other authors who pay far less attention to his material. John Renshaw, in his The Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco (2003), describes his work as ‘the first attempt to offer an overview of the Chaco since Alfred Metraux’s “Ethnography of the Chaco”’, published in the HSAI in 1946, but he makes no reference to any of Métraux’s numerous fieldworkbased publications. Métraux’s work on voodoo has suffered a similar fate. If one looks at more recent studies of the phenomenon, there is

Alfred Métraux

161

little reference to his work. For example, Wade Davis, in his The serpent and the rainbow (1986), makes two very brief references to him. Indeed today few people cite his fieldwork results. There may, however, be a clue as to why Métraux confined himself to description and eschewed interpretation. There are two publications in which Métraux expresses his views on fieldwork, ethnography and anthropology, one published at the beginning and the other at the end of his career. In 1925, while still a student at l’École des Langues orientales vivantes, but after his first field trip to the Calchaquí and after having declared to Bataille his intention of becoming an ethnographer, he published as his second academic article, ‘De la méthode dans les recherches ethnographiques’. There are two points which arise from this article which deserve attention here. The first is that Métraux sees a clear division of labour within the anthropological endeavour which harks back to the nineteenth century and Frazer’s ‘men in the field’, whose duty it was to collect the facts that the anthropologists, in their armchairs, could use in their theorising. In Métraux’s case it is between the ethnographers and those he variously refers to as scholars, scientists or sociologists. The nature of Métraux’s fieldwork publications which we have just reviewed indicates that he continued to subscribe to this view throughout his working life; he saw his job as providing the facts which would speak for themselves, as Wagley put it (1964: 606), or, perhaps, on which other people could theorise. This concern with facts rather than theories did not escape his contemporaries and friends. Michel Leiris, in his preface to the French edition of Le Vaudou haïtien (not included in the English translation), wrote: In his work, Métraux seems like someone who cared above all for concrete knowledge and for whom the study of societies was, not a path opening out into theoretical insights, but a way of knowing men and of approaching them as nearly as possible, in all the diversity of their usages and customs. (1958: 7)19

The second point that can be taken from the 1925 article is that he appears to have a remarkably pessimistic view of the ethnographic endeavour. Basically he argues that the science of society must rest on a body of secure and precise facts, but it is questionable whether these can be collected. The reason for this is that the civilised mind is unable to comprehend the workings of the primitive mentality. Indeed, the only author he refers to is Lévy-Bruhl.20 To the question, ‘Do ethnographic facts have the high degree of precision and exactness indispensable to science?’, he answers: If, as has been believed and continues to be believed, there is an identity between primitive mentality and civilized mentality, the response to this

162

Peter Rivière

question cannot be other than affirmative. This universality of human reason has implicitly been admitted by the British sociological school, which is responsible for the illusion shared by many scholars regarding the quasiabsolute value of the result of these investigations. The critique presented by Lévy-Brühl in these two works, les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures and la Mentalité primitive, has cast a legitimate suspicion over this postulate. The analysis of the representations of primitives has revealed their fundamental differences from those of the civilized. ‘Wild’ humanity appears like a closed world, impermeable to our experience, which remains incomprehensible so long as one attributes those who create it with mental processes similar to ours. This misunderstanding, demonstrated with evidence only in the past fourteen years, is the reason for the imperfection of evidences obtained from the natives and will affect the results of ethnographic enquiries to come, as well as those that have already been provided to us. (1925: 276–77)21

The article continues with a litany of the difficulties and obstacles that impede the collection of accurate and reliable information. One might be led to think that this is rather a paradoxical position, given the author’s declared commitment to ethnography. However, he goes on to argue that, with sufficient ability, patience and the ingenuity to adapt to the circumstances, the ethnographer can overcome many difficulties and achieve an increasing degree of accuracy. He ends: The task of the ethnographer must be to succeed in assembling a collection of information and data whose value and precision place them beyond all criticism. The facts must dictate the hypotheses and not submit to them. It is on greater rigour in observation that the progress of sociology will depend, and it will only become a science of societies under this sole condition. (1925: 289–90)22

In other words and in the end, Métraux is claiming that the role of the collector of information is a highly skilled and not a purely mechanical occupation that anyone can undertake. It is a bid for the proper recognition of the ethnographer’s status, one to which he already aspired. The other article is entitled ‘Entretiens avec Alfred Métraux’, based on three interviews with Fernande Bing in 1961 and published posthumously in L’Homme (Bing 1964). The second and third interviews, dealing respectively with his work on Easter Island and on voodoo, are of no immediate interest, but it is worth looking at the first interview in some detail, for it is entitled, ‘Comment et pourquoi devient-on ethnologue?’ In answer to this question, Métraux states that ethnographers become ethnographers because they are ill at ease in their own society, because they do not belong – something which certainly seems true of

Alfred Métraux

163

Métraux.23 He then looks back at the mid-1920s when he decided to become an ethnographer. It was period of ferment and of surrealism that turned to exotic peoples to fulfil its aspirations, first in the fields of primitive art, but then, for some, to become channelled into scientific ends. It was at this time that Métraux undertook his first field research among Amerindians, and he found that among these people, he felt, unlike in his own culture, entirely at ease. The rhythm of life seemed slower and less problematic. He then embarks on a piece of romanticism which is best left in his own words:24 I also believe that this taking up contact with primitive civilisations has made me feel that, at root, the protest that has pushed me precisely towards civilisations that are so much removed from our own finds its motivation in a sort of nostalgia, a nostalgia that we, men of the West, have, I believe, felt at all times and which I call, using a term that may be humorous – or at least I intended it to be so – a nostalgia for the Neolithic. It seems to me, without wishing to fall into a facile Rousseauism, that humanity may have been wrong in going beyond the Neolithic. (Bing 1964: 21–22)25

He goes on to argue that the people among whom he spent time in South America do not differ in their style of life greatly from that of the Neolithic, and paints an extraordinarily rosy picture of such a life. He would, he states, be very happy living in the Neolithic age, if only there had been dentists. He admits, however, that there is no returning to the Neolithic, and the last people who are at that stage are rapidly disappearing. What has inspired his ethnographic career is the need to record, in as much detail as possible, this passing way of life, for he believes that they have been able to resolve, better than we, certain problems that confront humanity.26 In practice, however, this Neolithic utopia seemed to have escaped him, and often he does not seem to have enjoyed his fieldwork. For example, he wrote to Georges-Henri Rivière from Easter Island on 4 December 1934, complaining that life on the island is sad and monotonous. His stay on the island, which he describes as a ‘devil of an island’, has undermined his resistance, and he has rheumatism and a serious stomach complaint. He continues: All this for the modest glory of having compiled a dictionary, made a grammar and created a corpus of the traditions of these mongrelized Polynesians. I have a horror of the inhabitants of this island: it is difficult to imagine a population more vilely degenerated. South American contact has been enough to introduce the foulest vulgarity. (Laroche 1992: 64)27

164

Peter Rivière

In February 1954, he wrote to Pierre Verger: Through an act of masochism and pure stupidity, I have spent a month wandering around the Aymara country, in the rain, in the fog and with weather that was all the colder given that I was equipped for the tropics. I have a horror of the landscapes of the high plateaux, I can’t bear altitude, and the Aymara Indians inspire physically in me a violent aversion. In fact, they give me nausea. (Verger 1992: 182)28

Although he was looking forward to working among Tropical Forest people, his experience with the Kayapó in Central Brazil, a little later that year, was no better. He was, like most others, a victim to the endless delays that accompanied travel in the interior of Brazil at that time. The aeroplane that he expects on 4 April to take him from the Kayapó village of Kubenkankrey does not arrive and when by 6 May, desperate to leave, there is still no sign of it, he writes: I would feel much better … if I did not have at the bottom of my heart the fear of not being able to leave this place next Sunday. The prospect of another fortnight waiting here terrifies me. I won’t be able to stand it.29

The aeroplane finally arrives on 24 May. By that time, presumably, in a state of frustration and anxiety, he has even given up writing his journal. Later, however, no mention is made of his problems and worries, and the single difficulty to which he refers is his lack of an interpreter (d’Ans 1992: 11–15). Finally, right at the end of his career, in December 1959, in the little Andean village of Carhuauz, he confides these words to his journal: ‘The relentless silence of the main square under the sun, and the vague terror of being condemned to live here, even as an ethnographer’ (d’Ans 1992: 24).30 There is something enigmatic about Alfred Métraux. He was a man openly dedicated to fieldwork, which, in practice, he often found disagreeable. He devoted himself tirelessly to the accumulation of facts, whether from the field or from the writings of others, and to the production of descriptive accounts, but, at the same time, he seems to have had a principled unwillingness to submit the material to further analysis. A survey of South American ethnographies from the past three decades indicates that rarely do his anthropological colleagues refer to his work. On the other hand, Rhoda Métraux, Alfred’s second wife and an anthropologist in her own right, noted in her article on him in International Dictionary of Anthropologists (1991) that, while his work had been neglected for some years, ‘now it is recognized as an invaluable base

Alfred Métraux

165

on which to build new knowledge and new theory’. This may be so, and there are signs of a recent revival of interest in Métraux. In Geneva has emerged the Société d’Études Alfred Métraux, and in 2005, at a symposium in Paris to commemorate 60 years of UNESCO, a paper (see Prins 2005) celebrated his many years work as an applied anthropologist.

Notes 1. This was the Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán (hereafter Revista). 2. ‘Mon Institut et ma Revue sont les seuls organismes vivants de cette Université et mon activité est considérée comme un bon élément de propagande.’ 3. ‘Ma situation est loin d’être aussi brillante que l’année dernière en raison de l’effroyable débâcle économique de l’Argentine.’ 4. ‘J’ai quitté l’Argentine où mon activité à la suite de l’idiosyncrasie du pays risquait d’être complètement paralysée. J’ai échappé à la stagnation la plus lamentable.’ 5. For an account of Métraux’s work with UNESCO, see Prins (2005). 6. Nordenskiöld also rejected the idea of recent Asian or Oceanic influence in Amerindian culture to which Rivet subscribed. Interestingly enough, when Métraux published an article on tapirage (the treatment of birds, such as parrots, in order to change the colour of their plumage) in South America (1928c), he not only used a Nordenskiöld-type distribution map of the practice, but explicitly stated that he could not relate it to the Malayo-Polynesian culture area. 7. In April 1963, the month of his self-inflicted death and a few months after he had turned sixty, he published an article entitled ‘Does life end at sixty?’ Curiously, in none of the obituaries or commentaries on Métraux’s life that I have read is there any reference to what proved to be the rather ominous title of this article. The article mainly consists of examples of how well old people are treated and respected in simple societies, but ends on the slightly sour note that in modern societies we have exchanged these for increased longevity. Although the reason for Métraux’s suicide is outside the scope of this paper, Lévi-Strauss made a remark that suggests that he was suffering from a loss of what today we call self-esteem: ‘And what increases our desolation even more is the thought that he might not have overrated death if he had not so unfairly underrated his work, and that he left us under this double misunderstanding’ (‘Et ce qui aggrave encore notre désolation, c’est de penser qu’il n’aurait peut-être pas surestimé la mort s’il n’avait injustement sous-estimé son oeuvre, et qu’il nous a quittés sur ce double malentendu’; 1964: 8). 8. There is a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, list of Alfred Métraux’s publications in L’Homme, 4 (see Tardits 1964). 9. Métraux himself wanted to do more. He was disappointed that he was not to write the articles on the Altiplano, and he made a strong claim to write those on myth and religion, especially the former (Murra 1992: 78). 10. ‘la voie contemporaine des recherches sur les basses terres.’ 11. Louis Faron’s Hawks of the sun (1964), which is a fieldwork-based study of Mapuche shamanism, refers only twice to Métraux’s work on Araucanian shamanism, both times critically. Whereas Métraux refers to the work of Audrey Butt Colson in his updating of his 1944 article (1944b) on tropical South American shamanism in his posthumous collection, the latter makes reference only to his HSAI contributions in any of her works on the topic.

166

Peter Rivière

12. For example, ‘Contribution à l’ethnographie et à la linguistique des Indiens Uro d’Ancoaquil (Bolivie)’ (1935a), of 35 pages, is based on just one week’s stay in the Uro village of Ancoaquil, on the Bolivian Altiplano. 13. Given its date and place of publication, it is not too surprising that this edition is difficult to find. I am grateful to Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, who has a copy in his extensive collection of South Americana and provided me with a detailed account of how it differs from the 1951 edition. 14. A decade later, in the course of an interview, Métraux was much more scathing about Heyerdahl’s theory: ‘This is a perfectly unsustainable theory, which no man of science has accepted, I would even say so absurd that no scholar has dreamt of examining it seriously’ (‘C’est une théorie parfaitement insoutenable qu’aucun homme de science n’a acceptée, je dirai même si absurde qu’aucun savant n’a pu songer à l’examiner sérieusement’; see Bing 1964: 26). 15. An English version, Haiti: Black peasants and their religion, appeared in 1960. 16. In 1961 he stated that it was only in 1948, when he became involved with the UNESCO project in the Marbial Valley, that he began his study of voodoo (Bing 1964: 28). It is not clear why he should have claimed this, since he declares elsewhere that he became interested in the subject during his visits in 1941 and 1944, and he published his first article on voodoo in 1946 (Métraux 1959: 17). 17. This work still commands a sizeable readership and apparently remains popular in Haiti. I am grateful to Harald Prins for pointing this out to me, as well as for making a number of other invaluable comments on an earlier draft. 18. This against a background when there is likely to have been much discussion in Parisian anthropological circles about mythology, as Lévi-Strauss was then working on the first volume of Mythologiques, which appeared in 1964. 19. ‘Métraux apparaît dans son oeuvre comme quelqu’un qui se souciait avant tout de connaissance concrète et pour qui l’étude des sociétés était, plutôt qu’une voie débouchant sur les aperçus théoriques, un moyen de connaître les hommes et de les approcher du plus près, dans toute la diversité de leurs us et coutumes.’ 20. To whom, at least in those of his publications which are listed in the bibliography and comprise all his main ones, he never makes another reference. Perhaps it might be added that the Revue d’ethnographie, in which this piece appeared, was edited by, amongst others, Lévy-Bruhl. 21. ‘S’il y avait, comme on l’a cru et comme on continue à le croire, identité entre la mentalité primitive et la mentalité civilisée, la réponse à cette question n’aurait pu être que l’affirmative. Cette universalité de la raison humaine a été implicitement admise par l’école sociologique anglaise qui est responsable d’illusion partagée par beaucoup de savants sur la valeur quasi absolue du résultat de ces investigations. La critique présenté par Lévy-Brühl dans ses deux ouvrages, les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures et la Mentalité primitive, a jeté sur ce postulat une suspicion légitime. L’analyse des représentations des primitifs a révélé les différences foncières qu’elles présentent avec celles des civilisés. L’humanité ‘sauvage’ apparaît comme un monde clos, imperméable à notre expérience, qui reste incompréhensible si l’on attribue à ceux qui le composent des processus mentaux sembables aux nôtres. Ce malentendu, signalé avec évidence depuis quatorze ans seulement, est cause de l’imperfection des témoignages obtenus des indigènes et affecte le résultat des enquêtes ethnographiques à venir aussi bien que de celles qui nous sont déjà données.’ 22. ‘La tâche de l’ethnographe doit être de parvenir à rassembler un ensemble de renseignements et de données dont la valeur et l’exactitude seront au-dessus de toute critique. Les faits doivent imposer les hypothèses et ne pas s’y plier. C’est d’une plus grande rigueur dans l’observation que dépendront les progrès de la sociologie, qui ne deviendra la science des sociétés qu’à cette seule condition.’ 23. See Lévi-Strauss (1976 [1955]) and Leach (1984) for similar arguments.

Alfred Métraux

167

24. It should be noted that such romanticism was not that uncommon. One of the most famous examples of it is to be found in Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (1976 [1955]). 25. ‘Je crois aussi que cette prise de contact avec les civilisations primitives m’a fait sentir qu’au fond, la protestation qui m’avait précisément poussé vers des civilisations tellement éloignées de la nôtre, trouvait son motif dans une sorte de nostalgie, une nostalgie que nous, hommes d’Occident, avons, je crois, ressentie de tout temps et que j’appelle d’un terme peut-être comique, enfin que je veux tel, la nostalgie du néolithique. Il me semble, et cela sans vouloir tomber dans un rousseauisme facile, que l’humanité a peut-être eu tort d’aller au-delà du néolithique.’ 26. It comes across more or less explicitly in many of Métraux’s field studies that he sees himself engaged in salvage ethnography, that what he is observing is the debris of a past civilisation and that he is recording what will soon have gone forever. 27. ‘Tout ceci pour la modeste gloire d’avoir réuni un dictionnaire, fait une grammaire et constitué en corpus les traditions de ces Polynésiens abatardis. J’ai les habitants de cette île en horreur: on peut difficilement imaginer population plus vilement dégénérée. Il a suffi du contact sudaméricain pour y introduire la plus crapuleuse vulgarité.’ 28. ‘Par un acte de masochisme et de pure imbécillité, j’ai parcouru le pays aymara pendant un mois, sous la pluie, dans la brume et par des froids d’autant plus acerbes que j’étais équipé tropicalement. J’ai horreur des paysages de haut-plateau, je supporte mal l’altitude et les Indiens aymara m’inspirent une aversion physique violente. En fait, ils me donnent la nausée.’ 29. ‘Je serais beaucoup mieux…si je ne gardais au fond du coeur la crainte de ne pouvoir quitter cet endroit dimanche prochain. La perspective de quinze nouveaux jours d’attente m’épouvante. Je ne pourrai pas les supporter.’ 30. ‘implacable silence de la grande plaza sous le soleil, et vague terreur d’être condamné à y vivre, même en tant qu’ethnographe.’

References Auroi, C. and A. Monnier. 1996. Du pays de Vaud au pays du Vaudou: ethnologies d’ Alfred Métraux, Geneva: Musée d’ Ethnographie. Bing, F. 1964. Entretiens avec Alfred Métraux, L’Homme, 4: 20–31. Cooper, J. 1942. Areal and temporal aspects of aboriginal South American culture, Primitive Man, 15: 1–38. d’Ans, A.-M. 1992. Le contenu d’itinéraires 2, 1953–1961, Présence de Alfred Métraux, Cahiers Georges Bataille (Special Issue): 5–28. Davis, W. 1986. The serpent and the rainbow, London: Collins. Faron, L. 1964. Hawks of the sun: Mapuche morality and its ritual attributes, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Fernandes, F. 1963. Organização social dos Tupinamba, São Paulo: Difusão Européia do Livro. Grenand, P. 1982. Ainsi parlaient nos ancêtres: essai d’ éthnohistoire ‘Wa api’, Paris: ORSTOM. Laroche, M.-C. 1992. Alfred Métraux à l’île de Pâques, Présence de Alfred Métraux, Cahiers Georges Bataille (Special Issue): 47–65. Le Bouler, J.-P. 1992. Alfred Métraux et Georges Bataille en 1922: de l’École des Chartes à l’Amérique du Sud, Présence de Alfred Métraux, Cahiers Georges Bataille (Special Issue): 129–39. Leach, E. 1984. Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, 13: 1–23. Leiris, M. 1958. Preface, in A. Métraux, Le Vaudou haïtien, Paris: Gallimard. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1964. Hommage à Alfred Métraux, L’Homme, 4: 5–8.

168

Peter Rivière

——— 1976 [1955]. Tristes tropiques, London: Penguin. Métraux, A. 1925. De la méthode dans les recherches ethnographiques, Revue d’ ethnographie et des traditions populaires, 6: 266–90. ——— 1927a. Le bâton de rythme: contributions à l’étude de la distribution géographique des éléments de culture d’origine mélanésienne en Amérique du Sud, Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 19 (n.s.): 117–22. ——— 1927b. Migrations historiques des Tupí-Guaraní, Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 19 (n.s.): 1–45. ——— 1928a. La Civilisation matérielle des tribus Tupi-Guarani, Paris: Librairie Geuthner. ——— 1928b. La Religion des Tupinamba et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus tupiguarani, Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux. ——— 1928c. Une découverte biologique des Indiens de l’Amérique du Sud: la décoloration artificielle des plumes sur les oiseaux vivants, Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 20 (n.s.): 181–92. ——— 1929a. Contribution à l’ethnographie et à l’archéologie de la province de Mendoza (R.A.), Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1: 5–73. ——— 1929b. Deux anciens textes peu connus concernant l’institution du potlatch en Floride et dans le Gran Chaco, Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 21 (n.s.): 417. ——— 1930. Études sur la civilisation des Indiens Chiriguano, Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1: 295–493. ——— 1931. Les hommes-dieux chez les Chiriguano et dans l’Amérique du Sud, Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 2: 61–91. ——— 1932. Mitos y cuentos de los Indios Chiriguano, Revista del Museo de La Plata, 33: 119–84. ——— 1934. Contribution au folk-lore andin, Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 26 (n.s): 67–102. ——— 1935a. Civilización material de los Indios Uro-Chipaya de Carangas (Bolivia), Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 3: 85–129. ——— 1935b. Contribution à l’ethnographie et à la linguistique des Indiens Uro d’Ancoaquil (Bolivie), Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 27 (n.s.): 75–110. ——— 1935c. La religión secreta y la mitologia de los Indios Uro-Chipaya de Carangas (Bolivia), Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 3: 7–84. ——— 1935d. Les Indiens Uro- ipaya de Carangas, Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 27 (n.s.): 111–28. ——— 1936a. La structure sociale, Encyclopédie française 7: Section A, Chapter 2, Paris: Comité de l’Encyclopedie Française Éditeurs. ——— 1936b. Numerals of Easter Island, Man, 36: 190–91. ——— 1937a. Easter Island sanctuaries (analytic and comparative study), Ethnological Studies, 5: 104–53. ——— 1937b. Études d’ethnographie Toba-Pilaga (Gran Chaco), Anthropos, 32: 171– 94, 378–401. ——— 1938. The Proto-Indian script and the Easter Island tablets (a critical study), Anthropos, 33: 219–39. ——— 1939. Myths and tales of the Matako Indians (the Gran Chaco, Argentina), Ethnological Studies, 9: 1–127. ——— 1940. Ethnology of Easter Island, Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum. ——— 1941. L’île de Pâques, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1942. Le shamanisme araucan, Revista del Instituto de Antropología de la Universidade Nacional de Tucumán, 2: 309–62. ——— 1944a. La causa y al tratamiento mágico de las enfermedades entre los Indios de la región Tropical Sud-Americana, America Indigena, 4: 157–64.

Alfred Métraux

169

——— 1944b. Le shamanisme chez les Indiens de Amérique du sud tropicale, Acta Americana, 2: 197–219, 320–41. ——— 1945. Le shamanisme chez les Indiens du Gran Chaco, Sociologia, 7: 157–68. ——— 1946a. Myths of the Toba and Pilaga Indians of the Gran Chaco, Philadelphia: American Folklore Society. ——— 1946b. La civilisation Guyano-Amazonienne et ses provinces culturelles, Acta Americana, 4: 130–53. ——— 1946c. The concept of soul in Haitian vodou, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 2: 84–92. ——— 1946d. El dios supremo, los creadores y héroes culturales en la mitología Sudamericana, America Indigena, 6: 9–25. ——— 1947. Mourning rites and burial forms of the South American Indians, America Indigena, 7: 7–44. ——— 1948a. Ensayos de mitología comparada Sudamericana, America Indigena, 8: 9–30. ——— 1948b. Étude sur l’agriculture paysanne dans une vallée haïtienne, Acta Americana, 6: 173–91. ——— 1950. The contribution of the Rev. Father Cooper to South American ethnography, Primitive Man, 50: 39–48. ——— 1951a. Droit et coutume en matière successorale dans la paysannerie haïtienne, Zaïre, 5: 339–49. ——— 1951b. L’île de Pâques (Édition revue et augmentée), Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1952. Les croyances animistes dans le vodou haïtien, Mémoires de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, 27: 239–44. ——— 1956. Le mariage mystique dans le vodou, Cahiers du Sud, 43: 410–19. ——— 1957a. Easter Island: A stone-age civilization of the Pacific, London: André Deutsch. ——— 1957b. Haïti: la terre, les hommes et les dieux, Neuchâtel: À la Baconnière. ——— 1958. Le Vaudou haïtien, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1959. Voodo in Haiti, London: André Deutsch. ——— 1960a. Haiti: Black peasants and their religion, London: George G. Harrap. ——— 1960b. Mythes et contes des Indiens Cayapo (Groupe Kuben-kran-kegn), Revista do Museu Paulista, 12 (n.s.): 7–35. ——— 1962. Les Incas, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ——— 1963. Does life end at sixty? The UNESCO Courier (April): 20–23. ——— 1967. Religions et magies indiennes d’Amérique du Sud, Paris: Gallimard. Métraux, R. 1991. Métraux, Alfred, International Dictionary of Anthropologists, New York and London: Garland Publishing. Murra, J. 1992. Correspondance entre Julian H. Steward et A.M. à propos du Handbook of South American Indians, Présence de Alfred Métraux, Cahiers Georges Bataille (Special Issue): 75–78. Nordenskiöld, E. 1919–1938. Comparative ethnological studies (vols 1–10), Göteborg: Elanders Boktryekeri Aktiebolay. Prins, H.E.L. (with E. Krebs) 2005. Vers un monde sans mal: Alfred Métraux, un anthropologue à l’UNESCO, 60 Ans d’Histoire de l’Unesco, Paris: UNESCO. Renshaw, J. 2003. The Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco: identity and economy, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Rivière, P. 1967. Chaco and Mapuche, The Times Literary Supplement, 13 July 1967. Steward, J. (ed.). 1946. Handbook of South American Indians, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 143, vol. 1. Tardits, C. 1964. Bibliographie, L’Homme, 4(2): 49–62. Verger, P. 1992. Trente ans d’amitié avec Alfred Métraux: mon presque jumeau, Présence de Alfred Métraux, Cahiers Georges Bataille (Special Issue): 173–91. Wagley, C. 1964. Alfred Métraux 1902–1963, American Anthropologist, 66: 603–13.

Chapter 7

ROGER BASTIDE OR THE ‘DARKNESSES OF ALTERITY’ Stefania Capone

Introduction Within the French anthropology of the 1950s, Roger Bastide played a preeminent role in the foundation of what was an entirely new domain of studies at the time, namely ‘Afro-Americanism’, defined in France by its notion of ‘Black Americas’.1 If his heritage continues in France, thanks especially to the journal Bastidiana, it was in Brazil that Bastide acquired his reputation, profoundly marked by the development of studies on the religions and cultures of African origin. His slightly marginal position within the French academic world2 seems to have derived from his critical position with regard to the theories that were dominant at this period. As we shall see, his critical distance from the sociology of Durkheim and Weber, as well as from Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism,3 was motivated by a profound questioning of the role of the researcher and his involvement with the field. If fieldwork constitutes the privileged moment of the anthropological enterprise, in which alterity is fully at work, the reflexivity of the Bastidian intellectual project was not limited to encounters with the Other but became a constant aspect of his entire work. In Bastide’s case, theory cannot be the simple product of deductive reasoning or Cartesian rationality, as was the case for many of his colleagues, but involves a different rationality, one that seeks its chosen field in art and mystical states. Bastide never ceased to reflect on his sociological work, which was profoundly marked by the discipline of anthropology.

172

Stefania Capone

Figure 7.1. Roger Bastide, seated left on bench, Ifanhin, Bénin, 1958. Fundação Pierre Verger, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.

However, the complexity of Bastide’s intellectual trajectory cannot be understood without taking into account another figure who plays the role of a go-between linking the worlds of the candomblé and academia, namely Pierre Verger. Bastide’s friend and ‘accomplice’ for more than thirty years, Verger incarnated that ‘ethnographic essentialism’ that has been so much decried by the critics of a certain type of French anthropology. For Verger, theory is only a secondary aspect, of little importance and even carefully avoided in a personal project which was very remote from the scientific standards of the time. Bastide needed his ‘alter ego’ to reflect on his own practice and to theorise a ‘sociology in depth’. Bastide’s interest in mysticism, which marked his intellectual trajectory from the start, led him to think that the only way to understand the world of candomblé was for the anthropologist himself to go through an initiation.4 The first period of his intellectual biography, in which art and mysticism combine, thus proved crucial for the future development of his method, in which poetry would play a fundamental role.

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

173

The relationship between Bastide and Verger can be thought of as a perfect example of the anthropological division of labour between ethnographic description and theoretical analysis. The trajectory involving Bastide’s break with the dominant conceptualisations and his position as an outsider in the intellectual milieu of his period made him an exemplary case of another way of creating a sociology of religion, taking fully into account the ‘encounter with the other’, its chimeras and its dangers.

Bastide and French sociology in the inter-war period Roger Bastide was born at Nîmes in the south of France on 1 April 1898. The son of primary school teachers, he was educated in the Protestant religion and spent his infancy in Anduze in the Cévennes, which had been ‘a refuge of Protestant rebels’ at the start of the eighteenth century. As Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiróz, a former student of Bastide’s, has stated (1983: 7): ‘Right from his infancy, he was plunged into sociocultural contradictions which, throughout his life, constituted the background to his researches, the basic food for his observations and reflections .... Although feeling himself to be profoundly French, he was a member of a minority religious group which had known and kept the marks of its oppression and persecution.’ This specificity of Bastide, his ‘marginality’ with respect to the world that surrounded him, would be one of the marks of his scientific and biographical trajectories. The links he maintained throughout his life with other figures in the French academic world who were also Protestant by confession, such as Raoul Allier, Gaston Richard, Paul Arbousse-Bastide and Maurice Halbwachs, bears witness to the pregnant nature of a religious identity that was never completely abandoned and that marks his trajectory in different ways. Trained as a philosopher, it was under the direction of Gaston Richard (1860–1945)5 that Bastide discovered sociology by following Richard’s courses at the University of Bordeaux, where he obtained a licence (first-degree) bursary at the end of the First World War. Richard’s influence (1923), and in particular his anti-Durkheimianism, would play a continual role in his work overall. Trained in an academic universe that was strongly marked by the Durkheimian school, Bastide never ceased to rethink the relationship to the sacred and the religious, questioning Durkheim’s theories while taking into account certain of the master’s formulations. Nonetheless, in Les problèmes de la vie mystique, published in 1931 (Bastide 1931b), Bastide adopted a similar procedure to Durkheim’s in his study of religion, starting out from elementary forms of mystical

174

Stefania Capone

life, that is of primitive mysticism, in order to construct a ‘mystical chain’ to more elevated forms. As Fernanda A. Peixoto recalls (2000: 28), Bastide had already addressed some severe criticisms of Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) in an article of 1928 entitled ‘Mysticisme et sociologie’. In it, he questions Durkheim’s ‘ethnocentrism’, especially for the importance he gives to the exaltation of religious ceremonies in his work, which Bastide finds excessive. For Bastide, this was the outcome of a ‘western gaze’. Durkheim (1895) defined the ‘social fact’ as an entity sui generis, a totality which contains within itself its own explanation and which cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. To explain it, it was necessary to use the tools of the nascent sociology and to reject contributions from other disciplines, like psychology. In dissociating the individual from the collective, Durkheim saw in social norms and institutions the means whereby society exercises a constraining action on individuals. In his earliest writings, Bastide developed a whole series of criticisms of Durkheimian sociology, addressing himself to what he called the ‘collectivist emphasis’ and the effacing of the ‘individual fact’. But it was above all Durkheim’s attitude to belief which led Bastide to distance himself from Durkheim’s teaching and join the ranks of his critics. Thus, quoting Richard in his introduction to Eléments de sociologie religieuse (1935: 8), Bastide emphasises the importance of experience in sociological reflection: ‘the first condition to be satisfied by anyone wishing to understand the believer and the society of believers is to have participated oneself in a belief at some moment in one’s life, at least through emotion or sentiment’. In taking up Richard’s ideas, which would play a very important part in his preparations for his agrégation in philosophy, Bastide saw in the refusal of French positivism to take the individual into account one of the main limitations of the Durkheimian approach. In reducing the religious to the social, Durkheim had therefore lost the very essence of the phenomenon. By contrast, Bastide underlines the importance of individual factors in understanding religious phenomena while still retaining from Durkheimian theories the idea that the collective deeply penetrates the religious and the distinction between sacred and profane. The importance accorded, from his very first writings, to the individual dimension of religious practices evokes the theories of Durkheim’s great rival at this period, Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), the founder of French social psychology. The latter had developed a sociological theory based on criteria that were essentially individual, showing that the social is nothing other than the expression of individual forces, especially psychological ones. For Tarde, the domain of sociology boils down to inter-individual or ‘inter-mental’ communication. He thus opposes to

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

175

Durkheim’s ‘collective self ’ a multiplicity of individuals, irreducible to the collective consciousness.6 As Peixoto rightly stresses (2000: 35), where Durkheim affirms the legitimacy of science in opposition to literary style, history and psychology, Tarde ‘combines literary leanings and the image of the poet with scientific work’. This intellectual posture was much closer to the temperaments of Richard and Bastide, who cultivated a taste for literature and the arts, philosophy and psychology. For them, sociology is not enough on its own, as Durkheim affirmed, but has to be completed by other disciplines. For a rapprochement between sociology and social psychology, one has to wait for Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), Durkheim’s nephew and pupil: For our part, we observe the complete and complex reactions of numerically defined masses of men, complete, complex beings. We, too, observe what constitutes their organism or their psyche. At the same time we describe the behaviour of this mass and its corresponding psychoses: sentiments, ideas, and the volitions of the crowd, or of organized societies and their subgroups. (Mauss 1990 [1922]: 103)

The notion of the ‘social fact’, introduced by Mauss, offers a holistic approach which encompasses the totality of human manifestations. Mauss’s interest in ‘sentiment’ found echoes in Bastide’s writings, notably in Eléments de sociologie religieuse of 1935. But the attempt to draw closer to Mauss, whom Maurice Halbwachs had advised him to meet, was not a very happy one. Thus, in a letter dated 3 November 1936, Mauss, acknowledging Bastide having sent him this work, writes: Your introduction strikes me as far too philosophical. I add that one of those you particularly appreciate, Max Weber, is among those with whom Durkheim, Hubert and I communicated the least. […] As for the rest, I also believe that you have exaggerated appreciably the metaphysical basis of Durkheim’s thought. He was not only one of the founders of science, but almost exclusively a founder who used philosophy less and less. And to regard this philosophy as a metaphysics is equally wrong in my view.7

In the same work, Bastide also moved nearer to the interpretations of Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), for whom mysticism did not have pathological causes but constituted a collective template of perception expressing a different logic, a different type of relationship to the world, than our own. Being inspired by the notion of the collective representation of Durkheim, whose collaborator he had been, LévyBruhl affirmed that, if representations are the product of the social, it becomes possible to explain mystical representations with reference to

176

Stefania Capone

the principles that are proper to them and which are linked to a welldefined social milieu. However, to understand a ‘pre-logical’ mentality, it was also necessary to include supra-sensitive elements like the spirits of the dead, which form part of ‘primitive reality’. Bastide adopted some of Lévy-Bruhl’s formulations (1922), especially in the elaboration of his key concept, the ‘principle of compartmentalization’.8 The influence exerted by reading the first works of Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954), who had practised participant observation well before Malinowski, thus inaugurating the anthropological fieldwork advocated by Mauss, helped Bastide to rethink Lévy-Bruhl’s theories and to espouse an ‘obscure and confused thought’ which seemed to him better able to express mystical states.9 This calling into question of the dominant theories of his period put Bastide at odds with the French intellectual milieu, in which theory did not necessarily arise from field data. Durkheim had advocated the exteriority of the researcher in relation to the object of his research, this being the sole guarantee of objectivity. Mauss had reintroduced subjectivity in underlining the unconscious dimension of social phenomena, while recognising, like his uncle, the subordination of psychological to social phenomena. This attitude regarding the role of the researcher and his immersion in the field, as well as the epistemological status of mysticism and of the religious life in general, led Bastide to position himself critically with regard to Durkheimian sociology.10 Thus, in the introduction to his work of 1960 (see 1978: 4), Bastide writes: Durkheim always seems to hesitate between religion as ‘product’ and religion as ‘expression’. The two themes are always closely intertwined in his work, and it is difficult to separate them. […] Durkheim’s conclusion goes beyond the multitude of examples he compiles in support of his thesis, inasmuch as they all merely show that religion is always incarnate in the social structure, but not that social structure creates religion.11

Bastide, who in this period was working as a teacher agrégé de philosophie in the lycées and had been appointed to Valence in 1928, was already attracted by doing fieldwork. In 1930 he became involved in his first sociological enquiry on groups of immigrants in France, which would lead to ‘Les Armeniens en Valence’, a study that appeared in the Revue Internationale de Sociologie in 1931 (Bastide 1931a). It was in Valence, where he lived from 1928 to 1937, that Bastide wrote his first texts on religious sociology and mysticism, a theme that accompanied him right up until his death in 1974. Although a critic of Durkheimian theories, he made contact with Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), whom he met at Strasbourg and with whom he discussed his works on mysticism and

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

177

religion (Peixoto 2000: 39). His influence would become apparent in the Bastidian analysis of ‘collective memory’ (cf. Capone 2007).

