The Great Family of Man
Citation
Barthes, Roland. “The Great Family of Man.” In Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers, 100–102. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Originally published as “La grande famille des hommes” in Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957). English-translation excerpt consulted via the University of Kentucky course-hosted PDF.
Relevance
The defining critical counter-reading of The Family of Man. Barthes argues that the exhibition (titled La Grande Famille des hommes when it was shown in Paris) naturalizes historically-contingent human arrangements — “birth, death, work, knowledge, play” — as eternal and universal, thereby suppressing the political differences Barthes calls “injustices.” Any curatorial summary of the exhibition’s thematic logic that presents it as settled or neutral risks reproducing the bias Barthes diagnosed; citing Barthes is the minimum move toward perspectival balance.
Key excerpts / pages
- (Opening of the essay): “A big exhibition of photographs has been held in Paris, the aim of which was to show the universality of human actions in the daily life of all the countries of the world: birth, death, work, knowledge, play, always impose the same types of behaviour; there is a family of Man.”
- “The French have translated it as: The Great Family of Man. So what could originally pass for a phrase belonging to zoology, keeping only the similarity in behaviour, the unity of a species, is here amply moralized and sentimentalized.”
- “This myth functions in two stages: first the difference between human morphologies is asserted, exoticism is insistently stressed … Then, from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way …”
- “This myth of the human ‘condition’ rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.”
- “Why not ask the parents of Emmet Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?”
- Closing: “So that I rather fear that the final justification of all this Adamism is to give to the immobility of the world the alibi of a ‘wisdom’ and a ‘lyricism’ which only make the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them.”
Notes
- Page numbers above refer to the standard Lavers translation (Hill and Wang, 1972). The course-hosted PDF is a scanned working copy; exact pagination should be confirmed against a physical copy.
- Barthes references the “introductory leaflet” (attributed to André Chamson) and the “quotations which accompany each chapter of the Exhibition” — confirming from the critical side that the exhibition did proceed in thematic chapters, though Barthes does not enumerate them.
- Perspective: critical / theoretical. Companion to Sandeen 1995 (
src-sandeen-1995).