Abstract
Reviewed by: Jennifer Anne Boittin, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Race was tightly and with hindsight very problematically linked with the field of anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In France during the 1920s and 1930s a fascinating tight-knit group of men and women chose to call themselves ethnologists, in the hopes of distinguishing a French brand of ‘the study of human cultural diversity’. Their approach was to study the sociocultural forces that shape humans rather than the racial classification of humans, past and present. The latter was the approach favoured by the broader international cadre of physical anthropologists (2). Those following the former approach are the ethnologists at the heart of Alice L. Conklin’s tightly-woven narrative, one that frankly confronts the occasionally disturbing nuances of the very human choices made by researchers driven to better understand humanity and human interactions. Using an impressive array of archival texts (a term she extends to physical objects and photographs) Conklin is masterful in her exploration of how race, racism and ethnology were redefined by the men and women who created the Museum of Man (Le Musée de l’Homme) between the two world wars.
Conklin is particularly interested in distinguishing between ‘racial science’ and ‘scientific racism’. The distinction is an important one since many sciences of the early twentieth century, and especially anthropology, took biological definitions of race for granted. Yet not all scientists were racist, and many discussed here shifted dramatically towards antiracism over their careers, as they started to understand the dangerous implications of reading race outside of its sociocultural dimensions. Thus, in Chapter 4, ‘Skulls on Display’, Conklin wonders whether Paul Rivet’s Musée de l’Homme, which opened its doors in Paris in 1938, and had a strong educational mission to challenge the rise of scientific racism, succeeded in conveying its antiracist tendencies to the greater public. In Chapter 5, ‘Ethnology’, Conklin asks whether the field was ‘A Colonial Form of Knowledge’. She explores the varying degrees to which scholars developed a critical view of colonialism after conducting their fieldwork overseas, even while relying upon the empire for their fieldwork, funding and broader dissemination of their work. The fascination with empire, in other words, was part of their raison d’être, even if their study of empire and ethnology often led them to question the existence of a hierarchy of races. Conklin adroitly handles the paradoxical moral issues at the heart of her book, writing with particular clarity about the racial tensions at the heart of her story.
Some of the characters in this book are very familiar to those who study France, anthropology or the twentieth century. Germaine Tillion has just become one of the first women inducted into the Panthéon, though largely because of her role in the Resistance rather than her pioneering work as a participant observer in Algeria. Claude Lévi-Strauss was firmly embedded in the circles of young ethnologists who were shaped by the progressive ideas of Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet and Georges Henri Rivière.
By the penultimate chapter, Chapter 7, on ethnologists at war, the reader waits with baited breath to learn which of these young scholars were deported, killed, joined the Resistance, survived or, in the case of Marcel Griaule, advanced their careers in perhaps suspect ways. The foil and, by World War II, actual nemesis of many of these young men and women is the Swiss-born George Montaudon. His presence in this book serves as an important reminder of how scientific racists functioned, and demonstrates just how truly antiracist (in its context), was the work of the lively, intelligent, hardworking and often politically and socially savvy individuals who helped to create and run the Musée de l’Homme.
Conklin’s goal is not to emphasize her ethnologists’ antiracism. Instead, she seeks to explain why scholars have mostly forgotten French ethnologists (because their science was forged by problematic race questions in the era leading up to World War II), and why they are nonetheless worthy of being remembered (because their fieldwork often shifted them to quite active antiracist and progressive thinking, and because their ideas shaped later generations of anthropologists). Conklin begins and ends her work with references to the UNESCO statement on race of 1950, crafted by a group of scientists in Paris. A former student of Rivet and Mauss headed the group, which argued that ‘“race” is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth’, a phrase that mimics the evolution of French ethnologists’ thinking on race in the interwar years (1, 326–9). Yet in the 1951 revision of this statement, the group dropped the ‘social myth’ portion of its claim, considered too controversial. Conklin’s book is a powerfully told story of this evolution and its hiccups, and therefore of the scientific roots of race, racism, colonialism, anticolonialism and antiracism in the twentieth century, and is well worth reading.