The years in Brazil, or the discovery of the Other In 1937 Bastide was appointed to Versailles, but he only stayed there for a year, since Georges Dumas offered him a post as professor at the University of São Paulo. The author of Le traité de psychologie (Dumas 1923–24), ‘at once a doctor and a philosopher’ (Carelli 1993: 193), had originally been sent to Rio de Janeiro in 1908 as a spokesman for the Groupement des Universités et Grandes Écoles de France in order to set up scientific cooperation with Brazil. His role was to be central in the founding of the French lycée in Rio in 1916 and the sending of university missions to São Paulo between 1935 and 1939 (ibid.). Supported by a fund for French university and scientific expansion overseas, created in 1912, and a service promoting French works overseas, Dumas also founded Instituts franco-brésiliens de Haute Culture in Rio in 1922 and in São Paulo in 1925, which helped establish French higher education in Brazil (Lefebvre 1990). Paul Arbousse-Bastide, a former student of Dumas and long-term friend of Bastide, who was installed in Brazil from 1934, wrote to Bastide as follows in 1937: ‘I am reading you from afar, and our subjects of study are very close. I would like to have you for a colleague. You know that this is not impossible. A chair of sociology may become vacant from one day to the next, and sociologists are rare in the University … Think about it in principle. It would be for March 1938’ (quoted in Morin 1994: 36). Thanks to Dumas, the University of São Paulo (USP), which had only just been founded in 1934, had already brought together an important number of French intellectuals, among whom were Fernand Braudel (1935–38) in history, Pierre Monbeig (1935–46) in geography and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1935–38), who benefited from the splitting of Arbousse-Bastide’s chair of sociology.12 In 1938, Dumas invited Bastide to come to Brazil to take up the post of professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, which had been vacated by Lévi-Strauss. The contract Bastide signed with the Brazilian university envisaged him teaching Durkheimian sociology and – in reaction to Lévi-Strauss’s resignation, presented in 1937 so that he could conduct research among the Nambikwara and Bororo – it also obliged him to restrict his research to the university vacations. This arrangement with his employers is the origin of his brief field experience. In Le candomblé de Bahia (1958: 14), Bastide admits to having passed no more than nine months in the field, including five at

178

Stefania Capone

Salvador de Bahia, spread out over seven consecutive years (1944 to 1951).13 His work therefore proceeded more by following contacts with ‘local experts’ than through prolonged observation of the rituals he was studying: ‘as a result, I might get to know a candomblé during three months of vacation. The ceremonies that took place in months without vacations I could not get to know’ (quoted in Cardoso 1994: 72). At the start of his Brazilian sojourn, Bastide therefore devoted himself to his teaching and to intensive activities as a critic in several Brazilian journals. He attended the lectures of Brazilian sociologists and frequented Paulist intellectual circles. But it was especially the affinities between Bastide and the modernist group in São Paulo, notably with Mario de Andrade, that marked his first steps in Brazil. The Modern Art Week, put on in São Paulo in 1922 upon the centenary of the country’s independence, offered a group of young intellectuals an opportunity to assert themselves on the national scene. Bastide quickly inserted himself into this group, to which belonged the poet Mario de Andrade, the painter Lazar Segall, the archaeologist Paulo Duarte, the writer Oswald de Andrade and the art critic Sergio Millet. It was in his debates with the modernists that the French sociologist refined his view of the Other in his search for the ‘Brazilian soul’. This intense dialogue becomes clear in Bastide’s writings on Brazilian art, especially his reflections on the Baroque and the work of Aleijadinho (Peixoto 2000: 64). In his first writings can already be found his questioning of the authenticity and originality of Brazilian culture, with a particular interest in syncretism, without which it is impossible to understand the reality of Brazil. In these earliest Brazilian writings can be found themes dear to Bastide: the links between art, mysticism and religion in the article ‘Pintura e mística’ (‘Painting and mysticism’) of 1938, and the psychoanalytical analysis applied to a sociological topic in ‘Psicanálise do cafuné’ (‘A psychoanalysis of the cafuné’) of 1940. The link between art and mysticism is one of the constant themes in Bastide’s writings. For Bastide, mysticism and painting are intimately interwoven with one another, since mysticism is ‘the search for unity, the will to integration’, while painting is ‘the search for and conquest of unity’. Art and religion are thus for Bastide ‘two forms of ecstasy, two forms of contact with the sacred, as manifested in styles of life and artistic expressions’ (ibid.: 70). But Bastide did not restrict himself to maintaining his numerous contacts with Brazilian sociologists and intellectuals.14 He kept up his contacts with the French academic world, trying to help his colleagues who were in danger from the imminent war. Thus in 1940 he received a letter from Georges Gurvitch, who was to play a central role in his future return to France. Gurvitch wrote to him from Clermont-Ferrand,

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

179

where the University of Strasbourg had withdrawn, to ask Bastide to consider an application from Gurvitch to teach in Brazil, ‘since the law of 18 July 1940 on the dismissal of naturalized officials had led to his suspension, before being permanently dismissed’ (Morin 1994: 38). Despite his efforts Bastide could do nothing, and in 1942 Gurvitch departed for New York. Having returned to France at the end of the war, he joined Bastide at the University of São Paulo, where he taught for a year. In 1948 he wrote to Bastide again, regretting the fact that the latter, ‘the best candidate and [his] preferred candidate’, had not agreed to replace him at the University of Strasbourg, ‘which would have allowed him to be appointed Maître de Conférences and, when he had finished his thesis, titular professor’ (ibid.). During his first years in Brazil, Bastide devoted himself to his teaching and to studying the Brazilian literature on his chosen topics. But it was also in Brazil that he discovered American sociology, especially studies of acculturation and culture contact, through the ‘Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation’ by Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton and Melville Herskovits (Redfield et al. 1936).15 The latter had defined the process of acculturation as ‘those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups’ (Herskovits 1938: 10). This process of social and cultural change also involved the disorganisation and reorganisation of individual personalities. Robert Park (1928) used the expression ‘marginal man’ to designate a member of a cultural group that has lost its characteristics in contact with another group, though without having been integrated into the dominant group. He therefore becomes ‘marginal’ since, as Arthur Ramos writes (1979 [1937]: 244), he is on the margins of two cultures: his own, which he has lost, and the other one, which he has not yet assimilated. When Bastide arrived in Brazil, Arthur Ramos was already recognised as the great specialist in Afro-Brazilian cultures and religions. Bastide met him in 1938, when he was occupying the chair of anthropology at the new National Philosophy Faculty (FNFi), founded that year in Rio de Janeiro, and he rapidly became his friend (Teixeira and al. 1952). Ramos undoubtedly had a great influence on the evolution of Bastide’s thought, in particular on his interest in social psychology.16 Bastide had to wait until the start of 1944 to undertake his first AfroBrazilian fieldwork, travelling to the Nordeste between 19 January and 28 February. On this journey, which led him to Recife, João Pessoa and Salvador de Bahia, he met Jorge Amado, who was to become his guide within the world of the Bahian candomblés. His contacts with those initiated into the candomblé were thus made through the intermediation

Stefania Capone

180

of a great Bahian writer, as well as through rather precarious linguistic exchanges, mixing, according to Amado, ‘French and Nagô’, since, despite having already spent six years in Brazil, Bastide had not yet mastered Portuguese (Lühning 2002: 10).17 In fact, Bastide was never to master it. In the course of time, he fashioned a language of his own, ‘a bizarre mixture of French, Latin and Provençal, in which, here and there, Brazilian words surfaced’ (Queiróz 1994: 218). This does not seem to have prevented Bastide from grasping deeply the point of view of the Other, sometimes appropriating it in order to reason, as his lifelong friend Pierre Verger stresses, with his interlocutors’ arguments by seeing things ‘through their own eyes’ (Verger 1978: 52).

Poetry as a scientific method This attempt to plunge as deeply as possible into the ‘Brazilian soul’ led Bastide to revise his approach to the field and his methodology. During this initial journey, despite the very short period he spent in the field, with Amado’s help Bastide had the opportunity to attend several ceremonies in the Bahian candomblé. Thus he attended the ‘confirmation of an ogan’, a ritual title bestowed on men who do not go into trance, in the terreiro (cult house) of Mãe Cotinha. He was also present at the ‘exit of an iaô’, the ceremony which marks the end of the period of initiation by publicly presenting a newly initiated person, in a terreiro of the Angola nation, that of the celebrated Joãozinho da Goméia. It was with this pai-de-santo (cult leader) that he was to have his first experience of the ‘sacred’: The inspired [sic] to be cannot be visited, not even by the ogans or the obaj [obá], in the traditional terreiros. João da Gavea [Goméia] nonetheless permitted me to violate this secret taboo, and I saw, spread out along the boards, each wrapped from head to foot in a large white sheet, five or six bodies. They looked like larvae, or some white cockchafer grubs, and indeed, during this period they are truly human larvae. A new ‘self ’ is being born, a metamorphosis of the personality going on in the belly of the sanctuary, from which will very shortly emerge the sons of the gods [the initiated], who will then open themselves out in the shade of the hut, their wings still fragile, the wings of beings who henceforward will be saints [orixás]. (Bastide 1995 [1945]: 63)18

In this first work on the candomblé, Bastide seems to hesitate between a scientific approach and poetic writing, which he feels more suitable in describing this new universe that is opening before his eyes. Thus, in his introduction, he writes:

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

181

This is just a bundle of images. It is not purely a scientific book, let alone a type of lyrical chant. […] Perhaps the main fault with this work actually resides in its hesitation between science and poetry. However, this hesitation exactly translates the spiritual state in which I found myself at that moment, torn between a very great degree of fervour and the desire to conduct objective research. (ibid.: 11–12)19

However, Bastide’s scientific care and the reflections he had already made from the writings of his Brazilian predecessors also led him to question the interpretations of these religious phenomena, as well as their generalisations: Up until now, studies have been restricted to superficial descriptions of the fetish cult of Bahia. The moment has come to devote ourselves to researches that require greater patience. It is necessary to construct monographs on all the terreiros, at least the more traditional ones, together with all their activities. When such monographs have been completed, studies carried out on the same nation can be compared first, and then the various nations compared among themselves.20 I believe this method will be particularly fertile in separating false generalizations from true ones, for the researcher tends to take everything he states about a terreiro as a general characteristic. In doing this, a false idea is provided of a cult which should only be spoken of with the greatest respect. For my part, every time I made any observation whatever, I sought to localize it in order then to pose the same question to other informers. Now, I have often stated that such-and-such gesture or myth did not go beyond a restricted domain, that of a nation, and often even that of a unique terreiro. (ibid.: 73–74)

This recommendation was not actually followed, since, in the work Bastide was to write in 1958 on the candomblé of Bahia, all references to particular individuals or places have been removed. The description he presents therefore forms the basis for an analysis of the ‘subtle metaphysics’ of the candomblé in which all the internal differences, so evident in his first work of 1945, have been finally erased. In the 1958 work, one discerns the influence of Marcel Griaule and of a certain type of Africanism, which, since the 1930s, had sought to cast light on African ‘philosophies’ and ‘metaphysics’. Motta (1994: 105) has raised again the question of Griaule’s possible influence over Bastide, affirming that a certain number of ideas developed in Le Candomblé de Bahia (1958) had already been anticipated in Images du Nordeste mystique en noir et blanc (1945; see 1995), in which Bastide declared that the ‘philosophy of the candomblé’ is not a ‘barbarous philosophy’ but a ‘subtle form of thought’ that had to be deciphered. Now, this same Bastide was aware of the closeness of his 1958 volume to Griaule’s work. Thus, in the introduction, written in 1972, to his Estudos

182

Stefania Capone

afro-brasileiros (‘Afro-Brazilian studies’; Bastide 1973b), a collection of a series of essays originally published between 1946 and 1953, Bastide writes as follows about this first stage of his Brazilian sojourn: I would like to stress that, at this period, I had not yet had an opportunity to read Griaule’s first books (the circumstances of the Second World War had prevented me from receiving these books in Brazil). At around the same time, Griaule arrived at some conclusions that were close to mine on the subject of Dogon religion, which concealed a philosophy as rich and as valuable as those of a Plato or an Aristotle. (Bastide 1973b: xii)

Other authors have underlined the affinities between Bastide and certain parts of French intellectual production, especially with the founding group of the Collège de Sociologie, Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois. In his 1945 volume, the only one of this group whom Bastide quotes is Leiris, an emblematic figure in thinking about the intimate articulation between art and anthropology. Leiris had discovered anthropology thanks to surrealism, which ‘represents a rebellion against western rationalism, being conveyed, among other things, through a curiosity about primitive peoples and about primitive mentality’ (Peixoto 2005: 136). The initiative in creating the Collège de Sociologie must therefore be understood in this context of cultural criticism, fed as much by surrealism as by anthropology. Bastide’s thematic affinities with this group are obvious: common themes include the dream, the unconscious, mysticism and the festival. The notion of the sacred was the intellectual focus of the group which had for its ultimate aim, according to Caillois (1950 [1939]), to ‘restore to society an active, epidemiological and contagious sacred’, a project echoed in the pages of Sacré sauvage et autre essais, published by Bastide in 1975. It was with Leiris that Bastide maintained relations the most. Thus, ‘in a warm letter’ dated 15 May 1958 replying to Leiris, who had sent him a copy of his La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar (1958), published that year, Bastide writes of having subscribed in one of his Brazilian books to the thesis of the ‘wardrobe’ of personalities, which to him ‘appears as necessary to apply to America as to Africa’ (Leiris 1996: 909).21 The affinities with Leiris are not just a matter of the topics dealt with but also, and above all, concern method. If Leiris was a writer and a poet concerned to explore all the resources of a language, he also sees in poetry a way of being able to advance knowledge about human beings. Bastide stressed several times in his writings the importance of poetry as a ‘form of knowledge about the world’. Thus, in Brésil terre de contrastes (1957: 16), he writes:

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

183

The sociologist who studies Brazil does not know which system of concepts to use. The ideas he has learned from European or North American countries are no longer any good. The old is mixed with the new. Historical periods are all tangled up with one another. The same words, such as ‘social class’ or ‘historical dialectic’, do not have the same meanings and do not apply to the same concrete realities. Instead of rigid concepts, it is necessary to discover notions that are to some extent fluid, capable of describing the phenomena of fusion, turmoil and interpenetration, and moulded on a living reality in perpetual transformation. The sociologist who wants to understand Brazil must often transform himself into a poet.

This link between scientific research and ‘poetic knowledge’ had already been formulated in a double article published in 1946 in the Diário de São Paulo, under the title ‘A propósito da poesia como método sociológico’ (‘On poetry as a sociological method’). In order to grasp a moving social reality, the sociologist must situate himself within the social experience he is studying; he must adhere to the ‘soul’ of the fact being studied. Understanding only becomes possible through this ‘transfusion of souls’, which forces the researcher to abandon his position as an external observer. Any type of judgement concerning the social reality being studied that proceeds from external categories must be rejected: For the sociologist, it is a matter of not situating himself externally in relation to social experience, but of living it […] we have to transform ourselves into what we are studying, whether crowd, mass, class or caste … As in an act of love, we must transcend our own personalities in order to adhere to the soul that is attached to the phenomenon being studied. (Bastide 1946, quoted in Queiróz 1983: 17)

But, to do this, it was necessary to modify profoundly the researcher’s own logical categories if one were to expect finally ‘an anti-ethnocentric mentality’ (Bastide 1973b: xi). The ‘crisis of conscience’ in what Bastide called his ‘spiritual itinerary’ would lead him to ‘convert’ himself to a different mentality. It was necessary to abandon a mentality produced by ‘three centuries of Cartesianism’ by fully accepting a ‘conversion’ presented as a crucial stage in the work of research: ‘Scientific research requires from me the initial passage through a rite of initiation’ (ibid.).

Initiation, or the ‘anthropology of chiasmus’ After his trip to the Nordeste in 1944, Bastide only returned to Salvador in January 1949 and August 1951.22 In 1946 Bastide met Pierre Verger, who had arrived in Brazil after a long journey through Latin America. Bastide advised him to go to Bahia ‘to find Africa again’, which

184

Stefania Capone

Verger already knew, having worked there as a photographer. Verger arrived in Salvador on 5 August 1946. Having fallen for the charms of the city and its religious traditions, he decided to establish himself there, where he was to remain until his death in 1996.23 The spiritual son of Senhora d’Oxum, the mãe-de-santo of Axé Opô Afonjá, Verger was a sort of alter ego to Bastide, opening doors for him to the Bahian candomblé, like Amado in earlier years. When Bastide undertook his second trip to Salvador in 1949, Verger was in Africa and could not accompany him on his visits to the cult houses of the candomblé (Verger 1978). It was on this trip that Bastide achieved his first divination séance with Vidal, the pai-de-santo or cult leader of the quarter of Brotas, who revealed to him his mystical connection with the god Xangô. On his third trip in 1951, in the celebrated terreiro of Axé Opô Afonjá, to which Verger was already affiliated, Bastide completed the ceremony of the consecration of the necklaces, called the lavagem das contas (‘washing of the necklaces’), through which is established the minimum of involvement between an individual and his protecting divinity. By this time, Verger had already become his main interlocutor a sort of local representative of the world of candomblé and principal ‘translator’ of the religious universe for his compatriot. This event, the consecration of the necklaces in the colours of the protecting divinities, is the source of a sort of ‘mysticism of initiation’ in the writings of certain authors who use Bastide as their authority, though this seems to mistake the internal organisation of the candomblé. Thus, Claude Ravalet (2005: 124) writes that Bastide was ‘initiated under Xangô’s aegis in the night of 3 to 4 August 1951’. However, Bastide, in an article devoted to this ceremony, states that this was not an initiation: ‘It was a private ceremony, of little importance, quite ordinary and, doubtless for this reason, neglected by researchers’ (Bastide 1973a: 363–64). The washing of the necklace is thus represented as ‘a form of incorporation into the candomblé in which one does not pass through initiation or the rite of “feeding the head”. […] The washing of the necklace constitutes the first moment in this incorporation; “feeding the head” is the second moment, initiation the third’ (ibid.: 364).24 Thus, if the washing of the necklace does not strictly speaking constitute an initiation, it nonetheless marks the individual’s link with the cult group, placing him under the authority of the spiritual chief, the mãe or pai-desanto who has conducted the ritual. The washing of the necklace – ‘which, as I have just said, is merely the first degree of incorporation of the candomblé, the lowest level, the most ordinary of all’ (ibid.: 373) – marks the acceptance, on the part of the individual, of a range of prohibitions and financial duties in respect of the cult house to which he belongs. In no way is he acknowledged by the initiated group as one

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

185

of them. He is, on the other hand, part of the group of abian, the future novices, candidates for initiation proper. This becomes evident if one reads attentively the passage from Bastide’s thesis of 1960, where he declares: ‘Africanus sum, inasmuch as I have been accepted by one of those religious sects, which regards me as a brother of the faith, having the same obligations and the same privileges as the other members of the same degree’ (Bastide 1978: 28, my emphasis). Bastide knew very well that his incorporation into the cult group was very superficial and did not permit him to attend all the rituals of the cult house. This reluctance to cross the threshold towards a ‘true conversion’ has been made the subject of analyses by two of Bastide’s closest collaborators, Maria Isaura de Queiróz and Françoise Morin. For Bastide, genuine participant observation, the ‘transfusion of souls’, had to be transformed into ‘controlled observation’ through the ‘selfcriticism’ of the researcher (Queiróz 1983: 17). If it is true that Bastide searched throughout his life for what Morin (1975) calls ‘an anthropology of the abyss’, his fascination with ‘the possibility of vertigo’ persisted up until his last years. Thus, in some notes edited in 1968 and entitled ‘Réflexion sur une agitation’, he wrote, of May 1968: ‘I find in it one of my fundamental desires (I have been defined previously as someone who circles around the abyss in order to feel the seduction of its vertigo, but who is firmly attached to the mast of the ship; one must hear the Sirens but not drown)’ (quoted in Morin 1994: 24). As Morin emphasises, for Bastide the seduction of the abyss was found above all in the study of the trance, the dream and ‘polytheistic mysticism’. Thus, ‘doubtless through a fear of drowning’, Bastide resisted the singing of the Sirens, clung to the mast of reason and did not pursue his initiation further (ibid.: 25). In 1965, in an interview he gave to the journal Combat, he confided to Jacques Delpeyrou: ‘In my passionate quest for mystical experiences, I have always had a fear of going mad’ (ibid.). Another route had been taken by Bastide’s friend and ‘accomplice’ Pierre Verger. Far from wanting to devote himself to scientific studies, Verger was hardly interested in the work of the anthropologist. In his journeys to Africa, he took notes in order to ‘fulfil his role as a messenger’, making clear the faithfulness of the Blacks of Bahia to African traditions by comparing Africa and Bahia. His wish was to be able to ‘recount Africa’ to his Bahian friends (Métraux and Verger 1994: 62).25 Verger spent many years going between Brazil and Africa, where in 1953 he had been initiated into the Ifá cult and become a babalawo (diviner) with the ritual name of Fatumbi: ‘Ifá brought me back into the world’. Verger had already conducted a borí in the Bahian terreiro of Axé Opô Afonjá in 1948. Mãe Senhora, who, ‘in a clever move’, had brought Verger under her spiritual protection (cf. Nobrega and Echeverria 2002: 178–9), consecrated his head to Xangô.26 When Verger

186

Stefania Capone

returned from Africa, Senhora bestowed on him the title of Oju Oba (‘the eyes of the king’, a ritual title given to one of Xangô’s sons), thus incorporating him finally into the hierarchy of her terreiro. Now, initiation carried out in Africa seemed to obey a very different logic from that put forward by Bastide: I went through my initiation not to ‘see’ (predict the future), but because it gave me access to the knowledge of the babalawo, those who transmit orally all the knowledge of the Yoruba people. […] It was this side that interested me, since I had not only the right to learn, but the duty to do so. This is completely different position from that of the anthropologist who enters like an analyst, with more or less idiotic questions which make no sense to the people … I conducted all my researches without posing any questions, merely collecting what the people judged important and what was linked to the corpus of knowledge of the babalawo. (cited in Nobrega and Echeverria 2002: 202)

In reality, what stimulated Verger was his desire to rid himself of his former bourgeois identity in order to identify fully with the Nagô, that is the inhabitants of the eastern region of Dahomey (present-day Benin). As he wrote in his correspondence with Métraux, whom he described as ‘almost his twin’, since 1952 his ‘sympathies’ for this people had been confirmed even more (Métraux and Verger 1994: 157). Verger never ceased to reaffirm his desire to ‘go native’, to ‘become Nagô’. Thus, on 12 May 1956 he wrote as follows: And yes! I have become very conformist, seeking Yoruba dignities and honours, while I have only sarcasm for those I could acquire in my own social milieu. This is very much what Lévi-Strauss describes [in Tristes tropiques]: ‘Willingly subversive among his own kind, and rebellious with regard to traditional usages, the ethnographer appears respectful to the extent of being conservative as soon as the society being envisaged is found to be different from his own’. If I do not wear a ribbon, on the contrary I display a bracelet of yellow and green pearls when in the milieu of the Yoruba Nagô, the insignia of my dignity as a babalawo. I refuse to kiss the hands of the dowagers, but I willingly and ostentatiously make extravagant bows in another style and utter interminable salutations in front of strange old crabs. (Métraux and Verger 1994: 229)

Verger’s ‘conversion’, unlike Bastide’s, does not seem to have been dictated by any inclination towards belief. Verger never ceased to declare his incredulity. Thus, in an interview he gave to Gilberto Gil a few days before his death in February 1996, he stated that he had never experienced the state of trance, since he was ‘an idiot as a Frenchman, a rationalist … I am not an idiot for believing in these things’ (quoted in Nobrega and Echeverria 2002: 388). In reality, Verger was never

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

187

inspired by profound mystical or metaphysical questioning as was Bastide: his transformation into Nagô was not the result of any spiritual quest, but the keystone to his quest for an identity. Upon his death, Verger was finally incorporated into the Nagô cult, attaining the status of an ancestor venerated in the cult of the eguns or revenants. Paradoxically for someone who remained an unbeliever right up to the end, Verger’s Baba Egun ‘manifested himself ’ for the first time in January 2005 in the terreiro of Balbino and received the name of funlade, ‘the ancestral spirit made of efun [chalk, a sacred substance linked to Oxalá]’ (Souty 2007: 366).27 Verger’s African initiation and the privileged links he was able to weave with the Bahian cult houses made him an ideal collaborator for Bastide, who, as we have seen, was greatly restricted in his research work. The extensive correspondence between Verger and Bastide, consisting of 227 letters over 27 years, reveals a genuine collaboration ‘between Verger, more nomadic, travelling unceasingly between Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean, and Bastide, more sedentary because he was teaching in São Paulo and Paris’ (Morin 1994: 40). Thus, in a letter sent to Verger on 30 June 1947 while leaving for Belém de Pará, Bastide writes: ‘Believe me, I envy you, being imprisoned by my students, far from the most cherished objects of my research. If you can, in the course of your travels, collect some texts of hymns, at Belém or Maranhão. I would be interested in having them to compare them with those of Recife or Bahia’ (quoted in Morin 1994: 40). At the end of the 1950s, Verger’s works inaugurated a new phase in Afro-Brazilian studies by suggesting links providing continuities with African cultures. His 1957 work had ‘the impact of a bomb’ in an environment in which all the specialists were insisting on acculturation, syncretism and change (cf. Bastide 1996: 18). The study of AfroBrazilian religions therefore became a hunting ground for the ‘Africanists’, a new generation of Brazilian anthropologists who, inspired by Verger’s work, went to Africa to search for proof of the faithfulness of certain Afro-Brazilian religious practices to the African tradition. For Bastide, Verger embodied the ‘transfusion of souls’ which he had pursued throughout his own life: No one could make these Afro-Brazilian cults better known and loved than Pierre Verger. Not only have his numerous voyages to the two coasts allowed him to compare the Brazilian ceremonies with those of Africa and to discover their perfect unity, but he is not an ‘outsider’, a stranger looking with curiosity and capturing hieratic gestures or faces in trance on the sensitive plate. He belongs to the world of the candomblés and has been accepted by the Blacks of Bahia as one of themselves, like a true brother, a white brother. North American sociologists have invented a term to

188

Stefania Capone

designate a research method which consists precisely of identifying oneself with the milieu one is studying, namely ‘participant observation’. However, Pierre Verger is more than a participant observer, for the word ‘observer’ still marks out a certain barrier, splitting the ethnographer in two in a rather unpleasant fashion as a ‘man of the outside’ and a ‘man of the inside’. For Pierre Verger, knowledge is the fruit of love and communion. (Bastide, Preface to Verger 1995 [1954]: 11)

Bastide tried several times to make his collaboration with Verger official, regretting that their two names did not figure ‘fraternally, one alongside the other’ (Morin 1994: 41). Verger almost always opposed the ‘law of secrecy’, to which he should have submitted as one who had been initiated, at the insistent requests of his friend.28 The works of these two authors demonstrate two models of ethnographic texts: one, Bastide’s, a highly abstract model of the candomblé, which, as da Silva recalls (2000: 127), owes its form to specific strategies of the textual description and interpretation of ethnographic data; and another model of ethnographic narration, Verger’s, that of ethnography as the ‘photography’ of a reality which becomes apparent in the choice of scenes to be shown in his work as a photographer, always presented as undeniable testimonies of the continuity of African traditions with Brazil and of the nearness of the candomblé rituals to those of the West African coast (ibid.: 130). For Verger, photography had to suffice by itself, without any other commentary or explanation. It is only at a second period, motivated by his desire to demonstrate the African faithfulness of Brazilian cults, that Verger was to use the image ‘in a more and more didactic fashion’ (Souty 2007: 133). The ambiguous relationship that Verger maintained with religious belief made him a sort of alter ego of Bastide’s, who remained, right up until his death, much more fascinated by mysticism than Verger. His distance, at the existential level, thus seems to be inversely proportional to this fascination.

Return to France, or ‘those excluded from the horde’ After 1951, and up to 1954, Bastide started to prepare his return to France, dividing his time between São Paulo and Paris. Lucien Febvre had offered him a post as Directeur d’études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). He finally returned to his own country in 1954. Bastide multiplied his teaching by giving a course on the sociology of Brazil and another on Brazilian literature to the Institut d’Amérique Latine. Art and sociology continued to be closely linked in Bastide’s trajectory. And it was in Paris that he resumed his association with Georges Gurvitch, who encouraged him to prepare his thesis.29

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

189

Upon Gurvitch’s death in 1965, Bastide became the director of the Laboratoire de Sociologie de la Connaissance, which he had created.30 Gurvitch’s position in the French academic world was unique: very much influenced by Marxism and German phenomenology, and concerned to combine certain Durkheimian themes with phenomenology, he never felt himself to be a true representative of French sociology, defining himself as being ‘excluded from the horde’ (Gurvitch 1966).31 Gurvitch was persuaded that the discipline was in crisis because it had still not succeeded in joining together theory and empirical research. Confronted with Durkheim’s theories, Gurvitch adopted the idea of social life being divided into different levels of reality, while criticising Durkheim’s ‘dogmatism’ and his view of God as a projection of the collective consciousness (Gurvitch 1959: 4). Such would be the consequences of a ‘conceptual deficiency, the cause of which is the Durkheimian definition of the social fact, from which unfolds the collective consciousness, to which is attributed the status of the supreme being’ (Marcel 2001: 13). Gurvitch was very critical of German sociology, and especially of Max Weber. The ‘young Marx’, by contrast, was one of his main points of reference because of the attention Marx gave to ‘the reciprocal immanence between society and the individual’ (Gurvitch 1948: 22). Mauss, with his notion of the ‘total social fact’, helped him work out his method, in which sociology and psychology were mixed together in order to achieve a genuine ‘reciprocity of perspectives’. The synthesis of the teachings of Mauss and Marx would lead Gurvitch to develop a typology of ‘depth levels’, which constituted an attempt to resolve the question of the separation between individual and society, thanks to levels which go from the morphological surface of society to the mental and psychic states of the individual. However, in order to arrive at a unified paradigm for the discipline, North American sociology also had to be confronted: The enormous descriptive work provided by American sociology has shown the way here, although to bear all its fruits, and even to become usable, it needs to be rooted in conceptual schemes that are clearer, more refined and more flexible, such as those which are the strength of French sociological thought. (Gurvitch 1950: 4)

In this respect, Bastide signed up fully to the Gurvitch school, since for him North American anthropology was merely the point of departure for the analysis of the interpenetrations of civilisations. He found the intellectual tools for the development of this analysis in French sociology and anthropology: Durkheim’s and Mauss’s notion of the

190

Stefania Capone

collective representation, Halbwach’s definition of collective memory and Lévy-Bruhl’s law of participations. Between 1945 and 1960 in French sociological circles, American authors were commented on in terms of a conception that referred to a ‘methodological holism’ inherited from Durkheimian and Marxist thought (Marcel 2004). It was a matter of appropriating methods of enquiry created across the Atlantic while rebuilding around them a conceptual inventory compatible with the need to explain the parts of the whole in all circumstances. American authors were therefore no more than ‘purveyors of methods permitting the collection of microsociological data’ (ibid.). Bastide adopted this critique by affirming that ‘the great task of sociology was to establish valid generalizations from monographic descriptions’ (Bastide 1960: 324). In the introduction to his major thesis, defended in 1957 at EPHE under Gurvitch’s supervision, Bastide examines the contributions of Marxism, Durkheimian sociology and French anthropology in the analysis of processes of the interpenetration of civilisations. Positivist sociology must be replaced by a ‘sociology of understanding’, which must be freed from Weberian subjectivism: ‘For the understanding he seeks is attained by reference to the observer, i.e. the sociologist who interprets the correlations. This is to ignore the fact that the sociologist himself is part of society, that he has been shaped by a given culture, and consequently that his own psychology has also been conditioned by social factors’ (Bastide 1978: 5). For Bastide, however, the determining factor of the new sociological conceptions must be sought in the very evolution of anthropology at the start of the twentieth century, and especially in the contributions of Granet and Leenhardt (1930, 1947): ‘A civilization does not reveal its true meaning unless it is grasped through its mythical vision of the world, which is more than its expression or justification, being indeed its very mainstay’ (Bastide 1978: 9). In American sociology, ‘what had so closely unified French sociology … was split up into three different disciplines: sociology proper, cultural anthropology and social psychology’. With Gurvitch and his ‘depth sociology’, ‘the stratification of the depth levels of social reality made a much richer dialectic possible … it made possible the transition from statics to change, from situation to cause; in brief it allowed explanation to be more effectively modelled on concrete fact in its perpetual transformation’ (ibid.: 10–11). Now, the sole means open to Bastide to achieve genuine understanding was ‘to become the Other’. But how could one integrate oneself into an ‘African’ religion? This was possible since, in Brazil, ‘there is a dissociation between culture and race’:

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

191

In the candomblé we find Spanish ‘daughters of the gods’ as well as French and Swiss members of the priestly hierarchy with various titles. […] All that is required is to accept African law wholeheartedly. From that moment on, however white one’s skin, one is caught up in the shared mystic rites, in taboos, and in susceptibility to magical vengeance. In fact it is possible in Brazil to be a Negro without being African and, contrariwise, to be both white and African. (ibid.: 28)

If, therefore, Bastide declares ‘Africanus sum’, he knows that his position in relation to the candomblé prevents him from achieving this deep understanding: it was evident that, even though I entered the candomblé as a ‘member’ and not at all as a simple observer, the law of the maturing of the secret, which dominates any religion of initiation, forced me to remain still too much of an outsider for me to be able to provide anything other than an introduction to a certain Negro vision of the world. Only a priest of the cult who occupies an elevated position in the hierarchy could provide us with the work I was praying for. (Bastide 1996: 18–19)

This ‘sociology of the encounter’ (Balandier 1995 [1960]), which demands the fruit of both scientific knowledge and shared belief, was thus condemned to failure. Only those who had been initiated could achieve genuine understanding, but they could not reveal it, since, as in Verger’s case, they were bound to the ‘law of secrecy’. Like the mystic, Bastide tried to position himself on another plane of existence, gazing towards somewhere else which was in reality at the root of himself. As he noted in his article of 1965 on ‘obscure and confused thought’, to lose consciousness to the point of losing oneself is equivalent to being plunged into darkness, to forgetting oneself in the silence of the self, until the ultimately revealing encounter with the Other. Right up to the end, Bastide was bound to the mast of reason, a new Ulysses trying to resist the Sirens’ songs.

Notes 1. For a critical analysis of this domain, see Capone (2005). 2. In his preface to a work of Bastide (1960), Georges Balandier writes (1995: v): ‘The separation, the delayed access to Parisian academic positions, the gap with respect to the ideological confrontations of the 1950s were for him a handicap. Besides these circumstances, equally important was the distance he was able to maintain between what was important to him and the concessions that had to be made to maintain his reputation.’ 3. On the ‘missed encounter’ between Bastide and Lévi-Strauss, see Mary (2000a, 2005). 4. For an analysis of the limits of this approach to the field, see Capone (1999: 41–48).

192

Stefania Capone

5. Richard taught at the University of Bordeaux, where he succeeded Emile Durkheim, who occupied the Chair of Pedagogy and Social Sciences from 1887 to 1902. He was linked to the Année Sociologique group, with whom he collaborated until 1907. For Bastide’s biography and bibliography, see Ravalet (1993a, 1993b). 6. Bastide stresses Tarde’s contribution (1890, 1898) to the study of the ‘interpenetrations of civilizations’ in one of his last works, Le prochain et le lointain (1970), where he defines him as ‘the true founder of cultural anthropology’. 7. This letter from Mauss to Bastide has been published in Bastidiana no. 49–50 (2005). See also Morin (1994: 38). 8. I have devoted another work to Bastide’s ‘principle of compartmentalization’ and theory of syncretism. See Capone (2007). 9. On this, see Bastide (1965), Beylier (1977: 234–37). 10. Brazil seems to have been a fertile field for the rediscovery of Durkheimian sociology, given Durkheim’s influence in the Paulist academic milieu of the period, especially among the members of the French mission in São Paulo (cf. Peixoto 2000). In his discussion of the relationships between magic and religion, Bastide partly adopts Durkheim’s formulations (1970) in opposing a ‘disaggregative’ magic to an ‘integrative’ religion. 11. This opposition to Durkheimian theories was not so clear in previous writings. Thus in 1945 Bastide wrote as follows on the subject of the trance or ‘mystical crisis’: ‘it is inscribed in a cultural ensemble, it follows a certain number of collective representations, and one can say of the candomblé what I have said elsewhere with regard to Durkheim, that a mysticism that commences at a fixed moment in order to end at a given moment while always following certain rules, far from explaining the social, can only be explained by the priority of the social over the mystical. … the explanation for the trance must be sought in sociology, in the constraint of the milieu over the individual’ (1995: 100). This approach was modified fundamentally some years later. Thus, in an article on the ‘washing of the necklace’, originally published in 1953, he writes: ‘the structure of the social is determined by religious conceptions and by the African philosophy of the universe. If we want to understand the morphological organisation of groups, we are obliged to pass through religious sociology, since it alone possesses the explanatory key’ (1973a: 370). 12. Jean-Paul Lefebvre (1990) lists thirty-eight French professors who took part in university missions to Brazil from 1934 to 1944. They occupied especially the chairs in the humanities and social sciences, while German and Italian professors shared the chairs in the exact and natural sciences. See also Peixoto (1989), Carelli (1993). 13. The sites and periods of his fieldwork were as follows: Bahia and Recife (December 1943 to February 1944), Porto Alegre (July 1945), Bahia (December 1948 to February 1949), and Bahia and São Luiz do Maranhão (July–August 1951). These periods correspond to university vacations in Brazil. 14. On the fertile ‘dialogues’ between Bastide and Brazilian intellectuals, as well as his debt to them, see Peixoto (2000), Capone (2007). 15. I have dealt with the relations between Herskovits and Bastide elsewhere (Capone 2007). Herskovits spent six months in Brazil at the start of the 1940s and supervised anthropological theses there, such as those by Octavio da Costa and René Ribeiro, while maintaining close links with Brazil, especially with Arthur Ramos. Cf. Guimarães (2004). 16. Ramos had already published, in 1936, an introduction to social psychology before Bastide arrived. For his interpretation of the process of acculturation, see Ramos (1979 [1937]). 17. From this journey Bastide would draw a book, published in Brazil in 1945 (see Bastide 1995). In this text, there are numerous errors concerning the terminology of the

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

193

candomblé and great confusion in transcriptions of the names of the orixás or divinities. The text was only published in France after Bastide’s death. 18. An obá is a particular type of ogan (cf. Capone 1999: 260–70). In this text, Bastide calls the mãe-de-santo (chief priestess) of the Casa de Oxumarê ‘Dona Cotilha’ instead of ‘Dona Cotinha’. Similarly, the celebrated pai-de-santo Joãozinho da Goméia, his principal informant at this time, becomes ‘João da Gávea’ (cf. Bastide 1995: 85, 63). 19. Here is an example of the Bastidian style, in which poetry seems to be the principal route to understanding reality: ‘The twilight chased me, forcing me to take the tram, which was full of black beggars, dreaming workers, amorous soldiers, ironic mulattos, brigands decked out in the most incredible shirts, sky blue with golden braids. I returned to my hotel, waiting for the tom-toms of the festival to call me back to those places, this time dominated by the night, the music and the divine madness’ (ibid.: 92). 20. The candomblé is divided into several ‘nations’: the nagô (ketu, ijexá, efon), the bantu (angola and congo), the jeje and the candomblé de caboclo, in which the indigenous spirits are venerated. Today this division into nations reflects a difference in the unfolding of the ritual rather than actual ‘ethnic’ origins. 21. See also the letters sent by Leiris to Bastide, published in no. 49–50 of Bastidiana (2005). 22. Two other brief trips were made after his return to France, in September 1962 and August 1973. 23. On Verger’s itinerary between Brazil and Africa, see Métraux and Verger (1994). A great number of works were published in Brazil at the centenary of Verger’s birth in 2002. Among others, see Le Bouler (2002), Lühning (2002, 2004), Moura (2002), and Nobrega and Echeverria (2002). On Verger, see also Capone (1999), Souty (2007). 24. The words ‘feeding the head’ designate the ceremony of the bori (bo + ori = ‘to venerate the head’), in which the head, the receptacle of the gods, is ‘fed’ by the blood of the sacrifices and the offerings of sacred food. Initiation proper is called feitura do santo, ‘the making of the saint [orixá]’. 25. When he started, Verger had no vocation for anthropological work, as he declared himself: ‘I did this research for myself and my friends in Bahia. The idea of publishing the results for a wider public never entered my mind. It was Monod who made me publish’ (Verger 1982: 257). Théodore Monod, Director of the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire or IFAN in the 1950s, had invited Verger to publish a study of cults in Brazil and Africa, which appeared in 1957. Verger entered the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 1962, finally becoming a directeur de recherche in 1972, at the age of 70. 26. See Souty (2007), Le Bouler (2002), on the tension – expressed in the attribution of two different protecting divinities (Xangô in Axé Opô Afonjá and Oxalá in the Casa Branca) – that brought the mães-de-santo of two of the most prestigious terreiros in Salvador into mutual opposition, since both wished to incorporate Verger into their cult group. 27. On the ‘counter-acculturative’ effect of Verger’s work and its consequences for the ritual practice of the candomblé, see Capone (1999: 253–59), Souty (2007: 256–62). The search for a ‘Nagô purity’ in the creation of a new terreiro, that of his ‘protégé’ Balbino Daniel de Paula, in which Verger participated actively, is an excellent illustration of the role he played in legitimating a ritual model (ketu) in the Bahian candomblé. Cf. Capone (2003). 28. They only published two articles together, a study of divination in Salvador in 1953, and an article on the Nagô markets of Dahomey in 1959. 29. For information on Gurvitch’s biography, see Gurvitch (1966), Duvignaud (1969), Balandier (1972).

