Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The Dakar–Djibouti mission (1931–3) is considered a founding event for French anthropology, both for the scale of its collecting processes and for the role played by its participants in the subsequent institutionalization of the discipline – then being established as ethnology (ethnologie). It is also notable for what it embodies of the interweaving of French scientific and colonial concerns in the 1930s, and its legacies in contemporary ethnographic museums. Julien Bondaz’s compact volume looks specifically at the birds of the Dakar–Djibouti mission, and at the mission through the prism of birds. By choosing this original angle, it offers a subtle reflection on the relationship between living animals and French ethnographers at the beginning of the last century in the context of naturalist collecting and, more broadly, colonial extractivism and scientific predation. It examines the conditions under which collections were assembled, and contributes to provenance studies in museums of anthropology, particularly in respect of the scientific trajectories of hybrid objects, those occupying a space between naturalia and artefacts. It recounts the methodologies used by the mission and its sources of inspiration, analysing the imaginaries mobilized and the disciplinary games played on the field and beyond. It also enriches our knowledge of the mission’s protagonists, whether Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris or André Schaeffner, key players in the professionalization of French ethnology, or figures who have remained in the shadows owing to their tragic fate – such as Deborah Lifchitz, who died in Auschwitz in 1942 – or to a structural invisibility in the case of the so-called local ‘auxiliaries’: field assistants, preparation assistants, logistics officers and hunting guides. From a close and sometimes surprising dialogue between scientific, artistic and literary elements, the author raises important epistemological questions on the (co)production of knowledge, the place of the materiality of bodies and collections in ethnography, the disciplinarization of Western sciences, the role of subjectivities and sensitivities, and, finally, also of violence, in the mission’s practices.
DOI: 10.1093/jhc/fhaf052
Author: Mélanie Roustan, France
Institution: Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4417225444
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