Jean Malaurie
| Jean Malaurie | |
|---|---|
Jean Malaurie aboard the Soviet hydrographic ship Malygin, off the coast of Uelen, during his expedition to Chukotka, August 1990.
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| Born |
December 22, 1922 Mainz, Germany |
| Nationality |
 France
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| Fields | Ethnohistorian, geographer-physist, writer |
Jean Malaurie (born December 22, 1922) is a French cultural anthropologist, geographer, physicist, and writer.
Jean Malaurie was born in Mainz, Germany, into a French Catholic family of history scholars of Norman and Scottish descent. In 1943, while studying at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, he was drafted into the Service du travail obligatoire (STO - Compulsory Work Service for the Germans). Refusing to join, he went into hiding until August 1944.
He did his postgraduate studies in the Institut de Géographie de l’Université de Paris, under Professor Emmanuel de Martonne who, some 15 years earlier, had also taught to Julien Gracq. In 1948, Emmanuel de Martonne granted Malaurie the title of geographer/physicist of the French Polar Expeditions led by Paul Emile Victor along the West coast of Greenland and on its ice cap. He accomplished two missions in the Skansen Mountain, in the south of Disko Island, with the French Polar Expeditions (spring/autumn 1948 and 1949).
After two geomorphological and geocryological missions for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – CNRS (“French National Centre for Scientific Research”), he spent two winters alone in the Hoggar desert in 1949 and 1950 (Algeria, Sahara). Then, in July 1950, he left on a mission to Thule, Greenland, where he led the “first French geographical and ethnological mission to the North of Greenland” for the CNRS. There, he established the first genealogy, covering four generations, of a group of 302 Inughuit, the northern most people on earth. He also implemented a planning of trends in order to avoid the risks of consanguinity (banning marriage up to the 5th degree).
As a geomorphologist in the Great North of Greenland, he raised the map of the coast to 1:100 000 (topography, geomorphology of screes and nivation, sea ice). The map covers a 300 kilometre long and 3 kilometre wide region from Inglefield Land and the north of the Humboldt Glacier, to the south of Washington Land (Cape Jackson, 80° N). He discovered various fjords and unknown littorals, which he was authorized to name himself after French names, like the Paris Fjord, or after his Inuit travel companions such as the famous shaman, Uutaaq. He conducted a detailed geomorphological study of the screes and high latitude geocryological ecosystems, of which he described the cyclic and strata organization. He later made this the subject of his thesis: Thèmes de recherche géomorphologique dans le nord-ouest du Groenland (Geomorphological research in Northwest Greenland). On April 9, 1962, he was named Docteur d’État de géographie of the Institut de géographie de la Faculté des lettres de l'université de Paris.
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