Progressive Geographies

Since the last update on this project, I have begun work on a chapter on Dumézil’s career from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. This is another fascinating period, partly because of the range of books he published – 14 in 11 years – but also because of the context. He was sent to Turkey at the outbreak of war as part of the military mission, returned after the defeat, lost his teaching posts under Vichy because he had once been a freemason, got them back, lost them again at the Liberation, and got them back again. In 1949 was elected to the Collège de France, where he taught for the rest of his career. Except for periods in the war (1939-40, 1941-43 and a short time in 1944), he taught at the EPHE throughout this time, and before he was elected to the Collège also taught Armenian at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes. But the key points of the story hide an undergrowth of detail, which I’ve been trying to work through.

This is a period which has been most closely scrutinised because of his political positions, with a critique by Carlo Ginzburg following a brief indication by Arnaldo Momigliano, the qualified defence by Didier Eribon, and further analysis from Bruce Lincoln, Cristiano Grottanelli and others. A particular focus of Ginzburg is the 1939 book Mythes et dieux des Germains, but there are some other pieces around this time which are also troubling. Some of the detail will only become clear when I’ve gone back to some of the archives, though I have got a lot of stuff copied to work on remotely. I think some of the criticisms need to be further nuanced in relation to the more precise dates which archival sources provide, but I have no wish to be an apologist, and there is some problematic material to account for here.

Trying to situate the story has led me to look at a range of questions: France’s military and political war; war-time censorship, paper shortages, and publishing more generally; Vichy laws about Jews and freemasons; collaboration, collaborationism and the épuration purging or cleansing after the Liberation; the parallels and contrasts between Dumézil and the linguist of Finnish and Hungarian Aurélien Sauvageot; the death of Georges Politzer; and the election processes of the Collège de France, on which I’d already done some work for Foucault and Alexandre Koyré’s unsuccessful attempt. I knew something about all these before, but I know more now. I’ve also written a little more on some of the people Dumézil was in dialogue with, including the politically problematic figures of Stig Wikander, Otto Höfler and Jan de Vries. (The discussion of Mircea Eliade’s post-war time in Paris will, I think, come in a dedicated chapter.)

In the last update I mentioned Benveniste’s 1947 fieldtrip to Persia and Afghanistan, and the various sources for this, including an unpublished report in his archive. There is actually a second report in the archives of Henry Corbin, which I hadn’t previously made use of. While some of the detail is the same as the one in Benveniste’s archive, there are a couple of extra things mentioned, including the audience Benveniste and Corbin had with the Shah. That led me to look for any other information on this. Some of the Benveniste-Corbin correspondence is published in the Corbin Cahier de l’Herne, and most of that relates to the 1947 trip. There are a lot of letters between them, mainly from Benveniste to Corbin, archived in the Fonds Henry et Stella Corbin, once at the EPHE and now at the new Humathèque Condorcet. I had looked at these, but only now began to realise how helpful they were. It took a bit of work to line up the letters – they are in two files, with duplicates, chaotic order and some pages missing. Some of the manuscript letters also exist in typescript. There are a few which are undated. But there is enough to really help fill in some detail about the fieldtrip, which took Benveniste through India shortly before partition and then on the return trip through newly independent Pakistan, and was not always straight-forward. But Benveniste’s close relation to the governments of both Persia and Afghanistan gave him exceptional access.

This led me back to Georg Morgenstierne’s reports on his linguistic studies in these areas in the 1920s, and forward to Georges Redard’s project for a linguistic atlas of Iranian speakers, with an initial focus on a linguistic atlas of Afghanistan. No volumes of the planned atlas were ever published, but there are various reports on progress, often delivered to the International Congress of Orientalists, which after the war took place about every three years. 

I’ve been working in Oxford libraries again, mainly the Bodleian Old Library and the Taylor Institute, and some of the libraries in London I’ve been using over recent months. Some of these became more regular places to work because the British Library had been difficult to use, though it is now functional to some degree. It requires ordering things with paper requests and then having to go up to the issue desk to ask if anything has arrived yet. I did quite a lot of research for my PhD in the old British Library reading room at the British Museum in the 1990s and this really took me back. But at least there is a working online catalogue now. With a couple of things I really couldn’t find an alternative library that had copies. I had a morning at the Warburg Institute Archives, which I’d not used before. They have a few letters relating to Ernst Kantorowicz, but more to and from Koyré, both of whom are tangentially connected to this project. I discovered that the online catalogue is very partial, and even the paper catalogue is incomplete. I thought I’d finished, and was packing up to leave, when the archivist told me there was one other place he could look, which uncovered some more letters, and led me to stay for a bit longer. So there is more than I expected, and I need at least one return visit.

I put this work aside for a while to write a chapter on “Foucault and Structuralism”, for The Foucauldian Mind, edited by Daniele Lorenzini. While I discuss Foucault’s relation to so-called structuralism in The Early Foucault and, especially, The Archaeology of Foucault, I have tried to develop some of the claims and frame it in a new way. I say a bit more about that chapter here. A related paper on “Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite: Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries” is now published (I’m happy to share if you contact me by email).

I have a Paris trip in May, with a plan to do some initial work with the Benveniste archive at the Bibliothèque nationale, various things at the Collège de France and the Archives nationales (many of which were exemptions I applied for when there last time), and possibly an initial look at the papers of the Centre Alexandre Koyré at the Humathèque Condorcet. Too much for this visit alone, so I’m planning the next couple of trips – though mindful to avoid Paris during the Olympics and, as ever, the rest of August. I hope to get to Switzerland to do an initial survey of a couple of archives in June. I am sure I need more time than the few days I’ll have there, but hopefully this trip will give me an idea of how much is needed.

Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications, including the still-delayed re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series, The Archaeology of Foucault, and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” are both now published.