Science-anthropology-literature : the dynamics of intellectual fields

The language of 'the human sciences', Vincent Debaene (2014) informs us, had no currency in France until the 1950s, albeit that the vocabularies of science and 'the human' had been brought into a set of variable relations with one another through the debates and practices that constituted the trajectories of French anthropology during the inter-war period. The primary institutional incubator for this distinctive anthropological discourse of 'the human' was the Muse´e de l'Homme and the closely related Institut d'ethnologie, and its main agents were the anthropologists who" whether as the museum's principal officers (Paul Rivet), the architects of the Institut's professional training programmes (Marcel Mauss), the leaders of the museum's fieldwork missions (Marcel Griaule, Alfred Me´traux, Claude Le´vi-Strauss), or as the more refractory members of those fieldwork teams (Michel Leiris)" articulated its tensions in different ways. If this institutional ensemble constitutes Debaene's point of entry into French anthropology's engagements with the languages of the sciences and 'the human', his focus is on how these engagements were inflected against the grain of the sciences by the contrary pull of literary discourses. His discussion also oscillates between a forward movement leading beyond the inter-war years into the postwar period and a backward one toward the early 19th century. The science and the literature between which anthropology is ambivalently installed, it should be added, do not function as constants throughout the different periods of Debaene's discussion. Liable to internal shifts and mutations as aconsequence of the dynamics governing their constitution as intellectual fields, their currencies are also pulled hither and thither as the relations between these fields" and between each of them and anthropology" also change. And they do so, Debaene insists, without any sense of an immanent telos governing their trajectories.