Sartre

Sartre's 'synthetic anthropology' was a supra-disciplinary practice with a revolutionary vocation; it had little tolerance of established academic disciplines, regarding them in general as in need of legitimisation and recasting by phenomenology. His view of academic institutions was correspondingly ambivalent. Scientificity, he asserted, was to be predicated on a critical reflexivity; hence his admiration for the subversive ethnographic fieldwork practised by Leiris and his own predilection for subverting the theories of primitive mentality developed by Lévy-Bruhl. His preference for anthropology over sociology reinforced his anti-Durkheimian position, although his enthusiasm waned as anthropology assumed a strong aca-demicist character in the work of Lévi-Strauss. Sartre's vast study of Flaubert illustrates his debt to ethnography and shows how his sociology was always in the last analysis a sociology of literature; in it may also be found confirmation of the powerful role played in his thought by the Maussian theory of the gift

Admiration · Ambivalence · Discipline · Reflexivity · Sociocultural anthropology · French Historical and Cultural Studies · French Literature and Criticism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

• "Sartre et "Les Temps Modernes

  E Mahaira-Odoni•Telos•1986

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