Unraveling The Ethnographic Encounter

Unraveling the ethnographic encounter: Institutionalization and scientific tourism in the
"œuvre" of Jean Rouch

Author(s): Peter J. Bloom
Source: French Forum, Vol. 35, No. 2/3 (Spring/Fall 2010), pp. 79-94
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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Peter J. Bloom
Unraveling the ethnographic encounter

Institutionalization and scientific tourism in the
aeuvre of Jean Rouch
Jean Rouch's films and the countless interviews with him were an
early point of departure for my own work related to the complexities
of French colonial cinema and its broader context.1 Rouch was a
significant figure in fashioning the ethnographic signature of late-
twentieth century France thanks to a genealogical and cinematic
purchase on institutional reform in the immediate postwar period.
His work reflects the contradictory context for colonial modernism in
France and West Africa, shaped in part by colleagues and those who
were featured in his films and assisted with their production. From this
collective standpoint of authorship, lying beyond the promotional myth
of the auteur, Rouch was aided by a cadre of highly skilled editors,
cameramen, associates, and advocates. The structure for ethnographic
film production, its exhibition, and claim to authority associated with
Rouch's work, became an emergent set of codified practices under
the aegis of the Comity du Film Ethnographique (CFE). Although
Rouch's remarkable interpersonal qualities of permeability were
fundamental to the emergence of ethnographic film as institutional
project, an abiding coterie of prestigious French Dogonologist elders
assisted Rouch in mounting the secular institutional deities of postwar
French cultural and research funding with surrealist-inspired flair.
Anna Grimshaw has pointed to Rouch as a figure who should be
understood as very much within a context, but whose work always
retained a subversive quality not to be underestimated, but rather re-
leased.2 In order to better understand the intermittently poetic and dis-
ruptive potential present in his work, and the broader context for eth-
nographic cinema that he came to represent, I examine Rouch's role
80 / French Forum / Spring/Fall 2010 / Vol. 35, Nos. 2-3
in repositioning the exotic encounter as part of a scientifically authen-

ticated spectacle. The threshold of cinema as the spectacularization of
"ritual" always implied a series of methodological problems, includ-
ing the vexed nature of the pro-filmic act, and the unresolved imbal-
ance of power represented by access to modernity as symbolized by
the camera. That is, cinema as a means of representation has tended
to overwhelm the act of representation itself, particularly among those
unable to represent themselves, and fundamental truth-making claims.
Further, expanding access to the means of production only forestalls
an entrenched economic and ideological rootedness witnessed in
Rouch's own fragile relationship to Oumarou Ganda, whose ruse in
the imagination of star power and Hollywood cinema was enacted as
ethnofiction in Moi, un Noir (1957-1960). Moi, un Noir and Jaguar
(1954-1967) have been referred to as one of the origins for cinema
verite, and Rouch has commented on the relationship of this move-
ment to his own orientation towards truth and falsity.3 In these two
films, the performance of reversal by the other has been celebrated as
a watershed moment in representing African subjectivity. However,
Ganda's masquerade in Moi, un Noir as Edward G. Robinson, long as-
sociated with the fictional character of Rico and his rise as mob boss
in Little Cesar (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, prod. Warner Bros., 1930), may
simply underscore Rouch's own sense of ambivalence about the in-
vention of new roles during this transitional period of political change.
A complex grouping of institutional alliances was essential not only
to funding Rouch's own filmmaking work, but supplemented its sig-
nificance as part of an emerging consciousness of ethnographic film
on the international film festival circuit. As is well known, cinema was
not considered respectable in the scientific human sciences discourse
of the 1940s in France, and considered subordinate to direct obser-
vation by ethnographers. Although a wave of interest in ethnograph-
ic film predates Rouch, especially among geographers like Georges
Castelnau, and among those associated with the Groupe Liotard,4 fun-
damental issues such as funding for raw film stock could not be paid
for with research funding. As Alice Gallois has explained, Marcel Gri-
aule, Paul Rivet, and Andre Leroi-Gourhan combated this somewhat
retrograde suspicion of filmmaking by making films themselves as a
supplement to their own fieldwork. Further, a network of French and
European institutional networks, particularly in Belgium and Italy,
Bloom: Unraveling the ethnographic encounter / 8 1
were essential to institutionalizing ethnographic cinema as stimulated

