German Typologies Confront French Immersion in Africa: The Ethnographic Photographs of Lotte Errell, Ilse Steinhardt, Thérèse Rivière, and Germaine Tillion"

Interwar German and French photographic ethnography in Africa differed in both approach and interpretation. In contrast to Lotte Errell, a German Jewish photographer who framed Africans as static typologies, or Ilse Steinhardt, who overtly racialized Africans in contrast to Aryan Germans, Thérèse Rivière and Germaine Tillion were French professionally trained ethnographers. More scientifically neutral than their German colleagues, they conformed to France’s colonialist mission civilisatrice. Both studied with French ethnographer Marcel Mauss; Thérèse Riviére worked at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle where her brother Georges-Henri Riviére was a major figure. From 1934 to 1936, they researched a mountainous corner of the French African colonies, the Berber Chaouia groups in the Eastern Algeria's Aurès region. Their project departs from not only from German patterns but also from standard French anthropology, first by studying Islam and the Maghreb and second by departing from colonialist patterns of study. Their immersion in Aurès shines through in interactive glances and gestures between sitters and photographers. Rivière’s 1938 illustrated anthropological article on housing types, marriage rites, and meals notes their cultural independence: “an important Berber group has remained very little Arabicized and even less Europeanized.” A scholar of Mediterranean family structures, Tillion defines a new, third category, “la république des cousins,” that complicates the simple opposition of what she terms “modern republics” and “savage republics.” This differs markedly from Steinhardt's imaginary nationalist reconstruction of a German colony that had been gone for twenty years, and from Errell's objectification of her African subjects for the popular press.