Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

A Conversation with Michel Leiris

Author(s): Sally Price and Jean Jamin
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Feb., 1988), pp. 157-174
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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Reports

A Conversation with
Michel Leiris'
SALLY

PRICE

AND

Paris, France. 28

JEAN

X 86/I2

JAMIN
III

87

Introduction [sp]: More than most participants in the

anthropological world, Michel Leiris eludes pigeonholing in terms of traditional categories of intellectual activity. With one foot in anthropology and another in literature, his life has also been centered on close personal
relations with a diverse network of creative artists and
thinkers, from Picasso to Sartre. In the realm of anthropology, both his recognition of the importance of the
ethnographer's subjectivity and his fascination with
"hybrid" social and cultural situations (particularly in
colonial settings) place his work of the I930S a halfcentury ahead of its time.
Many Anglophone anthropologists know Leiris best as
a participant in France's first major scientific expedition

in Africa,the Dakar-Djiboutiexpeditionof I93I-33,

led

by Marcel Griaule. It is therefore curious that his conscientious, sensitive, and introspective journal of that
undertaking, published in France as L'Afrique fantome
(I934), has never been translated. Indeed, relatively little
of his anthropological writing has come out in English.
The journal Sulfur has produced the beginnings of a corrective to this gap in the form of a special issue devoted
to Leiris (no. I5 [i986]); in addition to an opening essay
by James Clifford, it includes new translations of a variety of Leiris's anthropological and literary writings.2
The production of the following pages has conformed
to the Paris Review model, as described recently by John
Updike, allowing the participants "the opportunity to
peruse and edit the transcript, to eliminate babble and
indiscretion and to hone finer the elicited apergus" (New
York Times Book Review, August I7, I986, p. I); for
Michel Leiris fully shares the views of most of the Paris
Review interviewees, whose cooperation before a microphone represented more of a courteous and goodwilled concession to friendly pressure than an active enthusiasm for laying one's thoughts on the oral line. The
participation of Jean Jamin, Leiris's close friend and colleague at the Departement d'Afrique Noire of the Musee

I. ? I988 by The Wenner-GrenFoundation for Anthropological

Research.All rights reserved OOII-3204/88/29oi-0005$I.00.
2. Available for U.S. $6 plus $I postage from Sulfur, 2io Washtenaw Ave., Ypsilanti, Mich. 48I97, U.S.A.

de l'Homme, was explicitly designed to nudge the exchanges out of the realm of a formal interview and toward a more spontaneous conversation. Even so, the enterprise was hardly-as Leiris notes at the end-one
built on his favorite medium of communication.
Given the current attention being paid in anthropology to the nature of dialogue and its transcription and
translation, the steps that led to the text deserve comment. In the spring of I986, Leiris accepted my proposition to participate in this project on the condition that
he be given the opportunity to rephrase his comments in
writing. Two sessions were held at Leiris's home, on
October 28, I986, and March I2, I987. Jamin kindly
undertook the laborious task of converting the three and
a half hours of recorded conversation into wordprocessed pages and made substantial editorial modifications (deletions, amplifications, and reordering)with the
aim of pulling together related points in the discussion;
he also drafted many of the notes. This text was submitted to Leiris, who reworked pieces of his own commentary, making further abridgments and elaborations. I
reviewed this text (lightly rephrasing some of my own
questions, deleting a few exchanges, and reintroducing
two or three phrases that had been omitted in the first
written version) and translated it into English. I then
added to the notes, drafted this introduction, and
showed the whole manuscript to Leiris, who made a few
final revisions. Responsibility for the editing of this version rests with me; Jamin has prepared a French version
for the Paris-based journal Gradhiva. In short, this "conversation" represents (like its French variant) a text
based on recorded discussions, rather than a transcription in the strict mechanical sense. The illustrations were selected by Leiris.
After the conversations were held, I read for the first
time a 23-page typescript entitled "Titres et travaux," a
kind of discursive curriculum vitae which Leiris produced in I967 for his promotion to the rank of Directeur
de Recherche at the Centre National de Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS). As a preface to the following pages,
I have translated (rather literally) the introduction to
this previously unpublished document, in which Leiris,
referring to himself in the third person, summarized his
anthropological career.

Bornin Paris,April 2o, I9OI, Michel Leirisparticipated in the surrealist movement from I924 until
at that time he broke with the movement,
i929;
though he did not renounce the aims of broadly defined psychological and social liberation which it espoused. Motivated by these "humanist" concerns, he
became-even while pursuing his activities as a
I57

I58 | CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

writer-a professional anthropologist upon return

from his first trip to Black Africa: the Dakar-Djibouti

expeditionof I93I-33,

which he had been invited to

join by Marcel Griaule, with whom he was in contaci

through Georges Henri Riviere, then Associate Director [sous-directeurl of the Musee d'Ethnographie du
Trocadero. L'Afrique fant6me, the diary he kept over
the course of the expedition, can be seen at once as
marking his debut into anthropological writing and
setting the stage for the series of autobiographical
writings that represent the core of his work as a
writer, of which the best-known is L'aiged'homme
and of which a more recent volume, Fourbis,
(I939)
won the Prix des Critiques in I95 6. It was after returning from the Dakar-Djibouti expedition that
Michel Leiris took courses with teachers such as
Marcel Mauss (with whom he had previously studied
as an auditor), Marcel Cohen, and Paul Rivet.
As a poet, Michel Leiris has published, among
other works, Glossaire j'y serre mes glosses (I939), a
very special testimony to his long-standing interest ir
language as a lever to the imagination, as well as

Haut mal (I943) andAurora(I946); all three of these

books emerge directly from a surrealist perspective.
As a critic, he has written numerous studies, devoted
particularly to his writer and artist friends, including
Max Jacob, Raymond Roussel, Georges Bataille, Pablo
Picasso, Andre Masson, Joan Miro, Alberto Giacometti, and Francis Bacon. His fascination over the
years with bullfighting, to which he attaches a strong
aesthetic value, led to the appearance of Miroir de la
tauromachie (1938), as well as other writings of
taurine inspiration, and he established the text for a
feature-length documentary film called La course de
taureaux, which was realized by Pierre Braunberger
(I95').
In addition to the professional travels that took
him to Black Africa and then the Caribbean, a field
site inspired by his Africanist experience and his
friendship with the Martiniquan poet Aime Cesaire,
Michel Leiris has made trips of varying length to
Egypt, to parts of North Africa, and to several European countries. The mobilization of I939, by sending
him to the Sud Oranais [Algeria], provided the opportunity for a Saharan experience. In I95 5 he participated in a delegation of the Association of FrenchChinese Friendship which traveled to the People's
Republic of China. Finally, he made a brief trip to

Japanin I964 and went to Cubain I967.

Originally conceptualized as a kind of intellectual
expatriation and later chosen as a second profession,
anthropology now represents to Michel Leiris an activity that is intimately tied in with his literary activity. Given that poetry was his primary interest, he
was in a privileged position to conduct a study of the
language of initiation among the Dogon of Sanga and
to go on, afterwards, to a stylistic analysis of the texts
that had been gathered. In addition, the importance
that theater and performative spectacles more generally held for him could hardly help but lead him to

examine, with an obstinate determination to discern

the psychological underpinnings, the "ritual comedy"
(in the words of Alfred Metraux) which is practiced
by initiates to possession cults like that of the zalrin
Ethiopia or like Haitian vodu. Had art criticism not
been a familiar pursuit, it would have been more
difficult for him to adopt, aside from an anthropological perspective, a truly aesthetic perspective for his
latest publication, Afrique noire: La cre6ationplastique, which was written with Jacqueline Delange,
a colleague at the Musee de l'Homme. At the same
time, it is absolutely clear to him that his experience
as an ethnographic observer has contributed to his attempts at self-description. For is it not, in addition to
a psychoanalytic cure, the habit of assuming the position of an observer, when faced with human phenomena, which has allowed him to become the witness,
in some sense external, to things that were happening
within himself?
SP: Perhaps I should start out by saying just a few words
about the original idea behind this conversation. Adam
Kuper, who first proposed it, was particularly interested
in your reflections on the intellectual environment of
French anthropology over the past 50 years or so. I'm
hoping that we can talk about anthropology not so much
in a narrow sense as in terms of its ties with the literary
world, the artistic world, and the political world.
ML: Ties which were rather tenuous, in fact. There
wasn't much. It's true that I had some connections, but
you mustn't imagine that that was true for everyone.
SP: How should we proceed? Shall we set ourselves an
agenda, or would you prefer to wander around freely
among different subjects?
ML: I think the simplest thing is to wander around a bit
all over. I even believe that that's the only way to arrive
anywhere. In any case, we have Jean here who might be
willing to start out by making either a grand declaration
or else perhaps a short but incisive statement.
JJ:Not at all. I have no grand declaration to make. But
we could begin by using the CA interview with Edmund
Leach as a model; in that case what would be involved is
a kind of intellectual autobiography in spoken form. In
your case, Michel, it strikes me that although you have
written and talked quite a bit about yourself, you have
said relatively little about the intellectual itinerary that
led you into anthropology.
ML: In terms of my own experience, I can say quite
frankly that it was surrealism, which I was involved

with during the first four years (i925-29)

and which

represented for me the rebellion against the so-called

rationalism of Western society and therefore an intellectual curiosity about peoples who represented more or
less what Levy-Bruhl called at the time the mentalite
primitive. It's quite simple.

