Humility, Sexuality, Sexual Abuse Views on the Malagasy People Intimacy in the Writings of Jean Paulhan (1907-1910)

Résumé

Jean Paulhan arrives in Madagascar in 1908, aged 23, the age of responsibilities and “coming-of-age” according to Françoise Héritier. He then comes across an unknown society. In his rich correspondence, he confides to his relatives his astonishment regarding the behaviour of the Malagasy people and their modesty particularly. Indeed he establishes that the European rules of propriety regarding sexuality are transposed by Malagasy people to the food area.
Our intention is to put this attempt at an ethnographic approach in the context of two processes of the European thinking of the turn of the twentieth century. First of all, Paulhan is fully consistent with this « will to knowledge » emphasized by Michel Foucault regarding sexuality. Contemporary with the development of sexology and psychoanalysis, the building of Paulhan’s speech aims at objectifying the critical look at sexual practices, with the constant concern to give them a meaning, to uncover a system of thought. The speed in which he builds his analysis grid also makes it possible to put his intention back into the perspective of a process that Edward W. Said called orientalism. Just like travellers describing a fantasized Orient, Paulhan takes part in the building of an imaginary Madagascar where sexuality would entirely be free. This view leads to such a bias in the descriptions of some sexual intercourse between European and Malagasy people, that they are not perceived as genuine abuse. Humility thus allows to question in an original way the European representations of colonized societies.