BULAMAH, Rodrigo C. - Alfred Métraux. Between Ethnography and Applied Knowledge

Alfred Mtraux: Between Ethnography and Applied Knowledge
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

History
Alfred Mtraux: Between Ethnography and Applied
Knowledge
Rodrigo Bulamah
Subject: History of the Caribbean Online Publication Date: Jul 2017
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.452
Summary and Keywords
Alfred Mtraux was part of a prolific moment in which French sociology and ethnology
were enlarging their scientific scope and advancing toward new fields. Following the
colonial expansion of France, Mtraux participated in establishing ethnographic methods
for codifying social life, material culture, and artistic forms. Through his own
transatlantic voyages and personal exchanges, Mtraux left personal documents in
different parts of the world. Consequently, many are the archives that hold parts of his
personal collections, letters, and published or unpublished materials. In addition, because
of Mtrauxs own cosmopolitanism, studies on the ethnologists life and works can be
found in different languages. Mtraux meticulously collected artifacts and documents
from different cultures, and these items are now part of collections in museums in
Argentina, France, and the United States. The multiplicity of themes Mtraux dedicated
himself to during his life reveal logics and developments of his work, as well as the
importance of fieldwork to his making as an anthropologist, or a man of the field, as he
used to describe himself. His intense and long-term relationship with Haitian Vodou was
central in his career as it arose from his early interest in vanishing civilizations, religious
systems, and material culture, and defined his personal agenda for future research.
Keywords: Alfred Mtraux, cosmopolitanism, Atlantic world, Haitian Vodou, applied knowledge, ethics,
ethnographic collections, human rights, UNESCO
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The Making of an Ethnographer

On his first trip to Haiti, on the summer of 1941, the Swiss ethnologist Alfred Mtraux
observed a scene that marked him for the rest of his career. At Croix-des-Bouquets, north
of Port-au-Prince, he saw a pile of drums and ritual artifacts about to be burned in an
auto-da-f organized by a local priest. As the ethnologist described it, at the vertex of an
intense process of persecution known as the antisuperstition campaign, the offensive
against popular religious practices and beliefs awaken[ed his] desire to undertake the
study before it was too late.1 Even if Mtraux was to be proved wrong by internal logics
of Vodou and its connections to wide political systems, family and heritage dynamics, and
transnational displacements, what he witnessed in the years he worked in Haiti was a
process that left marks in Haitian cultural and religious landscapes. But Mtrauxs
interest in vanishing cultural artifacts and social phenomena, as well as his careful
attention to the theatrical dimensions of social life, were developed during his formative
years, spent divided between a stimulating intellectual scene in Paris and an important
museum in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Alfred Mtraux obtained his doctoral degree in June 1928 at the cole des Hautes tudes
in Paris, after having studied and graduated from major French institutions and after an
academic sojourns in Gothenburg. In Sweden, he studied with the zoologist and
archeologist Erland Nordenskild and had contact with important ethnographic material
from South America. He graduated with two dissertations, one about the material culture
of Tupi-Guarani groups,2 and the other, called a complementary dissertation in the
French educational system, on Tupinambas religion.3
By the time he obtained his doctoral degree, Mtraux was already a promising young
ethnologist, part of a prolific group of European intellectuals, writers, and artists.
Gathered around the Muse dthnologie du Trocadro and the Institut dEthnologie, they
shared not only a strong interest for exoticism and radical difference, greatly inspired by
the Surrealist movement and the possibilities of allying literary and artistic techniques to
scientific methods, but also common political views on ethics, social justice, and
emancipation. Museums then had the central role in the promotion of pedagogic
experience of difference to the wider public, training them as engaged and conscious
human beings. This was taking place at a particularly volatile time in Europe. Fascism
was gaining grounds and affecting peoples daily lives. Not surprisingly, museums
became important places for resistance in France, around notably figures such as Yvonne
Oddon, a friend and later collaborator of Mtraux. Along with Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet,
Georges Rivire, and Marcel Griaulle, in the interwar period they established the first
drafts of the field of French ethnology4 drawing inspiration from the sociological work of
mile Durkheim and his colleagues from the journal LAnne Sociologique.5
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It was Marcel Mauss, then director of the Institut of Ethnology, who suggested to Alfred
Mtraux that he analyze the unpublished travel accounts from 16th-century Brazil, for
instance, the writings of Andr Thevet, the French Franciscan priest who lived in the
Portuguese colony from 1556 to 1557. The Franciscans description contained eyewitness
accounts of an anthropophagic ritual and by carefully reading these fragmented and
diffuse sources, along with other materials, Mtraux was able to reconstruct the whole
Tupinamba cosmology and its civilization in a specific moment of its history. It was a lucid
exercise inspired directly by Mausss method of analysis through total social facts in
which travelers and missionaries descriptions were taken as ethnographic and historical
sources. In these sources, the anthropophagic ritual was considered as a revelation of a
societys ensemble and its articulations Mtraux was in fact one of the first scholars to
identify the philosophic dimension of Amerindian myths. He also emphasized the role of
shamans and prophets as important religious and political actors.6 But Paul Rivets
insistence on the fieldwork as an preuve de feu and Erland Nordenskilds attention to
cultural diffusion were equally influential on Mtrauxs training, views, and early
projects.
Following French colonial expansion, this was a time of new scientific explorations not
only by venturing to new terrains and distant places but also by inscribing cultures or
civilizations in a specific codified way that composed the ethnological science.7 Right after
his degree, Mtraux (followed by his wife, Eva Spiro Mtraux, and their eighteen-month-
old son, ric) moved to Mendoza, Argentina, a city where his father, a surgeon, had made
much of his career and acquired much prestige. Alfred Mtraux was born in Lausanne,
Switzerland, on November 5, 1902, of a mother with Russian origins and had lived part of
his childhood in the South American country. His long connection with Argentina, his
mastery of Spanish, the previous explorations of the region, and also his familiarity with
Nordenskilds work on the Gran Chaco and the Andean Highlands made him the most
certain choice to assume the position of director of the Instituto de Etnologa de la
Universidade Nacional de Tucumn, a project envisioned by the local industrial elite and
developed by Paul Rivet in 1928 after a four-month scientific mission in the country.8
At the Institute of Ethnology in Argentina, Mtraux was able not only to apply all his
ethnological knowledge acquired in Paris and Gothenburg, but he was also close to an
important and diversified cultural area he was already familiar with and that he would
take again as his field in the following six years.9 The institute was part of an institutional
network and ambitious collective project, associated directly with French ethnographic
missions, the creation of institutions abroad, and the formation of museum collections. As
the head of the Institute of Ethnology, Mtraux created and edited one journal, taught
courses, and established an ethnographic museum which granted him the possibility of
comparing objects and artistic forms from different times and places. But his intention
was not only a comparative and analytical one. Mtraux wanted to collect what was
vanishing. He would later admit, One of the greatest sorrows of my adult life was to have
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witnessed the agony of many of those small societies [] that in fact hold a profound
value and whose disappearance invariably represents a great loss.10
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Of Vanishing Sociocultural Artifacts

