Françoise Héritier as Fieldworker and Theorist: Women’s Status and the Transformation of Ethnology in Midcentury France

In the first part of the twentieth century in France, ethnology was a science in the making. Due to its low level of institutionalization relative to other social sciences, French ethnology had a large number of women in its ranks. This was in part due to the supposed existence of feminine qualities—such as sensitivity—which would enable women to obtain information on subjects considered more difficult for men to access during fieldwork (Laurière 2017, 427). As a result, the promoters of ethnology relegated women ethnologists to the collection of data, excluding them from the allegedly male domain of theory. With the increasing institutionalization of ethnology in the 1950s and 1960s, many women who had entered the discipline before the war gained institutional positions and intellectual recognition (much as Denise Paulme or Germaine Tillion, directrices d’étude at the 6th section of the École pratique des Hautes Études). 

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This was a time when, while women already made up more than a third of the students in France (Marry 1995, 591), “at a professorial level they were just becoming visible” (Waquet 2008, 300). However, despite the positive reception given to women by French anthropology in the 1950s-1960s, they remained subject to various kinds of constraints. In her work on women ethnologists in France during the inter-war period, Marianne Lemaire shows that these constraints affected the choices made by women anthropologists in regard to their objects of study. Moreover they strove, in their writing, to distance themselves from the suspicions of subjectivism that weighed on their work to be recognized as genuine ethnologists (Lemaire 2011, 83). The aim of this paper is to shed light on the role of gender norms in French anthropology beyond the inter-war period by analyzing Françoise Héritier’s career, from her first fieldwork in the Upper Volta in West Africa, present day Burkina Faso, to her election to the Collège de France. 

Héritier’s research on kinship systems (Héritier 2019[1981]), the prohibition of incest (Héritier 1979, 1994) and the differential valence of the sexes (Héritier 1996, 2002) make her one of the most theoretically ambitious anthropologists of the late twentieth century. Moreover, in succeeding Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France and as director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, she climbed, at the age of 49, to the top of the French university cursus honorum, an institutional position which had hitherto been almost exclusively reserved to men.

While this double specificity makes Françoise Héritier’s career an example of the subversion of gender norms, she remained subjected to them in various ways.

Françoise Héritier and Michel Izard in Upper Volta: A Collaboration on an Equal Footing?

Françoise Héritier discovered anthropology in 1955. At the time, she was preparing for the agrégation in history at the Sorbonne, where she met Michel Izard, a young philosophy student. They quickly fell in love and he took her to Lévi-Strauss’s classes at the Vth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Héritier 2009, 36). The following year, Lévi-Strauss offered them a mission for the General Government of French West Africa, which was looking for a geographer and an ethnologist for a study in the territory of Upper Volta (Héritier 2009, 39). The couple left for their first field trip at the beginning of July 1957 and got married on the spot in February 1958. Françoise Héritier carried out her first fieldwork as part of a team, as women ethnologists of the inter-war period did. All of the women were accompanied by their partners, male colleagues or a colleague of the same sex (Lemaire 2011, 85; Laurière 2017, 427).

While traveling as a couple may have made it easier for women anthropologists to gain access to the field, it also carried the risk that they remained in the shadow of their husbands, seen more as companions than as researchers in their own right. In an interview published in February 1935, French American ethnologist and specialist of Mexico Georgette Soustelle had to disabuse the journalist Claude Janel of the idea that her mission with her husband was a “honeymoon” (Lemaire 2011, 85). More egregiously, the results of their investigation were published exclusively under the name of her husband Jacques Soustelle. However, working against this tendency, Françoise and Michel subverted gender norms, even as they reproduced them in various ways.

The Izard Héritier Team: A Collaboration and a Mutual Admiration That Did Not Erase the Gendered Division of Domestic and Scientific Tasks

Although Françoise Héritier was recruited as a geographer for her first mission in Upper Volta, she and her husband conducted their research jointly. They were both named as authors of the publications based on fieldwork data (Héritier-Izard & Izard 1958a, 1958b, 1959). Michel seemed anxious to establish a kind of equal treatment between them. In a letter to his friend Olivier Herrenschmidt dated August 1959, he asks him “to write to Françoise because it will please her and also because your choice (write to me) is too clearly anti-feminist, like other things.”

His correspondence also demonstrates his admiration for his wife’s proficiency in the study of kinship. On 1 September 1960, while completing military service, he wrote to Herrenschmidt that he follows “Françoise’s work, particularly what she is doing […] on kinship, through highly technical letters, which sometimes give me the impression (and I mean this sincerely), being so comatose, that I am definitely outside the range of action of glutamic acid.” In doing so, he confessed that Françoise’s skills in this area were superior to his own. In another letter, he expressed delight at forming “a perfect team” with his wife. Françoise Héritier and Michel Izard’s work as a couple thus appeared, in the latter’s view, to be a collaboration between equals. The egalitarian nature of the couple’s relationship was also illustrated in the way they combined parenthood and fieldwork research.

