Los viajes del doctor Vellard

ABSTRACT: For most Americanist scholars, Jehan Albert Vellard (1901-1996) is relatively unknown. He may appear as a passing bibliographical reference, or at best as the doctor of medicine who joined Claude Lévi-Strauss on his trip to Mato Grosso. Vellard the Americanist is definitely not a contemporary author: to us, his works may seem antiquated, devoid of glamour and heuristic potential, while the author himself appears as an awkward and unpleasant ancestor whom nobody defends. Yet, such a diagnosis is simplistic and premature. This customary dismissal of Vellard prevents us from grasping his multifaceted personality, his role as a key witness at a critical moment for Chaco, the Andes and the Amazon, and his scientific research which combined ethnography, physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology and biology. This paper therefore revisits some of the anthropological expeditions in which Jehan Vellard took part during the 1930s, commissioned by the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and particularly his voyage to Paraguay (1931-1932) during the Chaco War and the famous Mato Grosso expedition (1938) with Lévi-Strauss. The aim is to reconstruct the specific context in which part of the Museum’s anthropological collections were formed, while at the same time shedding light on the ambiguities of the personal and scientific legacy of Jehan Vellard.