A Surrealist Writer's Diary of a Twenty-One-Month Anthropological Expedition

Michel Leiris (1901, 1990) joined the surrealist group led by André Breton in 1921; he published a volume of poetry and a surrealist novel, Aurora. In 1922 he began a lifelong practice of keeping a diary. He married Louise Godon ("Zette") in 1926. In 1929, afflicted with depression, a year of sexual impotence, masochist tendencies, alcohol abuse, and writer's block, he entered psychoanalysis with Dr. Adrien Borel. His diary, dedicated to total lucidity and a ruthless account of everything mortifying in himself, now is also psychoanalysis. He joined the dissident surrealists gathered around Georges Bataille. He followed anthropology courses taught by Marcel Mauss. He came to know Marcel Griaule, a young pilot in the French Air Force who now devoted himself to anthropology and had obtained diplomas in two Abyssinian languages. In 1931 Griaule organized a twenty-one-month expedition traversing Africa from Dakar to Djibouti. Leiris joined the expedition as its secretary and archivist. Upon his return he published the 533-page diary he had kept during the expedition as Phantom Africa. He now enrolled in anthropology classes; studied the history of religions, sociology, and the Amharic language; and in 1938 received a degree in anthropology. He then headed the Africa Section of the Musée de l'Homme until his retirement in 1971. He published some forty books, a series of autobiographical writings, ethnographic studies, and studies of major contemporary artists.

In 1931 the six months of the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris celebrated the economic and cultural resources of the French Empire. The "Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic and Linguistic Mission" that Griaule launched profited from the publicity from the exhibition and from a grant of 700,000 francs voted by the French Parliament, and from private subsidies.¹ The mission crossed nine French colonies, part of the Belgian Congo, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

The mission's primary purpose was to collect objects for the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, which was soon to become the Musée de l'Homme. They brought back 3,600 objects and Abyssinian paintings, 70 human skulls, 300 manuscripts, 6,000 photographs, and 200 sound recordings. For the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, they brought back 5,000 butterflies and insects, 170 stuffed birds, 20 stuffed mammals and preserved embryos, and live animals: a lion, a leopard, a warthog, two African hunting dogs, an armed duck, and a wild dog.

The mission was also an ethnographic and linguistic mission. The collection of utilitarian objects and clothing, ritual objects and status and ceremonial adornments, musical instruments and recordings, and paintings and sculptures was to constitute the primary documentation of a society. Griaule enlisted for the expedition an ethnographer, two linguists, a musicologist, an artist, a naturalist-taxidermist, a cinematographer, three technicians, and Leiris, who was to record the identity, provenance, use, and cultural significance of the objects collected. They stopped two months to study the Dogon of Sanga, six weeks to study the Kirdi of northwestern Cameroon, and five months to study zar spirit possession in Gondar in Abyssinia.

Ethnographers were enjoined to keep a daily journal in the field; Leiris was to do this for the expedition. He transcribed into the journal accounts of dances and funeral ceremonies witnessed and meticulous observations of spirit possession in Abyssinia. He also wrote of the acquisition of artifacts and ritual objects and of practical problems of transport. Griaule also expected Leiris would produce for publication a history of the expedition. But from the beginning Leiris had no intention to do so. The journal he kept was in fact the continuation of the diary he had kept since 1922.

Leiris wrote little of the character and activities of the other members of the expedition. He mentioned one or another only inasmuch he had interacted with them that day (although a few times he mentions one of them had sex with a native woman). He took pains...