ABSTRACT
From 1928 to 1940 the Institut d’ethnologie provided the framework for ethnology teaching in France. According to Denise Paulme (unpublished interview with G. Gaillard), at its opening the institute offered five or six presentations on physical anthropology by Paul Rivet, and the same number each on prehistory, by the Abbé Breuil, and linguistics, by Marcel Cohen, as well as seminars directed by Marcel Mauss twice a week. The institute’s first steps were strongly characterized by what I have called the belles lettres spirit (see Chapter V). This is attested by the fact that the institute’s first graduate, Paul Mus, became the director of the Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient (The French school of the Far East), and by the important place in research held by Abyssinia (Ethiopia), which was seen as a phantasmagorical representative of ancient classical civilizations (Cohen went to Abyssinia in 1910 and Griaule followed in 1928, and it took pride of place in the Dakar-Djibouti mission of 1933–1934). Between 1928 and 1935 the following scholars graduated from the institute: P. Mus, M. Griaule, A. Métraux, M. Leiris, J. Cazeneuve, L. S. Senghor, J. Soustelle, C. Lévi-Strauss, A. Leroi-Gourhan, G. Dieterlen, P.-E. Victor, D. Paulme, M. Rodinson. On the eve of the Second World War the courses offered were as follows: descriptive ethnography (M. Mauss), descriptive linguistics (M. Cohen), anthropology (P. Rivet); exotic prehistory (P. Wernert), African ethnography (H. Labouret), African linguistics (L. Homburger), linguistics and ethnography of East Asia and Oceania (J. Przyluski), zoological and biological anthropology (E. Rabaud), geology of the Quaternary and human palaeontology (A. Laquine), psycho-physiology and human beings and anthropoids (P. Guillaume), human geography (A. Demangeon), comparative racial physiognomy (J. Millot), and bibliography (Y. Oddon). After their formal training students joined missions, of which the best-known was the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, directed by M. Griaule, which crossed Africa from west to east between 1931 and 1933. From 1928 to 1940 the Institut d’ethnologie sponsored forty-eight such missions: ten within Europe (e.g. Estonia, Albania, Hungary), ten to Asia (e.g. Indochina, Japan), twenty-three to Africa (including ten to Maghreb countries), and five to Oceania and America. Some notable examples are Griaule’s mission to Abyssinia (1928), the Franco-Belgian expedition of A. Métraux and H. Lavachéry to Easter Island (1928), the Dakar-Djibouti expedition of Griaule, Leiris and Schaeffner (1931), that of J. Soustelle to Mexico (1932), that of P.-E. Victor and R. Gessain to Greenland (1932), that of G. Tillion and Thérèse Rivet to Algeria (1934), that of C. Lévi-Strauss to the Bororo (1936), and that of Arlette and André Leroi-Gourhan to Japan (1937). Also worth mentioning are Jeanne Cuisinier’s expedition to Indonesia, that of Labouret to Cameroon and Burkina, and that of Le Coeur to Chad. Griaule carried out a second mission to the Dogon at the end of which two of his team, D. Paulme and D. Lifchitz, remained behind to complete an eight-month stay in Sanga in 1934 – the first extended fieldwork by the French school. In 1928 Rivet was appointed to the anthropology chair attached to the Musée d’histoire naturelle, and thereby also placed in charge of the small Musée du Trocadéro. Rivet chose G.-H. Rivière as his deputy, and the two men won approval for the construction of the modernist Palais du Trocadéro to coincide with the holding of the International Exhibition in Paris. The new palace replaced the Musée du Trocadéro, which was destroyed, and became the home of the Musée de l’Homme, which opened its doors in 1937. It was in the Musée de l’Homme that the first French Resistance network was formed during the Occupation (Blumenson, 1977). The members of this network were either executed or deported (e.g. B. Vildé, A. Lewitzky, G. Tillion, Y. Oddon), while other anthropologists whose lives were in danger or who opposed the Vichy regime fled abroad, often to London (e.g. Soustelle, Lévi-Strauss, Rivet, Callois). After the enactment of the Vichy anti-Semitic laws on 2 June 1941, Mauss’s teaching rights were withdrawn and he was replaced by M. Leenhardt as director of studies in primitive peoples in Section V of the EPHE. The Sorbonne finally accepted the endowment of an ethnography chair in 1942, something Mauss had long called for. This new chair was first occupied by M. Griaule, whose thesis Masques Dogons [Dogon Masks] had gained him the first French doctorate in ethnology. Griaule’s successors as doctorate-holders were D. Paulme with La communauté taisible chez les Dogon [The Community of the Dogon in Law] (1942), Leroi-Gourhan with Archéologie du Pacifique nord: Matériaux pour l’étude des relations entre les peuples riverains d’Asie et d’Amérique [Archaeology of the North Pacific: Materials for the Study of Relations between Riparian Peoples of Asia and America] (1945), and Lévi-Strauss with Les structures élémentaires de la parenté [Elementary Structures of Kinship] (1948). As for the institutional organization of research, an important role was played by a state body called the Caisse nationale des sciences (National Science Fund), which in 1935 recruited its first ethnologists, M. Leiris and J.-P. Lebeuf. This Fund was the forerunner of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (National Centre for Scientific Research), which replaced it in 1938. Other ethnology graduates became assistants at Section V of the EPHE – such as Griaule, or were put in charge of various departments of the Musée du Trocadéro – like Schaeffner, Leroi-Gourhan and Vildé, and the group was employed at the Musée de l’Homme after its opening in 1937. The thirty names dealt with in this chapter represent the majority of scholars who passed through the Institut d’ethnologie from 1925 to 1939, although they form an eclectic group in terms of approaches and theories.
