Magazines - Tribal Art Winter 2011

By Nicolas Menut, acquisitions curator for the media library at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

Introduction
In May of 2011, the library of France’s most important anthropologist, who died in 2009, was added to the Musée du Quai Branly’s media library. The acquisition was made possible by the Lévi-Strauss Circle and the Friends of the Musée du Quai Branly. With the goal of preserving the intellectual patrimony of the great names of French anthropology, the media library at the Musée du Quai Branly has made it a policy to acquire important and well-known private libraries. Thus, in 2005, the professional library (which included some 3,000 titles) of Georges Condominas, author most notably of Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt (We Have Eaten the Forest) (1957) and L’Exotique est Quotidien (The Exotic is Everyday) (1965), was integrated into the museum’s collection, thereby considerably enriching the media library’s holdings in the areas devoted to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.