Staying in Paris was not an option for the young ethnologist. Paul Rivet wanted him to
fulfill a training abroad to become a true ethnographer, and Mtraux felt particularly
moved, sometimes in a strongly pessimistic way, by what he could learn being close to
societies that were going through rapid changes. At the Institute of Ethnology, in
Tucumn, Mtraux was able to develop a form of control over what was disappearing,
gathering materials and narratives but also denouncing in his publications the negative
effects of modernization.11 As a more triumphalist Paul Rivet would later explain, The
Institute has achieved an important contribution. It has promoted four big ethnographic
expeditions (). During those missions significant documents were assembled: three
native languages that were about to disappear were saved, rich collections were gathered
and Tucumn became an important center for ethnic research in South America. This
contribution was in fact part of the role Rivet and his group conceived to be the duty of
ethnographers in response to the rapid changes associated with colonialism. Colonial
questions had to be approached by the scientific spirit, and Argentina, which has also
indigenous problems will find in this kind of institution () the support for their
resolution.12
Mtraux was sure that in a couple of decades there would be only traces of these
important South American cultures, destined to disappear facing local conflicts, industrial
expansion, and urbanization. Civilizations such as the Chiriguano and the Chan, which
had survived the Inca expansion and the Spanish colonization, were now suffering from
an intense process of acculturation, losing their knowledge, material culture, and
language. The field researcher had the sacred and ethical duty to collect and inscribe
ethnographically those disappearing sociocultural products, including myths, oral
traditions, songs, objects, and artistic themes. In contrast to his early works, Mtrauxs
research and publications during his years in Argentina were densely based on
ethnographic fieldwork.
In his work tudes sur la civilization des indiens chiriguano, published in the first volume
of the Revista del Instituto de Etnologa de Tucumn, in 1930, the author was particularly
interested in pottery due to its malleability compared to other materials, which made it
open to ample possibilities for the inscription of forms, themes, and cultural information.13
A whole investigation was structured only by paying attention to the craft and diffusion of
drawings and forms foreseeing connections, exchanges, and movements among
populations of the Chaco and the Andes. The Chiriguano people would prove historical
connections with the Tupinamba from Brazilian coast that Mtraux studied previously.
The Tupinamba were known for their extensive migrations, even to the Chaco Plain, and
their search for the Land-without-evil, a place of affluence, eternal life, and victory in
war.14 Similar to his analysis of their material culture, Mtraux argued that through the
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analysis of their oral traditions, material and symbolic exchanges could be revealed and a
mythical landscape could serve as a map to deduce variations and historical changes.
Pottery was also a sign of how European influence was being received among the
Chiriguano, the Chan, and other groups of the region. For Mtraux, patterns, some of
them of pre-Colombian origins, were being forgotten or were losing their artistic value
due to a commodification process associated with the expansion of tourism in the
region.15 Women who dedicated themselves to these crafts had a particular role in
Chiriguano societies as keepers of tradition, while male mobility and absence were
particularly notable during Mtraux expeditions.16 But his attention was also directed to
the artistic process and aesthetic value of these objects. Mtraux employed language
such as good taste, elegant, artistic form, artistic traditions, and aesthetics to
describe objects and drawings that he collected and exhibited at the Tucumn museum. A
language quite different from his usual scientific and evolutionist vocabulary. It seemed,
as Villar and Bossert observe, closer to an idea of art similar to the one surrealist
movement defended, a movement in which Mtraux was an active participant.17
Analogous to the West African masks exhibited at the Trocadro Museum that inspired
Pablo Picassos Les demoiselles dAvignon, these objects and their production were
artistic expressions on their own and could be taken as revealing primeval stages of
human arts.18
After six years at the Institute of Ethnology, Mtraux felt the weight of distance from his
friends and from the flourishing Parisian environment. He was bored, isolated, and
thought himself destined to agonize in an outlaw existence as a franc-tireur of science,
as he would write to his friend and confidant, Yvonne Oddon.19 Apart from that, his
intentions to engage politically with the indigenous welfare in Argentina were frustrated,
as the country was at the time going through a nationalist climate oriented toward its
Hispanic past and silent about its Amerindian roots, as anthropologist Edgardo Krebs
reveals.20
Back to Paris in January 1934 for a short break, the ethnologist began looking for
something else to dedicate himself to, perhaps alongside his friend Georges Henri
Rivire, coordinating museum exhibitions as they once did; teaching at the cole Pratique
des Hautes tudes; or participating in scientific expeditions to Africa, Asia, or French
Guiana. Again, the relentless and pragmatic Paul Rivet took the initiative and invited
Mtraux to take part in a Belgian-French ethnographic mission to Easter Island.
According to Christine Laurire, Mtraux was only thirty-two years old when he
represented France on such an important mission, and it seems that Rivet convinced him
to be the ethnographer and linguist of that enterprise by promising him an ethnographic
mission in one of the French African colonies or a position in Paris. Although Mtraux
showed clear evidence of his hesitations, the enterprise to the Pacific Island was
definitely a way for him to earn scientific prestige among his colleagues in France and
who better than himself, already familiar with South American contexts and its
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bureaucratic puzzles to co-direct this odyssey. In July 1934, aboard of the colonial vessel
Rigault de Genouilly, Mtraux started the journey to his new field.21
The Nostalgic Traveler

Easter Island became an obscure object of desire to many scientists, collectors, and
travelers due to its mysterious monolithic stone statues, the moai, and to its writing
system inscribed in wood boards, known as rongorongo, so complex and rich that they
raised important controversies among archeologists, orientalists, linguists, and
philologists. On the foreword of the first edition of his book Lle de Pques, Alfred
Mtraux reveals that he had an interest in the islands mysteries from an early age,
thanks to stories about this legendary island full of gigantic statues by his fathers cabinet
of curiosities, which included Easter Island axes and vegetable tissues.22
The decade of the 1930s was a heroic time for French ethnology, finding new terrains and
expanding scientific methodologies. Durkheims sociological theories and those of his
colleagues gained important recognition but compared to other imperialist nations,
ethnographic missions were still not at the center of French ethnological enterprise. The
Ethnographic and Linguistic Mission Dakar-Djibouti was a turning point. Museums and
the Colonial Ministry were at the center of this project. For the first time in history of
France, the Dakar-Djibouti Mission found official and financial support from the
Parliament through a law passed on March 31, 1931. Popular support was no less
considerable, and followed the excitement around the Paris Colonial Exhibition in that
same year. After the success of the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, other expeditions were
organized and the Easter Island mission was one among them.23
At the end of July 1934, Mtraux and Henry Lavachery, his Belgian colleague with whom
he developed a close friendship, reached the shores of Easter Island on a windy and rainy
winter day. The rural landscape, the twisted reefs, the sharp ridges and needles that
received the force of the sea reminded the ethnologist of Sweden, if it were not for the
strange, forbidding, diabolical rocks of the foreground. The missions chief purpose was
an investigation about the islands past and the group was promptly introduced to two
important figures: Victoria Rapahango, who was perhaps the last person who
perpetuates on Easter Island the traditions of nobility and culture of the old Polynesian
aristocracy and who mediated their relations with the village of Hanga-roa, checked
Mtrauxs notes, and helped him with the reconstruction of ancient techniques; and Juan
Tepano, a local sculptor and wise man, who looked and had the character of certain old
Parisian artists, in Mtrauxs first impression. Tepano was in fact an authority in
ethnographic matters [whose reputation] had spread as far as Chile and due to his
knowledge, he was living history. His mother, Viriamo, was born in the time of the
kings. She was not able to speak, but her tattooed legs revealed an ancient custom of
the island, somewhat connected to Polynesia. Viriamo was already born when the first
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missionaries arrived in 1864 and it was to her that Tepano owed his knowledge, as he
declared to Mtraux and Lavachery.24
While Lavachery was focused on describing and measuring ruins, burial sites, and
petroglyphs, and Israel Drapkina Chilean physician who was also part of the group
treated the locals, analyzed their blood, and gathered demographic and physical
information, Mtraux was collecting stories and analyzing archeological findings. As he
would state, unlike other scientists who dedicated themselves to the mysteries of that
place, he was attracted by these few hundred Polynesians who have survived so many
disasters and continue to speak their ancient language and hand down the legends and
stories of their distant ancestors. Easter Island had some similarities with the Gran
Chaco. The island was in state of decay and Mtraux did not ignore that. I was not
unaware(), he declared, of their ignorance of the old religion and past customs. Like
the old Viriamo that Mtraux and Lavachery encountered, the island was a body without
a soul.25
But Mtraux hoped that he would at least experience a faint murmur of rare techniques
and traditions from old times which would give [him] fresh insight into the mysteries of
the island. Again, the ethnographer felt impelled to carefully collect legends, stories, and
objects, in an effort to fulfill the difficult imperative of ethnographic rescue, to use
Laurires formulation, and to observe practices and customs in order to confront and
discuss theories about a civilization whose past was of great fascination, as statutes and
graphic boards could materially testify. The expedition lasted for five months and resulted
in a work of historical ethnography. Collections of objects were sent to the Trocadro
Ethnographic Museum and to the Royal Museum of Art and History, in Belgium.26
In January 2, 1935, Mtraux and Lavachery boarded the Belgian training ship Mercator
and sailed toward Polynesia. For a couple of months they explored these Southern seas
until they reached the seaport of Honolulu. There Mtraux was received by a group from
the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, where he found an opportune academic environment to
discuss and scrutinize his research materials and formulate his own analysis and critiques
of other theories, sometimes even in disagreement with his professor, Paul Rivet.27 He had
the support of Rivet, who was very satisfied with the quantity of objects and quality of
information Mtraux had gathered, and for the exhibition he would organize at the
Trocadro Museum. In January 1936, Mtraux assumed the position of ethnologist in
charge at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. It was far from the promised position in Paris
and the proximity to the Trocadro group or from an expedition in some French colony in
Africa toward which Mtraux would feel constantly inclined, but his coming of
professional age in Hawaii was the start of a journey to the North American academic
scene.
By dedicating himself to reading about Polynesia and to publishing his analysis against
established interpretations that he considered erroneous, mystifying, and lacking
attention to archeological and ethnographic data, Mtraux soon became a recognized
specialist of Easter Island. During this time, he maintained intense correspondence with
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important anthropologists such as Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber, and worked together
with Peter Buck (a.k.a. Te Rangi Hiroa) and Kenneth Emory, both specialists of Polynesia,
who collaborated with comparative materials to support Mtrauxs thesis. Many of his
articles were published in English, and his first extensive work dedicated to the island
was published in English at the Bishop Museum Bulletin.28 He was in search of prestige
and recognition both among his Anglophone peers and his French colleagues. Sometime
later, in 1941, came a more literary version of his research in French, as Lle de Pques,
his second book in Vincent Debaenes sense.29
Destined to Insular Mysteries

