Entre Tintín y Tartarín: la misión Dacar-Yibutí en el origen de la etnografía francesa

Abstract

RESUMO: La Misión Dakar-Yibutí, bajo la conducción de Marcel Griaule, atravesó el continente africano entre 1931 y 1933. Este trabajo describe sus vínculos con la naciente etnografía francesa, así como la forma en la que se organizó y llevó a cabo. PALABRAS-CLAVES: Etnografía francesa, Dogon, Etiopía.A Inmaculada Díaz Narbona.

Stop the Academic World, I Wanna Get Off in the Quai de Branly. Of sketchbooks, museums and anthropology

“…There was an interesting Trocadero atmosphere about it -meaning that one could sense a mix of pro-colonial intellectual endeavour with interdisciplinary tones, and the ghostly presence of the anthropologist Marcel Griaule -who notoriously directed the Dakar-Djibouti Mission in the early thirties with the declared aim of collecting ethnographic materials for the future Musée de l'homme, and the less declared aim of returning to Ethiopia, where he had made his debut as linguist, anthropologist and novelist, some five years before (see Griaule 1991;Debaene 2007). The controversy surrounding the mission, and Griaule's activities in Northern Ethiopia, though very subdued in the anthropological academic circles because of his later success as the charitable connoisseur of the Dogon from Mali, is in itself both thrilling and shaming, a number of very interesting works having already dealt with it (Bosc-Tiesse & Wion 2005, Brumana 2002, Macé 2002. In my earlier visits to the Musée de l'homme, in Paris, I had been fascinated and intrigued by the carelessly dusty vitrines protecting the panels taken from the Ab'ba Antonios church in the rural vicinity of Gondar (Northern Ethiopia), one of the centrepieces of the predatory collecting activity led by the Dakar-Djibouti Mission members.…”