THE NEW ETHNOLOGY AND LA SITUATION COLONIALE IN INTERWAR FRANCE

Alice L. Conklin
University of Rochester

La proposition, avance par Georges Balandier dans les annes 1950, que ce que jobserve, en ralit, nest pas un village kong ou une tribu fang, mais une situation coloniale, na dune certaine manire pas encore ni dexercer ses effets subversifs dans la discipline. Le rapport des ethnologues la domination coloniale ou postcoloniale nest pas de servilit, mais de dngation. Tout se passe comme sils ne la voyaient pas et leur complicit objective se rduit gnralement laisser croire quelle pourrait ntre pas visible 1

Jean Bazins 1996 invocation of the enduring effects of Georges Balandiers critical insights of the 1950s is a testimonial to not just how revolutionary, but also how persuasive these insights were and remain. It is common currency now, even among those of us who are not anthropologists, that rst European travelers, then European scientists invented places like Africa that tell us more about themselves/ourselves than the reality they purported to describe. The particular invention of the twentieth century was anthropologists discovery of pure cultures untouched by history and especially by colonialism. Having found such peoples, anthropologists then devoted themselves to recording and preserving their authentic traditions before it was too late. Balandiers precocious contribution to the eld, in this context, was to take the colonial situation itself as his object of study as early as 1951 and to render visible the unequal power relations so discreetly evacuated by his more complicit professional colleagues.2 The above assessment offers a useful starting point for a discussion of Balandiers place in modern French ethnology, because in correctly identifying the latters remarkable achievements Bazin nevertheless overemphasizes the
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invisibility of the empire for French anthropologists generally. Recent scholarship on the history of the social sciences in Europe has gone beyond the once useful, but now rather conning, trope of preservationist anthropology as the handmaiden of colonialism, to consider more closely the many different institutionsincluding colonial onesthat supported the emergence of the discipline in the rst half of the twentieth century. Historians of anthropology have increasingly shown that colonial and academic knowledge of non-Western cultures helped to constitute each other at specic moments in time, while diverging at others.3 Balandiers own work, I would like to suggest in this essay, is a case in point. It did not spring ex nihilo from a brilliant mind, although no one would deny that the latter was present. Rather, his confrontation with la situation coloniale was critically framed by at least two imperial factors at the beginning of his career. Both remind us that while the generation of anthropologists that mentored Balandier may have ignored colonialism when it came to writing about native cultures, they openly sought the imprimatur of empire and the opportunities it afforded them for the institutionalization of their science. What were these two factors? First was Balandiers own colonial situation as a state-employed anthropologist detached to French West Africa in the highly politicized post-Brazzaville context. Second, and my particular concern in this essay, was his earlier sociological training at the Institut dethnologie (IE) at the University of Paris and the Muse de lhomme (MH) at a moment when these two linked institutions were openly placing ethnological knowledge at the service of empire.4 Founded in the interwar years by Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet and Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, the IE and the MH attempted to renovate anthropology in France by promoting the study of so-called primitive cultures in loco, rather than from armchairs in Paris. They baptized their new approach ethnology to distinguish it from the excessively physical anthropology that still dominated in France. In their bid to professionalize ethnologie, Mauss, Rivet, and Lvy-Bruhl consciously sought colonial subsidies for their new courses, publications, and research devoted to the social facts of nonWestern cultures. Such knowledge would surely improve colonial rule, they claimed, by helping administrators to understand their subjects. They did not have to ask twice. Anthropology in its new ethnological guise was an inexpensive science to fund, and the desired subsidies soon materialized. Ethnologys stated goalmaking colonialism more efficient and more humane through better knowledge of their subjectswas one, moreover, that every colonial interest could applaud in theory, if not devote itself to in practice. Last but not least, as Benot de lEstoile has pointed out, the French state after World War I was now eager to legitimate its right to colonies by mobilizing the prestige of science for its own sake.5 Out of this tangled web of cross-cutting motivations, ethnology in the 1920s and 1930s, at the Insti and the Troca, became colonial through and through, at least institutionally, nancially, and in its choice of scientic objects. At the same time, as Vronique Dimier and

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Gary Wilder have each shown in different ways, French administrators in the colonies became increasingly scientic and ethnological.6 Given this colonial imbrication of the IE and MH, Bazins suggestion that French anthropologists paid little attention to empire requires revising, at least for the inter war period. But does not this same phenomenoni.e., ethnologies reliance on colonialism to institutionalize itselfprove Bazins larger point that anthropology was directly complicit in the empires many inequities? There are, of course, degrees of complicity. I will argue that while Mauss, Rivet, and Lvy-Bruhl certainly mobilized imperial resources, they did so in ways that reected their particular professional aspirations rst and foremost. This preoccupation in turn kept them (and at least some of their students) at a critical distanceliterally and epistemologicallyfrom empires most direct use and abuse of their science. Was it not from his specic location, of the empire but also outside of it, that Balandier was able to produce the kind of anticolonial sociology for which he is justly famous? Indeed, Balandiers case suggests that we still have much to learn about colonial forms of knowledge, as they emerged on the margins of a scientizing empire and a professionalizing science. To grasp Mauss, Rivet and Lvy-Bruhls scientic aspirations in the interwar years, a brief review of the organization and status of the discipline of anthropology in France is helpful.7 In the 1920s, there was still no university chair or program in the eld, although there was a rich and variegated tradition of studying man in the many parallel schools that existed alongside the various facults des lettres and facults des sciences, and in private associations. There was also a marked divide between physical anthropologists interested in systems of racial classication and ethnographers concerned with humanitys diverse cultures and more especially primitive and exotic ones. The former, an outgrowth of natural history, historically had enjoyed the most prestige in France and internationally despite deep disagreements within their ranks. Its professional bases were the cole dAnthropologie, the Musum National dHistoire Naturelle (Musum), the Institut de Palontologie, and the Broca Laboratory at the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes (EPHE); these were all teaching institutions that nevertheless did not confer the university degrees essential to careers in France in higher education. By 1900, physical anthropologists in France were no longer at the cutting edge of scholarship, although institutionally they still dened and therefore controlled what ofcially passed for anthropology in France. Rather it was Frances other learned community devoted to the science of manthose sociologists, linguists, and ethnographers documenting and analyzing civilizations beyond Europethat appeared the more dynamic and more innovative, albeit also more marginal and (if possible) more fragmented. The most successful among them had found a niche in the erudite fth section of the EPHE, devoted to les sciences religeuses, as well as at the cole des Langues Orientales Vivantes and the more practically oriented cole Coloniale. As Emmanuelle Sibeud has shown, increasingly

