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Trained in philosophy and sociology, French ethnologist Marcel Maget (1909–1994) was deputy curator of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, directed by Georges Henri Rivière, from its creation in 1937. During the Nazi occupation, he co-directed several intellectual projects on rural architecture and traditional furniture. In 1944, freeing himself from the straitjacket of folklore studies, he founded and directed the museum’s Laboratoire d’ethnographie française, and gave impetus to numerous surveys of rural France. He rigorously applied the methods of sociology and anthropology to the study of contemporary France and the French rural world. He taught at the École du Louvre and the Institut d’Ethnologie. In the mid-1940s, he began a long-term ethnographic study of a village in the Hautes-Alpes region, which led to the publication of his monograph Le Pain anniversaire à Villard-d’Arène en Oisans (1989). He wrote an important, little-known guide, Ethnographie métropolitaine: guide d’étude direct des comportements culturels (1953), which was much admired by Isac Chiva and Pierre Bourdieu, who established Marcel Maget as one of the pioneers of ethnography in France.

Keywords: Anthropology of France | Folklore | Museum curator | Second half of the 20th century | France | French folklore | Methodology | Musée national des arts et traditions populaires | Isac Chiva | Georges Henri Rivière | Pierre Bourdieu

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