WHAT SORT OF ANTHROPOLOGIST WAS PAUL RIVET?

Laura Rival

Few anthropologists today know who Paul Rivet was. Even

in France, where he played a central role in shaping the

discipline during the interwar years, the name of Paul

Rivet evokes only vague memories: ‘Rivet, the Director of

the Museum of Mankind?’ ‘Rivet, the Americanist?’ ‘Didn’t

he write that controversial book on the origins of

American Indians?’ The name is known, but no one seems to

remember Rivet’s theoretical contribution or teaching.

Rivet was a medical doctor, military officer, field

naturalist, collector, physical anthropologist,

ethnologist, linguist, a builder of academic institutions

and a politician – indeed, a success in all these

professions. He became an anthropologist while working in

the field in the Ecuadorian Andes. His five years of

fieldwork little resembled the classic ethnographic

fieldwork that Malinowski was to undertake in the

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Trobriands ten years later, but they nevertheless

determined the range of issues, methods and theoretical

questions he was to explore throughout his long career.

Even though he may have been practically erased from the

discipline’s collective memory today, Rivet’s work shaped

and influenced the development of post-Second World War

social anthropology in France, including Lévi-Strauss’s

structuralism. Moreover, his holistic and humanist vision

of anthropology as the science of humankind, as well as

his political commitment to educating the public about

the value of cultures other than their own, are

surprisingly relevant today. Indeed, as I suggest in the

conclusion, they are perhaps even more relevant today

than at any time since his death in 1958.

Paul Rivet’s multi-stranded career

The second of six children, Paul Adolphe Rivet was born

on 7 May 1876 in Wasigny, a small village in Lorraine.1 He

started school near Nancy, in the village of Blénod-les-

Toul, where his father, a soldier who had lost his right

arm during the Franco-Prussian war, worked as a tax

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collector. From him, Rivet learnt to be a fervent patriot

deeply committed to equality of citizenship and human

rights (Dussán de Reichel 1984: 70). His primary

education completed, Rivet enrolled in the grammar school

at Nancy, where he excelled in literature and poetry and

passed the baccalaureate in philosophy with distinction

(d’Harcourt 1958, Pineda Camacho 1985, Zerilli 1991–93).

Despite his obvious talent for literature and philosophy,

this son of a modest provincial family decided against

preparing the entry exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure

(Laurière 1999: 109). Although he was not particularly

attracted to medicine and had no ambition to serve in the

French army as his grandfather, uncle and father had done

before him, he chose, mainly for financial reasons, to

become a military doctor (Chevasse 1958: 106). Rivet’s

unusual twin training in French humanism and medical

science gave him the encyclopaedic breadth he was to

deploy so fruitfully throughout his long academic career.

One can also assume that his employment as medical

warrant officer in the Paris cavalry from 1898 to 1901

helped him develop the discipline and organisational

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skills for which he later became so famous, not least as

Director of the Musée de l’Homme.

As is often the case in anthropological careers,

serendipity played a large part in Rivet’s choice of

Ecuador as the country in which he would conduct field

research. By pure chance he was given an opportunity to

accompany the second French geodesic mission, charged

with re-measuring the equatorial meridian. As the mission

involved collaboration with the Académie des Sciences de

Paris, Rivet was able to receive some scientific training

at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) before

departing, especially in anthropometric methods. Far from

being unusual, Rivet’s expertise in comparative anatomy

and his passion for natural history were shared by other

members of the geodesic mission, and, indeed, by many

early twentieth-century anthropologists (Stocking 1992b:

17–32). León (1958: 307) nicknames them ‘science

missionaries’.

In Ecuador, where he was to spend the next five

years of his life, Rivet travelled indefatigably,

attending patients and collecting numerous and diverse

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materials. Free medical services were obviously very

popular and were consciously used by the geodesic mission

as an efficient means of enlisting the locals’ goodwill.

A zealous field naturalist, Rivet collected plant and

animal specimens, archaeological finds (bones, pottery

and so on), indigenous artefacts, oral traditions and

vocabularies of many of the languages spoken in Ecuador

at the time, and took anthropomorphic measurements.

In the first two years of his stay, Rivet mainly

collected species for the MNHN, contributing equally to

entomology and botany. The specimens were sent for

identification to leading scientists based in France,

elsewhere in Europe or the United States. The breadth of

his collections is reflected in the fact that more than

thirty animal species were named after him.2 His botanical

collections also contained many new species and

varieties. Very soon, the anthropological collections he

sent back to Paris roused the interest of scholars at

MNHN. However, Rivet had to fight hard not to have them

treat him as a simple field surveyor and collector. He

had personally funded the expeditions, and the

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collections were the fruit of his personal efforts. He

aspired to the status of full researcher, and was

determined to be the one who would classify, study and

analyse the objects now stored at the MNHN, which, as far

as he was concerned, belonged to him (Laurière 2006: 236–

39).

In July 1906, having won the battle, he was

officially detached from the Army’s geographical services

to work at the MNHN as an independent scholar under the

supervision of René Verneau and Ernest-Théodore Hamy. He

soon became a member of the Société des Américanistes de

Paris (in 1907), even serving as its general secretary

for several months the following year, a post to which he

was to be formally elected in 1922 and which he was to

occupy for more than thirty years, until his death in

1958. He received much praise and scientific recognition

in 1908 for his collections, exhibited in the zoology

galleries of the MNHN. In 1909, when Verneau took up the

Chair of Anthropology at the MNHN in succession to Hamy,

Rivet became his research assistant.

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Soon after, Rivet published one of his most

important scientific papers,3 which offers a systematic

refutation of the theories and methodologies that defined

physical anthropology at the time. While in the field, he

had collected complete anthropometric measurements for

300 Indians (mainly adult men) and had also measured at

least 60 skeletons in cemeteries. His ancient bone

collection comprised 350 skulls and about 500 bones,

including 400 long ones. Back in Paris, his intention had

been to write a substantial anthropological study of the

American Indian race with his MNHN colleague, Raul

Anthony. The paper was to explain the scope, origin and

history of the internal diversity of the race. However,

the systematic study of the empirical data he had

gathered led him instead to reject the premises of

anthropometry. Skull measurements, he concluded, lead to

the arbitrary classification of humans in entirely

fictitious groupings. The human types so determined have

nothing real in common, only the arbitrary trait used as

a basis for their classification.

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In 1910, ideological disagreements between the MNHN

and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris over

anthropometric measurements and the scope of

anthropological research reached crisis point, which

prompted Rivet and Verneau to resign. A year later, Rivet

created a new learned society based at the MNHN, the

Institut Français d’Anthropologie, of which he became the

archivist-librarian. Durkheim, Hertz, Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl

and many others immediately joined the new Institut,

which sought to redefine anthropology ‘in its widest

sense’. No longer a mere synonym for physical

anthropology, anthropology was to be based on a

federative integration of all the disciplines involved in

explaining ‘the human phenomenon’, chiefly linguistics

and ethnography (Dias 1991: 246–50). The Institut’s main

function in the eyes of its members was to fight against

sterile specialism and to facilitate the circulation of

new ideas and knowledge in all the domains that

interested broad-minded anthropologists (Laurière 1999:

111).

