French interwar ethnology paradoxically fueled racism despite asserting racial equality

Evidence

Levy-Bruhl, “L’Institut d’Ethnologie,” p. 234. 46. The issue of how involved professional French anthropologists (as opposed to colonial administrators with some Institut training) were in French imperialism in the 192o’s is, of course, a vexed one. Jean Copans has argued that, despite the practical orientation Levy-Bruhl wished to give the new Institut d’Ethnologie, the fieldwork produced by the professionals there was less closely allied to the interests of the colonial state than that of Britain’s International African Institute (also founded in 1926). Whereas the latter consciously dedicated itself to producing concrete information about African institutions-past and present-essential to indirect rule, the Durkheimian orientation of French interwar ethnology led to a more philosophical exploration of African cosmogony and total social facts. A positive aspect of this approach was that the different races of the world were seen as fundamentally equal. Copans, Critiques et politiques, pp. 9o-97. Yet Institut ethnographers have also been criticized for reifying the “traditional” aspects of African cultures at the expense of their modem features, and assimilating all African societies into a larger civilisation noire whose underlying structures were everywhere the same. In these ways, their work may have inadvertently contributed to the growing sense among administrators and the public of how different Africans were from whites, thus the intensifying racism of the interwar years. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1321

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the reader’s existing interest in the French republican civilizing mission and how scientific/cultural institutions underwrote colonial hierarchy — echoes the earlier chapters on the Institut d’Ethnologie and French assimilationist assumptions.
• QUESTION: How did Durkheimian ‘total social facts’ methodology specifically lead to reifying the traditional at the expense of the modern in African societies?