Robert Jaulin
Encyclopedia
Robert Jaulin was a French ethnologist. After several journeys to Chad
, between 1954 and 1959, among the Sara people
, he published in 1967 La Mort Sara (The Sara Death) in which he exposed the various initiation rites through which he had passed himself, and closely analyzed Sara geomancy
. In La Paix blanche (The White peace, 1970), he redefined the notion of ethnocide in relation to the extermination by the Western world
of the Bari culture, located between Venezuela
and Colombia
. If a genocide
designs the physical extermination of a people, an ethnocide refers to the extermination of a culture.
and highlight the importance of cultural relativism
in order to respect other cultures. Although he was part of the humanist
tradition of universalism
seen through a multiculturalist viewpoint, he opposed a universalist method of ethnology which would try to abstract general laws from the study of particular societies — targeting in particular structuralism
, preferring, on Malinowski
's steps, to immerge himself in one specific culture and closely describe it. In this aim, he theorized a specific approach to ethnology, dubbed in 1985 ethnologie pariseptiste by Yves Lecerf in an attempt to describe Jaulin's teachings at the University of Paris-VII since May '68 .
Jaulin signed the Manifeste des 121 opposed to the use of torture during the Algerian War
(1954–62). After a journey among the Bari in South America
, he called for a convention on ethnocide in the Americas at the Congress of Americanists, and in February, 1970, the French Society of Americanists convened for that purpose . Jaulin criticized in particular the role of Christian missionaries towards non-Western cultures.
In 1970, he created at the University of Paris-VII the first department dedicated to ethnology, anthropology
and science of religions
, to which participated scholars such as the philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Pierre Bernard
, Bernard Delfendahl, Serge Moscovici
, Jean Rouch
, Michel de Certeau
, etc..
, an Indian people living on the border between Venezuela and Colombia, in the second half of the sixties, as witnessed by Robert Jaulin himself. Whether conflicting or collaborating among themselves, multiple vectors of ethnocide in place (the Catholic Church and other Christian confessions, the Venezuelan and the Colombian armies, the American oil company Colpet, and all the “little colonists” as Jaulin calls them) converged to the relentless disavowal and destruction of Bari’s culture and society.
In Jaulin’s understanding of the notion, it is not the means but the ends that define ethnocide. Accordingly, the ethnocide would be the systematic destruction of the thought and the way of life of people different from those who carry out this enterprise of destruction. Whereas the genocide assassinates the people in their body, the ethnocide kills them in their spirit.
Collective and arbitrary murder, systematic abduction of children to raise them away from their parent’s culture, active and degrading religious propaganda, forced work, expulsion from the homeland or compulsory abandonment of cultural habits and social structure, all these practices, described by Robert Jaulin, have in common a deep despise for the other man and woman as representatives of a different cultural world.
Along with a detailed description and analysis of Bari’s case, La paix blanche is also a broad reflection on Western civilization
’s tendency to disacknowledge, lower and destroy other cultural worlds as it comes in touch with them, while extending its own domain, bringing the focus of the discussion back from the frontiers of Western civilization to its core and its history. As he takes his inquiry back in time, Jaulin shows that the way the West relates to other civilizations is a continuation of the way it has always related to its own inner cultural diversity, from the monotheistic exclusion of the representatives of different and differing cultural spaces (the “other” gods, divinities, entities, etc.) to its reinstatement under the successive garments of Reason, Revolution, Progress or Science.
A long reflection on the dynamics that led to worldwide ethnocide, its different “masks”, its history and, according to him, one of its earliest manifestations, monotheism
, led Robert Jaulin to a complete reappraisal of the phenomenal and conceptual fields polarized by the notion of ethnocide.
This reassessment took its final shape in the 1995’s work, L’univers des totalitarismes : Essai d’ethnologie du “non-être” (in free translation: "The Universe of Totalitarianisms: An Ethnological Essay on “Non-Being”"). In this book, the notion of “totalitarianism” (which should not be mistaken for Hannah Arendt
’s concept of totalitarianism
) depicts the underlying dynamics of which ethnocide becomes a manifestation among others.