Michel and Françoise’s daughter Catherine was born on 5 February 1960. Françoise had only accomplished one period of fieldwork between 1957 and 1958, and her pregnancy might have been an obstacle to her continuing her work in Upper Volta. For example, Rose-Marie Lagrave, a sociologist specializing in gender studies, wrote in her memoirs that when Germaine Tillion, who could have supervised her thesis, found out she had two children, she wouldn’t let her go to Algiers. As a result, Rose-Marie Lagrave ended up completing a thesis on village life in contemporary novels, which enabled her, in her own words, “to become a bookworm and reconcile my job as a mother with my doctoral training” (Lagrave 2021, 225-227).

Against academic norms that made maternity an obstacle to doing fieldwork in far away lands, Françoise Héritier continued her research in the Upper Volta, a part of Africa which until 1960 had been colonized by France. Her first fieldwork diary, written between November 1963 and March 1964, reveals that they brought Catherine along when she was only three and a half years old. For the next fieldwork, which began in autumn 1964, Michel and Françoise decided to leave without their daughter, who spent the year with Michel’s parents. After six months away from her, the couple started taking turns (one going away on fieldwork while the other looked after Catherine), and sometimes left the child in the care of her grandparents or friends (Héritier 2009, 41).

Although Michel Izard tended to present his relationship with Françoise Héritier from the angle of a collaboration on an equal footing, Françoise’s first fieldwork diary reveals that, as mother and wife, she combined research work with domestic chores. During the six months of fieldwork, she was always the one who “washes Catherine” and “feeds her.” This imbalance regarding the practicalities of child-rearing was also present in how they shared their scientific work. If Françoise and Michel co-authored research based on their first year of fieldwork, she was provided menial secretarial tasks, like typing and formatting their work. In a letter dated December 1957, Michel wrote to Herrenschmidt that while he has free time, Françoise “has less […] because of typing.”

In addition, Michel Izard undertook projects in which he planned to benefit from Françoise’s work without her being credited. In a letter to Herrenschmidt dated August 1959, the ethnologist mentions a book project on French ethnology. Although presented as a six-handed work, Izard specified that only the two of them would be named authors: “Authors: You and me (…) Françoise would help us, but firstly, 3 authors is a bit stupid (especially for 128 pages); secondly, it was originally a two-person project.”

In the end, the couple’s division of responsibility for household chores, the division of scientific work, and unpaid and unrecognized work carried out by Françoise for her husband, ultimately reflected and reproduced gender norms in place in the French social world of the 1960s.

After an initial period of collaboration as husband and wife, Françoise and Michel’s work soon became distinct, with each of them working on his or her own particular subject in a specific field. Françoise Héritier then found herself leaving home alone on fieldwork, sometimes for several months in a row. Nonetheless, research institutions still considered her as the wife of a researcher rather than as an ethnologist in her own right.

Institutional Constraints: Françoise Héritier as Her Husband’s Wife

In 1963, Françoise Héritier began a thesis under the supervision of Denise Paulme on kinship and marriage among the Samo, while Michel Izard started his own on “The ancient political organisation of the Yatenga.” As a result, the couple spent more and more time apart, each working on his or her own fieldwork, producing writings in his or her own name. Despite this autonomy, in the eyes of the research institutions, Françoise remained first and foremost her husband’s wife.

The explicit discrimination suffered by Françoise Héritier because she was a woman came into focus when, in July 1966, Pierre Aigrain, directeur des enseignements supérieurs at the French Ministry of Education, refused to grant her funds to go on fieldwork on the pretext that “the mission funds requested for Mr. Izard have been refused by the competent Commission.” Thus, Héritier was refused funding on the grounds that her husband did not obtain funding. In this manner, she was relegated to the status of wife, which clearly prevailed, in the eyes of the institution, over her status as a researcher. She replied in September 1966, writing that she “protests against the procedure which consists of associating my fate with that of my husband,” recalling that they carry “different research, in different fields, with the help of fundings which are not granted to the couple, but to each of us in particular.” This protest was not taken into account, and it was only after joining CNRS as attachée de recherche that she was able to return to fieldwork in September 1967.

