Jean Malaurie: “Student of Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, I have always been anti-totalitarian”

The scientist, explorer and writer Jean Malaurie died at the age of 101. The man who founded the Terre humaine collection has always defended the Inuit and minorities in general. In 2005, he gave an interview to Le Figaro on the occasion of the donation of his archives to the BNF.

LE FIGARO. - What does the donation of the Terre humaine archives to the National Library of France mean to you?

Jean MALAURIE. - This is recognition for these authors, companions in this publishing adventure, who did not hesitate, through writing, to try to make their thoughts accessible to the general public. And then it’s a whole intellectual movement that is valued.

How to define it?

He wants to defend the identity of people or minority groups and emphasize their sacred dimension. Let us recall this sentence from Roger Bastide, the author of a magnificent study, Le Candomblé de Bahia: “It is not social morphology which controls religion or which explains it but on the contrary the mystic who controls the social.”

Could you come back to the interdisciplinary nature of your collection?

Human land is a land of freedom. Student of Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, I have always been anti-totalitarian. I am not a Marxist, nor a structuralist. Nor is it Durkheimist when Durkheim affirms the primacy of the social structure over the individual. But I read them all and study their thinking closely.

From this blinderless watchdog that is Terre humaine, how do you consider current thinking?

The collection was born during great ideological turbulence. The list of “isms” imposing a reading grid on the world was then long. But it was an expression of post-war liberation and excitement. Today, the situation is different: we are experiencing a major intellectual crisis. In our universities, we have settled into frantic competition which undermines respect for others, the primary condition for the life of ideas. I am not talking about the provincialism that is winning over us, the imperialism of the American language which results in a growing inability of our colleagues across the Atlantic to read works in a foreign language. The time of Kafka or Stefan Zweig, when an intellectual spoke three to four languages ​​and took the honor of reading everything, is moving away. More generally, I have the impression that our society is becoming “decivilized”.

What does this imply for your field, social sciences?

We can therefore ask ourselves where the great thinkers are. There are many very promising young people in France, but few have a chance due to a flawed and targeted recruitment system. I know of two recent cases: Dominique Sewane, a brilliant ethnologist, whose work among the Batammariba in Togo Le Souffle du mort, resulted in the inclusion of their territory as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Alexandra Richter, Germanist, specialist in Goethe's philosophy of Nature. What do we offer them? Two cases among many...

Does the upcoming opening of the Museum of Early Arts, Quai Branly, thanks to which the general public should be able to better understand the riches of our different brothers, give you reason to hope?

The President of the Republic is working sincerely so that the extraordinary message of the first peoples is finally, in our capital, perceived with honor and intelligence. It is very regrettable that the Louvre has not long had rooms reserved for large Amerindian, Inuit, African, Siberian or Australian societies.

But there are already ethnographic museums.

They favor the object. However, there is a whole intangible heritage that calls for a specific method. It is the imaginary afterworld of societies: their rituals, their music, their dances. As an awareness of the extraordinary artistic creativity of traditional peoples, the Quai Branly is vital. The West is looking for new expressions of the sacred, but the art of the peoples who will be evoked there “does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible”, according to the expression of Paul Klee. I don't need to mention what he brought to André Breton, Picasso, Max Ernst or Dubuffet. It makes us perceive what our tired senses no longer feel, these chthonic forces which express themselves through the veins of the earth, the icebergs, the labyrinths of the stone, and which these hypersensorialized peoples, in their imagination, experience by going back up until the times of Genesis, finding themselves whale-man, wolf-man, spider-woman.

What about research?

Undeniably, the Museum of Man, to which we owe so much, was in crisis. He had aged. After having asserted itself at the Trocadéro, before the war, with these pioneers of our anthropological thought, it too quickly favored its mission of collecting objects, forgetting somewhat to question itself and to make the visitor think about the “wild thought” which conceived them. Without a doubt, this prestigious institution should have worked more closely, in particular with the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences. The new Museum of Primitive Arts must, if it does not want to be a simple aesthetic showcase, avoid this error.

You yourself have spent your life looking at “the other”, in this case those from the extreme lands of the Far North. But is the most famous of the books that you have dedicated to them, The Last Kings of Thule, read in the “field”, in Greenland?

The young Greenlandic intelligentsia commented very favorably on it. One of them told me: “I went to Denmark (on which Greenland depends, editor’s note) to study law. Well, after reading The Last Kings, I understood that if I didn't return home with a different mindset, I would be betraying my people. This makes me believe that the works of Terre humaine have some power. The first peoples are like sentinels in defense of the threatened ecology. Under their feet, they feel, better than anyone, this sacred land in great danger following our madness of development at all costs.

In the near future, do direct testimonies, not reported by a third party, seem essential to you?

These territories of the first peoples are not the third world. They are a universe of another civilization of cognitive faculties unrelated to ours, and where the sap of a new humanity which is being built and which is in reserve rises. Encourage the publication of the testimonies of these little-known, long-despised peoples; helping to bring out at the heart of these societies what I call “ethnologists of their own history”, this is indeed a real challenge for Terre humaine, whose authors are a sort of “passengers” between the still living past of these societies and their very near future.

What do you think of the contemporary sculptures of the Northern Canadian Inuit that can currently be seen at the Musée de l'Homme?

They prove that Inuit artists do not spend their time copying the past, in a repetitive art that would become deadly. They venture into the development of very original abstract forms. Here they are in tune with the modern world. A market is developing, it allows them to assert themselves in their future with an income that did not seem guaranteed. The fact remains that we are still far too inclined to be interested only in the picturesque grandeur of the past of these peoples, as if they could not have a future, with a philosophy which is becoming more complex.

So how can we act intelligently?

We must generate indigenous executives trained in politics, thinkers capable of considering their own future, of contributing to that of ours, of defending their rights and of resisting the disastrous material neocolonialism, which is still there, notably through omnipresent television. This is why, in St. Petersburg, I created, with the support of Gorbachev, a State Polar Academy. Today it has 1,100 students from all over Siberia. I am convinced that among them one day a Chekhov, a de Gaulle or a Mandela will rise.

But what is the interest for us French people in getting involved in the future of these small peoples?

I succeeded in ensuring that the French language was, as it was in the past, the first compulsory foreign language for these young executives. The Polar Academy is a member, as a university, of the association of French-speaking universities; This will perhaps allow France in the future to have the best relations with the Siberian leaders of tomorrow.

What happened to the Eskimos you know best, the Thule Inuit?

They are guides for tourists while remaining hunters, with small jobs, practicing a small souvenir industry. Here is a people who suffered terrible assaults, were deported by the American army, and lost their religion, shamanism, this complex pantheistic thought, a philosophy of subtle nature. Fortunately, the Inuit are pragmatic. On their sleds, they have radios and cell phones. Many use the Internet. We are in another world. I now believe that they need to find a new vision, a new lease of life, the tenacious will to believe in themselves and in the importance they have in the future of the planet.