Stefania Capone

194

30. This raises a question about Marcel’s statement (2001: 6) that, after 1965, ‘there was no longer a Gurvitch school’. Gurvitch had left his mark on Bastide’s work, notably on his theory of syncretism and of the ‘Negro-African collective memory’ (cf. Capone 2007). See also Mary (2000a, 2000b). 31. One could say the same about Bastide, cf. Balandier (1995).

References Balandier, G. 1972. Georges Gurvitch, sa vie, son oeuvre, Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises. ——— 1995 [1960]. Une sociologie de la rencontre, Préface to Roger Bastide, Les religions africaines au Brésil: contribution à une sociologie des interpénétrations de civilisation, Presses Universitaires Françaises. Bastide, R. 1928. Mysticisme et sociologie, Revue Internationale de Sociologie, 36(5/6): 297–306. ——— 1931a. Les Arméniens de Valence, Revue Internationale de Sociologie, 39(1/2), 17– 42. ——— 1931b. Les problèmes de la vie mystique, Paris: Armand Colin. ——— 1935. Eléments de sociologie religieuse, Paris: Armand Colin. ——— 1938. Pintura e Mística, Revista do Arquivo Municipal (São Paulo), 50: 47–60. ——— 1940. Psicanálise do Cafuné, Revista do Arquivo Municipal (São Paulo), 6(70): 118–30. ——— 1946. A propósito da poesia como método sociológico, 2 parts, Diário de São Paulo, 8 and 22 February. ——— 1957. Brésil, terre de contrastes, Paris: Hachette. ——— 1958. Le candomblé de Bahia (rite nagô), Paris: Mouton. ——— 1960. Problèmes de l’entrecroisement des civilisations et de leurs œuvres, in G. Gurvitch (ed.), Traité de sociologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises, vol. 2. ——— 1965. La pensée obscure et confuse, Le Monde Non-Chrétien, 75/76: 137–56. ——— 1970. Le prochain et le lointain, Paris: Edition Cujas. ——— 1973a. Algumas considerações em torno de uma ‘lavagem de contas’, in R. Bastide, Estudos Afro-brasileiros, São Paulo: Perspectiva. ——— 1973b. Estudos Afro-brasileiros, São Paulo: Perspectiva. ——— 1975. Le sacré sauvage et autres essais, Paris: Payot. ——— 1978 [1960]. The African religions of Brazil: toward a sociology of the interpenetration of civilizations [Les religions africaines au Brésil: contribution à une sociologie des interpénétrations de civilisation], Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——— 1995. Images du Nordeste Mystique en Noir et Blanc, Paris: Actes Sud/Babel (orig. Brazilian edn. 1945). ——— 1996. Etat actuel des recherches afro-américaines en Amérique Latine, Bastidiana, 13/14: 11–28. Bastide, R. and P. Verger. 1953. Contribuição ao Estudo da Adivinhação em Salvador (Bahia), Revista do Museu Paulista, 7: 357–80. ——— 1959. Contribution à l’étude sociologique des marchés nagô au Bas-Dahomey, Cahiers de l’Institut de science économique appliquée, 95: 33–65. Beylier, C. 1977. L’œuvre brésilienne de Roger Bastide, Thèse de doctorat, Paris, 2 vols. Caillois, R. 1950 [1939]. L’homme et le sacré, Paris: Gallimard. Capone, S. 1999. La quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé: pouvoir et tradition au Brésil, Paris: Karthala.

Roger Bastide or the ‘darknesses of alterity’

195

——— 2003. Regards contemporains sur les premiers candomblés à Salvador de Bahia, in A. Kouvouama and D. Cochart (eds), Modernités transversales: citoyenneté, politique et religion, Paris: Éditions Paari. ——— 2005. Repenser les ‘Amériques noires’: nouvelles perspectives dans la recherche afro-américaniste, Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 91(1): 83–91. ——— 2007. Transatlantic dialogue: Roger Bastide and the African American religions, Journal of Religion in Africa, 37(3): 1–35. Cardoso, I. 1994. Entretien avec R. Bastide, Bastidiana, numéro spécial, ‘Roger Bastide: Claude Lévi-Strauss. Du principe de coupure aux courts-circuits de la pensée’, 7/8: 69–73. Carelli, M. 1993. Cultures croisées: histoire des échanges culturels entre la France et le Brésil de la découverte aux temps modernes, Paris: Nathan. da Silva, V.G. 2000. O antropólogo e sua magia, São Paulo: EDUSP. Dumas, G. 1923–24. Traité de psychologie, Paris: Alcan. Durkheim, E. 1895. Les règles de la méthode sociologique, Paris: Alcan. ——— 1912. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris: Alcan. ——— 1970. L’avenir de la religion, in E. Durkheim, La science sociale et l’action, Introduction et présentation de J.-C. Filloux, Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises. Duvignaud, J. 1969. Georges Gurvitch, symbolisme social et sociologie dynamique, Paris: Seghers. Guimarães, A.S.A. 2004. Comentários à correspondência entre Melville Herskovits e Arthur Ramos (1935–1941), in F.A.Peixoto, H. Pontes and L.M. Schwarcz (eds), Antropologia, história, experiências, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG. Gurvitch, G. 1948. La sociologie du jeune Marx, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 4, 3−47. ——— 1950. La vocation actuelle de la sociologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises. ——— 1959. Les cadres sociaux de la connaissance sociologique, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 26: 165–72. ——— 1966. Mon itinéraire intellectuel ou l’exclu de la horde, L’Homme et la société, 1: 3–12. Herskovits, M. 1938. Acculturation: the study of cultural contact, New York: Augustin. Le Bouler, J.-P. 2002. Pierre Fatumbi Verger: um homen livre, Salvador: Fundação Pierre Verger. Leenhardt, M. 1930. Notes d’ethnologie néo-calédonienne, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie. ——— 1947. Do Kamo: la personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien, Paris: Gallimard. Lefebvre, J.-P. 1990. Les professeurs français des missions universitaires au Brésil (1934– 1944), Cahiers du Brésil Contemporain, 12: 89–100. Leiris, M. 1958. La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar, Paris: Plon. ——— 1996. Miroir d’Afrique, textes édités par Jean Jamin, Paris: Quarto Gallimard. Lévy-Bruhl, L. 1922. La mentalité primitive, Paris: Alcan. Lühning, A. (ed.) 2002. Verger-Bastide: dimensões de uma amizade, Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil. ——— 2004. Pierre Verger, repórter fotográfico, Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil. Marcel, J.-C. 2001. Georges Gurvitch: les raisons d’un succès, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 110: 97–119. ——— 2004. Une réception de la sociologie américaine en France (1945–1960), Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 11: 45–68. Mary, A. 2000a. Le bricolage africain des héros chrétiens, Paris: Editions du Cerf. ——— 2000b. Le défi du syncrétisme: le travail symbolique de la religion d’Eboga (Gabon), Paris: Editions de l’EHESS. ——— 2005. Métissage and bricolage in the making of African Christian identities, Social Compass, 52(3): 281–94.

196

Stefania Capone

Mauss, M. 1990 [1922]. The gift, London and New York: Routledge. Métraux, A. and P. Verger. 1994. Le pied à l’étrier: correspondance 1946–1963, Paris: JeanMichel Place (présenté et annoté par Jean-Pierre Le Bouler). Morin, F. 1975. Roger Bastide ou l’anthropologie des gouffres, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 40: 99–106. ——— 1994. Les inédits et la correspondance de Roger Bastide, in P. Laburthe-Tolra (ed.), Roger Bastide ou le réjouissement de l’abîme, Paris: L’Harmattan. Motta, R. 1994. L’apport brésilien dans l’œuvre de Bastide sur le candomblé de Bahia, in Philippe Laburthe-Tolra (ed.), Roger Bastide ou le réjouissement de l’abîme, Paris: L’Harmattan. Moura, C.E.M. de. (ed.). 2002. Uma saída de iaô: Pierre Verger, São Paulo: Axis Mundi Editora. Nobrega, C. and R. Echeverria. 2002. Verger: um retrato em preto e branco, Salvador: Corrupio. Park, R.E. 1928. Human migration and the marginal man, The American Journal of Sociology, 33: 881–93. Peixoto, F.A. 1989. Franceses e Norte-Americanos nas ciências sociais brasileiras 1930– 1960, in S. Miceli (ed.), História das ciências sociais no Brasil, vol. 1, São Paulo: Vértice. ——— 2000. Diálogos brasileiros: uma análise da obra de Roger Bastide, São Paulo: EDUSP/FAPESP. ——— 2005. Roger Bastide: Nordeste mystique, itinéraires africains et villes brésiliennes, Bastidiana, 49–50: 127–40. Queiróz, M.I.P. de. 1983. Nostalgia do Outro e do Alhures: a obra sociológica de Roger Bastide, in M.I.P. Queiróz (ed.), Roger Bastide, São Paulo: Ática. ——— 1994. Roger Bastide, professor da Universidade de São Paulo, Estudos avançados, 8(22): 215–20. Ramos, A. 1936. Introdução à psicologia social, Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio. ——— 1979 [1937]. As culturas negras no Novo Mundo, São Paulo: Editora Nacional. Ravalet, C. 1993a. Bio-bibliographie de Roger Bastide, Bastidiana, 1: 39–48. ——— 1993b. Bibliographie de Roger Bastide, Bastidiana, 3: 7–110. ——— 2005. Roger Bastide et le Brésil, Bastidiana, 49–50: 117–26. Redfield, R., R. Linton and M. Herskovits. 1936. Memorandum for the study of acculturation, American Anthropologist, 38: 149–52. Richard, G. 1923. L’athéisme dogmatique en sociologie religieuse, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse, 3: 125–37, 229–61. Souty, J. 2007. Pierre Fatumbi Verger: du regard détaché à la connaissance initiatique, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Tarde, G. 1993 [1890]. Les lois de l’imitation, Paris: Kimé. ——— 1999 [1898]. Les lois sociales: esquisse d’une sociologie, Paris: Synthélabo. Teixeira, A. et al. 1952. Arthur Ramos, Rio de Janeiro: Ministério de Educação e Saúde, Serviço de Documentação. Verger, P. 1957. Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun: à Bahia, la Baie de tous les saints, au Brésil et à l’ancienne côte des Esclaves en Afrique, Dakar, Mémoires de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), no. 51. ——— 1978. Roger Bastide, Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, 20: 52–53. ——— 1982. 50 anos de fotografia, Salvador: Corrupio. ——— 1995 [1954]. Dieux d’Afrique: culte des Orishas et Vodouns à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves en Afrique et à Bahia de Tous les Saints au Brésil, Paris: Editions Revue Noire.

Chapter 8

THE ART AND CRAFT OF ETHNOGRAPHY: LUCIEN BERNOT 1919–1993 Gérard Toffin

In the landscape of the French anthropology of the second half of the twentieth century, Lucien Bernot (1919–1993) appears as a quite original figure.1 Like certain other anthropologists we are dealing with in the present volume, he did not occupy the front stage and was not well-known abroad, except perhaps by Western colleagues working on his particular geographical areas of research, namely the Chittagong Hills, Burma and Southeast Asia. He has nevertheless been very influential in France, through his books and his teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (sixth section), which in 1975 became the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). In fact, Bernot trained a whole generation of young anthropologists between 1960 until 1980, mainly on Asiatic studies but also a few on European ethnography. I myself was a doctoral student of Bernot’s for both my Ph.D. dissertations.2 From 1972 till 1986 I was in very close contact with him and learned a great deal about anthropology from him. His teaching was for me a kind of revelation, an immersion into the reality of fieldwork and the craft of ethnography, as well as a move from concept to action. Throughout his career, he defended a vision of anthropology based on intensive fieldwork and knowledge of the vernacular languages. He campaigned in favour of an ethnography oriented towards facts, realities and detailed observations. As Clifford remarks (1988: 139), this ethnographic vision, which is often associated with the Musée de l’Homme, formerly located in the Palais du Trocadéro (Paris), is rooted in a long French tradition. It dates

198

Gérard Toffin Figure 8.1. Lucien Bernot, on the occasion of his being honoured with a Festschrift at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1987. To the right in the background, Claude Lévi-Strauss (left) is talking to Marc Augé. Taken by J.C. Vaysse. Collection Bernard Koechlin.

back to the very origins of French anthropology, through figures like Paul Rivet, Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris and, as far as Asia is concerned, ethnographers belonging to the École Française d’ExtrêmeOrient (Charles Archaimbault, Guy Moréchand and Jean Boulbet, to name but a few). After the mid-1950s, this approach became in many ways linked with the name of André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986), prominent archaeologist and ethnographer specialising in technology, who was a professor at the Collège de France from 1969 until 1980. For a number of French anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century, Leroi-Gourhan embodied an alternative to the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, which is often considered too distant from ethnographic realities. Yet although he was undoubtedly an eminent scholar and great spirit, Leroi-Gourhan cannot be reduced to just one school. In the course he taught in the 1960s at the Sorbonne, I remember that he often claimed to be closer to the cultural anthropology of the United States than to the French or British schools of anthropology, a view of himself corroborated by a careful examination of his works. Although this ethnographic and empirical perspective has never been totally rejected by anthropologists who are more oriented towards theory, and although its practitioners generally maintained close relations with the latter, it retains its vitality as a stream of anthropology that is very different in its style and intellectual concerns from the Lévi-Straussian structural school (Toffin 1995).

The art and craft of ethnography

199

Life and works Lucien Bernot was born in Gien (Loiret department), central France, in 1919.3 Unlike most French anthropologists of the twentieth century, he came from a very modest family with strong rural roots. His father, who taught himself to read and write, was a worker in the PTT state telephone company. Throughout his life he cultivated a small garden and some vines, as was the custom in the region. Lucien became a typographer and followed this job from 1935 (when he was fifteen years old) until 1943 in several workshops all over France, including the Imprimerie Nationale in Paris. But he soon became interested in other cultures, starting with Asiatic writing systems, which were different from the graphic signs he was using in his job. From 1944 until 1947, he learned Chinese, then Tibetan, at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris.4 This degree gave him an equivalent to the baccalauréat and enabled him to enter university. In 1946 in the Musée de l’Homme he met André LeroiGourhan, who found him a post in the Asiatic department with a small salary. Bernot was in charge of filling out card indexes for the various tools and items that the museum acquired. In 1949, Claude Lévi-Strauss raised some funds from UNESCO for this young student in ethnology and oriental languages. Bernot was sent by the historian Lucien Febvre to a village located on the border between Normandy and Picardy, northwest of Paris, with René Blancard, a psycho-sociologist (see Lévi-Strauss 1995, Zonabend 1995). This UNESCO project was very much under the influence of the ‘Culture and Personality’ American school. Its emphasis was on the interactions between individuals and their society, as well as on the cultural models affecting children at an early age. The project was also intended to highlight contacts between cultures. A border village between two geo-cultural regions was an excellent choice in that connection. The two young men spent eight months there and in 1953 published a book, entitled Nouville, an invented word derived from nous, ‘we’, and ville, ‘town’. This monographic study, which was republished in 1995, was the first to focus on a French village from a genuinely anthropological perspective. The earlier studies on French communities by Robert Hertz (1913) on ‘Saint Besse’ in the Aosta valley, and by Louis Dumont (1951) on La Tarasque in Provence were mostly concerned with local cults. As for the study by Laurence Wylie on Roussillon (Village in the Vaucluse), this only dates from 1957. Between 1951 and 1952, Bernot undertook fieldwork with his wife, Denise, in the Chittagong Hills, in what was then East Pakistan (today Bangladesh). He was advised to do research in this area by Lévi-Strauss, who thus for a second time directed the young ethnographer’s career in

200

Gérard Toffin

a decisive manner. Lévi-Strauss had actually just returned himself from the Chittagong Hills, as he narrates in Tristes tropiques (1958). Bernot joined CNRS in 1954 and returned a second time to East Pakistan, thanks to a scholarship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (October 1959–February 1960). He worked mainly on a Tibeto-Burmanspeaking population, the Marma, who originally came from Burma. He submitted his doctorat d’état on this Buddhist group in 1967 with a fulllength study under the supervision of André Leroi-Gourhan, the thesis being published the same year in a two-volume monograph, Les paysans arakanais du Pakistan oriental (1967a). In 1967 another book dealing with another Tibeto-Burman-speaking ethnic group, Les Cak: Contribution à l’étude ethnographique d’une population de langue loi (1967b), whom Bernot had studied in 1960, also appeared. The Cak are very close linguistically to the Kadu, who live on the upper Mu River, Burma. By then Bernot had already joined the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (in 1964) as a Directeur d’Études and had started his important teaching to students in ethnology (or anthropologie sociale, the expression made more and more familiar in France under the influence of Louis Dumont and Claude Lévi-Strauss). His courses focused on technology, one of his favourite themes, but also on other topics, such as kinship and ethnobotany. This was before the anthropology department at Nanterre University (Paris X) had really got going: it only started in 1967 and became really effective in the early 1970s. The sixth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études was therefore the main place for training advanced students in anthropology. Bernot participated with Georges Condominas and André-Georges Haudricourt in the foundation of the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches sur l’Asie du Sud-Est et le Monde Indonésien (Cedrasemi). He played an active role in this Centre, stimulating a programme on a linguistic atlas of Tibeto-Burman languages to which I shall return. He went back several times to Asia, especially during the summer vacations, which in Southeast Asia corresponded with the rainy season. He worked mainly in Burma with his wife, who became Professor of Burmese at the Institut National des Langues et des Civilisations Orientales. He studied a number of Burmese craftsmen all around Mandalay and became interested in another ethnic group, the Intha, who lived on the edges of the Inle Lake and practised agriculture on floating islands. Although he was in some ways marginal to the dominant French academic establishment, Bernot was appointed professor in the prestigious Collège de France in 1979, where he mainly taught Burmese and Assamese ethnography. He entitled his chair the ‘Sociographie de l’Asie du Sud-Est’, resuscitating a term current at the beginning of the twentieth century (e.g. the chair of Alfred Le Chatelier, then of Louis

The art and craft of ethnography

201

Massignon, in the Collège de France was in the ‘Sociologie et Sociographie du monde musulman’). Bernot gives the following definition of this term: ‘To observe the facts and isolate those that characterize the society being studied without losing sight of their context, to search the disciplines that relate to this context for the means to clarify these facts and, through this, to enrich and deepen observations and descriptions: these are the steps that, for me too, the term “sociography” covers’ (Bernot 2000 [1978]: 28).5 He wanted to bring ethnography and history together in the Boasian manner, and to study literate as well as preliterate societies (Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France 2000 [1979]: 500). Yet, a few years later, he was no longer sure that sociography was the right word (personal communication). He died in 1997, at the age of 72, just after mowing his lawn in the garden of his house in Brantes, in southern France. Thus we lost an erudite scholar, a great connoisseur of rural life, a bon vivant, a very warm person with an open nature, expansive, but also modest and quite untypical in many other respects in the intellectual milieu of French anthropology.

Monographic studies and attention to detail Of all the professional ethnographers we are dealing with in this volume, perhaps nobody placed more emphasis on the importance of monographic study than Bernot. Even though he occasionally defended himself from the charge of relying exclusively on this method (‘AvantPropos’ to Les Paysans arakanais), most of his books have a monographic structure focused either on a village or a minority group. Nouville, for example, is the study of a specific locality inhabited by 594 individuals working in either agricultural activities or two local glass manufacturers. Les Paysans arakanais deals specifically with a particular ethnic group (about 100,000 in number in 1960), the Marma. The same can be said for his books on the Cak (about 3,000 individuals) and his article devoted to the Intha published in the Journal d’agronomie tropicale et de botanique appliquée (2000 [Bernot and Bruneau 1972]). Bernot was fully aware of the limitations of the monographic approach, especially with regard to a village. As he explained in one of his best articles, ‘Les Plein-Vent’,6 published in Ethnos (1975a), a village does not live in total isolation from the external world, but has links with surrounding villages and overlapping economic or social interests; it also has a relationship with cities as well as various markets, on which it may depend. Bernot also acknowledges that a particular village is frequently visited by people from different localities and that marriage rules often unite different communities through strong links. Quoting

202

Gérard Toffin

the French Marxist historian Charles Parain, he stressed that a regional approach is sometimes a useful complement to village study. Likewise, he mentioned Louis Dumont, his colleague at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, who argued that, in the Indian context, the supposedly self-sufficient multi-caste village is partly irrelevant from the sociological point of view (Dumont 1966). Nonetheless, Bernot defended the monographic approach, which he considered a good point of departure. Admittedly, the village framework is more appropriate for studying localities inhabited by a single ethnic group, such as the ones he worked in, than those consisting of multicaste communities. But more fundamentally, he was of the opinion that peasant life and rural social units are best considered at the local level, because farmers are attached in a very intimate manner to a specific territory. Bernot even suggests that the size of the ideal village to be investigated intensively by an anthropologist staying alone continuously for a year is 200 to 300 persons, including children (2000 [1973]: 325).7 It is only at this micro-level that the professional fieldworker can be on close terms with the local population and get to know everybody. It is also at this level that s/he can realise the strong contrast which opposes ‘us’ to ‘others’ in all rural worlds, a theme which occurs repeatedly in his works. Bernot devoted a whole article on how to conduct a census in a small territorial unit without official census data or a civil register. In this work, the author of Nouville is stimulated by a concern to collect data with as much rigour as possible (‘Le recensement d’un village’, 2000 [1973]), but unfortunately he ignores sampling problems and the representativeness of the materials collected. In his view, the census of a village of forty houses normally takes about forty hours. He suggests that the investigator should collect genealogies for the study of the social organisation at the same time. He also gives some advice on the possible use of photography to provide better identification of the population during an enquiry and to give each of them the pleasure of receiving their own photograph: The work of taking a census can be facilitated by means of photographs. One can ask a certain number of individuals to pose (it does not matter whom so long as they live in the village). From these photographs one has enlargements made, as many as the people in the photographs, plus two. When the photographs return from town, two are kept and [the others] distributed. On one of the retained photographs is indicated, using tracing paper, the name of each individual and his or her number. The other photograph is cut up and the corresponding face glued on to the individual page [for each person]. (ibid.: 327–28)

The art and craft of ethnography

203

This article may be considered as a late but nonetheless useful development of the innovative works of W.H.R. Rivers (1900) on the use of the genealogical method to study kinship systems and social organisation. By and large, indeed, Bernot’s fieldwork method was more or less in accordance with the methods laid down by Rivers in the fourth edition of Notes and Queries (Royal Anthropological Institute 1912):8 the necessity of learning the local language, the search for spontaneous informants, the concern to create as great an empathy as possible between the enquirer and the population being studied (Stocking 1995). This method of intensive enquiry, with both direct and participant observation, which Malinowski developed so well subsequently, contrasts strongly with the practice of the first tribal ethnographers in India and Burma, British for the most part, who gathered their information mainly while ‘touring’ or ‘surveying’ whole districts, spending a few nights camping in successive villages, and interviewing informants in isolation rather than in any detailed context.9 Ultimately, Bernot validates the monographic approach in these terms: Monograph, rural sociology within the monograph, structural study – no one of these forms of study can exclude the two others. But the excellent monograph can always, sooner or later, lend itself to structural analysis, while a structural study, however excellent, can never permit the monograph to be reconstructed. (1973: 245)

In other words, monographs are credited with a more permanent life than theoretical studies, which often fall under the influence of transitory moods, and whose life expectancy is much more limited. A good monograph will always be useful to future generations, being an inventory, a document made at a certain point in time and space, to which it can always be referred. It is instructive to examine closely the synopses and divisions of his works into chapters. For instance, Nouville falls roughly into three parts. The first four chapters are devoted to the geographical, historical, demographic and economic settings. The second part includes four chapters dealing with the life-cycle (infancy, adolescence, marriage and family life, and old age). The third and last part focuses on the inhabitants of the village and their relationships with outsiders (communal life, values, information, space and time, attitudes toward outsiders). The contents correspond to the expectations of those who conceived the UNESCO project. Among the various appendixes, one presents the result of the psychological tests that Blancard performed on a selected sample of the population. Included is an interesting chapter

204

Gérard Toffin

(Ch. 5), written in fact by Blancard, on childhood and education, a subject too often neglected by anthropologists even today. Let us now consider Les paysans arakanais, Bernot’s masterpiece, which contains an impressive body of ethnographic materials. Part 1 looks at the narratives of a Hinduised group through historical sources, mainly European (Portuguese, British, Dutch). Part 2, ‘Le monde végétal’, includes chapters on the elementary principles of Marma technology (Ch. 3), slash and burn agriculture (Ch. 4), occasional agriculture (ploughing and gardening) (Ch. 5), food (Ch. 6), bamboo and cotton (Ch. 7) and the house (Ch. 8). The third part is devoted to society – men and women – with chapters focusing on the economy (Ch. 9), the life-cycle (Ch. 10), the village and its environment (Ch. 11) and kinship (Ch. 12). The conclusion is devoted to the social division of labour. As a whole, such lists of contents are very classical, cover most aspects of society and culture, and adopt a holistic viewpoint, except for the two important domains of religion and politics, which are never treated as such, but only in relation to the facts of social organisation and material life. In the conclusion to Nouville, the two authors explain that their aim has been to throw light on the links between all aspects of the life of a social group: psychological, sociological, historical and economic. These divisions into chapters can be considered typical of the ethnographic monographs prepared in the Musée de l’Homme (and the École Française d’Extrême-Orient too) at that time. But what marks Bernot out as original and distinctive is his scientific attention to detail. Undoubtedly his powers of observation were acute, his interest in the concrete passionate. He himself gives some illustrations of his ethnographic method: For example, let us cite the different ways of lighting a fire according to whether it is done by a man or a woman, the places in the house classified according to whether they are occupied by the father, the mother or the children, the differences between the birth of a boy and that of a girl, between the cremation of a deceased male or female, the smell of a mother’s clothing in infancy, what happens to the hair of a young monk, the yams that wind themselves round in the opposite direction, etc. (1967a: 15)

What he thinks more important is the noting of ‘little details’ or ‘microdetails’, ‘hidden or not in the discourse of the informants’, in accordance with Mauss’s instructions in his Manuel d’ethnographie (2007 [1947]: 7). These details are in fact ‘crucial, primordial’, in Bernot’s words. He presents his work as an attempt, ‘starting with a little, to understand the whole, that is, to make the whole understood: that is, to make the Marma ethnic group understood’ (1967a: 14). The aim is to leave as little as possible behind the scenes and to list all the

The art and craft of ethnography

205

details, so that the underlying determinants of the social and cultural rules, the patterns of a group, can be highlighted. The result is a somewhat puzzling way of writing anthropology, one that recalls Franz Boas’s works, as well as the volumes of the Encyclopédie agricole of the Éditions J.B. Baillière10 or the agronomical works of the Maison rustique publishing house.11 These two types of work, which are a mine of inexhaustible information on the history of agricultural techniques in France, were very well known in the French provinces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though more by the rural elites in the strict sense than the minor peasants. This type of writing accumulates a tremendous quantity of detail on the social group studied, providing a sort of ‘naturalistic’ ethnography devoted to the daily routines, the chores of ordinary activities, repeatedly citing the terms of one’s informants and interlocutors. Thus when Bernot is studying agricultural techniques, he gives a lengthy description of how Hari Phru ploughs his two-acre plot of land before sowing wheat from 8.30 in the morning until 6.15 in the evening. Similarly, when he deals with marriage, he gives a description of a particular wedding, at a certain time and place. The farmers and their families are presented personally in the context, without any literary effect, and are placed at the heart of the ethnographic description. This particularistic approach also characterises chapters on rituals. Interestingly, the ethnographic data are often presented in a rough form, not very different, in all probability, from his field notes. Besides, the sentences in his texts, intricate and often quite long, are not written to be elegant but to reflect the complexity of the realities observed, the very opposite of any journalistic or literary type of writing. This direct style conveys a sense of reality that is expressed in the uniqueness of individuals and events.

The ethnography of techniques and of the botanical world In his teaching as well as in his writings, Bernot stressed the importance of the study of techniques and of material culture for a thorough understanding of pre-modern societies and cultures. After being appointed Directeur d’Études in the École Pratique des Hautes Études, he focused his seminar on ‘Les techniques de consommation (habitat, alimentation, vêtement) en Asie du Sud-Est’. His aim was to study the links between these techniques and the society using them and to bring out the articulations between the two. These aspects became more and more important as he advanced in his career. He identified a methodological interest in starting with these studies: at the beginning of his work, the ethnographer often does not understand enough of the

206

Gérard Toffin

language of the unfamiliar culture in which he has chosen to settle to carry out research on more abstract subjects. In advocating this method, he was inspired by his doctoral supervisor, André Leroi-Gourhan, whose main achievements in the field of anthropology were to reflect on technology and on the classification of pre-industrial techniques from all over the world, taking as his main parameter the various technical operations on raw materials (hammering, cutting, scraping, shearing, moulding, etc.). Bernot was also influenced by André-Georges Haudricourt, a colleague with whom he was in close contact throughout his professional life and with whom he shared a common vision of anthropology, or perhaps more broadly, a conception of research in the social sciences and humanities. Bernot was also a steady reader of the seven volumes of Joseph Needham’s Science and civilisation in China, a series published by Cambridge University Press from 1954 to 1985. This great work is conceived as a history of science, technology and medicine in China, seen in its fullest social and intellectual context. Bernot used to take examples from these books to illustrate his teaching. His concern for material culture was first of all motivated by his feeling that too much attention had been paid to religion and symbolism by most anthropologists, especially French ones, and that the ordinary means of subsistence had been neglected in the majority of studies. In fact, one of Bernot’s main lessons was that rural communities in either the hills or the plains were made up of peasant agriculturists, whose main preoccupation was to produce food for their own consumption, provide shelter, exchange and carry goods, wear clothes, produce tools, and in a more general way adapt themselves to a somewhat hostile environment. In a lecture delivered in the Maison franco-japonaise (Kyoto) in 1974, Bernot argued that a technique has to be studied from three different aspects: historical, geographical (including the influence of soil, fauna and flora) and how it is used. In this last respect, he proposed a useful functional classification of techniques into three parts: production (how tools and objects are acquired or made), distribution (how they are given away, exchanged or stored), and consumption (how they are used). Significantly, in each of these techniques, he placed the emphasis on gestures (the ‘techniques of the body’ of Marcel Mauss, 1936), and on the movements of the hand, the feet and of the whole body in daily work activities. Studying fieldwork, he recommended asking the following questions for each tool and object: ‘What? Where? When? How? How many? By whom? Why?’ (2000: 270). However, compared to Haudricourt and Leroi-Gourhan, Bernot’s studies of material culture pay less attention to classification proper. In accordance with the museological emphasis of the Musée de l’Homme,

The art and craft of ethnography

207

he took seriously every ethnographic object as a witness of the society being studied. Yet, on the whole he was more interested in the context, the relationship between various techniques and their relationships with social facts. Religious ideas interested him mostly when they could be connected with material life. Although he did not theorise the topic, he argued that technology is socially and culturally constructed. This appears clearly in his research on the house among the Marma and Cak. For instance, among many other topics, he considered such matters as the positions allocated to the different family members in the domestic space, the social and religious uses of different rooms (whether there was partition), the division into female and males areas, the values attributed to each part of the dwelling place, the economic aspects of the different divisions of the house, the inventory of all the objects kept in it, how they are kept, what happens in case of their loss and the psychological aspect of the house as a refuge. Very often, all these indicators vary from one ethnic group to another. More broadly, he considered the house ‘as the most useful, if not the most precious object of all ethnographic study’ (2000 [1982]: 142). In other words, for Bernot techniques were a key to entering into the social world, to deciphering cultural categories, modes of thought and local values. With food or habitat, he was confronted not only with technology, but also with economy, religion, family life, law and so on. My own study of the anthropology of space among the Newar and Tamang of Nepal is greatly indebted to these ideas (e.g. Toffin 1994). The similarity with Mauss’s Manuel d’ethnographie (2007 [1947]) is particularly evident here. In his courses delivered at the Institut d’Ethnologie in the University of Paris from 1920 to 1939, under the title ‘Instructions d’ethnographie descriptive’, Mauss actually devoted a great deal of space to technology. For the great master of anthropological studies of this period, the study of clothing, the house, pottery and fishing provided a way of addressing problems of economics or social morphology, of religious or legal anthropology. His teaching provided a vivid introduction to the study of societies populating the French colonies between the wars and ‘societies at the same stage’ (ibid.: 5). In this work, from considering the sandal as footwear Mauss passes to African secret societies, from agricultural works in Oceania to Polynesian chiefs, from boat technology to the chants of rowers. ‘Learning to observe’ is specified as the goal from the first sentence of the Manuel (ibid.). Although Bernot only came to know Mauss towards the end of the latter’s life, one finds the same inspiration in his own course. Indeed, his teaching seems to have come straight out of the Manuel. It is this global vision of anthropology that the title of the volume published in his honour in 1987 – De la voûte céleste au terroir,

208

Gérard Toffin

du terrain au foyer: mosaïque sociographique – with contributions from sixty-five anthropologists, tries to capture (see Koechlin et al. 1987). Closely linked to the study of material culture for Bernot was the examination of plants and the botanical world. In this respect too he was probably influenced by his long-term friend Haudricourt, an agronomist himself and a specialist in cultivated plants. Together they edited the Journal d’agronomie tropicale et de botanique appliquée, a wellknown scholarly journal of ethno-botany published by the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris since 1923. Bernot collected from the Marma a herbarium of about 160 vegetables, giving the names and uses of ninety-two edible plants, either wild or domesticated. Such botanical variety is nothing exceptional in Southeast Asia, where forest people often use more than four hundred species of plants, all named, as food. The Hanunoo of Mindoro described by Harold C. Conklin (1975), an important reference in Bernot’s works, distinguish more than 1,600 different plant types, reaching the astounding number of 430 cultivars. The samples collected in the field by Bernot were given to the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and identified by Haudricourt and J.E. Vidal. For most of these plants, the author of Les paysans arakanais also documented how they were cooked and what they were eaten with. Bernot developed a strong interest in the agriculture of these selfcontained societies, which was organised mainly to fulfil the subsistence needs of its people rather than to produce a marketable surplus. On the one hand, he dealt with swidden agriculture, which was practised by the Marma on the peripheral land of their territory, as in a great number of other Asian rural groups. He even gave a yearly course on that topic in the Collège de France. On the other hand, he spoke and wrote a great deal about rice cultivation, either wet or dry, which is particularly important in Southeast and South Asia, being the staple cereal of a number of these countries. His rich article on rice cultivators, included in a manual published by Armand Colin in 1975 (1975b), is a first-rate study, embracing the history of the plant Oryza, its origins and varieties, wild and cultivated, the various ways of cultivating it, the vocabulary of its different organic parts, the associated techniques of irrigation, the harvest tools (knives and sickles), the processing of the grain, how to measure and store it and so on. All these researches played a great role in the development of ethnobotany in France, stimulating many of Bernot’s students to take an interest in the complex relationships between humans and vegetables, as well as to collect data on the names of plants from the four corners of the world. It is from these seminars on ethnobotany and ethnozoology, in which Haudricourt, Jacques Barrau and Claudine Friedberg also participated – held in the delightfully antiquated rooms

The art and craft of ethnography

209

of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, among specimens of snakes preserved in jars of formaldehyde and various stuffed animals – that a whole series of researches on indigenous systems of classification and local taxonomies was born.

