François ROBINNE

Director of IRASEC from 2012 to 2016

I studied simultaneously at Paris-X Nanterre (bachelor’s degree in ethnology), at INALCO - then Langues’O - (DREA in Burmese), and at EHESS (thesis defended in 1985). My training was completed by courses at the Collège de France in Lucien Bernot’s chair of “Sociography of Southeast Asia”. In the wake of this master, but also of A.G. Haudricourt and the “Techniques and Culture” team (Cresswell, Sigaut, Mahias, Lemonnier), I was initially interested in gestures, food, and architecture in Burma, as well as in the relationship with the sea and, more generally, in social urbanism in its most everyday aspects. From 1994 onwards, I focused my research on inter-ethnic relations : firstly in Buddhist environments (Shan State and Central Burma), then in Christian environments (Kachin and Chin States). At the turn of the millennium, an epistemological dimension was given to the problematic of trans-ethnic networks, heterogeneous identities and “landscapes of hybridity” (Moussons 17). If I have come to refer to myself not as an ethnographer or ethnologist but as an anthropologist, it is not so much by reference to the distinction established by Lévi-Strauss ; but because, moving away from the essentialist vision of ethnicity and inter-ethnicity, I have come closer to the dynamics of crossroads, to the coherence of the ‘spaces of dispersion’, of which South-East Asia is first and foremost a part. After having been director of IRSEA (University of Provence - CNRS) from 2008 to 2011, I took up my post as director of IRASEC in Bangkok (MAEE - CNRS) from September 2012.

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