Museums, highly political places

This article was also published on the Socio Links site.

A museum is a summary of history (s). Not only those of the objects it houses, but also from the evolution of representations of the world and the border between art and science, that an exhibition freezes in order. This observation is particularly significant when it comes to showing human diversity, the culture of peoples of other continents. This is the demonstration that Benoît de l’Estoile develops, anthropologist at Cnrs Teacher at the École normale supérieure and specialist in Brazil in this essay as dense as she is erudite. Retracing the evolution of “ others’s taste “Which develops in France in the interwar period, he somehow returns the ethnological focal length to those who have made a profession to observe and to show the peoples” primitive “, Colonized or” first ». It thus shows in particular how the will to show cultural diversity, which has gradually imposed itself as a new universalism, is closely linked to the desire to turn the colonial page, itself inseparable from the development of ethnology in France and the discourse on “ Others “, Deeply” rooted in colonial soil ».

Benoît de l’Estoile begins by tracing in a first part the advent of ethnology. This owes a lot to the success of the 1931 colonial exhibition in Vincennes. It was more exactly the speeches that surrounded the organization of this event and the representations they convey that interest the anthropologist. Designed by its organizers as a “ justification From the colonial enterprise in the face of its criticisms, the colonial exhibition appears for observers more as a microcosm, a staging of human diversity in the world presented on a reduced scale, than a “ human zoo As we tend to imagine it today. Presenting itself as a kind of “ colonial encyclopedia », It mainly promotes a scientific project of knowledge of the various cultures of this colonial empire, and it is then that the three types of stories are developed which accounts for the development of indigenous cultures: a discourse» evolutionary “Which insists on the progress that the colonial conquest for cultures” would have allowed “ natives », Characterized until then by stagnation ; a speech “ differentialist Which emphasizes on the contrary on diversity ; and the last one, “ primitivist “Which takes up the evolutionary idea by reversing the judgment on cultures” natives »He aesthetically values ​​otherness. These stories will keep an interpretative force still valid today. But beyond that, it is also the definition of a new community, of a new “ We “That establishing this colonial exhibition, a” We imperial Who asymmetrically brings together metropolitan and colonized peoples, not without contradictions.

Against a vision of French ethnology which would have been built against colonization, Benoît de l’Estoile retraces in detail the missions carried out by Marcel Griaule with the objective of traveling West Africa in East (“ From Dakar to Djibouti ), The cruise of Korrigane In Oceania, and the expeditions of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the center of Brazil, all companies in the 1930s following the colonial exhibition and funded by the public authorities. It shows well how of an adventurous leisure for a literate bourgeoisie (but whose women are not excluded), ethnology is gradually professional through a meticulous collection aimed at exhaustiveness – and using means not always very “ moral “As in particular testified to Michel Leiris – objects of” Others To feed the Museums of Ethnography. In doing so, ethnologists bring a scientific guarantee to colonization, and whose speeches by officials like Albert Sarraut or Maurice Delafosse show that it was a political objective consciously targeted by the political authorities.

Museums therefore occupy a central place in this device, and it is then at the Museum of Man which will settle at Trocadéro, in Paris, in place of the Museum of Ethnography created in 1878. Benoît de l’Estoile retraces in detail the museographic choices made by the young George-Henri Rivière under the scientific responsibility of Claude Rivet, and especially shows that it will evolve in a tension between three objects of “ Others ” : THE “ Encyclopedic speech “, L ‘ “ travel illusion “And the” Exhibition of masterpieces This is not without referring to the three stories initiated by the colonial exhibition of 1931.

The aesthetic perspective will thus gradually impose itself on the detriment of ethnological science, the art of peoples “ primitive “Being more and more considered a” Art of origins ». The qualifier of “ primitive “Will be replaced by that of” first To alleviate the pejorative connotation, but the idea remains until the opening of the Quai Branly museum. The recent opening of the latter signs at the end of January 2003 the closure of the Museum of African and Oceanian Arts installed in the Palais des Colonies de la Porte Dorée, and this passage symbolizes the expropriation of ethnologists operated by the art merchants, at the forefront of which the collector Jacques Kerchache, a close to the former President of the Republic Jacques Chirac, died in 2001. (lucrative) of “ First arts “, Their business cannot be summed up, however, to a commercial operation, but indeed has an ethical and political dimension as evidenced by the abundant discourses which surround it, largely articulated around the topos of the” discovery ». They nevertheless help to dehistorize the cultures of “ Others “, Striving to surround them with a kind of” magic ».

Ethnology, however, keeps a place in the museums of “ First arts “, That of guardian of a myth of contemporary cosmology: the” lost paradise “Cultures” primitive “Whose so-called proximity to nature would be gradually destroyed by progress. A myth that can be read in the organization of exhibitions, as Peoplesinstalled at the Museum of Man in 2006, but also in the statutes of certain associations, and in the very architecture of the Musée du Quai Branly designed by Jean Nouvel. Benoît de l’Estoile then reports on the increasingly lively claims concerning the legitimate property of objects exhibited in museums. Then, in a last chapter, he presents the conception today defended by certain anthropologists (of which he is a part), alternative to that of the promoters of “ First arts -for which the face-to-face experience with the work is self-sufficient-that of a connection cultural and historical of the different peoples that would break with the “ Westernrocious And dualism intrinsically carried by the museum model of others. This is the aiming contained for example in the proposal of a “ Métis Museum »Carried by Serge Gruzinski, but which is also already at work in a series of exhibitions that Benoît de l’Estoile relates. This call to no longer stage an otherness “ mythical », With his double wild and domesticated side, to go beyond the aesthetic or intellectual experience to allow the visitor to meet the ways of living from his contemporaries, both different and linked to his, comes to conclude this essay in a way all the more convincing than the socio-historical genesis of the museum of others which precedes it was traced in vigorous way. And through it, Benoît de l’Estoile recalls how the performative character of representations in their ordering of the world.

This work is finally a contribution of importance to the controversy triggered by the recent inauguration of the Quai Branly museum, including a recent number of Debate echoed. In addition to an article by Benoît de l’Estoile which in substance takes up the theses developed here to underline the “ forgetting the colonial heritage “And points of view on the monument drawn by Jean Nouvel and the approach he houses, the Revue de Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet, publishes an article by Philippe Descola who describes as” false debate “He who opposes the defenders of a museography” scientist »Ethnographic objects to those of an aesthetic approach to the arts» first “Since, according to him, both complement each other, and that it is a question of apprehending all the ways of which an object can” testify “, as “ Incorporation of the intentionality of a legitimate or erroneous referent, as a memorial sign for an individual, as an instrument of an exchange relationship between humans, as a simple material cause, as an indication of the singularity of a collective (and) as a work of art “, Inviting to rethink the museographic question of” contextualization ».