Grégoire and the Anthropology of Emancipation

Abstract

Anthropology is, without any doubt, at the center of the contemporary reception and perception of Henri Grégoire’s work. In his recent book Vers un multiculturalisme français, Jean-Loup Amselle, a French anthropologist who has studied in African societies, considers Grégoire’s ideas as the very model of an extremely influential concept of multicultural society linked fundamentally to the concept of assimilation.¹ According to Amselle, Grégoire’s model sees multiculturalism as an obstacle, a problem to be resolved and to be overcome in the interest of creating a nation; for him, the co-existence of multiple cultures can only be a transitional period in the evolution of modern, enlightened societies. I try to show in this essay that this perception of Grégoire’s cultural and anthropological thought as basically assimilationist is perhaps too reductive, especially with regard to his ethnological writings, and above all the travelogues he wrote after a long journey to the eastern departments of France during the year 1797.