What is a body? To this question, the musée du quai Branly’s first major anthropological exhibition offers some unexpected answers. The visitor is invited to compare ways in which the body and the person are represented in four different regions of the world: West Africa, Western Europe, New Guinea and Amazonia. In marked contrast to the western concept of the body as the seat of an irreducible individuality, the team of anthropologists led by Stéphane Breton demonstrates that no human society - including our own - looks upon the body as an entity of strictly individual thought and action. The body is in fact regarded by different cultures as a semi-finished product that must be completed. It is a work in progress, the raw material in a "manufacturing process".

“I am not alone in my body”: with this postulate as a starting point, the individual cements a relationship with ‘something that is not themselves’, and which differs from culture to culture.

The body is where confrontation is expressed: male/female, living/non-living, divine/image, human/non-human… Oppositions which are also encountered in artistic, ritual and social productions (sculptures, artefacts, images of the body etc) presented here.