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Tribute to Lucien Bernot

by Bernard Frank

Lucien Bernot (1919-1993)

Lucien Bernot, Professor of Sociography of Southeast Asia at the Collège de France, was born on December 2, 1919 in Gien, Loiret. Of Burgundian peasant descent, his father, a PTT worker, had taught himself to read. Unable to continue his studies, he entered an apprenticeship at the age of 14, but chose a profession for which he felt a strong attraction, that of composer-typographer. He practiced it, with interruptions, for 10 years from 1934; interruptions, in particular, due to his entry into the underground during the Occupation, when the pacifist and former conscientious objector that Lucien Bernot was left, not to take up arms, but to, at the constant risk of his life, help those being pursued.

In 1944, while working in the Paris region, he decided to enroll as a public lecturer in Chinese at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes. His aim, he says, was "limited and practical: to learn to compose in this language". Having passed the school's entrance exam, he became a regular student, graduating with the equivalent of the Baccalauréat.

He always had a great predilection for this field of printing, of which he had both an encyclopedic view, and a precise grasp of the smallest detail. Conversing with him on the subject was a delight.

Beyond printing, he was interested in all forms of manual craftsmanship, particularly in the rural world with which he was most familiar - men and techniques. Very early on, he began cycling the roads of France, inquiring about things, questioning people in a way - as those who accompanied him know - that they took for granted. He continued in the same way through much of Europe - even the Balkans - and North Africa.

While studying Chinese, he liked to visit the Musée de l'Homme. An old friend, who was an ethnographer, introduced him to the museum and showed him around its reserves. An initiative with far-reaching consequences. "It was truly an accident", he says, "... the accident part also exists", but he concedes "Many things are done at the unconscious level..." (Interview in Itinéraire, 2^nd quarter 1992).

He came to be known to a number of researchers, including André Leroi-Gourhan, then deputy director of the Museum, who took an interest in him and advised him to enroll in Ethnology. This led to lectures by Paul Mus, Pierre Gourou and Roger Dion. He also took Tibetan at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1946, on an "intellectual unemployment" allowance, he was given his first position in the Museum's Asian Department, with the main task of classifying the Tibetan collections. The following year, he joined the CNRS as a research trainee. He went on to become an attaché and then a research fellow.

On the advice of Claude Lévi-Strauss, he embarked on a project whose aim, through a survey conducted in a French village, was to combine a rigorous ethnographic approach with a methodology that intended to assert itself entirely free from the theoretical presuppositions of the then-dominant American anthropology.

The area of investigation was chosen in the Bresle valley, on the borders of eastern Normandy and Picardy. Carried out under the dual patronage of UNESCO and the VI th section of the École pratique des Hautes Études, in collaboration with a psychologist, this survey, which lasted from July 1949 to February 1950, led, among other results, to the publication, 3 years later, of a work in the Travaux et mémoires series of the Institut d'Ethnologie, entitled Nouville - un village français. Lucien Bernot was responsible for the whole of the first part, devoted to "The framework of Nouville life" and, within the second, on "The circle of individual life", for the chapters on Adolescence, Communal life, Time and Space; he was also involved in the chapters on Family Life, Old Age and Death, and Attitudes Towards Strangers, as well as in drafting the conclusion, which brought together data that - let's quote - "demonstrated the solidarity between all the psychological, sociological, historical and economic aspects of the life of a social group".

When Lucien Bernot presented his work to the Collège de France, he took pleasure in underlining the affinity between the work he had carried out 30 years earlier and that of Demangeon and Jules Sion, the memorable author of "L'Asie des Moussons". The empirical research he had carried out, carefully recording the day-to-day activities of the inhabitants, had enabled him to feed the theoretical thinking he had learned from the various masters who had trained him. The experience had shown him, he says, that "it was possible to closely associate meticulous description, the globalizing, totalizing vision of ethnology, the temporal and spatial dimensions (history and geography) and communication (linguistics and sociology)". He goes on to explain the meaning of a term that is the very one he will propose for the title of his chair, that of "Sociographie".