Mtraux left Europe with clear intentions of finding a place in the United States. A
certain degree of frustration with not being chosen for a position in Paris nor a mission to
Africa, as well as some divergences with Rivet, may have motivated his desire to seek
refuge abroad. But he also had a deep interest in North American approaches to
ethnography. As he told Michel Leiris, in 1936, Ive finally found a mother-land. I love
this country, as you would love it yourself.30 Mtraux had applied to become an US
citizen in 1936, and in 1941, he was granted it. He assumed a double nationality from
thence onward.
From 1938 on, Mtraux taught and was enrolled in different places such as Berkeley,
Yale, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1941, he was hired as assistant editor at the
Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. There Mtraux had a
prolific time and contributed more than anyone else to the monumental Handbook of
South American Indians. This encyclopedic work had the support of the U.S. Department
of State and was organized by the anthropologist Julian Steward. Its first volume was
published in 1946, making public an enormous amount of data from different South
American groups systematized around geographic and cultural areas or general themes,
divided into common subjects such as geography, environment, history, mythology,
material culture, psychology, and social organization. Mtrauxs contribution ranged from
the Chaco populations and Amerindian groups to more general and comparative articles
in sections sometimes co-authored with anthropologists such as Herbert Baldus and Curt
Nimuendaj. Commenting on the six volumes of the Handbook, anthropologist Paul Radin
argued that here, for the first time, in any language, can one obtain a broad aperu of
cultures that, for all but the specialist, hitherto represented a terra icognita.31
Mtrauxs previous work and continuous interest in South American populations earned
him an important role on the edited volumes. Expressing his gratitude to Alfred Mtraux,
Steward commented soberly that both Mtrauxs unsurpassed knowledge of South
American ethnology and great generosity were crucial to the completion of the work.32
But, as Priscila Faulhaber remarks, while Mtraux spent his first two years as assistant
editor to later become assistant director at the Smithsonian Institution, Julian Stewards
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excess of care about his career and his will to be in control of the whole editing process,
being the only editor of the six volumes, ended up wearing out their relationship.33
His time at the Smithsonian Institution was crucial for his adjustment to this new
academic environment, but also to finding new fields. During the interwar period, the
United States became the destiny for many Europeans seeking refuge. As Claude Lvi-
Strauss would later remember, Mtraux was in part responsible for finding him a position
in New York, showing remarkable care for that an occasion would be offered him to
escape the occupant.34 In 1941, young Lvi-Strauss was forced to flee a Paris occupied
by the Nazis and under Vichy rule. In New York, the Franco-Belgian ethnologist lived a
fruitful intellectual period during which he placed aside his early political engagements,
encountered important American anthropologists, and advanced his work on elementary
structures of kinship while reading and building on network theories, Russian linguistics,
and mathematics.35 Unlike his friend, Mtraux had already abandoned the aspiration of
returning to France. He was engaged in intellectual projects and was developing affective
ties on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1941, then based at Yales Institute of
Human Relations, Mtraux married his second wife, Rhoda Bubendey, an anthropologist
from the same institution and a student of Bronislaw Malinowski. In the summer of the
same year, the couple traveled to Haiti, a place they would soon return and to which they
would dedicate important part of their professional and personal lives.
In 1941 and in 1944, Alfred Mtraux visited Haiti for short periods of time. These
journeys were quite fruitful, and Mtraux felt motivated to actually pursue an
engagement that would combine ethnographic work with the promotion of social
progress. It was also a form of taking forward his desire to work among black populations
and doing a black ethnography (ethnographie noire), something he desired since his
early travels to Africa, always sparse and casual.36 This interest in Africa and the black
Americas (Les Amriques noires) and its heterogeneous cultures and histories motivated
and excited him. Most importantly, it connected him with ancient friends such as Michel
Leiris and Georges Bataille.37 Since his first trip to Haiti, even though a honeymoon,
Mtraux did not want to have a simple touristic experience. He received advice on what
to look for to have an authentic experience from Melville J. Herskovits, the important
American anthropologist, author of Life in a Haitian Valley (1937).38 The couple arrived in
a particular moment when Haiti was under the government of lie Lescot. It was the
apogee of the antisuperstition campaign, a series of missions directed by the Catholic
Church promoting violent raids, pyres, persecutions, and symbolic violence against family
or collective temples and sanctuaries, known as ounf. The antisuperstition campaign had
some support from state authorities, foreign clergy, police forces, and local political
chiefs. These missions ended up codifying popular practices and cosmologies under the
label of superstition at the same time that it recognized and reinforced their power,
creating an enormous impact on Haitian popular culture, spiritual practices, and political
landscape.39
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The huge pyramid of drums and superstitious objects Mtraux saw behind a
presbytery in Croix-de-Bouquet, near Port-au-Prince, was an example of the performative
violence promoted by the antisuperstition campaign. By witnessing this process, Mtraux
felt compelled to start an effort to salvage some of these objects at the same time that it
awaken[ed] [his] desire to undertake the study before it was too late. Mtraux was
sensitive not only to the destruction of objects due to their ethnographic importance but
also due to aesthetic reasons which might be explained by his earlier fascination for the
Surrealist movement and its intellectual and artistic possibilities.40 The same feeling he
experienced during his ethnographic work at the Gran Chaco led him to a similar effort to
collect objects and ritual artifacts. Alfred and Rhoda Mtraux found a friend and
colleague in Jacques Roumain, a Haitian anthropologist who had studied in New York and
Paris, with both Mauss and Rivet, and who had returned to Haiti in 1941 after six years in
exile.41 Roumain accompanied the couple on a trip to le de la Tortue in Northern Haiti.
About him, Mtraux wrote: The Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, () was equally
convinced of the need to put on record the story of Voodoo which seemed so gravely
threatened. To this end, and out of our discussions, was born the idea of a Bureau of
Ethnology for Haiti.42
The Haitian Experience

From what we know, Mtraux did not return to Haiti before 1944. In the meantime,
Jacques Roumain had consolidated the Bureau dEthnologie as an educational center for
Haitian archeology and ethnology, combining Roumains attention to both universal
values and cultural particularisms. In November 1944, Mtraux returned to Haiti for one
month as associated director of the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Smithsonian
Institution in a mission of cultural cooperation sponsored by the U.S. Department of
State. It was a time in which the United States was developing its war effort and
expanding its foreign policy. Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson,
Geoffrey Gorer, Ruth Benedict, and Rhoda Mtraux were developing methodologies and
theoretical elaborations about the study of national character and engaging themselves in
applying anthropology to international relations.43 Alfred Mtraux himself participated in
1945, a bit before the armistice, at a military division coordinated by the United States in
which a group of sociologists and psychologists went to Germany to study the social and
psychological effects of city bombings.44
Alfred Mtraux went back to Haiti with the objective of consolidating his connections
with the Bureau of Ethnology. He pursued his effort to collect and stimulate the collection
of artifacts at the same time that he looked for documents on Haitian culture that could
be published in scientific journals in English or French. By that time, Jacques Roumain
had already passed away, but Mtraux found the Bureau of Ethnology flourishing and
developing interesting studies about society and culture. The antisuperstition campaign
had lost its force due to political changes, popular resistance, and, as Kate Ramsey
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argues, cultural rearrangements around the notion of Haitian folklore.45 At the Bureau,
Alfred Mtraux also met Odette Mennesson-Rigaud, a Frenchwoman who was married to
the Haitian intellectual and artist Milo Rigaud. Although not anthropologist by profession,
she cultivated an interest toward Vodou and had a strong familiarity with popular classes
and with Haitian Creole.
As an equivalent to Victoria Rapahongo and Juan Tepano, Odette Mennesson-Rigaud was

