The ethnologist and publisher Jean Malaurie, who died at the age of 101, was the tireless advocate of the “first peoples” particularly of the Far North, denouncing with charisma the “fatigue” of a West which has lost contact with nature.
The Great North exerted on him “a force of appeal so profound that it had become an obsession”, insisted this author of a dozen books, creator of the “Terre humaine” collection.
Suspicious of philosophical systems and, in his words, “big words in “isms”, like fascism or communism”, this trained geographer did not like labels.
He himself was not reducible to a single specialty: was he first and foremost an explorer? A scientist ? An adventurer ? A writer ? An editor ? He was all of these at the same time.
He spent ten years of his life between Greenland and Siberia, wrote a famous book in 1955 in tribute to the Inuit, The last kings of Thule.
The first man, with the Inuit Kutsikitsoq, to reach the geomagnetic North Pole – which is not the North Pole – in 1951 in two dog sleds, Jean Malaurie led the first Franco-Soviet expedition to Siberian Chukotka in 1990.
He was also the first Westerner to discover, that year, the “alley of the whales”, a monument in northeast Siberia with a shamanic spirit, ignored until its identification in the 1970s by Soviet archeology.
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.
Attached to shamanism
A huge vigorous frame with narrowed eyes, white locks and thick black eyebrows until old age, thunderous voice, Jean Malaurie was above all a “character”, a hyper-energetic “big mouth”, fighting against the decline of the West: “ our senses are tired. By dint of telephones and calculators, we have become handicapped.”
Attached to shamanism, he regretted that it was sometimes impossible for him “to make people understand 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 as follows: “I am nomadic, I smell, I note everything then I become sedentary, a citizen among others, dressed in an animal skin. » He spoke fervently of periods spent in igloos, eating raw fish in -5°C (and -30°C outside the shelter).
Jean Malaurie was born on December 22, 1922 in Mainz (Germany), where his father taught, into a bourgeois and austere family. He said that a crossing of the frozen Rhine, made at a very young age, 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.
” A reference “
This stay will change his life. “Human Earth” (Plon) was born because he was “upset” in 1951 by the brutal establishment of an American nuclear base: he wanted to warn against the risk that the earth would no longer be, one day. , human. His catalog includes the Sad tropics, by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Jean Malaurie has also co-edited works devoted to the Far North of Quebec, such as From New Quebec to Nunavik 1964-2004with Jacques Rousseau.
The transdisciplinary influence of his work was also revealed during the exhibition Meeting northern territories and indigenous cultures cdedicated to the painter Jean Paul Riopelle, in 2020-2021, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Combining geography, ethnology and history, Jean Malaurie has contributed to building a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of man.
“I would just like my ashes to be 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 Télérama, a few months shy of his 98th birthday.
He then said he had “several projects in progress” to “get the “Terre humaine” collection back on track, which, according to him, was going “off the rails”.
In February 2021, he stepped down as honorary president of the collection.
Praising his early ecological awareness, Prince Albert II of Monaco described the author as “the model, the reference for all those who […] are mobilizing for our planet and for its poles.”
With Duty