Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2010

By Bérénice Geoffroy-Schneiter, European editor of Tribal Art magazine.

Introduction
Stéphane Breton and Serge Gruzinski have had theirs, and now it’s eminent anthropologist Philippe Descola’s turn to use the West Mezzanine of the Musée du Quai Branly for an original exhibition. The former student and successor of Claude Lévi-Strauss sets the bar very high by blending discourses on ethnology, art history, and philosophy, with the aim of decrypting the genesis and symbolism of representations created by the hand and spirit of man in all four corners of the world. With the evocative and poetic term “factory of images” (which brings to mind the notion of “atelier” as well as the humble transmission of knowledge and traditions), the ethnologist invites the visitor to stroll across the “four great figurative strategies that correspond to the four great ways of perceiving the continuity and discontinuity between things.” These four “ontologies” serve as the guiding principle for Descola’s argumentation in his attempt to reread the world.