The taste for words One of the outstanding characteristics of Bernot’s ethnography is its interest for linguistics, more specifically for ethno-linguistics. These considerations appeared very early, at the time of the Nouville study. In a lecture delivered in 1949 entitled ‘Les confins picards de la Normandie d’après quelques considérations d’histoire économique et sociale’ (2000: 337–8), he raised the question of the significance of local toponyms and village names ending with ville, mesnil court, bec, budh or boeuf between the departments of Seine-Maritime (Normandie) and Somme. He linked these suffixes with the remote history of the region and the influence of the various groups that had migrated through Normandy or settled there (mainly Frankish, Roman, Germanic and Scandinavian). Thus ville denotes Roman influence, boeuf and be point to Scandinavian origins and so on. Each of these groups has thus left behind certain words that are still alive today. The link between ethnography and linguistics is also prevalent in his research on Southeast Asia. With his wife, who specialised in linguistics, in 1958, he published a short book (Bernot and Bernot 1958) on the Tibeto-Burman language of the Khyang of the Chittagong Hills, a Chin group. The book contains a general presentation of the Khyang and data on their clan organisation, kinship terminology and technology, but at its core is an account of Khyang phonology and vocabulary. Some of the articles he wrote during the same period concern mainly the classification of the Tibeto-Burman language groups in the area, taking the work of Robert Shafer (1967) as a guide. Similarly, the paper he published in the volume offered to G.H. Luce, a leading epigraphist and historian of ancient Burma, is entitled ‘Éléments de vocabulaire Cak recueilli dans le Pakistan Oriental’ (2000 [1966]). In addition, the team he chaired within his laboratory (Cedrasemi; see above), with the aim of drawing up an ethno-linguistic atlas of Southeast Asia, was a joint research project on the mapping of different word series. The words were either collected in the field or taken from the published documentation of the time. The main linguistic families of the area – Tibeto-Burman (on that group alone, 230 languages were selected), Austro-Asiatic, Mon-Khmer, Thai and so on – were all taken into account. Such tremendous work supposed first of all the precise

210

Gérard Toffin

localisation of ethnic groups and languages on a map. The western part of Burma even included, at least partly, the Nepalese Himalayas, which was filled mainly using data collected by Brian Hodgson, a former British Resident in Kathmandu during the nineteenth century. Through this method, Bernot and his colleagues sought to throw light on the history of the local populations and on migrations. The team started by mapping three words: ‘dog’, ‘teeth’ and ‘salt’, a list afterward extended to 21, then to 80 words, though it is unclear to me how they were chosen. The maps (size 55 x 70 cm, then reduced to 42 x 59 cm) were printed off by the cartographic laboratory of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in small numbers for preliminary research use only. Bernot also thought of mapping information on rice cultivation – wet and dry rice, modes of preparing ricefields, use of nurseries, techniques of harvesting and so on – but this project remains largely unrealised. The models for these undertakings were the various linguistic atlases published by linguists on French regions,12 such as that on the Massif Central published in four volumes in 1959–63 by Pierre Nauton, one of Bernot’s favourites because of its richness and its numerous ethnographic aspects. The final work of the Southeast Asia ethno-linguistic atlas was published partly in the journal ASEMI (1972, III, 4), without much analysis or comment. On the whole, the atlas remains mainly a research project. What chiefly interested Bernot in the words taken from different languages was their own identity – which was jealously guarded by each ethnic group – their links with the social and material worlds, their migrations and the testimony they reveal of a disappeared past. He liked to trace a word’s history, how it travelled over various geographical areas in the course of time, within a diffusionist framework. In a paper presented to a symposium in the Sorbonne in 1986 on the Routes d’Asie (2000 [1988]), he mentioned the different plants which arrived in Southeast Asia from elsewhere: maize (from America), sorghum (from Africa), nuts, yams, varieties of beans. Some of these plants had been introduced to China through Southeast Asia. He gave the Chinese names borne by these plants today and described how the words had been formed. He noted in passing that the introduction of new plants in Asia has not acted to the detriment of local ones, as has happened in Europe. In a similar vein, he noted that certain spices came to Southeast Asia from India together with their original names, such as pepper, Piper nigrum L., whose Sanskrit name, marica, has been adopted by some languages of Asia for either pepper or pimento. Then taking the example of the plough, Bernot stressed that, even though the name for it in Southeast Asia may have come from Indian languages, its construction has become highly differentiated today, from northern to southern regions: North Burma, North Laos and North Vietnam have

The art and craft of ethnography

211

adopted the Chinese plough, whereas the southern parts of those countries still used the Indian type. Through all these notations, the researcher can point out certain ancient links and speculate about the past influence of one group over another. Bernot’s ethnographic descriptions are filled with the indigenous expressions that are used to speak about different objects. He was aware of the danger of using preconceived European categories and wanted to understand each culture in its own terms, from the inside. Similarly, it is worth mentioning his interest in folk classifications. One of his main guides in this respect was again Conklin, whose work on the Hanunoo (1975) is still a key reference today. It is unfortunate that the new orientations in linguistics, with their shift towards cognition (among other things), have made such approaches if not marginal then at least less valued than formerly.

Conclusions: achievements and limitations Besides the attention to detail and the descriptive aspect of his works, Bernot emphasised what he considered a ‘global’ conception of ethnography. As we have already noted, this global conception is reflected in the synopses of his main books, the most notable exceptions being firstly, religion – which is considered only in passing, never as a whole – and secondly, politics and power, whose role is rarely taken into account at all. These lacunae are, of course, important and represent a significant difference between Bernot’s ethnography and that of the British school of anthropology. But by and large, Nouville and Les paysans arakanais are characterised by their holistic viewpoints, a holism, however, that is not sociological, properly speaking, but principally methodological. These works aim to draw a picture of a whole society or a whole culture. Bernot himself expresses his concern with this aspect in the preface to his two volumes on Les paysans arakanais, when he explains that one of his crucial aims was ‘to attempt to acquire a view of the whole of Marma culture’ (1967a: 13), the other goal being ‘the search for detail’ (ibid.: 15). The two approaches are presented as complementary, each requiring and building on the other. Bernot mentioned explicitly the influence of Marcel Mauss (‘une approche maussienne’) in this respect (ibid.: 10), in that he applied the adjective total, invented by Mauss to characterise pre-modern society, to the individual in preliterate and traditional societies: ‘Having been something of a sociologist in studying a French village, and an ethnographer in studying several villages in East Bengal, I believe I can affirm that, in both areas, I have encountered “total” men’ (2000

212

Gérard Toffin

[1975a]: 235). In fact, it is rarely remembered today that Mauss used the expression ‘total’ not only to designate social institutions but also humans themselves. In a lecture delivered in 1924 to the Société Française de Psychologie, he wrote: The average man of our days – and this is true above all of women – and almost all the men of archaic or backward societies, is a ‘total man’: he is affected in all his being by the least of his perceptions or by the least mental shock (Mauss 1979 [1950]: 28) [And further:] The study of the complete man is among the most urgent of these studies we would ask you to make. […] It is this man, this indivisible but measurable but not dissectible being that we met in our moral, economic and demographic statistics. It is this man that we find in the history of masses and people, and of their practices, in the same way that history meets him in the history of individuals. (ibid.: 26, emphasis in the original)

Bernot uses the expression ‘total men’ in a rather different sense, namely that agriculturists, men and women in the forest and other people in traditional societies maintain close contact with the soil, trees, plants, cattle and fields. This is the meaning of that elegant expression ‘les Plein-vent’ (see also above), which Lucien Febvre (1942) uses, outside its original context of arboriculture, to denote ‘peasant’. Bernot’s conception of ethnography is also distinguished by its interdisciplinarity. In his own words: I am convinced that the human sciences demand of the researcher that he develops his faculties of observation … that he knows perfectly the bibliography of his subject, that he avoids becoming a prisoner of theory or of any single discipline, but uses one and the other as a means of guiding his thought, a programme which is not original, since it was already expressed in l’Année sociologique at the moment it was founded. (2000 [1978]: 28)

The parallel here with Mauss’s Manuel is also striking: ‘Ideally, an expedition should not set out without its geologist, botanist and ethnographers. […] So, set out as a group’ (2007 [1947]: 13). In fact, Bernot made a great many references in his works to the French school of geography of Albert Demangeon, Max Sorre, Roger Dion and so on, as well as to the historical École des Annales, quoting frequently Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. With all these scholars, he shares the same scientific values, the same trust in the progress of science and pure scholarship. The diachronic dimension is also prevalent in all his works, from ethnography to linguistics, contrary again to the British school, which was sceptical of using historical facts during most of its classical

The art and craft of ethnography

213

functionalist period (ca. 1922–1970). When Bernot spoke of Arthur Hocart, he mostly mentioned The Progress of Man (1933), an evolutionary work forgotten today, not the better known books, Kings and Councillors (1936) or Les Castes (1938). In his studies, he always used written sources if they were available, using them either to demonstrate the influence of the past on the present, as in his work on the Marma (1967a), or else to derive the etymology of a word or indicate parallel usages in other languages. However, the information drawn from books was never used as a way of devaluing observation. Similarly, the concerns with space, with the influence of geography on human settlements and processes of diffusion from one country to another, are recurrent themes in all his works. The author of Nouville also summoned up other disciplines: botany and linguistics, as already mentioned, but also architecture, which he found very useful in respect of the ethnographic study of vernacular houses and settlements. My own ethno-architectural studies in Nepal (Toffin 1991, 1994) entirely confirms this recommendation. Ultimately, Bernot regarded himself as a ruralist, that is, a specialist in peasant societies. His family background gave him an immediate understanding of agriculturists’ concerns and attitudes. His students, brought up for the most part in an urban culture, learned a great deal from him about these rural topics. Clearly Bernot was first of all an ethnographer; but he was also eager to collaborate with other disciplines that were closely linked to his field of research and to promote a global approach to rural men and societies that was valid for France as much as for Asia. He wrote: I would not hesitate even to write that, among these three examples of peasants [those of Nouville, East Bengal and Haiti, where Bernot spent a brief time13], I have felt less difference than that which exists between most citizens of Paris and the peasants of the Bresle valley from whom they are separated by some 150 kilometres. I have no pretensions to a desire to define rural sociology, but wish to try and research the common denominators between types of countryside established in a landscape ‘which belongs to the fields, to the countryside’ – the definition of ‘rural’ according to Littré. (2000 [1975a]: 235)

By writing this sentence, Bernot was obviously recalling his country origins. However, it is a contestable thesis he presents, given the demonstration by a scholar like Haudricourt of the profound differences that oppose rice-cultivators to cereal-cultivators, or peasants in Western countries to tuber-planters in Oceania. Whatever the case may be, this notion explains the frequent comparisons he made between western rural communities and Asian farmers in the east.

214

Gérard Toffin

Some words should also be devoted to Bernot’s relationship with the chief authority on structuralism in France. Interestingly, throughout his career there seems to have been a strange complicity, at least at first sight, between Bernot and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Of course, the latter embodies a totally different trend in anthropology, oriented mainly towards theory, universal rules of marriage, structures of communication and the mind. He developed a highly intellectual school, in which Bernot, like Haudricourt and Condominas, was not at ease. Moreover, some of the structuralist followers of Lévi-Strauss looked down rather disparagingly on the research of someone like Bernot, which was so attached to realities, and they considered such ethnographic studies at best peripheral and subordinate. In the dual geography of French anthropology of the second part of the twentieth century, the first dominated by Leroi-Gourhan, the second by LéviStrauss, Bernot evidently situated himself much closer to the former. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss supported Bernot at different key moments in his career, even writing a preface to the re-publication of the Nouville monograph in 1995. This cannot be explained only in terms of tactical or political reasons: from the very beginning, Lévi-Strauss was impressed by Bernot’s unconventionality and deep knowledge, immediately recognising his astonishing erudition in so many different fields. But more broadly, unlike some of his imitators, the leader of structural anthropology has always defended ethnographic studies, the collection of materials through fieldwork, without which, as he wrote, a more interpretative anthropology cannot exist. Everybody can recall the considerable use Lévi-Strauss made of ethno-botanical data and folk classifications in La pensée sauvage (1964). What about Lucien Bernot today? Re-reading his monographs closely, some limitations naturally emerge. The sociological dimensions of the groups studied – the conflicts, the relations of power within communities, for instance – remain largely unexamined. Attempts to go beyond particular descriptions and to propose cultural generalisations are extremely rare. The style also sometimes sounds old-fashioned today in some ways. In brief, Bernot’s main achievements are based on a combination of erudition and fieldwork: they are in no sense guided by the anthropological theory of his time. Nevertheless, his monographs are models of their kind and exert a continuing influence, unfortunately far too limited and too much restricted to French researchers and students. His book with Blancard on Nouville (Bernot and Blancard 1953) is a landmark in the study of the anthropology of France, breaking with the former folklorist approach, and for the first time applying anthropological methods and addressing concerns in favour in countries distant from the French field. Similarly, his works

The art and craft of ethnography

215

on Tibeto-Burman-speaking ethnic groups remain essential introductions to the material culture of Southeast Asia and are still unrivalled, being among the best books to be prescribed for the education of professional fieldworkers. English translations of them would undoubtedly be useful tools and would help extend their readership. Interestingly, Bernot never challenged his naturalist approach to ethnography, nor did he ever raise epistemological questions about the validity of the fieldwork experience or of ethnographic knowledge: he just explained straightforwardly how the material was collected, in which village, and on the basis of which observations. All signs of subjectivity are banned from his books. However, Bernot’s achievement was undoubtedly to associate datacollecting with a good sense of humour, an immediate and friendly contact with his interlocutors and informants. All this cannot be learnt from books and is contrary to what happens in most other social sciences and humanities, most of which deal exclusively with written documents. The anthropologist, as is well known, works with living people and has to rely on his or her own human qualities to establish personal contacts with informants and win their co-operation. In this connection, Bernot raised ethnographic fieldwork not only to a respected craft, a necessary discipline, but also to something of an art.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Robert Parkin, Anne de Sales and Geneviève Bédoucha for their comments on an earlier version of this article. 2. The first, on Pyangaon village, was submitted in 1974 (EPHE, 6 ème section), the second (my doctorat d’état), entitled ‘Société et religion chez les Néwar du Népal’, in 1982, Paris, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. 3. On Bernot’s life, see especially Thomas et al. (1987), Toffin (1995), D. Bernot (2004). 4. The École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes was transformed into the Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in 1971, following the student movement of 1968. It had originally been created during the French Revolution, in 1795, on Lakanal’s initiative. At this period, it was called the École Speciale des Langues Orientales. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, this École has been known to successive generations of students as ‘Langues O’. 5. The quotations taken from Bernot’s articles and similar items are given here according to the pagination in Bernot (2000), a collection of all his works published under this form. The references to his books are given according to the pagination in their original editions. 6. He took this word, which refers to arboriculture, especially of fruit trees in unsheltered locations that are exposed on all sides to the wind, from Lucien Febvre’s book on Rabelais (1942). 7. Interestingly, the population of Pyangaon, the first Newar village in which I carried out fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley, was 484 in 1971 (close to the 594

Gérard Toffin

216

inhabitants of Nouville). I chose this village mainly because of its low population, more or less in accordance with Bernot’s recommendation. 8. One cannot help being struck by the considerable gap between the dates of the appearance of the two fieldwork manuals, Notes and Queries (first edition 1874) and Marcel Mauss’s Manuel d’ethnographie (2007 [1947]), which provided a broadly similar framework for investigation and type of questionnaire. 9. However, Bernot himself never actually spoke Marma or Cak fluently, nor even Burmese, as he himself confessed in his introduction to Les Paysans arakanais (1967a: 11); instead, he relied mainly on English-speaking informants and his wife. Nonetheless he was always passionately interested in words, vocabularies and dictionaries. 10. The publishing house of J.B. Baillière, founded in 1818 in Rue Hautefeuille in Paris, has been one of the great scientific and medical publishers in France since the nineteenth century. It has reissued extracts from the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Alambert several times in different forms. Its collection Encyclopédie agricole covers a whole series of subjects concerning agricultural techniques, the care of animals, plants and forests, the use of manure, etc. 11. La Maison rustique, founded in 1836 in Paris, is a bookshop and publisher specialising in agriculture, stock-raising, horticulture, hunting and fishing, and is still active today. 12. This linguistic atlas of France is different from the geographical atlas of France published under the auspices of the National Committee of Geography from the beginning of the twentieth century. Cf. Febvre (1962). 13. Before researching in East Pakistan, Bernot started a study in Haiti, thanks to a grant from UNESCO. He did not publish anything on this.

References Bernot, D. 2004. Les collines de Chittagong, in M. Izard (ed.), Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Éditions de l’Herne (‘Cahiers de l’Herne’). Bernot, L. 1966. Éléments de vocabulaire Cak receuilli dans le Pakistan Oriental, in B. Shin, J. Boisselier and A.B. Griswold (eds), Essays offered to G.H. Luce, Artibus Asiae, vol. 1: 67–91 [republished in L. Bernot, 2000, 389–414]. ——— 1967a. Les Cak: contribution à l’étude ethnographique d’une population de langue loi, Paris: Éditions du CNRS. ——— 1967b. Les Paysans arakanais du Pakistan Oriental: l’histoire, le monde végétal et l’organisation sociale des réfugiés Marma (Mog), Paris: Mouton (2 vols). ——— 1972. Essai pour la présentation de la carte des langues, ASEMI, 3(4): 1–6 [republished in L. Bernot 2000, 482–94]. ——— 1973. Le recensement d’un village, in L’homme, hier et aujourd’hui: receuil d’études en homage à André Leroi-Gourhan, Paris: Cujas, 17–24 [republished in L. Bernot 2000, 325–32]. ——— 1975a. Les Plein-Vent, Ethnos 1975: 1–4, 73–90 [republished in L. Bernot 2000, 235–47]. ——— 1975b. Riziculteurs, in R. Creswell (ed.), Éléments d’ethnologie,1: huit terrains, Paris: Armand Colin (‘Collection U’) [republished in L. Bernot, 2000, 101–42]. ——— 1978. Titres et travaux, Paris: Imprimerie Commerciale d’Anthony. [republished in L. Bernot, 2000, 27–41]. ——— 1979. Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France, Paris: Collège de France [republished in L. Bernot 2000, 497–510].

The art and craft of ethnography

217

——— 1982. The house of swidden farmers as a special object for ethnological study, in K.G. Izikowitz and P. Sorensen (eds), The house in East and Southeast Asia: anthropological and architectural aspects, Richmond: Curzon Press, 35–40 [republished in L. Bernot 2000, 143–48]. ——— 1988. Transmissions des techniques et des produits entre la Chine et l’Asie du Sud-Est, in Routes d’Asie: marchands et voyageurs, XVe–XVIIe siècle (Varia Turcica XII), Paris and Istanbul: Isis, 87–101 [republished in L. Bernot, 2000, 157–69]. ——— 2000. Voyage dans les sciences humaines: qui sont les autres? Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne. Bernot, L. and D. Bernot. 1958. Les Khyang des collines de Chittagong: matériaux pour l’étude linguistique des Chin, Paris: Plon (Cahiers de l’Homme). Bernot, L. and R. Blancard. 1953. Nouville: un village français, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie. Bernot, L. and M. Bruneau. 1972. Une population lacustre: les Intha du lac Inlé (États Shan du Sud, Birmanie), Journal d’Agriculture Tropicale et de Botanique Appliquée, 19: 10–11, 410–41 [republished in L. Bernot, 2000, 63–100]. Clifford, J. 1988. The predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conklin, H. 1975. Hanunoo agriculture: a report on an integral system of shifting cultivation in the Philippines, Yale: FAO Forestry Development Paper No. 12. Dumont, L. 1951. La Tarasque, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1966. Homo hierarchicus, Paris: Gallimard. Febvre, L. 1942. Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIème siècle: la religion de Rabelais, Paris: Albin Michel. ——— 1962. Pour une histoire à part entier, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Hertz, R. 1913. ‘Saint Besse’, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, vol. 67. Hocart, A.M. 1933. The progress of man: a short survey of his evolution, his customs and his works, London: Methuen. ——— 1936. Kings and councillors: an essay in the comparative anatomy of human society, Cairo: Paul Barbey. ——— 1938. Les castes, Paris: Guethner (Annales du Musée Guimet, vol. 54). Koechlin, B., F. Sigaut, J. Thomas and G. Toffin (eds). 1987. De la voûte céleste au terroir, du jardin au foyer: mosaïque sociographique, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1958, Tristes tropiques, Paris: Plon. ——— 1964. La pensée sauvage, Paris: Plon. ——— 1995. Pour la réédition de Nouville, in L. Bernot, Nouville, Paris: Archives contemporaines. Mauss, M. 1936. Les techniques du corps, Journal de Psychologie, 33 (3–4). ——— 1979 [1950]. Sociology and Psychology (tr. B. Brewster), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ——— 2007 [1947]. Manual of Ethnography (tr. D. Lussier), New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Nauton, P. 1959–1963. Atlas linguistique et ethnographique du Massif Central, Paris: Éditions du CNRS (4 vols). Needham, J. 1954–1985. Science and civilization in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rivers, W.H.R. 1900. A genealogical method of collecting social and vital statistics, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 30: 74–82. Royal Anthropological Institute. 1912. Notes and queries on anthropology, 4th edition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Shafer, R. 1967. Introduction to Sino-Tibetan, Part 2, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Stocking, G.W. 1995. After Tylor: British social anthropology 1888–1951, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

218

Gérard Toffin

Thomas, J. 1987. À Lucien Bernot, in B. Koechlin, F. Sigaut, J. Thomas and G. Toffin (eds), De la voûte céleste au terroir, du jardin au foyer: mosaïque sociographique, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Toffin, G. 1994. Ecology and anthropology of traditional dwellings, Traditional dwellings and settlements review, 5(2): 9–20. ——— 1995. Lucien Bernot (1919–1993), L’Homme, 133: 5–8. Toffin, G. (ed.). 1991. Man and his house in the Himalayas, Delhi: Sterling Publishers. Wylie, L. 1957. Village in the Vaucluse, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Zonabend, F. 1995. Nouville après Nouville, in L. Bernot, Nouville, Paris: Archives contemporaines.

Chapter 9

ANDRÉ-GEORGES HAUDRICOURT: A THOROUGH MATERIALIST Alban Bensa1

Accessing the real In an interview given to the Union Rationaliste in 1984, André-Georges Haudricourt summed up the initial context in which he learned to do research, and set the tone for the whole encounter: ‘I’m my parents’ son, and my parents were city people who’d gone back to the country because they didn’t like living in the city, having to say “Good morning, good evening,” etc. I obviously inherited some of that.’ Born in 1911 and raised on his father’s farm in Picardy, where a good number of farm workers were employed, André-Georges was apparently too sickly to go to school. His mother taught him to read, and he took correspondence courses until the age of fifteen. He was then admitted to the Lycée Saint Louis in Paris, and three years later, in 1929, he passed the nationwide competitive examination for admission to ‘L’Agro’, the Institut National d’Agronomie. During his youth in Picardy, he acquired an extraordinary culture as an autodidact, observing the rural world and agrarian techniques in actual use, listening to the surrounding patois, initiating himself into a knowledge of foreign alphabets (Greek, Russian) by means of a stamp collection, and showing a passionate interest in botany, history and biology, among other subjects. He thus acquired a free-ranging, acute perspective on human knowledge that was far removed from the conventions and disciplinary distinctions that characterise ordinary schooling. His ability to rid observation of all

220

Alban Bensa

Figure 9.1. André-Georges Haudricourt: ‘le maître à la recherche de la petite bête ou le maître dans l’exercice de ses fonctions’, June 1972. Fonds André-Georges Haudricourt/ Archives IMEC.

preconceptions led him to the understanding that the only genuine ‘fact’ was what could be known through the senses. Cleaving to the real in all its strangeness, his words and texts do have a certain abruptness to them, somewhat like a whack of the baton a Zen master uses to wake his disciples from their dreams. Haudricourt’s anthropological thinking was thus always grounded in tangible material traces of human activity, what is presented to our sensory experience: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste. Palpating leaves, crushing them between his fingers to bring out or ‘express’ their odour; cupping his hand around his ear to apprehend better the sound of a voice, the ‘interesting phonemes’ it produced; scrutinising landscapes, buildings and tools so as to identify spaces and the particular plants in them, their materials, forms and functions – this extraordinary observer concentrated all his attention on what can be grasped of the world as it appears to us. Being anchored in this way in the materiality of the real

André-Georges Haudricourt

221

presupposes an ability to clear out the mind. To remain in the empirical world and perceive effectively, a would-be observer needs to know how to expel social, psychological and intellectual considerations that might cloud or obstruct the full receptiveness required, namely the conventions of human relations (politenesses, phatic or narrative speech, compulsory banalities, etc.) and the ordinary flow of psychic life, in which ideas, images, and feelings screen out the world of the visible, the audible, the sensory. It is only by fully exposing ourselves to that world, returning to what is there, right in front of us, that we can grasp and analyse it. Though Haudricourt’s close-up view may be hyperrealist, it is not contemplative, but rather active and critical. He worked to discern the connections, schemata and logical relations that are common to actions and representations operative in objects, words, and physical gestures and practices. His fascination for the material world in the broad sense constantly pushed him to wonder about the origin and history of practices. Being anchored in the materiality of things and living beings caused him to develop a general attitude of caustic doubt about the supposed autonomy of representations and ideas. For Haudricourt, it is clear that the ideas which stir and agitate human beings have their source in the experiences that link us to the world. The origin of what seem the most cerebral ideologies can therefore, in his view, be related to habits acquired in hunting or domesticating animals and plants; that is, through humans’ interaction with the ecological and historical constraints (climatic, geological, botanical, zoological; migrations, confrontations, ways of doing) that have affected diverse peoples, groups and populations. For Haudricourt, focusing on the natural world and techniques works like a kind of stripping agent, making it possible to see and correct our misguided wandering in the supposedly pure sphere of ideas and feelings. Consistent with this view, he never explains texts by other texts or enters the history of ideas by way of ideas, but always refers ideas and affects to the social, linguistic and above all sensory and technical experience that, in his understanding, enabled them to emerge. The domain of abstract ideas (‘abstracted from what?’, he might ask) is only comprehensible if it is not dissociated from the hold of the physical and social worlds of our senses, themselves the very tools of our first investigatory experience. It would be wrong, however, to consider Haudricourt’s way of proceeding as mere ‘sensualism’. As he understood it, sensory experience proposes different values which can be connected with systems of ideas, such as that by which pork is valued in China and reviled in the Judeo-Christian world, or by which the plant world has served as a referent for the East, whereas the West has tended to conceive of itself in terms of the animal-breeding model. Looking at

222

Alban Bensa

human beings’ relations to the natural world brings to light not direct determinations but rather choices based on their observations of and attempts to imitate animals: swimming like frogs, running like horses, singing like birds, digging in the earth like pigs, counting in a way suggested by leaf lobes and so on. Conversely, animals imitate us when they live in our company: only domesticated dogs bark as if they wanted to speak to us – wild dogs live in packs and howl. With comments of this kind, often made jokingly, Haudricourt sought to draw attention to both the reciprocal ‘learning’ that might be said to take place between the natural and human milieus, and the biological processes common to all living species. ‘I don’t separate the natural and the human sciences’, he liked to say. This approach constitutes a refusal to imagine any kind of autonomy for the symbolic order or any dissociation between the biological and the social that might be arbitrarily imposed by culture. Close in this to Gregory Bateson, Haudricourt conceived of the natural milieu and human beings as having a kind of mutual hold on each other, and he sought to conceive of that hold by suggesting the possibility of organisational schemata common to both the natural and cultural orders. This approach meant that he rejected all spiritualism, as well as liberal individualism and its psychological presuppositions, working instead to link conceptions of the world and nature to the history of the most material practices. He thus identified a few fundamental functional wholes within which necessary ties might be understood to have developed between the environment, techniques and representations. As he saw it, these kinds of contiguities between natural milieus, societies and schemata for interpreting the world were determining totalities in which all were inescapably caught up. By refusing to recognise or posit any break in the continuity between physical and mental activities, body and soul, Haudricourt developed an anti-dualist, immanentist, deterministic conception of the human sciences that intimately links human life, gestures and practices, as well as moral and religious values, to plant and animal life. As repeated action, technique is aimed at transforming a material world that is resistant to humans, their needs and specific interests. For Haudricourt, technical action is effective both physically and socially because handling or treating plants and animals forms a continuum with humans’ treatment of each other, a continuum both cultural and geographical, a continuum that might in turn be called a civilisation. The gradual development or constitution of that continuum and the relational principles that prevail within it were inspired by technical initiatives that involved a savoir-faire (physical know-how) and savoirpenser (intellectual understanding) that are closely entwined. The

André-Georges Haudricourt

223

contours of these techno-cultural worlds could only be discerned by attending to ‘typical, ancient’ facts. Techniques had been invented by trial and error and transmitted by teaching and learning; they were later adapted and modified in the course of a history in which established ways of doing interacted with local innovations, conformism with ingenuity, in which local innovations came to interfere with established ways of doing, and ingenuity with conformism. Haudricourt’s method is thus genealogical in the sense that it encompasses both inheritances and transformations, more or less unconscious old ways (pesanteurs) and conscious practices, without establishing any simplistic correspondence between a series of movements or gestures and a particular ‘mentality’. As a historical conception of societies, it is aimed less at identifying the causes of individual or collective behaviour than in shedding light on the specific ecological constraints that may have oriented social relations in this or that direction and enforced ways of acting and interpreting, each with its particular logic, ways that varied according to whether one was raised in China or the Fertile Crescent, for example.

Haudricourt’s model of determinant interactions It was during his stay in Vietnam, lasting over a year (1948–49), that Haudricourt developed his model of an opposition in the practices of agriculture and animal breeding between Asia and the West, a model he never ceased to enrich. Before this decisive experience and the sense it brought of being ‘entirely elsewhere’ (Haudricourt and Dibié 1987: 94), there is no mention of any ideas on ‘the pastoral peoples and the gardening peoples’. When discussing his reading of the Bible – ‘one of the funniest books there is’ – with Charles Parain in 1937, for example, he was more directly interested in farming vehicles and threshing, citing Isaiah 28:27–28 in this connection: 27. For dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge, nor is a cart wheel rolled over cummin; but dill is beaten out with a stick, and cummin with a rod. 28. Does one crush bread grain? No, he does not thresh it for ever; when he drives his cart wheel over it with his horses, he does not crush it.

It was his experience of the Far East as ‘the world turned upside down’ that led him to wonder about the source of behavioural differences between persons who had originated in distinct civilisations and to develop explanatory hypotheses for these differences. He wrote his first, as yet unpublished text, ‘Recherche des bases d’une étude comparative

Alban Bensa

224

des mentalités extrême-orientales et occidentales’ in Hanoi in 1948 on the basis of his unpublished correspondence of the time. Also around this time, he spoke of his ideas to Jacques Gernet, who found inspiration in them for a talk entitled ‘Le comportement en Chine archaïque’, published in 1952 in the Annales. As Haudricourt later explained: ‘For my part, I waited ten years longer than Gernet to publish an article I called ‘Domestication des animaux, cultures des plantes et traitement d’autrui’ (Haudricourt 1962). Though L’homme et les plantes cultivées, written with Hédin and published in 1943, and L’Homme et la charrue à travers le monde, written with M. Delamarre and published in 1955, may be considered a point of departure, the fact is that his own writings on the subject amount to no more than fifty pages, namely a series of short articles published from 1962 to 1986. In the general schema that Haudricourt constructed, an opposition is developed between sheep, goat and cattle-breeding societies, which in the Neolithic Near East also cultivated grain plants (wheat, barley), and societies in ancient Asia and Oceania, where pig-breeding and tuber plant gardens (i.e., rice paddies) predominated. These two technical worlds are understood to have inspired two different sets of moral, religious and philosophical attitudes, characteristic of two ‘mentalities’ that cannot be reduced to one another: the western and the eastern. The separating of wheat from chaff and the shepherd’s direct authority over his herd may be seen as opposite to the gestures and practices of a Chinese or Oceanian horticulturist or plant grower or farmer, who ‘accompanies’ the growth of various tubers without intervening directly in nature. Herbivores, cereal grains and transcendence The first western herdsmen-breeders were governed by specific constraints in their approach to animals of the bovine, ovine and equine families. These animals lived together in herds in wide-open spaces; they were not at all in competition with humans to find food, and they did not spontaneously come near them. To get close to them, hunt or gather them, and thereby subject them to human authority – the law of the stick or whip – camp or village dwellers first had to follow them and channel them into tight mountain valleys. In Haudricourt’s view, this violent coercion was of crucial importance – historically structural, in that it endowed what would become the monotheistic world of Jews, Christians and Muslims with a religious, philosophical and political model, the model of transcendence, dualism and absolute hierarchical authority. The distance separating wandering herds of herbivores from their masters-to-be, and shepherds from their beasts after the latter had come under human control, appears as the first technical experience of

André-Georges Haudricourt

225

transcendence. The gulf separating these animals from the communities that domesticated them is cast in the image of the distance separating God from humans, a god whose authority is expressed by the arm of Jehovah-the-father raised to threaten humans, homologous with the stick the shepherd uses to beat the animals in his herd. This distance is attested by the arbitrary separation of body from soul, of ideas from their shadow in Plato’s cave, and it is also to be found in the Aristotelian political model, where the leader is understood to be a father imposing his law on a childlike people. Subaltern internalisation of transcendent authority was nothing more than this feeling of obligation that dominated the western moral conscience up through the writings of Kant. For Haudricourt, the categorical imperative had its origin in what the shepherd does when he leads or directs his herd with his crook. It is diametrically opposed to eastern pragmatism, wherein situations are evaluated as a function of immediate circumstances, without any projection of abstract moral demands from without. This is particularly clear in the history of pig domestication. Pigs, tubers and immanence Haudricourt located the beginning of the chain of constraints he discerned with regard to pigs in the domain of plants of the variety that stock a great quantity of nourishment: ‘vegetal growth is indirect in a way because it is always preceded by the stocking of energy reserves over a variable length of time, food that will be used later’ (Haudricourt and Hédin 1943: 70). Plants that stock great quantities of underground reserves in the form of carbohydrates or fats and lipids grow in ‘variable climates where there is one fairly long season that is unfavourable to vegetation in that it is either extremely dry or cold’ (ibid.: 72). This describes the case of rhizomic plants and tubers in tropical or monsoon regions, where the rain, which brings to an end a long dry period, enables yams, taro and other edible roots to grow rapidly and accumulate new reserves for the following season. Remarkably, this distribution of these plants coincided with the distribution of zones that were formerly inhabited by wild pigs. These animals ate tubers and small animals living in fairly loose soil; before horticulture and breeding, they lived only in the tropical forest zones of Asia (Sus scrofa, which later moved into Europe), Africa (Potamochoerus porcus) and North and South America (Dicotyles ajacu). Wild pigs used their snouts, teeth and tusks to dig up nourishing tubers. As Haudricourt understood it, as soon as the humans who had settled on the edges of tropical forests in Africa, and later Asia and Oceania, learned to make these plants their staple nourishment, they found themselves in competition with the wild pigs. And he hypothesised that, during the

226

Alban Bensa

proto-agricultural period, they learned from the pigs how to find and dig up wild yams and taro roots, replacing the pig’s snout with a digging stick. To eat the tubers found in the forest, people needed to learn how to make a fire and how to wash them before cooking them, because certain taro and manioc roots become toxic on exposure to the air. While humans learned to light a fire 1.8 million years after the first hominids appeared in East Africa in 2.5 million BC, hunting and gathering only gradually and partially gave way to horticulture, plant growing and farming much later. Yam and taro cultivation is only attested around 12,000 BC in Southeast Asia; significantly, it is contemporaneous with the domestication of Suidae or porcine animals. With the invention of plant cultivation by means of cuttings and transplantation into prepared soil, humans entered into direct competition with wild pigs, which ruined human planting work by digging up the soil in search of yams and taro roots. To prevent this damage and neutralise the pigs’ destructive power, hunting had to be intensified, planted gardens enclosed and pig movements monitored, while pigs themselves also became a source of meat for the domestic unit. In any case, Haudricourt points out, these animals could only have been domesticated after agriculture began, not before, because raising and breeding them presupposed their being fed by people, first indirectly, when the pigs pillaged the humans’ gardens and stayed in the general vicinity of their settlements to eat human excrement, and later directly, when tubers came to be grown specifically as animal fodder. Obviously, he notes in passing, the domestication of wild pigs, like that of herbivores, could not be thought of as deliberate. It should rather be seen as the effect of the gradual invention of tuber plant cultivation, which required intensified hunting to protect gardens, which in turn made it possible to produce an abundance of food, the remains of which could be used to feed the pigs and thereby domesticate them. A major advance in the process was made when men began capturing piglets in the forest and giving them to the women of the village to suckle or nourish with porridge made from tubers, as was still done until very recently in certain regions of Melanesia. These animals, which were now attached to the house and family, were not rigorously separated from their as yet wild relatives. Adult sows were mounted by wild boars in a kind of semi-breeding, where herd reproduction was not monitored or controlled. All human efforts were concentrated on ‘mothering’ the infant piglets found in distant or relatively close forest areas. Like children, the piglets benefited from their ‘mother’s’ care; she fed them, attended to their bodies, even gave them a name. Cohabitation of this sort, notes Haudricourt, no doubt constituted an important enrichment of humans’ relations with natural species, and thus of

André-Georges Haudricourt

227

inter-human, i.e., interpersonal relations. The extension of affectivity to include nature was an expression of the new closeness to animals induced by domestication. In return, it increased mutual social relations among people with personalised affective ties to pigs, dogs and even plants, which they now thought of as members of their families. Hunters in the Palaeolithic period and in the area of the Lascaux caves could only act with regard to wild animals by means of signs. But with the domestic breeding of animals, namely pigs and dogs, humans began communicating more directly and indeed physically with individualised animals on a daily basis, speaking to them, stroking them, caring for them and feeding them (sometimes even mouth to mouth). In China, Southeast Asia and Oceania, pigs live under human dwellings. In contrast to the western attitude, their scatophagic behaviour is not rejected as dirty or disgusting. A pig’s stomach is long enough to allow it to digest without ruminating, and eating excrement (i.e. food pre-digested by other animals) has the effect of a kind of AlkaSeltzer, enabling them to digest yet other foods. Pigs, then, suckled at the human breast almost like children, became human beings’ permanent companions and waste disposers. Pigs reproduced in the forest, as did yams that had been forgotten in spaces that were once gardens. The yams reverted back to the wild and produced new clones (Haudricourt 1964). Forests and former gardens, places where nature manifested its singular power to provide humans with unexpected resources, were endowed with ambivalent meaning. Far from village dwellings, they were places where one might get lost and even perish, but where one might just as easily find plants and animals which could be brought back to the family to enrich the usual menu. Such discoveries were made possible by the ancestors, human beings who had returned to nature after their death. The ancestors’ power was ‘taboo’; that is, both negative and positive, because in the places where they operated, far from habitations, one could meet with either death or life; there was the risk of losing one’s way, but potentially also the opportunity of finding something that would improve one’s daily life. In Oceania, then, the taboo has nothing to do with notions of purity and impurity but is what characterises human relations with spaces that have been abandoned to spontaneous vegetation. It is therefore not at all surprising that both pigs and yams were thought of as children found in the wild and thus as assimilable to the ancestors, who prolonged human society into both the future and the past. A regularly developed theme in Kanak tales is the discovery, in spaces far removed from human settlement, of beings who, when brought back into the domestic space, enrich it with forces that are so strong and in some cases so new that they become difficult to control

228

Alban Bensa

(Bensa and Rivierre 1983). Making a detour through these wild spaces favours the renewal and diversification of nature and society. The products found there are integrated into the household like providential family extensions. This would seem to explain why plant gathering and cultivating are described by Oceanians as maternal, mothering practices. The yam laid in the soil like a newborn in its crib and transported and swathed like a child at harvest time is likened to a gift from the ancestors that humans figured out how to reproduce, making it yield others of its kind. Likewise the pig brought back from the wild, where the bodies and spirits of the founders of human lineages lie, is brought up as if it were a child. In this view, there is no boundary between the natural and supernatural separating socialised beings from a distant ‘beyond’ where inaccessible entities live. The ancestors are there in the visible world, just behind all that is manifest in it. They care for their descendants by providing the living with food; in return, or for propitiatory purposes, the living maintain them through rituals that are in fact gifts of food. In the Kanak world, boiled yams are offered (in the past it was also the heart and liver of sacrificed persons). These products of the wilderness – such as forest yams and pigs, which were simultaneously ancestors to be maintained and appeased by gifts of food, and animal ‘babies’ whose growth was likened to that of human babies – were dependent on the persons who found, captured, suckled and fed them. The substitution and substitutability obtaining between the human, the vegetal and the animal accords well with the notion of the immanence of ancestral powers and the sacred. The actions of horticulturalists or plant growers and of the breeders of semiwild pigs only facilitated the manifestation of these forces. They accompanied them rather than sought to impose their will on them, since they were ‘thought of’ or ‘understood’ as integral parts of a whole in which nature, society and the ancestors were associated rather than dissociated. The point, then, was to favour the growth of plants by pulling up weeds and digging a cavity beneath a planted tuber for it to grow into. In Vanuatu, for example, people feed pigs with boiled tubers so they do not wear down their teeth by digging in the forest ground and so that their incisors grow into each other in such a way as to form bracelets, a precious exchange commodity. A similar gesture of reception and welcome, of care and maintenance, can be found in Oceanian political rhetoric, in which the taboo power of the chief (his mana) is linked to that of a plant or animal discovered in the bush or on distant shores, a being then transformed into a child-ancestor that needs to be raised. In New Caledonia, people speak of ‘child chieftains’ who bear within them the powers of the bush and will gradually be domesticated by the old men of the land, the

André-Georges Haudricourt

229

masters of the soil. Further north, in the Melanesian archipelago, pig accumulation is the focus of rituals accompanying the ‘Big Men’: their power is proportionate to the number of bush-discovered piglets they are able to raise, that is the number of relations these warrior-hunters maintain with ancestors who have become their children through the domesticating labour performed by their wives. Such was Haudricourt’s way of thinking about the way the societies of Asia and Oceania made pigs and yams into ancestors and children produced by their care, in opposition to the societies of the Fertile Crescent, where humans were made to depend on the protection they were granted by larger herbivorous animals. In the Indo-Pacific region, his thinking went, pigs were thought of as child-ancestors, whereas in the ancient Mediterranean world, domesticated bovine and equine animals were understood to have direct kinship with humans. The contrast is indeed striking between the image of women in Papua New Guinea suckling piglets and the image of the Christian crib, in which a baby in a stable is warmed by the breath of a cow and a donkey. The relation of continuity between human society and animal and vegetal species obtained in the East was hardly conducive to the emergence of anything resembling the dualist opposition between the pure and impure characteristic of civilisations of grain-growing herbivore breeders who ‘separated the wheat from the chaff’ and rejected ‘black sheep’ (in French, brebis galeuse, literally ‘gall-infected sheep’) from the herd. As Haudricourt liked to point out, the sequence in the scriptures where Jesus exorcises a man by transforming the demons in him into pigs was simply unimaginable in the Asian-Pacific cultural universe. According to this scheme, large herbivorous animals and their masters were the parents terribles of Middle Eastern humans, whereas pigs were the pampered, liberally raised children of the Chinese and Oceanians. The figure of the Biblical or Koranic herder-farmer is thus for Haudricourt the symmetrical opposite of the figure of the Chinese gardener with his pigs living beneath the house.