by Rouch's filmmaking and advocacy starting in the 1950s.5
Rouch's position within the French institutional context was devel-
oped in relation to the history of ethnology on the one hand, and an
emerging internationalist film culture on the other. As a former stu-
dent of Marcel Griaule, who was the leading figure in the history of
French ethnography, Rouch was primed to play an important role in
expanding the ethnographic frontier of cinema in the late colonial pe-
riod. From this vantage point, Rouch's work may be best understood
through shifting historical circumstances, the reform-minded postwar
context, and serendipitous encounters that have always been crucial
to shaping his work. Furthermore, Rouch's position as member of
CNRS at the Musê de l'Homme located him within a specific insti-
tutional discourse and inspired his work. The watershed 1931-1933
Dakar-Djibouti Expedition was at once a defining event in the history
of ethnography not merely because it served as the foundation for the
collection at the Musee de l'Homme, but because of its association
with surrealism. The special issue about the expedition in the surreal-
ist magazine Minotaure (1933-1939) was a sensation for those like
Rouch who saw it as a means by which to link an aesthetics of ritual to
an emerging modernist ethos. As a supplement, the fashionable world
of African- American cultural modernism revealed transformative pos-
sibilities by which the science of ethnography could be allied with the
modernity of blackness. Further, ethnography as an ethics became en-
trenched through the all-important association between the Mus€e de
l'Homme and the Resistance during the occupation as embodied by
the ethical and magnetic qualities of its first directors, Paul Rivet and
Georges-Henri Riviere.
A contemporary rallying point for a critique of Rouch's films, par-
tially taking its cue from deconstruction, has invariably pointed to the
troubling representation of African bodies enacting trance ceremony
among the Hauka in Les Maitres Fous (1955). This film has activated
censure, and a rich extended commentary, particularly given the effect
of representing what appears to be abjection as social symptom within
a project of social reconstruction. In effect, Les Maitres Fous as Ror-
schach test among commentators has reinforced broader themes in the
postcolonial academy. Paul Stoller's important analysis of the film as
counter-hegemonic colonial masquerade relies on a nuanced render-
ing of details within this film.6 Paul Henley, however, has shown that
this particular reading of Les Maitres Fous, in its attempt to reassert
subaltern agency, misses the point of an accurate rendering of the rit-
ual itself and the Hauka's predilection for self-definition as migrants
and the more general nature of holey ancestor spirit possession cults
in West Africa.
Instead, Henley points to instances of hybridization, rather than de-
colonization, or what he describes as a "glossolalic combination of
French and Songhay that is the distinctive language of the hauka." 1
Additionally, he refers to the research undertaken by Marc-Henri
Piault and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan in reinterpreting details of the
ritual depicted in the film.8 One such detail is the relationship between
cracking an egg on a small statue to the authority of the governor gen-
eral of colonial Ghana by means of a cutaway to the plume in his hel-
met that is reinforced by Rouch's voiceover narration. Henley calls
this suggestive association into question as a false clue in Stoller's
overall perspective on a claim for the Hauka's derisive reference to co-
lonial authority. Following Laurent Devanne's interview with Rouch,
Henley explains that although this cutaway is likely to have prevented
the film from being granted general release in the UK by the British
Board of Censors because of its direct reference to the Crown, the
Hauka neither intended nor implied such subtle mockery.9
There might only be a handful of anthropologists and Hauka prac-
titioners with adequate expertise to interpret the significance of the
ritual event depicted in Les Maitres Fous, and corroborate a meaning-
ful local and dynamic context for the sacrifice of a dog and grotesque
consumption of its partially cooked carcass. However, the emphasis
on the intentional ity of the action itself assumes the event depicted
to be authentic in spite of its staging for the camera as a questionable
pro-filmic event. Further, the sharpened focus on specificity of inten-
tion, which again foregrounds an ethnographic pedigree, neglects the
context for the film's reception, which was not initially shown to the
Hauka themselves, although they invited Rouch to film the ritual in
the first place.
Instead, Les Maitres Fous reveals a fault line among audiences who
have seen it, primarily at an array of international festivals and later
within institutional university settings, where it never ceases to pro-
voke a sense of disruption. Lest we forget, the enduring structural
Bloom: Unraveling the ethnographic encounter / 83
project of rehabilitating "otherness" and accepting the rhetorical basis

