French administrators studied African peoples partly for professional advancement
Evidence
The most famous examples of administrators known for compiling sensitive accounts of customary law before World War I are Governor Clozel of Upper Senegal-Niger and Maurice Delafosse. In 1909 it was Clozel, not Governor General Ponty, who ordered the administrators of his colony to complete the classification of customary law requested by Dakar in 190 5: Robinson, “Ethnography and Customary Law in Senegal,” pp. 232-233; Wooten, “Colonial Administration.” Determining how interested French administrators were generally in the peoples they were ruling is no easy task. Sibeud has shown that many French administrators in sub-Saharan Af- rica were motivated to study local peoples under their authority for practical reasons as well as a desire to establish themselves professionally by pub- lishing their research in France in the most prestigious social science jour- nals of their day … Unfortunately, no overall study of the content of this colonial ethnography exists; it was clearly of uneven quality, although the best- known authors, such as Maurice Delafosse, Charles Monteil, and Fran~ois Clozel, paved the way for the creation of the Institut d’Ethnologie at the University of Paris in the 192o’s — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1097
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The administrator-as-ethnographer dynamic recurs in the modern imposition of republican categories—who writes the rules matters.
Related
- French colonial administrators studied local peoples for career and practical motives (similarity 0.88)
- French administrators lacked real knowledge of the African customs they were charged to reform (similarity 0.82)
- Clozel institutionalized scholarly study of African history within the colonial administration (similarity 0.81)
- Professional ethnology in France was framed as a tool of colonial control (similarity 0.81)
- French ethnology was founded explicitly to serve colonial control objectives (similarity 0.80)