This article aims to evaluate the importance of Americanist studies and the place of French researchers in the constitution of an international research network in the early 20th century. We try to understand how this disciplinary field emerged centered on the native American people, especially their cultural and social specificities. An analysis of the methodological underpinnings of the first collections reveals that special attention was given to the collection and the study of material culture since it bore witness to the diversity of human societies. Young collaborators were hired to be in charge of and to analyze the collection of objects for the Musée de l'Homme in order to fill the lacuna of knowledge of the "native Americans cultures". Lévi-Strauss' two missions (1935 and 1938) to make the inventory of the material culture that were part of this project inaugurated a new phase of Americanist studies, focussed on the study of social structure. We evaluate the importance of this change for Americanist research in the Amazon and the consolidation of an international research network that came into being prior to the Second World War. Such a documental review, which questions the 'museologized' ethnographic object, is important because it allows us to reread the history of the discipline, in the light of the importance of the historical contexts, political debates and the place of Americanist studies in Brazil and in France. It is also possible to define the limits of an anthropology which becomes autonomous and takes a critical position in relation to colonial states and welfare services provided to native Americans.
Americanism; French Anthropology; Museology
