Race as Myth: Primitivism and Scientific Racism in Interwar France

In 1925, the armchair theorist Marcel Mauss and the physical anthropologist Paul Rivet founded France’s first academic institute for the training of ethnologists in fieldwork: the Institut d’Ethnologie at the Sorbonne. Twelve years later the Institut moved into the renovated Musée de l’Homme, which would remain its home until the early 1950s, when anthropology departments finally opened up in the French university system.  Throughout the interwar years, “L’Insti” and “Le Troca” fostered camaraderie, competition, and a radical politics of racial and cultural tolerance among its idealistic and talented students, as they travelled back and forth to field sites often located in the empire.  Many of these students had turned to the still precarious field of ethnology after the debacle of World War I out of a desire for intense contact with “archaic” peoples – unmediated by the textual ethnographies on which their mentors had typically relied.  In-depth exposure to alternative ways of ordering reality in turn prepared this cosmopolitan generation to challenge the scientific categories in which humanity had been ordered in France for over a century. Trained in the 1920s and 30s to see the world divided between primitive and advanced cultures as well as into a myriad of biologically different (if mixed) races, ethnologists such as Michel Leiris, Alfred Métraux, Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Leroi-Gourhan would argue innovatively by the 1940s that race science itself was a Western myth that needed deconstructing.  My paper will investigate how the radical de-centering of the self through contact with the “primitive” in the race-obsessed 1930s helped Mauss and Rivet’s students to adopt a position of extreme cultural relativism in the 1950s – one which paradoxically discredited the raciologist for lack of scienticity but empowered the social scientist as the premier interpreter of myths, whether Western or other.