Creative energy at the service of an ecological humanism, explorer of frozen deserts, anthropo-geographer, successful writer and publisher, Jean Malaurie (Mainz, 22 December, 1922 – Dieppe, 5 February, 2024) traversed the 20th century as a retro-futurist, appropriating Terence’s maxim: Homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto [I am man, nothing that is human is indifferent to me].

A prolific author of works that are classics nowadays, from The Last Kings of Thule to Hummocks, from Ultima Thule to The Call of the North, from Letter to an Inuk from 2022 to Oser, resister [To dare, to resist], Malaurie always promoted the construction of a civilisation of the Universal, multiple in its unity, multi-ethnic and rich in fruitful cross-fertilisation.

Awarded Grande Médaille of the Société de Géographie in 1997, Patron’s Gold Medal (Royal Geographic Society, 2005), UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in charge of Arctic issues (2007), Commander of the Légion d’honneur (2015), Malaurie embodied the figure of the non-conformist and eclectic humanistic intellectual, unus et multiplex. On the day after his death, French President Emmanuel Macron paid him a vibrant tribute, remembering him as ‘[a] French writer of the Universal, a man who knew how to dare, to resist [...], a great scholar who traced the legend of the century.’¹

Refusing, in June 1943, ‘the unacceptable Service du travail obligatoire (STO, compulsory work service) [and] the paramilitary collaboration Vichy sought to entertain with Nazi Germany’², Malaurie, in his early twenties, chose his side and went into hiding. This courageous act of resistance constitutes the catalyst for a metamorphosis in his identity:

In the post-war period, Malaurie enrolled in the Faculty of Geography in Paris and attended the courses of Prof. Emmanuel de Martonne who, in 1948, appointed him geographer of the Expéditions polaires françaises directed by Paul-Émile Victor on the west coast and ice sheet of Greenland. In 1950-51, under the aegis of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, French National Centre for Scientific Research), he carried out the first solo geomorphological mission in the Thule district.

For the young scholar, the Arctic appeared as a mythopoeic and palingenetic space of immanent transcendence:

In an explicitly claimed filiation to Giambattista Vico and in the wake of Fernand Braudel and Lucien Febvre (founding fathers of the Ecole des Annales), Malaurie placed his research in a diachronic flow that spans the long duration of Nature.

From a descriptive geography that reads, orders and measures the visible to a sacred geography that investigates the spirit of the matter, from a horizontal perspective to a vertical vision, Malaurie, immersed in the North, enriched his epistemological method. From the Heraclitean philosophy of becoming to the naturalist philosophy of the Renaissance, from the thought of Enlightenment to the German Naturphilosophie, from Franciscan Christianity to Inuit shamanism, the geo-anthropologist hybridised his heuristic approach, articulating rationality and sensoriality, memorial intuitionism and inspired foreknowledge (an original approach that enables us to grasp the quintessence of the phenomenon, outside the spatial, temporal and formal contexts).

In the Northen liminal quarters of the ecumene live the Inughuit (the Polar Eskimos), who possess a thousand-year-old wisdom and osmotic knowledge of the ecosystem:

A process of deconstruction of a mutilated identity and a vector of rediscovery of the totality of the Ego, Malaurie’s inuitisation⁶ is a dialogical dynamic, a relational itinerary in which a threefold movement of knowledge (of the world), of self-knowledge (of the deepest layers of self-consciousness), and of recognition of the Other as another Myself is realised. This identity metamorphosis influenced his epistemological positioning, enabling Malaurie to better investigate the close relationship between the arctic ecosystem and the Inuit’s social morphology. The Inuit have empirically elaborated, over millennia, an original social contract that Malaurie christens, with an oxymoron, anarcho-communalism.⁷

Malaurie charted Nuna (the Mother Earth) and undertook to study the Arctic ecosystem through petrography, from ujarak, the stone, conveying the memory of geological times, the receptacle of cosmic energy that, detaching itself from the mother rock, forms the ujarassuit, stony masses that lie at the foot of the cliffs. During this initiatory itinerarium that opens to the intelligence of Nature, Malaurie inuitised himself (‘the Inuit, he writes, [were] [my] second university’⁸) and elaborated a welcoming epistemological approach that combines sensory perception, memorial intuition and rationality.

[...]