for self-rule in the former colonies often functions as a claim for pu-
rity and a search for origins in order to extend the cultural institutional
mandate in the service of universality. While Rouch's oeuvre has at-
tracted attention among those with tiers-mondiste sympathies includ-
ing self-identified "Rouchians," a broader multicultural critical project
has also dispelled the fetishistic will towards a dreaded community of
fellow travelers and adventurers.
Rouch's position as an institutional figure in the history of French
anthropology and cinema coded him as very much within the realm of
the humanistic colonial inheritance. His continued advocacy for and
sense of belonging to the faded cultural positioning of the Musee de
l'Homme has contributed to the ambivalent framing of his work, and
an all too convenient antagonist in postcolonial discourse. Nonethe-
less, the transfer of Rouch's films and the collection held by the Comi-
ty du Film Ethnographique (CFE), which he co-founded in 1952 with
Andr£ Leroi-Gourhan (191 1-1986), 10 from the Musde de l'Homme
to the Archives du Film at the Centre national de la cinematographic
(CNC), is starting to permit greater awareness of the scope and in-
terconnected nature of Rouch's work within ethnography and cine-
ma. The shifting landscape of multiculturalism within France and
West Africa is also very much implied in various readings of the films
themselves, within and beyond Rouch's sense of intentionality.
To better understand Rouch's ambivalence in liquidating the colo-
nial legacy as institutional "semiophore-man," as Krzysztof Pomian
might describe him," I would like to make a brief detour by examin-
ing Rouch's resistance to the founding of the Mus£e du Quai Branly
and final dismemberment of the Musee de l'Homme. The consolida-
tion of the objects formerly held at Mus£e de l'Homme with that of the
Musee des Arts Africains et d'Oceanie (MAAO) at the Musee du Quai
Branly has been part of a far reaching state-centered cultural proj-
ect, signaling a state-centered repackaging of the French ethnographic
heritage as part of an incremental national strategy of rebranding as a
gesture towards museum-centered multiculturalism. As debates with-
in museum studies and the history of the anthropological collection
became increasingly visible by the late 1980s, the conflict between
preserving the cultural patrimony in all of its perversions came into
conflict with political rights, repatriation debates, and important shifts
84 / French Forum / Spring/Fall 20 ro / Vol. 35, Nos. 2-3
in the field.12 One such case of a contested cultural patrimony focused

on the remains of the Khoisan woman Sara Baartman, whose skeleton
and sexual organs were preserved in the back regions of the Musde de
l'Homme.13 Its existence was brought to the attention of Nelson Man-
dela, finally leading to the repatriation of her remains after some con-
troversy in France and a ceremonial interment near her birthplace on
the Eastern Cape in South Africa.14 These remains, among others, not
only blighted the French anthropological patrimony as a collection of
bizarre curiosities but also threatened to unravel elemental strands of a
French cultural internationalist mandate linking national identity to its
scientifically grounded and secular anthropological inheritance. The
architectural and cultural orientation of the Musee du Quai Branly,
which became closely associated with Jacques Chirac's presidential
authority and the art dealer Jacques Kerchache,15 relies on a minimal-
ist aesthetics of disappearance in its restaging of ethnography such
that the colonial legacy has become disarticulated from contextualiz-
ing the ethnographic objects themselves.
A rich subfield of critical historical research that has examined this
ethnographic legacy in relationship to colonialism was able to evolve
precisely because of the accessibility allowed in the laboratory set-
ting for ethnographic research at the Musee de l'Homme. 16 The Mu-
see du Quai Branly, though certainly an architectural improvement
over the increasingly mausoleum-like totemic stature of the Musee
de l'Homme, recasts the public image of ethnography for the muse-
um-going public. It showcases an intimate experiential ambiance em-
bossed with the architectural signature of Jean Nouvel in an attempt
to re-naturalize the objects themselves.17 The presentation of objects
foregrounds a spatial cinematic atmospherics of control in place of the
natural history museum context as the outcome of an uneven history
of encounter. Finally, to return to Rouch, it was this very dynamics of
an encounter on film, and in relationship to the film apparatus itself,
that became an enduring quality in his work.
Rouch expressed his resistance to the new ethnographic order
imposed from above and the reorganization effort, but also strong-
ly advocated for the preservation of the collection of films held by
the CFE.18 Integrating the CFE collection into that of the Archives du
Film at the CNC partially relies on historical precedent and earlier
support for Rouch's work, particularly in the area of production part-
nerships, training, and the organization of festivals. The accession of

the CFE film archive as the history of ethnographic cinema fits within
the broader context of scientific film at the Archives du Film for which
Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planete serves as a primary source.19
Fortunately, the effort to preserve the works of the CFE and Rouch's
films in particular, posthumous as it might be, has finally resulted in
the wider availability of many of his films, and the appearance of an
array of publications20 and DVDs that have made Rouch's contribu-
tion to the cinema of French ethnography better known.21
Fran§oise Foucault, one of Rouch's closest collaborators for the
past thirty years in organizing the Bilan du film ethnographique start-
ing in 1982, a yearly ethnographic film festival, became the chief
point of contact for Rouch with his baffling schedule of appointments.
She shared an office with Rouch in the awkwardly designed staging
area at the Musee de l'Homme in which a number of visitors and col-
laborators would be present.22 At the 2009 conference held in Rouch's
honor, Le Projet Jean Rouch?, which included screenings, papers, and
round tables, Foucault explained that Rouch's death in an automo-
bile accident in Niger primarily activated a sense that he had taken a
trip from which he never returned, and a feeling that he simply went
somewhere else.23 Rouch's final return to Niger might have been fit-
ting in conceiving of Rouch's institutional position within French eth-
nography, creating closure on a particularly mythologized colonial
spatial imaginary organized around the theme of the Habe, or Song-
hay, which included numerous subgroups in Niger and Mali, whose
trance ceremonies served as an enduring site of wonder in Rouch's
ethnographic films.
The fascination with this particular group was initially elaborated
in a geographic and anthropological account by the French Army of-
ficer Louis Desplanges, published in 1907.24 The enduring fascina-
tion of French anthropology for the Habe, and later the Dogon, that
Gaetano Ciarcia has analyzed with remarkable insight,25 was tied to a
search for native purity that circumvented the Muslim invasion from
the north, which Desplanges describes as "red fervent Muslim invad-
ers" (463). A return to the origins of African civilization, as it were,
was not merely a series of ethnographic methods, but a search for na-
tive purity and its redirection within the colonial imaginary.
In point of fact, however, Rouch returned to Niger to meet the
granddaughter of Oumarou Ganda and attend a dedication ceremony.

