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Daniel Fabre (1947-2016), French anthropologist and author of a rich work of nearly four hundred and fifty titles, is one of the great Europeanist ethnologists of the turn of the 21st century, who continuously brought history and anthropology into dialogue. Born in Narbonne, he studied political science, literature and philology at the University of Toulouse. He followed the teachings of dialectologist and ethnolinguist Jean Séguy and took René Nelli’s course in southern ethnography, which led him to focus, at the end of the 1960s, on the ethnology of France. From 1973, he led a multidisciplinary collective research team in the Pays de Sault (Languedoc Pyrenees), which would constitute his favoured ethnographic field for about ten years, focusing on oral traditions and tales in Occitan. He became assistant professor in sociology at the University of Toulouse and then gave a seminar at the Toulouse branch of the EHESS from 1976. In 1978, with his friend prehistorian Jean Guilaine, he founded the Centre d’anthropologie des sociétés rurales. Inspired by the Levi-Straussian approach to myths, he and his colleagues from Toulouse forged an ethnology of symbolism applied to European fields. After conducting his first surveys on oral literature, carnival, the social and cultural production of masculinity in Europe, rural communities and the anthropology of ordinary writing, he was elected Director of Studies at EHESS in 1989. In 2000, he founded the Laboratoire d’anthropologie de l’institution de la culture (LAHIC) in Paris. Often published as part of collective research programmes that he led and inspired, his works then focused on the transfer of sacredness (in particular the modern forms of the cult of the artist and the writer); the institution of culture and the anthropology of art (the art of madmen, of children, of “primitive” people); the anthropology of the literary institution; and the cultural forms of the presence of the past (local history, archaeology). Close to Italy, he taught anthropology of religions at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” from 1999. His work on the anthropology of monumentality and patrimonialization has marked the field of heritage studies. An enthusiast of the history of anthropology, he was interested in the European history of ethnological sensibility since the Enlightenment. He was one of the founders of BEROSE.

Keywords: French Ethnology | History of Anthropology | European Studies | Rural Societies | Carnival | Oral literature | Symbolic Anthropology | Heritage | Art Anthropology

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