Volume

JJ:But did you talk much about anthropology, as such, in

the company of surrealists?
ML: Hardly. No, we talked rather about the Orient in
the Rimbaldian sense: Orient with a capital 0, meaning
all that is not part of the Occident. Artaud, and the rest
of us after him, vomited up the Pope and developed a
kind of cult of the Dalai Lama [(Artaud) i925]. It was a
bit convoluted.
JJ:In the end, you were replacing one cult-that
son-with another.

of Rea-

ML: Exactly, but we didn't realize that at the time. We

stood firmly against the West. And this was evident in a
fairly blatant way in the surrealist statements and manifestos. What was going on was a rebellion against Western civilization, plain and simple.
JJ:But the Western civilization that you were rejectingdidn't you reduce it, sometimes rather crudely, to a few
key elements, or perhaps even just to capitalism?

29,

Number

i,

February I988 1 159

not the same thing. Since then, a lot of water has passed
under the bridge, and the issues have been examined
more dispassionately. Breton had enormous strong
points-that goes without saying-but he also had a
fault: he was a difficult person, and rather authoritarian.
There were quite a few of us who rebelled against him.
And then, at that time it was primarily Bataille, who had
never been a surrealist, who accused Breton of being an
idealist in spite of his claims of materialism. All of this
is so terribly complicated that I think I should simply
refer you to the history of surrealism written by Nadeau
[I964 (I944)]. But in the end, what matters and what is, I
think, really important is that our first political position
was an anticolonialist position, opposed to the Guerre
du Rif. Basically, we were concerned about the situation
of colonized peoples well before we were concerned
about the situation of the proletariat. It seems quite
likely-this is the aesthetic dimension-that exoticism
played a role. We were much more inclined to be solidary with "exotic" oppressed people than with oppressed people living here.
JJ:How did you first get involved in surrealism?

ML: Yes. But then-not right away. That happened only

later, and that's the reason that most of us moved in the
direction of communism. At the beginning it wasn't
conceptualized in terms of capitalist society. Within
these developments, given that we're adopting an anthropological perspective for present purposes, there is
one thing that is perhaps worthy of mention: it's that
our first political manifestation was the Saint-Pol Roux
banquet, which was, in effect, a protest against the war
in Morocco.3 The cry was "Vive Abd el-Krim!"

ML: I was very close to Masson; at the time he was more

or less my mentor [maitre a penser], and he had become
a surrealist. In terms of how I got to know Masson-I
had met someone named Roland Tual who also became
a surrealist but who never wrote anything; I first met
him through Max Jacob in Saint-Benoit sur Loire, when
Max Jacob had retired to the Benedictines. I became
close with Tual immediately, and he told me I should
absolutely get to know his friend Andre Masson, whom
he considered a marvelous painter. I met him in i92i,
and we hit it off from the very first [see Leiris i982]. But
JJ:And "Down with France!"
it was Max Jacobwho was my mentor in terms of poetry.
ML: Yes, naturally. But all that had nothing to do with I used to send him poems and he would correct them for
anthropology or with an interest in what is now called me. Well, not exactly. He generally told me that they
the Third World. At any rate, our first political state- were very bad. He wasn't wrong. That's how I did my
ment was the adoption of an anticolonialist stance.
apprenticeship. Masson's influence was through his
painting and as a person. He was a very cultured man
SP: Can you describe how the ideology you've been talk- who had a tremendous store of knowledge. I used to go
ing about evolved over time, in terms of your own posi- to his studio in the afternoon while he was working. We
talked. We talked about things we were reading. Sometion?
times I would do some work. It was really an atelier in
ML: I never really rejected surrealism as such. Like sev- the full sense of the term. Miro was already there; he
eral others, I rejected the tutelage of Breton, but that's was Masson's immediate neighbor. Masson is the one
who got me involved with surrealism. He had an exhibition at the Galerie Simon, which was run by Kahnweiler
3. The banquet given in honor of the poet Saint-Pol Roux (i86iI940),
whom Breton considered a precursor of surrealism, took [see Kahnweiler i982]. Breton went to the exhibit and
place in July I925 at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris.It was the stage was very taken with a painting by Masson called Les
for one of the great scandals of surrealism,as the surrealistspresent quatre 6lements, so he wanted to meet him. Later it was
gave a particularly hard time to one of the invited guests, Mme.
Rachilde, reproachingher for her chauvinistic patriotism. Breton Masson who introduced me to Breton. I also knew Lim(I969 [1I9521:I1I5-I7)
later noted that "Leiris barely escaped a bour, who had already become a surrealist, though not a
lynching for having uttered expressly seditious remarks,first cry- very orthodox one and not very disciplined. Through
ing them out at the window and then on the boulevard." The him I got to know Desnos. I might have already menGuerredu Rif was one of the first major colonial wars; first Spain tioned to you, because
it's interesting in terms of la
and then France fought, from i 92i to i926, against the Berber
histoire
I was talking a walk one afpetite
litteraire:
tribes who were united under the military andpolitical authorityof
must have had lunch
Abd el-Krim and who had been opposing Europeanattempts to ternoon with Limbour-we
penetrate their territory since the early i gth century.
together-and by pure chance we ran into Desnos,

i6o I CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

whom Limbour knew pretty well.4 Desnos caught us up

on news of the French ex-Dada group and told us that
there was going to be a new journal called La Revolution
Surrealiste-a title, Desnos added, along the lines of La
Bataille Syndicaliste. Later I saw Breton pretty regularly
in the famous Cafe Cyrano. But I was attached principally to Aragon, who was much more "with it"
[beaucoup plus dans la vie] than Breton. Breton took on
the role of guru to some extent, but with Aragon we used
to wander around at night in Montmartre.
JJ:In a sense wasn't this a break with the Catholic upbringing and bourgeois background that your family
gave you?
ML: I never considered it as a break. Quite frankly, I had
no ambition whatsoever to have any kind of a profession
at all. I just wanted to write.
SP: If you were 2o or 30 years old today-at a time when
surrealism has settled in as part of our cultural heritage
but is no longer a contemporary dynamic movementwhat are the associations that you would develop? Who
are the people in the literary or artistic or political world
that you can imagine getting involved with?
ML: At the present time I don't know of anyone, like
Breton or like Sartre later on, who could really be called
intellectual leaders [maitres a penser]. I really see no one
at all. I don't mean to say that there aren't very able
people of absolutely top quality, but as for people who
could really be called maitres a penser, who inspire a lot
of people to follow them, who persuade others of their
vision-I don't see whom you could say that of today.
SP: In other words, you were fortunate in being born into
a moment of history that was particularly receptiveML: Yes. I believe that the situation of young intellectuals during the twenties was a great deal better than it is
now. After all, the political and economic problems
were less severe. It was therefore more normal to engage
in almost purely intellectual activities. Today there are
certainly people, as I said, of real worth, but things are
more dispersed. There really is no intellectual movement worthy of the name.
JJ:And then there was the influence of jazz, which you
wrote about in that famous passage in L'alged'homme.
ML: Of course. Jazz was very important to me.
JJ:Coming back to what you were saying earlier: was
jazz seen as being something exotic?

4. Georges Limbour (1900-1970)

was a writer and art critic whi

signed Bataille's anti-Breton pamphlet, Un Cadavre, in I93C

Robert Desnos (1900-1945)

was an early star of surrealism, gifte,

in the practice of automatic writing.