Rouch first encountered Ganda, a Zerma Nigerien migrant in Treich-
ville (a district of Abidjan, Ivory Coast) at a preliminary screening of
Jaguar. Though Ganda had long been deceased, Rouch's engagement
with young filmmakers in Niamey had left an imprint such that he was
asked to attend the opening of the Niamey Centre Jean Rouch. As part
of Rouch's itinerary, he planned to travel to Sangha, Mali, for another
dedication ceremony in honor of the then recently deceased Germaine
Dieterlen (1903-1999), with whom Rouch made several films from
1967-1973 documenting the Sigui ritual as part of a recurring 60-year
cycle among the Dogon.26
These continued commemorative rituals in Rouch's honor held in
Niamey, where Rouch first began his work in Africa, and in Mali, as
last surviving member of the once powerful French ethnographic kin-
ship network anchored by Marcel Griaule, reveals a certain social in-
vestment and dependency upon the ethnographic archival imaginary.
An underlying question that these commemorations leave unresolved
is its contemporary relevance beyond the cliche of African praise in
the folkloric imagination. The utility of such praise, however, has be-
come a means by which to reinforce a tourist economy that has de-
veloped around the popularity of ethnography as niche tourism. That
is, these films and related works have welcomed a fantasy of purity,
difference, and otherness in the developmental imagination. The eco-
nomic reality of such an effect among the Dogon in Mali in particular
is difficult to refute, leading to an interrogation of how Rouch's eth-
nographic cinema relies on a series of historical claims to authenticity
that begins with Griaule's work among the Dogon.
Two early Griaule films in particular, Au Pays des Dogon (dir.
Marcel Griaule, 1931), which was made during an early phase of the
Dakar-Djibouti Expedition, and Sous les masques noirs (dir. Marcel
Griaule, 1939), which dealt more directly with ritual, contributed to a
culture of ritual enactment among the Dogon for outsiders well within
the colonial exotic economy of exploration. Rouch's initial film de-
picting the Dogon began with Cimetieres dans lafalaise (1950), when
the Sangha Dam was constructed thanks to Griaule's initiative, but
Rouch's work in Sangha among the Dogon continued some years lat-
er as part of his collaboration with Germaine Dieterlen in document-
ing the rituals associated with the seven-year Sigui cycle from 1967-
1973, which only occurs every sixty years. The documentation of this
event, which Griaule did not live long enough to witness, may be con-
sidered to be a totalizing moment of the French ethnographic enter-
prise. It was a moment when the science of ethnographic description
began to enter into a regime of cinematographic codification. With the
epic dimensions of the Bandiagara Escarpment documented on film
as being integral to a ritual space reputedly preserved for centuries, its
transformation as a worthy tourist monument was finally consecrated
once established as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1 989.
The joining of scientific exploration with popular entertainment has
always been a readily identifiable trope in French cultural history, par-
ticularly in relation to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centu-
ry ethnographic and colonial exhibitions. Dogonophilia revives these
colonial phantoms of the past in a new guise, grounded by Griaule's
immensely popular text Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Intro-
duction to Dogon Religious Ideas [Dieu d'Eau (1948)], and certified
by the numerous films that were to follow, produced in the spirit of
commemorating Griaule, Dieterlen, and finally Rouch. Questions of
authenticity and repudiations regarding the veracity of certain claims
in relation to Ogotemmeli's revelations have been part of an ongo-
ing controversy, mirroring, in part, the well-known controversy about
Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) as revealed by Der-
ek Freeman in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmak-
ing of an Anthropological Myth (1983). The issue of contention with
regard to Ogotemmeli, however, revolved around reputed astrological
knowledge of the Sirius star system prior to the scientific identifica-
tion of this astrological cluster, and the extent to which it was in fact
an instance of misinterpretation by Griaule. These initial refutations
by Walter van Beek,27 among others, point to an underlying emphasis
on authenticity that relies on mysticism, pointing to a larger question,
which goes to the very heart of a fantasy of an arrested historical past
as embodied by an African sage.
As Gaetano Ciarcia and Anne Doquet have carefully explained, the
perverse contemporary effects of the search for ethnographic purity has
facilitated an ethnographic tourist economy reliant upon the structured
nature of ethnographic authority. More specifically, the imposition of
a strict hierarchy of knowledge as a historical explanatory model has
created what Ciarcia has described as a panoptic complex leading to a
"self-exoticizing cultural patrimony."28 This relies, in part, on promot-

