Professional ethnology in France was framed as a tool of colonial control

Evidence

Indeed, whether even the metropolitan scholars, responsible with Delafosse for the creation of the lnstitut d’Ethnologie, had such an interest is open to question. The ethnologists teaching there insisted that their mandate was simultaneously scientific and utilitarianthat is, they were to study colonial peoples, but always in order better to control them. As Levy-Bruhl explained it, the principal reason for founding the Institut was the “urgent” need in the colonies for practical ethnological information gathered by professionals. “When a colony contains peoples of inferior civilization, or very different !civilizations] from our own, good ethnologists are as necessary as good engineers … and good doctors.” Successful mise en valeur required an “exact and profound knowledge of !local] languages, religions and social cadres, which must not be tampered with lightly,” to avoid insurrections. As these quotations suggest, the research agenda of the “scientific” Institut members had, on paper at least, the same political and economic objectives as the colonial administrators they were now training. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 692

Categorization

• CANDY: The idea that top-tier academics like Levy-Bruhl sold ethnology as being as necessary as good engineers and doctors for controlling colonies is a compact, quotable insight about science’s instrumental entanglement with empire.