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sophisticated amateur ethnographers were also beginning to emerge from the ranks of the colonial administration, the best known of whom was the Africanist Maurice Delafosse. Finally a number of ethnographic societies were founded or refounded in the prewar yearsfurther evidence of a ourishing interest in traditional societies beyond Frances borders. Although these different groups did not initially work in concert, by the turn of the century, many of them were coming to the same conclusion. This was that the science of man needed to be placed on a new, more theoretically rigorous and more synthetic basis than that on offer by Brocas disciples, one that took into better account social, linguistic, and cultural facts of simple societies. This multifaceted reforming impulse ultimately culminated in the two linked initiatives invoked above: rst, the creation of the IE and a dramatic overhaul of Frances existing ethnographic museum, the Muse dethnographie du Trocadro (MET), which together, it was hoped, would give ethnologists an institutional base that could eclipse if not supplant the cole dAnthropologie and redene anthropology at the Musum; and second, the turn of these same ethnologists to the colonies for funds and legitimation, both because they believed in the possibility of a humanitarian empire and because the scientic management of human resources overseas had become politically lordre du jour in France. Mauss was certainly one of the earliest and most articulate advocates of a renovated anthropology in France. Unlike other maverick scholars who shared his concerns but did not move in the same elite circles, he was also sufciently well connected to make his views heard. In 1907, ve years after his appointment to the EPHE, he considered applying for the directorship of Frances long neglected MET.8 It is as if Mauss sensed even then the important role that this museum could play and should play in the professionalization of a new, more culturally oriented science of man. In the end he did not secure this position. Yet the concerns that motivated Mauss in 1907 resurfaced six years later. In a 1913 letter to the minister of public education, Mauss pointed out that the breakthrough effected by Durkheimian as well as recent Anglo-American and German sociology had depended on their innovative use of ethnographic documents. Les faits ethnographiques, he wrote, emprunts des socits infrieures, font dsormais partie intgrante de lensemble des faits que considrent les disciplines les plus classiques. 9 But, he lamented, France was doing nothing to study such facts or make them known. That same year, in two articles surveying ethnography in France and abroad, he concluded bitterly that even Switzerland and Sweden had done better than France in this domain, despite the latters superior status as a great scientic power and colonial power.10 He then added,
La cause et aussi la consquence de la stagnation de lethnographie en France est labsence ou linsuffisance des institutions qui pourraient sen occuper. Nous navons ni enseignements, ni bons muses, ni offices de recherches ethnographiques parce que nous ne nous intressons pas lethnographie. Et, inversement, nous ne nous intressons pas cette science parce quil ny a chez nous

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personne qui soit particulirement intress son succs. Une science ne vit pas que de beau langage, il lui faut un matriel et un personnel. Il lui faut des organes permanents, des institutions durables qui la crent et lentretiennent.11

Maussin what was clearly a bid to establish himself as a leader of this missing science in Francewent on to outline what remained to be done if France wanted to rank on a par at the very least with London and Vienna. As an observational science like zoology, botany, geology and physical geography, ethnography demanded three different orders of work: fieldwork, during which documents were collected; museum or archival work, where objects were classied, studied, and published; and teaching, where knowledge produced was communicated to specialists and even the public at large.12 A year earlier, Mauss had actually drawn up a proposal for one piece of this larger institutional project. He envisaged the creation of a Bureau of Ethnography attached to the university, whose explicit objective would be to organize, encourage, and activate ethnographic studies in France and particularly in the French colonies.13 Nothing came of this particular proposal as France mobilized for war. But what is striking about Mausss description of the state of ethnography in France in 1914 is the extent to which his recommendations were realized in the 1920s and 1930salthough not by Mauss alone. I still do not have all the elements of the story. It nevertheless appears that Mauss and Lvy-Bruhl, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, fellow socialists and longstanding friends, together approached the Musum anthropologist Paul Rivet shortly after the war with their idea of forming an IE at the University of Paris to teach ethnography and publish research in the eld.14 Rivet and Mauss had already been in touch before the war. Rivet had written to Mauss in 1914 applauding his excellent article and hoping that it would have some effect.15 Although a medical doctor trained in Brocas anthropometric methods, Rivet had cut his anthropological teeth during a ve-year mission in South America, from 1900 to 1905; while there he began studying the material culture, and more especially the languages and migration patterns, of the peoples of Meso-America and became a passionate advocate of a more polyvalent approach to the science of man. Dispatched from the navy to the Musum upon his return, by the 1920s he would soon become Frances most eminent Americanist. A gifted administrator as well, he found himself head of both the Socit des Amricanistes and the Institut International dAnthropologie. His organizational skills, his publication record, his internationalist and socialist politics, as well as his ambition to succeed in the elite social world of the French intelligentsiato which he, unlike Mauss and Lvy-Bruhl, was not connected by birth or marriagemade him an especially valuable recruit to Mausss ethnographic cause.16 Mauss and Rivet would run the Institut together as co-secretary generals, with Rivet particularly responsible for organizing the content of its curriculum and its day-to-day operations. Yet it was thanks to Lvy-Bruhls political con-

