© G. Dufresne

Robert Jaulin(1928-1996) was research director the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research) and founder of the department of ethnology at the University Paris VII – Denis Diderot, where he was the director and where he taught until his death.

After several stays in Chad between 1954 and 1959 to study the Sara populations, he published in 1967 La Mort Sara, essay in which he describes initiation rites he has himself been through. Refusing doing scientific research without committing itself set him apart from the scientific community.

Several stays among the Bari, Indians living at the border of Venezuela and Colombia, determined its commitment against ethnocide, negation and extermination by the Western World of any other culture, especially those considered “primitive” as he denounced in books that are also a statement: La Paix blanche (1970) and La Décivilisation (1974). For Jaulin “any civilization is alliance with the universe”, but the white civilization, powered by a fierce conquest ideal revealed itself an undertaker determined to “dominate nature” and “the true communities”, where the concept of “decivilisation” is taken from; “The western civilization by choosing to destroy all minority cultures that could have threatened it, chose to demise all values it could have been compared to. It can only watched in a mirror the legacy of its past”. The ethnologist stood for a “white indianity, hypothetic application of a human logic of the compatible” with the universe and other cultures.

Jaulin also published Gens du soi, gens de l'autre (1972), Les Chemins du vide (1977), Mon Thibaud (1980), Le Cœur des choses (1984), Géomancie et islam (1991).