Robert Jaulin defines totalitarianism as an abstract scheme or machine of non-relation to cultural otherness characterized by the expansion of "oneself " ("soi") through an election/exclusion logic. The totalitarian machine operates by splitting the universe into its own “agents” on the one side, and its “objects” on the other, whether they be individuals, families, groups, societies or whole civilizations. It proceeds by depriving the later of their quality of cultural subjects through the erosion and finally the suppression of their space of tradition and cultural invention, which mediates their relation with themselves, i.e. their reflexivity. With the mutilation of their “field of cultural potentialities”, as Jaulin calls it, the totalitarian dynamics transforms its “objects” into new “agents” of expansion, reduced to a mock self-relation defined by the horizon of a potential election. However, to become actual this election needs to articulate with a pole of exclusion; thus the need of a new expansion of this universe of non-relation, the universe of totalitarianisms, by definition an endlessly expanding universe whose theoretical limits paradoxically coincide with its own self-destruction.
The election/exclusion logics works by means of pairs of contradictory and, therefore, mutually exclusive terms. Their content may be as varied as the different semantic domains invested by the totalitarian machine: chosen/doomed, religion/magic, truth/falseness, literate/illiterate, savage/civilized, subject/object, intellectual/manual, proletarians/capitalists, science/illusion, subjectivity/objectivity, etc. In all these contradictory pairs, one of the poles “means” to occupy the whole field; but at the same time, its own meaning and “existence” depends on the virtually excluded pole.
According to Robert Jaulin, the asymmetrical relation portrayed by these pairs is but the starting point of totalitarian movement, its static and temporary position. Its dynamics derives from the “wished for” or prospective inversion of the relation between its two poles. This may happen through the totalitarian pair defining the pre-existing situation, the design of a new one or, more often, through recovery and adaptation of old formulas.
The recovery of the Marxist proletarian/capitalistic contradictory pair or the even older monotheistic chosen/doomed couple by many Independence or Prophetic Movements in the former European colonies as a means of inverting the pre-existing totalitarian field is an instance of the shifts through which the “totalitarian trajectory” reinvents itself. This example also shows the place of ethnocide within the overall totalitarian dynamics as the dialectical alternate to totalitarian inversion.
Such an inexorable and elementary logic, with its ability to migrate to, pervade and finally destroy ever-differing cultural and social worlds, accounts for the endlessly restarted trajectory of totalitarianism’s two-pole field through time and space.
Chad
Chad , officially known as the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west...
, between 1954 and 1959, among the Sara people
Sara people
The Sara are an ethnic group in Central Africa, who reside mostly in Chad, making up approximatively 30% of its southern population.-In Chad:...
, he published in 1967 La Mort Sara (The Sara Death) in which he exposed the various initiation rites through which he had passed himself, and closely analyzed Sara geomancy
Geomancy
Geomancy is a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand...
. In La Paix blanche (The White peace, 1970), he redefined the notion of ethnocide in relation to the extermination by the Western world
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
of the Bari culture, located between Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
and Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
. If a genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
designs the physical extermination of a people, an ethnocide refers to the extermination of a culture.
Life
Jaulin has given particular attention to phenomenons of acculturationAcculturation
Acculturation explains the process of cultural and psychological change that results following meeting between cultures. The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both interacting cultures. At the group level, acculturation often results in changes to culture, customs, and...
and highlight the importance of cultural relativism
Cultural relativism
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and...
in order to respect other cultures. Although he was part of the humanist
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
tradition of universalism
Universalism
Universalism in its primary meaning refers to religious, theological, and philosophical concepts with universal application or applicability...
seen through a multiculturalist viewpoint, he opposed a universalist method of ethnology which would try to abstract general laws from the study of particular societies — targeting in particular structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, preferring, on Malinowski
Malinowski
Malinowski is a Polish surname. It may refer to the following:People:*Bronisław Malinowski , a Polish anthropologist.*Bronisław Malinowski , a Polish athlete.*Donald Malinowski , a Catholic priest and politician....
's steps, to immerge himself in one specific culture and closely describe it. In this aim, he theorized a specific approach to ethnology, dubbed in 1985 ethnologie pariseptiste by Yves Lecerf in an attempt to describe Jaulin's teachings at the University of Paris-VII since May '68 .
