L’invention africaine de l’écologie française

Abstract

The African Invention of French Ecology History of the Field Station of Lamto (Ivory Coast), 1942-1976 This article examines how ecological researches conducted at the field station of Lamto (Ivory Coast) contributed to the institutional and theoretical structuring of ecology in post-war France. Created in 1962 by the École normale supérieure of Paris (ENS) and supported by the International Biological Program (IBP), the station of Lamto was devoted to the quantitative study of the savannah ecosystem. The history of Lamto – understood as a scientific project and as a site of research – reveals the importance of the post-colonial deployment of French scientists in Africa, in the context of « la Coopération ». First, the scientific genealogy of Lamto enables to trace the colonial roots of quantitative ecology. The Lamto project originated during the naturalist exploration of the prairies of Mount Nimba (Guinea), as early as 1942. A young French naturalist, Maxime Lamotte, conceived there his first investigations in quantitative ecology, relying on a massive use of local indigenous auxiliaries. At the turn of African independences, his project had to be displaced to the neighbouring Ivory Coast, where the station of Lamto was founded. The second part of the article insists on the organization of scientific work at Lamto, between 1962 and 1976. The study of the ecosystem of Lamto, internationally recognized as excellent, relied on a strict coordination of researches. While Lamotte, who headed the zoology laboratory of the ENS, compiled data for the whole ecosystem, several PhD students focused respectively on one component. In turn, they employed numerous unskilled workers for raw material collection. Drawing on colonial hierarchies, the organization thus reflected metaphorically the pyramidal structure of ecosystems. In a third part, the article discusses the role of scientists from Lamto in the emergence in France of ecology as a scientific discipline. The international insertion of the project –the most important French project sponsored by the IBP– gave a strong influence to its leader Maxime Lamotte and to several other scientists. On the tropical field of Lamto, the durable contacts between botanists, zoologists and geographers boosted interdisciplinary dialogue, which proved crucial to the theoretical and institutional making of ecology. Lamto has thus not only been a favourable site for ecological research, but also an occasion of circulations beyond national and disciplinary boundaries.