Twilight of the Sun Kings: French anthropology from modernism to postmodernism, 1925-1950

This dissertation is the first historical study of select French anthropological discourse from Durkheim to Levi-Strauss. My aim is neither to celebrate anthropology's hard-won scientificity, often exemplified by Claude Levi-Strauss's structural revolution, nor to denigrate anthropology as a science manque crippled by a deficient positivism or a rampant surealism. Instead I understand appeals to "science" as normative justification for the diverse visual and verbal practices of theorists and fieldworkers in tribal Africa, America and Oceania from 1925 to 1950. On this view French anthropology appears as a series of only partly commensurable "language games of science" embodying distinct scientific styles and protocols of representation. The games isolated thus far are Durkheimian primitivism, 1900-1914; Maussian relativism, 1920-1930; French Americanism (as distinguished from Africanism and Oceanism), 1930-1945; and the structural anthropology created by Levi-Strauss, 1945-50.;Occasionally I attempt to draw links between these various language games of anthropology and changing patterns of academic culture in the university. This move is suggested by Bourdieu's analysis of practice as a space where individuals play language games open to improvisation and in which players' institutional strategies become apparent only in retrospect. Primitivism, world depression, the world wars, colonialism and decolonization are all mediated by academic dispositions, which register these events in only very indirect ways. Although French anthropology is surely the protege of imperial power, it is the shifting shape of the knowledge-game that I stress throughout.;The narrative begins with a modern scientific intention to know and save the Primitive and ends with a postmodern rejection of this messianic project. As floating signifier in this intellectual field, the Primitive displays a variety of connotations, since the anthropologists create a multiplicity of primitive cultures none of which appears to be simple, pristine or original. Within each game the players oscillate between discursive taboos and their violation and eventually falter on the contradictions posed by their activity. Ultimately, the salvage ethnology of Mauss, Rivet and Levy-Bruhl meets its negation in the superrationalism of Levi-Strauss, here read counter-intuitively as an avatar of postmodern anthropology.