Materialism and determinism In their famous 1903 article, ‘De quelques formes primitives de classification: Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives’, Durkheim and Mauss claimed that sociology was in a position to ‘shed light on the genesis and thereby the functioning of logical operations’. Similarly, the conclusion of Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Durkheim 1912) sums up the point of view of the Ecole Française de Sociologie on the matter: categories are ‘social things’ that ‘were not

Alban Bensa

230

made to apply exclusively to the social kingdom’, but ‘extend to reality as a whole’. Although Haudricourt was a diligent student of Mauss, he did somewhat modify this argument by making technical gestures and practices the source of representations, that is, by working to anchor the social in material practices. In this understanding, categories did not arise from projecting the social on to the real but rather through the extending of technical experience and the effectiveness of that experience to representations of social relations. The social and logical categories that humans would later think of as obvious, as the givens of their consciousness of the world, might in fact be thought of as modelled on the vital relations that humans had with plants and animals. In the model presented above, two wholes are identified, corresponding to the different forms taken by agriculture and animal breeding in the west and in Asia and Oceania, wholes whose components – contexts or milieus (geography), practices and knowhow, ideas and values – were tightly intertwined. Two types of explanation were needed in Haudricourt’s view to account for the origin of these networks of correspondences, one biological, focused on the biological rules that governed interaction among living species, the other emphasising the history of human populations. Natural sciences and social sciences Haudricourt’s particular way of looking at social facts was profoundly shaped by his training as an agronomist and his experience as a botanist. He liked jokingly to differentiate himself from both LeroiGourhan, who he said had come to human sciences via zoology, and Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism seemed marked by his geology walks. As a knowledgeable biologist investigating the capacity of our senses to inform us about the world, Haudricourt regularly looked to such fields of inquiry as brain chemistry, the symmetries and asymmetries of the body, the loss of a developed sense of smell that followed on from anthropoids’ adoption of the vertical position (distancing the nose from the ground), and so on. Because we share with nature the same chemical make-up and the same physical and biological organisation, it was important never to lose sight of the continuity between the natural and human sciences. Plant and animal properties and ways of life were like a force field that humans were compelled to deal with. Conversely, life altogether was organised by rules that applied to or ran through all species. Haudricourt perpetually situated himself at the junction between biological inheritances that either accumulated or were lost through evolution, and inheritances that were transmitted, abandoned or recurred through teaching, learning and imitation, as well as habits that had developed within human societies in the course of their

André-Georges Haudricourt

231

histories. It was as a resolute opponent of any form of innatism, including Chomsky’s in the case of linguistics, that he explored both the biological and social origins of sensory and cognitive schemata. What was left to humans of the sense of smell that their primate cousins still retained? How was it that seeing was so difficult for people in the Middle Ages that no one seemed able to draw a plant or animal at all realistically? How was it that, if everything came down to differences, ‘classifications’ could be established that grouped together certain features and excluded others? Constantly seeking explanations, Haudricourt refused to imagine a cause that was not itself determined by another cause; he therefore moved ineluctably from the social to the biological via techniques. The body governed the mind because it was both a living and an interactive arrangement. The constant externality of causality was no doubt one of the major traits of his thought, and he used it to combat not only innatism, mentalism and spiritualism, but also the idea of arbitrary cultural power or imposition. He was strongly attached to the determinist dimension of the materialist sciences, and therefore strongly denied that there was any value in attempts to demonstrate any sort of discontinuity between the biological, the social and the symbolic. It is on this essential point that his theoretical orientations seem incompatible with Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology. Human sciences, historical sciences In Haudricourt’s view, the link between the life sciences and the sciences of man and society had to do with their shared inscription in a fundamentally historical order. The relations he established among the various levels of reality were first and foremost historical, whether this meant the biological history of the species or the history of populations and their environments. We cannot doubt that for Haudricourt the respective models of grain-growing herdsman and pig-raising tuber gardener obviously correspond and apply to members of these two major sets of civilisations, and that this obviously preconditions the ways they look at the world. However, it was just as clear to him that the people of the Fertile Crescent and those of the Middle Kingdom or the Oceanian continent were in control of their breeding and farming techniques – that is, they adjusted their know-how to the situations they had to deal with in such a way as to ensure at least a minimum of effectiveness. They were thus inscribed in a historical dynamic of constant adaptation that accounted for local variations in the model, which in their turn were to be studied on a case-by-case basis. In fundamental agreement with Bachelard’s critique of generality and corresponding defence of the inescapable importance of detail, Haudricourt perpetually vaunted particularisms. Differences constituted

232

Alban Bensa

genuine challenges for the idea of the absolute, for the systematic spirit that had been generated by the concern particular to all the descendants of Abraham for transcendence, purity and order. And differences were always to be explained in historical terms. Haudricourt used his extraordinary erudition in matters of event history, battles and the movements of peoples and kings – knowledge which, of course, implied a precision regarding dates and locations – to reflect on thoroughly concrete singular attitudes. Universality was reserved for the domain of biology, and Haudricourt took great pleasure in relating his colleagues’ theoretical orientations (like the valuing of this or that animal and a specific way of pruning grapevines) to their particular individual itineraries and the history of the social groups they belonged to. ‘My Marxism is limited to relating what people think to the situations they find themselves in either by choice or in spite of themselves’, he remarked to me one day. In his view, recurrent attitudes or ones that could be transferred from one level to another (for example, a way of handling plants to a way of treating other humans; links between sensory experience and the most abstract conception, etc.) bore the mark of technical gestures and practices and the representations governed by them. Those attitudes also bore traces of the history that had been lived through by the people who manifested them. Thus rejecting, as Mauss had, any reading of individual behaviour in strictly psychological terms, he refused, for example, to imagine that Heidegger’s interest in being could be unrelated to the German quest for communal unity, that Levi-Strauss’ concern for universalism was not an indirect effect of a desire for social integration, or that the fashion for developing theories about métissage, that is, racial or ethnic mixing and interbreeding, was not also an echo of the existential problematic at the heart of the experience of so many excluded communities. At the risk of assuming or seeming to have assumed a reductionist position as a provocateur, Haudricourt continually sought out traces of the most concrete experiences in moral, philosophical and political attitudes. When his comparative approach encountered linguistic, sociological or technical similarities in practices, Haudricourt always gave a priority to the hypothesis of direct contact, either long past or recent, between the peoples using them. ‘How can we really know’, he threw out at the end of an interview, ‘whether Roman tiles do or do not come from countries that used split bamboo?’ This remark evokes his strong interest in the work of Graebner and diffusionism, a theory that clearly posed the question of exogenous versus endogenous change. This problematic is also at the core of Haudricourt’s linguistic work, in which he sought to understand the emergence of phonological systems in a perspective that embraces structural necessities and the effects of

André-Georges Haudricourt

233

historical contact. He was just as willing to underscore the importance of the sudden and the new (the appearance of a high tone, the appropriate adoption of a hitherto unknown technical movement, a fashion, etc.), as of what has been maintained and resists change. History, as he saw it, was not merely a series of transformations, but also a storing up of acquisitions in which teaching and learning replaced the genetic – a power, that is, that extended back into the past and established something similar to an identity. This oscillation between accumulated, consolidated histories and historical movement was based on an idea, close to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, of the unconscious recurrence of physical and mental attitudes – Haudricourt compared them to survivals in biology. This enabled him to engage in a kind of archaeology of societies whose primary materials were their languages and objects. In this work he was mistrustful of abstract conceptualisation, and easily raged against the Marxist notions of ‘modes of production’, ‘productive forces’ and ‘state ideological apparatus’. Notional Marxism, which talked of production but not plants or animals, power and control but not know-how, relations of domination but not the domestication of pigs and so on, prevented people from observing the extraordinary material singularity of the ordinary, the enormous impact of seemingly utterly unremarkable actions. On a visit to Leningrad in 1934, he left Soviet researchers thoroughly perplexed when he explained to them that the fall of the Roman Empire had less to do with the collapse of a ‘proslavery ideology’, programmed by some ‘sense of history’ or other, than with the fact that the barbarians had better military equipment (lances, bridles, etc.). His functional historicism, with its foundation of concrete erudition, his defence of facts against linguistic effects and the related suggestion that reality was the same as mere grammatical games or vague terms that made no explicit reference to the visible, material world meant that, throughout his life, Haudricourt stood in an antagonistic relation to the dominant intellectual environment. A singular way of seeing In asserting that he was ‘a real ethnographer’, Haudricourt was claiming the right to look at people and things directly, without mental or linguistic flourishes, in a way that set reflection into motion on the basis of what is accessible here and now, a way that dismisses everything that is not first grounded in observation. He was always surprised to see that most people were absorbed in their interpersonal relations, and that, like Victor Hugo on the heath, they kept ‘their eyes fixed on their thoughts’ rather than on the world around them. Concerned to shatter all self-generated and self-fuelled mentalism, Haudricourt continually

Alban Bensa

234

reminded us of the presence of the natural world and of human beings as integral parts of and partakers in this world. His highly concentrated attention to the most visible details and their infinite complexity was a source of profound jubilation, as if, for him, sensuality and affection could only be reached through the exercise of observation. In return, he never failed to fulminate against purveyors of ideas without material ballast, ‘philosophers’ of the sort who, like Sartre, did not know the difference between a lime tree and a chestnut tree. In direct contrast to many people, specifically intellectuals, Haudricourt did not have to make any particular effort to bring about the catharsis that frees seeing from parasitical ideas. Spontaneously grasping the world in its material nudity, and in a perpetual state of amazement as he did so, he was, as it were, quite naturally disconnected from the kind of ordinary social communication that is often in itself a problem for social science researchers wishing to accede to objective seeing. In a permanent state of scientific wakefulness and attentiveness, Haudricourt had instead to make his way back to the necessary illusion of social life so as not to seem completely out of phase with others and society. Let it be said that he often only managed to do this by means of the salutary halfdistance from one’s fellow human beings that humour affords us.

Notes 1. Translated from the French by Amy Jacobs.

References Bensa, A. and J.-C. Rivierre. 1983. Histoires canaques, Paris: Conseil international de la langue française, Edicef. Durkheim, É. 1968 [1912]. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris: PUF. Durkheim, É. and M. Mauss. 1903. De quelques formes primitives de classification: Contribution à l’étude de représentations collectives, L’Année sociologique, 6 (1901– 2): 1–72. Gernet, J. 1952. Le comportement en Chine archaïque, Les Annales en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Éditions Armand Colin, March 1952. Haudricourt, A.-G. 1962. Domestication des animaux, culture des plantes et traitement d’autrui, L’Homme, 2(1): 40–50. ——— 1964. Nature et culture dans la civilisation de l’igname: l’origine des clones et des clans, L’Homme, 4: 93–104. Haudricourt, A.-G. and J.-B. Delamarre. 1986 [1955]. L’homme et la charrue à travers le monde, Paris: La Manufacture. Haudricourt, A.-G. and P. Dibié. 1987. Les pieds sur terre, Paris: Éditions Métailié. Haudricourt, A.-G. and L. Hédin. 1943. L’homme et les plantes cultivées, Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

Chapter 10

LOUIS DUMONT: FROM MUSEOLOGY TO STRUCTURALISM VIA INDIA Robert Parkin

Life and career Louis Dumont was born in Salonika, Greece, in 1911, where his father, an engineer, was manager of a company building a railway from there to Constantinople.1 Louis’ grandfather, Victor Emile Dumont, was a commercial artist who created designs for wallpaper in France and for cashmere produced in India in the nineteenth century. Louis’ first wife, Jennie, died in 1977 after forty years of marriage to him. He later married Suzanne Tardieu, an expert in Norman furniture at the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires. He died without issue in Paris on 19 November 1998, at the advanced age of eighty-seven. As a youth, Dumont went to the Lycée Saint-Louis to prepare for entry into the École polytechnique in Paris, but dropped out at eighteen because of disgust with the bourgeois lifestyle into which this was leading him. His mother, who had made considerable sacrifices for the sake of his education, threw him out, and he turned to a series of jobs, in insurance, as a proof-reader, and so on. During this time he became politically engaged as a communist fellow-traveller in support of the Popular Front government. However, he eventually returned to academic interests, frequenting the Collège de Sociologie of Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris in the late 1930s and simultaneously gaining indirect exposure to India for the first time through a group calling itself Le Grand Jeu. In 1936, thanks to Georges Henri Rivière, perhaps the most important French museologist of the

236

Robert Parkin

inter-war period, he obtained a clerical job in the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, which had just been separated from the Musée de l’Homme. Among his tasks was to type up Lévi-Strauss’s notes on the Bororo. He also discovered, and followed, Mauss’s courses in anthropology, which he was to describe later as a sort of ‘conversion’. Among other things, this inspired his interest in India, and he passed a certificate in ethnology in 1938. The following year he enrolled in the École du Louvre with a view to preparing a thesis in the history of art on Celtic survivals in modern French tools. However, the Second World War intervened and put an end to this project.

Figure 10.1. Louis Dumont, taken by himself, among the Kallar, Tamil Nadu (India), with his chief informant, Muttusami Tevar, 1949. Courtesy Mme Dumont.

Louis Dumont

237

Dumont was taken prisoner early in the war and sent to Germany. He was set to work as a field hand, then as a worker in a factory in a Hamburg suburb. During his spare time in captivity he not only learned German but also translated three German books on French folklore. Feeling at some point that he had done enough of this, he asked his wife to send him materials with which he could learn Sanskrit. Even more extraordinary, with the connivance of a guard he was not only able to meet Walther Schubring, an expert on the Jains, but to take weekly lessons from him in Sanskrit too. After the War, in 1945, he resumed his activities at the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, in which capacity he undertook a study of the southern French festival of La Tarasque, the subject of his first major written work (Dumont 1951). Simultaneously he studied Hindi and Tamil in preparation for fieldwork in India, which he was able to undertake from 1948 through a scholarship obtained for him by the eminent French Sanskritist, Louis Renou. He himself describes this period as one of unremitting hard work. Dumont therefore started his substantive career in anthropology relatively late, at the age of 38. His first trip to India lasted two years altogether, including eight months with the Pramalai Kallar, a Shudra caste of former warriors and bandits in Tamil Nadu. It resulted in his only fieldwork monograph, Une sous-caste de l’Inde du Sud (1957c). After a further brief sojourn with the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, at the instance of Fürer-Haimendorf he went to Oxford in 1951 to replace M. Srinivas, a former student of Radcliffe-Brown’s, as Lecturer in Indian Sociology in the then Institute of Social Anthropology. This was during Evans-Pritchard’s tenure of the chair, and Dumont referred to this period as a kind of ‘second training’ (in Galey 1982b: 18). In 1955 he returned to Paris, took his doctorate, and was appointed to the chair of the Sociology of India, later changed to a chair in Comparative Sociology, at the 6th section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (later the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme), where he remained for the rest of his career. He apparently owed this appointment in great measure to Lévi-Strauss and Lucien Febvre. Immediately after his appointment he set up the Centre d’Études Indiennes en Sciences Sociales, which became the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud in 1967, though he left this to pursue other interests in 1970. In 1976 he founded ERASME (Équipe de Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale: Morphologie, Échanges), a research team set up by CNRS (the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) with the aim of comparing whole cultures on the basis of their key values (the latter being a basic concept in Dumont’s mature thought). These years also saw the launch in 1977 of a book series jointly published by the Maison des Sciences de

Robert Parkin

238

l’Homme and Cambridge University Press. In 1982 ERASME was taken over by Daniel de Coppet, but following his death in 2002 it broke up. From 1955, Dumont spent fifteen months intermittently in a village in Uttar Pradesh, but was neither as inspired by nor as successful in this second period of fieldwork, of which little was published, despite plans for a monograph on mourning. It was here, however, that he was confronted with renunciation, from which he later developed the important notion of the out-worldly individual, a fulcrum in his later comparison between India and the West. Instead of writing up this stint of fieldwork, he turned to global accounts of Indian civilisation, first in the semi-popular La civilisation indienne et nous (1964) and then in his major work, Homo hierarchicus: essai sur le système de castes (1966a). Many of the articles in Contributions to Indian Sociology, the journal he founded in 1957 with his former student David Pocock, were a preparation for this task (Pocock ceased to be editor in 1964, Dumont in 1967). Subsequently Dumont turned to the study of European ideology, which he saw as fundamentally reversing Indian ideology in stressing both equality and individualism. This led to the two volumes of Homo aequalis, Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique (1977) and L’idéologie allemande (1991), the first charting the emergence of economic thought as a separate domain from politics in Europe, the second demonstrating variations in individualism in Europe (specifically Germany in relation to France). This was supplemented by a collection of papers entitled Essais sur l’individualisme: une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne (1983b). All of these works were eventually translated into English apart from La civilisation indienne et nous. To complete the picture there is his work on kinship, some of the major works being collected together in the volume Affinity as a value (1983a), including the comparative paper Hierarchy and marriage alliance in south India (originally 1957b), but also consisting of a course of lectures given in Paris on descent theory and alliance theory, Introduction à deux théories d’anthropologie sociale (1971).

Ideas Dumont is known today principally as a structuralist, indeed the leading structuralist of his generation in French anthropology after LéviStrauss himself. Intellectually, however, his thought developed, even changed radically during the early part of his career. His involvement with the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires seems to have given him not only an interest in material culture, which was still to be found in Sous-caste, but also a diffusionist perspective on the past, which

Louis Dumont

239

stimulated his interest in south India specifically. This was because he was influenced to begin with by sub-stratum theories that postulated, in this part of India, a Brahmanical or ‘Aryan’ veneer to local society and ideology that had been diffused to the area from north India but that now existed over an earlier and indigenous Dravidian base. Although this view has since been superseded in mainstream anthropology, not least thanks to Dumont’s own efforts, it has more recently entered political discourses advocating a specifically Dravidian national identity and the rejection of ‘Aryan’ influences from the north. But it was initially because of a desire to get at the Dravidian sub-stratum that Dumont chose to study a middle-ranking caste remote from Brahmanical influences, in a village without Brahmans. However, Dumont had also gone out to India having read in proof the relevant chapters of Lévi-Strauss’s Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949), with which the author had himself provided him. This, plus the fact that the Tamils themselves, ‘born sociologists’ according to Dumont (in Galey 1982b: 21), thought like structuralists in terms of binary oppositions between kin and affines, quickly led Dumont to see structuralism, not diffusionism, as the best approach towards understanding south Indian social organisation. This was the second profound change in attitude he experienced, the first having been the discovery of Mauss, which initiated the shift in his thought from cultural to sociological approaches that was completed by his experiences of south India and of Oxford (the latter still had something of its Radcliffe-Brownian tradition of social rather than cultural anthropology that itself drew on Durkheimian precedents). Substratum theories and survivals were therefore progressively abandoned by Dumont in favour of a combination of Maussian sociological holism and what became an original form of structuralism. I shall return to the significance of Mauss’s teaching for Dumont’s comparisons between India and the West later. These sociological and structuralist influences remained with Dumont henceforward, though he was never a slavish imitator of any of them, his structuralism in particular developing in markedly different directions from Lévi-Strauss’s. As Toffin (1999: 12) remarks, although meaning is still present in Dumont’s structuralism, values replace signifiers and signifieds, and hierarchy replaces structuralism of what might be called here the ‘simple’ sort of Lévi-Strauss: in short, hierarchical oppositions involving encompassment, and reversal between differently constructed levels, replace simple binary oppositions that may or may not be asymmetric and whose reversal is a matter of different contexts only. However, as Toffin also points out, these differences from Lévi-Strauss are more apparent in Dumont’s

240

Robert Parkin

work on India and modernity than in his studies of kinship, where indigenous values are of lesser importance than general principles. Another way of putting this is that Dumont’s work on kinship freed itself less from Lévi-Straussian structuralism than his studies of caste and European modernity. And Galey makes the further point that, unlike Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, Dumont’s ‘does not aim at defining the universal through the similarities of a human nature postulated a priori’ (1982a: 8). The focus on values permits Dumont to attempt instead ‘to recapture the entirety of mankind through the recognition of intrinsic dissimilarities’ (ibid.: 9). As Moffat hints, however, Sous-caste too is closer to Lévi-Straussian structuralism than Dumont’s later work on India: ‘In the years since Une sous-caste, the divergences have become increasingly apparent. Dumont’s structuralism is more concretely grounded in particular intersocietal comparisons; it has a stronger interest in social action; and it is more relative and reflexive’ (1986: xix). Sous-caste recognises fully the importance of the dichotomy between pure and impure, and therefore of status, among the Pramalai Kallar, but the absence of Brahmans from the village Dumont worked in means that the relation of status to power is left aside here. And although the importance of hierarchy is recognised, it is not problematised as it was to be in Homo hierarchicus and related work. This is significant in light of the frequent charge that Dumont’s overall account of caste is excessively Brahmanical: to the extent that this charge can be made to stick, it does not apply to Souscaste. The early numbers of Contributions also represent a decisive and explicit break with the past. This was quite deliberate from the outset. Thus Dumont and Pocock downgraded earlier tribal studies, which had dominated the anthropology of India hitherto – despite tribes being a definite minority of the population – in favour of an advocacy of the study not just of caste, but of the caste system. Thus although history, including Maussian world history, remained important in Dumont’s later work, with world-historical perspectives even becoming central later on, the flirtation with diffusionist survivals and sub-strata had disappeared from his writings by the late 1950s. At that point in his career, his attention became focused rather on the need to study a society like the caste system synchronically and holistically, as a coherently functioning and structured phenomenon, not as a series of historical layers and accidental accretions. Caste was also to be treated as comprehensible in terms of its own values, which were fundamentally religious, not as a pathological or degenerate system of naked power and oppression. As Madan (1999: 479) points out, Dumont controversially saw caste as resolving conflict, unlike totalitarianism, which was the elevation of power as a value in its own

Louis Dumont

241

right. Dumont also doubted whether caste could be reformed: it could only cease to exist. From this point of view, modern competition between castes represented a change not in fundamental values but in behaviour, a change produced, furthermore, by external influences introduced under the cover of modernity. His work on kinship is perhaps even more striking in respect of the adoption of synchronic, holistic, sociological perspectives over purely historical and cultural ones, as in the famous article of 1953 on ‘The Dravidian kinship terminology as an expression of marriage’. Although this part of his corpus is relatively small, it is in part concerned to see in what he called ‘positive marriage rules’ – elsewhere ‘prescriptive alliance’ or ‘cross-cousin marriage’ – a system found in all parts of the world, even where historical links are unknown, in the manner of LéviStrauss. This stands in marked contrast to his arguments that caste is unique to India. It is exemplified by his re-examination of Australian as well as Indian material on kinship (the parallels between Australia and south India in their both having systems of prescriptive alliance, though with differences in detail, are well known), as well as his lectures on kinship (Dumont 1971). But even within India, there were two other examples in which he sought to understand kinship in comparative, universal terms. One was his largely failed attempt to argue away the acknowledged differences between north and south Indian kinship, which he himself recognised was problematic (Dumont 1957a). The other, much more convincing, was his demonstration that the highly unusual system of affinity (if such it was) of the matrilineal Nayar in Kerala could be understood in terms of wider, pan-Indian values and practices (Dumont 1983a). As already indicated, a third major impact on Dumont, apart from Mauss and structuralism, was his four-year sojourn in Oxford with Evans-Pritchard. Although Dumont evidently doubted whether the great man entirely understood what he (Dumont) was trying to do, he saw in The Nuer, with its demonstration of the relativity of groups through unending processes of fission and fusion, the work of a structuralist manqué (Dumont 1968). He may also have been influenced by Evans-Pritchard’s notion of anthropology as essentially a process of translation (cf. Madan 1999: 476–77). More than anything, though, the experience seems to have drawn Dumont away from what I would claim is the common division of labour in France between ethnography and theory, and towards a more Anglo-Saxon situation where it is more usual for anthropologists to contribute to both. Certainly, according to Galey (2000: 325), ‘he admired British ethnography’, and Sous-caste, his only ethnographic monograph, is noticeably influenced by it. This, plus his interest in India, led him to produce the great majority of his

242

Robert Parkin

work in English, either originally or through eventual translation, which he always controlled very directly. He is therefore probably the best-known French anthropologist of his generation in the AngloSaxon world, for many even ahead of Lévi-Strauss himself. Indeed, he is perhaps better known in Britain, America and of course India than in his native France, despite his being made a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 1987 (with Georges Dumézil making the presentation at Dumont’s home in Paris). Together with his reluctance to become involved in wider political issues and his readiness to occupy a single post in his career after 1955, this helped cushion him from some of the competition and rivalries of the Parisian academic hothouse. Other intellectual positions that Dumont adopted can be traced right back to his study of the popular festival in southern France known as La Tarasque, which he set not only in its regional context in southern France, but also in the wider context of Mediterranean Christianity. Thus the study combined anthropological fieldwork with a consideration of the wider context of his study, using insights drawn from history. This recognition of different contexts is also found in his later work on India – though stretched out over all his subsequent major writings rather than condensed into just one – and with a similarly varied methodology. Fieldwork in south India described the specifics of a particular caste in a particular region, Tamil Nadu. This led to a regional south Indian comparison of kinship in an extended paper, Hierarchy and marriage alliance in south India (Dumont 1957b), then to wider comparisons focusing essentially on the different forms of relationship between kinship and caste in north and south India (see especially Dumont 1966b). As far as India was concerned, this process culminated in the overall account presented in Homo hierarchicus (Dumont 1966a), which drew, as already noted, on localised ethnographies (mainly by other anthropologists) as well as the more global insights of history and Indology. In this regard, it is a pity that Dumont’s fieldwork in north India was so much less successful that his research in Tamil Nadu. Not only was the area physically less pleasant, dry and dusty, and the people not really ‘born sociologists’ like the Tamils, but the absence of his wife on this trip evidently upset him somewhat, as did persistent sickness. More specifically, though, the village he chose had thirty-six castes living in it, unlike the Tamil village, where it was a simpler matter to concentrate on just one caste. The idea behind his later trip to Uttar Pradesh was to extend regional comparison within India. In the event, in Homo hierarchicus Dumont had to rely instead on the often outmoded work of earlier anthropologists to give him a solid ethnographic basis for north India. But this was not the end of the process of continually expanding comparative horizons, for Dumont’s work on European ideology, taken

Louis Dumont

243

together with that on India, could be seen as forming the starting point for a global comparison of what he called non-modern and modern societies. By the time of the work on Europe, ethnography had been left behind and general ideas had replaced observed facts. The source material is rather history, especially the history of ideas, to which Dumont’s own account is often seen as having contributed. The chief inspiration here again appears to have been Mauss. Although Mauss’s influence on Dumont is usually seen in terms of his holism and sociology, Dumont’s overall approach to historical change, even after his conversion to structuralism, was also influenced by the distinctive evolutionism of the Année sociologique school that is perhaps most clearly represented by Mauss. Indeed, Dumont’s overall comparison of India and Europe is cast in the world-historical terms of a contrast between non-modern and modern ideologies, in a manner very similar to that routinely adopted by this school. And like much of its work, Dumont’s typological sequences do not entirely match the historical ones: in particular, while the India Dumont discusses as the paradigm of non-modern societies is contemporary, the Europe of modern ideology is mostly historical. Similarly, the separation of economic from political ideas charted in Homo aequalis I resembles a disassembling in modernity of aspects of a phenomenon that were fused together primordially, which one finds regularly in the writings of the Année sociologique school and forms a significant aspect of their specific version of evolutionism (cf. Parkin 2001: Ch. 13). A further influence of the Année Sociologique on Dumont as represented by Mauss concerns the virtues of cooperative work in academic activities. But this was not the only, nor even the first example he had encountered that had this impact on him: there was also his early work in the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, where Dumont and his colleagues saw their work in preserving France’s folklore heritage as ‘a duty as much as a profession’, in Toffin’s words (1999: 8). Similar attitudes informed his later work. Early articles in Contributions were unsigned, to indicate that they were the joint work of the two editors (Dumont and Pocock), a policy soon abandoned, however, as it came to be feared that it was discouraging other scholars from taking part in these debates. Dumont conceived of the study of India as a joint project not only between Indologists and anthropologists, but also between anthropologists undertaking fieldwork in different parts of India, who provided the local factual underpinnings to his synthetic view of the whole. This is represented not only in the use made of various materials in Homo hierarchicus, in terms of both geographical regions and different disciplines, but also in his engagement with other specialists from these disciplines after his foundation of the Centre d’Études Indiennes en

244

Robert Parkin

Sciences Sociales (Toffin 1999: 9). ERASME too was intended to go beyond the usual levels of cooperation, even producing one text jointly authored by four of its members (Barraud et al. 1984). In general Dumont appears to have regarded joint work as more akin to scientific research, though he also felt that this was difficult to sustain in the social sciences, where the individual researcher is the norm, resulting in what he called ‘a chronic instability in the major interest or interests of the profession’ (in Galey 1982b: 20). This feeling can also be connected with Dumont’s overall view of the scholar’s task. An immensely hard-working and precise scholar, with an eye for detail as well as the wider picture, he explicitly saw himself as an artisan or craftsman as much as an intellectual, as comes out especially strongly in his interviews with Jean-Claude Galey (1982b) and Christian Delacampagne (1981: 4), to whom he described himself as ‘a jobbing social anthropologist’. He felt he had a duty to other researchers coming later who might want to use his work in being as comprehensive as possible. Thus Sous-caste, being intended as a comprehensive account of a particular caste, contains data on many matters not of pressing concern to Dumont himself but provided in case they might be of value to scholars coming afterwards. Indeed, as Moffat points out (1986: xviii), while the earlier chapters in that book are based on observation, the later ones reflect more directly the people’s own collective representations; it is easy to see that it is the latter that most interested Dumont, especially in respect of his later work. Another aspect of his craftsmanship was that, although allegedly sensitive, even hostile to criticism (cf. Madan 1999: 490), he was also prepared to revise his own work, as shown in his successive studies of north Indian kinship (e.g. Dumont 1962, 1975) and his occasional replies to his critics. Moffat called him ‘a good experimentalist’ (1986: xvi), while Galey remarked that he ‘was neither a man of systems nor a figurehead’ (2000: 326), but one scholar among many cooperating scholars, though undoubtedly at least primus inter pares to his followers. Rarely engaging as a scholar in the wider world of affairs, Dumont nonetheless clearly had a scepticism of egalitarianism, recognising that it had its limits, beyond which ordinary moderns were no longer prepared to recognise it (as with race in the West); thus his attitude here was, in a sense, ethnographic, not ideological. He was similarly sceptical, mainly in conversations reported by others, of the notion of human rights in contemporary international discourses, seeing it as a form of universalism based ultimately upon the atomising and egalitarian values of Western modernity, and therefore quite possibly of doubtful relevance to other traditions (cf. de Coppet 1990: 123–24, Galey 2000: 327).