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tacts and his in at the Sorbonne that the IE saw the light of day in 1925. When the Cartel des Gauches came to power, the three men saw the opportunity to realize their objectives. Lvy-Bruhl introduced the idea and a projet de rglement for a new ethnographic institute to the Sorbonnes Conseil des Professeurs (of which he was a member) in December 1924, with the specic mandate to study Frances colonies.17 The plan was modest enough not to offend: the Institute would offer a few courses of its ownmostly in descriptive ethnographybut would draw upon existing courses at the Musum, the EPHE, the University of Paris, the cole Coloniale and cole des Langues Orientales. Students already registered at the University could enroll, and students at the EPHE and the cole des Chartes would be exempt from matriculation fees. Institute students could prepare a diploma (later these became certicates for licenses in either sciences or lettres). The new program would be housed at the Institut de Gographie. It would also inaugurate an important publication, a new series of monographs entitled Travaux et mmoires, dedicated to bringing into print the ethnographic facts which French anthropologists were now going to collect. Finally and most importantly, principal funding would come from the colonies, directly implicated in the scientic work of the new Institute. The Sorbonne assembly passed Lvy-Bruhls proposal but stipulated that the IE should not cost the University anything. Sbastien Charlty, Rector of the University, referred the project to Gaston Doumergue, minister of public instruction, who passed it on to douard Daladier, colonial minister and friend of Lvy-Bruhl. It was Daladier who approved the colonial subsidy that in the end would prove the linchpin of the institution. He also insisted that, given the colonial subsidy, cole Coloniale students and colonial functionaries en cong should also be dispensed from paying fees and that competent colonial administrators should be allowed to teach there.18 The colonial underpinning of the IE, which was ofcially created on 1 August 1925, was thus in place from the outset. The fate of the Institute, in turn, quickly became linked to that of Frances ethnographic museum, which also became avowedly colonial in these years. Museums had been critical to Mausss conceptualization of how to transform ethnography into a proper science since at least the turn of the century. In 1913, he had been particularly scandalized by Frances backwardness on this front as well. By 1928, however, Paul Rivet was in the ideal position to bring the MET into the orb of the new ethnology, giving its acolytes a real laboratory in which to work and an institution that could hire their students. By tradition the director of the MET had held the chair in French anthropology at the Musum; by the late 1920s Rivet was a frontrunner for that position, since he had been teaching and working at this institution since 1908. When he was elected Professor in 1928, Rivet made it a condition of his acceptance that the Muse dethnographie be formally attached to the Musum and that he be allowed to hire both a sousdirecteur to help turn the museum around and a staff to run it. Rivet and Mauss

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now had yet another means of acquiring ethnographic facts and disseminating their new science more responsibly and more widely than had hitherto been the case. That the museum would be responsibly scientific, Rivet left little doubt.19 With the help of both wealthy patrons and IE students sent on mission to conduct fieldwork and acquire artifacts, Rivet soon built up the museums library and collections. All Institute students were expected to spend time at the museum, which Rivetwith Mausss backingalways conceived as much a research facility as an institution for the popularization of science. Many doctoral students survived by working for the MH, helping to catalogue its collections and determining how they should be exhibited. Finally in 1937 and 1938 Rivet realized a longstanding ambition: the relocation of the old Trocadro museum and IE together in a new building, complete with classrooms, display galleries, photothque, phonothque, salle de cinma, and salle de lecture for its library. He also moved the Musums physical anthropology collection to the new premisesfor Rivet and Mauss accepted that ethnology as they were dening it required that man be classied racially as well as studied sociologically. In 1938, a little late for the Worlds Fair that was held in Paris a year earlier, Rivet was able to inaugurate a refurbished and renamed Muse de lHomme, so called because the necessary elements for learning about man in all his facetscultural as well as racial, prehistoric as well as contemporarywere now contained in its four walls. In point of fact, most of the objects in the museum came from the French colonies, which also underwrote its budget especially in the early years of its transformationa connection the MET did nothing to hide and like the IE considered one of its great strengths.20 The renovated Muse dethnographie, Rivet insisted in 1931, in his plea to the government for more funds, would continue the educational work of the Colonial Exposition closing that same year.21 On the eve of the opening of the MH, Rivet could still write douard Daladier, then war minister, that his new museum was a colonial museum and request the presence of colonial troops at its inauguration.22 As the above description implies, identifying the colonial vocation of the linked IE-museum nexus is easy: it was openly embraced and celebrated. Determining the exact nature of the colonial connection, however, is less straightforward than it might appear. Certainly, all three men who guided the IE and the MET-MH stated how important their work was to colonization. In a well known article published by Lvy-Bruhl in 1926, announcing the creation of the IE, he described it as a scientic institution that would travailler au progrs de la science ethnologique, on the one hand, and on the other, mettre les rsultats de cette science au service de notre politique indigne toutes les fois quon le lui demandera.23 If the latter clause seemed to leave it up to colonial bureaucrats to callor not callon anthropologists whose work they were underwriting, another paragraph made a stronger pitch for the active role anthropologists should play overseas in Frances ofcial imperial project: eth-

