Marcel Mauss and the Colonial Question.His Students and Colleagues in Canada and USA

In our paper, we will present Marcel Mauss’s position on the colonial question and also the researches of some of his students and American closed colleagues who did field researches in Canada : Henri Beuchat who wrote with Mauss the famous essay on the Eskimos (1906) et who became one members o the Stefansson and Anderson's great and tragical Canadian Arctic expedition (1913-1918) and Marius Barbeau, the first Canadian anthropologist, who has done field work in Canada on the potlatch. The American scholars are Franz Boas who studied the Inuits ( The Central Eskimo, 1888) and the Houses of the Kwakiutl Indians (1889) of British Columbia and Edward Sapir who became in 1910 the head of the Division of Anthropology of the Geological Survey of Canada where he developed a project to document the Indigenous cultures and languages of Canada. For both of them, the big issue was to introduce the idea of cultural relativism.