"In the first half of the twentieth century, the name sociography was given to this association of approaches. To observe facts and identify those that characterize the society under study, without losing sight of their context, to seek in the disciplines related to this context the means to shed light on the facts, and thereby to enrich and deepen observations and descriptions: this is the approach that, for me too, the term 'sociography' covers".

It was in the year following this survey (1951) that he was to get his first hands-on experience of East Asia - or, to be more precise, South-East Asia - the attraction of which was at the root of a series of changes in his life, which he himself modestly preferred to continue seeing as a series of accidents.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had just returned from a mission to East Pakistan - now Bangladesh - where he had visited the hills east of Chittagong, a town located on the northeastern edge of the Ganges delta, invited him to spend a year there. His task was to study ethnic groups that differed from the majority Bengali-speaking population, who themselves spoke Tibeto-Burmese.

His approach is characterized by the fact that he arrives in this region with a survey method previously used in a village in France, and which he will adapt to the reality of the place.

He is accompanied by his wife, Denise, with whom he has worked and will work until the end in the closest union of heart and mind. She herself was trained as a Chartist, but on this occasion began to learn Burmese, which she went on to study in ever greater depth, later becoming a professor at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes.

Returning to the region in 1959-1960, he found the opportunity to go further south of the Delta, where some twenty thousand ethnic Marma refugees still lived, speaking a kind of archaic Burmese known as Arakanese, and there he gathered the material for his main doctoral thesis, to be defended in 1965, Les paysans arakanais du Pakistan oriental ; l'histoire, le monde végétal et l'organisation sociale des réfugiés Marma. The first part deals with the history, or more precisely, the "histories of a Hinduized ethnic group", histories that will be detailed in two chapters: "Merchants' testimonies" and "Hinduism and historiography". The second part deals with agricultural technology: traditional agriculture, i.e. slash-and-burn; occasional agriculture, i.e. ploughing and gardening; food; bamboo and cotton, two fundamentally useful plants; and the home. The third part deals with the economy, the individual life cycle, villages, kinship and the division of labor. Extremely dense in terms of documentation, the work nonetheless continuously captures our attention, so full is it of the reality that the author had such a gift for capturing and transmitting.

Among his later missions were those to Burma. During two of these, he took an interest in the Intha of Lake Inlé, in the center of the country, who have perfected a singular technique of growing crops on floating islands; floating islands formed by the entanglement, sometimes over a meter thick, of an extremely invasive water hyacinth introduced from South America at the beginning of this century. Villagers saw regular-shaped slabs from these floating islands, moor them close to their houses and cover them with topsoil for cultivation. It was to these Intha that he devoted the second year of his lecture at the Collège de France, as can be seen from the Abstract he published in the 1979-1980 Annuaire.

A lecturer at the 5^th section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (future École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), he was appointed Director of Studies in Southeast Asian Ethnology in 1964. From 1975, he was also responsible for training in general ethnology.

In 1978, he was appointed to the Collège de France. The proposal to create the chair had been put forward by Jean Filliozat and supported by André Bareau, Rolf Stein, Jacques Gernet, Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Leroi-Gourhan.

He lectured there for 7 years, until 1985, expounding on the wealth of his experience in an area of extreme ethnic complexity, where, as if echoing the conclusions of his earlier work in Nouville, evidence of solidarity between all aspects of life in a vast region had become ever more apparent to him.

Lucien Bernot was a man of unrivalled sincerity, human generosity and warmth. Very discreet in his manner, he had an imposing presence. But, on the other hand, he had a marvellous ability to delight and make people laugh. His friends, whom he treated so well, remember with nostalgia a dish of which he had the secret and which he called his "Neolithic soup", made with spelt, a kind of very hard wheat that is still grown in Haute-Provence and which is only cooked, he said, when a spade iron that has been boiled with it is softened.

He died suddenly, the evening after a happy day's travel with his wife, on July 14, 1993. His bibliography, prepared by his family and friends, currently comprises 57 titles. It will be published at the head of a volume in his memory being prepared by the Institut de recherches sur l'Asie du Sud-Est (IRSEA) in Aix-en-Provence.

Bernard Frank, 1955.