Louis Dumont

245

Applications Although he is often compared with de Tocqueville, Dumont’s career thus reversed the earlier Durkheimian project of Célestin Bouglé, who began studying Western notions of equality before turning to India. Bouglé, who never visited India, certainly understood it less well than Dumont and blamed all its alleged problems on the Brahmans. Few anthropologists have capitalised more literally than Dumont on the principle that studying another society teaches us a lot about our own. As for structuralism, as already noted, in Dumont’s case this was always more ethnographically specific, less universalistic, than Lévi-Strauss’s. But it is Dumont’s development of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist device of binary opposition into what Dumont called hierarchical opposition that I want to focus on here. Not only is it the key to Dumont’s understanding of India, it also raises a number of interesting issues regarding how the West too views itself, as I shall argue below. However, it has also been widely misunderstood; at the same time, it provides a method of relating ideology and practice in a way that was not open, I would argue, to Lévi-Strauss’s simpler form of structuralism. Dumont initially applied this revised form of opposition to the relationship between the Brahman and the Kshatriya in Indian society. Varnas rather than castes in the strict sense, both Brahmans and Kshatriyas were associated with different forms of authority. In the Brahman’s case, this meant spiritual authority in a broad sense. The canonical depiction of the Brahman as a priest reflects reality in India only partly. There are priests who are not Brahmans, especially those who serve lower status castes and tribes. There are also Brahmans who are not priests but landholders, having their land worked by often untouchable labour, but seeing themselves as restricted or even nontransactors whose lack of dependence on the gifts of clients and the sins embodied in those gifts allows them to claim superiority over Brahman priests. The role that these landowning Brahmans claim for themselves is to study the ancient texts, the Vedas, and to perform rituals, including exact repetitions of these texts, of profound cosmological significance. In the traditional system the Kshatriyas, by contrast, have authority in the secular sphere and are associated with secular rule, power and warfare. Everyone, including the Brahman, is subject to them, but only in that sphere. This indicates the inferior status of that sphere compared to that of the Brahman, who is responsible for cosmic goals transcending the narrow domain of the practical affairs of the man in the world, the domain of the Kshatriya. In short, Dumont says, this is not an ordinary binary opposition of the type exploited by Lévi-Strauss, whether the poles are seen as equivalent in status (or in ‘value’, to use

246

Robert Parkin

Dumont’s term) or as asymmetric. The nature of the Brahman– Kshatriya relationship is that it is a hierarchical opposition in which the values represented by the Kshatriya are ‘encompassed’ by those of the Brahman. This is because, while even the Brahman landowner is subject to the Kshatriya in the secular sphere, that sphere is not only inferior to, it is also encompassed by, the sphere of the Brahman, which by virtue of its transcendence is superior overall. This view is reinforced by the fact that the Kshatriya supports the Brahman in the latter’s task (by giving him land in the first case, and in pre-Hindu, Vedic times, by providing the sacrifice) and protects him physically by providing social order. In other words, the secular sphere has no purpose other than to support the transcendental activities of the sphere of the Brahman. As already noted, this notion of hierarchical opposition is certainly among the most misunderstood in the whole of post-war anthropology. A more familiar, though much abused example may make clearer just what is involved (cf. Dumont 1980: 239–40). In pre-politically correct times, the English word ‘man’ had a double meaning. On one ‘level’, to use Dumont’s term, ‘man’ was simply opposed to ‘woman’ as its opposite. On the other level, it stood for the whole of humanity, including ‘woman’ (as in ‘mankind’). On this latter level, in other words, it ‘encompassed’ its contrary, ‘woman’. Clearly this went along with a whole set of circumstances in which things male were seen as ideologically more important, of higher value and so on, than things female. On the level involving encompassment, moreover, women are simply invisible, thanks precisely to their encompassment. It is only on the secondary level, that of distinction, that the category ‘woman’ appears at all. The two ‘levels’ are thus differently structured. They are also ideologically unified into a single structure: they do not simply represent different ‘contexts’ in which first one pole of a binary opposition, then the other, is prominent. The contexts produced by reversing one of LéviStrauss’s merely asymmetric binary oppositions are equivalent, in that moving between them simply involves reversing the polarity of the opposition. In moving between Dumont’s levels, on the other hand, one is moving between a superordinate situation of the encompassment (i.e. non-visibility) of one pole by the other, and a subordinate situation in which both are present by being distinguished. Thus, to return to India, the Brahman either stands for (encompasses) the whole of society in its relations with the cosmos, in rituals in which only he is evident; or else he appears alongside the Kshatriya as subject to the latter’s authority in a subordinate (secular, non-transcendent) situation or level. So much for encompassment – what about hierarchy? First, given that levels are unequally valued, there must be hierarchy. It is fairly easy to relate this to a society like India’s, which is still hierarchical today to

Louis Dumont

247

a high degree (e.g. the persistence of caste, but also aspects of modern life, like office politics, as well as kinship). The problem for Dumont’s critics has been his insistence that this model is pertinent to the West too, despite the West’s claims to egalitarianism. One result of this has been that Dumont has been accused of mistaking or ignoring the nature of equality, and even of actually preferring hierarchy to it as a mode of life. Even within India, his account has repeatedly been criticised for giving the Brahman’s point of view and ignoring those of other sectors of society. This can be seen partly with respect to the values of the renouncer, who turns his (sometimes her) back on society in order to pursue personal salvation as an individual. Yet the landowning Brahman may be considered closest to these ideals of anyone still in society, given his status as a minimal transactor – like the renouncer, the landowning Brahman tries to minimise his dependence on the householder and also avoids exchange transactions, since they carry with them some of the sin-laden and otherwise inauspicious substance of their inferior givers. As already noted, it is this that distinguishes the landowning from the priestly Brahmans, who are more or less entirely dependent on such transactions (cf. Dumont 1966, 1980). Dumont’s critics have made some significant points, but they still tend to misconstrue both his own position and the nature, let alone existence, of hierarchy in the West. Again, this often reflects sheer misunderstanding. Hierarchy is not simply the basis of the model of hierarchical opposition seen objectively – as a subjective cultural value, it may itself partake in this very model by actively being one of the poles of a hierarchical opposition. It is perhaps a failure to recognise this that has most misled Dumont’s critics. Hierarchy in Dumont’s terminology is not just social stratification: it is the operation of according different values to different things. Here it is useful, I think, to invoke the notion of ‘preference’. Briefly, we may say that while India prefers the values of hierarchy to those of equality, so that the former encompass the latter, the West does the reverse. In other words, in the West the value ‘equality’ itself encompasses the value ‘hierarchy’ in what is clearly another hierarchical opposition. That is, equality is an ideal, one associated with other ideals like individuality and freedom. As such, ordinarily it is stressed to the exclusion of hierarchy. Yet Western society is still hierarchical in many respects, which mostly relate to practical (i.e. non-ideological) matters. The world of work in particular is hierarchical, since – however much this may be mystified by modern industrial relations and personnel practices – orders are still given and obeyed, and firms managed through processes of hiring and firing subject others. Similarly, the law, government and the military are domains that are rarely endowed with more than the status of

248

Robert Parkin

necessary evils, in that they too limit the practical exercise of the Western ideals of liberty and equality, not least because they are hierarchical, generally quite literally so. Yet significantly they also appeal to their own support or protection of the ideals of liberty and equality as their ultimate justification, that is, they explicitly subordinate themselves to them. In short, there is a hierarchical opposition in the West that places equality in a superordinate and therefore encompassing position in relation to its opposite, hierarchy. The latter only emerges in domains proper to it, and then as a practical matter necessitated by, but also supporting, the level of fundamentally egalitarian and individualistic ideals. Thus the relationship between equality and hierarchy in the West is itself a hierarchical opposition involving levels and encompassment. This formulation may seem strange, but that is simply because there is a fundamental contradiction in the Western way of life that a hierarchical society like India is not faced with. For Dumont, hierarchy is unavoidable, anywhere. In India, the parallel to the hierarchical opposition described above for the West is the reverse situation, in which hierarchy encompasses egalitarianism, just as society encompasses the individual and duty encompasses both material interest and freedom (sometimes represented by pleasure). This can be expressed in indigenous terms, in respect of the triple but still hierarchical distinction between the ends of life, dharma, artha and k¯ama, or duty, work and pleasure: all have their place, but in a descending order of value, and therefore encompassment. Certainly, as has often been remarked, the values of the renouncer, which are ultimately concerned with personal salvation, appear to stress both individuality and the basic equality of all transcendent approaches to that end. This is far from being a negligible point, since this is an important form of transcendence, though one only pursued by a minority of Indian society (since, moreover, the aim is moksha, that is, liberation from the cycle of rebirths, it can also be seen as encompassing the above three values). Yet ideologically the renouncer is not in society, and indeed often marks his or her removal from it by undergoing a symbolic death ritual, quite possibly complete with shrouds and immersion into the Ganges or a river assimilated to it. Conversely the Brahman’s role is a social one, since he keeps the cosmos in being for the good of society and ultimately of humanity; he can therefore claim to lack the self-centredness of the path of the renouncer. This is one area where, as Richard Burghart shows us (1978), the values of the renouncer and the Brahman conflict, both politically and ideologically. However that may be, Dumont argues that, in expressing a preference for hierarchy, the model of hierarchical opposition therefore

Louis Dumont

249

accords with the superordinate value in Indian society; in the West it does not. In other words, hierarchical societies comfortably exist in conformity with their ideals, which stress that very hierarchy; egalitarian ones never can, because for practical reasons they can never entirely evade the hierarchy they are opposed to – all they can do is subordinate it as a value to the higher emphasis placed on egalitarianism. This has at least three further consequences. One relates to racism. Dumont does not oppose this to egalitarianism so much as see it as one of the latter’s pathologies. Although the West has influenced some Indian discourses in the direction of racism, and differences between castes have probably always been seen in part as differences of substance, modern racism never appears to have existed in traditional India. In the first place, the caste system is a system of inclusion rather than exclusion. Although one’s practices (cousin marriage, consuming beef and alcohol, polygyny) may consign you to a low status within the system, the system will still find you a place. In other words, hierarchies are flexible, because they are essentially relational: you are not absolutely different from me, just more or less pure, and your rank with respect to me reflects this. Even if you are impure, and although I might shun all contact with you, ideologically I do not dismiss you entirely but rank you accordingly. Egalitarianism, on the other hand, can only produce definitions in substantial terms, since adopting a relational approach to definition along Indian lines would involve introducing the very hierarchy that egalitarianism rejects. However, no society that sees itself as ideologically egalitarian seems to be able to free itself entirely from some urge to discriminate in practice: this is one of the ironic contradictions that Dumont locates in modernity. And if a social group is to discriminate while still maintaining equality within its own boundaries, it can only do so through a process of exclusion, that is, by defining the object of its discrimination as wholly different in substantial terms, for example racially or ethnically. We should not forget that the white populations that dominated certain multi-racial societies in the fairly recent past, as in the southern United States or South Africa, saw themselves as internally equal, at least racially and therefore in terms of substance, if not always socially (e.g. class). This was, of course, contrasted with the draconian and often vicious discrimination, also in substantial terms, meted out to non-whites in the same society. The practical outcomes of this discrimination were the colour bar in the US and apartheid in South Africa (cf. Dumont 1980, Appendix). The second consequence of applying hierarchical opposition to the egalitarian West relates to questions of discrimination in other ways. Dumont repeatedly insists on the relationship between making distinctions and differentially valuing what is distinguished: indeed, for

250

Robert Parkin

him we only distinguish in order to state a preference, that is, to allocate different values. This is another reason why oppositions cannot be other than hierarchical. A corollary of this is that if we wish to cease to discriminate we should not distinguish, that is, should not draw attention to difference. Up to a point, this reflects practice in the West as this has evolved over the past few decades. There is a contrast here with many other parts of the world, where it may be much more common for individuals to be identified casually with others in terms of race or ethnicity. In the West such usages are increasingly felt to be wrong, or at least impolite, and as making an unnecessary point – which is not to say that they have disappeared entirely, of course. Only if ethnic or racial discrimination is being discussed substantively, for example as an issue that still needs addressing, does reference to such differences seem justified. Similar practices have extended to other domains of potential or actual discrimination, such as sexual orientation, disability or food preferences (vegetarianism, for example). One might also add gender, though here the situation is complicated by a continuing compulsion to make often oblique reference to difference in circumstances of, for example, flirting and seeking partners. But even here – in work environments, for example – discussing work in relation to gender differences is no longer seen as acceptable except in the context of overcoming any remaining discrimination (again, I am not saying that it never happens, only that it is no longer considered politically correct). Gender also becomes interesting when it is combined with a consideration of sexual orientation, or at any rate gay politics. In Britain, at least, the term ‘gay’ tends to have a double reference of the sort discussed earlier for ‘man’ and ‘woman’, sometimes covering both genders, sometimes only men, as in the frequent identifier ‘gay and lesbian’; conversely ‘lesbian’ is categorically female, never male. This surely demonstrates the continuing power of hierarchical opposition, even in social circles that would appear to have the greatest interest in rejecting not only discrimination, but also the sense of differential value and hierarchy that goes along with it. The third consequence of applying hierarchical opposition to the egalitarian West is the relation of ideology to practice. As Allen notes (1998: 3), Dumont was well aware of Weberian and Parsonian sociology, and unlike Lévi-Strauss took them into account by giving the practical activities they stressed their due place, while characteristically subordinating them to the level of ideals. It is in the nature of pragmatic activities that they may conflict with ideals while at the same time supporting them (e.g. the offerings the wealthy make to the church or temple from their ill-gotten gains; see Parry and Bloch 1989). As Parry reminds us (1994), so long as humans have values distinct from the

Louis Dumont

251

world of the practical, their ideals will be unattainable and will thus always have a separate existence from the actual and the practical. I have no qualms in suggesting that, even in a period that stresses practice and agency, ideals remain equally valid objects of enquiry for the anthropologist. One of the reasons I believe Dumont’s work to be of value is that, through the notion of hierarchical opposition, he has offered us a way of relating ideology and practice that is rooted in the Durkheim tradition, yet also goes beyond it. As noted above, the level of ideals and values always encompasses that of practice, since although the former may be reliant on the latter for its fulfilment, the latter is ideologically subordinate, sometimes even ideologically unrecognised. It is only when the pragmatics of providing worship or the morally compromised nature of the world of practice become focal points for discussion that they are at all evident, and then only at the subordinate level of distinction, not the superordinate level of encompassment. I therefore suggest that Dumont’s name should be added to those who have attempted to combine practice and agency with ideology, including in the most recent period Giddens and Bourdieu, in the middle distance Parsons, and originally Weber himself. However, Dumont differs from all of these in according ideology a clearly superordinate value with respect to practice, thus keeping him closer to Durkheim, while articulating this difference through the uniquely Dumontial hierarchical opposition. To recap, therefore, Dumont’s intellectual trajectory can be seen as involving a series of shifts. The first was from early diffusionist, culturological approaches drawn from his museum experience to Maussian sociology, holism and world-historical perspectives, supported by a growing appreciation of Lévi-Straussian structuralism focused on simple binary oppositions. A second shift was from an early familiarity with this latter form of structuralism, stimulated also by his early fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, to the revision of structuralism in the direction of hierarchical opposition that was stimulated by his wider comparisons within India, as well as sustained in his yet wider comparison between India and the West. A third shift was from observation to ideas, from fieldwork to writings, in forming the evidential basis of his work, though in both producing ethnography and using it theoretically he was also adopting a distinctly Anglo-Saxon rather than French anthropological methodology. Yet, in combination with a lesser but still real familiarity with non-Durkheimian writers such as Parsons and Weber, who emphasise practice as much as ideas and values, hierarchical opposition also gave Dumont a way of relating and reconciling ideology and practice that was simply not open to LéviStrauss’s simpler form of structuralism. This is in addition to the

Robert Parkin

252

manner in which he used hierarchical opposition to render less opaque aspects of Western ideology and practice as well as Indian. It is these latter aspects, I suggest, that give Dumont his greatest claim to our continuing attention.

Note 1. I never met Dumont personally, though I corresponded with him on one occasion and saw him speak on another. In this appraisal I am therefore relying on published sources, especially for Dumont’s life (Part 1) and his more private views, namely the obituaries by Allen (1998), Galey (1999, 2000), Madan (1999) and Toffin (1999), two interviews given by Dumont (Delacampagne 1981, Galey 1982b), and appraisals by Galey (1982a) and Moffat (1986). Many of the views I give voice to in Part 2 are also anticipated in these writings. Part 3 has a little more claim to originality. A slightly different version of this chapter has already appeared in Spanish (Parkin 2006).

References Allen, N.J. 1998. Obituary: Louis Dumont 1911–1998, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 29(1): 1–4. Barraud, C., D. de Coppet, A. Iteanu and R. Jamous. 1984. Des relations et des morts: quatre sociétés sous l’angle des échanges, in J.-C. Galey (ed.), Différences, valeurs, hiérarchie: texts offerts à Louis Dumont, Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Burghart, R. 1978. Hierarchical models of the Hindu social system, Man (n.s.), 13(4): 519–36. de Coppet, D. 1990. The society as an ultimate value and the socio-cosmic configuration, Ethnos, 1990(3–4): 140–50. Delacampagne, C. 1981. Louis Dumont and the Indian mirror, Royal Anthropological Institute News, 43: 4–7. Dumont, L. 1951. La Tarasque: essai de description d’un fait local d’un point de vue ethnographique, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1953. The Dravidian kinship terminology as an expression of marriage, Man, 53: 34–39. ——— 1957a. For a sociology of India, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1: 7–22. ——— 1957b. Hierarchy and marriage alliance in south India, London: Royal Anthropological Institute. ——— 1957c. Une sous-caste de l’Inde du Sud: organisation sociale et religion des Pramalai Kallar, Paris: Mouton. ——— 1962. Le vocabulaire de parenté dans l’Inde du Nord, L’Homme, 2(2): 5–48. ——— 1964. La civilisation indienne et nous: esquisse de sociologie comparée, Paris: Armand Colin. ——— 1966a. Homo hierarchicus: essai sur le système des castes, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1966b. Marriage in India, the present state of the question III: north India in relation to south India, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 9: 90–114. ——— 1968. Preface, in E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Les Nuers, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1971. Introduction à deux theories d’anthropologie sociale, Paris and The Hague: Mouton.

Louis Dumont

253

——— 1975. Terminology and prestations revisited, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), 9(2): 197–215. ——— 1977. Homo aequalis: genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1980. Homo hierarchichus: the caste system and its implications (2nd ed.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ——— 1983a. Affinity as a value: marriage alliance and south India, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ——— 1983b. Essais sur l’individualisme: une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne, Paris: Le Seuil. ——— 1991. Homo aequalis II: l’idéologie allemande, France-Allemagne et retour, Paris: Gallimard. Galey, J.-C. 1982a. The spirit of apprenticeship in a master craftsman, in T.N. Madan (ed.), Way of life: king, householder, renouncer. Essays in honour of Louis Dumont, Delhi: Vikas, and Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. ——— 1982b. A conversation with Louis Dumont, Paris, 12 December 1979, in T.N. Madan (ed.), Way of life: king, householder, renouncer. Essays in honour of Louis Dumont, Delhi: Vikas, and Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. ——— 1999. Obituary. Louis Dumont (1911–1998): an enduring consistency, EASA Newsletter, 25: 13–17. ——— 2000. Louis Dumont (1911–1998): a committed distancing, American Anthropologist, 102(2): 324–29. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1949. Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Madan, T.M. 1999. Louis Dumont (1911–1998): a memoir, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), 33(3): 473–501. Moffat, M. 1986. Preface to Louis Dumont, A south Indian subcaste: social organization and religion of the Pramalai Kallar, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Parkin, R. 2001. Durkheimian evolution in the work of Marcel Mauss, in R. Parkin, Perilous transactions: papers in general and Indian anthropology, Bhubaneswar: Sikshasandhan. ——— 2006. Louis Dumont: estructuralismo, jerarquía e individualism, Revista de Occidente, 299: 9–34. Parry, J. 1994. Death in Banares, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parry, J. and M. Bloch (eds). 1989. Money and the morality of exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toffin, G. 1999. Louis Dumont, 1911–1998, L’Homme, 150, 7–13.

Chapter 11

WILL THE REAL MAURICE LEENHARDT PLEASE STAND UP? FOUR ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN SEARCH OF AN ANCESTOR Jeremy MacClancy

Students of anthropology have it tough: the courses they are taught on the history of the subject are usually boring, blinkered and Whiggish to boot.1 All too often the subject is presented as a deadening chronicle of disciplinary self-improvement, with each generation identifying, then moving beyond, the sins of their forefathers (and mothers). Evolutionism, this story tells us, was racist, functionalism dovetailed with colonialism, structural-functionalism ignored history, high structuralism was for mystics, postmodernism was an apolitical dead-end, while diffusionism was just plain wrong-headed. Only the present holds out much promise. ‘Onward, ever upward’ is the underlying agenda to this all-too common tale. At times I am surprised our students stay with us. Of course, this party line of constant self-advancement only appears coherent because it wilfully excludes so much. At an Oxford lecture I attended several years ago, Stephen Jay Gould argued that we humans are not at the apical growing tip of some evolutionary tree but out on a limb, and we ignore all the other branches we happened not to go down at our peril. It was a salutary reminder of just how random our development can be. Anthropology is little different. The conventional format of our history remains oddly silent about a whole host of different approaches which did not make it for the wrong reasons. And there are even more, still worthy of our consideration today, which contain valuable insights and suggestive agendas. In other words, what our students need is not

256

Jeremy MacClancy

Figure 11.1. Maurice Leenhardt (back row, centre), with Melanesian pastors during a conference, Nouvelle Calédonie 1916. Archives de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, Fonds Maurice et Raymond Leenhardt, 12 J.

just a history of anthropology, but an anthropology of that history as well. They need to learn why some ideas are yet propagated while the rest are left to lie fallow. For if anthropology is about putting ideas and customs into their contexts, surely it behoves us to do the same with our own practices. We are not special. There are, of course, exceptions. Not all historians of anthropology are Whigs with a wilfully exclusionary style. Some have tried to rewrite the past by vigorously promoting the forgotten, the neglected, the marginalised. But this is not a high-minded, Lazarus-like revival of the otherwise dead, merely a variant of the tired self-interested strategy of those striving for hegemony. I could cite several examples. Instead I will stick with the one I know best. In the 1960s and 1970s, Rodney Needham persuaded the University of Chicago Press to establish a series, with him as editor, dedicated to the re-printing of nineteenth-century works, each with a lengthy introduction by himself or one of his brighter students. Needham’s aim was manifold. First, these books gently subverted established historiographies by exposing their structuring conventions. Second, they acted as cautionary tales for students, reminding them that ideas then being touted as new were not in fact quite that novel. Third, they implicitly criticised high structuralist abstraction and love of apparent paradox by demonstrating that anthropological ideas could be discussed in a pellucid, seemingly

Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up?

257

unpretentious nineteenth-century prose (which happened to chime with Needham’s own literary style). Fourth, and perhaps above all, these books reflected, and so further established, the singularity and historical depth of his own vision of our discipline: who else had had the insight to realise the contemporary value of these forsaken classics? These books could thus act as supplementary means of advancing the project more explicitly stated in his major essays and books. They were, if you like, the soft sell complementing the hard sell of his key articles and tomes. Though a former student of Needham’s, I am still rather surprised to find myself treading a somewhat similar path, albeit in a far less illustrious mode. In a variety of papers, I have tried to re-illuminate once bright corners of anthropology, almost forcibly bringing them to others’ attention (e.g. MacClancy 1986, 1995, 1996, 2000). In this chapter, however, I wish to do something different. Instead of attempting to resuscitate a long-dead figure, I wish to examine how others have tried to do so, and to what effect. In the process we might learn something about the way histories of anthropology are negotiated for present-day purposes. My object of attention is Maurice Leenhardt. If the aim of this volume is to demonstrate that French anthropology has not been, as the stereotype has it, all grand theorising from afar and that, to the contrary, it has in fact a long tradition of empirical fieldwork with its own grounded theory, then Leenhardt fits the bill extremely well. For in the 1930s and 1940s, he was hailed by his peers as one of the greatest fieldworkers of his day, and certainly the most long-term one. Moreover, as we shall see, he had his own particular theoretical approach, born in his case out of his missionary concerns. In this chapter, I first sketch his life; then examine the interests of his varied would-be resuscitators, including those who wish to revive the man, only in order to put the knife back in; I end with some general comments.

A life We can be brief. Our subject’s biography has already been recounted many times, most memorably by Clifford (1982). The Leenhardts were a pious family of bourgeois Protestants inclined towards the liberal professions and the pastorate. Franz Leenhardt (1846–1922) was an eminent geologist who desired to fuse theology with positive science. His fourth child, Maurice (born 1878), was a mediocre, occasionally troublesome student, who went deaf in one ear and failed his baccalaureate three times. Inclined towards the missions from an early age, he married in 1902 and was ordained three months later; four days after that, the couple left to establish a mission in New Caledonia.

258

Jeremy MacClancy

Life on the former penal colony was not easy. The locals were increasingly hemmed in by expansionist colonists: farmers, herdsmen, miners, Catholic missionaries, administrators. Between 1855 and 1900 the local population dropped by almost half, their death hastened by imported alcohol, diseases and firearms, while the rebellion of 1878–79 led to the killing of two hundred Europeans and several times that number of indigenes. Leenhardt had to contend with demoralised but still proud locals (known as Canaques), territorial priests and colonials keen to keep their potential labour-force subdued, not educated. The highminded young missionary was forced to learn, by painful mistakes, how to be diplomatic yet firm if he wished to assist those he defended. To the colonial government of the day, he became a long-term irritant. He established his mission station, Do Neva, on the eastern coast and worked intensively with his natas, pastor-evangelists. They were the central plank of his conversion strategy: he saw his own role as protecting and encouraging an autonomous Melanesian church. Thus educating the natas became his first priority, essentially through practical exercises in the comparative analysis of religious languages: the biblical and the indigenous forms. Leenhardt would make tours to visit his natas stationed in villages along the coast and in the bush, and he and his wife also ran a school for local children. Though his church steadily grew, Leenhardt remained concerned about the thoroughness of locals’ conversions. In order to understand this process better, he realised he would have to comprehend indigenous ways as deeply as possible. So, during his first leave home in 1908–9, he broached the work of Durkheim’s Année Sociologique group and of Lévy-Bruhl, while his father, ‘as usual, urged him toward more precise observation and stressed the importance of collecting genealogies’ (Clifford 1982: 75). On his return to Do Neva, he commenced in earnest an ethnographic study of his neighbours. He wished, through repeated discussions and encounters, to probe the lived reality of customary life, and so derive the most apposite terms and forms for a New Caledonian Bible. Working with his natas, he aimed to translate the words of God into expressions meaningful to a living Melanesian language. To Leenhardt, this laborious co-operative translation was the key to any worthwhile conversion. In 1920 he and his family returned to France. There he began to engage seriously with university anthropology. At his father-in-law’s house, he met Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. This proved to be the start of a long and productive friendship, the philosopher eager to learn from the fieldworker about Melanesian conceptions and Leenhardt keen to discuss his companion’s ideas about the ‘prelogical’ and ‘modes of participation’. He gave papers at academic meetings, met with Marcel Mauss, and at his request published a long article on a key New

Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up?

259

Caledonian festival. In 1922 he embarked on a seventeen-month investigative tour of all the French Protestant missions in sub-Saharan Africa. During these visits he was able to check and prove the worth of the guiding ideas he had elaborated in New Caledonia. In late 1923 he went back to Do Neva, this time without his family. It was to be a difficult stay, with Leenhardt wishing to see the principles of his evangelising approach well-rooted, so that it would survive his departure. He believed in a strong indigenous church, with great autonomy, little hierarchy, and reliant on local pastors. To his great disappointment, his ideas would be rejected by his metropolitan superiors. They continued to regard their independent, critical colleague with suspicion; his recommendations were quietly ignored. Back, this time definitively, in Paris in 1926, Leenhardt had to look for work, as his Mission Society would not give him a position of responsibility. He gained employment as an ‘urban missionary’, attending to the needy of the city. That took up half his time; the rest of each week he dedicated to writing and teaching, for both anthropological and missionary audiences. He established and edited a bimonthly journal about missionary matters, Propos missionaires, and besides producing numerous articles of ethnography, published a trilogy of works: Notes d’ethnologie néo-calédonienne (1930), Documents néo-calédoniens (1932), and Vocabulaire et grammaire de la langue houaïlou (1935). Thanks to his growing friendship with Mauss, he began in 1933 to teach at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Within a few years he was doing half of Mauss’s teaching. In 1937 he accepted an invitation to publish a popular account of indigenous life, grounded in fieldwork. His Gens de la Grande Terre presents a sympathetic account of New Caledonians as bearers of a rich, rounded tradition, worthy of our interest and increasingly threatened by colonialist inroads. Shortly after its publication in 1938 Leenhardt and his wife returned for more than a year’s stay to carry out a survey of the languages and dialects of New Caledonia and nearby islands. The result, Langues et dialects de l’Austro-Melanesie, is a somewhat forbidding compendium of grammatical sketches and vocabularies. Of course Leenhardt, while conducting his survey, did not act as an aloof academic, but attempted to intercede in important issues of the day. Many of his supporters now venerated their white-bearded ‘Missi’, while his white opponents continued to regard him, with unease, as an influential, interfering négrophile. When, in 1940, the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy government forced Mauss to resign from the École Pratique des Hautes Études, he had Leenhardt replace him. Leenhardt turned the lectures he gave there into his most famous, most challenging book, Do Kamo: la personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien (1947). The next year he returned, for

Jeremy MacClancy

260

the last time, to New Caledonia as the founding director of a government research station in the capital, the Institut Français d’Océanie. As before, colonialist differences made his stay initially very tense. While waiting patiently for these criticisms to peter out, he gently encouraged the work of his junior colleagues and so cemented the reputation of the fledgling institute. In Paris, Leenhardt, who was now well into his seventies, kept up an exemplary list of activities: organising, teaching, writing. In 1952 he accepted the presidency of the Alliance Evangélique Universelle. The next year he planned a final trip to la Grande Terre. But that summer he was diagnosed with cancer, and died in January 1954.

In search of an ancestor In my sketch of his life, I have coasted over Leenhardt’s central ideas, because exactly what they were is the key issue of this chapter. Instead of advancing my own exegesis of his words, I wish to examine how others have interpreted his thoughts. Leenhardt the post-structuralist avant la lettre In the mid-1970s Jim Clifford was an unknown, young academic with a first degree in literature from Harvard, where he had become acquainted with the first signs of what is now termed a poststructuralist approach. He went to Paris to do doctoral research on the history of French anthropology during the interwar period. After reading Do Kamo and then Leenhardt’s unpublished letters and journals, he chose to focus on this by then neglected figure. Throughout his book, Clifford takes pains to stress the open-ended, dynamic nature of Leenhardt’s thoughts and approaches. He portrays an assiduous, sensitive priest who engaged with anthropology in order to further his missionary project. According to Clifford, Leenhardt wanted to comprehend the amplitude and profundity of New Caledonian thought in order to ascertain the most effective way towards meaningful conversion. He did not arrive at a final, definitive position but ‘thought and rethought a difficult and inspiring involvement with the Melanesian world’ (Clifford 1982: 1). Moreover, this rethinking had reflexive effect, making Leenhardt reconsider the very nature of Christianity and its teachings. In the process, theological abstraction came to yield first place to the power of a concrete immediacy. Clifford lays stress on Leenhardt’s radical notion of selves without unifying centres: ‘There is no experience of a defining “body”. The Melanesian feels no physical envelope that separates a personal “inside”

Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up?

261

from an objective “outside”’ (ibid.: 185). Rather, the self is that amalgamation of dualistic relationships which each New Caledonian accumulates and participates in. Instead of a centralising ‘ego’, an indigene is made up of dualities, between himself and his parent, uncle, spouse, cross-cousin, clan, ancestor, totem, and so on. Leenhardt did not speak of traditional locals as individuals but as each having a ‘personage’, a relational ensemble of such dualities. Myths are not to be seen as stories but as geographically rooted providers of images which, through juxtaposition, enable locals to experience complex emotional states. Thus myths are not so much narrated as lived. Especially at heightened, ritualised moments, a New Caledonian may participate, via these dualities, in a socio-mythic space, where time and distance, in conventional Western terms, are collapsed, transcended. Leenhardt wished to forge a Western vocabulary to render the distinctiveness of New Caledonian ways. He wished, for instance, to emphasise the lack of distinction for indigenes between thought, on the one hand, and expression and concrete action on the other. In modern parlance, he wanted to emphasise the illocutionary dimension of utterance. Here, saying is doing, and utterance a speech act. For him ‘parole’, which his English commentators have translated as ‘the word’ or ‘words’, dissolved the conventional gap between speech and language. But he wished to give ‘parole’ a much broader compass than those linguistic dimensions. Not tied to elocution, it was positioned more concretely in gestures. While it could not be separated from thinking, ‘thought’ was here understood as solidified emotion rather than intellect. In sum, this remarkably wide version of ‘parole’ was whatever manifests the person, was more likely to be exemplified by things than words, and was to be understood as expressivity rather than structure. Clifford’s analysis is subtle and gracefully couched. Indeed, he does the job so well that almost all subsequent Anglophone re-interpreters of Leenhardt are to a certain extent influenced by his reading of the man’s work. However, what is of particular interest here is his stress on the contemporary relevance of Leenhardt, whom he portrays as a bypassed trailblazer: ‘What is important ... is that his mistrust of systematic closure, his emphasis on reciprocal interpretation and cultural expressivity, placed him on the boundary of a science that, since Tylor, had concerned itself with the study of whole, integrated ways of life in more or less continuous development’ (ibid.: 173). Clifford’s Leenhardt is an institutionally marginal figure, whose interests and approaches dovetail remarkably well with ideas only then beginning to percolate through into the anthropology of the early 1980s. On a perhaps flippant, more likely designedly polemical note, Clifford even terms Leenhardt a post-structuralist, albeit one avant la lettre (ibid.: 173).

262

Jeremy MacClancy

The various concerns which Clifford underlines in his biography – reciprocity, reflexivity, open-endedness, persistent provisionality, the decentred self, and the problems of translation – are all, of course, now classically post-modernist matters. And the first raisers of that banner in social anthropology were Clifford himself and his colleague George Marcus in the book they edited, Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography (1986), today as notorious as it is famous. In a recently translated book, the Parisian historian of ideas François Cusset (2008) argues that in the 1980s American academics trumpeted the ideas of French theoreticians (e.g. Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard), which they branded ‘poststructuralism’, just as those approaches were rapidly losing favour on their home turf. The very term ‘poststructuralism’ is itself an American coinage; it does not exist in France (Wolin 2008). The postwar saw was ‘When a philosophy dies, it comes to Oxford’. For the 1980s, replace ‘Oxford’ with ‘America’. Cusset does not discuss anthropology in his account, but Clifford’s importation of Leenhardt into US academe slips all too easily into this interpretation of the trans-Atlantic trade in ideas. For these reasons, it is not overly cynical to see Clifford as in effect exploiting the figure of Leenhardt as a means to bring poststructuralism into anthropology. At the same time, of course, it is also an exploitation of Leenhardt in order to advance his own academic career, to be recognised as a standard-bearer of the then anthropological avant-garde. I contend that this interpretation is not too cynical because Sangren, in one of the first incisive critiques of postmodernism, exposed the hegemonic pretensions of Clifford and Marcus’s movement (Sangren 1988). For, by claiming the equality and diversity of different theoretical approaches, they quietly failed to state the superiority of one theory: their own. When Sangren links this bid for hegemony to their own desire for institutional self-advancement, Clifford, an otherwise very astute respondent, complains of ‘innuendo about career strategies’ (Clifford 1988: 425).2 Leenhardt the phenomenologist Romantic The American anthropologist Thomas Maschio did fieldwork in the mid-1980s among the Rauto of southwestern New Britain. In his magisterial ethnography of them, he openly acknowledges the influence of ‘Leenhardt’s seminal work on the character of New Caledonian religious experience. It is an insight that to my mind has neither been applied, nor even recognised, save tangentially, by the anthropology of religion’ (Maschio 1994: 28). What Maschio finds so useful in Leenhardt is his conception of the role of mythic consciousness in a New Caledonian’s progress towards

Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up?

263

authentic personhood. Dissatisfied with well-established anthropological approaches which stress the discursive interpretation of symbolic representation, Maschio is stimulated by Leenhardt’s phenomenological focus. Following his exemplar, Maschio does not wish to comprehend local ways according to the structuring constraints of a Western semiology, but to explore the ways Rauto ritual and poetic performances enable the enactment, expression and invention of the self. Thus, openly inspired by Leenhardt, he sees Rauto religious performance and expression as ways to transform nostalgia, anger and other emotions into a style of cultural memory, one which juxtaposes patterned cultural meaning with an emotional feeling of plenitude. While he acknowledges the use of Clifford’s reading of Leenhardt, Maschio goes further, for he wishes to associate Leenhardt with a longstanding strand within Western ideas. First he points out how Leenhardt’s portrayal of the link between individuation and mythic consciousness resonates with Jung’s characterisation of the individuation process. The ideas of both intellectuals about the mythic image being ‘somehow basic to human existence’ dovetail with Barthes’ conception of it as retaining the obtuse and ‘sometimes obscure meaning of primary intuitive experience ... as a way of knowing that eschews clear conceptual thought and language’ (ibid.: 31). While Leenhardt and Jung saw mythic thought as central, they both regarded it as only the foundation for individuation. Both considered that mythic thinking needed to be coupled with rationality ‘so that a person could bring about a psychologically balanced form of individuation’ (ibid.: 220). Openly opposing them to modern symbolic anthropologists who employ metaphors of reading, writing and editing, Maschio groups Leenhardt and Jung into a long line of Romantic thinkers, especially Vico, who were concerned with the relations between image, memory and experience (ibid.: 33).3 In other words, in order to understand Leenhardt within his plenitude, Maschio places him within a strand of Western thought which goes back centuries while retaining much relevance for anthropologists of religion today. According to Maschio, Leenhardt can yet be a guide for our times. Leenhardt the existentialist Deborah van Heekeren sees Leenhardt as a crypto-existentialist who embedded a Heideggerian perspective into his ethnography. Since Leenhardt did not explicitly acknowledge any debts to the philosopher, she grounds her argument on several struts: Clifford’s note about Leenhardt’s regular conversations with a translator of Heidegger (Clifford 1982: 250, n. 39); the ethnographer’s concern to focus on experience

264

Jeremy MacClancy

and thus, if need be, to transcend western categories of analysis; and the parallels between his concept of mythic participation and Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, ‘an ontological term which he employed to designate man in respect of his being’ (van Heekeren 2004: 433). Heidegger argued that the essential nature of existence could be revealed in certain ‘limit situations’, such as struggle and death. Only in these situations might the presence of being become evident. To van Heekeren, these situations, which she designates ‘existential events’, resonate with Leenhardt’s stress on clusters of participations in which mythic thought is lived. Just as the philosopher thought authentic being was discovered in a situation such as death, so the ethnographer considered that New Caledonian authenticity was discovered in sociomythic events: ‘a moment experienced as passion/flight/transformation, or perhaps fear or despair, that is universally recognised yet deeply and individually experienced’ (ibid.: 438). Similarly, she sees Leenhardt’s idea of the collapse in socio-mythic space of distance between people and things as strikingly similar to Sartre’s comment on the annihilation of distance between subject and object (ibid.: 438). She concludes that both Leenhardt and Heidegger recognised a mode of being that participates with the world. This being-with-the-world is at the same time a being-with-others. However, to be with others authentically, one has to experience the mode of relation to the other which promotes existence in the full sense (ibid.: 446). If Heidegger was concerned about the survival of authenticity in the modern world, Leenhardt was similarly troubled about the continuation of ‘plenitude’ in colonialist times. The value of van Heekeren’s approach is heuristic, or pragmatic: it is to be judged in terms of its results. A fieldworker of Papua New Guinea, she claims, ‘I have been particularly impressed by the way Leenhardt’s writing resonates with the work of indigenous authors in so far as each seems to capture a fundamental sense of being that other models elide’ (ibid.: 432). Analysing her own field-data, she wishes to demonstrate that mythic dimensions to ontology can also be uncovered in other parts of Melanesia. To her, this is the greatest legacy of Leenhardt: his interpretation of myth as more than story or charter, leading to an ‘outstanding philosophy of Melanesian existence’ (ibid.: 433). The problem with approaches such as van Heekeren’s is that the game is rarely worth the candle. It is all too easy to speculate on possible precursors whom Leenhardt might have read and who might have influenced him. Heidegger is one candidate. Bergson and Mach are others. But how to choose between them, unless we have substantiated evidence?4

Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up?

265

Leenhardt the decentred soul If there is a key volume in Marilyn Strathern’s oeuvre, it is her Gender of the gift (Strathern 1988). And if there is a key, much commented-upon idea in that book, it is her portrayal of Melanesians as ‘dividuals’, an idea first formulated by Marriott in his South Asian ethnography (ibid.: 348–49, n. 7). Recognising dividuality means regarding persons in primarily relational terms, constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them (ibid.: 13). While praising the ‘brilliance’ of Leenhardt for charting the extent to which persons appear through their relationships, Strathern bluntly states that he made the mistake of thinking there is a centre, albeit an empty one, to New Caledonian personhood (ibid.: 268–69). Instead she wishes to speak almost exclusively of relationships. Bill Maurer, who wishes to promote a ‘lateral anthropology’, strongly queries Strathern’s desire to call Leenhardt mistaken: ‘Refusing the structure of error, I would simply add that this language lies alongside others, where mistakes can be made and where the very idea of a mistake can be obviated by multiple and polyvalent emergences’ (Maurer 2005: 19). Edward LiPuma, a fellow Melanesianist, criticises her on precisely this point. He contends that she has exploited the much-used tactic of criticising predecessors on the grounds that they have been compromised by ethnocentric presuppositions, in this case Leenhardt. He considers that the power of her argument rests on a usually unexamined ‘theory of anthropological “progress” based on increasing epistemological awareness of the uniqueness of other’s cultures’ (LiPuma 1998: 55). In other words, he regards her as a Whig. Eric Hirsch, a Melanesianist colleague of Strathern’s, counter-argues that LiPuma has misrepresented her. She did not ignore the individual aspect of personhood. As Hirsch emphasises, Strathern states early on in her book: ‘Far from being regarded as unique entities, Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived’ (ibid.: 13, Hirsch 2001: 140).5 Even though we take this point, it does not puncture the power of LiPuma’s criticism of Strathern’s discriminating dismissal of Leenhardt. I might add that if, as Hirsch claims, ‘her interest is not to deny the relevance of the individual to Melanesian social life’ (ibid.: 140), how are we meant to conceive of individuals without centres? It would seem difficult for Hirsch to answer that convincingly without having to modulate Strathern’s criticism of Leenhardt.