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Published in 1912, L’Ethnographie ancienne de l’Équateur,4

ostensibly co-authored by Rivet and Verneau, but in

reality very much Rivet’s work, was awarded several

prizes. Based on an abundance of sources – which are not

simply listed but also commented on and integrated fully

into the text – the book provides a comparative analysis

of the large archaeological collections that Rivet

brought back from Ecuador. It is still widely regarded as

a masterpiece of rigour in the methodical description of

pre-Colombian material culture.

1 This reconstruction of Rivet’s life owes much to Christine Laurière’s fine

intellectual biography of Paul Rivet’s (Laurière 2006), which I read after

having completed my own research. I would also like to thank all the French

and Ecuadorian colleagues who shared with me their memories of Rivet’s life

and their knowledge of his work.

2 See León (1958: 312–14) for an exhaustive list of scientific names

incorporating the word ‘riveti’. Rivet’s first collections included parasites

dangerous to humans and domesticated animals, and insects involved in

propagating a range of diseases and plagues (ibid.: 309). These collections

allowed him to produce the first entomological studies ever realised in

Ecuador (Aráuz 1958: 75–76).

3 ‘Recherches sur le prognathisme’, published in L’Anthropologie 21 (Rivet

1909).

4 The term ‘ancient ethnography’, coined by Rivet, was only used by himself

and a few associates (Laurière 2006: 146, 155).

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Rivet’s subsequent publication plans were curtailed

by the outbreak of the First World War.5 Throughout the

war, he worked with the same energy, method, discipline

and sense of organisation, this time to reform the

medical care of wounded soldiers and, later on, the

running of a military hospital in Salonica, where he also

managed to find the time to organise scientific

expeditions and prepare naturalist collections for the

MNHN. After the war,6 Rivet almost resigned from the

Société des Américanistes de Paris over political issues.

A number of its French members wanted to see German-

speaking scholars banished from the Société’s membership

list. Rivet, who strongly believed in international

scientific cooperation and knew how much America owed to

German and Austrian scientists, fought hard against the

motion and won.7

In the 1920s, Rivet increasingly turned his

attention to linguistics. He had already authored or co-

authored 22 communications on South American indigenous

languages between 1907 and 1919, but the 21 works

published between 1920 and 1925 are more comparative and

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more ambitious in scope, especially the chapter on

American languages he wrote for Meillet and Cohen’s

Langues du monde (Rivet 1924).

On 6 August 1925, after months of preparatory work

and lobbying by Lévy-Bruhl, the French ministry for

5 He was never to publish, for example, his study of the remarkable

collection of 800 pre-Columbian ceramics he had brought back from Ecuador.

This collection, currently stored in the Musée du Quai Branly, has never

been studied or exhibited. However, Rivet continued to write about pre-

Columbian gold smelting after the war.

6 Rivet received an impressive number of military decorations for his

services to the nation during the First World War (Araúz 1958: 31–32), and

almost left academia after it (Laurière 2006: 454–79).

7 From 1909 to 1941, Rivet wrote in French to Boas, and Boas replied in

English. The letters cover a wide range of topics, from linguistics,

politics, the development of international Americanism, anthropology and

racism, the rise of fascism in Germany, nationalism and internationalism,

fund-raising for publishing, and more. In a fascinating exchange of letters

written during 1919, we learn that Rivet invited Boas to contribute an

article to the Journal de la Société des Américanistes. Boas replied that he would, but

in German. Rivet wrote back saying that he could not accept an article in

German under present circumstances, as every one knew that Boas spoke and

wrote fluently in both English and Spanish. It would just be too

provocative, and stir up hatred among those whose motion he had just

defeated. See archived letters in the Musée de l’Homme: 14/08/1919 [FB to

PR]; 04/09/1919 [PR to FB]; 09/10/1919 [FB to PR].

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colonial affairs agreed to fund the creation of an

Institut d’Ethnologie within the University of Paris.

Rather like the British government, the French government

institutionalised and funded modern anthropology when it

became convinced that anthropology could play a positive

role in the administration of the colonies. Lévy-Bruhl

invited Marcel Mauss and Rivet to become the institute’s

general secretaries. The Institut’s role was to train

‘professional ethnologists’,8 introduce anthropological

findings to civil servants assigned to the colonies and

educate the public about the invaluable contribution to

civilisation made by the populations, societies and

cultures found in the French colonies and beyond.

According to Laurière (1999: 114), Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss

delegated to Rivet the task of organising and

administering the Institut. The close collaboration

between the three men, who shared the same socialist

political ideals and humanist values (Pineda Camacho

1985: 8, Jamin 1989: 282), led to the institutional

association of three Parisian research and teaching

centres: the Sorbonne (under Lévy-Bruhl), the Ecole

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Pratique des Hautes Etudes (under Mauss), and the MNHN

(under Rivet). Through their association, the three

scholars hoped to facilitate the federation of three

complementary theoretical approaches to the study of

mankind, or sciences de l’homme as they are still referred to

in France: philosophy (under Lévy-Bruhl), sociology

(under Mauss) and anthropology (under Rivet). This they

saw as a necessary condition for strengthening a modern

French anthropological project firmly anchored in a

common methodology, namely ethnographic fieldwork (Allen

2000).9

In 1928, Rivet was elected to the MNHN Chair in

Anthropology, the title of which he immediately attempted

to change to that of the Chair of the Ethnology of Modern

and Fossil Men. Rivet’s appointment revived the muted,

yet persistent intellectual dissensions between those who

favoured a broad, holistic anthropology programme and

those who were eager to maintain physical anthropology as

a separate, if no longer hegemonic discipline. The

following year Rivet, who had obtained agreement that the

Trocadéro be attached to his chair, became the director

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of the museum, where he created a library of ethnology.

Faced with the challenge of holding so many different

offices simultaneously,10 Rivet chose to concentrate on

the MNHN and the Trocadéro, leaving Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl

fully in charge of the Institut d’Ethnologie. By then,

and perhaps as a result of this unintended division, it

was decided that the University of Paris would offer two

different qualifications in anthropology, a certificate

in ethnology awarded by the Science Faculty (Faculté de

Sciences), and another awarded by the Faculty of Arts and

Humanities (Faculté de Lettres).11 Rivet, who continued to

advocate ethnology as a total science giving equal

importance to physical anthropology, linguistics and

ethnography (defined as the study of past and present

material culture), became increasingly convinced that

such a project required the upgrading of the old

Trocadéro Museum, which he finally achieved in 1937 with

the creation of the Musée de l’Homme.

As Jamin (1989) and Laurière (2006: 518), who refer

to Rivet as a ‘scholar and a politician’, both note, the

various aspects of Rivet’s multi-faceted career and his

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different projects – to develop Americanist studies on an

international scale, participate actively in progressive

politics and popularise anthropology as a science in the

service of universal civilisation, that is of a true

humanism – became increasingly merged from the mid-1930s

onwards. Having responded favourably to Lévy-Bruhl’s

offer to join the Socialist Party (SFIO), Rivet soon

involved himself in formal politics. In 1934, he founded

8 See Dias (1991) and Laurière (2006) for a discussion of the changing

meanings of ‘anthropology’, ‘ethnology’, and ‘ethnography’ in France in the

pre-Lévi-Straussian era. Johnson (2003: 12), who does not seem to be aware

of this most central debate in the history of French anthropology,

attributes Lévi-Strauss’s reworking of the three modes into three different

stages of anthropological enquiry to the latter’s effort to reposition

anthropology in relation to other human sciences, in particular history and

philosophy.

