In 2010, Vincent Debaene published Farewell to travel. French ethnology between science and littérature(Gallimard), by wondering about this French tradition which wants that, back from his “field”, the ethnologist writes not one, but two books, one scientific, the other literary: Easter Island d’Alfred Métraux, Ghost Africa by Michel Leiris, The High Rollers by Marcel Griaule, Sad tropics by Claude Lévi-Strauss are added to their work on the Easter Islanders of Rapa Nui, the Dogons of Mali, the Amhara of Ethiopia or the Nambikwara of Brazil. In “Farewell toAdieu ? “, hosted in 2018 in the dossier” Ten years of theory “ofActa fabula, he wanted to give a sort of afterword to a work which encouraged studies on the relations between literature and ethnology or anthropology, numerous enough for an issue of the journal Critique or come to take stock in 2016, under the title “Writings all terrain” (Stéphane Massonet reported on these “New fields of literature” for Acta fabula).
Éléonor Devevey publishes today at the Presses du Réel Common grounds. Anthropologists and writers in the second half of the twentieth century. What role does literature as an idea, corpus or practice, play in the surveys and writings of anthropologists? And vice versa: what do writers of anthropological knowledge do? What place does he find in their library and in their approach? From exchanges between Georges Condominas and Georges Perec to the work of Yvonne Verdier, of the Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians by Pierre Clastres to Gérard Macé’s essays, the book seeks to shed light, from a corpus of writings of anthropologists and writers, on the reconfiguration of their reports from 1945 to the present day.
(Photo: © Jean-Loup Trassard)
– .