Jaulin signed the Manifeste des 121 opposed to the use of torture during the Algerian War
Torture during the Algerian War
Elements of the French Armed Forces as well as of the opposing Algerian National Liberation Front made use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence , creating an ongoing public controversy. Pierre Vidal-Naquet estimates that there were "possibly hundreds of thousands of instances of...
(1954–62). After a journey among the Bari in South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
, he called for a convention on ethnocide in the Americas at the Congress of Americanists, and in February, 1970, the French Society of Americanists convened for that purpose . Jaulin criticized in particular the role of Christian missionaries towards non-Western cultures.
In 1970, he created at the University of Paris-VII the first department dedicated to ethnology, anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and science of religions
Religious studies
Religious studies is the academic field of multi-disciplinary, secular study of religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing systematic, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.While theology attempts to...
, to which participated scholars such as the philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Pierre Bernard
Pierre Bernard
Pierre Bernard, Jr. is a graphic designer and comedian, most notable for his work on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, Late Night with Conan O'Brien and Conan. He had a recurring sketch called "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage", where he would complain about issues that concern him while...
, Bernard Delfendahl, Serge Moscovici
Serge Moscovici
Serge Moscovici is a Romanian-born French social psychologist, currently the director of the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale , which he co-founded in 1974 at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris...
, Jean Rouch
Jean Rouch
Jean Rouch was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.He is considered to be one of the founders of the cinéma vérité in France, which shared the aesthetics of the direct cinema spearheaded by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles...
, Michel de Certeau
Michel de Certeau
Michel de Certeau was a French Jesuit and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences.-Education:...
, etc..
The concept of ethnocide
Robert Jaulin redefined the concept of ethnocide in 1970 with his ground-breaking La paix blanche : introduction à l’ethnocide ("White Peace: Introduction to Ethnocide"). This capital work, which remains to be translated into English, gives a detailed account of the ethnocide-in-motion suffered by the BariBari
Bari is the capital city of the province of Bari and of the Apulia region, on the Adriatic Sea, in Italy. It is the second most important economic centre of mainland Southern Italy after Naples, and is well known as a port and university city, as well as the city of Saint Nicholas...
, an Indian people living on the border between Venezuela and Colombia, in the second half of the sixties, as witnessed by Robert Jaulin himself. Whether conflicting or collaborating among themselves, multiple vectors of ethnocide in place (the Catholic Church and other Christian confessions, the Venezuelan and the Colombian armies, the American oil company Colpet, and all the “little colonists” as Jaulin calls them) converged to the relentless disavowal and destruction of Bari’s culture and society.
In Jaulin’s understanding of the notion, it is not the means but the ends that define ethnocide. Accordingly, the ethnocide would be the systematic destruction of the thought and the way of life of people different from those who carry out this enterprise of destruction. Whereas the genocide assassinates the people in their body, the ethnocide kills them in their spirit.
Collective and arbitrary murder, systematic abduction of children to raise them away from their parent’s culture, active and degrading religious propaganda, forced work, expulsion from the homeland or compulsory abandonment of cultural habits and social structure, all these practices, described by Robert Jaulin, have in common a deep despise for the other man and woman as representatives of a different cultural world.
Along with a detailed description and analysis of Bari’s case, La paix blanche is also a broad reflection on Western civilization
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
’s tendency to disacknowledge, lower and destroy other cultural worlds as it comes in touch with them, while extending its own domain, bringing the focus of the discussion back from the frontiers of Western civilization to its core and its history. As he takes his inquiry back in time, Jaulin shows that the way the West relates to other civilizations is a continuation of the way it has always related to its own inner cultural diversity, from the monotheistic exclusion of the representatives of different and differing cultural spaces (the “other” gods, divinities, entities, etc.) to its reinstatement under the successive garments of Reason, Revolution, Progress or Science.
A long reflection on the dynamics that led to worldwide ethnocide, its different “masks”, its history and, according to him, one of its earliest manifestations, monotheism
Monotheism
Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one and only one god. Monotheism is characteristic of the Baha'i Faith, Christianity, Druzism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Samaritanism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism.While they profess the existence of only one deity, monotheistic religions may still...
, led Robert Jaulin to a complete reappraisal of the phenomenal and conceptual fields polarized by the notion of ethnocide.