to Mtraux an interlocutor who granted him the possibility of entering this other cultural
world by facilitating access to temples and by introducing him to important priests,
sacerdotal figures, and servers. As Mtraux stated, she had ample information about
subjects usually hidden from foreigners. By being able to read her notes, Mtraux urged
her to make a part available to science, and they selected the description of a ceremony
organized around the feeding of spirits, known as manje lwa, to be published as an article
in 1946. Alfred and Rhoda Mtraux themselves translated it, and Alfred wrote the
introduction. This foreword was the first essay of a research project that involved many
publications and in which he engaged himself for more than ten years until the
publication of his monograph Le Vaudou Hatien, in 1958.46
His was an effort to take Vodou as a scientific object, going against popular biased
accounts, such as those produced by foreigners during the U.S. occupation (19151934),
and having as model important contributions such as the works of Jean Price-Mars,
Melville Herskovits, and Jacques Roumain. During his sojourns in Haiti, Mtraux received
visits from friends and colleagues such as Michel Leiris, Yvonne Oddon, and Pierre
Verger, who together or individually ended up publishing something about their
experience.47 Besides, the companions that Mtraux found in Haiti made his work there
more fruitful and granted it an important collective dimension. As he would later admit to
his friend Georges Bataille, the Haitian experience () was the only gratifying one in all
its senses. It is possible that I would have better succeeded if my work was developed ()
in societies where I could have made friends and in which I would have been able to get
out of myself. In Haiti, I did not feel bored as I was able to speak and react in equality.48
Not surprisingly Mtraux dedicated his book to Mennesson-Rigaud and to Lorgina
Delorge, a Vodou priestess (mambo) from the popular quartier of La Salines, in Port-au-
Prince, a place where Mtraux became a habitu and was considered a child of the
house or pitit kay.49
Vodou acquired in Mtrauxs work a clear distinction from common-sense assumptions

and was viewed as a religious system operating through the combination of daily
practices; possessions; rituals; spiritual and ancestor agency; and the circulation of
objects, food, and gifts. Mtraux also argued against certain views that would stress the
African heritage and the quest for origins in New World religions. Vodou was a syncretic
phenomenon born fairly recently from a fusion of many different elements. And it is
the dynamic aspect of Voodoo always evolving before our eyes which is more to our
purpose than the rich material it affords to the erudite, possessed by a craving for the
search for origins.50 One should not only look for Africa in Haiti, but [to] our own
classical heritage.51 The difference between a Haitian houmf [Vodou temple], he
Page 12 of 30


stated, and a country temple in ancient Greece is not great.52 His point of view was not
distant from the universalistic arguments that the Haitian ethnologist and diplomat Jean
Price-Mars made in his important book about the making of Haitian culture.53 Crucial to
this initiative were the dialogues he had and observations he made among peasants and
other social groups he encountered in Port-au-Prince and in the South, around the city of
Jacmel, in the Marbial Valley. This was possible due to the new functions Alfred Mtraux
assumed as senior social officer at the Department of Social Affairs of the United Nations,
in New York, in 1947, and later at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization.
Page 13 of 30


At the Crossroad: Between Ethnography and

Applied Knowledge
It was one year after the creation of UNESCO that, aware of the educational and peace
building work that the institution was planning to promote around the globe after the
huge impact of World War II, the Haitian government proposed to participate in a pilot
project aiming at the development of literacy and education. Approved at the Second
Session of UNESCO General Conference, in 1947, the project would be developed in a
locality in the South of the country, not far from the town of Jacmel, indicated by the
Haitian government and financed by the Viking Fund of New York, UNESCO, and the
Haitian state.54 It was a project in which social expertise could be combined with
ethnographic knowledge and methods in a form of applied anthropology aiming toward
medium- and long-term goals. It was not only the case of studying a civilization or a
religion suffering an intense process of acculturation in which objects should be gathered
and exposed in museums and myths and practices should be registered through
ethnographic writing. Mtraux showed great excitement about the possibility of
combining knowledge with practical action as an applied anthropologist, and he reflected
about it on many occasions through articles published in scientific journals, but also in
magazines of wider circulation.55
With the intention of forming and training a group in field research and data analysis, in
1948 the couple gathered a group of young people, such as the agronomist douard
Berrouet; doctors; and social scientists, some of them with some background in
anthropology, as for instance, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, who studied in London with
Bronislaw Malinowski, and Rmy Bastien who was a student at the Universidad de
Mxico. Together they conducted surveys on villages around the Marbial Valley, exploring
food exchanges, agricultural knowledge and practices, economics, hygiene and medical
practices, kinship relations, all along paying attention to social dynamics and
psychological and mental structures that would help on the effective success of the pilot
project. The idea was to reinforce local education, build schools and community centers,
cooperatives of production, dispensaries, and a center of art and education. Later the
project expanded its goals, engaging with health and agricultural problems finding
support from the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization.
From the collective research resulted many articles on peasants education, family and
households, funeral rites, religion, and the report co-authored by Alfred Mtraux, Jean
and Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain and douard Berrouet, Making a Living in the Marbial
Valley (or Lhomme et la terre dans la Valle de Marbial), both in English and French
published by UNESCO in 1951, along with Rhoda Mtrauxs doctoral dissertation Kith
and Kin: A Study of Crole Social Structure in Marbial, Haiti (1951) and Rmy Bastiens
dissertation La famlia rural haitiana (1951). Also, a book on Haitian Creole grammar and
Page 14 of 30


linguistic was published in 1953 by Robert Hall, professor at Cornell University, in

collaboration with Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, H. Ormonde McCornell, and Mtraux.
The project ended up not achieving its main goals. Alfred Mtraux coordinated it until
August 1949, returning to Haiti in early 1950 due to problems the new director in charge
of the project in the field was facing. In general the whole enterprise was subject to
excessive bureaucratic demands, funding interruptions, local political and religious
conflicts, and the support from the Haitian government who started to aim its attention
toward the Exposition international du bicentenaire. Mtraux became aware of the
limited role anthropologists could fulfill by occupying a position of authority in such
projects. Although control of the project and ethnographic research were, for him,
utterly incompatible, he had not lost his confidence in the importance of social
scientists, particularly anthropologists, for giving technical assistance on programs
contributing to human progress and emancipation such as those the United Natoins and
other institutions were fomenting at that time.56 His next work at UNESCO was exactly
the opportunity to be more directly engaged in these efforts as a social scientist. In April
1, 1950, he moved to Paris to become responsible for UNESCOs Division for the Study of
Race Problems, replacing the Brazilian scholar Arthur Ramos, who died a year before
unexpectedly. Mtraux was already divorced from Rhoda Mtraux, with whom he had his
second child, Daniel.
Before 1950, Mtraux had previously visited Brazil on numerous occasions and had
shown great interest in the work of Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre as early as
1940.57 From 1950 on, Mtraux published numerous articles at the The UNESCO Courier,
the institutions newspaper, in which he questioned and analyzed Brazilian colonial
history and contemporary society. At that time, Brazil occupied an important place among
modern nations due to the particularities of Portuguese colonization and the many African
traditions that have forged the national character in a society preserved from the bitter
fruits of racial discrimination.58 It was a clear passage from the problem of African
heritage in the New World, in which Haiti played a central role, to the problem of racial
relations. The contemporary Brazilian situation was compared to those of the United
States and South Africa and pointed toward a possible racial harmony in which apartheid
and segregation laws did not exist. Nevertheless, following his scientific endeavor,
Mtraux argued for the need of ethnographic research to determine what constituted this
social harmony and its connections to socioeconomic features. He then participated in a
large-scale survey together with Brazilian and foreigner researchers, such as Roger
Bastide, Charles Wagley, Marvin Harris, Thales de Azevedo, Florestan Fernandes, Luiz
Aguiar de Costa Pinto, Ren Ribeiro, and Oracy Nogueira. They surveyed five areas
considered fundamental to the understanding of racial relations in the country:
Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo, and the inlands areas of the northeast.59
The research in Brazil did not confirm the expectation that the country could serve as an
example of a harmonic society. Instead, the research as a whole revealed that in Brazil,
with its many regional particularities, racism was structural and had particular
connections with class divisions despite the apparent cooperation between races.
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Nevertheless, while this conclusion was being formulated, and even after that, UNESCO
never stopped aiming for the protection of human rights on a global scale, particularly for
ethnic and racial minorities, something that changed for good the global perspective on
human difference and social divisions.60 Racism was perceived as a threat to peace and
World War II stood as a strong example and a clear memory of how wrongful
understanding of otherness could lead to tragedy. UNESCOs goal was to educate and
build a global conscience against misleading biological theories about human differences.
With this in mind, the transnational institution promoted the publication and diffusion of
numerous pamphlets, including its own newspaper, the Courier, based on scientific
research on society, history, biology, and human differences.61 In 1952, as part of this
project, Claude Lvi-Strauss wrote a piece on race and history that caused an important
impact. He argued that human civilization was a whole, forged through the coexisting of
cultures in which diversity should be a value and depend[ed] less on isolation of the
various groups than on the relations between them.62 Mtraux had a similar view of
culture. Rather than an isolated collection of elements, it was a dynamic process of
intense interrelation.63
The Tragic Sentiment of Our Insularity

