New from BEROSE: Revisiting Van Gennep’s Life and Work, by Christine Laurière

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Bérose: an article (in English) on a lesser-known facet of Van Gennep’s anthropology. This is one of a series of 11 articles dedicated to Van Gennep in the (newly renamed) Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.

Laurière, Christine, 2025. “The Struggle for Ethnography: Van Gennep and Marcel Mauss as Enemy Brothers,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.

French anthropologist, folklorist and ethnographer, Arnold Van Gennep (1873–1957) is a key figure in the history of the discipline. His international fame is mainly linked to the rereading of his famous work Les Rites de passage (1909) from the 1960s onwards by anthropologists such as Max Gluckman, Victor Turner and Rodney Needham. Since the 1970s, he has also been recognized in France as the founding father of French ethnography at home—among other works, his monumental Manuel de folklore français contemporain appeared in several volumes from 1937 onwards. This double portrait, however, is incomplete. Van Gennep also played a key role in the rise of the legitimacy of French anthropology in the 1900s–1920s but in an unusual way, as he was a troublemaker and somewhat of a trickster. This biographical essay offers a deliberately alternative reading of Van Gennep’s bumpy scientific path. It shows that he had a highly original notion of ethnography as an independent science, refusing to subordinate it to either sociology or ethnology, and refusing the great divide between “us” and “them.” While following his unfruitful attempts to build closer relations with Durkheimian sociologists, the article traces the transformations of Van Gennep’s views on disciplinary frontiers in the first quarter of 20th century. These attempts failed partly for theoretical and methodological reasons, but also for reasons of political philosophy, namely about the place of the individual in society according to Van Gennep’s anarchist sensibilities. His intellectual and institutional rivalry with Marcel Mauss—which has not been addressed properly so far—is highlighted as one of the reasons why Van Gennep abandoned “exotic” anthropology altogether and for good, devoting himself to European and French folklore from the 1920s onwards. The affirmation of ethnography as a scientific discipline was at stake, generating fierce power struggles over definitions and methods to eventually determine who would legitimately bring it to the baptismal font of French academia. Arnold Van Gennep’s antagonistic views provide an excellent vantage point from which to highlight this decisive moment.