9 The series Travaux et mémoires de l’institut d’ethnologie (Laurière 1999: 114) was

founded the following year, in 1926. See Dias (1991: 71–72) for an outline

of what was taught by Mauss and others at the turn of the century. Very

little is known about the professional relationships or intellectual

affinities between Rivet, Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl, or about the discussions

they must have had while designing the first teaching programme. Laurière

(2006: 496–97) found letters of students comparing the esoteric, hard-to-

follow teaching of Mauss with the limpid, structured quality of Rivet’s

lectures. There are no records of Lévy-Bruhl’s teaching.

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the Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes

with the physicist Langevin and the philosopher Alain,

and acted as its first president. A year later, in 1935,

Rivet became the first politician to be elected on a

Popular Front list as councillor for the City of Paris

and the Regional Council of the Seine (Lottman 1982: 78),

inaugurating a long and distinguished political career.

Rivet also continued to contribute to the expansion

of the Société des Américanistes. Under his presidency,

various collaborative projects with European and North

American Americanists were planned or undertaken, and

links with researchers, informants and correspondents

multiplied throughout South America, where he travelled

and taught with increasing regularity. In her biography

of Julian Steward, Kerns (2003: 224) mentions that Rivet

was involved with Lowie as early as the late 1920s in an

encyclopaedia project on America’s cultures and

societies.12 By the time US funding became available in

the early 1940s, France could no longer, for obvious

reasons, participate in the project, which became

exclusively associated with its sponsor, the Smithsonian

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Institution. If Julian Steward became the encyclopaedia’s

general editor, it was a former student of Rivet, Alfred

Métraux, who wrote many of the ethnological entries.

When the Vichy regime fired him from the

directorship of the Musée de l’Homme in 1941, Rivet

accepted an invitation from the Colombian president,

allowing him to escape from the Gestapo just in time.

Between 1941 and 1943, he helped develop the National

Institute of Ethnology (Instituto Etnológico Nacional),13

the Ethnological Institutes of the Universities of Cauca,

Antioquia and the Atlantico, and the Colombian Society of

Ethnology (Sociedad Colombiana de Etnología). He also

trained the first Colombian social anthropologists

(including Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff), participated in

10 On 3 December 1928, Rivet wrote to Boas (on official MNHN headed paper):

‘I feel emasculated by the reorganisation of the lab at the MNHN and that of

the Trocadero. Add to this the directorship of the Institute of Ethnology

and that of the Journal of the Americanist Society of Paris, and you’ll

understand why my days fill so quickly’ (my translation).

11 This arrangement was to last until the great university reforms of 1968.

The Musée de l’Homme, successor to the Trocadéro, became a research unit

(‘laboratory’) of the MNHN, which continued to have two anthropology chairs,

one in prehistory and one in ethnology, the latter being held by the

director of the Musée (Michel Izard, personal communication, December 2004).

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the foundation of Bogotá’s ethnographic museum, mounted

several fieldwork expeditions (de Friedemann 1984) and

worked closely with Paulo Duarte, the leading Brazilian

archaeologist, who had been his student.

Rivet’s best-known book, Les origines de l’homme américain,

was published in 1943, and his major Bibliographie des langues

aymará et kicua completed in 1954, four years before his

death. The Musée de l’Homme, which he considered to be

his most important scientific achievement, survived him

for nearly five decades, until the creation of the Musée

du Quai Branly in 2006. Rivet was in many ways stimulated

by the Victorian ambition of using anthropological

knowledge to reform society (Stocking 1987: 324–29), and

the museum he directed constituted, in his eyes, a

perfect synthesis between research, education and

politics. Aimed at popularising ethnological science in a

way that would valorise the material cultures of so-

called primitive societies and elevate them to the rank

of civilisations, the collections of the Musée de l’Homme

were designed on the one hand to educate the French

public against racist ideologies and prejudice, and on

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the other hand to signal to officials and elites that the

duties and responsibilities of good government equally

apply to all citizens.

Paul Rivet’s fieldwork

In line with much of the anthropological writing of his

time, Rivet’s early work deals essentially with the

questions of origins and historical change. The almost

complete absence of concern for issues of structure,

12 I found a letter from Rivet to Boas sent on official Société des

Américanistes headed-paper dated 23 February 1924, which might be the first

mention of a joint Franco-North American encyclopaedia project. After

congratulating Boas on the Handbook of American Indian Languages, which he judges

‘absolutely essential reading’, and expressing the hope that the Smithsonian

Institution will fund the publication, despite current economic

difficulties, Rivet adds: ‘I would also like to take advantage of the next

Americanist congress to ask the Smithsonian delegates whether they would

consider favourably the proposal to produce a handbook of Central and South

American Indians, very much in the same style as that produced by Hodge for

North America. I am convinced that many European scholars (Nordenskiöld,

Koch-Grünberg, Lehmann, Preuss, Krickeberg, Karsten, myself) would readily

and happily collaborate. We could also ask a few South American colleagues

to contribute. What do you think?’ (my translation).

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function or meaning is striking. Yet even though he uses

his observations of contemporary indigenous cultures more

as a source of facts to extrapolate about the

‘aboriginal’ past than as a basis from which to examine

particular forms of social organisation, the ethnographic

interest in the diversity of human ways of life is never

entirely absent from his writings. An examination of his

first field study of indigenous people (Rivet 1903), his

essay on the Jibaros (Rivet 1907–8), and his 1906

programmatic report will illustrate both his

anthropological interests and his methodological

approach.

The Quichua Indians of Riobamba (1903)

A medical doctor14 doubling as a field naturalist, Rivet

came into contact with many patients during his two first

years in Ecuador. As a matter of policy, he treated not

13 Renamed the National Institute of Anthropology after Rivet’s death.

14 Rivet wrote his early publications in his capacity as ‘a medical doctor

attached to the French geodesic mission’.

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only the geodesic mission staff but also many influential

Ecuadorians, local scholars and, on occasion, indigenous

people and mestizos from the rural communities he visited

during his collecting trips (Dussán de Reichel 1984: 70–

71). He talked to many people, but never directly to the

Indians themselves. Although he did interact with

indigenous contracted labourers and patients, most of his

ethnography comes from observing the Indians at a

distance through layers of stereotypes. What kind of

ethnographic observations did he make, then, in the

highlands of Ecuador? An examination of his first field

study with indigenous people, the Quechua Indians of

Riobamba (Rivet 1903), gives us some clues.

The article starts with a detailed geographical

description of the Riobamba region, followed by a

discussion of whether ‘the Indians of the Riobamaba

region’ actually are an adequate unit for anthropological

analysis. What differentiates these Indians from their

neighbours? Rivet argues that, although a full study of

their customs and physical make-up (through

anthropometric measurements) would be needed to conclude

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with certainty that they indeed form a distinguishable

biocultural unit, they seem to possess enough traits in

common to be treated as a separate group. ‘Group’ here is

not used in the social or political acceptation of the

term, but rather to refer to a population made up of

individuals sharing a common physical appearance, due

partly to their shared biology and partly to their shared

material culture.

