The abundance of his work and the many tributes organized since his death could suggest that Daniel Fabre (1947-2016), founder of the online encyclopaedia BEROSE, director of studies at EHESS and holder of the chair of anthropology of Europe, had several intellectual lives: that of the animator of the “Toulouse School” around the anthropology of the symbolic, the constant companion of historians, the analyst and attentive participant of writing practices and literature; that of the observer of the correlated phenomena of the disappearance and perpetuation of cultures; that of the founder, in Carcassonne, alongside the Ministry of Culture, of the first labelled Ethnopôle, making it possible to reconcile fundamental research and the social registration of the discipline as close as possible to the field; that of the creator in 2001, with the support of the CNRS, EHESS and the Ministry of Culture, of the Laboratory of Anthropology and History of the Institution of Culture (LAHIC), now part of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology (IIAC). While highlighting the close links that Daniel Fabre contributed to forging between the Ministry of Culture, its services and professions, and ethnological research in France and Europe, paving the way for a flourishing anthropology of heritage today, this symposium wishes to show that the construction of these new fields of research was carried out in the continuity of the objects and analytical tools forged since the first years of his career. His research on national cultures in Europe, heritage phenomena, cultural institution and the renewal of the theorizing of the notion of heritage, extended to ethnological and intangible heritage, are rooted, as previous ones, in a deep sensitivity towards the traces and marks of the past, the experiences to which they give rise and, ultimately, to the essential changes in heritage value. While reflecting the specificities and fecundity of his companionship with the Ministry of Culture, the interventions within this conference provide an in-depth exploration of these threads that run through all his work, lending it coherence, and highlight how they originate in an ethno-biography that made Daniel Fabre the conscious experimenter, in the order of culture, of thresholds, passages, ruptures, crossings, losses and mourning.
Symposium accredited as part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, organised by LAHIC (IIAC UMR 8177-CNRS/EHESS), the Ministry of Culture (Office of Heritage/Department of Piloting Research and Scientific Policy), the Institut national du Patrimoine, the GIS Patrimoines en partage (in prefiguration), with the collaboration of the École du Louvre, the École française de Rome and the Centro per lo studio delle trasformazioni del territorio (CeSTer) of the University of Tor Vergata (Rome).