Anthropological institutions in nineteenth-century France.

Abstract

TU NTIL THE LATE SECOND EMPIRE, anthropology was an ambiguous term in French usage. Along with the competing neologisms ethnology and ethnography, anthropology was defined and redefined by those who advocated the close study of humankind but failed to settle on the special content, approach, or emphasis of the discipline. After the establishment in 1859 of the Societe d'Anthropologie and the steady rise in reputation of its principal founder, the anatomist and surgeon Paul Broca, the term anthropology began to assume definite meaning. In later years, it came to be identified almost exclusively with Broca and his associates and was used to denote their conception of anthropology as a natural science devoted to positive investigations into human anatomy, the variety of human physical types, and man's place in nature. The term ethnology went largely out of existence in France until revived in the 1920s by Durkheimians under the leadership of Marcel Mauss, scholars who deliberately sought to break with the physicalist tradition of nineteenthcentury anthropology. Ethnography, on the other hand, developed independently of Brocan anthropology as a purportedly comprehensive-jointly physical and moral-science, but without ever enjoying the latter's reputation or