Promesses de Patagonie, d’Araucanie et de Terre de Feu. Stratégies de collecte et d’élaboration du savoir scientifique en France concernant l’Extrême-Sud du continent américain (1878-1937)

In the 19th century, French ethnology relied on a network of public institutions, scholarly societies, and individuals, and was promoted by the musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878-1937). In this era, the southernmost part of the Americas was perceived as a region that called into question the conceptual and scientific frameworks of Western culture, due to its, its landscape of extremes, and the biological and cultural specificities of its inhabitants. The formation of a national French collection from this region was the result of individual and collective efforts. These collecting endeavors were tied to the dominant scientific paradigms, the personality of collectors and scholars for whom the collections were intended, and the political and social contexts of Argentina and Chile, as well as that of Native communities impacted by the loss of their economic independency and territorial autonomy. The “object” collected in the field arrived at the museum bearing values and views that influenced the ways the latter were perceived. This thesis analyses the practices of collecting and the construction of knowledge of these populations; in so doing, it writes a history of collections that deconstructs the old museum categorizations in order to recover their human and scientific consistency