Um livro de boa fé: A contraditoriedade do presente na obra de Henri-Alexandre Junod (1898-1927)

Henri-Alexandre Junod is the epical ancestor of southern African ethnography and, via Radcliffe-Brown's use of it, his work has constituted a central referent of all theoretical debates in twentieth century anthropology. Junod also published a novel, Zidji (1910), to which he attributed considerable importance as an historical document. This novel, however, has passed completely outside the radar of all historians of anthropology. In this essay, the novel is studied in the light of the notion that, for Junod's generation of ethnographers, there was an essential contradictoriness of the present moment.