Michel Leiris is reinterpreted here as a discreet key figure of another literary modernity. He turns to ethnology to reflect on his writing and life games in light of foreign cultural practices. Michel Leiris (1901-1990) was both a surrealist and an ethnologist. As a boundary-crosser and dissident in two worlds, the literary and the scientific, he became an early critic of colonialism and the European understanding of literature, which he sought to undermine through language experiments and radical self-analyses. The book presents Leiris within the artistic and intellectual force field of surrealism, the lectures of Marcel Mauss, the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro, the journal Documents, and the Collège de Sociologie (1937-1939). During the Dakar-Djibouti mission (1931-1933), he witnesses how others transcend boundaries.