Even ethnographer-administrators versed in African cultures upheld French republican colonial policy

Evidence

Jules Brevie was governor general from I930 to I936. His commitment to the same policy is all the more telling because he fit the profile of the “ethnographer-administrator” much more than either of his fellow Ecole Coloniale graduates, Carde and Van Vollenhoven. Brevie had had considerable field experience in the Western Sudan and showed an all-consuming interest in native policy while in office. He was enormously well read, and in 1923 published Islamisme contre “naturisme” au Soudan franr;ais: Essai de psychologie politique coloniale. This book, to which Maurice Delafosse wrote the introduction, compared animism to Islam in West Africa. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1347

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Delafosse and Levy-Bruhl as intellectual influences on French colonial native-policy thinking.