“Ethnography in France”: Ethnographic Practices and Theories in Marcel Griaule Between the Empirical and Rhetorical

With regard to Marcel Griaule, one of the (probably the most famous) founders of French ethnology, the image of the ethnographic enterprise that one gets is that of a cognitive action much more based on what happens in the field than on the application of a real method previ- ously elaborated. Despite James Clifford claiming that Griaule “worked out a distinctive ethnographic method (1988: 56)”, it is quite difficult to separate in Griaule’s ethnography the empirical from the rhetorical, especially if we think that his major ethnographic report, Conversations with Ogotemmeli, appears the outcome of a number of complex dialog- ical processes of education/initiation and exegesis. According to Clifford, it was “a crucial turn in the research process”; it marked “a new style of research” in which the trust of informants was finally recognized. “No longer untrustworthy witnesses subjected to cross-examination, the Dogon ‘doctors’ Ogotemmeli and his successors, were now learned inter- locutors” (ivi, 83). Similarly, the ethnographer is no longer that aggressive collector of artifacts, texts, songs; he is now a transcriber of formulated lore, a translator, exegete, and commentator.