Dumont, Louis (1911-1998)
Louis Dumont (1911–1998), one of the most influential French anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century, questioned the ideology of Western individualism and egalitarianism on the basis of his years of fieldwork and his reflections on Indian ethnology. A student of Marcel Mauss, he began his career at the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires. After an initial survey in Provence, which gave rise to his monograph La Tarasque (1951) on a popular religious cult paid to a dragon, he spent two years (1949–1950) in India, in Tamil country. He brought back the ethnographic material for his thesis, Une sous-caste de l’Inde du Sud. Organisation sociale et religion des Pramalai Kallar, written in England, during his three years (1952–1955) as lecturer in Indian sociology at the Oxford Institute of Anthropology, then directed by Evans-Pritchard. Appointed director of studies at the EPHE (VIe section) in 1955, he co-founded the Centre d’études sur l’Inde and the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology. Following the steps of Lévi-Strauss, he pursued his research into kinship and alliance in India. Homo Hierarchicus (1966) is a study of the Indian caste system analysed through the prism of hierarchy and holism. Using methodological dualism, he laid the foundations for a comparative sociology of Western modernity in his trilogy Homo aequalis.
Keywords: Anthropology of France | Religious Sociology | Sociology | History of religions | Indology | Philology | Structuralism | Orientalism | 20th century | France | Kinship anthropology | Modernity | Anthropology of religion | Hinduism | Caste | Holism | Hierarchy | Individualism | Marcel Mauss | Claude Lévi-Strauss | Evans-Pritchard
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