All through the 1950s, Mtraux deepened his engagements with human rights. He put
special emphasis on the emancipatory capacity of science. At the same time, he never
stopped writing about his fieldwork experiences and kept visiting and exploring other
countries. A proof of Mtrauxs intellectual coherence was how he continued to address
his previous research in various forms of publications, and in English, French, and
Spanish. When U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy rose to prominence on the Senate
Committee on Government Operations, the United States became for him an unpleasant
place. As he would ask his friend Pierre Verger, What is the witch hunt in Africa if
compared to the persecution of the most sympathetic people in the United States in the
name of a political and moral conformism whose description could make us throw up
[?]64 He kept revisiting his past fields, revealing an ample agenda of work organized
around common themes and questions that were constantly reframed around new
comparative materials that he gathered along his travels. He shared a sort of
ethnophilia, defined by Jean-Philippe Belleau as this ethical and affective dimension of
oneself, not necessarily toward a specific ethnic group but for what he considered
vanishing civilizations.65
He became professor at the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes in 1959, training and
sending to the field in South America ethnographers such as Lucien Sebag and Pierre
Clastres. Science was for him a way of inquiring reality (or multiple realities) both as a
political and poetic craft. In a way, his early works as an ethnologist were not that distant
from his later engagements and productions as a sociologist. He never abandoned his
visions about the universal principles of humanity, rooted in a strong cosmopolitan
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perspective, while remaining attentive to the cultural diversity of each culture, its history
and its people. Mtraux combined an empirical standpoint with a great attention to
ethical values. He was, as he used to describe himself, a man of the field.
If Mtraux thought himself destined to the study of insular mysteries,66 from Easter
Island to Haiti and beyond, the facts of political conflict and intense processes of social
change and modernization made him assume a pessimistic regard toward the world and
also to his own work. As Roger Bastide would put it, Mtraux lived the drama common to
every ethnologist and in a way to every human being: the tragic sentiment of our
insularity.67 Along with Michel Leiris and Claude Lvi-Strauss, Alfred Mtraux was part
of a group of Europeans who felt the impact of the war and who first witnessed the
effects of decolonization, bringing back to Europe news of the tragedies of the modernist
project, a neurotic or sacrificed generation, in the words of anthropologist Florent
Kohler.68 As Pierre Clastres once remembered, Mtraux used to talk about himself as
someone nostalgic of the Neolithic.69
Alfred Mtrauxs last piece was published in April 1963, bearing as title the question
Does Life End at Sixty?70 The article appeared in the UNESCO Courier and discussed the
ways different cultures deal with aging. An anguished final paragraph compares the
respected and active position of the elderly in traditional cultures to the comfort offered
by our communal homes for the aged.71 It was his farewell note. That same month, on
April 11, 1963, Mtraux killed himself at the Chevreuse Valley, not far from Paris. He took
a lethal amount of barbiturates and, as he did while watching his fathers death, carefully
described it by paying attention to the effects on his body and mind.72 His death can be
seen as a form of sacrifice, the afflictive passing of an ancestor who has left testimonies
and reflections about a troubling world, revealing the importance of peoples work and
public engagement as historians, philosophers, and social scientists.
Page 17 of 30


Discussion of the Literature

Alfred Mtraux refused to draw excessive theoretical conclusions in his works and ended
up not formulating a great theory that could join the anthropological canon. Although he
had developed some general ideas about culture in his work on Haitian Vodou and in
specific articles about applied anthropology, for him, ethnography was a central feature
in a relation of knowledge production, a theory built through observations and in a close
dialogue with interlocutors. As Lvi-Strauss remarked in his posthumous homage, for
Mtraux, ethnology [was] a human science in all its meanings (), which drawing from
traditional disciplines such as paleontography, archeology, philology, and history () was
able to constantly invigorate itself through fieldwork experience.73 Due to his multiple
fields and activities, it is hard to define Mtraux according to usual disciplinary
classificationsethnologist, sociologist, ethnohistorianor according to national
traditions. He was the product of a heroic moment of French ethnology, but was
influenced as well by the Swedish school of ethnology and later was part of a crucial
period in American anthropology. His fieldwork followed an unorthodox itinerary, making
it difficult to limit him to such classical labels Americanist, Polynesianist, Haitianist,
Brazilianist, or the like. Fact is that his works keep a constant influence according to its
specific area or geography, although hardly being taken as a whole.
His investigations among the Gran Chaco and Andean populations, as well as his work on
Easter Island, are of great value due to the his scientific interpretations on each of these
fields. Likewise, his writings on religion, migration, and ritual among the Tupinamba
pointed to the methodological possibility of combining ethnography among contemporary
Amerindian populations with the historical analysis of travelers and missionaries
accounts from earlier centuries. The importance he ascribed to shamans and prophets in
the Amerindian religious and political life inspired the works of French anthropologists
such as Helne and Pierre Clastres and were crucial to Claude Lvi-Strausss structural
analysis of classificatory systems and variants of myths in the Americas. In Brazil,
Mtrauxs work found fertile terrain and was engaged by sociologist and anthropologist
Florestan Fernandes, who focused his classical thesis on the social function of war among
the Tupinamba and the central role played by ancestry and the appropriation of enemies
names. These developments gave particular prominence to the field of Amerindian
historiography and ethnohistory, which inspired recent formulations about Amerindian
temporalities, personhood, and ontologies established by anthropologists such as
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Ndia Farage, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
His book on Haitian Vodou remains a classical reference to those working in Haiti and the
Caribbean. Owing to its ethnographic sensibility and its descriptions about peasants
lives, kinship, religion, and views of political changes, it is an important historical
document. It can also be quite inspiring thanks to its engagement with local notions and
conceptions such as that of knowledge (konesans), so central to the authors analysis.
Haitian Vodou proved its persistence as a dynamic process by, on the one hand, finding its
Page 18 of 30


way into a political struggle for recognition and identity in a public sphere dominated by
class, racial, and religious tensions. On the other hand, as anthropologists and historians
like Rachel Beauvoir, Karen M. Brown, Karen Richman, Elizabeth McAlister and Kate
Ramsey reveal, Vodou remains an important set of dynamic popular practices and spirits
actively participate in the material world by dwelling in specific places such as family
land, trees, water sources, and caves, and by manifesting agency in different forms of
exchange with those who are alive.
Recently, interest in Mtrauxs life and work has grown. From the publication of new
editions of his early writings, to the organization of meetings worldwide to debate works,
to the publication of articles exploring specific moments of his life and the personal
connections he made during his travels.74 His artifact collections, written documents, and
pictures are spread around the globe as part of the Smithsonian Institution collections, at
the Instituto de Etnologa of the University of Tucumn, and at the Muse du quai Branly-
Jacques Chirac, in Paris. Mtraux was an assiduous correspondent, keeping a constant
exchange with his friends and colleagues, and also a conspicuous writer, writing journals
and drawing important reflections on books and academic or non-academic magazines.
Thanks to this rich body of materials, new insights are being drawn and new possibilities
for research are being pointed out. Nevertheless, still lacking is research that would put
together his many sites and themes of work with his position as someone who tried to
institutionalize academic knowledge by establishing connections between central and
peripheral contexts, institution and field, science and public engagement. More
clarifications are needed to understand, for instance, the importance of his work on the
Incas (a work qualified by Levi-Strauss as being as remarkable as the one on Easter
Island); how his early readings of Neopolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico influenced
him; what his World War II experience meant for his later work; and how Paul Radins
Primitive Religion: Its Nature and Origin, which he translated to French, impacted his
work.75
Mtraux never ignored the importance of applied knowledge. Praxis, according to

