Anthropology and Politics, the Beginnings: The Relations between Franz Boas and Paul Rivet (1919-42)

For me, Franz Boas was a master, even though I was never able to attend his courses. It was to his works that I turned to seek a working method and, whenever possible, a model. What characterizes Boas' work is its extraordinary wealth of different values. Reading it led me to understand the complexity of ethnology and the interdependence of its various branches: anthropology, prehistory, archaeology, ethnography, serology. Thanks to him, I was able to imagine what a real Museum of Mankind should be, that is, a panoramic museum where the visitor would find the full portrait of races, civilizations and languages in the world. I owe it to Boas to have been able to bring the Musée de l'Homme into existence after twenty years of effort.

Rivet (1958:251)

For anthropologists and historians of anthropology in the United States, the life and work of Franz Boas (1858-1942) hold little mystery.¹ Since his death there have been many publications devoted to him, in spite of an important period of lesser attention from the 1950s to the 1970s. Nearly everything has been said, explained, commented upon, criticized, and analyzed: his scholarly and private biography, his Jewishness, his university education in Germany, the scientific disputes he took part in, the various positions he occupied over his career, his relations with his most important contemporaries and with his students, with the Harlem Renaissance movement, with his women students, his scientific and institutional activity in museums and the university, his conception of a "four field" anthropology (biological anthropology, social anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology), his Americanist ethnographic work and the quality of the relations he maintained with his informants, the diverse facets of his personal scientific work, the decisive impetus he gave to linguistics, his thoughts on art, his political convictions and commitment, his anti-racism and anti-Nazism, among other things. Examination of the voluminous archives deposited in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia has also contributed to a considerable literature that clearly reminds us that Franz Boas is truly the founding father of American anthropology and, as such, he occupies a special place in the memory of the discipline, in the pantheon of Totems and Teachers.²

Keeping all this in mind, if a researcher happened to propose more documentation on the relations between Franz Boas and French ethnologists, one would think that if such relations existed, they must have been with Marcel Mauss—from founding father to founding father. However, this is not the case at all. The two men exchanged a total of six letters over a brief period from 1926 to 1931 (two from Boas and four from Mauss).³ We know from other sources that Mauss was an attentive reader of Boas's ethnographic works, especially on the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, which Mauss frequently quoted in the "Instructions ethnographiques" handed out to his students at the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris. Nonetheless, nothing indicates a close relationship between the two scholars other than occasional and episodic contact.

There is nothing surprising in this for anyone who is careful to avoid a conception of the history of anthropology overly oriented to the present and who avoids the temptation of an a posteriori reading of the history of the field. As a matter of fact, it was with Paul Rivet (1876-1958), the other founding father of modern French ethnology—who is relatively unknown today and whose importance has been underestimated to such an extent that he is the poor cousin in this historiography—that Franz Boas maintained an unsuspected, long, and passionate epistolary relationship that has until today not been the object of attentive and detailed analysis, although this enables us to enrich the way we look at these two anthropologists and understand the quality of their relations.⁴ Over a period from 1919 to 1941, the two men exchanged no fewer than 129 letters—52 from Paul Rivet and 77 from Franz Boas—which is a considerable number. The first merit of this correspondence is to make truly palpable...