Rivet proceeds to describe systematically and with

clinical accuracy the physical appearance of men and

women (clothing, adornment, hairstyle), dwellings

(including furniture, tools and sleeping arrangements)

and the yards around them, where children play and

domesticated animals live. He observes that compounds are

fenced and gives the scientific names for all the plant

species making up the hedges. The different species of

animals found are also listed. He then goes on to

describe the people’s food preferences, the ways in which

food is prepared and consumed, and women’s work, in

particular the preparation of maize beer. The detailed

description is followed by a diagnosis: these Indians

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live an extremely impoverished way of life, which has

been forced upon them by history. Their amenities are

basic and rustic, the pervasive filth and lack of hygiene

a constant source of illness, but their diet is frugal

and healthy. In this early ethnographic experience,

Rivet’s training as a medical doctor clearly shapes and

channels his field observations, guiding his assessments

of local health conditions, remedies and attitudes to

western medicine. He shows a great interest in and

appreciation of indigenous cultural achievements: their

physical endurance, their capacity for hard work, their

local knowledge of plant remedies. If the Indians of

Riobamba are not resistant to malaria or smallpox and die

at a young age, it is because they refuse to be

vaccinated, live far from medical centres and do not look

after themselves properly. They use harmful treatments

such as throwing themselves into icy cold rivers when

they have a high fever, or rubbing guinea pigs onto their

bodies for purposes of ritual cleansing. Their witch

doctors are charlatans who exploit their ignorance and

part them from the little cash they are able to earn.

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Here ends the ‘individual ethnography’, as he calls it

(Rivet 1903: 64), of the Indian of Riobamba, who, despite

the abject poverty in which he is forced to live, manages

– just about – to retain some human dignity.

The second section of the article deals with the

regional configuration created by the two co-existing,

but not mixing, biocultural populations found in the

Riobamba valley. Before examining the social networks

that unite the Indians, Rivet examines the reasons for

the profound chasm that exists between the Indians and

the whites (1903: 64–65). What amazes him most is that,

while the Incas succeeded in imposing their language and

customs on the local indigenous population in less than

fifty years, Spanish culture, even after three centuries

or more, has not fully penetrated, much less replaced,

the Indian cultural heritage. The two ‘races’ live side

by side, but without mixing and with minimal

communication, the whites concentrated in the urban

centres, the Indians dispersed throughout the

countryside. The Indians may have adopted Catholicism,

but their animistic way of practising the Old World

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religion has very little to do with what the priests and

missionaries intended to teach them.

He then outlines the different types of political

organisation found in the valley, compares hacienda-bonded

and free communities, and discusses the power and

authority of self-appointed chiefs (he names a few).

Here, the reader is left to wonder how much his own

childhood, spent on the historically disputed border

between France and Germany, which is rife with cultural

and political divisions, and his military training have

influenced his ethnographic understanding. The unfamiliar

landscape and the human settlements are looked at

strategically, and political alliances and divisions

mapped out. At several points in the text, Riobamba

indigenous customs and institutions are compared with

Arab practices.

Rivet goes on to examine the patterns of authority

within the family before describing family life (1903:

65–67), for instance the affectionate ties between

husband and wife. Pre-marital sexual life, marriage

negotiations, wedding rites and various family relations

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are then described succinctly. Stress is put on the

common human desire to found a family, and cultural

differences are played down. This passage demonstrates

again Rivet’s sharp observational skills (for instance,

his penetrating description of how women care for their

drunken husbands), but also his almost total lack of

interest in any ‘why’ question. Although exotic practices

are accurately noted and exposed without a trace of moral

judgement, they never become a source of wonder. It is

the generically human experience that retains Rivet’s

attention throughout.

The style in which the third section is written is

entirely different. It is as a socialist that Rivet

analyses the category ‘Indian’ as a political

construction inherited from the colonial order. The

analysis is aimed at uncovering the particular political

and economic relationships, not between humans pertaining

to different ‘races’ but rather between landowners and

labourers. Three categories of Indians are differentiated

and analysed, and the Spanish terms (concierto, apegado and

suelto or libre) defined. Concierto Indians, the most

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exploited (Rivet actually says ‘unfortunate’), are debt-

bonded to large hacienda landowners. The debt contract is

described, as are the working conditions. Although

legally freer than concierto Indians, apegado Indians in

fact live almost as precariously and inhumanly as their

debt-bonded brothers, for they have no way of themselves

producing or selling the products of their labour on the

market. Suelto Indians sell not only their labour force but

also farm products (e.g. crops, eggs, cheese), products

they collect (e.g. firewood or grasses, whose scientific

names are given) and the artefacts they make (e.g. ropes

made with the fibre of certain plants, whose scientific

names are also listed). If they are not much better off

economically than the Indians in the two other

categories, it is because suelto men end up wasting all the

cash they earn.

The last section is dedicated to indigenous

religiosity. Rivet starts with the assertion that, in

their religious practices as in their linguistic

behaviour, the Indians, although a vanquished race, have

successfully resisted the victors (1903: 74). The sketchy

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mention of religious beliefs, superstitions, funerary

rituals, the cult of the dead and life-cycle rituals that

follows is aimed at supporting the general argument that,

despite missionisation and colonisation, the Indians are

essentially pagans who still believe in mountain spirits,

assimilate the figure of Christ to the hacienda landlord

and let the priests exploit and oppress them shamelessly

(ibid.: 74–75). Unsurprisingly, it is in the treatment of

religious beliefs, where the native point of view and the

indigenous symbolic meanings must form the central focus

of the inquiry, that Rivet’s lack of ethnographic empathy

is most disturbingly evident. The problem is not so much

that Rivet did not talk directly with Indian informants

about their religious ideas and practices (he had no

means of establishing the necessary relations of trust

without total immersion) but rather that he is incapable

of imagining that the Indians of the Riobamba valley may

have their own reasons to believe what they believe in,

or to act the way they act. To him, they are simply

superstitious, ignorant people living in a backward and

profoundly racist country. With his naïve and simplistic

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conclusion that religion is a powerful ideology used to

keep the Indian masses in servility, Rivet fully reveals

himself as the Third Republic thinker he is, totally

imbued with the superiority of his scientific aspirations

to rationality, progress and enlightenment. Scientific

knowledge is a weapon against not only religious

mystification and ignorance but also poverty and

inequality. The destitution and social immobility in

which the Indians live, he concludes, should in no way be

attributed to racial inferiority, for they result from

three centuries of harsh treatment and enslavement

(ibid.: 78).

Rivet’s primary interest in the human condition,

wherever he happened to find it, comes across vividly in

this first study, perhaps even more so in the absence of

an interest in cultural difference. Rivet may have lacked

cultural empathy, but certainly not social empathy. He

did not choose to research a complex and depressing

situation, but simply tried to analyse it as a witness,

without exoticising the very poor Indians he knew.15 This

first study also shows Rivet’s unusual interest in the

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complex history of mixed-race and acculturated

populations, or what today would be called in France les

métissages culturels, or the ‘mestizo mind’ (Gruzinski 2002,

Castelain et al. 2006).

