From Race To Culture To Esthetics: A Museographic Journey into French Ethnology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When I attended classes at the Muse de l'Homme (the National Museum of Man in Paris) in 1965-66 to prepare for my degree in ethnology, we received training in physical anthropology. 1I even recall accidentally dropping, on exam day, an Inuit humerus (we still called them Eskimos then), breaking it into two pieces.Meanwhile, our favorite readings were books by Michel Leiris and Claude Lvi-Strauss who, in the wake of the UNESCO Declaration of 1950 on the question of race, explained that the significant differences between groups of humans were in fact cultural and not racial.In the end, culture prevailed over race and the physical anthropology course vanished from the Ethnology curriculum in the whirlwind of reforms of 1968.It was replaced by courses in population genetics and biological anthropology, which would study the influence of social and cultural factors on phenotypic and genotypic differences.Even though Culture had in the end won the game against Race, the debate was rooted in many years of intellectual and institutional history.The management and orientation of the Muse de l'Homme between the 1920s and the 1950s is a perfect window into this past.In this reflection essay, I draw upon my own experiences with, and readings of, this history to situate the story of the still-new Muse du Quai Branly within the changing contexts of French anthropology and ethnology, including the history of the Muse de l'Homme out of which it has arisen. From Race to Culture: The Triumph of Ethnology?A book was recently published telling the story of the career of Paul Rivet, founder of the Muse de l'Homme and specialist on the Americas (Laurire 2008). 2 Rivet's meandering career path reflects the transition from race to culture.Like most "anthropological museographers" of the time, Rivet had been trained as a medical doctor.Before him there were Paul Broca,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".