My thanks to Richard Sieburth for his indispensable advice during the conception of this essay, and to George Stocking for a very helpful critical reading of the first draft.

¹ Ernst, Max, Beyond Painting, Tanning, Dorothea, trans. (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948), 13.Google Scholar

² My broad use of the term roughly coincides with Susan Sontag's view of surrealism as a pervasive—perhaps dominant—modern sensibility. See her On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 51–84.Google Scholar For a treatment that distinguishes the specific tradition I am discussing from the surrealism of Breton's movement, see Jamin, Jean, “Un sacré collège ou les apprentis sorciers de la sociologie,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, no. 68 (1980), 5–30.Google Scholar

³ Research on the common ground of twentieth-century social science and the avant-garde is still undeveloped. Thus my discussion is very preliminary. On the French context: Boon, James, From Symbolism to Structuralism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972);Google ScholarDuvignaud, Jean, “Roger Caillois et l'imaginaire,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, no. 66 (1979), 91–97;Google ScholarHollier, Denis, ed., Le collège de sociologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1979);Google Scholar Jamin, “Un sacré college”; idem, “Une initiation au réel: a propos de Segalen,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, no. 66 (1979), 125–39;Google ScholarLourau, R., Le gai savoir des sociologues (Paris: Union Générate des Editions, 1974);Google ScholarTiryakian, E. A., “L'école durkheimienne et la recherche de la société perdue: la sociologie naissante et son milieu culturel,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, no. 66 (1979), 97–114.Google Scholar

⁴ Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 84.Google Scholar

⁵ Nadeau, Maurice, The History of Surrealism, Howard, Richard, trans. (New York: Macmillan, 1965): 1–3.Google Scholar

⁶ Apollinaire, Guillaume, Calligrammes, Greet, Anne Hyde, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 341.Google Scholar

⁷ As quoted by Sontag, , On Photography, 204.Google Scholar Paul Fussell's incisive study also stresses the initiation by World War I of a generation into a fragmented, “modernist” world: The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

⁸ Leiris, Michel, “The Discovery of African Art in the West,” in Leiris, M. and Delange, J., African Art (New York: Golden Press, 1968), 33.Google Scholar

⁹ Nadeau, , History, 112–14.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Personal communication.

¹¹ On Mauss and field work, see Condominas, Georges, “Marcel Mauss et l'homme de terrain,” L'Arc, no. 48 (n.d.), 3–6;Google Scholaridem, “Marcel Mauss, pere de l'ethnographie française,” Critique, no. 279 (1972), 118–39; no. 301 (1972), 487–504.Google Scholar And for a sense of Mauss's concrete advice to students, see his own Manuel d'ethnographie (Paris: Payot, 1947).Google Scholar

¹² Bing, Fernande, “Entretiens avec Alfred Métraux,” L'Homme, 4:2 (1964), 20–23.Google Scholar

¹³ Mintz, Sidney W., “Introduction to the Second English Edition,” Métraux, Alfred, Voodoo in Haiti, 2d ed., Charteris, Hugo, trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 2.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Leiris, Michael, “Regard vers Alfred Métraux,” in his Brisées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966), 252.Google Scholar On the friendship, see also Bataille, George, L'Erotisme (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1957), 14;Google ScholarMétraux, Alfred, “Rencontre avec les ethnologues,” Critique, no. 195–96 (1963), 677–84.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Métraux, , “Rencontre,” 682–83;Google ScholarBataille, , L'Erotisme, 72–73, where the debt to Mauss is acknowledged.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Bataille, Georges, “L'Amérique disparue,” in Babelon, Jean et al. , L'Art précolombien (Paris: Les Beaux Arts, 1930), 5–14.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Artaud, Antonin, The Peyote Dance, Weaver, Helen, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976).Google Scholar

¹⁸ The tradition is visible in the “Hommage à Georges Bataille,” published by Critique, no. 195–96 (1963),Google Scholar in which essays appear by Mtraux, Leiris, Queneau, Masson, and Wahl of the prewar generation, and by Foucault, Barthes, and Sollers of the emerging critical tradition. (Another crucial outgrowth of ethnographic surrealism that cannot be pursued here is its connection with third world modernism and nascent anticolonial discourse. It is enough to mention a few prominent names: Aimé Césaire (a long-term friend of Leiris), Octavio Paz, and Alejo Carpentier, who was a collaborator on the journal, Documents, discussed in the next section.)