The Jibaro Indians (1907–8)

Rivet organised expeditions apart from those of the

geodesic mission and travelled to the eastern and western

slopes of the Andes, where he met and studied independent

and isolated Indian populations such as the Tsachilas

(Rivet 1905). Like any other traveller, he became

fascinated with the famous ‘Jibaros’ and planned to spend

at least nine months in their territory, a project he

15 Laurière (2006: 101) quotes an unpublished document in which Rivet

powerfully summarises his view: ‘rags are not picturesque’ (‘le haillon n’est pas

pittoresque’). Pineda Camacho (1996: 61) mentions letters Rivet wrote to the

Colombian government, urging officials to act against the dire poverty in

which the country’s indigenous population was living, a remedy without which

no truly national integration or democracy could develop. Analytical

tensions between ‘culture’ and ‘poverty’ still pervade much contemporary

work on Amerindians (see, for instance, Hall and Patrinos 2006, Kalt et al.

2008).

193

ultimately could not carry out (Laurière 2006: 192). He

nevertheless wrote a substantial essay on Jibaro culture,

mainly based on secondary sources, and on the few direct

observations he had made himself while measuring and

interviewing travelling Jibaros.

The study, which compiles approximately thirty

references in various languages and includes a number of

personal observations, as well as answers to

questionnaires Rivet sent to missionaries and traders, is

justified on the ground that, even though the Jibaros are

universally known among travellers as a ‘fiercely

independent, pure and original Indian race’, no

ethnographic synthesis of their culture exists as yet

(Rivet 1907: 338, 349). After a brief exposition of the

facts justifying the treatment of Jibaro culture as a

separate, distinct and homogeneous biocultural unit,

Rivet presents the highly detailed data he compiled in

nine different sections: historical background,

geographical distribution, census data, physical

anthropology, material culture, family life, social life,

religious life and psychic life. Material life is

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subdivided into the house, agriculture and husbandry,

food, weapons, musical instruments, daily life, and

hunting and fishing; family life into gender relations,

children’s education, marriage, birth and death; social

life into social organisation, commerce and warfare;

religious life into traditions, divinities, witchcraft,

afterlife, totemic beliefs, celebrations, superstitions

and medicinal recipes; and finally, psychic life into

general knowledge, counting, arts, moral life, cultural

personality and reflections on the race’s future.

The historical section is based almost entirely on

Federico Gónzalez Suárez’s Historia General de la República del

Ecuador.16 In Rivet’s characteristic ethnographic style,

direct observations are complemented with descriptions of

collected materials and annotated summaries of secondary

sources. Archaeological data are used to complement or

illustrate historical works, and direct field

observations juxtaposed with responses to questionnaires

sent to ‘intermediary informants’. Often, questionnaires

are used to expand the ethnographic inventory by covering

facts on which no direct observation was possible,

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instead of being used to offer a complementary

perspective on the same object of analysis. This leads to

a problematic division of labour between direct and

mediated observation: whereas the ethnographer (Rivet)

specialises in the direct observation and collection of

concrete material items, the intermediary informant,

being deemed more intimately familiar with the Indian, is

asked to contribute the sociological, intellectual, moral

and symbolic data.

The stereotypical generalisations offered in the

sections on the family, social institutions, religious

beliefs and Jibaro personality are drawn from what people

who ‘know’ the Jibaros told Rivet. Except for a few

corrective comments, where Rivet uses his direct

knowledge to correct stereotypes that he finds erroneous

or exaggerated (1907: 608–9), there is no questioning of

the sources. Moreover, and perhaps more disturbingly,

wonderful ethnographic facts are noted in the course of

descriptions of material culture or daily life – and just

left at that. These facts, so fascinating for the modern

ethnographer, are never commented upon or analysed. There

196

is absolutely no attempt on Rivet’s part to raise a

question or to call upon the native point of view;

ethnographic facts do not awaken his imagination. For

instance, he states in passing (ibid.: 601) that Jibaro

men put their left fist in their mouths each time they

tell myths or tribal war stories. A beautiful, very

graphic drawing by one of his colleagues from the

geodesic mission even illustrates the scene (ibid.: 600).

The same indifference greets other facts, such as the

magical practices surrounding the sale of a gun to a

white trader (ibid.: 602) or the high rate of female

suicide among the Aguaruna (1908: 239).16 Rivet’s medical profession opened many doors to him (Zerilli 1991–93:

358), in particular that of Mons. Gónzalez Suárez, Archbishop of Ibarra, a

colonial city north of Quito. This scholar-priest, who had a remarkable

knowledge of Ecuador’s history and prehistory, became Rivet’s friend (Aráuz

1958: 77–78) and informal teacher, advising him on practically all his wide-

ranging interests: linguistics, physical anthropology and pre-Columbian

material culture. Rivet publicly acknowledged his intellectual debt to

Gónzalez Suárez (ibid.: 15–17), including an article for the Journal de la Société

des Américanistes in 1919. I doubt that Rivet would have agreed with León’s

assertion (1958: 316) that he (Rivet) was the founder of anthropology in

Ecuador. He would have demanded that the title be shared with Mons. Gónzalez

Suárez and with another of his Ecuadorian friends, the historian Jacinto

Jijón Caamaño.

197

In contrast with his manifest disinterest in

cultural aspects that cannot be catalogued, Rivet is

unstoppable when it comes to giving the scientific names

of the plants used, describing artefacts or praising

techniques, technologies, bodies of practical knowledge

and other types of indigenous material achievement.17 The

same goes for his expert appreciation of the Jibaro’s

diet, physical beauty, strong constitution, economic

self-sufficiency and preventive measures against smallpox

epidemics. He has, of course, no time or sympathy for

remedies grounded in superstition or beliefs in

witchcraft.

Zerilli (1991–93: 390) sees in this essay the

richest and most ethnographic of all Rivet’s works.

Laurière does not share this point of view (2006: 193),

nor do I. What this essay illustrates so well, however,

is the ways in which the ‘natural scientist-cum-

anthropologist’ (Stocking 1992b: 20) used ‘indirect

17 For example, he enthusiastically describes fire-making and other

techniques to light houses at night (1907: 588–89), giving the impression

that, in addition to having witnessed these techniques, he tried them out

himself.

198

informants’ in the collection of ethnographic data

(Rochereau 1958, Pineda Camacho 1996). While still

employed by the geodesic mission, Rivet had no choice but

to rely on the information he could obtain from priests,

military officers, local scholars or traders. What

started as a practical way of gathering data on places

and people he was curious about but could not visit

himself became a way of working, even a methodology. Like

his predecessors (cf. Dias 1991: 82–83), Rivet thought

that good ethnography did not depend on field

professionals, and that good questionnaires filled in by

knowledgeable correspondents were sufficient. Observation

and classification could remain two separate activities

as long as the anthropologist had a vast network of

secondary informants with whom he could correspond

regularly. Rivet’s pragmatic methodological approach was

particularly successful for researching Amerindian

languages. He not only amassed great quantities of

linguistic data (mainly vocabulary lists) but also co-

authored scores of publications with indirect informants

and co-researchers formally trained in linguistics.

