What path led you to study anthropology?
In 1967, a lecturer came to my school to tell us about his journey in the footsteps of the ancient “Garamantes”, a people of caravans traveling the Sahara. His slides, worn out from having been shown in schools for so long, made me dream, but also his Land Rover. My path was set. I was seven years old and I wanted to become an archaeologist/ethnologist. As luck would have it, my parents and my teachers encouraged me in this direction. I am starting my studies at the University of Rennes in Art History and Archaeology. My first “field” as an ethnographer in 1980 during my second year of DEUG was on the last secular manufacturer of hosts in Vendée with Philippe Sagant, then research director at the CNRS.
Ethnography, ethnology, anthropology: what are the differences?
Ethnography is about being in the field with your notebook and pencils. I observe, I ask questions, I take photos, I record, I live with a community to collect data. Then, upon returning, we analyze and synthesize the data from this community to produce ethnology. Anthropology consists of comparing data from your field with data from other fields carried out by other ethnologists around the world. Claude Lévi-Strauss did not do much field work but was able to synthesize all this data. In this incredible diversity across the world, we are all the same but all different. It is the human race that brings all these communities together.
The world with all this diversity is one hell of a playground.
It’s magnificent! We observe and work on forms of incredible diversity. I could be with the Inuit in Greenland and then later be with the hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. These are intense human experiences that sometimes made me cry, aware of how lucky I was to have been able to meet these beings. We come away enriched. Afterwards, we reason and we realize that there are many links between all these communities.
What can all these ancient communities bring us? What do they have to tell us?
They are a form of brokers between their ways of seeing the world, their environments, the planet in the face of technocrats who have a more macro influence. The projects that I have been able to carry out with the populations starting from their needs, by involving them in the decision-making process, by showing that they develop know-how which could also be useful to us in order to question our own condition. Well it works! A co-construction that is difficult to make decision-makers understand.
Throughout these journeys, a special encounter?
More than one! With the Massai, a nomadic people whom I met more than twenty times in ten years and my first meeting with a hunter dressed only in an animal skin. He was asleep peacefully between two baobab roots near his bow and arrows. I also remember being alone in the world on the sled for a seal hunt with the Inuit on the ice floe. Meetings which allowed us to create fraternal bonds. They continue thanks to the staging of Macha Makeïeff in the show “Offended Souls” based on my travel diaries. The play brought together thousands of spectators from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to the Criée in Marseille. This demonstrates the public’s interest in better understanding our cultural and societal origins in order to better co-build together.
* Social science which focuses on resolving the problems posed by the arrival of new technologies in an environment for which they were not initially designed.
Swiss