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nologists were as important as doctors or engineers, since they could provide une connaissance exacte et approfondie des langues, des religions, des cadres sociaux of the populations indignes. Despite these claims, it is difcult to nd Lvy-Bruhl, Mauss or Rivet taking any direct interest in colonial policy, that they might coordinate their teaching and research projects with the specic needs of administrators in the eld. Nor did they lobby for positions for their students in the colonial administration. Given this ambiguity on the subject, a better sense of how Mauss, Rivet and Lvy-Bruhl envisaged the relationship between colonialism and the scientific study of so-called primitive cultures can be gleaned from the organization of the Institute in its early years and the correspondence of Mauss and Rivet in particular.24 LIE a pour objet de coordonner, dorganiser et de dvelopper les tudes ethnologiques, en particulier celles qui se rapportent aux Colonies franaises, de former des travailleurs pour ces tudes et de publier leurs travaux. Il pourra envoyer des missions aux colonies et exceptionnellement ailleurs, il pourra subventionner des publications aux colonies, dans la mesure de ses ressources.25 This description of the Institutes raison dtre, contained in the 1925 decree and which did not change throughout the interwar years, makes clear, of course, the central role of the colonies in facilitating the emergence of tudes ethnologiques. The money would come from the empire. Students, as a result, would mostlyalthough not exclusivelybe sent to study peoples living under French rule. As, or perhaps more, revealing, however, in the description quoted above is the pronounced academic orientation envisaged for this new colonial science: it was taken for granted that the bulk of the funds would be used to subsidize research with a view to publication in the metropolein the new Travaux et mmoires series, with its prestigious Sorbonne imprint and its implied limited readership of fellow scholars. Here is one clue that the IE founders viewed their enterprise as one principally dedicated to the production of new knowledge in keeping with the most rigorous scientic standards obtaining in France, rather than according to the specic needs of more local (colonial) agendas. This academic vocation was further underscored by the makeup of the governing bodies of the Institute. Colonial delegates were given representation only on the Institutes administrative council, not on its Directors Committee, which made the essential decisions. The former had 28 members, of whom ten were designated by the colonial governments or the colonial minister; the latter had five members, all of them professional scientists attached to metropolitan institutions of higher learning.26 These included Mauss, Lvy-Bruhl and Rivet, the linguist Antoine Meillet, who held a chair at the Collge de France, and Maurice Delafosse, a colonial governor who had virtually retired from service and was now teaching at the cole des Langues Orientales. A nal indication that the new ethnology would be cast primarily in the mode of pure research can be found in the minutes of the very rst meeting of the Conseil dadministration, held in November 1925. At this meeting

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Lvy-Bruhl noted, once again, that one of the Institutes goals was to prepare men called to live in the colonies (administrators, doctors, ofcers, missionaries). He nevertheless spent more time discussing the particular research attributes of the IE, two of which had not appeared in the organizing decree. These are of particular interest because they both conrm the academic vocation of the new ethnology and reveal, somewhat surprisingly, that Mauss, Rivet, and Lvy-Bruhl very much saw a place for this kind of scholarship in the empire proper: la conser vation des civilisations indignes par lorganisation de muses aussi bien en France quaux colonies et denqutes ethnologiques and collaboration avec toutes les organisations scientiques dj existantes [in the colonies] by establishing une liaison entre elles.27 The IE, in short, would not only publish erudite monographs in France dedicated to the cultures and languages of peoples in the colonies. It would also bring academic science itself to the colonies in the form of satellite institutions that the IE controlled and coordinatedmuseums and scientic organizationsin the continued absence of university departments of anthropology in France. It is significant in this context that the largest subsidy for the Institute80,000 francs promised from the beginning and routinely reconrmed until the Depression forced a retrenchmentcame from Indochina. This colony already had a well-developed tradition of colonial erudition in its cole Franaise dExtrme Orient (EFEO), as its right to send a delegate to the Conseil dadministration of the IE indicates.28 The director of the school until 1929, the Orientalist Louis Finot, had been one of Mausss professors 25 years earlier at the EPHE, and they had remained friends ever since. Mauss (who had been to Hanoi in 1902 at the schools invitation for the meeting of the Socit des Orientalistes)29 kept Finot well informed of his plans over the years regarding a Bureau dethnographie, and in 1925 Finot wrote that he was delighted that this plan was nally materializing. Although Finot claimed to have had no hand in persuading the governor general to open his coffers, Finots cooperation coupled with the local governments largesse helped the EFEO and Indochina more generally to quickly become a favored vector of the IE and the MET.30 Finot was particularly keen to have a museum founded in Indochina, a properly ethnological one, particularly since nous sommes en ce moment encombrs par un projet Sarraut pour qui un muse dethnographie cest un muse Grvin pour amuser les touristes avec pour directeur un brave garon qui a besoin dune prbende.31 Indeed, he impressed upon Mauss that it would be misguided for the Institute to give priority to
les publications ethnologiques . Le besoin le plus pressant, cest lorganisation des enqutes ethnologiques, la recherche des documentations et leur conservation les vieilles coutumes, les costumes, les traditions disparaissent avec rapidit. Le gouvernement gnral et les gouvernements locaux pourraient faire beaucoup dans ce sens, mais il faut quil soit stimul par des objurgations venues de Paris et portant lestampille ofcielle. En outre il faudrait quun de vous vint ici pour tudier le terrain et mettre sur pied une organisation pratique. La chose est possible et elle en

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vaut la peine. Bien entendu lcole Franaise serait l pour vous prter son appui. Examinez cela avec M. Lvy-Bruhl et voyez ce qui est possible.32

The Institute did not, in the end, make a choice between eldwork and conservation on the one hand, and publications on the other, at least from a nancial point of view: almost all of their research budget went to publishing ethnographies, initially those of ethnologists known to them working in the colonies, and then to their students. To subsidize missions denqutes for their students, they appealed successfully to other sources, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Commission des Missions, the Musum, and the Caisse de recherches scientiques (later CNRS). Yet even as they turned to these traditional forms of establishing academic legitimacy, Mauss and Rivet also took seriously Finots project of founding museums overseas, in tandem with their revamping of the MET. Rivet was particularly active in the domain and was probably responsible with Finot for persuading the governor general of Indochina to begin planningat least on paperan ethnographic museum in Hanoi in 1929.33 He met with Governor General Pierre Pasquier during the Colonial Exposition in 1931 and reminded him in a subsequent letter summarizing their conversation that:
Nous nous sommes trouvs entirement daccord sur la ncessit urgente de recueillir lethnographie et le folklore dIndochine avant quils ne disparaissent, cette destruction saccomplissant avec une rapidit effrayante. Je vous ai dit que lIE qui compte cette anne 117 lves dont un bon nombre se destine aux tudes asiatiques, serait en mesure de vous fournir dici un an les enquteurs ncessaires.34