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As we know today, what works for the collection of

material items and factual information may be totally

inappropriate for both ‘the sociological study of systems

of action’ (Leach 1957: 119) and the reconstruction of

psychic life ‘fixed in language, art, myth and religion’

(Stocking 1992b: 37). However, Rivet was not studying

indigenous social classifications: his task, as he saw

it, was to survey the field by gathering basic

ethnographic descriptions that could be mapped onto the

South American continent and methodically classified.

That Rivet remained uninterested in the general structure

of society and the native point of view until the end of

his life explains why his 1941–1942 field research in

Colombia was similar in almost every respect to the

fieldwork he had carried in Ecuador at the beginning of

his anthropological career. Accompanied by his Colombian

students, he sailed through various remote regions to

collect anthropometric measurements, blood samples,

archaeological artefacts, numerous items of material

culture and vocabulary lists (Pineda Camacho 1996,

Laurière 2006: 817–18). Here too, fieldwork was aimed at

200

constituting the material archives of disappearing

cultures.

Origins and migrations of the ‘American Man’

Rivet’s early publications, authored in his capacity as a

‘medical doctor attached to the French geodesic mission’,

well illustrate both his anthropological interests and

his methodological approach. They touch on many

burgeoning domains (from studies of prehistoric skeletal

remains, to studies of diseases, indigenous languages,

religious beliefs, artefact use and economic activities,

and physical features or biomedical conditions), and

combine field data reports or syntheses of previously

published work (often in Spanish) with comparative

analyses. Of the nineteen articles written between 1901

and 1908 (as listed by León 1958), eleven deal with

contemporary groups and customs, three concern pre-

Columbian cultures and five involve general comparative

discussions. These early publications give a good

indication of how Rivet decided, under Mons. Gónzalez

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Suárez’s influence, to stop surveying the natural

environment and start studying the origins of South

America’s aboriginal populations, as well as the

trajectory of pre-Columbian civilisations, which involved

researching the continent’s archaeology, physical

anthropology and folklore. As Uribe (1996: 52) remarks,

Rivet thus shifted his interests from natural history to

human culture, but without changing his basic

methodology: collecting, classifying and comparing.

His foremost interest in origins and migrations is

clearly stated in the 1906 programmatic report (Rivet

1906: 236), which starts with several pages dedicated to

the geography and history of the Andean region, where the

geodesic mission had taken the majority of its

measurements. In fact, twice as much space is dedicated

to history as to geography, while just a few pages

towards the end provide some ethnographic information.

Why so much importance given to history? Because, replies

Rivet (ibid.: 232), the traveller can easily reconstruct,

beneath the cultural manifestations of Inca civilisation,

the traces of anterior and original local civilisations,

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as the bewildering diversity of ancient burial

arrangements existing in the Ecuadorian Andes testifies.

Spanish empire-building, exactly like Inca empire-

building, took place in the inter-Andean valley, where,

as a result, the population is racially mixed, in

contrast with the lowlands, where ‘racial purity is

almost absolute’ (ibid.: 233, my translation). The

ethnological problem, concludes Rivet, is therefore far

more complex (and more interesting) on the high plateaus.

The ethnological research summarised in the rest of

the article consists in numerous archaeological

excavations and anthropometric measurements – more than

two hundred subjects of both sexes and all ages. These

two different modes of direct empirical data collection –

one aimed at reconstructing the past of human and

cultural diversity, the other at understanding the nature

of contemporary diversity – are complemented by two types

of secondary sources: the published work of historians,

and interviews with outsiders in daily contact with the

Indians, essentially priests, military officers and

traders. The ‘American Man’ was, from the beginning,

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Rivet’s most systematic ethnological concern. He asks in

the 1906 report the questions he will answer in Les origines

de l’homme américain: What can today’s diversity of physical

appearance, language and material culture tell us about

the origins of indigenous cultures? Where did the

American Indians come from originally? Although he cannot

address these questions fully as yet, he tries to account

for what he is already calling métissage. For him,

hostility between the two races (conquerors and

vanquished) explains why Andean Indians have not lost

their identity, despite centuries of Hispanic influence.

The ‘races’ have mixed biologically, but not culturally.

Civilised by the Incas and still speaking their Quechua

language, the mixed-blood Indians continue to resist

hispanisation stubbornly (1906: 233).

The continuities in Rivet’s intellectual development

are noteworthy. Even earlier, in the journal he kept

during the transatlantic cruise from France to Ecuador

(Zerilli 1991–93), Rivet revealed his curiosity about the

mechanics of intercultural communication. The facts he

observed, described and meticulously recorded during

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stopovers in the Caribbean illustrate his profound

interest in biological and cultural hybridity, as well as

their social and political consequences. In Martinique,

for example, he reflected on the condition of

Christianised blacks, who have remained fetishist at

heart (‘les nègres catholiques restés fétichistes’). And until the

end of his life, for instance in the teaching he

delivered in Colombia (a country even more racist and

conservative than Ecuador) on the remarkable

civilisational achievements of indigenous cultures, he

continued to develop with passion and eloquence the

themes of universal humanism and racial equality (Dussán

de Reichel 1984), two ideals he saw as inseparable from

an anthropological reflection on métissage.

That Rivet was a diffusionist is clearly revealed by

his fascination for origins, his interest in historical

migrations, miscegenation and linguistic diversity, and

his (over-) use of historico-comparative methodology.

Whereas most diffusionists, especially those associated

with the Vienna School of ethnology (Haekel 1956),

emphasised a people’s historicity with reference to their

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spatial distribution and the spatial and temporal

diffusion of their material culture, Rivet chose to

classify people in terms of linguistic distribution,

which he saw as scientifically more accurate and more

rigorous. His analysis of South American languages was

modelled on the philological work produced by the

linguists who had reconstructed the Indo-European family.

Boas, who had adopted the same model at the start of his

research on North American languages, soon departed from

it, as Stocking explains: ‘By 1920 [Boas’] position ...

had changed drastically, and he was inclined to believe

that diffusion of morphological traits could modify the

fundamental structural characteristics of a language’

(Stocking 1992a: 86).

The legacies of Paul Rivet’s vision for anthropology

As I have tried to show in the previous section, Rivet

was not simply a ‘frenetic empiricist’, as Claude Lévi-

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Strauss called ethnologists from previous generations to

highlight the unique nature of his own conception of

fieldwork as a revelatory experience of ‘radical

displacement’ (Johnson 2003: 9, 169). Nor was his way of

doing fieldwork simply the result of circumstantial

constraints or lack of maturity, as his last spell of

fieldwork in Colombia amply demonstrates. Rivet was bent

on collecting a certain kind of empirical data in the

field, as a result of both his training and his own

understanding of anthropology. A careful reading of Dias

(1991) amply supports a view of Rivet’s work as being

entirely in line with previous attempts in France:

firstly, to define anthropology as broadly as possible;

secondly, to oppose racist rankings of human cultures by

showing that languages are better guides to the study of

lasting cultural differences than physical traits are;

thirdly, to have museum collections accepted as major

research tools and to treat material culture as the

embodiment of a people’s cultural creativity and

technological achievements; and fourthly, to demonstrate

through a range of scholarly studies that great

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civilisations had developed in the New World, a continent

of which so little was known.

