Description

Germaine Tillion, a French ethnographer, conducted 36 months of fieldwork in the Aurès mountains of Algeria in the 1930s. Returning to France in 1940, she immediately joined the Resistance only to be betrayed and deported to Ravensbrück with her mother. Tillion survived and became one of the most outspoken early “witnesses” to the Holocaust; she later criticized the use of torture in Algeria. Tillion’s extraordinary commitment to combating injustice in the “dark” twentieth century is being recognized with her “Pantheonization” in Paris this coming May. How do we account for such a life? This talk is not only about Tillion but about a larger group of résistants: scholars. She was in fact part of a remarkable cohort of students in interwar France who, under the mentorship of Marcel Mauss, acquired the conceptual tools to render the so-called primitive Other “familiar.” Mauss understood before most the need not just to denounce the old racial science that underpinned Nazi ideology, but to show that another way of seeing the Other was possible. In their ethnographies, Mauss’ closest students consistently demonstrated how differences among human societies were the product of history rather than that of biology. Several of these students became resisters and precocious critics of colonialism. I will nevertheless conclude with a dramatic counter-example: Jacques Soustelle, a resister-ethnographer from this generation who later joined the OAS.

Alice L. Conklin is a professor of history at the Ohio State University. She is the author, most recently of In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France, 1850-1950. She is currently working on the first global anti-racism campaign conducted by UNESCO’s Social Sciences Department.