Jeremy MacClancy

266

Towards an assessment? Leenhardt as post-structualist (Clifford), romantic (Maschio), existentialist (van Heekeren), decentred soul (Strathern): one man, four anthropologists, four rather different interpretations of the same work: why the diversity? We have already mentioned the felt need of some academics to cut their own road, and to be seen to be doing so. In other words, it pays the ambitious to come up with an individual interpretation of Leenhardt which advances their own interests. But there is a further reason why he is such a suitable candidate for multiple interpretation. Do Kamo is not easy to read. It is at times a confusing jumble of inconsistent language and unannounced shifts in style. Its English translator stresses its labile vocabulary and eccentric organisation (Gulati 1979; see also Clifford 1982: 172). Bensa claims that Leenhardt proceeds ‘less by progressive analyses than by inspired affirmations’ (Bensa 2000: 95). Crapanzano notes that in Do Kamo, Leenhardt can confuse role and person, and fails to separate the concept of the person from the experience of being a person. He also highlights ‘the sudden intrusion of the concrete in the abstract and the abstract in the concrete, indeed the idiosyncrasy of its language’ (Crapanzano 1979: xvi, xxiv). Jamin, while sympathetic to Leenhardt’s desire to produce an effective translation, queries the limits of his endeavour: By turning translation upside down, that is to say by trying to adapt and bend his own language to that of others, he certainly reinstated the original grammar, but immediately risked a loss of meaning: because he so wanted to learn, say and transcribe difference, he risked making it incomprehensible. (Jamin 1978: 56)

In other words, by attempting to render into French the almost unnameable, Leenhardt produces the almost unreadable. Several criticise his inconsistent use of ‘myth’. Crapanzano contends that he confuses ‘a mode of knowledge with a cultural reality of some never quite clear status’. According to him, Leenhardt elided a construct, analytically derived by himself, from observed behaviour with an experientially felt reality portrayed by him and then attributed to New Caledonians (Crapanzano 1979: xviii–xix; see also Young 1983: 15). To put that another way, how much of Do Kamo’s ‘mythic consciousness’ represents indigenous patterns of thought, and how much is Leenhardt’s own mystifying creation? One reason this question is so difficult to answer is that, unlike Malinowski, Leenhardt did not provide the social contexts associated with individual myths (Young 1983: 15–16). Thus several of his analyses can appear more literary than social, and some even anecdotal (Crapanzano 1979: xx).

Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up?

267

Furthermore, Leenhardt’s central notion of participation can be easily questioned. Thus Naepels points out that Leenhardt, when speaking of a related pair, such as an uncle and his nephew, claims that a local does not ‘perceive two persons but the unity of that pair, without truly being conscious of the individuals composing it’. As he argues, though indigenes might speak of their ‘parents’, that does not mean that they are not clearly aware of the individual existence of their mothers and fathers (Naepels 2007: 77). Naepels, himself a veteran fieldworker of New Caledonia, here speaks with some authority. Some have argued that Leenhardt lacked a modern appreciation of metaphor, in effect denying New Caledonians’ ability for metaphorical play and beauty. Instead he tended to confound local descriptions of experience with evidence for description (Young 1983: 15; see also Naepels 2007: 79). This criticism could stand as a particular instance of the more general fear that Leenhardt appears to give a determining weight to linguistic structures as reflecting ways of thought (Naepels 2007: 71). It is therefore of great concern to learn that Leenhardt, even though he had lived among the locals for so long, could still get it badly wrong. Clifford starts the key chapter of his book, Chapter Eleven ‘Structures of the person’, with the following: Leenhardt never tired of recounting a conversation with Boesoou Erijisi in which he proposed to his oldest convert: ‘In short, what we’ve brought into your thinking is the notion of spirit.’ To which came the correction: ‘Spirit? Bah! We’ve always known about the spirit. What you brought was the body.’ The largest part of Leenhardt’s ethnological theorizing was direct or indirect exegesis of this retort. (Clifford 1982: 172)

Clifford makes such a grand claim because, he states, the response made Leenhardt revaluate the applicability of the Western notion of ‘body’ to New Caledonians, and so enabled him to conceive of indigenous personages as transcending European ideas of corporal limits. It is all the more worrying, therefore, that Leenhardt can here be accused of mistranslation. Naepels, who is able to read Leenhardt’s texts in their indigenous languages, contends that he incorrectly translated the term used by Boesoou Erijisi, ‘karo’, as ‘body’ (corps). The nata made his remark in the course of a conversation about Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, in which he argued that what the missionaries had brought was the flesh, in the Pauline sense of the carnal, the fleshy, the sinful. Naepels is emphatic that Leenhardt’s transcription of his friend’s words does not justify his claim that New Caledonians had been unaware of their bodies as bodies, as the support or prop of individual existence:

268

Jeremy MacClancy

When Leenhardt, unconscious of the conceptual difference between flesh and body, quoted the decontextualized translation of this dialogue, he turned his very subtle indigenous pupil into the involuntary witness of the primitive absence of the consciousness of self. (Naepels 2007: 84)

If Naepels is correct, a central feature of Do Kamo is exposed as the outcome of a single miscomprehension. It is criticisms such as these which enable some of Leenhardt’s commentators to characterise him in less than eulogistic terms. Thus L’Estoile points out that his work in places suffers from an evolutionist, truly primitivist vision of New Caledonians (L’Estoile 2007: 29–32), while even Clifford, otherwise a panegyrist of Leenhardt, feels forced at one point to admit that ‘his rather mystical Canaque is an exaggeration’ (Clifford 1982: 137). Not surprisingly, then, at least one Melanesianist has accused Leenhardt of explicit racism (Guidieri 1984: 75, n. 1). Alban Bensa, a French anthropologist of New Caledonia, has questioned much of Leenhardt’s ethnographic analysis.6 But he goes further. According to him, Parisian intellectuals cited Do Kamo so often because its portrait of Canaques dovetailed neatly with the long-grounded stereotype of the ‘primitive’, still inhabiting an Eden long denied to us. In other words Leenhardt’s language seduced an anguished intelligentsia. Bensa concludes, somewhat rhetorically, by asking, how Leenhardt, who had done such lengthy, painstaking fieldwork, could ‘come up with a vision of the Canaque world so strange and so distant from those of his predecessors and of his successors?’ (Bensa 2000: 97). Jean Guiart, Leenhardt’s most distinguished pupil, stung by the criticisms of his Parisian colleagues, tried to defend his revered teacher by writing a short biography of him. Unintentionally, in his hagiography he provides his enemies with further arms. For he reveals that, in Documents néo-calédoniens (1932), Leenhardt quoted long extracts, without any attribution whatsoever, from the notebooks of one especially talented nata (Guiart 1998). As Naepels notes, this is surely plagiarism and verges dangerously close to colonial exploitation (Naepels 2000). While Leenhardt’s work is now much utilised and praised by Canaques in their struggle to regain a sense of cultural dignity, Bensa worries that the ideas in Do Kamo are also being used to explain, ‘against all evidence’, the scholastic failure and economic difficulties of native New Caledonians. Far from assisting politicised Canaques, Do Kamo may be exploited to show the indigenes up as living in an archaic world (Bensa 2000: 94).7 Leenhardt’s eulogisers might wish us to view him as an exemplary, activist anthropologist, prepared to fight against the worst excesses of colonialism, but, according to his critics, he was still very much a man of his time. However hard he was prepared to rethink his position and

Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up?

269

understanding of New Caledonian ways, he was, unsurprisingly, not able to free himself of all the prejudices of his varied milieux. Indeed, is it unfair to think that he could?

Towards a lateral history of anthropology Every complex thinker, over the course of their life, stakes a variety of positions. Moreover, the different facets of his or her work can be picked up by commentators in a plurality of ways. We have already seen Leenhardt in four different guises. More, of course, are possible: such as Leenhardt as a ‘pioneer of ethnolinguistics’ (Calame-Griaule 1978: 43, Laroche 1978: 46) or as ‘the first French anthropologist to carry out serious ethnography’ (Cavignac 2001: 8); he is praised by phenomenologists and mythologists for his contribution to their fields, and by clinical psychologists as ‘one of the very few anthropologists who influenced the psychological and psychiatric theories of his time’ (Dardel 1954, Garelli 1995, Mouchenik 2005).8 Others are surely possible.9 This interpretative process is further enriched if the thinker does not write in a pellucid prose. Given the spasmodic abstruseness of Do Kamo, it is not surprising that many of his commentators preface their remarks with ‘If I understand him correctly’. Of course, this lack of clarity only fuels the exegetic challenge, facilitating multiple and often competing interpretations. The obvious question most commentators here raise is why, if their man is so worthy of critical attention, was his work marginalised for so long? Jamin, for instance, says Leenhardt was ‘unappreciated, forgotten, neglected’ (Jamin 1978: 55). No commentator suggests that there was any discernible, deliberate intention by succeeding generations of French anthropologists to sideline him and his oeuvre. Rather, structuralism came very strongly to the fore, and his approach simply went out of fashion. Lévi-Strauss, who replaced Leenhardt at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, practised a very different kind of anthropology, much more rationalist in style and with almost no concern for phenomenological issues. He did not need to criticise Leenhardt – he just asked an alternative, maybe complementary set of questions. This explanation is all the more likely because it was precisely when the vogue for structuralism had passed and its replacements were first being touted that the re-evaluation of Leenhardt’s work commenced.10 If (and that is a big ‘if ’) the influence of Leenhardt’s writings can be easily summarised for today’s anthropologists, it is as an exemplar of experience-rich ethnography which strives to grapple with translating the non-discursive. What the resurrection of his work strongly suggests

Jeremy MacClancy

270

is that Whiggish approaches to the history of our subject are deeply misleading, if not downright distorting. Imagine the difference if, instead of teaching it in a hierarchical format, grounded on an illusion of progress, we presented its past practitioners and their ideas in a lateral, multi-layered manner (e.g. Maurer 2005: 19). How much richer, more suggestive, more open-ended, more receptive to alternative styles our subject could be!

Notes 1. My thanks to Peter Parkes for comments, and to Anne de Sales for assistance in obtaining French references. All translations from the French are by myself. 2. Marcus, in a joint reply with his fellow postmodernist promoters Michael Fischer and Stephen Tyler, complains of an ‘unsavory, ad hominem charge of bad faith, a totally unsupported charge of scheming careerists who wish merely to advance themselves’ (Fischer, Marcus and Tyler 1988: 426). 3. Stephen, who did fieldwork in southeast Papua New Guinea, judges Leenhardt’s understanding of New Caledonians’ mythic participation to have been ‘romantic’ (Stephen 1995: 141). 4. Given that several commentators on Leenhardt note parallels between his work and Malinowski’s, especially regarding the former’s concern with myth and the latter’s with magic, it might be entertaining to play with the idea of Mach (on whom Malinowski wrote his doctorate) influencing both, but in divergent ways. But would the enterprise rise above the level of entertainment? 5. Hemer, who quotes the same phrase, states that it is only on close reading of your book that one can spot that ‘Strathern’s analysis does allow space for non-relational aspects of Melanesian personhood’. In a review of recent work on personhood in the region, she notes the divergence of subsequent Melanesianists from Strathern’s approach and stresses the need to make a distinction between individuality (recognised and perhaps valued) and individualism (recognised and not valued) (Hemer 2008). 6. See, for example, Bensa’s critique of Leenhardt’s approach to totemism (Bensa 1990) and of his conception of the relation between grammatical categories and forms of thought (Bensa 1995); also Bensa and Leblic 2000. For further criticisms of Leenhardt’s notions of totemism, see Naepels (1998), Salomon (2000). 7. For examples of Leenhardt’s relevance to contemporary New Caledonia, see http://www.adck.nc/html_en/programme/mwavee.pho?num=38 (accessed 20 April 2005). Mouchenik, a clinical psychologist, is concerned that Leenhardt’s ideas directly influenced psychiatric ideas in New Caledonia until recently, allowing most local psychiatrists to neglect ‘the more multiple evolutions of contemporary psychoanalysis: familial, group, and transcultural’ (Mouchenik 2006: 664). 8. Dardel, one of the earliest exponents of social geography in France, was also Leenhardt’s brother-in-law. 9. There is, for instance, the literary Leenhardt, in a short story, ‘Boys smell like oranges’, by Guy Davenport, a university friend of Needham’s (Davenport 1996). Needham himself praised Leenhardt for Do Kamo, which he regarded as an exemplary ethnography of a particular concept (Needham 1972: 152–53). When I asked him, in 2006, where he had first heard of Leenhardt, he said he did not know. Leenhardt was someone he seemed to have learnt of from very early on (Needham, personal communication).

Will the real Maurice Leenhardt please stand up?

271

10. My colleague Peter Parkes comments: ‘Lévi-Strauss’s refusal to speak of Leenhardt is still curious: I don’t think he was anti-phenomenology, at least with respect to Merleau-Ponty, more against what he called “shop-girl philosophy”, maybe regarding his EHESS predecessor as a sentimental precursor to Sartre’ (Parkes, personal communication.). In his reply dated 23 September 2008 to a letter of my own about his silence, Professor Lévi-Strauss stated, ‘I am unfortunately too old…to try answering your query’. The old fox!

References Bensa, A. 1990. Des ancêtres et des hommes: introduction aux théories kanak de la nature, de l’action et de l’histoire (Nouvelle-Calédonie), in R. Boulay (ed.), De jade et de nacre: patrimoine artistique kanak, Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux. ——— 1995. Chroniques kanak: l’ethnologie en marche, Paris: Ethnies-Document. ——— 2000. Les ‘réalités mythiques’ de Maurice Leenhardt, Gradhiva, 27: 93–97. Bensa, A. and I. Leblic (eds). 2000. En pays Kanak: ethnologie, linguistique, archéologie, histoire de la Nouvelle Calédonie, Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Calame-Griaule, G. 1978. Maurice Leenhardt, pionnier de l’ethnolinguistique, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 34: 43–44. Cavignac, J.A. 2001. Maurice Leenhardt e o início de pesquisa de campo na antropologia francesa, cchla.ufrn.br/tapera/equipe/julie/maurice_leenhardt.pdf (accessed 4 July 2008). Clifford, J. 1982. Person and myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian world, Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— 1988. Comment (on Sangren 1988), Current Anthropology, 29: 424–25. Clifford, J. and G. Marcus (eds). 1986. Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, V. 1979. Preface to English translation of Do Kamo by Maurice Leenhardt, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cusset, F. 2008. French theory: how Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dardel, E. 1954. The mythic: according to the ethnological work of Maurice Leenhardt, Diogenes, 7: 33–51. Davenport, G. 1996. The Cardiff team: ten stories. New York: New Directions. Fischer, M. and G. Marcus with S. Tyler. 1988. Comment (on Sangren 1988), Current Anthropology, 29: 426–27. Garelli, J. 1995. La phénoménologie du jugement et la dimension ‘cosmomorphique’ du corps chez les Canaques, selon Maurice Leenhardt, Droits et cultures, 29: 255–74. Guiart, J. 1998. Maurice Leenhardt: le lien d’un homme avec un peuple qui ne voulait pas mourir, Nouméa: Le Rocher-à-la-Voile. Guidieri, R. 1984. L’abondance des pauvres: six aperçus critiques sur l’anthropologie, Paris: Seuil. Gulati, B.M. 1979. Translator’s note, to English translation of Do Kamo by Maurice Leenhardt, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hemer, S.R. 2008. Poit, personhood, place and mobility in Lihir, Papua New Guinea, Oceania, 78(1): 109–25. Hirsch, E. 2001. When was modernity in Melanesia?, Social Anthropology, 9(2): 131–46. Jamin, J. 1978. De l’identité à la difference: la personne colonisée, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 34: 51–56. Laroche, M.-C. 1978. L’enseignement de Maurice Leenhardt, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 34: 45–48.

272

Jeremy MacClancy

Leenhardt, M. 1930. Notes d’ethnologie néo-calédonienne, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie (Travaux et Mémoires, 8). ——— 1932. Documents néo-calédoniens, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie (Travaux et Mémoires, 9). ——— 1935. Vocabulaire et grammaire de la langue houaïlou, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie (Travaux et Mémoires, 10). ——— 1937. Gens de la Grande Terre: Nouvelle Calédonie, Paris: Gallimard. ——— 1946. Langues et dialects de l’Austro-Melanésie, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie (Travaux et Mémoires, 46). ——— 1947. Do Kamo: la personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien, Paris: Gallimard. L’Estoile, B. de. 2007. Une politique de l’âme: ethnologies et humanisme colonial, in M. Naepels and C. Salomon (eds), Terrains et destins de Maurice Leenhardt, Paris: EHESS. LiPuma, E. 1998. Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia, in M. Lambek and A. Strathern (eds), Bodies and persons: comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacClancy, J. 1986. Unconventional character and disciplinary convention: John Layard, Jungian and anthropologist, in G. Stocking (ed.), Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and others: essays on culture and personality (History of Anthropology 4), Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ——— 1995. Brief encounter: the meeting, in Mass Observation, of British surrealism and popular anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1(3), 495–512. ——— 1996. Popularizing anthropology, in J. MacClancy and C. McDonaugh (eds), Popularizing anthropology, London: Routledge. ——— 2000. The decline of Carlism (The Basque Series), Reno: University of Nevada Press. Maschio, T. 1994. To remember the faces of the dead: the plenitude of memory in southwestern New Britain, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Maurer, B. 2005. Mutual life, Limited: Islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mouchenik, Y. 2006. Maurice Leenhardt et l’invention d’une personnalité indigène en Nouvelle-Calédonie, Annales médico-psychologiques, 164(8): 659–67. Naepels, M. 1998. Histoires de terres kanaks: conflits fonciers et rapports sociaux dans le region de Houaïlou (Nouvelle-Calédonie), Paris: Belin. ——— 2000. Review of Guiart 1998, Oceania, 70(4): 370–71. ——— 2007. Notion de personne et dynamique missionaire, in M. Naepels and C. Salomon (eds), Terrains et destins de Maurice Leenhardt, Paris: EHESS. Needham, R. 1972. Belief, language and experience, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Salomon, C. 2000. Savoirs et pouvoirs thérapeutiques kanaks, Paris: PUF-INSERM. Sangren, S. 1988. Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography: ‘Post-Modernism’ and the Social Reproduction of Texts, Current Anthropology, 29: 405–35. Stephen, M. 1995. A’aisa’s gifts: a study of magic and the self (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology 13), Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, M. 1988. The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press. van Heekeren, D. 2004. ‘Don’t tell the crocodile’: an existentialist view of Melanesian myth, Critique of Anthropology, 24(4): 430–54. Wolin, R. 2008. The state of literary theory: America’s tolerance for French radicalism (review of Cusset 2008), The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle Review, 13 June, http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=ww474bgn53kn7fv2g17ytbnzwr2rxhpt (accessed 26 June 2008). Young, M. 1983. Magicians of Manumanua: living myth in Kaluana, Berkeley: University of California Press.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Alban Bensa, anthropologist and Directeur d’Études at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (IRIS), Paris, is a specialist in the Kanak societies of New Caledonia, where André-Georges Haudricourt sent him on a mission starting in 1973. He has conducted ethnolinguistic and social anthropological research focused on politics and narrative, as well as on the relationship between anthropology and history. Among his recent publications are La fin de l’exotisme: l’anthropologie autrement, Toulouse: Anacharsis 2006; and with Didier Fassin (eds.), Les politiques de l’enquête: épreuves ethnographiques, Paris: La Découverte, 2008. Margaret Buckner completed graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Paris X-Nanterre under the direction of Professor Eric de Dampierre, whom she met as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bangassou, Central African Republic. Still a member of the Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, she now teaches cultural and linguistic anthropology at Missouri State University. She has published several articles on the Zande, but since 1991 has also been carrying out research among the Manjako of Guinea-Bissau. Stefania Capone took her PhD from Paris X-Nanterre in 1997 and her habilitation in 2005. She is currently Directrice de recherche (Tenured Senior Researcher) at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the New York University, and a researcher at CIRHUS, the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, CNRS/NYU (New York). She is the author of La quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé (Paris, 1999; Brazilian edition, 2004; American edition, 2010, Duke University Press); and Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde: religion, ethnicité et nationalisme noir aux États-Unis (Paris, 2005; Brazilian edition, 2009). Girodana Charuty is a Directrice d’Études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. A Europeanist, she has worked on the medicalization of madness, Christian custom in Mediterranean Europe

274

Notes on Contributors

and social practices of writing. Her current research is on the history of Italian anthropology and on ethnographic knowledge developed in the course of the nineteenth century in the context of missionary activity. Her publications include: Le Couvent des fous: l’internement et ses usages en Languedoc aux XIXe et XXe siècles, Paris, Flammarion, 1985; Nel paese del tempo: antropologia dell’Europa cristiana, Naples, Liguori, 1995; Folie, mariage et mort: pratiques chrétiennes de la folie en Europe occidentale, Paris, Le Seuil, 1997; and De Martino: les vies antérieures d’un anthropologue, Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, Parenthèses/MMSH, 2009. Anne de Sales is a Researcher in anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, a member of the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative in Nanterre (CNRS-LESC), and a Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford). She has carried out extended periods of fieldwork in Nepal, where her studies of shamanic practices and oral literature include the monograph Je suis né de vos jeux de tambours: La religion chamanique des Magar du nord (Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 1991). More recently she has published a series of articles towards a comprehensive ethnography of the Maoist insurrection that overthrew the royal regime in Nepal in 2006. Paul Henley is Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where he has been Director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology since its foundation in 1987. Having begun his career as an Amazonist specialist, he moved into visual anthropology after training as a documentarist at the National Film and Television School through a scheme managed by the Royal Anthropological Institute and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He has recently published The Adventure of the Real, a major study of the film methods of Jean Rouch, with the University of Chicago Press. Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Social Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University, has done major fieldwork in Vanuatu and the Basque Country. He has published extensively on the histories of anthropology and of its interchange with literature. His latest book is Expressing identities in the Basque arena (Oxford: James Currey, 2008). Peter Parkes is Reader in Historical Anthropology at the University of Kent. His fieldwork has concentrated on the Hindu Kush region of eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, particularly among the non-Islamic Kalasha (Kalash Kafirs) of Chitral District, NWFP, Pakistan. His research interests include mountain subsistence and development, verbal arts, visual anthropology, and historical

Notes on contributors

275

anthropology. He has also published extensively on fosterage and adoptive kinship in Eurasia. Robert Parkin is a Departmental Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His interests include kinship, the anthropologies of South Asia and eastern Europe, and the history of French anthropology. His main works regarding the latter are The dark side of humanity: the work of Robert Hertz and its legacy (Harwood, 1995), Louis Dumont and hierarchical opposition (Berghahn, 2003) and ‘The French-speaking countries’, in Fredrik Barth et al., One discipline, four ways (The University of Chicago Press, 2005). He has also translated work by Henri Hubert, Robert Hertz and Louis Dumont into English, including Dumont’s Introduction to two theories of social anthropology (Berghahn, 2006). Laura Rival is University Lecturer in Ecological Anthropology and Development, and a Fellow of Linacre College. Her doctoral research was among the Huaorani Indians, on whom she has published numerous articles and two books (Hijos del Sol, Padres del Jaguar: Los Huaorani de Ayer y Hoy, Abya Yala 1996, and Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador, Columbia University Press 2002). Her research interests include the impact of development policies on indigenous peoples; Amerindian conceptualisations of nature and society; and nationalism, citizenship and state education in Latin America. Peter Rivière is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He has had a life-long interest in the Native Peoples of Lowland South America. His main works include Marriage among the Trio (1969), Individual and Society in Guiana (1984), Absent-minded Imperialism (1995), and a two-volume work, The Guiana Travels of Robert Schomburgk 1835–1844 (2006). He has recently edited A History of Oxford Anthropology (2007), published by Berghahn. Gérard Toffin is an anthropologist, Directeur de recherche at CNRS and a specialist on the Himalayas. He has worked on the material culture, social structures and religions of several ethnic groups in Nepal, in particular the Newar of the Kathmandu valley. His main publications are Man and his house in the Himalayas (1991), Le palais et le temple (1993), L’ethnologie: la quête de l’autre (2005) and Newar society: city, village and periphery (2007). He is currently preparing a book on a major Nepali royal festival and is interested in the anthropology of space.

SUBJECT INDEX

A abian (novices), 185 Académie des Sciences de Paris, 127 acculturation, 16, 179, 187 action, 197, 261 action, social, 19, 240 activism, political, 20 ‘ada (custom), 64 adatrecht, 62, 68 advocacy, 57, 59 affinity, 241 Africa, 14, 16, 21, 77, 80, 103, 105, 106, 109, 119, 153, 171, 182–8, 190–2, 207, 225 East, 226 French West, 62 South, 19, 22, 249 West, 78, 79, 81–3, 93, 97 Afro-Americanism, 171 agency, 251 agriculture, 204–6, 208, 212, 213 swidden (slash and burn), 208 Aguaruna, 137 Ait ‘Amar, 49, 59 Ait Iraten (Kabyles), 48, 49, 52, 57, 61 Albania, 67 Algeria, 11, 12, 27, 45, 47, 60, 65, 66 Algiers, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 58, 60, 68 ‘alim (ulema) (religious scholar[s), 49 alliance, prescriptive, 241 Alliance Evangélique Universelle, 260 alliance theory, 238 alterity, 9, 29, 156, 171 Altiplano, 152, 157, 165, 166 Amazon, 7, 23, 143 America, 22, 182, 225, 242 Black, 171 Latin, 143 South, 142, 154, 163, 225 American Man, 138–40 Amerindians, 21, 148, 163 amin (president), 54, 61

‘anaya (protection), 54, 57, 63 Ancoaquil, 166 Andes, 125, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 164 Anduze, 173 Angola, 180, 193 animism, 159 Année du Patrimoine, 25 Année sociologique, 6, 8, 22, 26, 31, 160, 192, 243, 258 Anthropologie, 28 anthropology Anglo-Saxon, 76, 81, 83, 86, 87, 95–100, 143, 241, 242, 251 armchair, 43, 46 biological, 144 British, 2, 6, 8, 26, 109, 162, 198, 211, 212 cognitive, 9 cultural, 8 dialogical, 86, 95 four-field, 105 French, passim lateral, 265, 269–70 physical, 3, 29, 105, 128, 130, 136, 139, 141, 144, 147 shared, 86, 96, 97 structural, 144 visual, 75–100 anthropometry, 128, 133, 138, 139, 142 Antioquia, 131 antisemitism, 41 anti-structuralism, 17, 20 Aosta, 199 apartheid, 249 apegado, 134–5 Apulia, 39 Arabic, 48 Arabs, 134 archaeology, 8, 129, 138, 139, 143, 198, 233 archives, 27 Argentina, 15, 151, 152, 157

278 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 99 Armenians, 16, 176 art, 171, 172, 175, 178 art, history of, 236 Art Nègre, 77 artefacts, 145 artha, 248 Arts populaires et loisirs ouvriers, 34 Aryans, 239 Ashluslay, 154 Asia, 143, 224, 225, 229, 230 South, 208 Southeast, 197, 200, 208, 209, 210, 215, 226, 227 Asie du Sud-Est et le Monde Indonésien (ASEMI), 210 Assam, 200 Astrophel and Stella, 1 asymmetry, 118 atlases, linguistic, 210 Auraucanians, 156, 165 Aurès, 10 Australians, 143, 148, 153, 241 Austroasiatic, 209 Aymara, 153, 164 Azande history and political institutions, 114 B babalawo (diviner), 185, 186 Bahia, 180, 181, 184, 185, 187, 192, 193 Bahnar, 4 ballet, 91 Bandia, 113–16, 120, 122 Bandiagara Cliffs, 77, 82 Bangassou, 103, 104, 107–9, 113, 114, 120 Bangladesh, 199 Bangui, 109 bantu, 193 barbarians, 233 Baroque, 178 Bastidiana, 171 Belém de Pará, 187 belief, 174 Bella, 84 Bendo, 120 Bengal, East, 211, 213 Bénin, 172, 186 Berbers, 12, 45, 46, 48, 60, 62, 66–8 Bering Straits, 143 Bernice Bishop Museum, 152 Beyliks, 59 bia (soul etc.), 93

Subject index Bible, 223, 258 Big Men, 229 binaries (binary oppositions), 239, 245, 246, 251 biology, 30, 133, 142, 219, 232, 233 bitti (drum), 89, 91 Blénod-les-Toul, 126 blood groups, 142 Bocage, 39 body, 23, 41, 42, 206, 230, 231, 260, 267 Bogatá, 131 Bolivia, 151–3, 157, 166 Bonneville, 30 borí, 185, 193 Bororo, 160, 177, 236 botany, 208, 213, 230 Bourg la Reine, 34 Bourgogne, 39 Brahmans, 239, 240, 245–8 Brantes, 201 Brazil, 15, 153, 164, 171, 177–83, 187, 188, 190–3 Bresle Valley, 213 Briançon, 36 brideprice, 67 bridewealth, 114 Brotas, 184 Bureau of American Ethnology, 153 Bureau Politique des Affarires Arabes (bureaux arabes), 47, 50, 53, 58, 66, 67 Burma, 197, 200, 203, 209–11 Burmese, 17, 216 bush school, 30 C Cak, 200, 201, 206, 209, 216 Calchaquí, 151, 157, 158, 161 Canaques, 23, 258, 268; see also Kanaks candomblé, 16, 172, 177–81, 184, 187, 188, 191–3 candomblé de caboclo, 193 cannibalism, 156, 158 canons, 46 Carhuauz, 164 Caribbean, 140, 187 Cartesianism, 171, 183 cartography, 34 Casa Branca, 193 Casa de Oxumarê, 193 caste, 19, 21, 160, 183, 202, 240, 241, 245, 247, 249 catalogues, 35

Subject index categories, 230 Catholicism, 134 Cauca, 131 Caucasus, 67 causality, 231 Central African Republic, 14, 103, 104, 107 Centre d’Anthropologie de Toulouse, 40 Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, 237 Centre d’Etudes Indiennes en Sciences Sociales, 237, 243–4 Centre d’Etudes Sociologiques, 106 Centre de Documentation et de Recherches sur l’Asie du Sud-Est et le Monde Indonésien (Cedrasemi), 200 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 8, 78, 89, 93, 106, 108, 193, 200, 237 Cévennes, 173 charivari, 41, 43 chiasmus, 183 Chicago, 107 Chile, 151 Chin, 209 China, 210, 220, 223, 224, 227, 229 Chinese, 199, 211 Chipaya, 152, 157 Chiriguano, 152, 157, 158, 160 Chittagong Hills, 197, 199–200, 209 Christ, 125 Christianity, 39, 41, 43, 59, 67, 91, 140, 224, 242, 260 Christmas, 41 Chronicle of a summer, 89, 92 Chroniques, 11, 28–32, 35 ciné-eye, 93 ciné-poems, 78 ciné-trance, 13, 16, 21, 75, 89–92, 94, 95–6 cinema, ethnographic, 75–100 cinema-vérité, 92, 93, 94 circumcision, female, 21 class, 249 Clermont-Ferrand, 178 Clisthenes, 120 Code Civil, 55, 56, 57 Code Pénal, 57 coffee, 116 cognition, 211 Collège de France, 6, 28, 198, 200–1, 208 Collège de Sociologie, 182, 235 Colombia, 15, 131, 138, 140, 141, 143, 147

279 Colombian Society of Ethnology, 131 Colonial Exhibition (French), 7, 9 colonialism, 9, 12, 14, 21, 46, 50, 60–5, 80, 84, 97, 117, 129, 134, 135, 207, 255, 258–60, 264, 268 Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes, 131 Commune, Paris, 60 comparison, 11, 38 compartmentalization, principle of, 176, 192 concierto, 134–5 conflict, 240 congo, 193 Congress of Popular Art, 28 consciousness, collective, 175, 189 Constantople, 235 Contributions to Indian Sociology, 238, 240, 243 cosmology, 81, 83, 246, 248 coutumiers, 5, 61 Creoles, 143, 144 cults, 21, 81, 135, 181, 185, 187, 191, 193 cultural relativism, 8 culture contact, 179 heroes, 156 material, 133, 136, 138, 140–2, 147, 158, 159, 205, 206, 208 and nature, 18 and personality school, 199 D Dahomey, 186 Dakar, 79 Dakar-Djibouti Expedition, 7, 32, 77 dance, 22, 38, 81, 85 Dasein, 264 Dauphinois, 36 deduction, 2, 171 Dellys, 50 democracy, 50, 58 depth levels, 189 depth sociology, 17, 190 descent theory, 238 dharma, 248 Diaguita, 151 dichotomies, 63 Dieu d’eau, 98 diffusionism, 7, 17, 20, 140, 142, 143, 210, 213, 232, 238, 239, 240, 251, 255

280 diglossia, 40 Dionysian, 91, 96 Direct Cinema Group, 87–8, 92 disability, 250 discourse, 14 discrimination, 249, 250 distinction, 246, 251 dividuals, 265 Do Kamo, 259, 260, 266, 268, 269, 270 Do Neva, 258, 259 Dogon, 16, 77–85, 98, 99, 160, 182 domestication, 227 Dra el-Mizan, 48, 52, 67 Dravidian, 239 drawing, 33 dreams, 182 dualism, 18, 224, 261 Dutch East Indies, 62 E Easter Island, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163 Ecole des Annales, 212 Ecole des Chartes, 151 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), 197, 198, 271 Ecole du Louvre, 28, 236 Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, 5, 198, 204 Ecole Française de Sociologie, 229–30 Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, 25, 151, 161, 215 Ecole Polytechnique, 47, 56, 58, 235 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), 25, 27, 108, 130, 151, 153, 188, 190, 197, 200, 202, 205, 210, 237, 259, 269 Ecole Speciale des Langues Orientales, 215 Ecuador, 15, 125, 127, 129, 132, 138– 47 education, 204 efon, 193 efun (chalk), 187 egalitarianism, 19, 244–50 egun (revanent), 187 Empire, French, 4, 7 Empire, Second, 60, 64 empiricism, British, 2, 95 encompassment (of contrary etc.), 239, 246, 248, 251 Encyclopédie, 25 epilepsy, 41

Subject index Epiphany, 41 Equipe de Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale: Morphologie, Echanges (ERASME), 237–8, 244 Escuela Nacional de Antropología, 153 Essai sur la religion bambara, 81 essentialism, ethnographic, 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 17, 20, 22, 172 Ethiopian church movement, 19 ethnicity, 250 ethnobotany, 17, 200, 208, 214 ethnocentrism, 174 ethnofiction, 78 Ethnographie, 28 ethnography ancient, 146 canonical, 12, 13, 66 dialogical, 12, 13 French, passim ethnolinguistics, 209, 269 ethnology, 6, 27, 28, 37, 42, 77, 103, 105, 109, 129, 130, 132, 141, 144, 146, 147, 199, 200, 236 ethnopoetics, 66 ethnopsychiatry, 41 ethnozoology, 208 Europe, 37, 242–3 evolutionism, 4, 20, 213, 243, 255, 268 exchange, 247 existential events, 264 existentialism, 8, 19, 263–4, 266 experience, 16, 18, 21, 22, 29, 33, 41, 174, 221, 263, 266 Exploration scientifique d’Algérie, 66 F facts, 2, 6, 7, 11, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 137, 155, 161, 164, 220, 223, 233, 243 facts, social, 174, 175 family, 4, 134, 136, 137, 160, 203, 207 Far East, 18 fascism, 21, 146 feeding the head, 193 feitura do santo, 193 Fertile Crescent, 223, 229, 231 fertility, 39, 40 fieldwork, passim fiqh, 49, 56 First World War, 6, 43, 129, 146, 173 fission, 241 Florida, 153

Subject index folklore, 4, 5, 11, 20, 25, 27, 29, 32, 36, 37, 39, 139, 214, 243 Folklore du Dauphiné, 34 food, 133, 136 Fort-Napoléon, 12, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 67, 68 Fort-National, 61, 68 Franco-Prussian War, 126 Freudianism, 87 Fulani, 84, 90 functionalism, 213, 255 funlade (spirit), 187 fusion, 241 G Ganges, 248 gay, 250 gender, 250 Gender of the gift, 265 genealogical method, 203 genealogies, 202, 223, 258 Geneva, 165 geography, 35, 139, 177, 212, 213, 243 human, 34, 38 social, 270 Germans, 11, 189, 232 Germany, 21, 22, 134, 146, 237 Gestapo, 131 gestures, 261 Gien, 199 gifts, 245 Godeste, 108 Gold Coast, 76 Gothenburg, 151, 154 government, 247 Gran Chaco, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159 Grand Jeu, 235 Greece, 235 Greeks, 14, 119 Groupement des Universités et Grand Ecoles de France, 177 Guianas, 156 H habitus, 233 Haiti, 155, 159, 166, 213, 216 Handbook of American Indian Languages, 147 Handbook of South American Indians, 153 Hanoi, 5, 224 Hanunoo, 208, 211 harp, 112, 117, 118

281 Harvard, 260 Hautes-Alps, 35 Hawaii, 152 hegemony, 262 hierarchy, 3, 18, 191, 224, 239, 240, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 259, 270 Hierarchy and marriage alliance in south India, 242 Himalayas, 210 Hindi, 237 Hispanics, 140 Historical Society of Algeria, 50, 66 Histories of the Berbers, 48 historiography, 256 history, 18, 42, 81, 105, 110, 139, 144–6, 154, 156, 159, 175, 177, 201, 219, 231–3, 240, 242, 243, 255 cultural, 39 of ideas, 243 life, 111 oral, 5, 110 of religions, 25, 42 social, 38 world, 240, 251 holism, 20, 175, 204, 239–1, 243 holism, methodological, 190 homicide, 57 L’Homme, 162 Homo Aequalis, 238 Homo Hierarchicus, 238, 240, 242 Honolulu, 152 horticulture, 226 householder, 247 houses, 41, 204, 207, 213 Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), 152 human rights, 244 humanism, 15, 144–5 hurma (moral reputation), 54, 57 hybridity, 140, 143 Hylean Amazon Project, 153 hysteria, 41 I iaô, 180 Ibarra, 147 ideals, 251 ideas, 221 identity, 15, 19 ideology, 19, 245 idiophones, 112 Ifá cult, 185

