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French anthropologist (1921–2011) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Georges Louis Condominas (29 June 1921 – 17 July 2011) was a French cultural anthropologist, known for his field studies of the Mnong people of Vietnam.[1]
Condominas was born in 1921 in Haiphong[2] (former French Indochina, Vietnam today). His father was a French officer in the colonial army and his mother has Chinese, Vietnamese and Portuguese ancestry. He died in the night of Saturday to Sunday 17 July 2011 from a heart attack at the hôpital Broca in Paris where he had been hospitalized for some time.
Georges Condominas studied at the Lycée Lakanal, on the southern outskirts of Paris, but kept in touch with his father through letters and photographs. After he graduated, he studied law in France. He then returned to Indochina to work in the colonial administration but gave up his job and studied art in Hanoi. During the Japanese occupation he was imprisoned at the Mikado Hotel.
After World War II, he studied ethnology and returned to France to follow the lectures of famous professors of the time such as André Leroi-Gourhan, Denise Paulme or Marcel Griaule at the Musée de l'Homme, and Maurice Leenhardt at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris.
One of his first ethnologic field is in a Vietnamese village called Sar Luk in the province of Dac Lac. From this experience, he wrote two books:
After this first major field, he studies other fields in Madagascar, Togo and fulfills several missions in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia for the Unesco.
In 1960, he becomes professor at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris and creates the CeDRASEMI, a French research center focused on South East Asian and the Insulindian world, in 1962.
Condominas is Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Yale University between 1963 and 1969. He is Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences of Palo Alto in 1971. He pronounce in 1972 the Distinguish Lecture of the annual session of the American Anthropological Association, where he denounce the Vietnam War and the ethnocide of the Mnong. He was a closed friend of Margaret Mead, John Embree and Elisabeth Wiswell Embree. He is considered as a master of ethnology in Japan, where he was the first foreigner ever to pronounce a speech at the Nihon Minzoku Gakkai, a Japanese anthropological association, for its 50th anniversary.
He is also invited at the Australian National University in 1987 and at the Japanese university of Sophia in 1992.
His work inspired many books and movies. The record he made of the Mnong music can be heard at the end of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the final scene of which was inspired by Condominas's description of the ritual slaughter of buffalo.[3]
For the opening of the Musée du quai Branly in 2006, an exhibition is devoted to him and his field of Sar Luk. The exhibition was also presented the next year, in 2007, in Hanoï, Vietnam, with a bilingual catalog. Today, his working papers, his personal library and his pictures are preserved at the mediatheque of the Musée du quai Branly, available for scholars and researchers. His audio records are preserved and digitized by the French Research Center for Ethnomusicology (LESC, CNRS, Paris Ouest University).[4]
Condominas declared that the US Department of Commerce delivered his research on Vietnam to US soldiers. In violation of international copyright laws, his works were translated to English. He obtained this information to one of his research participants, who was tortured previously by the US.[5]
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