Mtraux, was never exterior to the scientific endeavor. He and many of his friends and
colleagues, such as Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet, Yvonne Oddon, and Jacques Roumain,
considered research institutions as integral to educational projects, collections,
institutions, and political initiatives to promote social change and justice. In the
contemporary academic world, in which the neoliberal job market seems to be imposing
its rhythms and demands and it is no longer a problem to have anthropologists working in
corporations, to think of the moral role that social scientists share in seeking justice and
equality is to be in connection with an important part of humanitys intellectual, ethical,
and institutional historya history full of sacrifices and imperfections.
As variegated and unorthodox as Mtrauxs trajectory might seem, trying to see how his
displacements and the many people he interacted with influenced his work and how one
field illuminated the other and formed him as a researcher and officer will uncover new
perspectives about his life as well as reveal important facts about the multiple contexts in
Page 19 of 30


which he participated. At the same time, it will shed light on new possibilities for science
and applied knowledge in a world that demands ever more public engagement.
Primary Sources
Archives of Alfred Mtrauxs work can be found in many parts of the globe. Some of them
hold personal journals and research notes, while others preserve relevant
correspondence by or addressed to the ethnologist as well as artifacts and pictures he
collected during his travels. Some important materials can be found in the archives of the
Universidad Nacional de Tucumn and at the Smithsonian Institution. Other
correspondences, pictures, and artifacts from the length of his career are available at the
Collge de France, the Muse du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, and the Laboratoire
dAnthropologie Socialeall in Paris. The UNESCO Archives and the Archives of the
Bibliothque Centrale du Musum Nationale dHistoire Naturelle hold important sources
on his fieldwork in Haiti, on the pilot project on health and education, and on the
UNESCO project on racial relations in Brazil. At the Bibliothque Hatienne des Frres de
Saint Louis de Gonzague, in Port-au-Prince, there is good collection of his published
works on Haiti and Haitian Vodou. Mtraux himself sent them to the library.
Personal archives of his friends and colleagues also hold letters and documents that may
be useful for research about specific moments of his life, as for instance, Yvonne Oddons
collection at the General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale
University; the Michel Leiris Funds at the Bibliothque littraire Jacques Doucet; Pierre
Vergers records at Fundao Pierre Verger, in Salvador, Brazil; and the Melville J.
Herskovits Papers, at Northwestern University Library, for correspondences ranging from
1936 to 1941. Odette Mennesson-Rigauds archives were damaged by the January 12,
2010, earthquake in Port-au-Prince but are being reestablished. This collection might
hold crucial documents for understanding Mtrauxs exchanges with his interlocutors and
also the influence of Odette Mennesson-Rigauds notes and collections in Mtrauxs work.
Some of his letters and journals were compiled in different articles published in edited
volumes in his honor or in specific publications. The best collection of testimonials and
documents can be found in Prsence dAlfred Mtraux, ed. Dominique Lecoq (Paris:
AcphaleLes Amis de Georges Bataille, 1992). For the letters exchanged with Pierre
Verger, his twin brother and confidante, see Le pied ltrier: correspondances 1946
1963, ed. Jean-Pierre Le Bouler (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1994). For his early journals,
see Itinraires 1 (19351953) Carnets de notes et journaux de voyage, ed. Andr-Marcel
dAns (Paris: Payot, 1978). For some fragments and comments about his journals ranging
from 1953 to 1961 that were never published (for editorial reasons), see Andr-Marcel
dAns, Le contenu dItinraires 2 (19531961), in Prsence dAlfred Mtraux. A
complete bibliography of the author was gathered by Claude Tardits and later extended
at an edited volume organized by Claude Auroi and Alain Monnier followed by a list of
Page 20 of 30


published works dedicated to, or that engaged with, Alfred Mtraux.76 Finally, some of his
personal materials are still held by his family and other institutions and might be made
public in the future.
Links to Digital Materials

Unesco Archives: a complete collection of Mtraux publications at the The Unesco
Courier as well as other collections.
Calames, catalog of archives and manuscripts in French universities and libraries.
Rhoda Mtraux Papers, Library of the Congress, USA.
Alfred Mtraux voyages.
Further Reading
French Ethnology, Museums, and Ethnographic Missions
Clifford, James. On Ethnographic Surrealism. Comparative Studies in Society and

History 23.4 (October 1984): 539564.
Fabre, Daniel, and Claudie Voisenat, eds. Les Carnets de Brose, no. 17. Paris: Lahic/
Direction gnrale des patrimoines, 20132015.
Fournier, Marcel. Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
lEstoile, Benot de. From the Colonial Exhibition to the Museum of Man: An Alternative
Genealogy of French Anthropology. Social Anthropology 11.3 (2003): 341361.
Larson, Carolyn R.Our Indigenous Ancestors: Museum Anthropology and Nation-Making

in Argentina, 18621943. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.
Laurire, Christine. Paul Rivet, le savant et le politique. Paris: Publications Scientifiques

du Musum national dhistoire naturelle, 2008.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. French Sociology, In Twentieth Century Sociology. Edited by G.

Gurvitch and W. E. Moore, 503537. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1945.
Mauss, Marcel. Lethnographie en France et ltranger. In uvres, vol. 3. Paris:

ditions de Minuit, 1969.
Peixoto, Fernanda. A viagem como vocao. Itinerrios, parcerias e formas de

conhecimento. So Paulo: Editora da Universidade de So Paulo, 2015.
Page 21 of 30


Argentine, Amerindians, Easter Island, United States, and World War

II
Crdoba, Lorena, Frederico Bossert, and Nicolas Richard, eds. Capitalismo en las selvas:
Enclaves industriales en el Chaco y Amazona indgenas (18501950). San Pedro de
Atacama: Ediciones del Desierto, 2015.
Fischer, Steven R.Island at the End of the World: The Turbulent History of Easter Island.
London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
Goulard, Jean-Pierre, and Patrick Menget. Prsentation. In La religion des Tupinamba

et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus tupi-guarani. Edited by Alfred Mtraux, 123.
Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 2014.
Mtraux, Alfred. The Morale Division: An Ethnography of the Misery of War. Edited by
Edgardo Krebs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
Monnier, Alain. Nostalgie du Nolithique: de Lausanne Las Lomitas. Documents sur

Alfred Mtraux ethnologue. Geneva, Switzerland: Socit dEtudes Alfred Mtraux and
Labor et Fides, 2003.
Price, David. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBIs Surveillance of

Activist Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Villar, Diego. Culture matrielle et changement: Alfred Mtraux chez les Chiriguano.
Journal de la socit des amricanistes 102.2 (2016): 99119.
Haiti, Haitian Vodou, UNESCO, Brazil, and Racial Relations
Bulamah, Rodrigo C. Um lugar para os espritos: os sentidos do movimento os sentidos

do movimento desde um povoado haitiano. Cadernos Pagu 45 (2005): 79110.
Collins, John. Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian
Racial Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Cosentino, Donald J., ed. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum,
1995.
Dubois, Laurent. Thinking Haitian Independence in Haitian Vodou. In The Haitian

Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Edited by Julia Gaffield,
201218. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Duedhal, Poul, ed. A History of UNESCO: Global Actions and Impacts. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016.
Page 22 of 30


Goyat, Julia. Etnologia, arte e poltica: a experincia haitiana de Alfred Mtraux. PhD
diss., Department of Anthropology, Universidade de So Paulo, 2018.
Maio, Marcos C., and Ricardo V. Santos, eds. Raa, Cincia e Sociedade. Rio de Janeiro:
Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil e Editora Fiocruz, 1996.
Maurel, Chlo. Histoire de lUnesco. Les trente premires annes: 19451974. Paris:
LHarmattan, 2002.
Mintz, Sidney. Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations. Boston:
Harvard University Press, 2010.
Palmi, Stephan, ed. Africa of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of
Afro-Atlantic Religions. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008.
Richman, Karen. Migration and Vodou. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
Roumain, Jacques. uvres compltes. Edited by Lon-Franois Hoffmann. Madrid:

ALLCA XX, Collection Archivos, 2003.
Notes:
(1.) Alfred Mtraux, Le Vaudou Hatien (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 13. First published in
English as Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). Unless otherwise
indicated, all translations are the authors.
(2.) Alfred Mtraux, La civilisation matrielle des tribus Tup-Guaran (Paris: Librairie
Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1928).
(3.) Alfred Mtraux, La religion des Tupinamba et ses rapports avec celle des autres
tribus tupi-guarani (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014).
(4.) It is important to remark that the term ethnology, rather than anthropology, was
predominant in the early 20th-century French field of social sciences. Paul Rivet, who
advocated for the term, defined it as the science of man in its totality. On that matter,
see Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Place of Anthropology in the Social Sciences and the
Problem Raised in Teaching It, in Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. G.
Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), particularly, pp. 354359. For an analysis of these
definitions and how they changed in France due to different intellectual projects, see
Benot de lEstoile, Le gout des autres. De lExposition colonial aux Arts premiers (Paris:
Flammarion, 2007), 132134.
(5.) Christine Laurire, Paul Rivet, le savant et le politique (Paris: Publications

