French respect for African custom was justified by biological race-regeneration thinking tied to eugenics

Evidence

11 All administrative measures tending to modify the organization of native society can, by the disruption they cause to time-honored habits, have negative repercussions upon the resistance of the race.” For this reason, Carde cautioned his subordinates in I 926 against interfering in marriage customs, family arrangements, or trying to move from collective forms of labor to individual ones. … This emphasis upon race regeneration-which previous historians of the doctrine of association have (like its civilizing content) failed to note-was entirely in keeping with the intensifying interest in mise en valeur in the interwar years, and the larger eugenicist and pro-natalist trends emerging in the metropole at this time. These developments help make clear why it was only in the I 92o’s that Dakar began to explore and articulate its own attitudes toward labor. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 860

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how ‘respecting’ African institutions in the interwar period was newly grounded in a medical/biological race-regeneration rationale rather than earlier cultural arguments.