Abstract

In the '20s and '30s, pari passu with the formation of ethnology as an academic grounded discipline, the primitive is asserted as a rhetorical asset for the most critical invectives against the stagnation of Western civilization. Michel Leiris (1901-1990), formerly his training as an ethnologist, awakes to the huge capacity of expressive deviation offered by the so-called primitive arts. Engaged on a literary self-portraiture that appreciates imaginary walking through Culture, Mythology and History, the author of L'Afrique fantôme (1934) builds his expressive resources by means of sulfurous articles for the vanguard magazine Documents (1929-1931), where we can see the initial training of his ethnographic imagination and of his usually called "ethnography of the self". This article revisits some moments of early leirisian writings that impregnated with language games and fiction a nascent anthropological and ethnographic conscience, which is little prone to impartial objectivity and neutral scientific documentation of the Other.

Key words:
Primitivism; Ethnography; Imaginary; Michel Leiris; Raymond Roussel