F rance, Anthropology in

Anthropology developed late in France, though the country had cradled its premises during the Enlightenment and the first elaborations of the social sciences happened after the French Revolution of 1789. Dominated by racial and natural history paradigms during the nineteenth century, ethnology got new recognition with the advent of sociology but remained in the framework of museums. After World War II, social anthropology eventually experienced a rapid expansion with the development of research institutions. Conventional readings of the history of French anthropology usually have an emphasis on structuralism and Marxism but they miss the importance of dynamic anthropology and the contribution of many other critical currents of thought that contributed to the reconsideration of the epistemological and methodological bases of the discipline. The reevaluation of ethnological inquiry, in particular since the 1980s, engendered the detraditionalization and de‐exoticization of social anthropology and a growing diversification of its fields of research.