ML: For me, it represented exoticism within the context

of American industrial society. Jazz was simultaneously
part of industrial civilization and Africa.
SP: I remember reading in something you wrote that you
conceptualized jazz almost as a kind of spirit possession.5
ML: A litle bit, it's true. I was very ready to think of jazz
as being something like trance. And I don't think that's
totally wrong.
SP: Did your experiences seeing trance in Africa modify
your perception of jazz?
ML: I once wrote a review of a film by King Vidor called
Hallelujah [Leiris I930] in which I suggested that blacks
were people who were particularly able to abandon
themselves and to enter into states of trance.
JJ:It seems as though the surrealists could have been
expected to have an interest in jazz. And yet that wasn't
the case.
ML: Breton couldn't stand music. But there were others
who liked it well enough.
JJ:There was surrealist poetry, surrealist painting, and
surrealist sculpture, but was there ever any surrealist
music?
ML: There's no way you could have had surrealist
music. In order to have surrealism, there first has to be
realism. There has to be a reality to manipulate. Music
(and I am not denigrating it when I say this) has absolutely nothing to do with reality. It's a system that has
no signs. Music has no signification. What matters are
the relationships between sounds. Surrealist music is
inconceivable. Literary surrealism, yes, because literature is made of words. Pictorial surrealism, yes, because
pictures are made of images. But a musical surrealism?
What could it be based on?
JJ:You wouldn't consider jazz surrealist in a way?
ML: Not at all. At least not as I see it. It does have one
feature that also contributes to surrealism, thoughimprovisation.

JJ:There's also a subversion of values-that is, of Westem musical values. Sometimes even an explicit attempt
to mock them.
ML: OK. But that's a very secondary aspect. The essential thing is that literary or pictorial surrealism implies
that signifying things are being played with. In music, in
iazz. there are no signifiers. I've alwavs liked and
5. See Leiris's i982 discussion of jazz with Michael Haggerty, translated in Sulfur 15:97-104.

Volume 29, Number i, FebruaryI9881 i6i

thought highly of Rene Leibowitz, my good friend th
composer, conductor, and musicologist, whose intell
gence and sensitivity I have always admired. But he onc
wrote a little book in which, as I see it, he was con
pletely off-base, and Sartre's preface to it was too. At th
time he wrote it, when people were talking about a ii
terature engagee, he thought he'd shown that there wa
such a thing as a musique engagee, and he used as hi
example Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw. Wel
the fact is that the A Survivor from Warsaw is absc
lutely not musique engagee; it's the words that are er;
gages, not the music.6 One of the sad proofs that musi
can't be engagee is the famous chorus from Nabucc
Verdi's opera, which was almost a Risorgimento-typ
anthem and has now been called into service by the e)
treme right as the anthem of the Front National!
JJ: Returning to the idea of exoticism, it's interestin
that the surrealists' interest in exoticism was played ou
more by thought than by action. Contrary to what man
people think, they traveled very little. And you were th
only one who became an ethnographer.
ML: In fact, it wasn't just a matter of exoticism. It wa
more a hatred of ways of thinking and ways of bein
which were accepted as a matter of course in our ow.
society. You have to realize that there was a very marke
Parisianness in surrealism. For example, Aragon's L
paysan de Paris [I953 (i926)], which I consider one (
the great books of the surrealist movement, is in a way
search for the merveilleux, for mythical element!
within Parisian life-for example, on the grand boiu
levards or the Passage de l'Opera. And a little later or
Nadja [Breton I964 (i928)] was the same thing. Esser
tially, Nadja is an exclusively Parisian merveilleux. Yoi
could say that surrealism was basically a validation c
the irrational; whether that happened somewhere else o
here was absolutely beside the point. You say that I'r
the only surrealist to have become an anthropologisi
and it's true that I'm perhaps the only one to have be
come a professional anthropologist, but for exampl
there's also Benjamin Peret, who published a collectioi
of Indian myths [I960], in Mexico I think, and there'
also a younger fellow, Vincent Bounoure, who's becom
a specialist in Oceanic art.
JJ:But they're not professional anthropologists!
ML: No, that's true.
SP: Perhaps that's not the essential distinction here.
ML: I was probably the one who went farthest in tha
direction. But you certainly couldn't say that I was the
only one. Even Breton-Marguerite Bonnet, who's di
recting a new edition of Breton's work about to appearii
6. See Leibowitz (I950). Leibowitz preparedthe final score of the
I947
work for Schoenberg,whose eyesight was failing, and conducted its first Europeanperformance,in Paris.

La Pleiade, has discovered some notes that Breton took

among the Hopi.
JJ:In looking through some surrealist declarations and
manifestos, I came upon a "Read/Don't Read" list
[Pierre I980], which included Levy-Bruhl's Mentalite
primitive in the banned column, as well as Durkheim!
ML: Yes, but Levy-Bruhl was inspirational for me, not
for the surrealists. I think that for the surrealists, and for
Breton in particular, Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl must
have seemed too academic.
SP: Turning toward a different branch of the surrealist
movement, can you tell us something about your friendship with Aime Cesaire [Leiris i965]?
ML: That happened relatively late. My friendship with
Cesaire, which quickly became a very close one, dates to

about

I945

or I946, maybe even I947. I met him

through Pierre Loeb, the art dealer. I must have known

him for about a year before I made my first trip to the
Caribbean, on the occasion of the centenary of the i848
Revolution.
SP: Did he influence your decision to go to the Caribbean?
ML: Absolutely, it was really because of him that I went
the first time. There's one thing that should perhaps be
mentioned about my involvement with the Caribbean.
In the same way that what attracted me in jazz was its
mixedness, its hybrid aspect-that is, the fact that it
combined African roots with contributions from Western civilization-I was attracted to the Caribbean because of the cultural clash that took place there.
SP: One of the things that I find striking about Cesaire is
the fact that, although his writing is so strongly Antillean in expression, he has never (that I'm aware of) written anything purely in Creole.
ML: He considered the idea of writing in Creole inopportune. Since he had a message to get across-a message of
negritude and a pro-Antillean statement-he needed to
do that in a language that was widely used. He couldn't
do that in a language that's semifolkloric the way Creole
is.
SP: On the other hand, you argued very vigorously, almost 40 years ago [ig5oa], that Creole should be included in the educational curriculum in Martinique.
ML: Of course. It's not good to pull people away from
their native language. But a writer who sees himself as
having a message to get across-it's quite reasonable
that he would use a language more widely understood
than his native language.

CURRENT

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SP: How would you characterize the relationship between negritude and surrealism [see Leiris ig5oa:Io6i6]?
ML: For Cesaire, negritude is essentially the condition of
those who were viewed as blacks by the society in which
they lived. The term and the idea were invented by
Cesaire and Senghor and Damas when the three of them
were students together. It was a matter of showing nonwhite students who were working here that they had
something in common with each other, and that was
their negritude-that is, the fact that they were all
treated as blacks by the other students, who were
whites. Obviously, one can say that among blacks
rationalism is not as greatly valued as it is among us, or
at least as much as we claim to value it.
SP: Another question, still thinking about the Antillean
response to surrealism: The surrealist movement is often viewed as a particularly French-and even, as you
pointed out earlier, a particularly Parisian-phenomenon.
ML: That's true.
SP: And as "rebellions" go, surrealism seems to have
been an unusually "civilized" one in the strictly Westem European sense of the term. It strikes me that Antillean intellectuals like Cesaire who became surrealists
were not only making a statement of rebellion like their
Parisian colleagues but also and in the same breath displaying their classical erudition and affirming their mastery of a very European French culture.
ML: Yes, that's a legitimate way to view it. For a very
long time Caribbean writers-if I may be critical, and
perhaps even a bit hard on them-were under the influence of the Parnassians and then later the surrealists.
That is to say, they took their cues from outside in both
cases. Now, Cesaire did not just receive; he also contribHe and his friends who were inuted-enormously.
volved in the joumal Tropiques could hardly not sympathize with surrealism, which was the enemy of a kind
of culture that represented above all, for them, the system that an authoritarian metropolitan power was trying to impose upon them. As a student, Cesaire first
developed (with Senghor and Damas, as I mentioned) the
idea of negritude; and several years later, at the beginning of the last war, he was taken on as a traveling companion by Breton, who met him in Fort-de-France. In
becoming one of the major voices of surrealism, Cesaire
may have shown his mastery of certain French values,
but it's also important not to forget that those very
heterodox, even revolutionary, values had nothing to do
_.:.

rr :

i-

1:.

7. For a discussion of the journal Tropiques and of Cesaire's ties

with Leon-Gontran Damas and Leopold Senghor, see Eshleman and
Smith (I983).