ing the historical scientificity of ritual as a means by which to reinforce
its unadulterated vintage. In other words, the systematic exaggeration
of ritual occludes an understanding of other everyday activities, trans-
forming tradition into a vehicle of the scientific gaze overtaken, as it
were, by the plenitude of ritualization as its own justification and fe-
tish. It is a scenario that implies the continual reinvention of the colo-
nial tradition of invention in the shaping of a reliable tourist economy
as one step beyond the familiar contrivance of kitsch aesthetics.
The tourist effect of staging tradition as impervious to the dynam-
ics of social change may also be understood as yet another variation
on Jean Baudrillard's compelling formulation of simulation and simu-
lacra.29 As Baudrillard explains, simulacra become the most reliable
form of truth in the layered procession of falsifications. It is in this
way that ethnographic cinema creates a scenario in which affect in the
tourist economy of authenticity overdetermines the usual cause and
effect of cultural interaction. Instead, the vice grip of affect transforms
the social dynamic itself and is held captive by the influx of hard cur-
rency in a tourist economy of studied leisure in search of a lost sense
of historical and experiential purity.
This reading of the Dogon is intricately linked to the history of
French cultural institutional power beginning with the display of Ban-
diagara dances popularized at the 1931 French Colonial Exhibition
whose display of exoticism, according to the massive Rapport general
of the exhibition, was extremely well received by all those who wit-
nessed it. Ciarcia has described the exulted status of the Dogon and
their transformation into a civilizational object lesson as a form of
"ethnographic distortion." The nature of this distortion is such that
it creates a coercive social construct that keeps social hierarchies in
place denying a dynamic transformation of the social in the name of
tourist adventure. That is, it relies on the perpetuation of the artificial
construction of stasis in order to retain the myth of native purity.30 The
culture of revelation and the secret so critical to representing the Do-
gon has become critical to the branding of the Malian tourist industry.
The generation of leisure around a reliable tourist experience in the
world of the Dogon implies various practices of commemoration, and
Rouch's films have supplemented this peculiar scenario - intention-
ally or not. Though his later work implied a participatory gloss, his
early films were produced very much within the model of colonial
documentary foregrounding an authoritative description of the events
depicted on screen. Rouch began as an engineer during the Second
World War, and one of his first films, Au pays des mages noirs ( 1 946),
focuses on a hippopotamus hunt and trance ceremony that was lat-
er edited and distributed by the French newsreel company, Les Actu-
ality Fran9aises. This thirteen-minute one-reel film was very much
within the spirit of French colonial documentary cinema and a style of
ethnographic cinema from which the filmmaker-adventurer was vis-
ibly absent from the event being represented. Although this quality
distinguished it from many interwar documentary films, it was edited
in a style closely associated with the address of Actualit£s Frangaises
documentary shorts. Primarily featuring the folklorization of Sarko
fishermen (a subgroup of the Songhay) over the course of a hippo-
potamus hunt while reaffirming cultural practices, the action culmi-
nates in a final trance ceremony that became an important source for
Rouch's work.
The voiceover commentary locates and describes practices within
a descriptive ethnographic style of filmmaking that is finally reprised
as a more textured rendering of an analogous hippopotamus hunt in
Bataille sur le grand fleuve (1952). In this later film, the same story
is presented in a more comprehensible manner with color film stock.
Still within the conventions of colonial documentary cinema, the film
was later shown to an audience of prisoners in Accra because Rouch
was interested in making contact with the migrant Nigerien commu-
nity in colonial Ghana as part of his doctoral dissertation project. Af-
ter showing the film, various prisoners urged him to show it to fellow
Hauka mediums in Accra, and arranged for a public outdoor screening
of the film on the tennis court at the British Council in June 1954. As
Rouch recounts, two months later he received a telegram from Hau-
ka priests inviting him to film the annual gathering that was soon to
take place in Nsawam-Aburi, a small town in the foothills twenty-five
miles north of Accra. The result of this serendipitous encounter led
to the making of Les Maitres Fous .31 It was this film and the thematic
of trance as an indexical feature of ethnographic film that became a
means by which African film criticism and the poetics of Third Cin-
ema embarked upon a critique that challenged how and why ethno-
graphic cinema sought to represent the somatic realm of African con-
sciousness, thus transforming it into an object in a collection as pure

