To Chirac's surprise, anthropologists did not applaud this new relativism. They were particularly unhappy with the use of the term "primitive." It was insulting. It was also difficult, if not impossible, to define. They were not mollified when the president suggested an alternative designation—the Musée des Arts Premières. Was he perhaps confusing an ethnographic showcase with a museum of upper Palaeolithic archaeology? Nor were they persuaded that the modern European notion of "art" was an appropriate description for the fabrics, stools, decorations, weapons and canoes that Chirac wished to put on display. Finally, they pointed out, Paris already had two museums, established in the colonial period, which performed similar—and now surely anachronistic—functions. These were the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the world-famous Musée de l'Homme, with its fine ethnographic collection.
This last argument did not trouble the president. He simply closed down the other two museums and appropriated their collections for his new $300m monument. And while he was impatiently waiting for the scholars to come to their senses, he obliged the Louvre to devote its Pavillon des Sessions to an exhibition of 120 works of African, Asian, American and Oceanic art assembled by his favourite dealer Jacques Kerchache. The president overrode the objections of the curators that the Louvre was, after all, dedicated to the highest achievements of western civilisation. And he waved away anthropologists who enquired what, precisely, the arts of Africa, the Americas and Oceania had in common—aside, of course, from their now taboo designation as primitive.
The president did concede one point. The label "primitive art" was abandoned, and the euphemism "first art" more reluctantly dropped. In the end, his monument became simply the Musée du Quai Branly. Chirac modestly admits that should a future occupant of the Elysée wish to change the name to the Jacques Chirac Museum, he would consider it a great honour. But the absence of a name did not distract the architect, Jean Nouvel, from his task. He understood very well the message that the museum was intended to convey. Indeed, he has set it in stone. His building invites the visitor to explore an unspoiled tropical paradise.
Primitive peoples are figments of the western imagination. But they are not idle fantasies. They help us to think about ourselves. The primitive, the barbarian, the savage are our opposite numbers. They are what we are not. They define us as we define them.
Thucydides pointed out that Homer did not call his heroes Greeks. "He does not even use the term barbarian," he added, "probably because the Hellenes had not yet been marked off from the rest of the world by one distinctive appellation." For the Greek and the barbarian were twin births. Greek-speakers recognised themselves as Hellenes only when their city states drew together to face the Persian threat in the early fifth century BC. And they coined the description "barbarian" for their common enemy. They pretended that barbaroi stammered like idiots, or babbled like babies, or grunted like animals—bar bar. Hence the name. Soon the term "barbarian" was applied to all speakers of foreign languages.
To each nation, its own barbarians. For the ancient Greeks, the barbarians were slaves of tyrannical rulers. The Victorian English were appalled by their sexual freedom. Romanticising German scholars treated them as mystics. French philosophers pointed out that they lacked logic. And our verdict on the primitive depends on what, at any particular time, we feel about civilisation. Satisfied with ourselves, we despise the primitives for lacking our advantages. If we feel pessimistic, they may represent the hope of a better, more natural way of life. Sceptical, we may argue that we ourselves are no better than the primitives. And in a liberal mood we concede that they have something to teach us—about respecting the environment, perhaps.
And so in France, the country that coined the word "civilisation," the familiar antithesis of civilisation has been resurrected, dressed up in a contemporary idiom and put on display in a grand new museum. Chirac is confident that the French will now teach the world to put l'Autre in its proper place—surely an appropriate new mission for French civilisation. He claims that his Musée du Quai Branly is a monument to cultural diversity, equality, even fraternity. Alas, it is a ghetto of the colonised, an ideal banlieue of the French imagination.