Scientifiques du Musum national dhistoire naturelle, 2008).
Page 23 of 30


(6.) On the impact of New World anthropophagic rituals accounts in France, see, for
instance, Michel de Montaigne, The Cannibals, and Etienne de la Botie, Discourse on
Voluntary Servitude, in Selected Essays with La Boties Discourse on Voluntary
Servitude, ed. Michel de Montaigne, trans. J. B. Atikinson and D. Sices (Indianapolis:
Hacket, 2012). See also Cristina Pompa, O profetismo tupi-guarani: a construo de um
objeto antropolgico, Revista de Indias 64.230 (2004): 141174.
(7.) Fernanda Peixoto, O nativo e o narrativo: os trpicos de Lvi-Strauss e a frica de

Michel Leiris, Novos Estudos Cebrap 33 (July 1992): 187198.
(8.) In a letter from 1928 to the Dean of the University of Tucumn, Rivet reveals that
another reason for indicating Mtraux to direct the Institute was the fact that it was
impossible for him to employ a Swiss due to legal restrictions in France. See Edgardo
Krebs, Jorges Luis Borges and Alfred Mtraux: Disagreements, Affinities, Hau: Journal
of Ethnographic Theory 6.2 (2016): 313. See also, Edgardo Krebs, Alfred Mtraux and
The Handbook of South American Indians: A View From Within, History of Anthropology
Newsletter 32.1 (June 2005): 5.
(9.) About his early experience of fieldwork while he was only twenty-one years old and
already a student of Marcel Mauss, see See Jean-Pierre Le Bouler, Alfred Mtraux en
1922: de lEcole des Chartes lAmrique du Sud, in Prsence dAlfred Mtraux, ed.
Dominique Lecoq (Paris: AcphaleLes Amis de Georges Bataille, 1992), 129139.
(10.) Alfred Mtraux and Fernande Bing. Entretiens avec Alfred Mtraux, LHomme 4.2
(1964): 23.
(11.) Diego Villar and Federico Bossert, La etnologa chiriguano de Alfred Mtraux,
Journal de la Socit des Amricanistes 93.1 (2007): 127166.
(12.) Paul Rivet, Linstitut dethnologie de lUniversit de Tucumn, Journal de la socit

des amricanistes 25.1 (1933): 188189.
(13.) About the ambitious project that was the Revista del Instituto de Etnologa de
Tucumn, see Krebs, Alfred Mtraux and The Handbook of South American Indians, 6.
(14.) Mtrauxs interest on Amerindians migration dates from before his theses defenses,
when he published the book Migrations historiques des Tupi-Guarani. Land-without-
evil (La terre sans mal) was the name of his intended autobiography. See Krebs, Jorge
Luis Borges and Alfred Mtraux, 306, n. 18.
(15.) Alfred Mtraux, Civilizacin material de los indios Uro-Chipaya de Carangas

(Bolivia), Revista del Instituto de Etnologa de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumn 3.1
(1935): 108.
(16.) Alfred Mtraux, La mujer en la vida social y religiosa de los indios chiriguano,
Revista del Instituto de Etnologa de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumn 3.1 (1935):
145166.
Page 24 of 30


(17.) Villar and Bossert, La etnologa chiriguano, 147148. See also Alfred Mtraux, La
mujer en la vida social, especially 148.
(18.) As Mtraux himself wrote, pottery opened ample horizons to other human activity:
art. Quoted in Villar and Bossert, La etnologa chiriguano, 153. Created in 1878, the
Muse dthnographie du Trocadro held an important collection of African artifacts,
paintings, sculptures, and ritual objects. Their exhibition caused a strong impact on
French metropolitan and colonial intellectual and artistic scenes. The Trocadros
collection would later be transferred to the Muse de lHomme, created in 1938, under
the auspices of Paul Rivet. See, for instance, Benot de lEstoile, From the Colonial
Exhibition to the Museum of Man: An Alternative Genealogy of French Anthropology,
Social Anthropology 11.3 (2003): 341361; and Christine Laurire, Lo bello y lo til, el
esteta y el etngrafo: El caso del Museo Etnogrfico de Trocadero y del Museo del
Hombre (19281940), Revista de Indias 72.254 (2012): 3566.
(19.) Letter from Alfred Mtraux to Yvonne Oddon, Tucumn, August 21, 1933, quoted in
Christine Laurire, LOdysse pascuane. Mission Mtraux-Lavachery, le de Pques (1934
1935) (Paris: Les Carnets de Brose, Lahic/Direction gnrale des patrimoines, 2014), 53.
(20.) Krebs, Alfred Mtraux and The Handbook of South American Indians, 6.
(21.) Laurire, LOdysse pascuane, 54 (for Rivets promise), 5657 (about Mtrauxs
hesitations) et passim (for a description of Mtrauxs trip). See also Alfred Mtraux,
Easter Island. A Stone-age Civilization of the Pacific, trans. Michael Bullock (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1957), 1112.
(22.) See Laurire, LOdysse pascuane, 54. Alfred Mtraux Sr. had a taste for archeology
and collected travel books, which were important for developing his sons interest for the
exotic. See Krebs, Jorges Luis Borges and Alfred Mtraux, 304.
(23.) Marcel Mauss, Lethnographie en France et ltranger, in uvres 3 (Paris:

ditions de Minuit, 1969), 395434; Jean Jamin, Le cercueil de Queequeq. Mission Dakar-
Djibouti, mai 1931fvrier 1933 (Paris: Les Carnets de Brose, Lahic/Direction gnrale
des patrimoines, 2014).
(24.) Alfred Mtraux, Ethnology of Easter Island, Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin
160 (1940): 4 (for Victoria Rapahongo); and Mtraux, Easter Island, 15, 23 and 24,
respectively.
(25.) Mtraux, Easter Island, 11 and 24.
(26.) Ibid., 11 (for Mtrauxs expectations); Laurire, LOdyse pascuane, 59.
(27.) See Laurire, LOdyse pascuane, 2638, for a description of the early hypotheses
around the rongorongo, and 113114, for a discussion around Mtrauxs and Rivets
distinct interpretations and its possible consequences.
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(28.) Mtraux, Ethnology of Easter Island.
(29.) See Vincent Debaene, Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and
Literature, trans. Justin Izzo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), x. As the
author states, Written in 1930s, they try to compensate for the shortcomings of the
documentary anthropology that was then being developed around the Muse de
lHomme. By their mere existence reveal the inadequacy of the positive, museum-based
paradigm on which French anthropology thought it could be foundedbut they dont
modify this paradigm. The 1941 edition of Lle de Pques was modified in 1951, losing
much of its literary features. The second edition was the one used for the English
translation of 1957. See Christine Laurire, LOdysse pascuane, 68.
(30.) Alfred Mtraux to Michel Leiris, January 10, 1936, Honolulu, quoted in Christine
Laurire, Dune le lautre. Alfred Mtraux en Hati, Gradhiva 1 (2005): 31, n. 3.
(31.) Paul Radin, Review to The Handbook of South American Indians, The Hispanic
American Historical Review 28.4 (1948): 540, emphasis in the original.
(32.) Julian Steward, ed., Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 1 (Washington, DC:
United States Government Printing Office, 1946), 9.
(33.) Priscila Faulhaber, The Production of the Handbook of South American Indians Vol
3 (19361948), Vibrant 9.1 (2012): 84111. For an interesting argument about the
different scientific standpoints between Mtraux and Steward regarding the organization
of the Handbook, see Krebs, Alfred Mtraux and The Handbook of South American
Indians.
(34.) Claude Lvi-Strauss, Hommage Alfred Mtraux, LHomme 4.2 (1964): 6.
(35.) See Vincent Debaene, Like Alice Through the Looking Glass: Claude Lvi-Strauss
in New York, French Politics, Culture & Society 28.1 (Spring 2010): 4657.
(36.) See Laurire, LOdysse pascuane, 56, especially Mtrauxs letter to Yvonne Oddon.
See also Krebs, Alfred Mtraux and The Handbook of South American Indians, 8.
(37.) Julia Goyat, Georges Bataille e Michel Leiris: a experincia do sagrado (So Paulo:
Humanitas/FAPESP, 2016).
(38.) See Laurire, Dune le lautre : Alfred Mtraux en Hati.
(39.) See, for instance, Jacques Roumain, propos de la campagne anti-supersticieuse/

