HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on a 1951 expedition to Mauritania by Swiss anthropologist Jean Gabus and painter Hans Erni.
Reubi, Serge, 2024. “Anthropology, Photography, and Painting: Jean Gabus and Hans Erni in Mauritania 1951‑1952”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Swiss scholar Jean Gabus (1908–1992) received an education in humanities and worked first as a journalist and explorer. After an expedition to Canada in 1938–1939, he wrote a dissertation on the Inuit, under the supervision of Wilhelm Schmidt. In 1945, he was appointed director of the Musée d’ethnographie of Neuchâtel (until 1978) and professor of geography and ethnography at the University of Neuchâtel (until 1974). He spent most of his career studying the nomad populations of Mauritania, Niger and Algeria, but his most important achievements were museological: he radically modernized the Neuchâtel museum and was an international renowned expert for museums for UNESCO from 1958 to the 1980s, popularizing the concept of objet-témoin. This article discusses the category of minor anthropological traditions and suggests that it is better understood as a historiographical artefact, not an undisputed fact. Intellectual practices that do not fit hegemonic narratives should not be positioned in terms of backwardness in time—or forwardness, for that matter; instead, one should accept the synchronic diversity of scientific activities. To demonstrate this, Serge Reubi (Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris) uses the conceptual lens of Daston and Galison’s objectivity theory and examines the 1951 expedition to Mauritania that Gabus organized with the painter Hans Erni, during which he tried to combine the use of mechanical means of recording (photo, records, films, artefacts) with the more subjective approach of an artist. By doing so, he believed that the expedition would be able to grasp both singular and specific events of the local populations and general human behaviors.
The present article is part of a series of six papers originally delivered in the panel “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives”held during the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures” (4–7 December 2023, online). The conference was co-organized by the EASA’s History of Anthropology Network and the Università di Pisa with the support of Bérose and ten other history of anthropology stakeholders. The panel was convened by David Shankland (Royal Anthropological Institute; University College London, UK), Christine Laurière (CNRS/UMR9022 Héritages, France) and Frederico Delgado Rosa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CRIA Centre for Research in Anthropology, Portugal).
The other articles within the “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives” series are:
“En torno al argumento del anacronismo y la Escuela Histórico‑Cultural en la Argentina: hacia un abordaje discrónico,”by Axel Lazzari
“Frobenius’ Culture History in Australia: Dead Ends and New Insights,” by Richard Kuba
“Fieldwork on the Banks of the Pilcomayo River: The Place of Erland Nordenskiöld in Pre-Malinowskian Traditions of Ethnography,” by Anne Gustavsson
“How Moscow Did Not Become a World Centre of Marxist Anthropology: Liudmila V. Danilova and the Fate of Soviet ‘Revisionism’ in the 1960s‑1970s,” by Sergei Alymov
“Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos ‘Tagungen’,” by Zsofia Johanna Szoke
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