Marcel Jousse

by

Edgard Richard

Semiotics
The anthropologist Marcel Jousse was born in 1886 in the then deep rural oral (illiterate) and poor Sarthe region, South-West of Paris. In 1913, he joined the Jesuit noviciate and in 1917, after three years of distinguished service as an artillery captain in World War I, he was sent as an officers’ instructor to Georgetown in the USA. In his first publication, the seminal Le Style oral mnémotechnique et rythmique chez les verbo-moteurs (1925; 1990 English translation: The Oral Style), he defines and illustrates the anthropological foundations of traditional mnemonic oral style by combining the three significant personal experiences mentioned: the oral milieu of his childhood, his study of the orally based Hebrew Bible and its Aramaic commentaries, and his encounters with the Amerindian oral-gestual tradition in the USA.