Reading by Pierre Aubé:
Now a hundred years old, this devil of a man offers us what was at the heart not only of a long life, but of an intense quest for the truth of being in his environment. Geomorphologist, trained in a hard science, Jean Malaurie focused his research where it was most perilous. The Sahara, first, for a moment. Then in the Arctic lands, within the team of Paul-Emile Victor. The mechanized convoys didn't really tell him anything worthwhile. And it was alone that he had to set out again, master of himself and his destiny. He took on the face of an old shaman, Uutaaq, who said to him, “I was waiting for you. He had to prove himself. Very quickly, as the depression becomes threatening. A mad raid, in the pale night, would have cost him his life, had it not been for the insight of his lead dog. For months, Malaurie will share the harsh life of the Inuit, in a single village: Siorapaluk. For his scree observations, he is seen on Disko Island, Inglefield Land, and as far as the geomagnetic North Pole. He raises cards, it's his job.
But what interests him most is the man who haunts these places. He shares their daily life. It will create lasting friendships. Men and women wonder about this unlikely young companion, but respect his freedom. He observes, questions tirelessly and, to explain the serious drop in fertility among his hosts, goes so far as to draw up a vast circular genealogical table. A model of its kind. He will also have discovered the secret American base of Thule, which is an insult to this preserved nature and to the men who live there.
He had to testify. As early as 1955, Les derniers rois de Thulé (The Last Kings of Thule) appeared, a work that has become cult, which opened this collection Terre humaine (collection, Human Earth), famous among all, which he directed with jealous care and invincible tenacity. A hundred volumes of participatory ethnology in which many people who have never had a voice will express themselves, from a Hungarian peasant to a fishing boss from Fécamp, from a soldier from the Great War to underground miners. They accompany prestigious names and works that have become legendary. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres, Jacques Soustelle, Wilfred Thesiger, Colin Turnbull, Roger Bastide, James Agee, Theodora Kroeber, Dominique Sewane and so many others. So many demanding works, which do not fall into the deadly trap of the travelogue, but tell of the long journey of these peoples who were called "first" and are only our initiators in humanity.
Jean Malaurie was able to express this long, ardent life according to Michel de Montaigne's wish: "A leaps and frolics". Do not believe these pages prisoners of a sterilizing chronology. Admittedly, the essential is said: the birth in Mainz, in a family of strict middle-class, suffocating what it is necessary. The academic curriculum, the great masters. The passage in the Resistance, in the Vercors. About his family, this secretive man is not very talkative. And how we understand! What he is inexhaustible about, willingly lyrical, is the truth of beings, their fight for life, their inner richness, which passes through myth, always preliminary, and fruitful. This scholar, always "in thought", like Giono's Panturle, has the art of making a mask speak, or the alley of the whales, mysterious in the heart of Chukotka, in the far east of Siberia. The little men who fuss over so little cause him indifference.
Jean Malaurie is indeed this capital contemporary for whom the essential can only be foreseen. This big alert, striking book says it with the right words. Admirably.
By Pierre Aubé
Presentation
An immersion in the heart of Inuit shamanism, following the path and the fights of Jean Malaurie.
De la pierre à l’âme (From stone to soul), this great book is the culmination of a lifetime of research and exploration led by Jean Malaurie in the Arctic, all around the Arctic Circle; from Greenland, the starting point of the journey, to Siberian Chukotka, for more than fifty years.
It is also a work of memory, a return to oneself, a never-ending attempt at inner elucidation, an intellectual sum that plunges the reader from the start into the intellectual effervescence of the years immediately after the war...
"I don't teach, I tell" says Jean Malaurie, whose scientific or ethnographic subject is never didactic, but is part of a personal adventure made up of encounters, trials, obstacles through the story of an often perilous wandering in the middle of a grandiose setting. Jean Malaurie is a storyteller giving to read, like a Jules Verne, the tribulations of a geographer in the far north. From stone to soul is a learning text and an initiatory quest leading from the study of stone through the prism of an exact science, geomorphology, to animism and the sacred. The story of a road to Damascus which leads a young geographer in love with figures and diagrams to a conversion of the gaze in contact with the Inuit. At the end of a slow and painful chrysalis, the narrator is "inuitized" and Jean Malaurie recounts here the exceptional moments of communion with the cosmos experienced with an animist people.
One can only be struck by the topicality and the prophetic character of this book undertaken a decade ago and returning to a human adventure inaugurated seventy years ago. Jean Malaurie denounces the broken link with the cosmos, the destruction of wildlife and natural environments, the reduction of bio-diversity, the productivist exploitation of resources, the programmed agony of these "sentinels" that are the root peoples. . "In the gaze of a dog or a bird, there is such humanity that one is taken by the nostalgia of a lost paradise"
Jean Malaurie : « De la pierre à l'âme » - Mémoires
éditions Plon, collection Terre humaine, 2022
656 pages, ill.
EAN: 9782259207201
Number of pages: 672
Size: 154 x 240mm
BIOGRAPHY
Jean Maularie (1992) is an extraordinary personality. Naturalist, anthropologist and writer, he led 31 missions from Greenland to Siberia. He initiates anthropogeaography to study the first peoples from their environment. In 1955, he founded the "Terre Humaine" collection published by Plon, which was born with his first masterpiece, The Last Kings of Thule. Director of research (CNRS-EHESS) and Ambassador for Peace at UNESCO, he defends the interests of the so-called "root peoples" on all fronts. He was recently hailed by Michel Le Bris as "one of the last giants" (Dictionary of explorers, Plon, 2010).
*This article has been translated from French into English by Marcus Boni Teiga
