Henri Victor Vallois

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Henri Victor Vallois (11 April 1889 – 27 August 1981) was a French anthropologist and paleontologist. He was one of the editors in chief of the Revue d'Anthropologie from 1932 to 1970, and became director of the Musée de l'Homme in 1950.

Biography

Henri Victor Vallois was born in Nancy. He became a member of the Society of Anthropology of Paris in 1912. In 1930, while professor of anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine in Toulouse, he succeeded René Verneau as co-editor of the journal L'Anthropologie in Paris, a position he held until 1970.

He held eminent positions in prestigious scientific institutions: he was Professor of the Ethnology of Present and Fossil Man at the National Museum of Natural History, Secretary General of the Society of Anthropology of Paris in 1937, Chairman of the CNRS "Anthropology, Prehistory, Ethnography" Commission, Professor in 1939 and then Director of the Institute of Human Paleontology, President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences UNESCO,[1] Director of the Anthropology Laboratory at the École des Hautes Études (1941–1961).

He died at the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

Research

In 1944, Henri Victor Vallois established a racial taxonomy in his book Human Races, which divided humans into four groups made up of twenty-seven races:

  • Primitive races: composed of two races (vedda, australian)
  • Black races: made up of seven races (Ethiopian, Melano-African, Negrille, Khoisan, Melano-Indian, Negrito, Melanesian)
  • White breeds: made up of ten races (Nordic, Eastern European, Dinaric, Alpine, Mediterranean, Southeastern, Indo-Afghan, Anatolian, Ainu, Turanian)
  • Yellow breeds: made up of eight races (Siberian, North Mongolian, Central Mongolian, South Mongolian, Indonesian, Polynesian, Eskimo, Amerindian)

According to him, these different races were divided into six "anthropological areas":

  • Europe and the Mediterranean basin (North Africa and Southwest Asia)
  • Sub-Saharan Africa
  • India
  • Trans-Himalayan Asia
  • Oceania
  • America

This book, published in the Que sais-je? collection by Presses Universitaires de France, sold 90,000 copies and was reprinted 9 times between 1945 and 1976.[2] It was translated into several languages,[1] and was considered a "reference work" at the time.[1] Its wide distribution "illustrates the importance of racial anthropology in France", according to Carole Reynaud-Paligot.[3]

In the 1930s and 1940s, Vallois was close to the ideas of other European racialist anthropologists. Vallois' 1951 position on the first UNESCO declaration on the notion of race is still famous today.[4] Vallois argued for the need to separate race, which he considered a biological fact, from racism, a cultural construct. In his view, the fight against racism, however legitimate, must not lead to the elimination of the anthropological concept of race. Vallois was not in favor of replacing "race" with "ethnic group", a substitution which, in his view, has the disadvantage of confusing the biological fact of race with the cultural fact of ethnicity. According to Vallois, anthropologists who, like him, recognize "the existence of race as a self-evident fact agree with what the man in the street has always observed", the scientific proof of race being, for Vallois, morphological characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, the shape of the nose or head, but also the skeleton.[5] Vallois' positions were criticized by many of his UNESCO colleagues, who considered the concept of race to be of dubious scientific quality.

Vallois defended the scientific validity of racial classifications in the name of a consensus which, according to him, was supported by an overwhelming majority of anthropologists at the time, against a minimal number of others who dispute it.[1] However, according to Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, who has traced the history of opinions on this issue, "from the very origins of physical anthropology, and without ceasing thereafter, the arbitrary nature of racial classifications has been recognized by a significant number of scholars throughout the world". The first to challenge the idea of race in France were Abel Hovelacque, a founding member of the Society of Anthropology of Paris, in the 1870s, and Paul Topinard, a disciple of Paul Broca, in 1885.

Works

  • Anthropologie de la population française (1943)
  • Les Races humaines (1944; 1951; 1976; Que sais-je? collection)
  • Les hommes fossiles, éléments de paléontologie humaine (1946)
  • "Races humaines." In: Grande Encyclopédie Larousse (1976)

Notes

Footnotes

Citations

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Bocquet-Appel, J.-P. (1988). "Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle: l’anthropologie physique institutionnelle en France", Écologie humaine, Vol. VI, No. 2, pp. 41–66.
  2. Reynaud-Paligot, Carole (2007). "I. L'anthropologie raciale." In: Races, racisme et antiracisme dans les années 1930. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 5–59.
  3. Reynaud-Paligot, Carole (2017). "Essor et diffusion du paradigme racial (XVIIIe-XXe siècle)", " TDC, No. 1109, pp. 32–35.
  4. Meyran, Régis (01 février 2009). "06. Des races aux cultures," Pourlascience.fr. Retrieved 18 September 2021.
  5. Alegret Tejero, Juan Luis (1993). Como se Ensenan los Otros. Análisis de la presentación racialists de la diversidad étnica en los libros de texto de EGB, BUP y FP utilizados en Cataluña en la década de los 80, p. 133.

References

  • Conklin, Alice (2013). In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

External links