A Woman Theorist: Françoise Héritier Essentialized Despite Herself

In her work on women’s writing in the inter-war period, Marianne Lemaire formulates the hypothesis that women ethnologists, in order to establish their scientific authority, strove to choose subjects of study that presented important formal constraints and let as little room as possible for their authorial figure in order to dissimulate their position as a woman under the figure of the scientist and thus “avoid the accusation of amateurism with which women were very likely to be threatened” (Lemaire 2011, 89). In this respect, Françoise Héritier’s subjects of study and writing choices have much in common with those of the women who preceded her in the discipline. To participate in the discipline of ethnology, Héritier disavowed or modified her object of study to align with what was considered a serious topic of study, a strategic choice which required her to address subjects and write in a style so as not to be reduced to their position as a woman.

The Choice of Demography and Kinship Studies: A Bulwark Against the Accusation of Subjectivism That Weighs on Women Anthropologists

As soon as she began to study ethnology, Françoise Héritier took a keen interest in demography. It was Héritier who wrote the demographic section of the works published with Izard. In 1959, she signed the review of a handbook on demographic research in developing countries for L’Année Sociologique, and the same year the couple was asked to write a chapter on demographic surveys in fieldwork for a collective volume edited by Jean Poirier.

It is significant that the researcher’s interest in demography developed in a context where Lévi-Strauss, who established himself as a dominant figure in French anthropology, designated demography as a means for ethnologists to lend scientific legitimacy to their work. Indeed, in Anthropologie structurale, Lévi-Strauss wrote that anthropology “approaches mathematical expression by tackling the numerical properties of groups, which are the traditional domain of demography,” and he also welcomed a new alliance between ethnologists and demographers, defining the resulting “socio-demography” as “already on a par with social anthropology,” and suggesting that it could one day become “the compulsory starting point for all our research” (Lévi-Strauss 2003[1958], 348-349).

Françoise Héritier therefore decided, from the very beginning of her career, to enter a field considered by her mentor as pertaining to the most scientifically advanced one in social anthropology. For that matter, it was through computer processing of statistical materials collected in a Samo matrimonial isolate that she formulated her first solution to the enigma of semi-complex systems of alliance (Héritier 1976). It appears, then, that Françoise Héritier’s choice of subject constituted an assertion of scientificity, an essential condition for female anthropologists to gain symbolic and institutional recognition.

It is striking to note that Françoise Héritier effaced reference to herself in her various works on Samo kinship, from her first article on the subject (Héritier 1968) to the publication of L’exercice de la parenté (Héritier 2019[1981]). Her writings do not take the form of narratives, but rather objective, formal analyses of how kinship systems function via a mathematical model.

The researcher’s concern to distance herself from any hint of her own subjectivity is particularly striking in the introduction of L’exercice de la parenté. She defends, in a few pages, the scientific nature of her approach, writing that it is based “not on purely mental views, but on detailed accounts of specific ethnographic studies that constitute, in a way, experimental data for anthropologists,” experimental data that enable her to uncover “statistical laws” (Héritier 2019[1981], 12). By laying claim to the experimental method and defining her results as “laws,” Françoise Héritier explicitly defined her approach as a scientific one in the strongest sense of the term, comparable to the natural sciences.

But despite these precautions, Françoise Héritier, like her predecessors, regularly found herself referred back to her status as a woman, and the stereotypes attached to it.

An Essentialized Reception

In her archives, the researcher kept a text written at the end of the 1970s by the Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch, which she annotated at his request. In it, he set out the conditions for ensuring that the Samo kinship system uncovered by the researcher was operative for Omaha kinship systems in general, writing: “We will only be able to answer this question when other analyses, of the same scope and led with the same meticulousness, have been undertaken.” This phrase attracts attention, in that it was annotated by Françoise Héritier who barred the word “meticulousness” and replaced it with “quality.” It is significant that Luc de Heusch used this adjective, associated—as sociologists of work have shown (Guilbert 1966)—almost exclusively with the feminine gender, to qualify a work which strives to dissimulate as far as possible its author’s gender identity.

The essentializing gestures of Françoise Héritier’s work were not always so subtle. For example, when the family historian André Burguière reviewed Françoise Héritier’s first book in the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in March 1982, he wrote that: “In this 40-year-old anthropologist with a sparkling smile and a slightly country style gentleness, the intimidating abstraction of structuralism takes on the air of intimidated competence. You think she’s going to tell you a recipe for jam—which she also does very well—and in the same good-natured tone she explains the skewing rule in the Crow and Omaha terminology systems.” André Burguière referred to Françoise Héritier in terms of her gender, halfway between the figure of the grandmother—through the mention of the jam recipe—and that of the sweet little girl. In this respect, the author presents as a curiosity the gap between the social being he describes and the theoretical complexity of her object of study.