affect in prolonging what Georges Balandier once described the "situ-
ation coloniale."32
A flash point has always been Ousmane Sembene's widely cited
criticism in a 1965 debate staged by Albert Cervoni, in which Sem-
bene reportedly claimed that ethnographic films by so-called "Afri-
canists" depicted Africans "like insects."33 However, it is important
to remember that Semb&ne also praises Rouch's film Moi, un Noir
(1957) as one of the three films of significance about Africa up un-
til that point. Rouch's reply to Sembene's charge in this exchange is
to defend the intention of Africanists by accepting Sembene's point
about how they have often reduced Africans to an entomological spec-
imen. While Sembene seems to imply that this is a form of epistemic
violence, Rouch claims that it is through this reductionism, perhaps as
a form of defamiliarization, that a unique perspective on comparative
cultural norms starts to emerge. He adds that, in so doing, it contrib-
utes to a new dimensionality within a European scientific perspective
of objectification. Rouch refers to the natural sciences in this regard,
drawing explicitly on the work of the French entomologist Jean-Henri
Fabre (1823-1915). Notably, this is still some years prior to Edward
Said's critical deconstructive analysis in Orientalism (1978), which
had a decisive effect within the American academy in relation to post-
colonial criticism. Rouch's emphasis on the subtractive quality of
representation as a generative form of intellectual subversion among
well-informed audiences has continued to serve a point of contention.
These concerns voiced by Semb&ne were later reiterated and speci-
fied by Teshome H. Gabriel, as he pointed to the inertia of African fig-
ures in Rouch's ethnographic films which depicted Africans as resis-
tant to change by their own means within their own circumstances.34
Furthermore, Rouch's ambivalence about taking a position relative to
African independence further led Gabriel to emphasize the manner in
which many of Rouch's films embody a psychologizing pathology of
the African subject. He further remarks that African people were de-
picted as "laboratory subjects" from the perspective of an outsider, not
in a position to understand nor prescribe a future course for African
cinema.35 Although these criticisms have become increasingly self-
evident, the broader stakes for reorienting French institutional dis-
course still remains an ongoing process.
The more recent enthronement of postcolonial criticism leads us to

