Ethnologist and publisher Jean Malaurie, who has died aged 101, was a tireless defender of “first nations”, particularly of the Far North, and with charisma denounced the “fatigue” of the West, which had lost touch with nature.
The Great North exerted a “power of attraction so deep that it became an obsession,” insisted the author of a dozen books, creator of the collection “Terre humaine.”
Distrustful of philosophical systems and, in his words, “big words in ‘isms’ like fascism or communism,” the trained geographer disliked labels.
He himself was not reducible to a single specialty: was he primarily an explorer? Scientist ? Adventurer? A writer? Editor? He was all of these at the same time.
He spent ten years of his life between Greenland and Siberia, in 1955 he wrote a famous book in tribute to the Inuit, The Last Kings of Thule.
Jean Malaurie, the first person with Inuit Kutsikitsoq to reach the geomagnetic North Pole—which is not the North Pole—in 1951 in two dog teams, led the first Franco-Soviet expedition to Chukotka, Siberia, in 1990.
He was also the first Westerner to discover that year the “Alley of the Whales,” a shamanic spirit monument in northeastern Siberia, ignored until its identification in the 1970s by Soviet archaeology.
A prominent figure in the French CNRS, he co-founded the State Polar Academy in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, responsible for the training of elites among the Trans-Siberian nations, of which he was honorary president for life.
Connected to shamanism
A huge energetic figure with squinting eyes, white locks and thick black eyebrows until old age, a thunderous voice, Jean Malaurie was above all a “figure”, a hyper-energetic “big mouth”, fighting against the decline of the West: “our senses are tired. Telephones and calculators have made us handicapped.’
Attached to shamanism, he regretted that it was sometimes impossible for him “to make people understand that the ‘first nations’ have the same thoughts as we do.”
“One can be titled and without culture, one can be illiterate and still be wise,” he assured.
He explained his work as follows: “I am nomadic, I smell, I notice everything, then I become settled, among other things, a citizen, dressed in animal skin. » He spoke passionately about periods spent in an igloo, eating raw fish at -5°C (and -30°C outside the shelter).
Jean Malaurie was born on December 22, 1922 in Mainz (Germany), where his father taught, into a bourgeois and austere family. He said that crossing the frozen Rhine, accomplished at a very young age, may have determined his vocation to the world of ice.
During the war, the resistance fighter studied literature and geography in Paris. With his modest salary as a researcher at the CNRS, he went to Thule in northwest Greenland in 1950 as a cartographer and geocryologist.
“Link”
This stay will change his life. “Human Earth” (Plon) was born because he was “disturbed” in 1951 by the brutal establishment of an American nuclear base: he wanted to warn of the risk that the Earth would one day no longer be human. His catalog includes sad tropics by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Jean Malaurie also participated in editing works dedicated to the Far North of Quebec, such as From New Quebec to Nunavik 1964-2004with Jacques Rousseau.
During the exhibition, the transdisciplinary influence of his work was also shown Encounter of Northern Territories and Indigenous Cultures cdedicated to the painter Jean Paul Riopelle, in 2020-2021, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
By combining geography, ethnology and history, Jean Malaurie contributed to building a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of man.
“I would just like my ashes to be scattered over Thule, Greenland. One way or another I’ll live on, maybe I’ll come back as a butterfly? » he confided to the magazine Telerama, a few months before his 98th birthday.
He then said he had “several projects in the works” to “get the ‘Terre humaine’ collection back on track, which he said had gone ‘off the rails.’
In February 2021, he resigned from the position of honorary president of the collection.
Prince Albert II of Monaco, praising his early ecological awareness, described the author as “a model, a reference for all who (…) mobilize for our planet and its poles”.
With duty