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The Most Famous

ANTHROPOLOGISTS from France

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This page contains a list of the greatest French Anthropologists. The pantheon dataset contains 69 Anthropologists, 11 of which were born in France. This makes France the birth place of the 3rd most number of Anthropologists behind United States and United Kingdom.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary French Anthropologists of all time. This list of famous French Anthropologists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of French Anthropologists.

Photo of Paul Broca

1. Paul Broca (1824 - 1880)

With an HPI of 65.72, Paul Broca is the most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 37 different languages on wikipedia.

Pierre Paul Broca (, also UK: , US: , French: [pɔl bʁɔka]; 28 June 1824 – 9 July 1880) was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist. He is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that is named after him. Broca's area is involved with language. His work revealed that the brains of patients with aphasia contained lesions in a particular part of the cortex, in the left frontal region. This was the first anatomical proof of localization of brain function. Broca's work contributed to the development of physical anthropology, advancing the science of anthropometry, and craniometry, in particular, the now-discredited practice of determining intelligence. He was engaged in comparative anatomy of primates and humans and proposed that Negroes were an intermediate form between apes and Europeans. He saw each racial group as its own species and believed racial mixing eventually led to sterility.

Photo of Marc Augé

2. Marc Augé (1935 - 2023)

With an HPI of 55.25, Marc Augé is the 2nd most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Marc Augé (2 September 1935 – 24 July 2023) was a French anthropologist. In an essay and book of the same title, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), Augé coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to spaces where concerns of relations, history, and identity are erased. Examples of a non-place would be a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket.

Photo of Jacques de Morgan

3. Jacques de Morgan (1857 - 1924)

With an HPI of 55.15, Jacques de Morgan is the 3rd most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 23 different languages.

Jean-Jacques de Morgan (3 June 1857, Huisseau-sur-Cosson, Loir-et-Cher – 14 June 1924) was a French mining engineer, geologist, and archaeologist. He was the director of antiquities in Egypt during the 19th century, and excavated in Memphis and Dashur, providing many drawings of many Egyptian pyramids. He also worked at Stonehenge, and Persepolis, and many other sites. He also went to Russian Armenia, as manager of a copper mine at Akhtala. "The Caucasus is of special interest in the study of the origins of metals; it is the easternmost point from which prehistoric remains are known; older than Europe and Greece, it still retains the traces of those civilizations that were the cradle of our own." In 1887-89 he unearthed 576 graves around Alaverdi and Akhatala, near the Tiflis-Alexandropol railway line.

Photo of Pierre Clastres

4. Pierre Clastres (1934 - 1977)

With an HPI of 53.87, Pierre Clastres is the 4th most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 19 different languages.

Pierre Clastres (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ klastʁ]; 17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory of stateless societies. An anarchist seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched Indigenous peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains were powerless. With a background in literature and philosophy, Clastres started studying anthropology with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux in the 1950s. Between 1963 and 1974 he traveled five times to South America to do fieldwork among the Guaraní, the Chulupi, and the Yanomami. Clastres mostly published essays and, because of his premature death, his work was unfinished and scattered. His signature work is the essay collection Society Against the State (1974) and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972), Le Grand Parler (1974), and Archeology of Violence (1980).

Photo of Marcel Griaule

5. Marcel Griaule (1898 - 1956)

With an HPI of 52.57, Marcel Griaule is the 5th most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 18 different languages.

Marcel Griaule (16 May 1898 – 23 February 1956) was a French author and anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France. He worked together with Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch on African subjects. His publications number over 170 books and articles for scholarly journals.

Photo of Georges Vacher de Lapouge

6. Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854 - 1936)

With an HPI of 51.29, Georges Vacher de Lapouge is the 6th most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.

Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge (French: [vaʃe də lapuʒ]; 12 December 1854 – 20 February 1936) was a French anthropologist and a theoretician of eugenics and scientific racism. He is known as the founder of anthroposociology, the anthropological and sociological study of race as a means of establishing the superiority of certain peoples.

Photo of Maurice Godelier

7. Maurice Godelier (1934 - )

With an HPI of 51.12, Maurice Godelier is the 7th most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.

Maurice Godelier (born February 28, 1934) is a French anthropologist who works as a Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He is one of the most influential French anthropologists and is best known as one of the earliest advocates of Marxism's incorporation into anthropology. He is also known for his field work among the Baruya in Papua New Guinea from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Photo of Alfred Sauvy

8. Alfred Sauvy (1898 - 1990)

With an HPI of 50.36, Alfred Sauvy is the 8th most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.

Alfred Sauvy (31 October 1898 – 30 October 1990) was a demographer, anthropologist and historian of the French economy. Sauvy coined the term Third World ("Tiers Monde") in reference to countries that were unaligned with either the Western bloc or the Eastern bloc during the Cold War.

Photo of Georges Balandier

9. Georges Balandier (1920 - 2016)

With an HPI of 47.98, Georges Balandier is the 9th most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.

Georges Balandier (21 December 1920 – 5 October 2016) was a French sociologist, anthropologist and ethnologist noted for his research in Sub-Saharan Africa. Balandier was born in Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont. He was a professor at the Sorbonne (Université René Descartes, Paris-V), and is a member of the Center for African Studies (Centre d'études africaines [Ceaf]), a research center of the École pratique des hautes études (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). He held for many years the Editorship of Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie (previously held by his mentor Georges Gurvitch) and edited the series Sociologie d'Aujourd'hui at Presses Universitaires de France. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1976. He died on 5 October 2016 at the age of 95.

Photo of Marcellin Boule

10. Marcellin Boule (1861 - 1942)

With an HPI of 45.41, Marcellin Boule is the 10th most famous French Anthropologist.  His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.

Pierre-Marcellin Boule (1 January 1861 – 4 July 1942), better known as merely Marcellin Boule, was a French palaeontologist, geologist, and anthropologist.

Pantheon has 11 people classified as anthropologists born between 1824 and 1935. Of these 11, 1 (9.09%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living anthropologists include Maurice Godelier. The most famous deceased anthropologists include Paul Broca, Marc Augé, and Jacques de Morgan. As of April 2022, 5 new anthropologists have been added to Pantheon including Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Maurice Godelier, and Georges Balandier.

Living Anthropologists

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Deceased Anthropologists

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Newly Added Anthropologists (2022)

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Which Anthropologists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 10 most globally memorable Anthropologists since 1700.