JJ:Isn't there something rather shocking about the way

surrealists viewed other cultures as being more irrational than ours, or as being totally irrational? Wasn't
this a denigration more than a validation of them?
ML: I mentioned earlier my review of the film by King
Vidor. I realize now that it was racist, given that it accepts with approval all the ideas that were used to stereotype blacks-unbridled sexuality, predisposition to
trance, etc.
JJ:If you looked at things another way, you could argue
that validating the "irrational" you've been talking
about had the effect of imbuing it with a positive aspect,
which is exactly what no one ever said. It took on as
much value as our rationalism, or our so-called rationalism.
ML: Certainly, the surrealist point of view assigned the
irrational greater validity, a more human quality.
JJ:So that the cult of rationalism was being replaced by a
cult of the irrational. But let's come back to anthropology. Would you say that in the beginning, and because of
the fact that anthropology focused attention on primitive societies, which were seen as irrational, that it
undermined the notion of rationalism in something of
the same way that surrealism did? And this even though
it was thought of as a science?
ML: Yes, but it was a science of the irrational. I thought
for a long time that members of Westem society could
leam from the experiences of certain non-Western societies and that these societies could have a very positive
influence.

JJ:In what sense?

ML: As if one way of life was more valid than another. It
was only later, after reflecting on the matter quite a bit,
that I arrived at what's known as cultural relativism. But
at the beginning, I truly thought that so-called primitive
societies were superior to ours. It was a kind of inverted
racism. You might say that it took me a very long time
to realize that within these splendid societies that ethnographers study there could be idiots and assholes exactly as in ours.
SP: Edmund Leach recently suggested that the central
problem for anthropologists today "is not whether we
should approach our data as scientists or as poets but
whether we can fully convince ourselves . . . that the
distinction between savage and civilised upon which the
whole edifice of traditional anthropology was constructed deserves to be consigned to the trash can"
[I986]. As I've understood your own fascination with
hybrid (and especially colonized) societies, it's as if
you're envisioning them as somewhere between these
two poles.

Volume29, Number i, FebruaryI9881 1I63

ML: Not exactly between them; it's more that they em
brace both poles, they represent a conjunction of th
two.
SP: In terms of the Caribbean, in what sense do you se
it as European and in what sense as African?
ML: In terms of what's European in the Caribbean-an(
I'm speaking now of the French Antilles-it's relativel,
simple. I've often heard schoolgirls there singing littli
songs that I had sung as a child in France. And then
you're familiar with Fort-de-France and other sucl
cities; they seem a lot like cities in the French provinces
In addition, the creole language, with its black Africai
syntax and its lexicon deriving essentially from Frencb
is a striking expression of the clash that happened there
In terms of what might be called "primitive," that's vis
ible at least within the popular sector and can be seen
for example, in the frequent recourse people have ti
magic and the strong inclination toward dance an(
music.

JJ:In this regard but retuming to the subject of jazz, it'

interesting that even though its African origins are th
dominant ones (on the level of rhythm), it was the Wes
that went farthest in recognizing and appreciating an(
valuing it. I'm thinking of that remarkable anecdote re
lated by Schaeffner [Jamin Ig8ia]. In 193I, during th4
Dakar-Djibouti expedition, the "boy" on the missioi
showed little or no interest in the pieces of jazz tha
Schaeffner played on the phonograph, but he did like t(
whistle the melody of Ravel's Bolero, which Schaeffne:
also liked to play on the phono. Schaeffner was surprise(
and, to tell the truth, terribly disappointed-being th
author of one of the first books to explore the Africar
roots of jazz [Schaeffner and Coeuroy i926].
ML: I might point out that Ravel's Bolero is above all
dance with an extremely strong rhythm.
SP: Over the past few years there's been a lot of interesi
in the influence of ethnographic materials on moderr
artists, Picasso and many othersML: Picasso never bothered with ethnography! Cer
tainly, he had an appreciation for certain African objects
but it was a purely aesthetic appreciation. He paid abso
lutely no attention to any meaning these objects migh
have had.
SP: What was your reaction to the exhibition on ties
between "primitive art" and modem art that was
mounted a year or two ago at the Museum of Moderr
Art in New York?
ML: The one put on by William Rubin, yes. Rubin came
to the Musee de l'Homme several times. We cautioned
him quite strongly about making hasty comparisons.
And I believe that he ended up making those comparisons in spite of all our wamings.

SP: You wrote in "Civilisation" [I929] that the modemism sometimes perceived in African art is the result of
pure coincidence. Since that time, a lot of people have
worked on this question. Do you think our understanding of the issue has become any clearer as a result?
ML: I think that since the work of Jean Laude8the issues
have become much clearer; that is, we now know not to
overestimate the degree of influence. I don't have a personal evaluation I can give you; Laude is the one who
tackled this question, and he had some extremely good
things to say. It's undeniable that there were some influences of African art on Westem art at the beginning of
the century-at least a few examples can be found. I
know that there are many African and Antillean intellectuals (I've known some of them) who like to think
that without African art there would never have been
such a thing as Cubism. That's completely untrue! Cubism derived essentially from Cezanne. Picasso could
well have done what he did without art negre. And if one
were to get involved in that sort of comparison it would
be necessary to consider Iberian art as well, since that
was a significant influence on his work. He never denied
that [see Richardson i987 for a recent development of
this point].
JJ:Continuing on the subject of art, but thinking also
about ties between surrealism and anthropology, it
strikes me that you were one of the first to treat socalled autochthonous art as art, to discover that there
might be something universal in it. I'm thinking in particular about what you've written on Wifredo Lam.
ML: Yes, but here I should engage in a little selfcriticism. The book I wrote about Lam (published in
Milan [I970] but never in France) puts a lot of emphasis
on his mixed parentage (a Chinese father living in Cuba
and married to a mulatto) and on the very real influence
(but as if he were the product only of inherited traits) of
his native environment and especially of his godmother,
who was a professional "sorceress." (He was, in fact,
very proud of that.) I talked about him basically in ethnographic terms; I didn't talk about him the way I would
have talked about another artist. For another artist, it
never would have mattered a bit to me whether he was
of Breton origin, or Basque, or whatever.
JJ:You didn't talk about Lam at all the way you talked
about Bacon.
ML: Right. But of course Bacon never went around talking about being bom in Ireland of an English father who
raised racehorses. What interested me in Bacon was that
he communicated through paintings what my friend
David Sylvester calls (after an expression that Bacon
used in talking about Picasso) [English:] the brutality of
fact [see Leiris I974].
8. See Laude (i968) and a special issue of the journal L'Ecrit-Voir
(no. 6, i985) devoted to his work.

I64 | CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

JJ:That's hardly surrealist!

ML: True. But because of the influence of Freud and
other influences as well, surrealism retained a strong
symbolist, and therefore idealist, character.
SP: In I950 [Leiris ig5ob], you argued that the essential
aim of education in colonial societies should not be passing on the colonizers' systems of ideas but rather equipping colonized people intellectually enough so that they
can determine their own destiny. Now, almost four decades later, Martinique and Guadeloupe are still part of
the state of their colonizers, though most of the other
islands of the Caribbean have become independent. Do
you think it's possible that French colonialism in the
Antilles has shown more reluctance to grant this transfer of responsibility for the destiny of the people? Said a
little differently, do you think France has been more
"successful" than other European colonizers of the region in imposing its own ideas and values?
ML: France did there what it has always done. It's the
same as all French colonialism-which
means that, in
contrast to British colonialism, which at least shows
some respect for local ideas, it's an assimilationist version of colonialism: "our ancestors the Gauls," the
metric system, and all that. As for labeling this "successful," I don't think so.
SP: In certain ways, Martinique seems to me to be the
most "Europeanized" of all the islands in the Caribbean.
ML: That's a direct result of French colonial policy,
which is assimilationist rather than associative.
SP: And yet that's not at all the case for the French
territories in Africa.
ML: There's an enormous difference between Africa and
the Caribbean due to the fact that the Caribbean has no
autochthonous population. All its people are immigrants, either from the top of the society, the youngest
sons [without inheritance] and so forth, or blacks who
were brought there through the slave trade. The only
autochthonous population, the Caribs, has completely
disappeared. Africa is a different situation; there the
Europeans were superimposed on autochthonous
groups. In the Caribbean, where nobody was "at home,"
France's assimilationist policy had a better chance of
succeeding than it did in Africa.
SP: One of the things I'd like to talk about with you
concerns the evolution of the goals of the Musee de
l'Homme. You once told me that during the I930S there
was a strong concern in the museum about proving that
anthropology was a true "science."
ML: As anthropologists, we were supposed to deny being
literary. Unfortunately, anthropology became jargon-

izing, because it's through the use of jargon that you

show yourself to be a scientist.
SP: But when did this develop? Was it sudden?
ML: It didn't happen all at once, but it was already visible in the very austere installations that were made in
I937,

and which are still there. Riviere is the one who

decided to get rid of the wooden cases and install metal

ones, in order to make them look more sober and austere
and severe. And then there was the antiaestheticism of
Riviere and his peers at the time. They didn't want to
hear any talk of "art negre"; it had become too fashionable. Besides, anthropology couldn't be reduced to what
was called "art negre" or to the study of exotic arts.
SP: You were at the museum when this was going on?
ML: Yes, I was there from the beginning. And I went
along with these ideas, I don't deny it. But at the time, it
was a normal enough attitude, because it represented a
reaction against the terribly aesthetic way people were
viewing civilizations. We were against both the explorers who wanted above all to romanticize and glorify relations with the people under study and the aesthetic view
of these peoples' material products.
JJ: That reaction against aestheticism might also account in a way for the dryness of ethnographic writing,
these monographs that, at least in France, often make
such tedious, even boring, reading. I don't think it's exclusively a problem of how they're written; some are
actually quite well written.
ML: That's true. It's rather a question of their point of
view.
JJ:Right. I have the feeling that anthropology in English,
especially the British literature (in spite of the fact that
ties between anthropology and the artistic and literary
world are less pronounced there) has fewer boring monographs.
ML: Although I don't know British anthropology terribly well, it seems to me that it reflects a closer contact
with the subject of study. With the French, there's a
possibility that the famous Cartesian spirit plays a role. I
would even say that's very likely.
JJ:To come back to the Musee de l'Homme, can you tell
us how you first met its founders, Riviere and Rivet?
Pirc+t

