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

In this meticulously researched monograph Alice L. Conklin offers a new perspective on the relationship between science, society, and empire. Focusing on the Musée de l’homme in Paris, she takes on an idée reçue of colonial historiography and postcolonial studies: the notion that anthropology is, in the words of Kathleen Gough, ‘a child of Western Imperialism’ (‘Anthropology and Imperialism’, Monthly Review, 19.11 (1968), 12–27 (p. 12)). Conklin traces the institutional and epistemological development of anthropology in France, from the cranial measurements practised by Paul Broca in the second half of the nineteenth century, to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s pioneering of structural anthropology after the Second World War. Opening with UNESCO’s condemnation in 1950 of scientific racism, a condemnation that bore the hallmark of French ethnological thought, she maps out the growth of the school of ethnology advocated by the sociologist Marcel Mauss and the anthropologist Paul Rivet, and shows how this school challenged the dominance of the biological, and overtly hierarchical, study of human ‘races’ within the human sciences in France during the two decades preceding the Second World War. Structured broadly chronologically, the monograph narrates the individual and interconnected histories of the academic institutions, museums, and personnel that together forged French anthropological thinking. Chapters address key themes such as the Exposition coloniale of 1931 and the opening of the Musée de l’homme in 1938 (on the former site of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro); the relationship between ethnology and colonialism (Conklin arguing that French ethnologists were often astute critics of empire); and the role played by ethnologists during the war (in which several of Mauss’s mentees joined and died in the Resistance). While the analysis acknowledges how French ethnology was influenced by international developments, exemplified by the interest of Georges Henri Rivière in American museums, it demonstrates how the school was also dependent on social, educational, and artistic networks peculiar to the Third Republic. The real strength of Conklin’s argument is her careful examination of how the path from the racism of the nineteenth century to UNESCO’s statement of 1950 was neither inevitable nor uncontested. Central to this is her interrogation of the writings of George Montandon and his administrative role under Vichy. It is now axiomatic that the guiding precepts of Vichy developed out of the Third Republic, and in recent years much has been done within the historiography of la plus grande France to demonstrate how racialization and racism, far from being specific to Pétain and Vichy, were prevalent before 1940; nevertheless, Conklin’s systematic analysis of Montandon’s entire œuvre offers new historical insights into the career of ‘one of Vichy’s most extreme collaborators’ (p. 308). Interweaving Montandon’s story with that of the ethnologists mentored by Mauss, who challenged dominant discourses of empire and racism, she successfully establishes that there was no French colonial consensus around any conception of race. Instead, a series of unresolved arguments about whether race was ‘an essential biological component of human identity’ (p. 146) were played out during the inter-war years in a European context in which the science of humanity was anything but politically neutral.