Rivet traveled to Indochina later for the rst time that same year to preside over the rst meeting of the Prhistoriens de lExtrme Orient. He used the opportunity to conduct a four-month-long ethnographic mission and came back completely seduced by the country he had discovered and the eldwork he had done. In 1932 Pasquier signed a decree creating the Hanoi ethnographic museum, which was placed under the authority of the EFEO. Meanwhile Rivet devoted his course the next year at the Institute to the Moi and Muong peoples; he also set to work creating a gallery devoted to the ethnography of Indochina at the MET.35 In addition to lobbying the authorities in Indochina, Rivet wrote to the governors general of West Africa and Madagascar (whose subsidies to the IE were second and third largest respectively, 35,000 francs and 20,000 francs) about sending students there as well to found a properly scientic ethnographic museum in each colony.36 Mauss did his part too. He bestirred himself in 1930 to visit Morocco. There one of his best students, Charles Le Coeur (a graduate of the cole Normale Suprieure as well as of the IE and the EPHE) had been appointed matre de confrences at the cole des Hautes tudes Marocaines in Rabat, to y faire cours et pour donner M. le Rsident Gnral des avis sur les services ethnographiques du Maroc.37 Once again, it was Rivet who would follow up with a museum initiative there

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as well; in 1931 he instructed his subordinate, Georges-Henri Rivire, to send museographical instructions to Lucien Cochain, yet another former IE student who was intent on founding a museum at Rabat.38 By 1939, when French ethnologists were invited to introduce themselves through a display of posters at the Worlds Fair in New York, a key collaborator at the Muse, MH and IE student Anatole Lewitsky, drew up a diagram of the institutional organization of French anthropology. The IE and the MH gured at the center, with no fewer than 21 centres dtudes ethnologiques in the empire listed under them, with whom Rivet was in regular contact.39 The impulse to found properly scientic ethnographic museums and institutes in the colonies further conrms the professionalizing ambition of interwar ethnology, at least as it was emanating from the metropole. One goal of the IE and Troca and their emerging colonial satellites seemed to be to get as many people as possible with either colonial connections or curiosity about other cultures to learn proper collecting and documenting strategies in the empire before it was too late. At the same time, these combined institutions gave the most gifted students an outlet for publishing and the opportunity to pursue higher degrees that would allow them to enter academiaor, more realistically, given the absence of teaching positions in the eld, to take on museum directorships, especially as they now began to open up in the colonies. There was little in the Institutes curriculum, certainly, that addressed how a budding ethnologist might advise a colonial administration seeking to oversee rationally a process of modernizationor encourage students to think in terms of colonial careers; those courses, if they existed, were the preserve of the cole Coloniale, and presumably if one had any interest in colonial service, one would enroll there. Very quickly the heart of Institute teaching became Mausss Instructions dethnographie descriptive, which devoted little time to the impact of colonialism upon indigenous societies and cultures.40 That Mauss himself saw, and wished to preserve, the distinction between pure sciencethe province of ethnologistsand applied sciencethe province of administratorsis manifest in two different letters. In one, again to his student Charles Le Coeur, he referred to the possibility for Institute students of getting scholarships to carry out eldwork from the Institut International pour ltude des Langues et des Civilisations Africaines, whose specific mandate was to document the impact of European cultures upon African ones in these years. Il sagirait, Mauss wrote witheringly, de faire de lethnographie intensive, suivi de ce que lon appelle dans cet institut dit scientique et mi-moral et missionnaire, des conclusions pratiques. He nevertheless recommended Le Coeur to apply and publish his practical conclusions separately.41 More revealing still, in correspondence with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Mauss discussed a recent letter he had gotten from a Ms. Rosenfels of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. The letter asked him for names of French anthropologists who might be interested in a seminar being organized on racial and cultural contacts in all parts of the world. Mauss wrote to Radcliffe-Brown as follows:

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Veuillez trouver ici ma rponse Miss Rosenfels. Ses tudes sont en effet importantes et de toute urgence, et dun intrt capital pour lAdministration. Lenregistrement de ces faits est videmment un devoir pour nous qui permettra de mieux asseoir la politique prsente et lhistoire future. Cest dautre part un sujet o peuvent sexercer non seulement les indignes dresss par vous mais aussi ceux de nos jeunes ethnographes qui ne sont pas tout fait capables dun travail sociologique approfondi. Ne le leur dites pas, mais cest bien ce que je pense. La science comporte dailleurs des degrs et cest plutt les gnrations qui nous suivront qui seront jugs que nous.42

Un travail sociologique approfondi: this is what Mauss hoped for from the best and brightest of the ethnologists that he was forming, and apparently he did not feel that racial and cultural contact between European imperialists and local societies lent itself to this kind of in-depth analysis. This impression is confirmed in another exchange of letters, this time between Bernard Maupoil, a colonial administrator in AOF preparing a doctorate with Mauss in the 30s, and his mentor. Maupoil wrote that M. de Coppet [the Popular Front governor general in West Africa] mappelle Dakar pour faire un travail sur les coutumes. Je ne sais pas encore de quoi il sagit. Je vous tiendrai au courant de cette activit pseudo-ethnographique. Mauss replied, in a rather pessimistic vein, that it had taken the Dutch at least 30 years to compile a decent coutumier of 60 volumes, prepared by 200 years of bonne administration in Indonesia.43 In citing these passages, I do not want in any way to suggest that Mauss was contemptuous of colonial administrators or automatically relegated them to junior partners in the work of collecting and analyzing social facts. But there were denitely two levels of scientic competence recognized among the students who came to IE coursescompetence in collecting and describing objects and customs and competence for undertaking sociological analysis. Many colonial administrators acquired only the rst, simply by virtue of the lack of time available to them to do research. Throughout the interwar years Mauss and Rivet nevertheless remained tireless advocates of any studentwhether enrolled in the colonial service or notwhose work met their high academic standards. Over time, moreover, it may be that an increasing number of the best students were administrators, because the percentage of cole Coloniale students enrolled in Institute courses kept going up.44 In his capacity as director of the cole Coloniale, Georges Hardy in particular sought close ties between the two institutions. This was due in part, as I have argued elsewhere, to the fact that it now suited interwar colonial policymakers on the spot to think in terms of how to stabilize traditional societies, and they sought reinforcement from what the best science had to say on the subject.45 Mauss, Rivet and Lvy-Bruhl were sufciently open to Hardys overtures to make him a member of the Directors Council in 1930. Yet despite this increasing Colo presence, at no point does it appear that either Rivet or Mauss considered seriously what kinds of ethnographic knowledge might be most

