Homage to Georges Condominas

Version française

The death of G. Condominas is to us the loss not only of our most distinguished specialist of South East Asia, but also of the undisputed master of French ethnography.

In what sense G. Condominas was to be considered as a master ?...Even for those who like me have been his students, the answer is not immediately apparent. Of course, as a specialist of Laos, I could lay emphasis on the outstanding quality of his Notes sur le bouddhisme populaire en milieu rural lao, but I have quoted that work so often that I would be afraid of repeating myself. I could as well stress the heuristic value of his concept of "social space" (that is used by our students almost as often as Mauss’ concept of "total social fact", and similarly misunderstood). It’s likely that I will later bring up that subject again, but taking a short cut, I prefer to go straight to the main point, and focus on the text which started G. Condominas on a marvellous career : why the chronic of the Mnong Gar village of Sar Luk was right away seen by all those who were fortunate enough to read it, as on ultimate model of ethnographic survey?...The striking thing about it, when fifty years later we read that book again, is the remarkable actuality of his author’s approach. Ironically, that actuality is the reason why we are not fully aware of what we owe G. Condominas. We have interiorized his teaching to such a pitch, we are so inclined to look at his fieldwork methods as if they were going without saying, that we have forgotten that he has been their initiator. Without trying to be exhaustive, I would like to bring out more particularly three points.

1. First, G. Condominas is the one who pointed out the imperative necessity of describing the context of data. He is not speaking of Mnong Gar people in general, or of a "theoretical" Mnong Gar society. Generalizing expressions such as "Mnong Gar people are convinced that", or "according to Mnong Gar belief", etc., can never be found in Nous avons mangé la forêt. G. Condominas is speaking of those Mnong Gar men and women he met, and in the company of whom he lived in the village of Sar Luk in 1949. Thus, he avoids the traps associated with too hasty generalizations. It’s impossible to ignore, indeed, that there’s always a gap between norms and practices, that societies and cultures are permanently changing, and that, at a ten years interval, two observers who are studying the same festival or the same ceremony, won’t see exactly the same things. Moreover, it should never be forgotten that meaning of words, behaviours or symbols, is dependent upon circumstances and situations; that when asking the same question to two different informants, they never give exactly the same answer; and that, as it is written by G. Condominas himself in the foreword of his book, there are always variants of prayers and medical or magic formulas.

Given that essential variability of human facts, the only way for an ethnologist to solve the problem is a careful and thorough description of his observations context, not only because their meaning depends on that context, but also because, in that manner, he provides his readers with an opportunity for finding out an interpretation different from the one he has proposed.

2. In the second place, even though he has not devised the concept, G. Condominas is probably the first researcher who has fully understood the reflexive nature of ethnographic surveys, which involves the necessity of describing interactions between observer and observed people. Curiously (but he writes these words during the fifties), he apologized for doing it : "Undoubtedly, I will be blamed for making mention of my interventions". But, instead of blaming him, we are grateful to him because, as he explains it for justifying himself, thanks to that, we learn that the ethnologist, however "busy with scientific research" he may be, "is still a man among men", so that, unavoidably, his very presence "however discreet it may be", modifies the facts he is observing

Nevertheless, was G. Condominas’ presence as discreet as he said?...When we read that after "Handsome – Tieng"’s suicide, he prevented his lover (and clanic sister) "Aan-the-Widow" from becoming "Old-Chaar"’s slave, we would rather think that sometimes he was not really neutral, and at the same time it becomes obvious that such an intervention had be to mentioned : it informs us, indeed, of the status that had been assigned to him (it’s not without a good reason that he had been credited with an "elephant-soul"!), and it also informs us of the way "Men of the forest" understand Justice and conduct negotiations".

3. Finally, I would like to recall the contribution of Nous avons mangé la forêt to anthropological theory, since it has been underestimated for a too long time. Although the name of Mauss is never quoted in that book, it’s by reading it that we can best understand the "good use", if I may say, of the concept of "total social fact". It’s too often forgotten that, according to Mauss himself, that concept is primarily an "heuristic principle" ("Essai sur le don", Sociologie et anthropologie, PUF, 1980 : 274). The important point is not explicitly referring to that concept. Since all social facts are multidimensional, a social fact may always be called "total", so that by saying it, we say nothing. The important point is "observing the concrete, and the concrete is Rome, Athens, the average Frenchman, the Melanesian man from a particular island; it’s not Prayer or Law per se" (Mauss, 1980 : 276). In other words, the important thing is "study of concrete, that is what is complete" (Ibid.), i-e study of human facts in all their aspects, social, historical and psychological. As Levi-Strauss ("Introduction à l’œuvre de Mauss", Mauss, 1980 : XXV) properly underlines it, concrete can only be approached through observation of individuals, and that’s just what G. Condominas shows us in Nous avons mangé la forêt. He shows us Mnong Gar social life in the way it was experienced, in a particular place and at a particular time, by men and women who had a body, their own sensitiveness, their qualities and weak points, a personal story, beliefs and preconceived ideas; men and women who were living together, who felt likes and dislikes, who were quarrelling and then were friends again; men and women who had a name, who had pangs and hopes, and who were feeling regrets or joy, which the ethnologist could only guess through an analysis of his relationship with them; men and women, at last, who, though "from the forest", were belonging to a social space of wider extent, since, even though he made that concept clear only ten years later, and even though at the time he was living in Sar Luk the concept of globalization was not yet in the limelight, G. Condominas never forgets that he is dealing with "people from the twentieth-century, absorbed by an economic system which overlays the entire world"

Today, Baap Can, Kröng-the-Stammerer, Aan-the-Widow, Handsome-Tieng, Bbaang-the-Deer, Aang-An-Ptosis, Kroon-One-eyed, Yang-the-Bawd, Choong-the-Widower, Ddöi-Dloong-the-Shaman, and many other people, equally important and attractive, the names of whom I won’t mention, are still alive in our memory, and they will keep on living for all those who will read Nous avons mangé la forêt : that’s why this book is the master piece of French ethnography. 

Richard Pottier
–Professor Emeritus –
Université Paris Descartes
1^st August 2011 

Opening event of the exposition about G. Condominas' works at the Hanoi Museum of Ethnography (2008)