Afrikanische Silhouetten und FeldfotografieM. Griaules Beitrag zur Mausschen „Entdeckung“ der KörpertechnikenAfrican Silhouettes and Field Photography. M. Griaule’s Contribution to the Maussian “Discovery” of Body Techniques

This essay focuses on the interaction between the new reproduction media and corresponding reconfiguration of research fields in anthropology using the case of the “techniques of the body” – a concept developed by Marcel Mauss (1872–1950). For Mauss, the initiator of this discipline in France, body skills constituted the most important anthropological entity resulting from the confrontation of technical images and his interest in walking techniques. Three scenarios are especially significant for Mauss’s formulation of “body techniques” as a genuine concept: the front during the World War I, a New Yorker hospital in 1926, and an ethnographical field study conducted in Africa during the late 1920s. Both, the photographic media as well as the Abyssinian expedition of his student Marcel Griaule, whose research publication Mauss co-authored (Silhouettes et graffiti abyssins) in 1933, take centre stage here.