La naissance de l'ethnographie africaniste en France avant 1914

This review of "Africanist ethnography" takes as date 1914, i.e after three decades of colonial administration. Colonial administrators laid claim to this ethnography in order to legitimate their field knowledge. Organized in a semiprofessional, semiacademic network since 1900, they used their ethnographic knowledge for their social promotion. When the social sciences were redefined owing to both the criticism of a physical anthropology and the emergence of sociology around Durkheim, the field work undertaken by these administrators impelled ethnography.