SOME PRESENT TRENDS OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN FRANCE.

Professor C. Levi-Strauss has written of an effort to revive the great French sociological tradition running from Montesquieu to Durkheim as a result of appreciation of and interest in it abroad. The question of the existence of a French tradition or school of anthropology arises at this point. The internationally recognized existence of a British school of social anthropology forgets that the existence of a school in a particular country or city is not an inevitable part of the life of an academic discipline. French academic life is still to a large extent ruled by the old tripartite division between the Facultés de lettres, de droit and de sciences. Broadly speaking, sociology and psychology depend on lettres, economics and political science on droit and anthropology on lettres and sciences. Ethnology, the history of races and societies, has been the predominating discipline in French anthropology and the term ethnologie is still used today for anthropology as a whole though the terms anthropologie culturelle and anthropologie sociale are gradually coming into general usage.