Research topics
Claude Fischler's main area of research has been a comparative, interdisciplinary social science perspective on food and nutrition. His work covers the structure and function of cuisines, tastes and preferences and their evolution and change over time and space, as well as body image.
Subsequently, he came to focus on perception of risk, scares and crises, on comparative approaches of attitudes toward food and health across cultures (in relation to, among other things, prevalence of obesity), on the reception and perception of sensitive technologies (including novel foods) and more recently on assessment and measurement of well-being and quality of life in a comparative perspective.
His main current research is on commensality - eating together - its forms and functions, and its possible impact on public health. The anthropology of commensality ties into the general issue of sharing food, at the local and global levels.
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous work is The Gift (1925).
François Joseph Charles Simiand was a French sociologist and economist best known as a participant in the Année Sociologique. As a member of the French Historical School of economics, Simiand predicated a rigorous factual and statistical basis for theoretical models and policies. His contribution to French social science was recognized in 1931 when, at the age of 58, he was elected to the faculty of the Collège de France and accepted the chair in labor history.
Françoise Héritier was a French anthropologist, ethnologist, and feminist. She was the successor of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France. Her work dealt mainly with the theory of alliances and on the prohibition of incest. In addition to Lévi-Strauss, she was also influenced by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. She was replaced by Philippe Descola, who is the current holder of the chair of anthropology at the Collège.
Louis Gernet was a French philologist and sociologist.
Claude Meillassoux was a French neo-Marxist economic anthropologist and Africanist. A student of Georges Balandier, he did fieldwork among the Guro (Gouro) of Côte d'Ivoire; his thesis was published in 1964. In the 1970s he criticised Marshall Sahlins's use of the notion of "domestic mode of production". Meillassoux was throughout his life a politically committed critic of social injustice.
Kilien Stengel is a French gastronomic author, restaurateur, and cookbook writer. He has worked at Gidleigh Park, Nikko Hotels, Georges V Hotel in Paris, and in a number of Relais & Châteaux restaurants. He was a teacher of gastronomy at the Académie of Paris and of Orléans-Tours. Stengel works at the European Institute for the History and Culture of Food at François Rabelais University. He is captain of a culinary book fair, en directot of a collection book. Usually, he work for Ministère de l'Éducation nationale teacher competition, Meilleur Ouvrier de France award, and Masterchef France. In 2015 his PhD in information science was supervised by J-J. Boutaud.
Georges Balandier was a French sociologist, anthropologist and ethnologist noted for his research in Sub-Saharan Africa. Balandier was born in Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont. He was a professor at the Sorbonne, and is a member of the Center for African Studies, a research center of the École pratique des hautes études. He held for many years the Editorship of Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie and edited the series Sociologie d'Aujourd'hui at Presses Universitaires de France. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1976. He died on 5 October 2016 at the age of 95.
Gilles-Gaston Granger was a French philosopher.
Philippe Descola, FBA is a French anthropologist noted for studies of the Achuar, one of several Jivaroan peoples, and for his contributions to anthropological theory.
Frédéric Lordon is a French economist and philosopher, CNRS Director of Research at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique in Paris. He is an influential figure in France's Nuit debout movement and has regularly contributed to French broadcast and print media on French and European politics, and also writes a regular opinion column for Le Monde diplomatique. He has argued in favour of Communism as an alternative to Capitalism in books, articles and media appearances, and has been engaged in a project of re-grounding the social sciences in a Spinoza-inspired materialism. He is considered one of the most prominent intellectual voices of the radical left in France today.
Carlo Severi is an Italian anthropologist who is Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is noted for his studies of ritual, image/imagination, and social memory
Albert Piette is a French anthropologist and a professor at the Department of Anthropology at Paris Nanterre University.
Claude Hagège is a French linguist.
Bruno Laurioux is a French medievalist historian born in 1959 in Loudun.
Alain Testart was a French social anthropologist, emeritus research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris and member of the Laboratory for Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. He specialized in primitives societies and comparative anthropology. His research themes included: slavery, marriage arrangements, funeral practices, gift and exchange, typology of societies, the political, the evolution of the societies, and questions of interpretation in prehistoric archaeology.
Didier Fassin, born in 1955, is a French anthropologist and sociologist. He is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and holds a Direction of Studies in Political and Moral Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been appointed to the Chair of Public Health at the Collège de France. Fassin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
Francine Saillant is a Canadian anthropologist and intellectual.
Hervé Le Bras is a French demographer and historian.
Denise Paulme (1909–1998) was a French Africanist and anthropologist. Her role in African literary studies, particularly in regards to the importance of Berber literature, was described as "pivotal".
Jean Jamin was a French ethnologist and anthropologist. Director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, he taught ethnology there from 1993 to 2016. He directed the journal L'Homme from 1996 to 2015 and co-founded the journal Gradhiva in 1986 alongside Michel Leiris. In the mid-1990s, he became a specialist in the study of the relationship between anthropology and literature, as well as between opera, jazz, popular music, and folk music.