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directly useful to colonial governanceor in the best interests of those subjected to French rule. They were, perhaps, too busy worrying about what was in the best professional interest of their edgling science. Was Rivets and Mausss attitude toward French colonialism largely an instrumentalist one, then, one in which they neither asked themselves the hard questions about the empire nor considered the future interests of the colonized, because to do so would have compromised the colonial monies and colonial sites so necessary for institutionalizing their new science? The answer is surely, on some level, yes. Yet it is important to remember that they belonged to a generation that still believed that the citizen/scientist could and should keep his or her research and political commitments separate. For Mauss, Rivet, and Lvy-Bruhl, the founding of ethnology fell under the rubric of the pursuit of pure science, which in turn required the distance from real life that only the ivory tower could provide. They thus created institutions and museums in the empire proper that echoed comparable scientic establishments at home and encouraged the kind of sociological research that would produce scholarly monographs for like-minded professionals. Practical conclusions also had their place, but the Institute was determined from the outset to produce more than local knowledge. Meanwhile an empire in quest of prestige had its own reasons in the interwar years for supporting an emergent academic science of manparticularly one that took traditional societies as its object of study. To insist on these points is not to deny French ethnologists complicity in colonialism. But it is to restore to view the historically specific colonial configuration of ethnology at its birth: that of an inside/outside science, with a far-ung network of contacts in the overseas territories and even the Colonial Ministry, yet rigorous research standards and an agenda that did not require (but could include) immediate and direct application of their ndings to overseas administration. Born at the margins of the academy and the empire, ethnology in the late 1930s was implicated in both but the handmaiden of neither.

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Notes
1. Jean Bazin, Interprter ou dcrire: Notes critiques sur la connaissance anthropologique, in Une cole pour les sciences sociales: De la VIe section lcole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, eds. Jacques Revel and Nathan Wachtel (Paris: Les ditions du Cerf/ditions de lEHESS, 1996), p. 415. I would also like to thank Emmanuelle Saada, Herrick Chapman, Gary Wilder, Dan Borus and Robb Westbrook for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The archives of the Collge de France are cited with permission. 2. Georges Balandier, La Situation Coloniale: Approche Thorique, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11 (1951): 44-79. 3. Recent works that theorize the relationship between anthropology and colonialism in new ways are Gary Wilder, Greater France Between the Wars: Negritude, Colonial Humanism, and the Imperial Nation-State (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999); Claude Blanckaert, ed., Les Politiques de lanthropologie, discours et pratiques en France (1860-1940) (Paris: LHarmattan, 2001); Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, eds., Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press, forthcoming); Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Benot de lEstoile, Lanthropologue face au monde moderne: Malinowski et la rationalisation de lanthropologie et de ladministration, Genses 17 (1998): 140-63. 4. Balandier acknowledged his intellectual debt to Mauss in La Situation Coloniale, noting that it was the latter who traced the way for his own theoretical conceptualization of la situation coloniale in its totality. According to Balandier, only an analysis that recognizes the inherent conicts and tensions of social relations under colonialism and takes into account colonizer and colonized permits cet approche concret et complet dj recommand par Marcel Mauss (p. 73). 5. Benot de lEstoile, Science de lhomme et domination rationnelle: Savoir ethnologique et politique indigne en Afrique coloniale franaise, Revue de synthse 34 (July-December 2000): 291-323. See also on this point Christophe Bonneuil, Des savants pour lEmpire (Paris: Orstom, 1991). 6. Vronique Dimier, Construction et enjeu dun discours colonial scientique sur ladministration coloniale compare (Thse de doctorat, Universit de Grenoble, 1999); Gary Wilder, Colonial Ethnology and Political Rationality in French West Africa (forthcoming, French Historical Studies). 7. The history of the organization of French anthropology in the twentieth century is just beginning to be written. My summary draws from my own research as well as from the following. On the history of ethnography: Emmanuelle Sibeud, La Construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878-1930 (Thse de doctorat, EHESS, 1999); Nlia Dias, Le Muse dethnographie du Trocadro (1878-1908): Anthropologie et musologie en France (Paris: ditions du CNRS, 1991); Filippo Zerilli, Il Lato oscuro dell etnologia (Rome: CISU, 1998); Elizabeth A. Williams, Anthropological Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, Isis 76 (1985): 331-48; Donald Bender, The Development of French Anthropology, The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 2 (1965): 135-54; Jean Jamin, Lhistoire de lethnologie est-elle une histoire comme les autres? Revue de Synthse 3-4 (1988): 469-83; Victor Karady, Le problme de la lgitimit dans lorganisation historique de lethnologie franaise, Revue franaise de sociologie 23, 1 (1982): 17-35; Victor Karady, Durkheim et les dbuts de lethnologie universitaire, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 74 (September 1988): 17-35; Claude Blanckaert, On the Origins of French Ethnology, in Bones,