282 Ifanhin, 172 ijexá, 193 ikhwan (religious confraternities), 59 illocutionary, 261 ‘ilm i-qalam (Islamic jurisprudence), 60 immigrants, 176 Imprimerie Nationale, 199 impurity, 227, 229, 240, 249; see also pure-impure imrabden (marabouts), 59 Incas, 134, 139, 140 India, 18, 21, 203, 211, 235–52 Indians (American), 133–6, 139, 140, 156 indirect rule, 66 individualism, 19, 238, 247, 248, 265, 270 individuation, 263 Indo-China, 62, 68 Indo-European, 140, 142 Indology, 242, 243 Indus Valley, 154 Informants indirect, 138 intermediary, 137 secondary, 144 inheritance, 52, 53 initiation, 172, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193 Inle Lake, 200 Institut d’Amérique Latine, 188 Institut d’Ethnologie, 6, 14, 129, 146, 207 Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 103 Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, 215 Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), 79, 193 Institut Français d’Anthropologie, 128–9 Institut Français d’Océanie, 260 Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 28, 34 Institut National d’Agronomie, 219 Institut National des Langues et des Civilisations Orientales, 200 Institut pour la Recherche et de Développement (IRD), 22 Institute of Social Anthropology (Oxford), 237 Instituto de Etnología, 152 Instituts franco-brésiliens de Haute Culture, 177 Instruments, musical, 111 intellectualists, 5, 88 interdisciplinarity, 212 International Labour Office, 153

Subject index internationalism, 146 interpreters, 20 Intha, 200, 201 Inuit, 85 Iroquois, 46 Isère, 34 Islam, 59, 60, 62, 68 Italy, 6, 37, 42 izerf (Berber customary law), 68 J Jains, 237 jama’a (public assemblies), 46, 53, 54, 57, 61, 64 jazz, 77 J.B. Baillière, 216 Jê, 160 jeje, 193 Jerusalem, 123 Jews, 224 Jibaros, 132, 136–8 jihad (holy war), 59, 60 Journal d’Agronomie Tropicale et de Botanique Appliqué, 208 Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 146, 147 Judeo-Christians, 221 jurisprudence, 63, 64 Jurjura massif, 45, 51, 61, 66 K Kabylia, Kabyle, 12–13, 21, 27, 45–68 Kadu, 200 Kallar, Pramalai, 236, 237, 240 kama, 248 Kanaks (see also Canaques), 227–8 karo (body), 267 Kathmandu, 210, 215 Kayapó, 160, 164 Kengu (river), 116 ketu, 193 khoja (interpreter/secretary), 12, 48–9 Khyang, 209 kinship, 58, 112, 158, 160, 200, 203, 204, 209, 238, 240, 241, 242, 244, 247 kinship, spiritual, 41 kisoro (board game), 112 Kontiki expedition, 159 Kshatriyas, 245–6 Kubenkankrey, 164 Kyoto, 206

Subject index L L’Anthropologie, 29 L’ethnographie, 28 La Kabyle et les coutumes kabyles, 45–68 La Maison Rustique, 216 La notion de personne en Afrique noire, 89 La pensé sauvage, 27 La religion et la magie songhay, 81 La Tarasque, 4, 199, 237, 242 Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative, 108, 122 Laboratoire de Sociologie de la Connaissance, 189 labour, division of 204 language(s), 111, 118, 138, 140, 142, 182, 197, 199, 203, 233, 258 Indo-European, 142 Melanesian, 19 North American, 141 Romance, 35 South American, 142 Langues O, 215 Laos, 210–11 Lascaux caves, 227 Latin, 180 Lausanne, 151 lavagem das contas (washing of the necklaces), 184, 192 law(s), 45, 46, 48, 51–6, 58, 62, 68, 160, 191, 207, 247 Le rêve plus fort que la mort, 75 League of the Iroquois, 46 learned societies, 3, 33 Leiden, 62, 68 Leningrad, 233 Les demi-savants, 27 Les forms élémentaires de la vie religieuse, 26, 174, 229 Les langues du monde, 129 Les rites de passage, 5, 26, 27 Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, 239 Les tabours d’avant: tourou et bitti, 89 lesbian, 250 levels, 239, 246, 247, 250 L’exotique est quotidian, 23 liberty, 248 life-cycle, 204 liminality, 12, 37 limit situations, 264 linguistics, 25, 40, 129, 130, 135, 138, 140, 142–5, 146, 147, 209–13, 231–3, 267 structural, 8

283 literature, 15, 35, 42, 126–7, 175, 179, 180, 188 oral, 112 Loiret, 199 Lorraine, 126 Lucania, 37 Lycée St Louis, 219, 235 M Madabazouma, 104 mãe-de-santo (chief priestess), 184, 193 Maghrib, 60, 62 magic, 37–9, 155, 156, 191, 192, 270 magico-religious, 42 Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 237 Maison Franco-Japonaise, 206 Malayo-Polynesian, 143, 148, 153, 165 Mali, 77 Maliki, 49, 52, 56, 59, 63, 64 Malvire-sur-Desle, 105 ma’mara college, 67 Man with a movie camera, 92–3 mana, 228 Mandalay, 200 mandrel, 110 Manuel d’ethnographie, 6, 207, 212, 216 Manuel de folklore française contemporaine, 4, 25, 28, 30, 32, 36, 37, 39–43 maps, 210 Mapuche, 165 marabouts, 59 Maranhão, 187, 192 Marbial Valley, 166 marginal man, 179 marginality, 173 Marma, 200, 201, 204, 207, 208, 211, 213, 216 marriage, 40, 43, 115, 134, 136, 158, 160, 201, 203, 205, 214, 249 cross-cousin, 241 rules, positive, 241 voodoo, 159 Marxism, 2, 8, 17, 38, 87, 189, 190, 202, 232, 233 Masai, 29 Masques dogon, 98 Massif Central, 210 Mataco, 152, 154, 157, 160 materiality, 219, 221, 222, 230, 233, 234 matriarchy, 67 Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology (Halle), 22 Mboki, 108, 111

284 Mbomu (river), 116 meaning, 42 medicine, 41, 43, 127 Mediterranean, 37, 242 mediums, 13 Melanesia, 18, 19, 226, 229, 256, 258, 260, 264, 265, 268, 270 Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et de folklore, 31 memory, 39, 177, 190, 263 Mendoza, 151 mentality, 183 mentality, pre-logical, 176, 258 Mercure de France, 11, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 43 mestizos, 132, 136, 143, 144 metaphor, 13, 117–18, 263 metaphysics, 41, 175, 181, 187 Méthode de l’ethnographie, 81 métissage, 21, 140–3, 232 Mexico City, 153 Middle East, 18 Middle Kingdom, 231 migration, 143, 156, 221 mind, 231 Mindoro, 208 Minot, 39 Minotaure, 77 miscenegation, 140 Mission Society, 259 Mission Sociologique du Haut-Oubangui (MSHO), 108, 122, 123 missionaries, 4, 5, 19, 23, 37, 135, 156, 257, 258, 260 Modern Art Week, 178 modernism, modernity, 14, 87, 178, 240–4, 249 moksha, 248 Mon-Khmer, 209 monographic approach, 201–3 montage, 93 Montauban, 19 Moqrani, 68 Morocco, 62 Mu river, 200 Mukhtasar, 56 multiculturalism, 9 Musée d’Ethnographie, 4 Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, 3 Musée de l’Homme, 9, 14, 22, 108, 125, 127, 130–2, 146, 147, 198, 199, 204, 206, 236

Subject index Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, 4, 25, 28, 29, 235–8, 243 Musée du Quai Branly, 9, 22, 131, 146 museology, 235 Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN), 28, 127–30, 146, 147, 208, 209 museums, 3, 9–10, 27, 141, 251 music, 14, 111, 113, 117, 193 Muslim (s), 51, 52, 55, 59, 62, 64, 224 mysticism, 15, 16, 172–6, 178, 182–8, 191, 192 myth(s), 19, 137, 138, 155–7, 160, 165, 181, 261–4, 266, 270 Mythes et legends d’Australie, 26 mythico-ritual, 63 mythologists, 269 N Nagô, 180, 186, 193 Nambikwara, 177 Nancy, 126 Nandi, 29 Nanook of the North, 85 Nanterre, 14, 103, 108, 122, 123, 200 nata (pastor-evangelist), 258, 267, 268 National Committee of Geography, 216 National Film Board of Canada, 87 National Institute of Anthropology, 147 National Institute of Ethnology, 131 National Philosophy Faculty, 179 National University of Tucumán, 152 nationalism, 146 nature, 18 Nayar, 241 Near East, 224 Negev, 123 Neolithic, 16, 21, 163, 224 Nepal, 207, 210, 213, 215 Neuchâtel, 27, 33 New Britain, 262 New Caledonia, 4, 19, 21, 228, 256–62, 265–9, 270 New Guinea, 229, 264, 270 New School of Social Research, 8 New World, 4 New York, 8, 179 Newar, 207, 215 Ngbandi, 114 nguinza (money), 105 Niamey, 79, 89 Nice, 30

Subject index Niger river, 78, 80 territory, 79, 84, 89 Nîmes, 173 Nivacle, 154 non-modern, 243 Normandy, 39, 199, 209 Notes and Queries, 203, 216 Nouvelle Calédonie, see New Caledonia Nouville, 17, 199, 201–4, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216 Nzakara, 14, 21, 103, 107–22 O obá, obaj, 180, 193 observation, 19 participant, 9, 83, 185, 188, 203 Oceania, 224, 225, 227–231 ogan, 180, 193 Oju Oba, 186 opposition binary, 19, 239, 245, 246, 251 hierarchical, 18, 239, 245–7, 249–52 Organisation pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technicque de l’OutreMer (ORSTOM), 8, 107 orixá (saint), 180, 193 Oryza, 208 Oxford, 18, 237, 241, 255 P pai-de-santo (chief priest), 184, 193 Pakistan, East, 199–200, 209, 216 Papua New Guinea, 229, 264, 270 Paris, 7, 19, 25, 77, 78, 107, 109, 128, 130, 143, 187, 188, 199, 207, 237, 242, 258, 259, 260 parody, 40 parole, 261 participation, mythic, 264, 267, 270 participations, law of, modes of, 190, 258 paysannat system, 116 peasants, 213 personage, 261, 267 personhood, 19, 38, 41, 42, 261, 263–7, 270 perspectivism, 156 Peru, 151, 153 phatic speech, 221 phenomenology, 8, 12, 19, 189, 269, 271 philology, 57 philosophy, 15, 42, 105, 126–7, 130,

285 146, 173, 175, 258 photography, 33, 98, 184, 188, 202 Picardy, 199, 219 pigs, 228–9 Pilaga, 157, 160 plants, 18 poetry, poets, 48, 77, 109, 111–12, 126, 172, 175, 181, 182, 193, 263 Poland, 27 politeness, 221 politics, 14, 20, 204, 211 polygyny, 249 Polynesia, 155, 158, 159, 163, 207 Ponts et Chaussées (Grand Ecole), 79 Popular Front, 131 Portuguese, 180, 204 positivism, 56, 174, 190 possession, spirit, 13, 16, 78, 79, 84, 89, 90, 93–4 postmodernism, 8, 13, 76, 86–7, 255, 262, 271 post-structuralism, 19, 23, 260–2, 266 potlatch, 153 pottery, 27 power, 42, 211, 240, 245 practice(s), 8, 13, 21, 62, 221, 222, 230, 245, 250–1, 252 practice, theory of, 63 Prague, 28 Pramali Kallar, 237, 240 Pre-Colombian, 139, 147 predation, 156 prehistory, 29, 105, 147 pre-logical, 176, 258 primitivism, 268 Protestant(s), 19, 173, 257, 259 Provence, 36, 199 psychiatry, 270 psychoanalysis, 8, 32, 178, 270 psychology, 18, 105, 174–6, 189, 203, 204, 269 social, 105, 174, 179, 192 pure/impure, 18, 227, 229, 240, 249 purity, 232 Pyangaon, 215 Q qadi (judge), 61 qanun (qawanin) (canon), 12, 46–68 Quechua, 132–6, 140, 142, 147, 153 questionnaires, 137 Quito, 147

286 R race, 15, 128, 134, 136, 139–41, 153, 190, 244, 250 racism, 61, 135, 141, 144, 146, 249, 255, 268 Rafai, 114 Rahmaniyya order, 59, 60, 67 raqba (feud), 57 rationality, 2, 135, 182, 263, 269 Cartesian, 171 Rauto, 262, 263 realism, 93 reason, 162, 191 reasoning, deductive, 2, 171 rebirth, 248 Recherches en sciences humaines, 106 Rechtsgeschichte, 55 Recife, 179, 187, 192 reflexivity, 171 regionalism, 33–5 relativism, cultural, 8 relativity of groups, 241 religion(s), 6, 15, 18, 39–42, 81, 135–8, 155, 158, 159, 165, 171, 173, 174, 176–9, 182, 187, 204, 206, 207, 211, 215, 240, 262, 263 African, 16, 190 Afro-Brazilian, 16 history of, 25, 29 Muslim, 59 remainders, 118 Renaissance, 143 renunciation, 238, 247, 248 representations, 18, 221, 230 collective, 175, 244 reproduction, cultural, 7 republicanism, 58 resistance, 11 reversal, 239 Revue Africaine, 50 Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, 26 rice, 208, 210 rights, human, 244 Rio de Janeiro, 177, 179 Riobamba, 132–6 ritual(s), 7, 12, 30, 33, 35–43, 77, 85, 133, 135, 158, 178, 184–5, 205, 228, 245, 246, 248 rituals of atonement, 42 role, 266 Romans, 55, 233, 267 rôtie, 40

Subject index Roussillon, 199 Rules of sociological method, 22 S sacred, 178, 182 sacrifice, 246 saints, 43, 180 Salonica, 129, 235 Salvador de Bahia, 178, 179, 183, 184, 193 Salvation, 247 Sanga, 82 Sango, 122 Sanskrit, 237 sanza (thumb piano), 112 São Liuz do Maranhão, 192 São Paulo, 16, 177, 178, 187, 188, 192 Sar Luk, 23 Savoy, 30, 36 Sayyid, 12, 49 science, 181 science fiction, 78 Sciences Po, 103 Second Empire, 60, 64 Second World War, 7, 8, 11, 27, 39, 153, 236 Sedan, 60 Seine-Maritime, 209 self, 260–1, 263 self-development, 19 semiology, 263 Senegal, 4 shamanism, 156, 165 shari’a, 51, 55, 59, 61 Shudras, 237 Sigui, 85, 98 singularity (seeing, thinking in), 14, 118–21, 233–4 Sirens, 185, 191 Smithsonian Institution, 131, 147, 153 socialism, 134 Socialist Party, 131 Sociedad Colombiana de Etnología, 131 Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 128 Société d’Etudes Alfred Métraux, 165 Société de Folklore Français, 28 Société des Américanistes de Paris, 128, 129, 131, 147 Société des Nations, 28 Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, 3, 10 Société des Sultanats, 117 Société Française de Psychologie, 212 sociography, 200–1

Subject index sociology, 4–8, 18, 20, 27, 42, 105, 109, 130, 172–9, 183, 187–92, 204, 237, 239, 243 depth, 17, 190 rural, 213 sociometry, 104–5 Somme, 209 Songhay, 13, 78, 80, 81, 84, 85, 93, 94, 99 Sorbonne, 28, 79, 130, 198, 210 sorcery, 39 Sorko, 84 Soudan, 77 soul(s), 23, 159, 183, 185, 187 Soviet Union, 233 space, 207, 213, 220 Spain, 67 Spanish, 134, 139, 142, 191 Sre, 22 St Besse (cult), 6, 31, 199 St Paul, 267 state, 19 status, 240 Stimmung, 91, 94, 96 Strasbourg, 179 stratification, social, 247 structural-functionalism, 8, 255 structuralism, 2, 3, 7, 8, 17, 18, 20, 40, 87, 88, 125, 144, 145, 148, 171, 198, 202, 213, 230, 231, 235, 238–45, 251, 255, 256 structure, 19 substance, 249 sub-stratum theories, 239, 240 Sud e magia, 38 suelto, 134–5 suicide, 137, 153 superstition, 15, 39 surrealism, surrealists, 13, 76–7, 88, 91, 96, 99, 163, 182 survivals, 32, 239 Sweden, 15, 151 Switzerland, 15, 27, 35, 151, 191 symbolism, 19, 37–42, 206, 263 symmetry, 118 syncretism, 16, 178, 187, 192, 194 T taboo, 227, 228 Tabou et totemisme à Madagascar, 28 taddart (village), 54 Tahoua, 75 tajmaat (assembly), 53

287 Tamang, 207 Tamazirt, 51, 61, 67 Tamil, 237 Tamil Nadu, 236, 237, 242, 251 Tamils, 18, 239, 242 tapirage, 165 tarentism, 39 techniques, technology, 17, 200, 205–9, 222–3, 232 Terre Humaine, 10 terreiro (cult house), 180–1, 184–7, 193 Thai, 209 theology, 257 theory, 2, 10, 15– 22, 160, 172, 189, 198, 213, 241, 257 of practice, 13 Third Republic, 21, 46 Tibetan, 199 Tibeto-Burman, 200, 209, 215 time, 38–9, 40, 118, 203 Toba, 152, 157, 160 Torres Straits expedition, 7 total, totalities, 211–12, 222 totalitarianism, 240 totemism, 6, 30, 136, 160, 270 Toulouse, 40 tourou (drum), 89, 90, 91, 94 tradition, invention of, 12 trance, 13, 16, 21, 91, 180, 186, 192 transactionalism, 12 transactions, 63 transcendence, 224–5, 232, 246, 248 transition, 12 translation, 241, 262 travellers, 9, 28 tribes, 240 Trickster, 119 Tristes tropiques, 16, 22, 167, 186, 200 Trobriands, 125 Trocadéro, 4, 9, 10, 14, 22, 28, 130, 146, 147, 198 Tsachilas, 136 Tuareg, 48, 65 Tucumán, 152, 153 Tupí-Guaraní, 15, 151, 156 Tupinamba, 151, 156, 157 Turks, 59 twins, 118 U Ubangui river, 113, 120, 122 Uele river, 113

Subject index

288 ‘ulama, 46, see also ‘alim Ulysses, 191 Une esthétique perdue, 14 UNESCO, 21, 123, 153, 159, 165, 166, 199, 203, 216 Union Rationaliste, 219 United States, 249 universalism, 232 universities, 3, 8 Untouchables, 245 ‘urf (customary usages), 64 Uro, 157, 166 Uro(u)-Chipaya, 152, 157, 158 Uttar Pradesh, 238, 242

W war, 158, 245 washing of the necklace, 184, 192 Wayapi, 156 Wasigny, 126 weapons, 136 West, 19, 239, 244, 245, 247–52 wheat, 18 Whigs, 255, 256, 265, 270 Whites, 134, 191 witch doctors, 133 witchcraft, 136, 137 work, 250 Writing culture, 262

V Valence, 16, 176 value(s), 3, 18–19, 207, 237, 239–41, 245–50 Vanuatu, 228 varnas, 245 Vedas, 245, 246 vegetarianism, 250 Versailles, 177 Vichy, 79, 84, 131, 259 Vienna school, 140, 143 Vietnam, 4, 17, 22, 210–11, 223 Vincennes, 7 Virgin, 41 voodoo, 159, 160, 162, 166 Vungara dynasty, 113, 114

Y Yale, 152 Yoruba, 186 youth, 41 Yuma, 148 Z Zande, 14, 107, 108, 111–23 Zen, 220 Zerma, 84, 89, 93 zima (cult priests), 90 zoology, 230

NAME INDEX A Ageron, C.R., 58, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69 Alain, 131 Aleijadinho, 178 Allen, N.J., 22, 23, 24, 70, 130, 148, 250, 252 Allier, R., 173 Althusser, L., 1, 2, 8 Amadigné Dolo, 85 Amado, J., 179, 180, 184 Andrade, M. de, 178 Andrade, O. de, 178 Ans, A.-M. d’, 164, 167 Anthony, R., 128 Aráuz, J., 146, 147, 148, 149 Arbousse-Bastide, P., 173, 177 Archaimbault, C., 198 Aristotle, 182 Armstrong, L., 91 Aron, R., 106, 117, 123 Aucapitaine, H., 66, 67, 69 Aurégan, P., 23 Auroi, C., 152, 154, 167 B Bachelard, G., 231 Baillière, J.B., 205, 216 Baker, J., 77 Balandier, G., 9, 191, 193, 194 Bangbanzi, R., 117 Barrau, J., 208, 244, 252 Barraud, C., 244, 252 Barthes, R., 1, 263 Bastide, R. 5, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 70, 171–196 Bataille, G., 151, 161, 167, 169, 182, 235 Bate, D., 98, 100 Bateson, G., 222 Baudrillard, J., 1, 262 Beaud, S., 22, 23 Bédoucha, G., 215 Behar, R., 67, 69 Bellwood, P., 143, 148 Belmont, N., 25, 28 Bensa, A., 17, 18, 266, 268, 270, 271, 273

Berbrugger, L.A., 50, 66 Berger, L., 22, 24 Bergson, H., 264 Bernand, C., 147, 148, 149 Bernard, A., 47, 50, 51, 52, 56, 60, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69 Bernot, D, 199, 216 Bernot, L., 2, 5, 9, 10, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 197–218 Berque, J., 45, 66, 67, 68 Berrouet, E., 159 Bertholet, D., 148 Betts, R.F., 61, 69 Beylier, C., 192, 194 Bing, F., 162, 163, 166, 167 Blancard, R., 199, 203, 204, 214, 217 Blanckaert, C., 9, 23, 63, 69, 149 Bloch, Marc, 212 Bloch, Maurice, 145, 149, 250, 253 Blue, J., 88, 100 Boas, F., 8, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151 Bouglé, C., 160, 245 Boulbet, J., 198 Bourdieu, P., 1, 8, 13, 62, 63, 68, 69, 71, 233, 251 Bousquet, G.H., 55, 62, 67, 68, 69, 71 Braudel, F., 177, 180 Breton, A., 91 Broca, H., 28 Bromberger, C., 11, 24, 43 Bruneau, M., 201, 217 Buckner, M., 14, 273 Burghart, R., 248, 252 Burke, E., 68, 69 Burns, P., 68, 70 C Caillois, R., 182, 194, 235 Campbell, L., 142, 149 Capone, S., 273 Cardoso, I., 178, 195 Carelli, M., 177, 192, 195 Carette, E., 48, 66, 70 Carlos, A., 150 Castelain, J.P., 136, 149

Name index

290 Céfaï, D., 9, 23 Certeau, M. de, 1 Cervoni, A., 99, 100 Chaix, B., 35 Chanock, M., 68, 70 Charuty, G., 4, 11, 12, 274 Chevasse, P., 127, 148, 149 Chirac, A., 105, 123 Chiva, D., 25, 28, 43 Chomsky, N., 231 Christelow, A., 68, 70 Clancy-Smith, J.A., 67, 70 Clastres, P., 16, 19 Clifford, J., 19, 22, 77, 80, 83, 98, 100, 198, 217, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 267, 268, 271 Cohen, M., 28, 150 Colleyn, J.P., 97 Colonna, F., 68, 70 Comte, A., 56 Condominas, G., 9, 17, 23, 200, 214 Conklin, H.C., 208, 211, 217 Cooper, J., 154, 155, 167, 169 Copans, J., 10, 22, 23 Coppet, D. de, 3, 238, 244, 252 Crapanzano, V., 43, 57, 266, 271 Cuisenier, J., 25, 43 Cusset, F., 10, 22, 23, 262, 271, 272 D Da Silva, V.G., 188, 195 Damouré Zika, 84 Dampierre, E. de, 9, 103–124 Daumas, E., 48, 57, 66, 67 Davis, N.Z., 24, 43 Davis, W., 161 De Martino, E., 37, 38, 39, 43, 44, 274 Delacampagne, C., 3, 23, 244, 252 Delafosse, M., 6, 7, 9 Delamarre, M., 224, 234 Demangeon, A., 212 Derrida, J., 23, 262 Descola, P., 8 Dias, N., 129, 138, 141, 145, 146, 149 Dieterlen, G., 7, 11, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 88, 98, 100 Dion, R., 212 Djabir, 115, Dostal, W., 48, 57, 66, 67 Douglas, M., 98, 100 Dournes, J., 22 Dresch, P., 68, 70

Drew, R., 87 Duarte, P., 131, 178 Dumas, G., 177, 195 Dumézil, G., 242 Dumont, J., 235 Dumont, L., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 199, 200, 202, 217, 235–254 Dumont, V.E., 235 Dundes, A., 27, 43 Durham, M.E., 67, 70 Durkheim, E., 1, 5, 6, 7, 11, 18, 22, 23, 26, 28, 31, 37, 42, 43, 68, 72, 128 Dussán de Reichel, 126, 132, 140, 142, 148, 149 Duvigneaud, J., 193, 195 E Eaton, M., 98, 100 Echeverria, R., 185, 186, 193, 196 Ellington, D., 91 Emerit, M., 67, 70 Evan-Pritchard, E.E., 14, 18, 23, 112, 113, 114, 122, 123, 124, 237, 241, 252 F Fabar, P., 48, 57, 70 Fabre, D., 25, 28, 40, 43 Fabre-Vassas, C., 41, 44 Faron, L., 165, 167 Favret-Saada, J., 39, 44, 45 Febvre, L., 177, 188, 192, 195, 199, 212, 215, 216, 217, 237 Féraud, L.C., 66, 70 Fernandes, F., 156 Ferry, J., 117, 124 Fieschi, J.-A., 88, 100 Fine, A., 41 Flaherty, R., 85 Forbes, J., 98, 100 Foucault, M., 1, 8, 262 Fox, R.G., 11, 24 Francqui, Commandant, 115 Frazer, J.G., 37, 148, 150, 158, 161 Frémaux, J., 66, 70 Friedberg, C., 208 Friedemann, N.S. de, 131, 149 Fulchignoni, E., 91, 94, 99, 100 G Gaillard, G., 3, 4, 24 Galey, J.-C., 240, 241, 244

Name index

291

Gellner, E., 68, 69, 70 Georgakas, D., 98, 100 Gernet, J., 224, 234 Giddens, A., 251 Gil, G., 186 Gilissen, J., 68, 70 Gingrich, A., 11, 24 Giorgio de Chirico, 77, 99 Gjeçov, S., 67, 70 Godelier, M., 2, 8, 24 Gónzalez Suárez, F., 136, 139, 147, 149 Goodman, J.E., 66, 70 Gould, S.J., 255 Gourmont, R. de, 28, 36 Graebner, F., 232 Granet, M., 190 Grenand, P., 156, 167 Griaule, M., 6–8, 11, 13, 16, 22–4, 32, 77, 79–85, 88, 98, 99, 100, 160, 181, 182, 198, 269, 271 Gruzinski, S. 136, 149 Gueydon, (Admiral de), 61, 70 Guiart, J., 268, 271, 272 Guimaraes, A.S.A., 192, 195 Gurvitch, G., 8, 17, 98, 178, 179, 188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 195

Hirsch, E., 265, 271 Hobbes, T., 63 Hocart, A., 213, 217 Hodgson, B., 210 Holleman, J.F., 68, 71 Hornborg, A., 143, 149 Horton, R., 106 Hubert, H., 175, 275 Hugo, V., 233 Hurgronje, R., 8 Hurgronje, S., 62

H Hacoun-Campredon, P., 67, 70 Haekel, J., 140, 149 Haffner, P., 97, 100 Hall, G., 147, 149 Hallbwachs, M., 173, 175, 176 Hamy, E.-T., 4, 8, 17, 98, 128 Hannemann, T., 45, 52, 56, 60, 63, 66, 67, 70 Hanoteau, A., 12, 13, 20, 21, 45–73 Harcourt, R. d’, 126, 149 Harris, O., 147 Hasluck, M., 67, 71 Haudricourt, A.-G., 9, 10; 17, 18, 20, 200, 206, 208, 213, 214, 219–234 Heekeren, D. van, 263, 234, 266, 272 Heidegger, 19, 232, 263, 264 Henley, P., 7, 13, 16, 75–102, 274 Hennebelle, G., 97, 101 Héritier, F., 8 Herskovits, M., 179, 192, 195, 196 Hertz, R., 6, 24, 31, 43, 44, 128 Heusch, L. de, 1, 8, 100 Hevezy, G. de, 154 Heyerdahl,T., 159

K Kalt, J.P., 147, 149 Kant, E., 225 Karsten, 147 Kemlin, J., 4 Kemper, M., 67, 68, 70, 71 Kerns, V., 131, 149 Khalil ibn Ishaq, 56, 60, 71 Koch-Grünberg, 147 Kovalevsky, M.M., 68, 71 Krickeberg, 147 Kropotkin, P., 68, 71

I Illo Gaoudel, 84 Izard, M., 147, 148 J Jamin, J., 10, 23, 43, 44, 77, 98, 101, 130, 148, 148, 195, 266, 269, 271 Jijón caamano, J., 147 Johnson, C., 141, 144, 146, 148, 149 Jolas, T., 39 Julien, C.-A., 66, 68, 71 Jung, 19, 272, 263 Just, R., 71 Jutra, C., 99, 101

L L’Estoile, B. de, 7, 9, 10, 22, 24, 268, 272 Lacan, J., 1, 8 Lam Ibrahim Dia, 84 Landaburu, J., 142, 147, 149 Langevin, P., 131 Laplantine, F., 22, 24 Laroche, M.C., 163, 167, 269, 271 Latour, B., 1 Laurière, C., 127, 128, 129, 130, 136, 137, 138, 141, 146, 147, 148, 149 Laveleye, E., 68, 71

292 Lazreg, M., 67, 71 Le Bouler, J.-P., 151, 167, 193, 195, 196 Le Chatelier, A., 200 Le Cour Grandmaison, O., 68, 71 Le Play, F., 4, 5, 28 Leach, E., 138, 149, 166, 167 Leacock, R., 87 Léautaud, P., 36 Leenhardt, F., 257 Leenhardt, M., 5, 19, 21, 23, 160, 176, 190, 195, 255–272 Lefèvre, L., 67, 71 Lehmann, 147 Leiris, M., 7, 22, 24, 43, 44, 100, 101, 107, 108, 161, 167, 182, 193, 195, 198, 235, León, L., 25, 127, 139, 146, 147, 149 Leontovitch, F.I., 71 Leroi-Gourhan, A., 4, 6, 17, 198, 199, 200, 206, 214, 216, 230 Letourneux, A., 12, 13, 45–74 Levallois, M., 67, 71 Lévi-Strauss, C., 1, 2, 7, 8, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 24, 27, 37, 39, 42, 44, 125, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 160, 165, 166, 167, 171, 186, 191, 195, 198, 199, 200, 214, 216, 217, 230, 231, 232, 236, 237, 238, 240, 241, 242, 245, 246, 250, 251, 253, 269, 271 Lévy-Bruhl, L., 6, 14, 28, 37, 128, 129, 130, 131, 146, 161, 162, 166, 175, 176, 190, 195 Linant de Bellefonds, Y., 66, 71 Linton, R., 179, 196 LiPuma, E., 265, 272 Lorcin, P.M.E., 61, 66, 67 Lottman, H., 131, 149 Lowie, R., 131, 154, 160 Luc, B., 51, 57, 71 Luce, G.H., 209, 216 Lühning, A., 180, 193, 195 Lyautey, M., 7, 68, 69 M MacCarthy, O., 47, 71 MacClancy, J., 5, 6, 19, 24, 255–272 Mach, 264, 270 MacMahon (Marshal), 57, 71 Madan, T.M., 240, 241, 244, 252, 253 Mahé, A., 45, 53, 57, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68 Maine, H., 160

Name index Malaurie, J., 22 Malinowski, B., 7, 15, 19, 42, 53, 62, 63, 81, 82, 98, 99, 101, 125, 149, 150, 160, 176 Mamber, S., 87, 98, 101 Mamdani, M., 68, 71 Marcel, J.-C., 189, 190, 194, 195 Marcorelles, L., 87, 101 Marcus, G., 19, 271 Marcy, G., 67, 71 Marillier, L., 25 Marin, L., 28 Mary, A., 191, 194, 195 Maschio, T., 262, 263, 266, 272 Masqueray, E., 45, 67, 72, 68, 70 Massignon, L., 201 Maunier, R., 63, 72 Maurer, B., 265, 270, 272 Mauss, M., 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 37, 44, 63, 80, 81, 86, 88, 128, 129, 130, 146, 148, 151, 152, 153, 175, 176, 189, 192, 196, 204, 206, 207, 211, 212, 216, 217, 229, 230, 232, 234, 236, 239, 240, 241, 243, 251, 253, 259 Meillassoux, C., 2 Merleau-Ponty, M., 1, 8, 271 Métraux, A., 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 105, 131, 151–169, 185, 186, 193, 196 Mézières, B. de, 116 Michelet, J., 67, 72 Millet, S., 178 Milliot, L., 47, 50, 51, 52, 56, 60, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72 Mistral, F., 36 Moffat, M., 240, 244, 252, 253 Monbeig, P., 177 Monnier, A., 152, 154, 167 Montagne, R., 45, 68, 72 Montesquieu, 55 Moore, S.F., 68, 72 Morand, M., 67, 72 Moréchand, G., 198 Moreno, Dr., 104, 124 Morgan, L. H., 46, 73 Morin, E., 89, 92 Motta, R., 181, 196 Moura, C.E.M., 193, 196 Moussa Hamidou, 84 Murra, J., 193, 196 Muttusami, Tevar, 236

Name index N Naepels, 267, 268, 270, 272 Nauton, P., 210, 217 Needham, J., 206, 217 Needham, R., 27, 44, 256, 257, 270, 272 Nef, J., 105 Neumann-Spallart, F.X., 105 Neveu, E. de, 67, 72 Nietzsche, F. 91, 99 Nobrega, C., 185, 186, 193, 196 Nordenskiöld, N.E., 15, 143, 147, 151, 154, 155, 158, 165, 169 O Ould-Braham, O., 67, 72 P Parain, C., 202, 223 Park, R.E., 179, 196 Parker, E., 46 Parkes, P., 12, 13, 270, 271, 274 Parry, J., 250, 253 Parsons, T., 251 Patorni, F., 53, 72 Patrinos, H.A., 147, 149 Paulme, D., 7, 11, 107, 160 Peixoto, F.A., 174, 175, 177, 178, 182, 192, 195, 196 Pergaud, L., 36 Perkins, K.J., 66, 67, 72 Pessoa, J., 179 Piault, M.-H., 98, 101 Pina-Cabral, J., 149 Pineda Camacho, R., 126, 130, 138, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148 Pingaud, M.C., 39 Plato, 119, 182, 225 Pocock, D., 238, 240, 243 Poussereau, L.M., 66, 67, 72 Prédal, R., 75, 100, 101 Preuss, 147 Price, S., 67, 98, 101 Prins, H., 152, 165, 166, 169 Privat, J.M., 29, 44 Pythagorus, 119 Q Quatrefages, A. de, 4, 9 Queiróz, M.I.P. de, 173, 180, 183, 185, 196

293 R Rabih, 110 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 160, 237, 239 Ramos, A., 179, 192, 195, 196 Randon, Marshal, 48, 49, 58, 61, 64, 66 Ravalet, C., 184, 192, 196 Redfield, R., 105, 179, 196 Reichel-Dolmatoff, G., 131 Renan, E., 36, 51, 72 Renou, L., 237 Renshaw, J., 160, 169 Rey, P.P., 2, 8 Richard, G., 173, 174, 175, 192, 196 Richardson, M., 98, 101 Ricoeur, P., 1 Rinn, L., 68, 72 Rival, L., 1, 8, 14, 15, 23, 275 Rivers, W.H.R., 203, 217 Rivet, P., 6, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 28, 125–150, 152, 153, 154, 165, 198 Rivière, G.-H., 4, 22, 28, 235 Rivière, P., 15, 16, 21, 275 Roberts, H., 68, 72 Robin, J.N., 68, 72 Rochereau, H.J., 138, 150 Rogers, S., 5, 24 Rohmer, E., 87, 101 Rosfelder, R., 82 Rouch, J., 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 20, 21, 75–102, 274 Rouget, G., 113, 124 Rousseau, 163, 167 Royer, L., 36 S Sabatier, L., 5, 68 Sadoul, G., 99, 101 Saint-Simon, 50, 58, 67, 71 Saintyves, P., 31 Salemink, M.B., 68, 72 Salemink, O., 68, 72 Sand, G., 35 Sangren, P., 262, 271, 272 Sartre, J.P., 8, 234, 264, 271 Saussure, F. de, 8, 9 Savigny, 55 Schaeffner, A., 107 Scheele, J., 63, 66, 67, 68, 72 Schubring, W., 237 Schweinfurth, G., 110, 124 Segalen, M., 5 Segall, L., 178

294 Senhora, 184, 185, 186 Shafer, R., 209, 217 Shinar, P., 68, 72 Si Lunis, 49, 51, 60, 61, 67 Si Mula, 49, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68 Sibeud, E., 22, 24, 68, 72 Slane, W. de, 48 Snyder, F., 68, 72 Sorre, M., 212 Souty, J., 187, 193, 196 Sperber, D., 9 Srinivas, M., 237 Stendhal, 35, 36 Steward, J., 131 Stewart, F., 68, 72 Stocking, G., 127, 132, 138, 140, 142, 150, 203, 217, 225 Stoller, P., 98, 99, 100, 101 Strathern, M., 9, 265, 266, 270, 272, 275 Strauss, L., 105, 106 Surdon, G., 68, 73 T Tallou Mouzourane, 84 Tarde, G., 174, 175, 192, 196 Tardieu, S., 235 Tardits, C., 165, 169 Taylor, L., 78, 98, 99, 102, 191 Teixeira, A., 179, 196 Ter Haar, B., 68, 73 Terray, E., 2, 8 Thomas, J., 215, 217, 218 Thompson, C., 77, 98, 100, 101, 102 Tillion, G., 11, 24 Tocqueville, A., 245 Todorov, T., 11, 24 Toffin, G., 14, 17, 239, 243, 244, 252, 253, 275 Tooker, E., 46, 73 Trautmann, T.R., 46, 73 Tupper, C.L., 68, 73 Tylor, E., 150, 160, 217, 261

Name index U Urbain, I., 50, 58, 59, 66, 67, 71 Uribe, T. 139, 150 V Vallès, J., 36 van Gennep, A., 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25–44, 160 Vangele, 110 Vaux, P. de, 113, 124 Velay-Valentin, C., 25, 44 Verdier, Y., 39, 40, 44 Verger, P., 16, 164, 169, 172, 173, 180, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196 Verneau, R., 128, 129 Vertov, D., 92, 93, 94, 95, 96 Vico, 263 Vidal, J.E., 208 Viveiros de Castro, E., 156 Vollenhoven, C. van, 62, 71 W Wagley, C., 154, 157, 160, 161, 169 Weber, F., 22, 23 Weber, M., 106, 113, 124, 171, 175, 189, 190, 250, 251 Wilder, G., 148, 150 Winston, B., 98, 102 Wylie, L., 199, 218 Y Young, C., 98, 102, 266, 267 Z Zerilli, F., 126, 137, 140, 141, 147, 150 Zin, D.L., 43 Zonabend, F., 5, 39, 199, 218