Leenhardt, Maurice

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LEENHARDT, MAURICE

LEENHARDT, MAURICE (1878–1954), was a French Protestant missionary and ethnographer. In the French ethnographic tradition of the era before World War II, Leenhardt stands out as a fieldworker of uncommon depth. From 1902 until 1926 he was a liberal evangelist in New Caledonia. His active defense of the Melanesians against colonial abuses and his stress on vernacular education and on the growth of autonomous local churches anticipated what would later be called liberation theology. His extremely subtle work in linguistics and Bible translation led him to ethnography. He had a relativist's understanding of cultural process and invention that brought him to challenge the notion of religious conversion as a discrete event. Leenhardt envisaged a longer, locally rooted historical development leading to a fresh articulation of Christianity, an experience of personal authenticity that would transcend, not abolish, Melanesian totemism and myth.

Upon leaving his mission field in 1926, after a successful, albeit embattled and unorthodox, career, Leenhardt turned his attention more directly to ethnographic description and ethnological theory. With the help of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Mauss he obtained a professorship at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and a post at the Musée de l'Homme. He published four works of detailed New Caledonian cultural description: Notes d'ethnologie néo-calédonienne (1930), Documents néo-calédoniens (1932), Vocabulaire et grammaire de la langue houailou (1935), and Langues et dialectes de l'Austro-Mélanésie (1946). He also wrote a synthetic ethnography, Gens de la grande terre (1937; rev. ed., 1952), and what is perhaps his best-known work, Do Kamo: La personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien (1947; translated into English as Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World, 1979). These works are characterized by rigorous attention to issues of linguistic and conceptual translation, by an emphasis on cultural expressivity and change over structure and system, and by an analytic focus on the person.

Leenhardt's chief ethnological contribution is his experiential concept of myth. In this view, myth should be freed from the status of a story or even of a legitimating social charter. Myth is not expressive of a "past." Rather, myth is a particular kind of engagement with a world of concrete presences, relations, and emotional participations. It is a "mode of knowledge" accessible to all human experience. There is nothing mystical, vague, or fluid about this way of knowing; it does not preclude logical, empirical activities, as Lévy-Bruhl tended to assume. Myth is fixed and articulated by a "socio-mythic landscape." For Leenhardt, place has a density inaccessible to any map; it is a superimposition of cultural, social, ecological, and cosmological realities. (The valleys of New Caledonia provided his most potent examples.) Orienting, indeed constituting, the person, this complex spatial locus is not grasped in the mode of narrative closure by a centered, perceiving subject. Rather, the person "lives" a discontinuous series of socio-mythic "times"—less as a distinct character than as a loose bundle of relationships. This mythe vécu ("lived myth") calls into question a Western view of the self as coterminous with a discrete body, a view that values identity at the expense of plenitude.

Bibliography

For a full account of Leenhardt's life and writings, see my work Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Berkeley, 1982). Useful collections assessing his career appear in the Journal de la société des océanistes 10 (December 1954) and 34 (March–June 1978) and in Le monde non chrétien 33 (January–March 1955). On his work in the light of liberation theology, see Jean Massé's "Maurice Leenhardt: Une pédagogie libératrice," Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuse 1 (1980): 67–80, and Pierre Teisserenc's "Maurice Leenhardt en Nouvelle Calédonie: Sciences sociales, politique coloniale, stratégies missionnaires," Recherches de science religieuse 65 (July–December 1977): 389–442.