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

Bodies and Behavior: Essays in Biological Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking (Chicago: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 18-55; Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994). On the history of physical anthropology: Claude Blanckaert, LAnthropologie personnifie: Paul Broca et la biologie du genre humain, preface to Mmoires danthropologie, by Paul Broca (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1989), pp. i-xiii and Mthode des moyennes et notion de srie sufsante en anthropologie physique, in Moyenne, milieu, centre: Histoires et usages, eds. Jacqueline Feldman, Grard Lagneau, and Benjamin Matalon (Paris: ditions de lEHESS, 1991), pp. 213-43; Joy Harvey, Races Specied, Evolution Transformed: The Social Context of Scientic Debates Originating in the Socit dAnthropologie de Paris (1859-1902) (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983); Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, Lanthropologie physique en France et ses origines institutionnelles, Gradhiva 6 (1989): 23-34; Michael Hammond, Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat in Late Nineteenth-Century France, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 118-32; Denise Frembach, Le Laboratoire danthropologie lcole pratique des hautes tudes (Laboratoire Broca) (Paris: [n.p.], 1980); William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Correspondance, Arnold Van Gennep Marcel Mauss, 5 March 1907; see also Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 355, n. 1. Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Marcel Mauss Ministre de lInstruction Publique, typescript, n.d. [1913], 2 pages, on p. 2. Marcel Mauss, Lethnographie en France et ltranger I, Revue de Paris (1913), p. 549. Marcel Mauss, Lethnographie en France et ltranger II, Revue de Paris (1913), pp. 820-21. Mauss, Lethnographie II, p. 821. Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Projet de cration dun Bureau ou Institut dethnologie, typescript, n.d. [1913], 7 pages, on p. 1. Archives du Muse MH (AMH), Correspondance Paul Rivet, Lucien Lvy-Bruhl Paul Rivet, 26 December 1925, La premire fois que je vous ai demand votre concours, si je me souviens bien ctait une rception Bd. St. Germain dans la maison des Amricains . Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet Marcel Mauss, 10 October 1913. On Rivets life and work, see, in addition to Zerilli, Il Lato oscuro, Christine Laurire, Paul Rivet, vie et oeuvre, Gradhiva 26 (1999): 109-28; and Jean Jamin, Le savant et le politique: Paul Rivet (1876-1958), Bulletins et Mmoires de la Socit dAnthropologie de Paris 1, 3-4 (1989): 277-94. Archives du Rectorat de Paris (ARP), Institut dethnologie, carton 26, Projet de cration lUniversit dInstitut dethnographie, Conseil de lUniversit de Paris, sance du 24 novembre 1924 and Institut dethnologie, Projet de Statut. ARP, Institut dethnologie, carton 26, Institut dethnologie, Modications au projet de rglement, Conseil de lUniversit de Paris, sance du 27 avril 1925; C. Gallois, Rapport sur le projet de rglement de lInstitut dethnologie, 18 May 1925; Dcret portant cration lUniversit de Paris dun Institut dethnologie, 1 August 1925. I am currently at work on the history of the transformation of the MET into the MH. Some aspects have been treated in the following works: James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Jean Jamin, LEthnographie mode demploi: De quelques rapports de lethnologie avec le malaise dans la civilisation, in Le Mal et la Douleur, eds. Jacques Hainard and Roland Kaehr (Neuchtel: Muse dethnographie, 1986), pp. 45-79; Jean Jamin, La

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20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

mission dethnographie Dakar-Djibouti 1931-1933, Cahiers Ethnologiques 5 (1984): 1-179; Jean Jamin, Le Muse dethnographie en 1930: lEthnologie comme science et comme politique, in La Musologie selon Georges-Henri Rivire: cours de musologie, textes et tmoinages (Paris: Dunod, 1989), pp. 110-21; Jean Jamin, Les objets ethnographiques sont-ils des choses perdues? in Temps perdu, temps retrouv, eds. Jacques Hainard and Roland Kaehr (Neuchtel: Muse dethnographie, 1985), pp. 51-74; James Herbert, Gods in the Machine at the Palais de Chaillot, Museum Anthropology 18, 2 (1994): 16-36; Elise Dubuc, Le futur antrieur du muse de lhomme, Gradhiva 24 (1998): 64-96; Nathalie Duparc, Muse de lHomme, Muse national des Arts Africains et Ocaniens, Muse Municipal dAngoulme: Trois partis pris musologiques diffrents (Mmoire de matrise, Universit de Paris, 1986). For published contemporary accounts of the transformation, Paul Rivet, Ethnologie, in La Science franaise (Paris: Larousse, 1933), pp. 2:5-12 and Lethnologie en France, Bulletin du Musum, 2e srie (January 1940): 38-52; Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri Rivire, La rorganisation du Muse dethnographie du Trocadro, Outremer (1930): 138-49; Paul Rivet, Paul Lester and Georges-Henri Rivire, Le laboratoire danthropologie du Musum, Nouvelles archives du Musum dhistoire naturelle 12 (1935): 507-31; and Paul Rivet, Ltude des civilisations matrielles: Ethnographie, archologie, histoire, Documents 3 (1929): 130-34. For a more detailed analysis of the colonial connections of the MET and MH, see Alice Conklin, Civil Society, Science, and Empire: The Foundation of Paris Museum of Man, Osiris 17 (2002): 255-90; and Benot de lEstoile, Des races non pas infrieures mais diffrentes: De lExposition Coloniale au Muse de lhomme, in Les politiques de lanthropologie, ed. Blanckaert, pp. 391-476. De lEstoile argues that the Colonial Exposition of 1931 represented a critical step in the subsequent institutionalization of ethnology at the Muse de lhomme in 1937. Certainly Rivet adopted many of the themes and display methods of the Exposition when setting up the Muse de lhomme, but the differences between the representations of colonial peoples in these two venues are as interesting as their similarities. AMH, 2 AM 1 A 2, Paul Rivet Maurice Foulon, Sous-secrtaire dtat au Travail, 24 October 1931, # 1905. Au moment o lExposition coloniale va fermer ses portes, il est indispensable quun organisme permanent dcent en continue luvre ducative, dautant plus que la plupart des collections qui y ont t runies vont nous tre transmises. The same argument is made in AMH, 2 AM 1 A 2, Paul Rivet M. le Snateur (sent to all senators), 5 December 1931, # 2210 bis. AMH, 2 AM 1 A 11, Paul Rivet douard Daladier, Prsident du Conseil, 5 May 1938, # 825. Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, LInstitut dethnologie de lUniversit de Paris, Revue dethnographie et des traditions populaires 23-24 (1925): 233-36. I have not yet found any of Lvy-Bruhls correspondence with either his students or colonial ofcials comparable to Mausss and Rivets, which would allow me to follow his subsequent involvement in the Institut dethnologie after its founding. ARP, Institut dethnologie, Carton 26, Annexe du dcret du 1er aut 1925, Rglement. The Conseil dadministration always included the following: the Recteur (Prsident), the deans of the four facults (Lettres, Sciences, Droit and Mdecine), one member each designated by the EPHE (Fifth section), the Collge de France, cole des Langues Orientales Vivantes, the Musum, the cole Coloniale, the cole Franaise dExtrme-Orient, the minister of public education, the colonial minister; each of the Governments General (Indochine, AOF, AEF, Madagascar), as well as the governor general of Algeria, and the resident general of Morocco, and the resident general of Tunisia designated a member as well. Finally, the colonial minister would designate two delegates to represent the other governments.

