Abstract
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl is famous for his ethnological studies on primitive mentality, which were very successful in the interwar years among republican philosophers, surrealist writers and colonial officers. However, the roots of his philosophical thinking in socialism have been seldom considered, despite the fact that he was a close friend of Jaurès and a strong actor of the network of French Alliance after 1918. This talk will draw a link between Lévy-Bruhl’s travels all around the world after the war and his engagement in the Dreyfus case, following his first reflections on the transformations of responsibility. My argument will be that Lévy-Bruhl’s reflection on the paradoxical identifications in relations between humans and non-humans come from the position of Dreyfus as a sentinel of the colonial system, which then serves as a guide map to orient his travels in the colonial world. This talk will then combine my first work on Lévy-Bruhl with my my recent work on sentinels of global health, displacing the debates on preparedness one century before.
About the Speaker
Frédéric Keck studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Université Lille III, as well as anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. He has written numerous publications on the history of French anthropology in its relations to philosophy (Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim, Bergson, Lévi-Strauss).
After joining the CNRS in 2005, he carried out ethnographic studies on health crises relating to animal diseases: BSE, SARS, and “avian” and “swine” flu. His work, at the interface between the history of science, the sociology of risk, and the anthropology of nature, more generally addresses the “bio-security” standards applied to humans and animals, as well as the forecasting methods that they produce with respect to health and ecological disasters.
He was a laureate of the Fondation Fyssen en 2007, received the CNRS bronze medal in 2011, and was a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in 2015. He directed the research and teaching department at the Musée du quai Branly between 2014 and 2018. He has been the director of the Laboratory for social anthropology since January 2019.
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