PvuiAC.r,

9. Paul Rivet (i876-i958) was, in i928, elected to the Chair of

Anthropology at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle,
which he rebaptized the "Chaire d'Ethnologie des Hommes Actuels et des Hommes Fossiles" and under which he placed the
Musee d'Ethnographiedu Trocadero; founder of the Musee de
l'Homme in I937, Rivet was also, during the Front Populaire,Depute Socialiste and Conseiller General of the Seine. GeorgesHenri

Volume

ML: It must have been in 192I, at the home of a cousin

of mine who was married to the musician RolandManuel. When they learned that I was interested in
modem art, they invited me to their house, where they
had people in every Monday. That's where I met Max
Jacob; I met Ravel there, too. One evening, a person
named Georges Riviere showed up (he didn't yet call
himself Georges Henri then) with two associates, and he
was immediately sat down at the piano, where he began
to play melodies that were more or less jazz with a great
deal of brio. We lost sight of each other after that, and I
didn't meet up with him again until Documents.'0
JJ:But isn't he the one who got you into anthropology as
a career?
ML: Anthropology as a career, there's no doubt about it.
What I owe to Griaule, on the other hand, is that he was
the one who gave me the opportunity to make my first
really big voyage and who trained me as a fieldworker.
Riviere is the one who introduced me to Rivet, and he
was also the one responsible for the fact that I had a
monthly stipend for a time from D. David-Weil;" that
doubled my salary, which was rather paltry. I was immediately captivated by Riviere, with his casual manner
and the eyes of an extraordinarily intelligent beast. He
made me think of Sade's character Dolmance, in La
philosophie dans le boudoir.
JJ:What about Rivet?
ML: He was an impetuous person, with the clear talents
of a man of action. On the whole, he had an excellent
record in terms of political positions; in I934 he was one
of the most active alongside Langevin in the antifascist
struggle,'2 and in his teaching he was consistently and
firmly antiracist. I took his course when I was studying
at the Institut d'Ethnologie. His lectures were beautifully prepared and extremely clear-you could almost
take them down as dictation. But compared with those
of Mauss, they were nothing. I should admit, too, that I
never had much liking for physical anthropology. The
main problem with Rivet was that he was very imbued
with his own self. But he did put together a Musee de
l'Homme that was openly antiracist and populist. He
was, of course, antinazi, and he became a strong partisan
for peace with Vietnam.
Riviere (i897-i985) was recruited by Rivet in i928 as SousDirecteur of the Musee d'Ethnographiedu Trocadero; he was
largely responsible for the conception of the future Musee de
l'Homme and, in I937, the founder and first curatorof the Mus6e
des Arts et Traditions Populaires.
IO. Documents was a journal edited by Georges Bataille (n. I3) to
which Leiris contributed seven articles during its two-year run in
I929-30
i i. D.

(see Cliffordi98i).

David-Weil was a collector and patron of the Musee d'Ethnographiedu Trocadero;Riviere served as his secretaryand adviser
before becoming Sous-Directeurof that museum.
i2. The Comite de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes was
founded in I934 by the philosopher Alain, the physicist Paul
Langevin,and Paul Rivet.

29,

Number

i,

February 1988

i165

JJ:At that period within anthropology (which was a new

discipline) there was an ideology, or perhaps better an
ethic, that was generally accepted. Would you say that it
was a science based on an ethic of commitment and
responsibility?
ML: There's no doubt about it. It was much stronger in
Rivet-and this is the thing that can be said in his
favor-than in Mauss.
JJ:And how did you get to know Bataille, who was, if not
the founder, at least the driving force behind Documents? 13
ML: It was through one of his older colleagues at the
Bibliotheque Nationale, a quite remarkable person
named Jacques Lavaud. He had done a thesis on the poet
Desportes and ended up as dean of the Faculte des
Lettres at Poitiers. It must have been shortly after I met
Masson. I remember very clearly the Bataille of that era:
a young man, romantic, impeccably dressed, as prone to
going off and losing himself in the stars as to rolling in
the muck.
JJ:What got you involved in the Documents adventure?
ML: I believe that Riviere was the one who had the idea
to start Documents, and he must have thought that
Bataille would make a very good general secretary. First
there was the pre-Columbian exhibition at the Pavillon
de Marsan,14 which Rivet, with the assistance of Riviere,
got involved in. Metraux, as an Americanist, got involved in working on the exhibition and the catalogue;
in any case, he was the one who thought of calling on his
former friend from the Ecole des Chartes [National
School of Palaeography], Bataille, to do an article on the

Aztecs [Bataillei928]. I met Metrauxin I934, when I got

back from the Dakar-Djibouti expedition. Until that
time, my relationship with him was essentially epistolary. Metraux was on a list to receive Documents, but he
was teaching at Tucuman [Argentina] and never received his copies. He used to write fulminating letters to
complain about not having received Documents, and I,
without knowing him, would send him letters of appeasement.
SP: In your "Regard vers Alfred Metraux" [Leiris I963],
you described Metraux as a poet, not in the sense of
someone who wrote poems but because he was capable
of going beyond simple scientific description in a way
that seemed to belong in the realm of poetry.
I3. Georges Bataille (i897-i962),
librarian, writer, and philosopher, was frequently critical and even hostile toward the surrealists. In addition to Documents, he founded and directedthe journal
Critique, which is still published in Paris (see Leiris I966).
I4. An exhibition entitled "Les arts anciens de l'Am6rique"was
mounted in i928 by the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at the Pavillon
de Marsan.

i661

CURRIENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

lw
V.,

dw

40r

for

-Ai

"IN
t7:.

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Ft 5F

Volume

29,

Number

i,

February I988

I~~~~~~~~~O

I-W

Facing page, Pablo Picasso

1963 (collection

(I88I-1973),

Michel Leiri

of Louise and Michel Leiris); above,

left, Francis Bacon (1909-), Study for Portrait (Michel

Leiris), 1978 (Tate Catalogue no. 102, Louise and
Michel Leiris Collection, reproduction courtesy of the
Marlborough Gallery, London); above, right, Alberto
Giacometti (I9Oz-66),
Michel Leiris, I96I (Musee
National d'Art Moderne, Paris, gift of Louise and
Michel Leiris); right, Andre Masson (1896-1987),
Homme attable (Homme dans un interneur),1924
(Musee National d'Art Modeme, Paris, gift of Louise
and Michel Leiris).

iI67

Volume

29,

Number

Erratum
Because of a printer's error introduced after the
authors had read proofs, the three portraits of Michel
Leiris that appeared on p. I67 of the February I988
issue were incorrectly identified. The legends should
have read as follows:
Michel Leiris,
Facing page, Pablo Picasso (i88I-I973),
I963 (collection of Louise and Michel Leiris); above,
Michel Leiris,
left, Alberto Giacometti (I9OI-66),
(Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, gift of
I96I
Louise and Michel Leiris); above, right, Andre Masson
Homme attabl6 (Homme dans un
(I896-I987),
int6rieur), I924 (Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris,
gift of Louise and Michel Leiris); right, Francis Bacon
Study for Portrait (Michel Leiris), I978
(I909-),
(Tate Catalogue no. I02, Louise and Michel Leiris
Collection, reproduction courtesy of the Marlborough
Gallery, London).
Please insert this page in your February issue (vol.
no. I) of CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY.

29,

i,

February I988

iI67E

i68

CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

book that was a summary of La mentalite primitive, I

believe by someone named Blondel [I926]. I was literally
charmed by that little book-always with the surrealist
idea that there was something else, different ways of
thinking from Western rationalism.