Like Boas, Rivet fully embraced physical

anthropology and mastered anthropometric measurement

techniques, only to use them against the analyses and

conclusions reached by phrenologists bent on proving the

genetic existence of separate human races and their

hierarchical ordering (cf. Pineda Camacho 1996: 65). The

relationship between Rivet’s Ecuadorian field experience

and his thesis that persisting differences between human

groups are cultural and linguistic rather than

biological, and therefore that ‘race’ is a vacuous

concept, has been examined by both Zerilli (1991–93,

1998) and Laurière (2006). The two authors may give too

much importance to the construction of scientific

discourse and not enough to Rivet’s own life experience.

A medical doctor with a passion for bettering human

health through a greater knowledge of anatomy, biology

and epidemiology, a keen observer of all things natural

and human, and a firm believer in a universal,

enlightened civilisation, Rivet soon connected facts

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collected in the field or learnt in libraries in a novel

way, which led him to oppose firmly the notion of racial

inferiority and propose instead the theory of métissage.

What struck Rivet upon arriving in Ecuador was the

bewildering phenotypic diversity found in the country,

both within and between ethnic groups. The co-occurrence

of intra-ethnic phenotypic diversity and inter-ethnic

linguistic diversity fascinated him. After four centuries

of Quichua and Spanish imposition, and despite the

intermingling of races, Ecuador had remained an ethnic

and linguistic mosaic. Human languages and human biology,

he concluded, do not change at the same rate, nor in the

same direction. Whereas human bodies are prone to mixing,

linguistic differences persist over time. Moreover, the

intermingling of races, far from being a cause of

generation, as so many of his contemporaries believed,

was a source of biological vitality and cultural

progress. European and American societies were both

racially mixed. The purpose of physical and biological

anthropology, including anthropometric measurements and

the study of blood groups, was therefore to measure the

209

historical process of métissage (Pineda Camacho 1996: 65).

Finally, it is by sharing the lives of Ecuadorian

indigenous peoples that Rivet could fully measure the gap

existing between their intelligence and cultural

creativity, and the racist stereotypes held by Latin

American elites and authorities of the ‘savages’. The

fact that all human societies contributed equally to the

general development of humankind could be demonstrated

through the study of indigenous material culture and

technology, for instance pre-Columbian metallurgy and

gold smelting. It is in Ecuador, a country of entrenched

paternalism and deep racial prejudice, that Rivet learnt

to feel the human dimension of his indigenous informants,

to lift the barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ once and for

all, and to reach a profoundly anti-racist and anti-

ethnocentric vision of humanity (Dussán de Reichel 1984:

71).

Although Rivet’s linguistic studies were made to

serve his diffusionist thesis, they nevertheless

contributed to a better knowledge of South American

languages. Not only did he pioneer a vast new field of

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research, he also helped improve the classification of

the numerous languages in this region (Pineda Camacho

1996: 59), even if, in the urgency of data collection and

comparison, his attempt to reduce the number of isolates

led to incorrect affiliations (Campbell 1997: 80–81).

Sometimes he rushed to conclusions too quickly and his

methodology was not sufficiently rigorous, but many of

his bold and brilliant intuitions were confirmed by later

research, and some of his hypotheses are still guiding

current research (Landaburu 1996). A number of Andean

specialists still consider his Bibliographie des langues aymará

et kicua (1951–54) an important work of reference.18 More

controversial was his application to South American

languages of genetic approaches specifically developed by

philologists to reconstruct Indo-European languages.

Boas, who tended to explain language similarities in

diffusional rather than genetic terms (Stocking 1992a:

74, 86), was critical of Rivet’s linguistic studies,

particularly his 1924 Langues américaines.19

Rivet’s diffusionist search for correlations between

the movements of material objects and languages led him

211

to put forward a range of hypotheses, some more

insightful or audacious than others, but all hotly

debated among Americanists. For example, his proposition

that the cultural influence of Amazonian civilisations on

Andean societies could be demonstrated on both

archaeological and linguistic grounds literally enthused

Nordenskiöld in 1913. Rivet’s main thesis, first

formulated in 1924 and perfected in 1943, that the

American continent had received not only Asian migrants

entering through the Bering Straits but also Malayo-

Polynesian and Australian migrants arriving by sea at

different times during pre-Columbian history was received

with more circumspection, especially in Anglo-Saxon

circles (Pineda Camacho 1996: 62).20 However, the 1943

publication of Les origines de l’homme américain in Spanish,

which came out just a few months after the French

Canadian edition, was received with great enthusiasm in

18 This, inter alia, is the opinion of Olivia Harris and of Carmen Bernand

(personal communications, July 2005, December 2006), the latter adding: ‘his

four volumes on the Quechua language are remarkable. No one has done better

since’ (my translation).

19 Rivet was much more admiring of Boas, whom he treated as a master (Rivet

1958), than Boas was of Rivet, whose work Boas hardly referred to.

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Latin America. Based on the biological hybridisation

hypothesis and the sociological law of substitution,21

Rivet’s métissage theory helped Creole intellectuals

valorise their mestizo heritage. Thanks to Rivet, they

could now form a positive image of their multi-stranded

national identities, rooted in a long history of mixed

ethnic origins and cultural achievements, and see these

as contributing to the universal cultural heritage of

humankind (Rival ms). It is worth noting that Claude

Lévi-Strauss immediately wrote a very favourable review

of Les origines de l’homme américain for Renaissance22 in which he

lauds Rivet’s erudition, lucidity and ‘positively

audacious will to speculate’, as well as his critical

stand against ‘timorousness and orthodoxy’. Pineda

Camacho (1996: 60) remarks that Rivet’s thesis on the

multi-ethnic peopling of the American continent, far from

being an eccentric flight of fancy, was a logical

diffusionist hypothesis that had first been formulated by

the Vienna school. Interestingly, various authors (for

instance, Bellwood 2005, Hornborg 2005) are currently

working on grand syntheses of the kind proposed by Rivet

213

and putting forward new hypotheses about cultural

identity and migratory movements, which Rivet would

doubtlessly recognise as akin to his own theoretical

efforts.

The legacies of Rivet’s work are diffuse and varied.