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27. ARP, Institut dethnologie, Carton 25, Sance du Conseil dadministration, 25 November 1925. 28. The typical subsidy was 10,000 francs or less; ARP, Institut dEthnololgie, Sance du Conseil dadministration, 27 May 1927. 29. Pierre Singaravlou, Lcole Franaise dExtrme-Orient, ou linstitution des marges (1898-1956): Essai dhistoire sociale et politique de la science coloniale (Paris: Harmattan, 1999), p. 76. 30. Lvy-Bruhl asked Finot to join the Conseil dadministration in November 1925, and he became a member of the Conseil de direction in 1926. Camille Guy also joined the latter in 1926, when Delafosse died. 31. Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Louis Finot Marcel Mauss, 3 February 1925. 32. Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Louis Finot Marcel Mauss, 14 October 1925. 33. AMH, 2 AM 1 D 14/f, arrt crant un muse dethnographie en Indochine, Vu larrt du 8.7.29 instituant une commission charge dtablir un muse dhistoire naturelle et dethnographie . 34. AMH, Correspondance Paul Rivet, Paul Rivet Pierre Pasquier, 23 March 1931. 35. AMH, 2 AM 1 A 3, Paul Rivet Gouverneur Gnral de lIndochine, 24 May 1932, # 1074. 36. AMH, 2 AM 1 A 1, Paul Rivet Gouverneur Gnral de lAOF, 30 June 1930, # 1006; Paul Rivet Gouverneur Gnral de Madagascar, 18 July 1932, # 1554. 37. Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Correspondance, Marcel Mauss Prsident (EPHE), 27 March 1931. 38. AMH, 2 AM 1 A 3, Georges-Henri Rivire Lucien Cochain, 26 May 1932, # 1100. 39. AMH, 2 AP 5 D, Papiers Anatole Lewitsky, Activit du Muse MH. The names of the institutions were: LUniversit dAlger, le Muse de Bardo Alger, la Socit de Gographie dAlger et de lAfrique du Nord, la Socit Historique Algrienne, la Socit dHistoire Naturelle de lAfrique du Nord, Institut Scientique Chrien au Maroc, lInstitut des Hautes tudes Marocaines, lInstitut dtudes Sahariennes, lIFAN, la Socit dtudes Soudanaises, la Socit dtudes Camerounaises, la Socit des Recherches Congolaises Brazzaville, lAcadmie Malgache Tananarive, Madagascar, lInstitut Franais de Damas, Syrie, lInstitut Franais dIndianisme de Karikal, Indes, lInstitut Bouddhique de Pnom Penh, Indochine, lAssociation des Amis du Vieux Hu, Indochine, Section dEthnologie Lcole Franaise dExtrmeOrient, la Socit des tudes Ocaniennes Papeete, Tahiti, la Socit des tudes Melansiennes Nouma, Nouvelle Caldonie. 40. In 1926-27, Mauss taught 30 lessons in descriptive ethnography; while three lessons were taught in ethnography of Africa, by Camille Guy, and five in Instructions dAnthropologie by Paul Rivet. The following year, Mauss taught 50 lessons, while the number of lessons in other courses stayed the same. Archives du Rectorat, Institut dethnologie, Carton 26, rapports annuels for 1926 and 1927. Seventy pages of typed notes from Mausss course in 1929-1930 were taken by Y. Oddon and T. Rivire. See AMH, 2 AP 2 A, Yvonne Oddon/1a. 41. Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Correspondance, Marcel Mauss Charles Le Coeur, 9 July 1931. 42. Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Correspondance, Marcel Mauss Radcliffe-Brown, 2 January 1935. 43. Collge de France, Archives Marcel Mauss, Correspondance, Bernard Maupoil Marcel Mauss, 3 December 1936; Marcel Mauss Bernard Maupoil, 11 December 1936. Jespre que cela deviendra srieux. Dites-lui bien de ma part que pour rdiger un coutumier de la valeur de ladat du gouvernement nerlandais de lInde, il faudra 30 ans de travail et 60 vols .

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44. The number of students from the cole Coloniale among total students enrolled increased as follows: 1927-1928, two out of 67; 1928-1929, ten out of 89; 19291930, 32 out of 114; 1931-1932, 28 out of 145; 1933-1934, 61 out of 1959. ARP, Institut dethnologie, Carton 26, rapports annuels. 45. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).