Thérèse Rivière, storia di uno sguardo. Museo, fotografia, colonialismo

Throughout her life, the ethnologist Thérèse Rivière (1901–1970) cultivated a sensitive and unconventional art of looking. Hired by her brother Georges Henri Rivière—then deputy director of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro and later a major figure in twentieth-century museology—as his secretary, she rapidly acquired a solid scholarly training and eventually became head of the museum’s Afrique blanche et Levant department. In 1934, she travelled to the Aurès region of Algeria on a field mission with Germaine Tillion, remaining there until 1937 and developing close relationships with the Amazigh communities she studied. Precisely because of this proximity, her photographs challenge the distanced and classificatory gaze characteristic of the colonial period. After returning to Paris and resuming her work at the newly established Musée de l’Homme, Rivière’s psychological fragility became increasingly evident. She moved from one hospital to another until her death. Where freedom had once prevailed, restraint now took its place; the bird’s-eye view gave way to broken or stolen spectacles. Yet her habit of thinking through drawing, her resistance to conformity, her passion for research, and her profound identification with the museum remained intact, preserving the coherence of her method of interpreting the world despite repeated electroshock treatments. Read today through the lenses of postcolonial and gender studies, Rivière’s life and work emerge as a kaleidoscope of critical insights. Her disarming irony, ability to circumvent hierarchies, and creativity in transforming fieldwork into a profound human encounter bring together a range of questions that remain urgently relevant.