Robert Jaulin

Robert Jaulin (7 March 1928, Le Cannet, Alpes-Maritimes – 21 November 1996, Grosrouvre) was a French ethnologist. After several journeys to Chad, between 1954 and 1959, among the Sara people, he published in 1967 La Mort Sara (The Sara Death) in which he exposed the various initiation rites through which he had passed himself, and closely analyzed Sara geomancy. In La Paix blanche (The White peace, 1970), he redefined the notion of ethnocide in relation to the extermination by the Western world of the Bari culture, located between Venezuela and Colombia. If a genocide designs the physical extermination of a people, an ethnocide refers to the extermination of a culture.

Jaulin has given particular attention to phenomenons of acculturation and highlight the importance of cultural relativism in order to respect other cultures. Although he was part of the humanist tradition of universalism seen through a multiculturalist viewpoint, he opposed a universalist method of ethnology which would try to abstract general laws from the study of particular societies — targeting in particular structuralism, preferring, on Malinowski's steps, to immerge himself in one specific culture and closely describe it. In this aim, he theorized a specific approach to ethnology, dubbed in 1985 ethnologie pariseptiste by Yves Lecerf in an attempt to describe Jaulin's teachings at the University of Paris-VII since May '68.

...
Wikipedia