¹⁹ Riviére, Georges-Henri, “My Experience at the Musée d'Ethnologie,” Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute(1968),17–22;Google Scholaridem, “Un Rencontre avec Georges-Henri Riviere,” Le Monde, 8–9 July 1979;Google Scholar see also “Du Trocadéro à Chaillot,” Le Monde, 5 July 1979, 13–15, a series of articles by diverse hands.Google Scholar

²⁰ Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “French Sociology,” in Twentieth Century Sociology, Gurvitch, Georges and Moore, Wilbert, eds. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), 527.Google Scholar

²¹ Lévi-Strauss's most elaborate attempt in this vein is his brilliant “Introduction à l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Mauss, Marcel, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1950), ix–lii.Google Scholar For a good corrective, see Leenhardt, Maurice, “Marcel Mauss,” Annuaire de l'École Pratique des Hautes Études, section des sciences religieuses (1950), 19–23.Google Scholar

²² Dumont, Louis, “Une science en devenir,” L'Arc, no. 48 (n. d.), 12.Google Scholar

²³ Mauss, , Sociologie et Anthropologie, 309.Google Scholar

²⁴ Documents, 2:3 (1930), 177.Google Scholar

²⁵ Nadeau, , History, ch. 12.Google Scholar

²⁶ Documents, 1:2 (1929), 95.Google Scholar

²⁷ Ibid., 100, 102.

²⁸ Documents, 2:1 (1930), 46.Google Scholar

²⁹ Documents, 1:5 (1929), 248.Google Scholar Schaeffner, who died in 1980, pursued a distinguished career as musicologist, ethnographer, essayist, and critic. See, particularly, volume 1 of his Essais de musicologie et autres fantaisies (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1980). Volume II is forthcoming.Google Scholar

³⁰ On this museological dilemma, see an interview with Leiris, Michel: “The Musée de l'Homme, Where Art and Anthropology Meet,” Réalites, no. 182 (1966), 57–63.Google Scholar

³¹ Documents, 1:4 (1929), 215; and 1:2 (1929), 117.Google Scholar

³² Documents, 1:7 (1929), 381.Google Scholar

³³ Ibid., 381–82.

³⁴ See Matthews, J. H., The Imagery of Surrealism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1977), 65–116.Google Scholar

³⁵ Barthes, Roland, “L'effet de réel,” Communications, no. 11 (1968), 84–89.Google Scholar

³⁶ See Documents, 2:1 (1929).Google Scholar

³⁷ “Mission Dakar-Djibouti,” special issue of Minotaure, no. 2 (1934).Google Scholar

³⁸ Leiris, Michel, “De Bataille l'impossible à l'impossible Documents, “ in Brisées, 256–66.Google Scholar

³⁹ Mauss, Marcel, The Gift, Cunnison, Ian, trans. (New York: Norton, 1967), 76–77.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ As quoted by Fortes, Meyer, “On the Concept of the Person among the Tallensi,” in Colloques internationaux du C.N.R.S., no. 544, La notion de personne en Afrique Noire (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1973), 284.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Gilot, Francois, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 266.Google Scholar

⁴² My account is based largely on personal communications from Georges-Henri Rivière and on his two memoirs cited in note 19. See also Paulme, Denise, “Sanga 1935,” Cahiers d'Études Africaines, no. 65 (1977), 7–12.Google Scholar See also Al Brown boxt für die Ethnologen (Frankfurt am Main: Qumran Verlag, 1980), a reprint of the Cirque d'Hiver gala program.Google Scholar

