Fabrice Grognet
This contribution originally appeared in French as a chapter in the edited volume Les musées d’ethnologie: culture, politique et changement institutionnel. It tracks the organizational and intellectual history of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, including its historical relationship with more recent institutions in French museum anthropology, including the Musée de l’Homme, the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, and the Musée du Quai Branly.
[Keywords: social history; intellectual history; anthropological museums;
ethnological museums; folk museums; history of science; history of anthropology;
governance; history of anthropology; France; Europe. Keywords in italics are derived from the American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus, a standard nomenclature for the ethnographic disciplines.]
The evolution of the ethnographical and anthropological museums in France is far from being linear and smooth. The duality between museum and anthropological sciences has always been a source of conflict, especially with regard to the periods considered and the influence of the State at particular times. The patrimonial institutions depending from the State have thus often been subject to great changes and even “metamorphoses.” And in this history, Chaillot hill has always been at the center, even if its story does not start with the Trocadéro.
It is in 1882, at the time of the French universal exhibitions and other fairs (Py and Vidard 1985) that the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET) is inaugurated. It is built over part of the Palace of the Universal Exhibition of 1878, and is the first institution in France to assemble in one place the material productions of populations from all continents. The MET thus creates a structure charged to regroup the collections that are scattered in various institutions and helps to establish a new discipline still marked by the authority of physical anthropology: ethnography.
However, after a promising start, the MET, criticized by those who claim for a sociological approach and ignored by the public, becomes obsolete at the beginning of the 20th century.
1At the occasion of the Exposition Intere des Arts et Techniques dans la vie moderne (“International Exhibition of Art and Technology in modern life”), the ancient Palais du Trocadéro becomes the Palais de Chaillot. The Musée de l’Homme, inaugurated the 20th of June, 1938, becomes, according to its creator and director Paul Rivet, the natural “heir of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro” (Rivet 1938:31).
2It takes over the site and the collections
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