As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the most

fascinating and striking fact is that, whereas Rivet is

treated as an anthropological ancestor in Colombia and

remembered with much respect, admiration and gratitude in

various other Latin American countries, he has been

almost entirely erased from the collective memory of the

French anthropological community today, despite the fact

that he was French anthropology’s chief guiding spirit

for more than three decades. Whether trained in Paris,

Ecuador or Colombia, Rivet’s former Latin American

students have left a wealth of testimonies, which speak

in surprisingly similar terms about his teaching style,

theories and vision of anthropology.23 Although more

research is needed on this point, what these testimonies

seem to suggest is that Rivet’s anthropology, as he

taught and expounded it in his academic writing and as it

214

informed his politics, resonated profoundly with the

ideals and values of Latin American Creole intellectuals

of the time. And if there is such a match between their

mestizo consciousness and Rivet’s anthropology, it is not

simply because they broadly shared the same political

culture but also, and more importantly, because Rivet’s

anthropology was in many ways their anthropology as well

(Rival ms). Rivet’s humanism resonated with the humanism

of the friends he made in the field. With them, he

debated not only the history of Ecuador but also the

20 In a hand-written letter sent by Rivet to Boas from the MNHN anthropology

lab on 13 February 1925, Rivet expresses his regret that Boas had not

accepted his conclusions regarding the genetic links between Malayo-

Polynesian, Australian and Amerindian languages: ‘Of all those who saw the

evidence I have marshalled to support my thesis, you are the only one who is

raising doubts […] I still hope to convince you in the near future with the

publication of more detailed studies, especially on the Yuma group’ (my

translation). Although Rivet (1932) was invited to give the Frazer Lecture

in Oxford in 1930 on Les Océaniens, no one in Britain was convinced by his

demonstration that the Australian Aborigines, Tasmanians, Melanesians,

Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians, Munda and Khmer formed a single

ethnic complex sharing a common linguistic stock.

21 Cultures do not merge into or mix with each other, but one replaces, that

is takes over, the other. See Jamin (1989: 288).

22 Reproduced in its entirety in Laurière (1999: 127).

215

concepts of progress, welfare and commonwealth, the good

society, the human condition, and many other issues that

engaged anthropology publicly as a new form of humanism.

Rivet could take part in a fruitful two-way

anthropological dialogue with his ‘secondary informants’

and friends, for there was no obvious colonial impediment

to such conversations. Progressive Creoles and mestizos

were as interested as he was in what humans have in

common, their common needs or common psychic unity,

independently of their social condition or geographical

location. For them as for him, the aim of anthropology

was to teach the history of mankind, that is the ways in

which humans had moved around the world, exchanged ideas

and goods, learnt from each other and intermarried to

create better societies. In this sense, Rivet’s humanism

also represented a Latin American aspiration to

humanism.24 Rivet’s objective studies of the material

aspects of human life demonstrated to his Latin American

audience that their heritage contributed directly to

humankind’s global heritage. Put differently, Rivet’s

humanism and that of his progressive Latin American

216

intellectual friends were inseparable from a

‘civilisation politics’, a politics deeply rooted in

modernist humanistic values, which led him (like Boas) to

embark on an empirical and moral critique of racism.

Rivet, whose broad vision of anthropology gave equal

importance to material culture (contemporary and past),

linguistics and what we would today call physical and

biological anthropology,25 would have agreed with Lévi-

Strauss’s definition of ethnology as ‘neither a separate

science, nor a new one. It is the most ancient, most

general form of what we designate by the name of

humanism’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978: 272). As Johnson (2003)

reminds us,26 structural anthropology was born from Lévi-

Strauss’ epistemological battle to define the nature and

scope of anthropology and its relationship to other

academic sciences. However, as they both ignore the

debates that shook French anthropology before Lévi-

Strauss’s ascension, they cannot appreciate the fact that

the latter’s battle had been preceded by Rivet’s battle,

nor that both men’s battles were directly linked to their

respective claims that anthropology was a new kind of

217

humanism, as the change of name from anthropology to

ethnology and back to anthropology (although structural

this time) amply reveals (see endnotes 8, 13).

It is not difficult to find lines of continuity

between the two French scholars, both Americanists and

admirers of Boas, both equally extolling the value of

linguistic studies and the importance of artefacts, and

both equally concerned with the relationship between

history and the production of cultural difference.

Whereas one provided French anthropology with the

institutional framework it needed to start existing as an

independent, nationally and internationally recognised

field of investigation, the other gave it the coherent

and rigorous theoretical framework it lacked. Much more, 23 See, for instance, Araúz (1958: 39), Pineda Camacho (1985: 11–12), Larrea

(in Araúz 1958), Dussán de Reichel (1984), Duque Gómez (1958), Valera (in

Araúz 1958), Santiana (in Araúz 1958) and Chevasse (in Araúz 1958). Carmen

Bernand (December 2006), another Latin American citizen and anthropologist,

mentions that: ‘It is while reading The origins of the American man as a young

student in Buenos Aires that I decided to become an anthropologist’ (my

translation).

24 Wilder (2005), of course, was to look at Rivet’s project in terms of his

defence of ‘tempered colonialism’ in Africa and other regions of the Third

World.

218

of course, will need to be said on the matter. In a way,

structural anthropology would not have existed without

Rivet’s ethnology, for Rivet asked the questions that

Lévi-Strauss tried to answer: Where do the natural

sciences end and the cultural sciences begin? How best to

unify natural and cultural determinisms methodologically?

To what extent can the methodological approaches used in

the natural sciences be applied to the social sciences,

and vice versa? What do we all share as members of the

same human species, and what makes us culturally

different?

It is also not difficult to see what impelled Lévi-

Strauss to create a distance between his ‘field

philosophy’ and Rivet’s twin concern with the natural

history of humankind and the history of societies. As we

saw earlier, Rivet’s fieldwork was emphatically not

sociological: he preferred to classify, order and

organise, rather than take stock of native significances.

The most important task for (structural) anthropology, as

Lévi-Strauss envisaged it, was to make historians,

philosophers and the public at large accept that there is

219

more than one way of conceiving humanity and its

relationship to the world. As Dias (1991: 242) puts it,

anthropology has always been a ‘domain of research torn

apart’ (‘un domaine de recherche écartelé’). And as anthropology

finds itself yet again at a crossroads, unsure of its

25 In a letter he sent to Boas on 14 February 1936, he said that he was

preparing a volume on ethnology for a French encyclopaedia, adding: ‘that

is, all the sciences of mankind, anthropology, ethnography, sociology and

linguistics’ (my translation).

26 Perhaps as a result of being under the spell of the received wisdom that

there is ‘a before and an after Claude Lévi-Strauss’, as Michel Izard told

me in an interview, thus stressing the epistemological break, or radical

discontinuity, initiated by structuralism. Bertholet (2003), like Johnson,

and almost certainly for similar reasons, presents an ahistorical version of

history in which Lévi-Strauss appears as a total outsider to French

anthropology, someone who learnt the trade in the USA. For Bertholet, Lévi-

Strauss – who was first recognised professionally not in France but in the

USA – is a true heir to Boas. More anecdotal, yet revealing, is Bertholet’s

(2003: 148–50, 173) narration of the famous New York dinner during which

Boas died. Told in a way that stresses the direct lineage between Lévi-

Strauss and Boas, the story hardly mentions Rivet at all. Having similarly

heard many French colleagues tell me, overwhelmed by the symbolic power of

the image, that Boas died in Lévi-Strauss’ arms, I did not pay attention to

Bertholet’s version until I re-read De près et de loin, where Lévi-Strauss (1988:

57–58) clearly states that the dinner had been organised in Paul Rivet’s

honour and that, when Boas felt unwell, he was attended by Rivet, who, after

all, was a medical doctor. The power of myth is indeed … overpowering.

220

epistemology, its field research methodology, its

intellectual mission or the kind of humanism it should be

defending (Piña Cabral 2005, 2006; Bloch 2005), there is

much to be learnt, as I hope to have shown in this essay,

from Paul Rivet’s humanist positionings and visions for

the common ground.

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