forget its sources within protest movements in relation to the colonial
legacy. Crucially, African film criticism emerged from a circuit of in-
ternational film festivals, sharing a platform with the expanding con-
text for ethnographic film. Significantly, the expansion of the American
research university and its related foundation infrastructure towards
the project of cultural internationalism functioned as a critical ideo-
logical counterweight to European cultural institutions, particularly in
the post-modernization era. Needless to say, Teshome H. Gabriel and
Manthia Diawara's critical examination of the colonial context in rela-
tion to the emergence of African and Third World cinema began to ap-
pear from within the American university academic context.36
Finally, these reflections on Rouch's role as institutional agent and
ethnographic filmmaker are from the perspective of someone who
encountered him, if ever slightly, and was welcomed by his willing-
ness to contribute to a broader vision that may have contradicted his
own perspective. In fact, Rouch's reorientation of the French colonial
documentary inheritance through ethnographic film became a form of
institutional subversion from within that continually nurtured a con-
text for inclusiveness. It was however Teshome Gabriel (i 940-2010),
a figure whose own scattered publications and nomadic intellectual
qualities were able to create the basis for a new perspective, who in-
sisted on an ethics of the multicultural imagination in the postcolonial
present that was less than fully elaborated in Rouch's ceuvre.
University of California, Santa Barbara
Notes
i . Almost all of the numerous books written about Rouch, and many published articles, in-
clude at least some interview material, and there seems to be a cottage industry of films that
not only include his presence as the privileged interlocutor but are, in fact, interviews in and of
themselves. The problem with all of this material is that it too closely allies Rouch the anthro-
pologist and author on the one hand with Rouch the filmmaker on the other. Paul Henley has
dealt with the implications by referring to Rouch the Author, on the one hand, and Rouch the
Filmmaker, on the other, in his recently published and remarkable biography, The Adventure of
the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010).
2. Anna Grimshaw, "Adventures on the Road: Some Reflections on Rouch and his Italian
Contemporaries." Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch. Joram ten Brink, ed. London:
Wallflower Press, 2007, pp. 277-284.
3. Rouch does examine the question of neither truth nor falsity in his essay, "Le vrai et le
faux," in Jean-Paul Colleyn, ed., Jean Rouch: cinema et anthropologic. Paris: Cahier du cinema/
essais-INA, 2009, pp. 1 1 1-121.
4. Andre Francis Liotard, Samivel (pseud.), and Jean Thevenot, Cinema d' exploration: Ci-
nema au long cours. Paris: Chavane, 1950. See also: Pierre Leprohon, VExotisme et le cinema:
les chasseurs d' images a la conquete du monde . Paris: J. Susse, 1945.
5. Alice Gallois, "Le cinema ethnographique en France: le Comite du Film Ethnographique,
instrument de son institutionnalisation? (1950- 1970)," 1895, vol. 58 (October 2009): 81-1 10.
Figures such as Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Franâise, Georges-Henri Riviere at the
Musee de 1' Homme, and particularly Enrico Fulchignoni at UNESCO were key figures in the
institutional project.
6. Paul Stoller, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 145-160.
7. Paul Henley, p. 130.
8. Henley Ibid. See also Marc-Henri Piault, "Preface. Regards croises, regards partages," in
Jean Rouch, Lês Hommes et les dieux du fleuve: essai ethnographique sur les populations songhay
du moyen Niger, 1941-1983. Paris: Editions Artcom, 1997, pp. 7-20. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sar-
dan, "La surinterpretation politique: les cultes de possession hawka du Niger," in Religion et mo-
de mite politique enAfrique noire , ed. Jean-Frangois Bayart. Paris: Karthala, 1993, pp. 163-213.
9. Henley, p. 443, n. 1 5. See also, Laurent Devanne, "Jean Rouch, cineaste ," in Kiniok.com
[webzine], n.d. See http://www.arkepix.c0m/kin0k/Jean%20R0UCH/r0uch_interview.html (ac-
cessed on September 5, 2010).
10. Guillaume Fau, "Le fonds Jean-Rouch a la Bibliotheque nationale de France," in Decou-
vrir les films de Jean Rouch: collecte d' archives, inventaire et partage. Veronique Cayla, Bea-
trice de Pastre, and Philippe Constantini, eds. [on behalf of the Centre National de la Cinematog-
raphic (CNC)]. Paris: CNC, 2010, pp. 21-25. For more on the founding of the CFE, see Alice
Gallois, "Le cinema ethnographique en France," pp. 81-1 10.
11. Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, I5(X>-i8(X). Trans. Eliz-
abeth Wiles-Portier. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990.
12. A series of exhibitions, edited volumes, and conferences ( 1 979-present) organized by
Jacques Hainard and Roland Kaehr at the Musee d'ethnographie in Neuchatel was one example
of a shifting perspective on the history, function, and context for ethnographic objects, themes,
and collections. At one point, important fissures ensued amongst former contributors as their re-
flections began to call into question the validity of the ethnographic object itself.
13. Stephen Jay Gould, "This View of Life: The Hottentot Venus," Natural History 91, no.
10 (October 1982): 20.
14. See Zola Maseka's two films about Sara Baartmaan. The Return of Sara Baartman (dir.
Zola Maseko, 2005, 55' First Run Icarus); The Life and Times of Sara Baartman (dir. Zola
Maseko, 1998, 52', First Run Icarus). See also Cris McGreal, "Homeward Bound," in The Man-
chester Guardian Weekly (February 28-March 6, 2002): 26; and Rachel L. Swarns, "Mocked in
Europe of Old, African Is Embraced at Home at Last," in The New York Times (Saturday, May 4,
2002): A3; Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost
Story and a Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
15. Tamara Levitz, 'The Aestheticization of Ethnicity: Imagining the Dogon at the Musee du
quai Branly," The Musical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2006): 600. (600-642)
16. An important founding document relevant to the display and exhibition of ethnographic
objects as a laboratory of observation at the Musee de 1' Homme was published by Paul Rivet,
Paul Lester, and Georges-Henri Rivi&re, "Le laboratoire d' anthropologic du Museum," in Ar-
chives du Museum dyhistoire naturelle 6, no. r 2, 1935: 507-53 1 .
