From Race To Culture To Esthetics: A Museographic Journey into French Ethnology

When I attended classes at the Musée 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.1 I 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 Lévi-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 Musée 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 Musée du Quai Branly within the changing contexts of French anthropology and ethnology, including the history of the Musée 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 Musée de l'Homme and specialist on the Americas (Laurière 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, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, and Ernest-Théodore Hamy, who founded the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography in 1878; subsequent after Rivet there were Henri-Victor Vallois, Jacques Millot, and finally Robert Gessain, who from 1968 to 1979 was the last Director, later Co-Director, of the Musée de l'Homme to have been trained in medicine.We must keep in mind the naturalist roots of the study of ethnology.The Chair of Anthropology (remember that for a long time in France, the word "anthropology" implied "physical anthropology"), which was established in 1855, and the Musée de l'Homme were both subordinates of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle (Natural History Museum).Any evolution in the study of ethnology was then merely a function of how far the above mentioned doctors would go beyond their initial training.Hamy had already taken a first step.As assistant and later the

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