Ethnologist Jean Malaurie, specialist in the Far North and founder of the “Terre humaine” collection at Plon, died at the age of 101

This fervent defender of the Inuit, to whom he had dedicated his book “The Last Kings of Thule”, he denounced with charisma the “fatigue” of a West which has lost contact with nature.

The ethnologist and editor Jean Malaurie, tireless advocate of “first peoples” particularly from the Far North, died in Dieppe at the age of 101, his son Guillaume announced to AFP on Monday February 5. Both an explorer, scientist and adventurer, he spent ten years of his life between Greenland and Siberia, wrote a famous book in tribute to the Inuit The Last Kings of Thule.

In the work published by Plon in 1955 and which made him famous, he denounced the destruction of their territory by the American army for the establishment of an air base, and described the way of life of a little-known people . The book was the first title in a successful collection that still exists, “Terre humaine”. Jean Malaurie directed it until 2016, and was its honorary president until 2021.

The Great North, his “obsession”

A great intellectual, recognized for his crucial contributions to Arctic ethnology, and a force of nature, he published his memoirs in 2022, From stone to soul, still at Terre humaine. This title was an evocation of his scientific conception according to which the culture and belief system of the individual (the soul) could not be understood without taking into account its relationships with its natural environment (the stone).

“He was a giant. Jean Malaurie has just left for the other side of the horizon. He leaves behind a work of masterful depth”, wrote on X (ex-Twitter) the anthropologist Philippe Charlier, who has directed this collection since 2021. Jean Malaurie was in the spotlight at the end of January at UNESCO with an exhibition of his pastels, depicting the polar regions. He published in 2001 The Art of the Far North.

This Great North, which exercised over him “a force of appeal so deep that it had become an obsession”, insisted this author of a dozen books. Suspicious of philosophical systems and, in his words, “big words in ‘isms’, like fascism or communism”this trained geographer did not like labels.

A pioneering scientist

The first man, with the Inuit Kutsikitsoq, to ​​reach the north geomagnetic pole (which is not the North Pole) in two dog sleds in 1951, Jean Malaurie led the first Franco-Soviet expedition to Siberian Chukotka in 1990. He was also the first Westerner to discover, that year, “whale alley”a northeast Siberian monument of shamanic spirit, ignored until its identification in the 1970s by Soviet archaeology.

A major figure in the French CNRS, he co-founded the State Polar Academy of Saint Petersburg in the early 1990s, responsible for training elites among the Trans-Siberian peoples, of which he was honorary president for life.

An immense vigorous frame with narrowed eyes, white locks and thick black eyebrows to an advanced age, thunderous voice, Jean Malaurie was above all a “character”a “big mouth” hyper-energetic, fighting against the decline of the West: “our senses are tired. Thanks to phones and calculators, we have become disabled”. Attached to shamanism, he regretted that it was sometimes impossible for him.to make it understood that the ‘first peoples’ have a thought equal to ours.

“One can be titled and without culture, one can be illiterate and still be wise”he assured.
He explained his work this way: “I am nomadic, I smell, I note everything, then I become sedentary, a citizen among others, dressed in animal skin.” He spoke fervently of periods spent in igloos, eating raw fish at -5° (and -30° outside the shelter).

Return to Thule

Jean Malaurie was born on December 22, 1922 in Mainz (Germany) where his father taught, in a bourgeois and austere family. He said that a crossing of the frozen Rhine, made as a child, may have determined his vocation for the world of ice. A resistance fighter during the war, he studied literature and geography in Paris. With his meager salary as a research associate at the CNRS, he left for Thule, in the northwest of Greenland, in 1950, as a cartographer and geocryologist (mineral specialist).

This stay will change his life. “Terre humaine” (Plon editions) was born because it was “upset” in 1951 by the brutal establishment of an American nuclear base: he wanted to warn against the risk that the earth would one day no longer be human. His catalog includes the Sad tropics by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Combining geography, ethnology and history, Jean Malaurie has contributed to building a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of man. “I just wish my ashes were scattered over Thule, Greenland. One way or another I will continue to live, maybe I will come back as a butterfly?”he confided to the magazine Telerama, a few months shy of his 98th birthday. He then said he had “several projects in progress” For “get back on track” the “Terre humaine” collection, which according to him was leaving “down in the water”. He left his position as honorary president of the collection in February 2021.