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The Mythic

According to the Ethnological Work of Maurice Leenhardt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Eric Dardel
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We have learned by now not to see myth as simple entertainment or a babbling. Where the nineteenth-century eye could find only an out-of-date toy left behind by childish peoples or a cultural stage-set for leisured social circles, the human sciences have taught us to recognise an authentic expression of man: myth says with utmost seriousness something that is of essential importance. What is more, it is a way of living in the world, of orienting oneself in the midst of things, of seeking an answer in the quest for the self. We owe this alteration of perspective to a whole group of scholars: Cassirer, Van der Leeuw, Unger, Preuss; we owe it in a quite special way to Maurice Leenhardt and to the original work which his recent death left uncompleted.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 2 , Issue 7 , June 1954 , pp. 33 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 In the course of a long missionary career in New Caledonia, serving the Paris Society of Evangelical Missions (1902-26), Maurice Leenhardt became interested in the sciences of man, sociology and ethnology. Entrusted with a scientific mission by the National Ministry of Education, he made a research trip to Black Africa, followed, some years later, by a scientific inquiry in Oceania, at Nouméa (1947). Called to take Marcel Mauss' place at the École des Hautes Études, he was named to his chair in 1940. After a course in Oceanian languages was set up at the École des Langues Orientales, he was called to ensure its instruc tion (1945). Death (on January 26 last) prevented him from putting a final touch, as he was trying to do, to his scientific work, from making precise some points that seemed to him insufficiently clear and from dispelling some misunderstandings to which studies of this type lend themselves. Nevertheless his scholarly work as it stands is important and original. Scattered through several journals (Revue philosophique, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, Revue d'Histoire et Philosophie réligieuses, Anthropologie, etc.) it is especially well-represented by some scientific publications of the Institute of Ethnology: Notes d'Ethnologie néo-Caledonienne, 1930, Documents néo-caledoniens, 1932, Vocabulaire et Grammaire de la Langue de Houailou, 1935, and by two works, which are more personal in nature, Do Kamo and Arts d'Océanie. This body of work, although uncompleted, to which must be added two impor tant articles in Histoire des Réligions (Quillet publishers), and Histoire des Réligions (Bloud and Gay publishers, 1953), has contributed to the enrichment and renovation of a whole wide sector of the science of man. It is one of those works which sustain new pioneers and open horizons, because there was talent in Maurice Leenhardt for awakening interests and developing vocations.