Abstract
On 18 May 1945 the Swiss-born ethnographer Alfred Métraux (1902–1964) wrote the following letter to his wife, Rhoda, from Tübingen, Germany:
My darling, This afternoon I have been deeply shaken by the sight of a group of Jewish girls who were coming back from one of the death factories — Auschwitz. How to describe them? Imagine corpses who had emerged from the grave. There was around these ambulating skeletons something out of this world. A woman whom I thought to be about 50 turned out to be 23. As she collapsed and was obviously dying, she was taken away in a hurry. I talked with the others. No sooner one of them began to mention the horrors of the camp, the others started to cry and the girl became hysterical. They had their tagged numbers tattooed on their bodies. Darling, I have seen that — most of them had been branded like cattle on the throat or on their shoulders. They were taken to rest in a room with beds on which they threw themselves sobbing and laughing. The few things that they were able to tell (sur)pass the published reports. They were thrown to dogs, forced to witness the burning of other women … They screamed when they mentioned what happened to the children. The whole incident was so awful that there was not a person present who did not have tears in his eyes. I had to leave because I was breaking down.
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Notes
For a book that reflects the impact of the Chaco War on the Indian populations spread over all sides of the frontiers between Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay, see Nicolas Richard, Mala Guerra: los indigenas en la Guerra del Chaco (1932–1935) (Asuncion-Paris: Museo del Barro, 2008).
For a history of the establishment of Anglican missions in the Chaco, see Wilfred Barbrooke Grubb, An Unknown People in an Unknown Land (London: Seeley & Co., 1911).
Alfred Métraux, Easter Island (Geneva: Editions Ferni, 1957 [1941]), 75.
Alfred Métraux, Le vaudou haïtien (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
Poul Duedahl has thoroughly analyzed the struggle within UNESCO’s race project between biologists and social anthropologists, each camp defending its own definitions of the concept. The victory, he concludes, went to the anthropologists, who were able to recast race in cultural, not biological terms — a perspective that had powerful real-world repercussions, and one which for the most part dominates our thinking about this issue today. See Poul Duedahl, “From Racial Strangers to Ethnic Minorities: On the Socio-Political Impact of UNESCO, 1945–64”, in Current Issues in Sociology: Work and Minorities, ed. Gregory A. Katsas (Athens: Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2012), 155–166. See also Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public”, American Historical Review 112:5 (December 2007): 1386–1413, and Chloé Maurel, “‘La question des races’: Le programme de l’UNESCO”, Gradhiva 5 (2007): 114–131.
On René Samuel Cassin, see: Gérard Israel, René Cassin, 1887–1976: La guerre hors la loi, avec de Gaulle, les droits de l’homme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1990).
Jacques Maritain, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (London: Allan Wingate, 1950).
For a history of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, see Curtis Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1994).
Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian, xiv. Jesse Green, ed., Cushing at Zuni: The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879–1884 (Albuquerque: University of Arizona Press, 1990).
Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Okot p’Bitek, African Religions in European Scholarship (New York: ECA Associates, 1990).
James Howe, Chiefs, Scribes and Ethnographers: Kuna Culture from Inside and Out (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2010).
Peter Lengyel, International Social Science: The UNESCO Experience (New Brunswick-Oxford: Transaction Publishers, 1986), 16.
On this subject, see David A. Taylor, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers Projects Uncovers Depression America (New York: Wiley, 2009); Jarrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Writers Project (North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
For the relationship between scientific and literary narratives in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, see Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon, 2009). For the same topic in the Victorian Era, see Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
On Frazer and Campbell, see Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). On cultures as “forms of life”, see Rodney Needham, Exemplars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Chloé Maurel, Histoire de l’UNESCO: Les trente premières années, 1945–1974 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), xi. In a series of letters to Rhoda, Alfred Métraux described the problems besetting the writing and different publications of UNESCO’s second statement on race. This is from one of the last letters on the subject, written in Paris on 22 April 1952: “It is possible and even likely that I shall have to go to New York very soon because of this fantastic affair of the pamphlet on race. It is a major crisis in UNESCO from which so far, I emerged safely, but a changed man. If my faith in UNESCO and in its heads is stronger than ever, I have lost my respect for many people and certainly this was also a crisis in my conscience … Did you know that Luther Evans [UNESCO’s director-general at the time] is a fine and courageous man — I would have never thought so. What a comfort to think that there are still some decent people in Washington … To tell you the truth, I am glad to fight and I am glad that my chiefs in UNESCO gave cause to believe in their sincerity and courage.” Private collection.
On the Courier, racism and the role of the Soviet Union in UNESCO, see Anthony Q. Hazard Jr., Postwar Anti-Racism: The United States, UNESCO, and “Race”, 1945–1968 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
On the Mass Observation project, see Tony Kushner, We Europeans?: Mass Observation, “Race”, and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (London: Ashgate, 2004); Nick Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Judith Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).
For Hyman’s perspective on how the questionnaires were assembled and on the policy value of the study, see Herbert H. Hyman, Taking Society’s Measure: A Personal History of Survey Research (New York: Rusell Sage Foundation, 1991).
Percival W. Martin, “‘Way of Life’ Book Series Planned by UNESCO”, UNESCO Courier 1:2 (March 1948): 6.
Harald Prins and Edgardo C. Krebs, “Vers un monde sans mal: Alfred Métraux, un anthropologue à l’UNESCO (1946–1962)”, 60 ans d’histoire de l’UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 2007), 115–125.
Aside from his published journals — Alfred Métraux, Itineraires I (1935–1953): Carnets de notes et journals de voyage. Compilation, Introduction et Notes par Andre Marcel D’Ans (Paris: Payot, 1978) — there are two main bodies of correspondence that cover the better part of three decades of Métraux’s life. For the 1930s and part of the 1940s are the letters to Yvonne Oddone, which Michael Leiris thought wise to preserve far from Paris, at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. For the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, covering the UNESCO years and much else, are the letters Métraux sent to Rhoda, which are invaluable. D’Ans prepared the manuscript of Itineraires II but it was never published.
Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
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Krebs, E.C. (2016). Popularizing Anthropology, Combating Racism: Alfred Métraux at The UNESCO Courier. In: Duedahl, P. (eds) A History of UNESCO. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58120-4_2
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