“ An intelligent cog in a machine ”? Latvian ethnologist Ziedonis Ligers ( 1917 – 2001 ) on a French mission

The article focuses on the life and work of Ziedonis Ligers (19172001), a Latvian emigree scholar who began a career in ethnology in his native country before World War II but spent most of his creative years as a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Having defended his doctoral thesis at Sorbonne in 1953, Ligers joined a research team formed by the eminent French ethnologist Marcel Griaule. The next ten years of Ligers’s life were spent conducting fieldwork in presentday Mali (then known as French Sudan) and in present-day Niger (a former French colony by the same name) and another seventeen years writing up and publishing his research findings. The material that he generated during the expeditions carried out on the CNRS floating laboratory Mannogo contained not only a wealth of notes on archaeological artefacts, livelihood techniques, social relationships and folklore of the peoples of the banks of the Niger Inland Delta (mostly the Sorko people), but also thousands of photographs and hundreds of ethnographic artefacts. It is argued here that in his ethnographic investigations, Ligers closely followed the principles that had been advanced by Marcel Mauss and specified by Marcel Griaule. One of the principles presupposed that the process of data production proceeds relatively autonomously from theoretical considerations. While in the field, attention was to be focused on careful ethnographic documentation and cataloguing, leaving the theory building to a wider scholarly community. Having completed his fieldwork expeditions, Ligers, however, remained largely alone with his corpus of data. Notwithstanding the richness and multifariousness of information in his twelve published volumes, his ethnographic legacy has received relatively little acclaim. The collection of artefacts that he had catalogued were transferred to the Musée de l’Homme without acknowledging Ligers’s contribution. Moreover, in his native Latvia, the ethnologist’s work in Africa is almost unknown. Looking at the circumstances (professional, methodological, technical and social) that shaped the destiny of the Mannogo mission and its research results, the article outlines the style of Ligers’s fieldwork and writing.