Maurice Leenhardt
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Maurice Leenhardt, (1878 in Montauban, 1954 in Paris) was a French pastor and ethnologist specialising in the Kanak people of New Caledonia.
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[edit] Mission in New Caledonia
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Protestant authorities concerned themselves with the evangelisation of the Kanaks, in competition with the Marist Brothers. Maurice Leenhardt was named pastor in 1902 in New Caledonia where he founded the "Dö nèvâ" mission in the valley of Houailou. Going beyond his role of pastor, he applied himself to understanding the mentality of this people on the road to extinction.
When he arrived in New Caledonia, Maurice Leenhardt was welcomed by these words from the mayor of Nouméa: What have you come to do here? In ten years there will be no more Kanaks. He applied himself to the fight against this slow genocide; he combatted the alcoholism that slowly ravaged the Kanak people. He translated the New Testament into the Houaïlou language with the help of his first students.
He returned to France in 1927 where he founded the Société des Océanistes and the Musée de l'Homme, and where he took the chair of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Following a second stay of nearly ten years in New Caledonia, he began teaching Oceanic languages at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in 1944.
[edit] Contributions to Ethnology
Maurice Leenhardt's contributions to ethnology are considerable, though he did not frame them theoretically.
Before Bronislaw Malinowski, he practiced the ethnology advocated by Marcel Mauss from his office in Paris. For twenty-five years he practiced participant observation and active research, the virtues of which were not rediscovered until the 1960s.
Maurice Leenhardt was not a dogmatist and through all these contributions, he never sought followers. He was nevertheless one of the first to consider social phenomena in their totality and to study the art, myths, and costume of the Kanak people as well as their language.
[edit] Bibliography
Luckily, the essential works are also the easiest to find.
[edit] Works by Maurice Leenhardt
- 1902 : Le Mouvement éthiopien au sud de l'Afrique. (republished 1976, Académie des sciences d'outre-mer)
- 1909 : La Grande Terre. (Brochure, Société des missions évangéliques, expanded edition 1922)
- 1922 : Traduction du Nouveau Testament en langue houaïlou.
- 1930 : Notes d'ethnologie néo-calédonienne. (Institut d'ethnologie)
- 1932 : Documents néo-calédoniens. (Institut d'ethnologie)
- 1935 : Vocabulaire et grammaire de la langue houaïlou. (Institut d'ethnologie)
- 1937 : Gens de la Grande Terre. (Gallimard)
- 1938 : Alfred Boegner. (Société des missions évangéliques)
- 1946 : Langues et dialectes de l'Austro-Mélanésie. (Institut d'ethnologie)
- 1947 : L'art océanien. (Ed. du Chêne)
- 1947 : Do Kamo. La personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien. (Gallimard, 1947, 1971, 1985)
- Several papers in the Journal de la Société des Océanistes.
- 1958 Notes de sociologie religieuse sur la région de Canala (Nouvelle-Calédonie), Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie (FRA), 1958, Vol. 24. (preface and annotated by Jean Guiart).) [1]
[edit] About Maurice Leenhardt
- Maurice Leenhardt. Personne et mythe en Nouvelle Calédonie. James Clifford (Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1987).
- Maurice Leenhardt, missionnaire et sociologue. Jean Guiart, Monde Non Chrétien, 1955, 13 p. L'article est téléchargeable sur le serveur de l'IRD (ex. ORSTOM)[2]
- Destin d'une église et d'un peuple : Nouvelle-Calédonie 1900-1959 : étude monographique d'une œuvre missionnaire protestante. Jean Guiart (Paris FR), 1959, 88 p). [3]
- Historique de la section langues océaniennes de l'INALCO, avec une longue notice biographique sur Maurice Leenhardt par J. de Lafontinelle. Article extrait de l'ouvrage : "Langues'O 1795-1995 : deux siècles d'histoire de l'Ecole des Langues Orientales", textes réunis par Pierre Labrousse. Editions Hervas. Paris 1995. http://www.langues-oceaniennes.org/texte/historique.pdf