ML: Yes, because he lived poetry. For me, a great deal of

what Metraux wrote has this kind of poetic value. His
very person was poetic. He was someone (and this was
proven by his death) who was completely maladapted to
contemporary life; he roamed around all over without
ever managing to find contentment; he was thoroughly
poetic.

SP: What was your relationship with Mauss?

SP: Did Metraux have an influence on your vision of

trance?

ML: The relationship of teacher and student. I was the

respectful student of Mauss.

ML: No, I can't say that he did. Well, yes, maybe. There
was one thing. Metraux did precede me in thinking
about the theatrical aspect of trance. It might even have
been in his book, Le vaudou haitien [I958], that he used
the term comerdierituelle, which is an excellent expression.15

JJ:Wasn't La langue secrete [1I948 (1938)] written under

his direction?

JJ:But when Schaeffner wrote about the Dogon funeral

rituals he saw in I93i, didn't he use the term opera
funebre in a similar sense?
ML: No, opera funebre is my expression! All Schaeffner
said, after attending a grandiose funeral ceremony, was
that "these are people who have an operatic sense." But
it was in the context of bullfighting that I talked about
opera fune?bre.It's in one of my poems about bullfighting
[I9431.
SP: Since coming to France last year, I've heard several
people say that it was their reading of L'Afrique fantodme
that first inspired them to think about becoming anthropologists. But the aspect of it that they've cited as
being most crucial is its literary quality, rather than its
anthropological content.
ML: I would point out that when I edited those daily
notes which made up the content of L'Afrique fantome
(which Malraux, who was a reader for Gallimard at the
time, judged worthy of publication), I didn't intend at all
to be writing ethnography. It was peripheral, really very
peripheral, to my ethnographic work.
JJ:But you once told me that the travel logML: Yes, it was praised by Mauss, of course. But as far as
I was concerned, the travel log was mainly a pretext.

JJ:Did you begin studying under Mauss when you returned from the Dakar-Djibouti expedition?
ML: I had taken a couple of his courses before, but it was
only after the expedition that I did them assiduously.

JJ:What led you to take Mauss's courses?

ML: It was my reading of Levy-Bruhl-or, rather, reading
Levy-Bruhl secondhand, I should admit. I had a little

ML: No. At the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, I don't

think we had a director as one does for a These de
Troiseme Cycle; we had examiners. Louis Massignon
was my examiner, and he made some hard criticisms of
the first draft. He told me that instead of proceeding
according to the Cartesian method, which was so dear to
the university, though he couldn't stand it (but which
did constitute the officially approved method!), I proceeded by "successive explosions of thought." I had to
do the whole thing over. But I came out of that meeting
ecstatic, because he was such a manifestly exceptional
person, and with expressions like that! I was charmed
even though he had demolished me-demolished me so
much that I ended up taking ten years to write La langue
secrete.
JJ:If we were to turn around Sally's comment of a few
minutes ago about anthropological careers that began
with a reading of L'Afrique fantome, what would you
say was the original inspiration for your own career?
ML: Perhaps Rimbaud. After all, Rimbaud spent time
"in the field," he did indeed! I knew Rimbaud mainly
through his poems, but I was also aware, like everyone
else, that he had given up everything in order to set out
for Ethiopia. He was a poet who abandoned the Parisian
literary world to go to the devil, to take up a life of
adventure.
JJ: You once remarked to me that Rimbaud probably
abandoned poetry because he realized it wasn't working,
that it was all fiction. You could as well have said that
from the beginning Rimbaud had a realist's conception-even perhaps a positivist conception-of poetry.
ML: In a way, Rimbaud is very realist, but it was a hallucinated reality. After all, hallucination is realist in
that the person believes it's the truth. Seeing a parlor at
the bottom of a lake was meant to be taken absolutely
literally.'6 But he saw that it wasn't working, and he was

i6. "Jem'habituai a l'hallucination simple: je voyais tres franchement une mosquee a la place d'une usine, . . . un salon au fond d'un
lac" (I became accustomed to straightforwardhallucination: I saw
I5. Metrauxhad alreadyused this expressionin "La comedie very clearly a mosque in the place of a factory, . . . a parlorat the
bottom of a lake) (RimbaudI873).
rituelledansla possession"(I955).

Volume29, Number I, February1988 i169

sufficiently honest with himself to throw the whole enterprise out the window. In terms of my reading, Conrad
was also important to me. I read Victory of course, but
also Lord Jim; I was fascinated by a hero who, as a kind
of atonement, passes over to the other side and becomes
a sort of tribal chief. And then there was also Fletcher's
book [1 923]. Prevert was the one who recommended that

to me. It must have been aroundi928-29,

maybe even

just before the Dakar-Djibouti expedition.

JJ: Can you tell us a little about the two versions of
surrealism represented by Prevert and Breton, that is, the
rue du Chateau and the rue Fontaine?17
ML: I wouldn't really say that there were two versions.
It's true that Prevert's cohort (Prevert, Tanguy, Duhamel) ended up dividing itself off, like the rue Blomet
group that I belonged to, and being unfaithful to Breton.
But you certainly mustn't conceptualize it in terms of
rival bands; it was a question of tendencies, what the
Communist party calls tendencies [fractions].
JJ: To your friends in the surrealist movement, there
were those two mottos: "Change life" and "Transform
the world."
ML: Yes. "Transform the world" was Marx. "Change
life" was Rimbaud. So for us it was a question of getting
the two to coincide. Rimbaud wanted to "change life,"
Marx wanted to "transform the world," and a motto of
the surrealists was to "transform the world and change
life."
JJ:Mightn't one say that one of the objectives of French
anthropology in the thirties was precisely, if not to
transform the world, at least to transform ways of thinking and maybe even change the life of colonized peoples?
ML: In the brochure that announced the founding of the
Institut d'Ethnologie Levy-Bruhl expressed what was, after all, a neocolonialist idea that anthropology provided
a way of developing a more rational and more humane
version of colonialism [i925]. Hence the idea that it
could change something, a kind of return to the scientism of the igth century, when people thought that Science would lead to Progress, not only of a technical sort
but also in the morality of humanity. In this respect it
was an old idea.
SP: In the radio program on Levi-Strauss last Saturday,
someone posed a question about whether Levi-Strauss
was a moralist.'8 What if we were to ask the same thing
I7. The rue du Chateau, in Paris's I4th arrondissement,was where
Marcel Duhamel hosted such friends as the poet JacquesPrevert
and the painter Yves Tanguy. Benjamin Peret and Raymond
Queneau also spent time there. Breton'sown apartmentwas on the
rue Fontaine.
i8. "Le Bon Plaisir de . . ." Claude Levi-Strauss.France-Culture,
October 25, I986, 3:30-7 P.M.

or you: i.ia you ana your ciose peers see yourseives as

moralists?
ML: I never considered myself at all in those terms. In
retrospect, I can see that I did have moralistic ideas, but
it was all very implicit; I wasn't aware of that at all. I
would come back to what I was saying a minute agothis idea that just occurred to me for the first time-that
essentially we were still living with a kind of igthcentury scientism. There was a confusion between science and progress, and between scientific progress and
humanitarian progress.
JJ: I imagine you've had some second thoughts about
that!
ML: Terribly. And I'm not very pleased about it. To convey my feelings in very broad terms: anthropology
doesn't serve any purpose, it changes nothing. It doesn't
change things any more than art does. In the final analysis I would locate anthropology in the realm of art. It
brings about change even less than philosophy does. If
you include morality in philosophy, well, morality can
have a certain degree of influence on customs.
SP: If you think, for example, of the situation of Indians
in Brazil, would you say that anthropology has no possibility of influencing things?
ML: Anthropology has an effect, certainly, if only to
show that the sacred is an important factor in the life of
societies. But in the end, the practical results are just
about nil. I would not have written "L'ethnographe devant le colonialisme" [ig5ob] if I hadn't thought that
anthropologists should denounce bad things that they
come to observe, but I don't see, up till now, that this
has had much of an effect. All the same, I find myself
signing this or that petition if I agree with it even though
I have no belief in its effectiveness. It's a moral gesture.
SP: I noticed your name on a letter of protest a few
weeks ago in an American periodical.19
ML: My name is seen only too often in those sorts of
situations! I've often decided to stop, but when you agree
with a text and someone asks you to lend your support,
it's very difficult to refuse. I remember one argument
that I found marvelous. A woman I didn't know phoned
me to sign a petition about something or other. I agreed
with it in principle, but I told her that my name had been
spread around so much that it didn't mean anything anymore. So she said to me: "Exactly! If you don't sign the
letter, people will assume that you're against it!"
JJ:I'd like to ask you a somewhat more personal question. After the career you've had (and I'm referring to
your anthropological career), how would you sum the
Ig. Letter regardinga biographyof Alberto Giacometti, New York
Review of Books, February26, I987, p. 33.

