ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Role of Moroccan Intermediaries in the Scientific Missions of Geologist Louis Gentil at the Time of the Colonization of Morocco

• In Event: Making and Unmaking Colonial Science

English Abstract

In the context of colonization of North Africa, scientific explorations were encouraged by European governments. Louis Gentil, a French geologist, was hired to explore unmapped regions of Morocco, especially in the south, and to gather knowledge about the country. He was one of the first to return from an expedition in Morocco with important scientific data. He collected thousands of rocks and fossils, now preserved by Sorbonne University, with hundreds of photographs taken on the field.
Throughout his numerous missions in Morocco, he met a lot of local actors who served as intermediaries to better understand the country he was exploring. He had a recurrent guide, Moulay Ibrahim, who helped him in his travels through Morocco and collected some of the samples himself. He met a lot of local chiefs, called chérifs, that welcomed him in their house and helped him through his journey. Taking a Muslim identity in his first mission in 1904, his relationship to otherness needs to be studied. In his last mission before his death, he came back to see some of the chiefs whom he had met twenty years earlier. The parallel narration of both meetings in his two travelogues showed a shift in perspective, as Morocco was now colonized by the French. One interesting aspect of Louis Gentil’s scientific works is the anonymization of some of his traveling companions. The relationship between the geologist and the Moroccans on the field can be questioned and analyzed to understand how he made science in collaboration with the locals.

Author

• Léane MOUSSEAU, Sorbonne University