⁴³ On this nègrophilie, see Laude, Jean, La peinture française (1905–1914) et l'art nngre (Paris: Klincksieck Editions, 1968), esp. 528–39;Google Scholar also Leiris, “Discovery of African Art. “For a particularly revealing example, see Soupault's, PhilippeLe nègre (1927; rpt. Paris: Seghers, 1975). Soupault's nègre is a kind of destructive-regenerative force, more Nietzschean than Afro-American.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), an account which underplays the positive valuations of the exotic frequently associated with such projections.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See the excellent short account of the mission by Jamin, J. included in Voyages et découvertes (Paris: Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1981).Google Scholar According to Rivet and Rivière's proud calculations (Minotaure, no. 2 (1933))Google Scholar 3,500 “ethnographic objects” were collected, along with 6,000 photographs, a large collection of Abyssinian paintings, 300 manuscripts and amulets, notations of 30 languages and dialects, and hundreds of recordings, “ethnographic observations,” botanical specimens, etc., etc. This, the mission's “booty,” in Rivet and Rivière's words, was the public measure of a successful mission. (Barthes, Roland. in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 140, has dissected this word, mission. An imperial “mana term,” he calls it which can be applied to any and all colonial undertakings, giving them as required a heroic, redemptive aura.)Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Leiris, Michel, L'Afrique fantôme (Paris: Gallimard. 1934; 2d ed., 1951);Google ScholarGriaule, Marcel, “Introduction methodologique,” Minotaure, no. 2 (1933), 7–12.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ A crucial nuance is missed in Donald Bender's account (Early French Ethnography in Africa and the Development of Ethnology in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Department of Anthropology, 1964), 90–95)Google Scholar which attributes to Griaule and his school a quixotic search for “complete description.” The operative, and not fully translatable, term in this form of empiricism is documentation (see Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, cited by Bender, p. 93). The Dogon world is recorded from various perspectives, and the data are not necessarily expected to add up to what Bender calls “a balanced picture.” In particular, there is no attempt to build up a version of reality based primarily on the experience of a participant-observing subject, who hermeneutically constitutes a native world. If something like a complete textualization of Dogon reality emerges from Griaule's work, it is based on an already formulated initiatory wisdom, and is largely a product of documentary transcription and exegesis. See Griaule, Marcel, Conversations with Ogotemmêli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

⁴⁸ See Douglas, Mary, “If the Dogon…,” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 7:28 (1967), 659–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The present account should serve as a corrective to Douglas's tendency to portray Griaule and the French tradition generally as formalistic and enamored of abstract systems. And it will reinforce her suggestive rapprochement of Dogon culture and surrealism. On this correspondence, see also Guy Davenport's imaginative placement of the Dogon, along with Fourier, in the Paris twenties, “Au tombeau de Charles Fourier,” DaVinci's Bicycle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

⁴⁹ On the Musée de l'Homme, see the works of Rivière cited in note 19, and Rivet, Paul, “Organisation of an Ethnological Museum,” Museum (UNESCO), vol. 1 (1948).Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Documents, 1:3 (1929), 130–34.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Rivet, , “Organisation,” 113.Google Scholar

⁵² See Martin Blumenson's account of the Musée de l'Homme cell, The Vildé Affair: Beginnings of the French Resistance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).Google Scholar

⁵³ Two characteristic UNESCO publications: Interrelations of Cultures (1953; rpt. Westport, Conn.: UNESCO, 1971)Google Scholar with contributions by Griaule, and Leiris, ; Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ An implicitly surrealist conception of mind as a creative source capable of generating the entire panoply of human expressions—both existing and potential, both mythic and rational—finds its most programmatic expression, perhaps, in Lévi-Strauss's esprit humain.

⁵⁵ (Paris: Librairie E. Leroux, 1939). The English version is Man and the Sacred, Barash, Meyer, trans. (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1959). The fourth chapter was delivered at the Collège.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ (1934; rpt. (with new introduction) Paris: Gallimard, 1950).

⁵⁷ Hollier, Le collège de sociologie. The collection includes texts by Bataille, Caillois, Guastalla, Klossowski, Kojeve, Leiris, Lewitzky, Mayer, Paulhan, and Wahl, with extensive commentaries by the editor. On the College, see also Lourau, Le gai savoir des sociologues, and the excellent account of Jamin, “Un sacré collège.”

⁵⁸ Duvignaud, , “Roger Caillois et l'imaginaire,” 91.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Jamin, , “Un sacré collège,” 16.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Leiris, Michel, “Du musée d'ethnographie au Musée de l'Homme,” Nouvelle Revue Française, no. 299 (August 1938), 344–45.Google Scholar

⁶¹ For a stinging critique of these assumptions, see Barthes, , “La grande famille des hommes,” in Mythologies, 173–76.Google Scholar

⁶² Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Humanisme el terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 182.Google Scholar

⁶³ See, for example, Adotevi, Stanislas, “Le musée, inversion de la vie,” L'Art Vivant (special issue, “Le musée en question”), no. 36 (1972–1973), 10–11.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Notably Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), preface and chs. 9, 10.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ I have pursued these matters further in a review essay of Edward Said's Orientalism, published in History and Theory, 19:2 (1980), 204–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁶ In the discussion that follows I have been stimulated by ideas in Revue d' esthétique (special issue, “Collages”), no. 3–4 (1978).Google Scholar

⁶⁷ On Bateson's Naven as an experiment in ethnographic writing, see Marcus, George, “Rhetoric and the Ethnographic Genre in Anthropological Research,” Current Anthropology, 21:4 (1980), 509.CrossRefGoogle Scholar