Ethnography as Relation: The Significance of the French Caribbean in the Ethnographic Writing of Michel Leiris

This article considers two kinds of connection between Leiris and the French Caribbean that between his ideas on ethnography and Martinican Édouard Glissant’s concept of Relation; and the impact that his encounter with the French Caribbean had on those ideas. In 1950 Leiris develops a conception of ethnography as a partnership between Western and non-Western societies in which the ethnographer is not only politically involved in the societies she or he studies, but also trains native ethnographers so that the discipline can become a dialogue — or Relation — between the perspectives of ‘self’ and ‘other’ on the self’s and the other’s cultures. In two important articles on Leiris, Glissant comments approvingly on Leiris’s formulation of the difference between his earlier phantasy of identification with the colonized and his new politicized stance. In fact, however, the difference is less clear-cut: Leiris’s writing continues to express a complex imbrication of the personal and the political; the political commitment can be seen as a ‘sublimated’ version of the original emotional investment. Leiris moves from a desire to achieve ‘contact vrai’ with the black other to a sublimated desire to study societies that are themselves made up of contacts with other cultures; and the Caribbean provides the ideal example. But the importance of the Caribbean for Leiris lies also in the greater possibilities it offers, compared with Africa, for making his own personal ‘contacts’, through his friendship with Césaire, with politically active Antillean intellectuals, and hence laying the foundations for interactive ethnographic partnerships.