Despite the essentialization that prevailed in the reception of her work, Françoise Héritier’s choice of her object of study paid off on the institutional level. The results of her research on the Samo, which led to a general theory of how semi-complex alliance systems work, opened the doors to the French institutional cursus honorum and brought her significant symbolic benefits, including the authority bestowed upon someone working within this avowedly scientific paradigm of mid-century French structuralism.

In 1976, drawing on the results of computer processing of data collected among the Samo, the researcher presented a general model for understanding Crow-Omaha systems. In her article, she intended to demonstrate that semi-complex alliance systems are structured, like elementary systems, by positive rules that direct the choice of spouse towards a certain category of individuals or groups (Héritier 1976).

In doing so, she offered a solution to the problem identified by Lévi-Strauss, in his preface to the second edition of Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, as the greatest future challenge in the anthropology of kinship (Lévi-Strauss 1967, 27-30), and confirmed his hypothesis, which earned her a dramatic acceleration in her career.

In 1977, she was successively elected maître de recherche at the CNRS and directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales at her first attempt in December. Françoise Héritier was therefore able to get promotions which, for the majority of women researchers in France at the time, still represented an often insurmountable “glass ceiling.” 

Her work on semi-complex alliance systems found a definitive expression in L’exercice de la parenté, published in 1981. More than a simple presentation of her results, this book marked the transition of the researcher’s thought to an anthropological theory with universal scope: in it, she added to the prohibition of incest “a second fundamental law of kinship, the very condition of the existence of the first […] the differential valence of the sexes, or if one prefers, the different position of the two sexes on a table of values, more generally the dominance of the masculine principle over the feminine principle” (Héritier 2019[1981], 69), a dominance that symbolically makes possible the exchange of women by men and the rule of exogamy which both are at the origin of the prohibition of incest. By positing this second fundamental law as a condition for the existence of the first, designated by Lévi-Strauss as “the fundamental process by which […] the passage from the biological to the social, from the state of Nature to that of Culture, takes place” (Lévi-Strauss 1949, 35), the researcher placed her anthropological reflection on the scale of the human species and claimed the status of theorist.

On 27 June 1982, Françoise Héritier, presented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, was elected at the professor’s assembly of the Collège de France. After Jacqueline de Romilly, she was the second woman to sit on the board since the institution was founded. This election was all the more prestigious in that it took the form of a succession. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss presented her candidacy to succeed him not only at the Collège de France, but also at the head of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, which he had founded in 1960. Françoise Héritier thus appeared as the designated successor to the most famous French anthropologist of the time, a rare occurrence in an academic world where, as Françoise Waquet notes, “knowledge and therefore the transmission of knowledge are gendered” insofar as “retiring professors look for their clone” and thus identify “more easily with a male teacher than with a female teacher” (Waquet 2008, 302).

The fact remains that Lévi-Strauss’s presentation of Françoise Héritier to the Assembly of Professors of the Collège de France also betrayed the weight of gender norms in the way research work carried out by women was considered. Although the professor described the candidate as a “great theoretician,” he presented her above all as a great technician, emphasizing her computer skills, before praising her as the candidate who was “the first Africanist, and even the first ethnologist, to have had the idea of learning the humble techniques used by land surveyors to draw up natives’ land registers.” By glossing over Françoise Héritier’s theoretical dimension and stressing her technical skills, Lévi-Strauss reproduced the gender norms prevailing in the academic field. Indeed, he chose to set aside the theoretical scope of Françoise Héritier’s work, the figure of the theorist and its corollary capacity for abstraction related to masculine gender, in order to highlight her meticulousness and dexterity, skills associated with femininity.

Françoise Héritier’s ascension to the top of the French university cursus honorum, an institutional position traditionally reserved for men, did not abolish the weight of gender norms, and this is even more striking in the light of the media coverage of this election.

A Woman at the Collège de France: Françoise Héritier as a Curiosity

The press coverage of Françoise Héritier’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France left no room for equivocation: more than a scientist, it was a woman who had been elected. Indeed, most articles focused less on the content of the anthropologist’s inaugural lecture than on her dress, physical appearance and intimidated attitude, all of which gives rise to an infantilization of the female researcher who appeared to be something of a curiosity.

In the magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, Mona Ozouf emphasised the “exotic sparkle” of her “cherry dress,” her “wisely parted black hair,” and the “charming features” of a researcher with “the knotted throat of a beginner.” In the Swiss daily 24 heures, Jacqueline Baron portrays her as a “good pupil of Claude Lévi-Strauss” who “worries about her dress.” The infantilization of the researcher reaches its climax in a short article in the newspaper Le Point: “A pupil of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Françoise Héritier-Augé, 49 years old, a girl, holds the chair of comparative studies of African societies at the Collège de France since January.”

