A Conversation with Michel Leiris

Abstract

Introduction [sp]: More than most participants in anthropological world, Michel Leiris eludes pigeonholing in terms of traditional categories of intellectual activity. With one foot in anthropology and another in literature, his life has also been centered on close personal relations with a diverse network of creative artists and thinkers, from Picasso to Sartre. In realm of anthropology, both his recognition of importance of ethnographer's subjectivity and his fascination with hybrid social and cultural situations (particularly in colonial settings) place his work of I930S a halfcentury ahead of its time. Many Anglophone anthropologists know Leiris best as a participant in France's first major scientific expedition in Africa, Dakar-Djibouti expedition of I93I-33, led by Marcel Griaule. It is therefore curious that his conscientious, sensitive, and introspective journal of that undertaking, published in France as L'Afrique fantome (I934), has never been translated. Indeed, relatively little of his anthropological writing has come out in English. The journal Sulfur has produced beginnings of a corrective to this gap in form of a special issue devoted to Leiris (no. I5 [i986]); in addition to an opening essay by James Clifford, it includes new translations of a variety of Leiris's anthropological and literary writings.2 The production of following pages has conformed to Paris Review model, as described recently by John Updike, allowing participants the opportunity to peruse and edit transcript, to eliminate babble and indiscretion and to hone finer elicited apergus (New York Times Book Review, August I7, I986, p. I); for Michel Leiris fully shares views of most of Paris Review interviewees, whose cooperation before a microphone represented more of a courteous and goodwilled concession to friendly pressure than an active enthusiasm for laying one's thoughts on oral line. The participation of Jean Jamin, Leiris's close friend and colleague at Departement d'Afrique Noire of Musee de l'Homme, was explicitly designed to nudge exchanges out of realm of a formal interview and toward a more spontaneous conversation. Even so, enterprise was hardly-as Leiris notes at end-one built on his favorite medium of communication. Given current attention being paid in anthropology to nature of dialogue and its transcription and translation, steps that led to text deserve comment. In spring of I986, Leiris accepted my proposition to participate in this project on condition that he be given opportunity to rephrase his comments in writing. Two sessions were held at Leiris's home, on October 28, I986, and March I2, I987. Jamin kindly undertook laborious task of converting three and a half hours of recorded into wordprocessed pages and made substantial editorial modifications (deletions, amplifications, and reordering) with aim of pulling together related points in discussion; he also drafted many of notes. This text was submitted to Leiris, who reworked pieces of his own commentary, making further abridgments and elaborations. I reviewed this text (lightly rephrasing some of my own questions, deleting a few exchanges, and reintroducing two or three phrases that had been omitted in first written version) and translated it into English. I then added to notes, drafted this introduction, and showed whole manuscript to Leiris, who made a few final revisions. Responsibility for editing of this version rests with me; Jamin has prepared a French version for Paris-based journal Gradhiva. In short, this conversation represents (like its French variant) a text based on recorded discussions, rather than a transcription in strict mechanical sense. The illustrations were selected by Leiris. After conversations were held, I read for first time a 23-page typescript entitled Titres et travaux, a kind of discursive curriculum vitae which Leiris produced in I967 for his promotion to rank of Directeur de Recherche at Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). As a preface to following pages, I have translated (rather literally) introduction to this previously unpublished document, in which Leiris, referring to himself in third person, summarized his anthropological career.