Life
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.
Jaulin signed the Manifeste des 121 opposed to the use of torture during the Algerian War (1954–62). After a journey among the Bari in South America, he called for a convention on ethnocide in the Americas at the Congress of Americanists, and in February, 1970, the French Society of Americanists convened for that purpose. Jaulin criticized in particular the role of Christian missionaries towards non-Western cultures.
In 1970, he created at the University of Paris-VII the first department dedicated to ethnology, anthropology and science of religions, to which participated scholars such as the philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Pierre Bernard, Bernard Delfendahl, Serge Moscovici, Jean Rouch, Michel de Certeau, etc.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Don’t tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.”
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“All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants, Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp them.”
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“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)