Far Afield : French anthropology between science and literature

415 Pages·2014·1.53 MB·English

by  Debaene

Far Afield

Far Afield
French Anthropolog y between Science and Literature
V I N C E N T D E B A E N E
T R A N S L A T E D B Y J U S T I N I Z Z O
The University of Chicago Press
chicago and london
vincent debaene is associate professor of French at Columbia University.
He is the critical editor of the Pléiade edition of the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss
and coauthor of Claude Lévi-Strass: L’Homme au regard éloigné.
justin izzo is assistant professor of French Studies at Brown University.
Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie
du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade
de France représenté aux Etats-Unis. This work received support from the French
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the
United States through their publishing assistance program.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2014 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2014.
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published as Vincent Debaene, L’Adieu au voyage:
L’ethnologie française entre science et littérature (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2010)
© Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2010.
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-10690-8 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-10706-6 (paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-10723-3 (e-book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226107233.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Debaene, Vincent, author.
[Adieu au voyage. English]
Far afield : French anthropology between science and
literature / Vincent Debaene ; translated by Justin Izzo.
pages cm
“Originally published as Vincent Debaene, L’adieu au voyage :
L’ethnologie française entre science et littérature (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2010)
© Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2010.” — Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-226-10690-8 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-10706-6
(paperback : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-10723-3 (e-book) 1. Ethnology—France—
History—20th century. 2. Ethnology—Authorship. 3. Literature and anthropology—France—
History—20th century. I. Izzo, Justin, translator. II. Title.
gn308.3.f8d4313 2014
306.0944'0904—dc23
2013028984
a This paper meets the requirements of
ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Preface to the English Edition ix
Introduction 1
The Ethnographer’s Two Books 3
Science and Literature: A Genealogy 12
i ethnography in the eyes of literature • 23
1 The Birth of a Discipline 25
Breaks and Discontinuities 25
Fieldwork 36
Ethnography’s Prestige 44
2 The French Exception 51
The Speculative Origins of French Ethnography 52
“Everything involving the exercise of the mind” 56
Malinowski: A Counterexample 61
3 Rhetoric, the Document, and Atmosphere 67
From the Science of Customs to Total Social Facts 69
Evocative Documents 71
The Supplement to the Ethnographer’s Expedition 76
The Impossible Return to Belles Lettres 81
The Human Document and the Living Museum 83
4 “A literature that is not meaningless like our own” 89
“Some of the innocent flavor of the original text” 89
L’Île de Pâques: 1941, 1951 98
Mauss, Fieldwork, and Ethnographic Documents 104
5 The Lost Unity of Heart and Mind 111
The Philosophical Voyage as Paradise Lost 112
From the Enlightenment to the Renaissance 116
A “New Humanism” 120
vi contents
ii l’adieu au voyage • 127
6 “Ceci n’est pas un voyage” 129
Travel: Polemics, Prestige, and Legitimacy 130
The Ethnographer, the Adventurer, and the Tourist 136
Spatializing Cultural Difference 138
L’Afrique fantôme and Tristes Tropiques: Impossible Intimacy 141
“This is not travel writing” 147
7 L es Flambeurs d’hommes:
The Ethiopian Chronicles of Marcel Griaule 151
The Ethnographer and the Littérateur 152
The Inadequacies of the Ethnographic Document 155
The Impossible Evocative Document 157
Excursus: Sociology and Cruelty 163
Ethnography and Cultural Knowledge 167
8 L’Afrique fantôme: Leiris and the “Living Document” 173
The Impossible Foreword 173
Reading L’Afrique fantôme 176
From Communion to Representation 182
Theatricality and the Family 186
Living Document, “Phantom” Africa 190
9 T ristes Tropiques:
The Search for Correspondence and the Logic of the Sensible 199
“The boat entered the harbor at 5:30 in the morning” 200
From Conrad to Proust 203
From the Deserts of Memory to the Science of the Concrete 210
History, Entropy, “Entropology” 214
“Doorways that reveal other worlds and other times” 219
iii literature in the eyes of ethnography • 225
10 Literature, Letters, and the Social Sciences 227
Lanson, 1895: The Dispossession of the Artist by the Scientist 228
The Man of Letters and the Social Division of Labor 234
Humanities, Sciences, and Counterrevolutionary Thought 239
Lanson, 1904: From Literature to Science 246
11 Disputes over Territory 249
Ramon Fernandez, 1935: A Conversation between
the Scientist and the Essayist 251
Breton, 1948–1966: “You will never really know the Mayas” 255
Bataille, Barthes, Blanchot, 1956: The Reception of Tristes Tropiques 262
contents vii
12 1955–1970: A New Deal 275
The End of the Documentary Paradigm 276
Ethnography and Literature in the “Real World” 279
(Post)colonial Literature and the Ethnographic 283
The “Terre humaine” Series: Literature from Within and Without 287
Barthes and “Structures” 296
Barthes, 1967: From Science to Literature 303
Conclusion 309
Literature 312
Ethnography 317

Acknowledgments • 325
Notes • 327
Bibliography • 369
Index • 387

Preface to the English Edition
This book was published in French under the title L’Adieu au voyage. This
phrase is an allusion to the last page of Tristes Tropiques, in which Claude
Lévi-Strauss invites us to seize the essence of humankind not through geo-
graphical or anthropological explorations of the planet (“fond farewell to
savages and explorations!”), but through the ephemeral contemplation of
the works of nature: a crystal, a perfume, or, famously, the eye of a cat. In
my mind, this phrase did not refer to such a project, and even less to some
historical moment: the farewell to journeying does not designate some
historical realization through which, after explorations and empires, the
West would observe with bitterness the end of exoticism or the vanishing
of differences (these topoi date back at least to the eighteenth century). It
designates rather a moment within ethnography, through which the an-
thropologist relinquishes any idealized conception of difference. It is thus
not only a farewell to some idealized Other, but also a farewell to oneself, in
other words the redefinition of the relationship between subject and object.
Like in Lévi-Strauss’s original phrasing, the farewell to the journey does
not point to any conclusion, or disenchantment, but to the reconfiguration
of a relationship, a twofold process of objectivation and subjectivation.
In the French anthropological tradition, this reconfiguration appears
through a striking phenomenon: upon their return from fieldwork, most
twentieth-century ethnographers produced, in addition to the expected
scholarly monograph, a second book, a book that was often more “literary,”
or at least freer in its form and intended for a wider audience than special-
ized publications. L’Île de Pâques by Alfred Métraux, L’Afrique fantôme by