Le regard d’un ethnologue malien sur les archives du Fonds Marcel-Griaule

• Main Author: Denis Douyon
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative 2008-08-01
• Series: Ateliers d'Anthropologie
• Subjects: anthropological archives; fieldnotes; Marcel-Griaule Archives; photography; scientific cooperation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/3062

The Marcel-Griaule Archives seen by a Malian anthropologist. From the point of view of Malian researchers, the Marcel-Griaule Collection is doubly interesting in that it includes, in great number, both photographs and investigation data on several of their country’s populations. While the ethnological works published by Griaule or his colleagues are the fruit of selection and organisation of data for scientific demonstration, the earlier fieldnotes, on the other hand, contain a multitude of varied and unpublished information which Malian anthropologists, familiar with the locations and the language, can easily contextualise and interpret thanks to the personal annotations and quotations written on the question sheets and in notebooks. As for the thousands of photographs in the Marcel-Griaule Collection, these exceptional but under-exploited documents are today of great value, as much historical as ethnographical, because of their age and the rapid evolution of the societies studied. It would be interesting, for example, within the context of touring exhibitions, to show these photographs to the populations concerned to encourage multiple commentaries on their past or on the anthropological missions of the 1950s.