170 1 CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

whole of it up? Are you satisfied with it? Do you feel

that you've made a contribution, provided a kind of sensitivity or some sort of clarification?
ML: I admit very willingly that I have contributed my
drop of water. I've helped a few people to see things a bit
more lucidly. To me, the duty of lucidity is a personal
duty. But that doesn't mean that it serves any useful
purpose at all. As for the second part of your question, I
believe that the work that has carried the most weight in
that respect is L'Afrique fantome, if you consider it as an
anthropological work.

Dahomean thrones that we have in the Musee de

l'Homme-that it would be very appropriate to return.
SP: Is the Musee de l'Homme making efforts toward the
restitution of objects?
ML: I believe that no effort at all is being made. There
are objects that were seized, either in wartime or in
peace (as was sometimes the case during the DakarDjibouti expedition), but the great majority of objects
that are now in anthropology museums were bought, fair
and square. And it could be argued that the buyers are
the legitimate owners.

JJ:You once told me-if I remember correctly-that you

were very touched by the fact that the community of
professional anthropologists not only accepted you as a
member but also acknowledged your anthropological
work.

SP: But does the fact that an object was paid for necessarily mean, in your view, that it should belong to the
buyer? There is a question of the balance of power between buyer and seller.

ML: Yes, because that's a kind of compensation. At first

I was thought of as a sort of bum. Well, now I'm happy to
be taken at least a little seriously!

ML: It could be argued that these objects were bought at

very low prices and that the market was not, therefore, a
fully proper one.

JJ: And after a rather curious publishing record, L'Afrique fantome has recently been reissued in the Sciences
Humaines series at Gallimard [see Jamin Ig8ib].

SP: I know, for example, that the Republic of Suriname

sent representatives to the United States to explore the
possibility of the restitution of certain museum pieces
but without making any kind of distinction between
those that were paid for and those that weren't; for
them, it wasn't a relevant variable.

ML: That brought me the satisfaction a hoodlum would

feel at being awarded the Legion of Honor!
SP: Still sticking to the subject of moral issues, I'd like to
talk about the collection of ethnographic objects, especially in the 1930S. In L'Afrique fantome, you describe
with great candor both the nature of your collecting and
your feelings about what you were involved in.
ML: One never tells all, of course, but in L'Afrique fantome I tried to record maximally. The notion that anthropology had a usefulness that was in some sense
moral led to the belief that, since the ends justified the
means, there were some situations in which it was permissible to do almost anything in order to obtain objects
that would demonstrate, once they were installed in a
Parisian museum, the beauty of the civilizations in
question. I would never have done what I did for commercial ends. Never. I always faulted Malraux for the
business of the bas-reliefs, because his goal was to sell
them. Ours was to show them in a museum.
SP: What's your position about the restitution of artifacts by Western museums to their countries of origin?
ML: In principle, I'm for it. In practice, it's clear that it's
not possible, for example, to return art objects that were
acquired by France under, say, Francois I"E!Not everything can be returned to its country of origin. But in
principle I understand very well that newly independent
countries would want to reclaim such objects. I can
as the
think of historic objects, for example-such

ML: I understand their reaction, and it is legitimate. But

so is the opposite point of view. I don't believe in taking
a position in general. You have to examine each case on
its own terms.
SP: You mentioned a while ago the distinction between
Malraux's removal of the bas-reliefs and your own collecting activities during the Dakar-Djibouti expedition.
Has your attitude toward these issues changed since that
expedition?
ML: In terms of Malraux, too, you have to be careful; his
behavior did not make me feel indignant. And there's
another thing that I'd like to clarify. Occasionally we did
get involved in acquisitions where we conducted ourselves rather casually. But it was rare. We paid for almost
everything. Looking back now, I think that some of what
we did was very wrong, in that it deprived people of
things that they were very attached to, and in the end to
absolutely no good purpose. Or at least not in any way to
their advantage.
JJ:Then what's it all for? What I mean is that, later on,
perhaps we'll make the same judgment about the kind of
anthropology that's being done today.
ML: I know. In terms of writing, which is the only activity that I indulge in these days, I've come to think that
it's a kind of drug. Well, there's no sense to drugs. And

Volume
yet one becomes incredibly dependent on them, and
then it's not possible to do without them.
JJ:Wouldn't you say that with such a drug, if you will,
one can have insights into reality?
ML: Do you mean literature?

JJ:Yes.
ML: Like any other drug. Just ask an addict. He'll tell
you that when he's under the influence of his toxicant,
he enjoys an extraordinary lucidity.
JJ:But an addict takes drugs for himself. He doesn't exhibit himself, much less read.
ML: I grant that there's a very big difference. But then I
ask myself whether, when one writes and publishes, one
isn't simply an addict afflicted with vanity.
JJ:Leaving that aside, do you think you have a message
to transmit?
ML: No, I don't think I do.
JJ:In that case, why do you write, and whom do you
write for?
ML: I've already told you. It's like a drug.
JJ:But if, after all your writing and publishing, no one
was responsive, if what you wrote left people indifferentML: I would be very disappointed.
JJ:Would you continue to write?
ML: Yes, of course. And I would think of the possibility
of receiving recognition later on. I might think about
posterity.
SP: When I read L'Afrique fantome, I often found myself
wondering whom you were writing for. There were moments when I had the impression that you were doing it
really for yourself, and then othersML: Essentially I wrote it for myself. I believe I've already mentioned that it was an experimental book. I'd
had my fill of literature, especially surrealism; I'd had
more than I could take of Westem civilization. I wanted
to see what would result when I forced myself to record
virtually everything that happened around me and
everything that went through my head. That was essentially the idea behind L'Afrique fantome.
SP: How did Marcel Griaule react? Did you show it to
him?

29,

Number i, February I988

| 17]

ML: At one point I was going to show him the proofs,

but I admit that I didn't do it-though I had said I
would-because I could see, given the way he was behaving, that he was a completely different kind of person
from me and that, being opposed to the spirit of the book
in spite of our camaraderie, he would have asked me to
cut it in ways that I wasn't willing to accept. So I decided
not to show him the proofs. He was absolutely furious
when the book came out; he felt that I had compromised
future field studies, and so forth.
SP: It seems to me that your metaphor of a drug addiction could be fairly applied to that book. Your daily entries almost never missed a beat for the entire expedition!
ML: Practically never. I wouldn't go to bed without setting down the report of my day. There were times when I
set down things from my file cards, notes that were essentially ethnographic-during my investigation of the
zar, when I didn't have a lot of time. In those cases I
simply recopied my file notes, for example, reports on
possession sessions. But otherwise I wrote a diary entry
absolutely every night before going to bed.
JJ:What did Mauss think of this "travel log" approach?
ML: He reprimanded me, in a fatherly, good-natured
way; but he was not approving.

JJ:And Rivet?
ML: I think I've already told you about that. In order not
to damage my image of him as a man of distinction and a
perfect liberal, he quibbled about questions of pure form,
pointing out errors in French or bringing up that business I had mentioned in the course of reporting a dream
(completely forgetting that it came from a dream) about
the Hudson Bay being located in New York, and also my
use of the verb recoller instead of recoler ["to stick back
together" and "to check over," respectively]. I really
wasn't pleased at all by that; I would have preferredhim
to be straight with me, the way Mauss was. But my
relationship with Griaule was the only one that was
spoiled by L'Afrique fantome.
JJ: If one were to evaluate your admittedly marginal
(nonacademic) position in French anthropology,
mightn't one say that you played something of the role
of an iconoclast, or rather of a demystifier, given that
you have rather frequently, shall we say, put your foot in
it?

ML: I don't deny it, but I would prefer to think of it as a

question of demystifying. It's not so much some destructive motive that drives me as a desire to demystify in
order to arrive at something more legitimately proven
and solid.

172

| CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

JJ:Even L'Afrique fantome represented a demystifica

tion of field research.
ML: Yes, and also a demystification of travel and c
travel literature.
JJ:On the other hand, the same couldn't be said of you
work on African art. Afrique noire: La creation plas
tique [Leiris and Delange I967] strikes me as a muc]
more conventional book.
ML: More orthodox.