The election to the Collège de France is unique in that it confers considerable symbolic power and often elevates the elected researcher to the status of master of his discipline. In this respect, the way in which Françoise Héritier is portrayed is all the more striking: the figures of beginner, model student and young girl that emerge from the above-mentioned press articles appeared to be the antithesis of the master status generally associated with such a position, and thus revealed the impossibility for women researchers to acquire such a title in their own right.

It also appears that the anthropologist suffered from being in the shadow of her mentor. Indeed, the various articles reporting on her election never failed to mention that she was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s pupil, a way of implicitly pointing out that she owed her institutional position to the prestige of her master and, as a result, denying her the rank of master.

Françoise Héritier, in a note left on a loose leaf written in the last years of her life, expressed her frustration that despite her exceptional career, she had never really been acknowledged as a master in her own right because of her gender:

“People use my ideas, eventually my words and the concepts that I have introduced as if they were there from all eternity, without an author. This is regularly the case for the incest of the second type and the differential valence of the sexes. They are used or alluded to, sometimes with a footnote: ‘as Françoise Héritier might have written’. Well, no. It’s not that she might have written it, she invented it. […] It’s not uncommon for people close to me, for whom it’s impossible to have a female ‘guardianship’ or ‘ancestry’ or to ‘recognize’ what they owe to a woman, to forget what came to them from me, their apprenticeship, training and, more often than not, their career and promotion, in order to approach, as if by direct descent, to the august memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss.”

Works Cited

Guilbert, Madeleine. 1966. Les fonctions des femmes dans l’industrie. Paris: Mouton.

Héritier, Françoise. 1968. “À propos de l’énoncé des interdits matrimoniaux.” L’Homme 8, no. 3: 5-21. .

Héritier, Françoise. 1976. “Contribution à la théorie de l’alliance. Comment fonctionnent les systèmes d’alliance omaha?” Informatique et Sciences Humaines, no. 29 (juin): 10-46. ‘Contribution à la théorie de l’alliance. Comment fonctionnent les systèmes d’alliance omaha?” Informatique et Sciences Humaines, no. 29 (juin): 10-46. 

Héritier, Françoise. 1979. “Symbolique de l’inceste et de sa prohibition.” In La fonction symbolique. Essais d’anthropologie, edited by Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, 209-243. Paris: Gallimard.

Héritier, Françoise. 2019 [1981]. L’exercice de la parenté. Paris: Points.

Héritier, Françoise. 1994. Les Deux Sœurs et leur mère. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Héritier, Françoise. 1996. Masculin/Féminin. La pensée de la différence. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Héritier, Françoise. 2002. Masculin Féminin II. Dissoudre la hiérarchie. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Héritier, Françoise. 2009. Une pensée en mouvement. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Izard-Héritier, Françoise and Michel Izard. 1958a. Aspects humains de l’aménagement hydro-agricole de la vallée du Sourou. Bordeaux: I.S.H.A.

Izard-Héritier, Françoise and Michel Izard. 1958b. Bouna. Monographie d’un village pana dans la vallée du Sourou (Haute-Volta). Bordeaux: I.S.H.A.

Izard-Héritier, Françoise and Michel Izard. 1959. Les Mossi du Yatenga. Étude de la vie économique et sociale. Bordeaux: I.S.H.A.

Lagrave, Rose-Marie. 2001. Se ressaisir. Enquête autobiographique d’une transfuge de classe féministe. Paris: La Découverte.

Laurière, Christine. 2017. “L’épreuve du feu des futurs maîtres de l’ethnologie.” In Les années folles de l’ethnographie : Trocadéro 28-37, edited by André Delpuech, Christine Laurière and Carine Peltier-Caroff, 405-447. Paris: Publications scientifiques du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.

Lemaire, Marianne. 2011. “La chambre à soi de l’ethnologue. Une écriture féminine en anthropologie dans l’Entre-deux-guerres.” L’Homme 200, no. 4: 83-112.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1967 [1949]. Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: La Haye, Mouton et Maison des sciences de l’Homme.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2003 [1958]. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Pocket.

Marry, Catherine. 1995. “Les scolarités supérieures féminines en France dans les années 80: un bilan contrasté.” In La Places des femmes. Les enjeux de l’identité et de l’égalité au regard des sciences sociales, edited by EPHESIA, 591-597. Paris : La Découverte.

Waquet, Françoise. 2008. Les enfants de Socrate: filiation intellectuelle et transmission du savoir – XVIIe – XXIe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel.