Robert Jaulin

Robert Jaulin (Cannet, the Alpes-Maritimes, 1928 - Grosrouvre, close to Montfort-l' Amaury, 1996) is a ethnologist French. After several stays of study to the Chad between 1954 and 1959 among the populations Sara, it publishes in 1967 Death Sara , test in which it describes the rites of initiation by which it had passed itself. Its design of an ethnological work in which the researcher implies himself personally it placed at share in the scientific world.

Biography

Robert Jaulin accomplishes many stays at the Bari, of the Amerindian living at the border of the Venezuela and the Colombia, which determine its engagement against the policy and the practice of what it calls the “Ethnocide”: negation and extermination, by the Western system, of any other culture, in particular known as “primitive”. He denounces it through the white Paix (1970) and Décivilisation (1974).

For Jaulin, “any civilization is alliance with the universe”, but the white civilization, animated by a wild spirit of conquest, appeared a predatory company and of destruction while seeking “to dominate the true nature” and “communities”; from where its concept of “decivilisation”: “Western civilization, while choosing to destroy all the minority cultures which could threaten it, consequently chose to cut down all the values face to which it could have been posed or to impose itself”. This civilization “is reduced by it to look in a mirror the vestiges of its past” and Jaulin pled for a “white indianity, hypothetical application of a human logic of compatible” with the universe, with the others Culture S.

The ethnology pariseptist, which Robert Jaulin defends, wants to be resolutely moral and refuses with the great theories with tendency universalists. It is for the traditional ethnography: " that implying a great intimacy with the community étudiée".

It thus recommends not only the investigation of ground but, like Malinowski, a long immersion among those which one wants to describe, and under the conditions closest to those of its inhabitants: clothing, lifestyles, use of the local language. Such an immersion does not prevent analyzing the facts noted with the greatest rigor and from giving them an interpretation which remains local and dated (" here and maintenant"). It is not question of making a " of it; modèle" and to draw some from the laws.

Robert Jaulin refuses " to make the economy be vivant" : the observer and observed exists, are the active components of the social play, they must be taken into account, the respect of the studied populations is paramount. He denounces in white Peace the " virtuous policies of acculturation progressive" who are in fact of the ethnocides.

It creates, in 1970, with the support of Michel Alliot, first president of the new multi-field university of Paris-VIi, the Unit of Teaching and Search (U.E.R.) of ethnology, anthropology and sciences of the religions. The philosopher Jean-All Saints' day Desanti takes part in it, like Pierre Bernard, Bernard Delfendahl, Serge Moscovici, Jean Rouch, Michel de Certeau, etc the U.E.R. will be, during years, a place where will cross multiple actors of the ethnology and anthropology (researchers of various disciplines, leaders Indian, doctors of O.N.G, agents of development, craftsmen, even held).

Jaulin to go at the end of its step also took its own existence like sees study of the relations adult-children ( My Thibaud , 1980) or love affairs ( the Heart of the things , 1984). For him, the “play of living” children or the love fall under an alliance with the other, that its ethnological research led it to oppose to the Western system. Thus, the Jeu, which is a true creation of the world by the child, is opposed to the Jouet, who is only “the advertizing recovery of what, precisely, was left with the imagination and the freedom of the child”.

Against a universalism to conformity and reduction to others with oneself, it defended in its works and its life a universalism of the meeting and compatibility: in its last book, the Universe of totalitarianisms (1995), it describes this life which is invented with the daily newspaper and which can be thought only in the plural universe of civilizations, as well as the properties of this other universe, that of “the obliged order” which is only one disorder to be and against which it fought all its life.

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