Marcel Griaule

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Marcel Griaule in 1931

Marcel Griaule (* 1898 in Aisy-sur-Armançon , Département Yonne ; † 1956 in Paris ) was a French ethnologist who became famous for his studies with the Dogon in West Africa and for his pioneering role in ethnological field research in France.

Life

Griaule was born in Ainsy-sur-Armençon in 1898 and received a careful upbringing. He wanted to become an engineer and attended the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand . In 1917 he volunteered as a pilot in the French Air Force. In 1920 he returned to his studies and attended the lectures of Marcel Mauss and Marcel Cohen . Attracted by ethnology, he gave up his plan to become an engineer. In 1927 he received a diploma from the Ecole Nationale de Langues Orientales, where he focused on the Amharic language and the ancient Ethiopian language .

Between 1928 and 1933 Griaule took part in two large ethnographic expeditions - one to Ethiopia and the ambitious expedition from Dakar to Djibouti , across Africa. On the second expedition, he first visited the Dogon, the ethnic group with which he was mainly concerned in the rest of his career. In 1933 he received a diploma from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in religious studies.

Dogon sculpture

During the 1930s, Griaule and his student Germaine Dieterlen undertook several group expeditions and continued their work with the Dogon. In 1938 Griaule presented his dissertation on the basis of the material he had developed.

At the beginning of the Second World War , Griaule was drafted into the French Air Force. From 1940 until his death he was General Secretary of the Société des Africanistes . After the war he was given the first chair in ethnology at the University of Paris. He died in 1956.

Griaule is known for the very personal reports he wrote about his relationships with the people he researched, especially the blind hunter Ogotemmeli. He was also known for his elaborate exegesis of the Dogon myths. Today he is criticized by ethnologists who believe that his reports do not accurately reflect the Dogon beliefs.

Griaule is the father of the ethnologist Geneviève Calame-Griaule .

Works

  • Abyssinian Journey. 1935. (Travel report of the ethnographic and linguistic study commissioned by the French government)
  • Les Flambeurs d'hommes dt. The living torch: people u. Spirits in Abyssinia , translated by Alfred Sohn-Rethel . - Berlin: D. Reimer, 1936. - engl. Burners of men: Modern Ethiopia. Lippincott, 1935 - the book received the Prix Gringoire
  • La Cosmogonie des Dogons (1936)
  • Les masques Dogons (1938)
  • Dieu d'eau (Conversations with Ogotemmeli, a work that tries to show the structures of the Dogon religious thought) (1948); engl. Conversations with Ogotemmeli , Oxford: Oxford University Press (1965); dt. Black Genesis: An african. Creation account , from d. Franz. By Janheinz Jahn . - Freiburg i. Br.; Basel; Vienna: Herder, 1970
  • Renard pâle, Ethnology of the Dogon , Institut d'Ethnologie, 1965/1991
  • Folk art of black Africa, 1950.
  • Dogon masks Photos: Marcel Griaule. Text: Michel Leiris . - Frankfurt am Main ; Paris: Qumran, 1980. - Text from the surrealist magazine Minotaure (1933)
  • Places of life: nature, contexts of life, etc. Faces d. Dogon , photogr. by Marcel Griaule. With e. Foreword by Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs. - Frankfurt am Main ; Paris: Qumran, 1980
  • Ethiopian graffiti , Frankfurt am Main; Paris: Qumran, 1980
  • Critical dictionary , article from the journal 'Documents', texts by Georges Bataille , Carl Einstein , Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, Georges H. Rivière , Berlin: Merve 2005

literature

  • Walter EA van Beek: "Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule." Current Anthropology , 32 (1991): 139-167.
  • Isabelle Fiemeyer, Marcel Griaule, citoyen dogon , Actes Sud 2004

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano: The Dogon Revisited ( Memento of the original from February 15, 2013 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 16, 2018. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ramtops.co.uk