This reassessment took its final shape in the 1995’s work, L’univers des totalitarismes : Essai d’ethnologie du “non-être” (in free translation: "The Universe of Totalitarianisms: An Ethnological Essay on “Non-Being”"). In this book, the notion of “totalitarianism” (which should not be mistaken for Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
’s concept of totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
) depicts the underlying dynamics of which ethnocide becomes a manifestation among others.
Robert Jaulin defines totalitarianism as an abstract scheme or machine of non-relation to cultural otherness characterized by the expansion of "oneself " ("soi") through an election/exclusion logic. The totalitarian machine operates by splitting the universe into its own “agents” on the one side, and its “objects” on the other, whether they be individuals, families, groups, societies or whole civilizations. It proceeds by depriving the later of their quality of cultural subjects through the erosion and finally the suppression of their space of tradition and cultural invention, which mediates their relation with themselves, i.e. their reflexivity. With the mutilation of their “field of cultural potentialities”, as Jaulin calls it, the totalitarian dynamics transforms its “objects” into new “agents” of expansion, reduced to a mock self-relation defined by the horizon of a potential election. However, to become actual this election needs to articulate with a pole of exclusion; thus the need of a new expansion of this universe of non-relation, the universe of totalitarianisms, by definition an endlessly expanding universe whose theoretical limits paradoxically coincide with its own self-destruction.
The election/exclusion logics works by means of pairs of contradictory and, therefore, mutually exclusive terms. Their content may be as varied as the different semantic domains invested by the totalitarian machine: chosen/doomed, religion/magic, truth/falseness, literate/illiterate, savage/civilized, subject/object, intellectual/manual, proletarians/capitalists, science/illusion, subjectivity/objectivity, etc. In all these contradictory pairs, one of the poles “means” to occupy the whole field; but at the same time, its own meaning and “existence” depends on the virtually excluded pole.
According to Robert Jaulin, the asymmetrical relation portrayed by these pairs is but the starting point of totalitarian movement, its static and temporary position. Its dynamics derives from the “wished for” or prospective inversion of the relation between its two poles. This may happen through the totalitarian pair defining the pre-existing situation, the design of a new one or, more often, through recovery and adaptation of old formulas.
The recovery of the Marxist proletarian/capitalistic contradictory pair or the even older monotheistic chosen/doomed couple by many Independence or Prophetic Movements in the former European colonies as a means of inverting the pre-existing totalitarian field is an instance of the shifts through which the “totalitarian trajectory” reinvents itself. This example also shows the place of ethnocide within the overall totalitarian dynamics as the dialectical alternate to totalitarian inversion.
Such an inexorable and elementary logic, with its ability to migrate to, pervade and finally destroy ever-differing cultural and social worlds, accounts for the endlessly restarted trajectory of totalitarianism’s two-pole field through time and space.
In collaboration
- De l'ethnocide, 10/18
- Anthropologie et calcul, Paris, 10/18, 1970
- L'Ethnocide à travers les Amériques, Paris, Éditions Fayard, 1972 (translated in Spanish, Editores Siglo XXI, 1976)
- Pourquoi les mathématiques ?, Paris, 10/18, 1974
- La Décivilisation, Bruxelles, Éditions Complexe, 1974
Posthumous
Exercices d'ethnologie, de Robert Jaulin, Roger Renaud (Éditeur), Paris, Éditions P.U.F., 1999External links
- Politique culturelle ou/et scientifique de l’UF d’ethnologie by Robert Jaulin
- A Manifesto, in The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
, Volume 20, Number 16 — October 18, 1973. - Ethnology and History with Julian Pitt-Rivers, RainRainRain is liquid precipitation, as opposed to non-liquid kinds of precipitation such as snow, hail and sleet. Rain requires the presence of a thick layer of the atmosphere to have temperatures above the melting point of water near and above the Earth's surface...
, No. 3 (Jul. - Aug., 1974), pp. 1–3 - Anthropologie et Calcul with Philippe RichardPhilippe RichardPhilippe Richard was a French actor. In 1948 he starred in the film The Lame Devil under Sacha Guitry.-External links:...
in ManMan (journal)Man was a journal of anthropological research, published in London between 1901–1994 by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. For first sixty-three volumes from its inception in 1901 up to 1963 it was issued on a monthly basis, moving to bi-monthly issue for the...
, New Series, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Sep., 1972), p. 493