Maget, Marcel (1909-1994)
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
Primary Sources
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« Remarques sur l’ethnographie française métropolitaine. Buts, méthodes, désignation »
Marcel Maget, 1948
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« Remarques sur le village comme cadre de recherches anthropologiques »
Marcel Maget, 1955
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Ethnographie métropolitaine : guide d’étude directe des comportements culturels
Marcel Maget, 1962
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« À propos du Musée des arts et traditions populaires de sa création à la Libération (1935-1944) »
Marcel Maget, 1993
Secondary sources
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« Marcel Maget et l’ethnographie des sociétés paysannes »
Jean‑Claude Chamboredon, 1989
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Préface à la republication de « Remarques sur le village comme cadre de recherches anthropologiques (1955) »
Florence Weber, 1989
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« Marcel Maget, le folklore et la Corporation paysanne »
Florence Weber, 2009
Notes and research instruments
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Marcel Maget’s Archives at the MNATP
Archives nationales,
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« Le fonds d’archives privées de Marcel Maget »
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