In the Museum of Man: Race, anthropology, and empire in France, 1850–1950 by Alice L. Conklin (review)

Alice Conklin’s book is a meticulously researched and nuanced study of the rival branches of the science of man in France between 1850 and 1950. Students of France, race and colonial science should not miss it, even though this is more a book on intellectual currents in Paris than on actual experiences and results in the colonized regions. At the heart of the study is the emergence of an ethnology that attempted to shed racial thinking with its more socio-cultural approach while racial science and racial explanations also persisted well into the twentieth century. Conklin follows these two strands of the science of man and their entanglements as they evolved. Though she starts and ends the book with the 1950 UNESCO declaration that race was not a biological fact but a social myth, a chapter on the role of anthropologists in Vichy France shows that this is no comforting story of how cultural relativism and ethnology triumphed over racial determinism.

The book is set up as a “multigenerational group portrait” of ethnologists who were committed to anti-racialism and pluralism, and their colleagues who propagated racial science in more or less politicized versions. The main protagonists are Marcel Mauss, nephew of Émile Durkheim and famous for his work on gift exchange, Paul Rivet, founder of the Musée de l’homme, their students and biological determinist George Montandon. The book also revolves around one central institution: the Musée de l’homme, opened in 1938, and its predecessors. The museum as a setting provides room for a focus on displays and educational purposes and for an analysis of the ongoing tug of war about who should be in charge of the museum.

Conklin, a professor in history at Ohio State University, is an expert in the history of the French Empire, so it comes as no surprise that “empire” is in the title of this book too. Two out of seven chapters (Five and Six) focus specifically on the relation between anthropology and colonialism. The book’s other chapters can also be grouped in sets of two: the first two chapters introduce the protagonists, Chapters Three and Four focus on the museum and Chapter Seven and the short epilogue cover the war and the UNESCO declaration.

Continuing on the work of many other scholars, both in French and English, Chapter One brings clarity in the labyrinthine cluster of individuals and institutional arrangements that made up the science of man in the nineteenth century. In the 1890s, social science in the form of the Durkheimians was sufficiently well organised to oppose the threat of scientific racism, as Chapter Two shows. Biological anthropology however would still be part of the science of man that Mauss and Rivet envisaged.

The new discipline also needed a museum and Chapter Three and Four show how, thanks to the assistant director Georges Henri Rivière, a “bourgeois aesthete and jazz enthusiast with no scientific training” (105), the museum of ethnography expanded and professionalized in the interwar years, in conjunction with the 1937 World’s Fair and culminating in the opening of the Musée de l’homme in 1938. But did the ethnologists succeed in challenging scientific racism in the museum? Displays included skulls, and the Anthropology Hall was all about racial difference with a section devoted to the three major “races” of the world. These museum displays show, according to Conklin, that even though ethnologists had nuanced views, they could not and did not fully break away from stereotypical views of racial difference.

For the readers of this journal, Conklin’s Chapters Five and Six are the most interesting as they deal with the extent to which the new professionalizing field of ethnology was a colonial science. Though there is little consensus on what that means, and while Pierre Singaravélou has argued that the ethnologists of Conklin’s book were marginal figures compared to colonial experts from...