Is Zeus Salazar “Maussian”? Writing the History of (French “influence” to) Philippine “Social Science”—a Disciplinal Footnote to 1968

Zeus Salazar is a major figure in the post-colonial intellectual history of the Philippines and Southeast Asia (Guillermo, 2009; Curaming, 2019). His disciplinal impact, measured (to cite one criteria) by the number of mentored scholars who went on to also shape the disciplinal bent of their own fields of learning, cut across the varied fields of the social sciences: history, psychology, archaeology, anthropology, and sociology. Salazar, for his part, in his professional training (Ph.D. in Ethnology in Sorbonne in 1968), considers as his European mentors (in the Francophone side) key “Maussian” figures in French social science in the second half of the 20^th century: Roger Bastide, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Claude Levi-Strauss. His 1968 ethnological and linguistic dissertation on the “Austronesian world” (and its central religious categories) foregrounds a conceptual and methodological approach captured by its term, “ethnic fact” (le fait ethnique). Viewed as “part” of the conceptual set and series of the key conceptual ideas of the French sociological school—from the “social fact” of Durkheim to the “total social fact” of Mauss, what is Salazar’s “ethnic fact” trying to articulate, or has objectively articulated? If “influence” is too poor a process to capture the “messy” interactions in any intellectual exchanges, and “rhizomatic” links are “too messy” to outline and make visible real disciplinal filiations, what can we learn in the case of Salazar’s “ethnic fact” concept? Through a fine reading of Salazar’s dissertation (tracking carefully its categorial choices and reasonings) and using insights coming from our intimate/reflexive conversations with Zeus Salazar himself, our paper hopes to provide pointers for a concept-centered “history of the social sciences” from the marginal footnotes of ’68 Paris.