Abstract

The idea that ethnology can and should be used as a tool for cultural criticism is quite obvious in the ethnologic and ethnographic works of Michel Leiris. We take this as a basis and take as infl ection point Michel Leiris’ breakup with the French surrealist movement and his later approach to the academic ethnology in 1930. We can differentiate two ways of understanding cultural criticism, before and after these events. They culminate with the publication in 1950 of the text L’Ethnographe devant le colonialisme, where Leiris defends that an ethnographer should be a “natural lawyer” for colonized people