Las Supersticiones (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de ltat, 1942). For a sophisticated
analysis of the antisuperstition campaign in Haiti, see Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the
Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), especially
ch. 4.
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(40.) Alfred Mtraux, Le Vaudou Hatien (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 13. See also J. Michael
Dash, Carabe Fantme: The Play of Difference in the Francophone Caribbean, Yale
French Studies 103 (2003): 93105.
(41.) See Carolyn Fowler, A Knot in the Thread: The Life and Work of Jacques Roumain
(Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1980); Christine Laurire, Jacques Roumain,
ethnologue hatien, LHomme 173 (2005): 187197; and Joshua Clough, Exile and
Ethnography; Jacques Roumain and the Problem of Place in Haitian National Thought;
19271944, CUNY Academic Works (2004): 144.
(42.) Mtraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 17.
(43.) See Federico Neiburg and Marcio Goldman, Anthropology and Politics in Studies of
National Character, Cultural Anthropology 13.1 (1998): 5681.
(44.) Alfred Mtraux, The Morale Division: An Ethnography of the Misery of War, ed.
Edgardo Krebs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
(45.) See Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 218247, and Alfred Mtraux, Vodou et
protestantisme, Revue de lHistoire des Religions 144.2 (1953): 198216.
(46.) Alfred Mtraux, Introduction, in Odette Mennesson-Rigaud, Feasting of Gods in

Haitian Vodu, Primitive Man 19. 1/2 (JanuaryApril 1946): 158, quotations from p. 4. Cf.
Jean Jamin, Rendez-vous manqu avec le vodou, Gradhiva 1 (2005): 225231.
(47.) See, for instance, Michel Leiris, Sacrifice dun taureau chez le hougan Jo Pierre-
Gilles, Prsence Africaine 12 (1951): 2236; Alfred Mtraux and Pierre Verger, Haiti:
Black Peasants and Voodoo, trans. Peter Lengyel (New York: Universe Books, 1960); and
Yvonne Oddon, Une crmonie funraire hatienne, Mmoires de lInstitut Franais
dAfrique Noire27 (1953): 246248. Yvonne Oddon also contributed to the UNESCO
project acting at on the pedagogic field.
(48.) Alfred Mtraux to Georges Bataille, May 1954, quoted in Fernande Schulmann-
Mtraux, Alfred Mtraux et Georges Bataille, in Prsence dAlfred Mtraux, ed.
Dominique Lecoq, 170.
(51.) Mtraux and Verger, Haiti: Black Peasants and Voodoo, 83. See also Mtraux, Le
vaudou hatien, 323.
(52.) Mtraux and Verger, Haiti: Black Peasants and Voodoo, 8283.
(53.) See Jean Price-Mars, So Spoke the Uncle: Ainsi Parla lOncle, trans. Magdaline W.
Shannon (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1983).
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(54.) See Alfred Mtraux, Anthropology and the Unesco Pilot Project of Marbial (Haiti),
Amrica Indgena 9.3 (1949): 183194; For the reason of the choice of that specific place
and the political and religious conflicts around that definition, see Christine Laurire,
Dune le lautre. Alfred Mtraux en Hati, 1622.
(55.) See letter from Alfred Mtraux to John Bowers, October 22, 1948, Box II, Haiti Pilot
Project Fund, UNESCO Archive, Paris. See also Alfred Mtraux, UNESCO and
Anthropology, American Anthropologist 53.2 (AprilJune 1951): 294300; Alfred Mtraux,
Anthropologist Reports on Fundamental Education, The UNESCO Courier 1.3 (April
1948): 4; and Laurire, Dune le lautre. Alfred Mtraux en Hati, 11.
(56.) Alfred Mtraux, Applied Anthropology in Government: United Nations, in

Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, ed. Alfred L. Kroeber, 880894 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1953), 889.
(57.) See Lorenzo Macagno, Alfred Mtraux: antropologia aplicada e lusotropicalismo,

Etnogrfica 17.2 (2013): 217239.
(58.) Alfred Mtraux, An Inquiry into Race Relations in Brazil, The UNESCO Courier
5.89 (AugustSeptember 1952): 6.
(59.) See Marcos Chor Maio, UNESCO and the Study of Racial Relations in Brazil:
Regional or National Issue?, Latin American Research Review 36.2 (2001): 118136.
(60.) Poul Duedahl, UNESCO Man: Changing the Concept of Race, 19451965, paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San
Francisco, California, November 2008.
(61.) Edgardo Krebs, Popularizing Anthropology, Combating Racism: Alfred Mtraux at

The UNESCO Courier, in A History of UNESCO: Global Actions and Impacts, ed. Poul
Duedhal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 2948.
(62.) Claude Lvi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 45.
(63.) Mtraux, Applied Anthropology in Government: United Nations, 892.
(64.) Mtraux and Verger, Le pied ltrier: correspondances 19461963 (Paris: Jean
Michel Place, 1994), 180. See also, Alfred Mtraux, Itinraires 1 (19351953). Carnets de
notes et journaux de voyage, ed. Andr-Marcel dAns, 285286, 487 (Paris: Payot, 1978);
and Macagno, Alfred Mtraux, 232235.
(65.) Jean-Philippe Belleau, Ethnophilie: lamour des autres nations (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). See also, Piero Matthey, Le terrain, mon amour,
Bulletin Genevois dAnthropologie 5 (19951996): 3135.
(66.) Alfred Mtraux and Fernande Bing. Entretiens avec Alfred Mtraux, LHomme 4.2
(1964): 28.
Page 28 of 30


(67.) Roger Bastide, Hommage Alfred Mtraux, LHomme 4.2 (1964): 8.
(68.) Florent Kohler, Vers une anthropologie intime: la correspondance dAlfred Mtraux
et de Pierre Verger, in Au fil de la plume, no. 10, ed. Anne-Marie Quint (Paris: Presses
Sorbonne Nouvelle), 76.
(69.) Pierre Clastres, Hommage Alfred Mtraux, in Prsence dAlfred Mtraux, ed.
Dominique Lecoq, 2934.
(70.) Alfred Mtraux. Does Life End at Sixty?, The Unesco Courier 16.,4).
(71.) Ibid., 23.
(72.) Michel Leiris wrote about Mtrauxs last words on his journal. See, Michel Leiris,
Journal (19221989) (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 591592. See also Leiriss comments about
Mtrauxs passing, in A Conversation with Michel Leiris, eds. Sally Price and Jean
Jamin, Current Anthropology 29.1 (February 1988): 168; and Guy Poitry, Carrefour des
potes: Michel Leiris et Alfred Mtraux, Bulletin Genevois dAnthropologie 5 (1995
1996): 39. On documenting his fathers passing, see Krebs, Jorge Luis Borges and
Alfred Mtraux, 304.
(73.) Lvi-Strauss, Hommage Alfred Mtraux, 7. On the differences between Mtraux

and Lvi-Strauss, see Krebs, Jorge Luis Borges and Alfred Mtraux.
(74.) See, for instance, the last issue of the Journal de la socit des amricanistes
dedicated to Alfred Mtraux. Philippe Erikson (ed.). Journal de la socit des
amricanistes, 102.2 (2016).
(75.) Lvi-Strauss, Hommage Alfred Mtraux, 7; Krebs, Jorge Luis Borges and Alfred
Mtraux, 305306.
(76.) Claude Tardits, Bibliographie dAlfred Mtraux, Lhomme 4.2 (1964), 4962;
Claude Auroi and Alain Mounnier, Du pays de Vaud au pays du vaudou: ethnologies
dAlfred Mtraux (Geneva, Switzerland: Muse dethnographie de Genve/IUED, 1996),
8697.
Rodrigo Bulamah
Doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology, Unicamp, Brazil/EHESS, France. Grant

2016/07105-0, So Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).
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BULAMAH, Rodrigo C. - Alfred Métraux. Between Ethnography and Applied Knowledge

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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

Summary and Keywords

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The Making of an Ethnographer

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Of Vanishing Sociocultural Artifacts

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The Nostalgic Traveler

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Destined to Insular Mysteries

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The Haitian Experience

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As an equivalent to Victoria Rapahongo and Juan Tepano, Odette Mennesson-Rigaud was

Vodou acquired in Mtrauxs work a clear distinction from common-sense assumptions

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At the Crossroad: Between Ethnography and

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linguistic was published in 1953 by Robert Hall, professor at Cornell University, in

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The Tragic Sentiment of Our Insularity

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Discussion of the Literature

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Mtraux never ignored the importance of applied knowledge. Praxis, according to

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Links to Digital Materials

Calames, catalog of archives and manuscripts in French universities and libraries.

Rhoda Mtraux Papers, Library of the Congress, USA.

Alfred Mtraux voyages.

French Ethnology, Museums, and Ethnographic Missions

Clifford, James. On Ethnographic Surrealism. Comparative Studies in Society and

Larson, Carolyn R.Our Indigenous Ancestors: Museum Anthropology and Nation-Making

Laurire, Christine. Paul Rivet, le savant et le politique. Paris: Publications Scientifiques

Lvi-Strauss, Claude. French Sociology, In Twentieth Century Sociology. Edited by G.