17. The Mus£e des Arts Africains et d'Oceanie (MAAO) occupied the site of the former
Cite de 1' information built for the 1931 Colonial Exhibition at Porte Dor6e. Since the MAAO
has been closed, it was renovated and transformed into the Cit 6 nationale de 1'histoire de
Timmigration, which opened in the fall of 2007. The transfer of the collection of objects at the
Mus£e de 1' Homme began in 2003 and the museum was closed for renovation in 2009. The Mu-
s 6e du Quai Branly was opened in 2006.
18. For more on Rouch's resistance to the closure of the Musee de V Homme, see: Andrd
Langaney and Jean Rouch, "'L'humain menace," L'Humanite , March 8, 2001. Sally Price, Paris
Primitive. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 95-98.
19. Paula Amad, Counter- Archive: Film , the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la
Planete. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 340, note 152.
20. The recent publication of Jean Rouch: cinema et anthropologic (edited by Jean-Paul
Colleyn) is of particular interest because it features seven key texts written by Rouch with an
introduction by Colleyn and a closing essay by Marc-Henri Piault, who is the current president
of the CFE.
21 . To date there are three French DVD sets available for purchase as part of the collection
known as "Le geste cinematographique," published by Editions Montparnasse, Paris. They in-
clude: (a) the 4-DVD set, including Les Maitres Fous (1956). La Chasse au lion a Varc (1967),
Jaguar (1967), Moi, un Noir (1959), Petit a Petit ( 1 97 1 ), La Pyramide humaine (1961), among
others, 2005 ( n.b .: all films in this set are without English subtitles); (b) Jean Rouch: Cocorico!
Monsieur Poulet (1974), Bataille sur le grand fieuve (1950), and Cimetieres dans la falaise
(1951), among others, 2007 ( n.b .: all films in this set include English subtitles); (c) Jean Rouch:
Une aventure africaine, 4-dvd set, 2010, ( n.b .: all films in this set are without English subtitles).
CNRS Images also distributes more than thirty Rouch titles, many of which have English subti-
tles. See www.cnrs.fr/cnrs-images for the CNRS catalogue. Documentary Educational Resourc-
es has typically been the US-based distributor for a limited number of films by and about Rouch,
including Les Maitres Fous , among others that include John Marshall, and Margaret Mead.
22. Brice Ahounou, a CFE associate, who worked with Rouch over many years has been the
organizer of the ongoing series known as "les mercredis du film ethnographique." Originally
held in the screening room at the Musde de 1' Homme, intermittent screenings under this heading
continue at different locations in Paris. Marc Henri Piault, Director of Research at CNRS (Emer-
itus), is now president of the CFE, and Jean Paul Colleyn, Director of Research at EHESS, has
now become the chief administrator of the CFE. Piault and Colleyn are among the best known
visual anthropologists working in France.
23. Personal Communication, Frangoise Foucault, 20 November 2009.
24. Louis Desplagnes, Ije Plateau central nigerien. Paris: Larose, 1907.
25. Gaetano Ciarcia, De la memoire ethnographique. L'exotisme du pays dogon. Paris: Edi-
tions de L' EHESS, coll. Cahiers de F Homme, 2003.
26. See Philippe Constantini's film, UAvenir du Souvenir [Jean Rouch et Germaine Dieter-
/en], 2004, 52'. It documents the commemoration of Germaine Dieterlen, with her granddaugh-
ter Catherine Dieterlen present, and mentions Rouch's death.
27. Walter E. A. van Beek, "Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel
Griaule." Current Anthropology 32 ( 1 99 1 ): 1 39-1 67.
28. Gaetano Ciarcia, De la memoire ethnographique. L'exotisme du pays dogon. Paris: Edi-
tions de L'EHESS, coll. Cahiers de P Homme, 2003. See pp. 164-181.
29. Jean Baudrillard : Selected Writings , ed. Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1988.
30. A watershed moment in developing the problematic of ethnographic authority was devel-
oped in the work of George Marcus and James Clifford. The most relevant work to this discus-
sion is Clifford's The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography. Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1988. See also, Anne Doquet, Les masques dogon: ethnologie savante et
ethnologie autochtone. Paris: Karthala, 1999. Gaetano Ciarcia, De la memoire ethnographique.
L'exotisme du pays dogon. Paris: Editions de L'EHESS, coll. Cahiers de 1' Homme, 2003.
3 1 . As cited by Henley, p. 319. Jean Rouch, "Our totemic ancestors and crazed masters,"
in Principles of Visual Anthropology , ed. Paul Hockings. Second edition. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1995, pp. 217-232.
32. Georges Balandier, "La situation coloniale: approche theorique," Cahiers internationaux
de sociologie 11, 1 95 1 , pp. 44-79.
33. Albert Cervoni, "Une confrontation historique en 1965 entre Jean Rouch et Sembene
Ousmane," [Special Issue: "Jean Rouch: Un griot gaulois"] CinemAction 17, 1982: 78. (pp.
77-78).
34. Teshome H. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation. Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982, p. 76.
35. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World , p. 77.
36. In addition to Gabriel's 1982 monograph, see his key essays on Third Cinema in Paul
Willemen, Questions of Third Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1990. See also Manthia
Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Diawara's most recent book integrates a selection of important material, African Film: New
Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. Munich: Prestel, 2010.

Unraveling The Ethnographic Encounter - Institutionalization and Scientific Tourism in The

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Unraveling the ethnographic encounter: Institutionalization and scientific tourism in the

"œuvre" of Jean Rouch

in repositioning the exotic encounter as part of a scientifically authen-

were essential to institutionalizing ethnographic cinema as stimulated

project of rehabilitating "otherness" and accepting the rhetorical basis

in the field.12 One such case of a contested cultural patrimony focused

nerships, training, and the organization of festivals. The accession of

granddaughter of Oumarou Ganda and attend a dedication ceremony.

"self-exoticizing cultural patrimony."28 This relies, in part, on promot-

sciousness, thus transforming it into an object in a collection as pure

The more recent enthronement of postcolonial criticism leads us to

University of California, Santa Barbara

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