Excerpt from the article: "STARTING IN 1925 WITH THE PAMPHLET CIRCULATED in support of the rebels of the Rif Valley fighting in Morocco for independence from France, the surrealists actively adopted an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist stance. Led by André Breton, they followed up this pamphlet with a small exhibition in 1931, “The Truth about the Colonies,” along with another pamphlet, “First Report on the Colonial Exhibition,” intended to refute the political assumptions of the major “Colonial Exhibition” showing in Paris at the time. While their political energies for the rest of the 1930s became concentrated on anti-fascism followed by self-exile or active resistance during World War Two, by the end of the war in 1946 they published a new anti-colonialist pamphlet with the title, “Liberty is a Vietnamese noun.” By 1950, in a talk given to a group of graduating ethnographers, the occasional surrealist Michel Leiris called on these young representatives of the state to defend the colonized people they would likely be studying against the force of the French Empire they purportedly would be representing. He told them: “ethnography appears to be closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers desire it to be so, or not. For the most part, it is in colonial or semi-colonial territories dependent upon their country of origin that they work.” Later on, he adds, “it is certain that we cannot neglect the fact that these societies . . . have been subjugated to colonial regimes and that they have, as a result, . . . undergone certain social disruptions. . . . . We cannot, therefore, on a human level, hold ourselves apart from the colonial administration.”1 Leiris concludes by encouraging the young ethnographers to practice an ethnography “detatched from a colonialist mindset” in order to prepare the way for emancipation and to accept the inevitability of the “essentially temporary” state of colonialism and thus to work on the side of colonialism towards its undoing.2