ABSTRACT
The institutionalization of French ethnology continued between the wars with the 1925 founding of the Institut d’Ethnologie by a philosopher (Lévy-Bruhl), a sociologist (Mauss), and an ethnographer/physical anthropologist (Paul Rivet). The Institut itself, and French anthropology of the period, juxtaposed the two poles of grand theory and the meticulous concern for particular data in the form of Mauss’s vision of a theory-driven and autonomous ethnology versus Rivet’s ideal of anthropology as the meeting-place of descriptively exact disciplines in the social and natural sciences.
