“Peoples Ethnographic”: Objects, Museums, and the Colonial Inheritance of French Ethnology

Abstract

It is well known that French ethnology owed its establishment as a scholarly discipline at the university level to the programmatic needs of French colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s. This essay explores an understudied aspect of that relationship: the long-term consequences of the colonial connection on the ethnology of metropolitan France. Characterized through most of the nineteenth century by an antiquarian celebration of regional identities, metropolitan ethnology underwent its own institutional refoundation in the 1930s under Georges-Henri Riviere, first director of the Musee National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, who used the conceptual and practical apparatus of colonial ethnology to outdo the rival field of studies in the effort to define the new museum. After considering the close ties between colonial and metropolitan ethnology, which both preceded and survived the political compromises and rifts of the Occupation, this essay offers a revisionist analysis of Riviere's structuralist museology of the 1970s. Le role crucial de la politique coloniale de la France dans la creation d'un cursus superieur d'ethnologie, et dans l'instauration de l'ethnologie en tant que discipline scientifique dans les annees 1920 et 1930, est bien connu. Il est question dans cet article d'un aspect moins developpe de cette relation: les consequences du legs colonial pour l'ethnologie metropolitaine, qui a subi aussi une refondation scientifique dans les annees 1930, apres la nomination de Georges-Henri Riviere comme premier directeur du Musee national des arts et traditions populaires. Dans le dispositif ideologique et pratique de l'ethnologie coloniale, Riviere et ses colleges ont trouve une arme a utiliser contre ceux qui voulaient faire du folklore le discours dominant du nouveau musee. Ayant examine les liens etroits entre les ethnologies coloniale et metropolitaine, qui toutes les deux ont precede les compromis et divergences de l'Occupation, cet article conclut par une analyse revisionniste de la museologie structuraliste deployee par Riviere dans les annees 1970.

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