JJ:Overall, its form is more like La langue secrete

which is also rather orthodox.
ML: Yes. I would point out that Afrique noire was writ
ten on commission, for a series whose character I knev
rather well from the start.
JJ:Literary critics, and even anthropological commen
tators, have claimed that you were one of the first t,
propose the idea of an ethnographie de soi-mem
[ethnography of the self], though that's not a term yoi
yourself have used.
ML: I think that if you look at the claim carefully it'
entirely false. The analysis that I've given, for example
of the effect on me when I was a child of certain word
that I didn't understand well-what does that have to di
with an ethnography of the self? When I write in L'ag,
d'homme of my first sexual arousals, there's nothin,
ethnographic about that! One thing that may cause con
fusion is that in my "Titres et travaux" I said that on <
fundamental level I was pursuing a single goal along two
different tracks, that is, I wanted to arrive at a genera
anthropology through the observation of myself an4
through the observation of people from other societies
But that's not the same thing. Obviously, you know tha
La r6gle du jeu (1948-76) was written mainly from fili
cards; well, the handling of file cards is something that
started when I was doing ethnographic research. I be
lieve that if I hadn't been an ethnographer I would neve
have had the idea of using file cards. I would have takei
notes, but it wouldn't have been the same thing,
wouldn't have used file cards that I manipulated ano
changed around and so on. The ethnographic element i
nothing more than the manipulation of file cards. I thin]
it's a bit cryptic to talk about "ethnography of the self.'
I've never talked much about my surroundings. If I'
done an "ethnography of the self," I would have gone oi
at length about who my parents were, what they did
what my family's social background was, etc.
JJ:What was Mauss referring to when he spoke of "eth
nographie litteraire" [literary ethnography]?

ML: He gave examples like Lafcadio Hearn. Beginning

with projected prefaces for L'Afrique fant6me,0 I felt
that the subjective element should be part of ethnography, but as a function of objectivity. It's objectivity,
it's the exterior, it's others that, in the end, must be
legitimately described. It's not yourself. You introduce
yourself into the scene in order to allow the calcul de
]'erreur [calculation of error].
JJ:What do you mean by the "calculation of error"?
ML: I believe it was in philosophy courses that I first
encountered the idea of the calculation of error. I know
that I was transported by the idea. For me it was a kind of
validation of error.If it appears in both plans for a preface
to L'Afrique fantome, it's for my own defense. Those are
almost plans for a legal defense, with the kind of mauvaise foi [Sartrean "bad faith"] that can enter into a lawyer's plea.
JJ:Thinking in terms of two poles that structure much of
our intellectual universe-that
is, Sartre and LeviStrauss-I would locate you much more on the side of
Sartre.
ML: The fact is that at a certain point in time I was very
strongly influenced by Sartre. I believe it's fair to say
that, despite having very great respect and friendship for
him, I have never been in any way influenced by LeviStrauss, not in any way at all.
JJ:How did Sartre influence you?
ML: By his dedication to living according to his philosophy. I also had much more intimate contact with Sartre
than with Levi-Strauss. What interested me in him was
his search for a morality, though he never managed to
define it.
JJ:Don't you think that has to do with the fact that, in
spite of your pessimism today, you still have some
confidence in the future, that you remain fundamentally
a "humanist"? It's also true that Levi-Strauss has been
more interested in societies that are dying out rather
than societies that are undergoing change as a result of
culture contact, which you've been more involved with.
ML: I would say that, in my current state of mind, my
hope (which has no social or humanitarian dimension) is
the notion that, after all, if I can manage to find a little
poetry somewhere, not all is without meaning.
SP: That's a very general kind of hopefulness, but what
about anthropology?

2o. The entry for April 4, I932, in L'Afrique fant6me, includes two
proposedprefacesunder the thesis: "It is through subjectivity (carried to its paroxysm)that one can reach objectivity."

Volume

ML: Well there, truly, in terms of anthropology, I see no

basis for hope.
SP: Do you read anthropology these days?
ML: No. Not at all. I'm much too lazy. I believe that
anthropology can produce interesting findings, for example (and this isn't directly ethnological, but it's related), the work that Levi-Strauss has done on comparative mythologies or the work of Dumezil. But what I'm
really trying to say is that in my opinion none of that
changes anything. It adds to knowledge. There's nothing
wrong with that, but in terms of -producing change, in
terms of improving things even one iota, I absolutely do
not believe it does.
JJ:As we were discussing earlier, the igth century had
the idea that Science could do positive things, but now
people tend rather to see Science as producing harm
more than good.
ML: Quite. If Science is harmful, it's best not to get
involved with it. Then what you get to is total obscurantism. What I would say, though, and this is a thoroughly
idealistic view, is that a person in our day and age who
has self-respect owes it to himself to be as lucid as he can
possibly be.
SP: You once wrote 11934:503]:
"I curse my entire childhood and all the education that I received, the imbecilic
conventions that I was raised in, and the morality that
others judged best to inculcate in me." Could you elaborate a bit on what inspired this outburst?
ML: It was mainly Catholic education that I was aiming
at, because I was raised, well, not in a bigoted way-that
would be an exaggeration-but I was raised as a Catholic, first in a tiny little school, and then later I did catechism and had my first communion, and so on. When I
vituperated with the kind of thing you've cited, I was
thinking primarily about sensuality: all the behavior
that has to do with that, and especially sexual acts,
which were considered, to sum it up in a single word,
immoral. After all, children are taught to value chastity
enormously. Masturbation in particular was seen as a
hideous thing, and so on. I know that I experienced horrible shame about that practice.
SP: Did you intend in any sense to be indicting Western
education on a more general level?
ML: My criticism was not of education in general but
rather of the education that I had received. Clearly (and
even then I didn't see it any differently), all children
should be educated. But it seemed to me that my own
education had not been sufficiently liberal and that my
Catholic education was responsible for the strong sense
of guilt that I had developed. That's essentially what I
had in mind when I wrote that comment.

29,

Number

i,

February I988

1I73

SP: What's your reaction to the kind of anthropology

that's now being referred to as "reflexive anthropology"
and the return to an interest in subjectivity? It almost
seems as though the kind of subjectivity that you were
trying to introduce into anthropology 50 years ago has
finally been integrated into the discipline.
ML: I think the subjective element should always be
present. In fact, it always is present, so it's better to
recognize it openly than to deal with it secretly. You've
got to lay your cards on the table, in effect. "Here I am,
I'm like this. And I, who am like this, have seen things
in such and such a way." To me, it's quite elementary. I
will make a concession to absolute objectivity and state
that that is what it would be most desirable to end up
with, but it just isn't possible; the subjectivity is always
there. That's why it's infinitely better to acknowledge
that subjectivity than to dissimulate. It's important to
be clear about it.
SP: Could you comment on the role of dreams and of
psychoanalytic theory in your work?
ML: I don't credit my psychoanalysis for the fact that
I've written; I had already started writing before. But I
would say that it allowed me, after the Dakar-Djibouti
expedition, to be well-adjusted enough to do a Licence de
Lettres and then to establish myself as a professional
anthropologist. What I'm saying is that, if I hadn't undergone analysis, I would still have participated in the
Dakar-Djibouti expedition, which had nothing to do
with my psychoanalysis (even though my analyst Borel'
actively encouraged me to accept Griaule's offer to take
part in the trans-African expedition he was planning). I
believe, however, that at the beginning of my treatment
I was in a sufficiently disturbed state that I never would
have had the courage to undertake a degree program
when I returned from that trip. And that would have
meant that I never would have become a professional
anthropologist. I'm not fanatical about psychoanalysis,
but I do believe that it's an effective kind of therapy
when it's well performed and that I for one benefited
from it. The same can be said of Bataille, who'd been a
patient of Borel and who was the one to recommend that
I see him; Bataille's first book, Histoire de l'oeil, was
written following his analysis. So analysis helped him.
As for dreams, my view has always been much more
surrealistic than psychoanalytic. That is, it's the manifest content, as Freud called it, rather than the underlying meaning that interests me in dreams. At the same
time, it's certainly true that a book such as Freud's
Psychopathology of Everyday Life influenced me on a
literary level; reading that book sparked my interest in
2i. AdrienBorelwas one of the foundersof the Societe Psychanalytique of Parisand of L'EvolutionPsychiatrique.A specialist in drug
addiction, he was analyzed by Rudolph Loewenstein. In I950, at
the end of his life, Borel played the role of the curd de Torcy in
Robert Bresson's film version of Georges Bemanos's 1936 novel,

Journal d'un cure de campagne.

I74

CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

small details that carried great significance. I should also

say that I got much more from the Freudian idea of the
primacy of sexuality than I did from Marx's idea of the
primacy of economics. Obviously, it's important to be
wary of all retrospective views like the ones I'm trotting
out in front of you; one has a nasty tendency to
rationalize them and to talk as though one had very positive intentions when in fact it was all completely implicit. Besides, you have to take into account that everything I'm saying is further distorted by the fact that oral
expression is not really my forte!

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