The French by themselves: Anthropology and the study of the French, 1829--1880

For two hundred years anthropology has without fail been understood and represented as a series of encounters between the European and the "Other." This study attempts to complicate this one-dimensional historical portrait by arguing that anthropology in France was also shaped and structured by a pre-occupation with studying the "races" of France. This self-conscious search for and study of the French "races" resulted from several related factors: arguments that Europeans knew less about themselves than they did non-Europeans; the fact that physicians promoted a physicalist anthropology as the key to understanding human culture and civilization, which meant they needed bones to measure (which were easier to procure in France itself); the highly charged political atmosphere of nineteenth-century France, a direct consequence of France's revolutionary inheritance; and there was the additional fact that French anthropologists wanted their specialty to be seen as useful and relevant and as a result, they emphasized the utility of physical anthropology. These factors combined to create a context for the study and representation of the French "races" in the discourse of nineteenth-century French anthropology.