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of the Histories of Anthropology

Originally from a family of royal dignitaries, Paul Hazoumé (1890-1980) was a Beninese ethnologist, writer and politician. Trained at the École normale de Saint-Louis, he published his first texts in the journal La Reconnaissance africaine. Sent to Paris in 1931 as a member of the Dahomey delegation to the International Colonial Exhibition, he participated in the Congress of the International Institute of African Languages and Civilizations. In 1937, he published Le Pacte de sang au Dahomey in the Travaux et Mémoires de l’Institut d’ethnologie de Paris – he was the only subject of the French colonial empire to have published in this series. His great historical novel Doguicimi, which he considered an “ethnological and historical document”, was published one year later. Member of the patronage committee of the journal Présence africaine and elected deputy of the Assembly of the French Union, this distinguished Africanist gradually moved away from ethnology after 1945.

Keywords: Ethnology | Ethnohistory | Literature | French colonialism | France | Benin | French West Africa | African Studies | Institut d’ethnologie | Père Aupiais