This lecture, cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was recorded in Berlin by Prof. Bénédicte Savoy with the help of cameraman and editor Timur El Rafie.
Museum collections, and more specifically ethnographic collections, are essentially based on a serial principle. In this respect, the massive accumulation of objects, conceived in a logic of exhaustiveness, constitutes the first marker of scientificity for European museums, which, at the beginning of the 20th century, affirmed their desire to embrace all the material cultures of all the peoples of the world.
In a text on the situation of ethnographic museums in France, written around 1907 but long unpublished, Marcel Mauss used this argument to denounce the Musée du Trocadéro's culpable lag in the face of the completeness and wealth of the documentary apparatus of German public collections.
This discrepancy can be explained by the fact that, in the German-speaking world, from the years 1900 onwards, museums forged privileged links with ethnologists in the field - and in particular with the Africanist Léo Frobenius - whose expeditions they financed in exchange for the shipment of exhibits, whereas in the French context, major ethnographic missions were mainly organized from the years 1920 and 1930 onwards.
