{"word_count": 1214, "character_count": 8210}
The members of CEH sadly announce the death of Corneille Jest, founding member of our research unit.Corneille Jest with children in Tarap, 1963 (C. Jest personal archives, CEH).Corneille Jest passed away on 23 January 2019 in the Paris area at the age of 88.Born in Strasbourg on 12 February 1930, CorneilleJest, a social anthropologist and specialist in Tibetan-speaking populations ofthe upper Himalayan chain, died at the age of 88 on 23 January 2019 in theParis region on the same day that CNRS’s “French Himalaya team”, which he hadhelped to set up, questioned its integration into a larger team.C. Jest was a great advocator of multidisciplinarityinsofar as all those involved―social anthropologists, geographers, agronomists,botanists, zoologists, etc.― had to be ready and willing to do fieldwork. Hewas trained by Charles Parain (1893-1984), an ethno-historian and specialist ofrural societies, and by André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986), a French anthropologist,archaeologist, prehistorian, and specialist in the anthropology of techniquesand parietal art, within the framework of the Centre de formation et derecherche ethnologique (CFRE), which had been founded by the latter in1944. Through an agreement between this organisation and CNRS, C. Jest wasrecruited by the latter in 1956 on a probationary period. Having gained tenure,he was to spend his entire career at CNRS.In 1960 he defended a postgraduate thesis at theSorbonne on the historical and techno-linguistic study of Haut-Lévezou, amicro-region in the Aveyron département where he had family relations.He pursued his research in this region, conducting enquiries on behalf of the Department’sEconomic Action Committee in early 1963 about rural depopulation and thetransformation of agricultural activities, before teaming up with Georges HenriRivière (1897–1985), founder and chief curator of the Musée national desarts et traditions populaires (MNATP), as coordinators of an RCP (RechercheCoopérative sur Programme : Cooperative Research Programme) on the Aubrac,a mountain area located on the border between the Aveyron, Cantal and Lozère départements,which has its own specific agricultural practices and techniques (summerpastures), and has been affected by major socio-economic transformations. Thetwo men were destined to get along. Like their mutual friend, A. Leroi-Gourhan,they both regarded the museum setting and the activities (including thecollection of objects) associated with it as the place for pursuing theirvocation and anthropology.In 1964, though he had already visited the Himalayas several times―first in Kalimpong in 1953,[1] then in Nepal which he had discovered in 1960 with the Tibetologist David Snellgrove, C. Jest used his experience of the Aubrac to launch the idea of an RCP in Nepal. Once again, he was appointed head of the assignment, and yet again reported back to a museum director, Jacques Millot, of the Musée de l’Homme.RCP 65 “Study of Nepalese regions” was launched in1965 during the “Aubrac” survey; it gathered together social anthropologists,agronomists and geographers. Another RCP, 253, “Ecology and geology of thecentral Himalayas”, took over from it in 1971. Focusing on a largergeographical area to include Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, from then on it alsowelcomed geologists and botanists. Between these two RCPs there was a certainamount of overlap in terms of their agendas, but also of their contributors anddisciplines. C. Jest hired researchers who had started their research in theAubrac and who, like Philippe Sagant, became specialists of Nepal, or else, heinvited researchers involved in his Himalayan investigations, such as theecologist Jean-François Dobremez, to contribute to his research on the plateausin central France.The research strategy of the two RCPs was similar tosome extent, especially regarding the importance given to visual anthropologyand to documentary filmmaking thanks to the ties that were established at theend of the 1950s between C. Jest and the filmmaker Jean-Dominique Lajoux. Thetwo men who had made several films together in Aveyron in 1959–1960 continuedto work together in the Himalayan valleys. They made five films between 1965and 1970: Tarap, la vallée aux chevaux excellents, Ma-cig la mère, peintured’une thangka tibétaine, dByar ston, la fête du milieu de l’été, in Tarapvalley in Dolpo, a region in northern Nepal inhabited by Buddhist andTibetan-speaking communities, but also Seto Matsyendranath devoted tothe eponymous festival at which the statue of this deity leaves its templeevery year to be carried through the streets of the old city of Kathmandu, orelse sPre-lo l’année du singe, a ceremony which brings to life everytwelve years in the valley of Kali Gandaki the four tutelary deities of thefounding clans of the Thakali.In addition to films, C. Jest brought back from hisdifferent field trips to the Himalayas numerous photographs, sound recordings,but also hundreds of objects that he left to the Musée de l’Homme, placedu Trocadéro, as well as samples of plants, insects and minerals, which heparticularly entrusted to the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris;collections that bear witness to an encyclopaedic and museographic approachcombining registers which nowadays would be distinct from each other. Whetheron the Aubrac plateaus or in the Himalayan valleys, he adopted the sameanthropological approach.In 1972 C. Jest defended, again under A. Leroi-Gourhan’s supervision, a doctoral thesis at the Université Paris V entitled "Tarap, la Vallée aux chevaux excellents : communauté tibétaine du nord-ouest du Népal" and published in 1975 by CNRS Éditions under the title Dolpo : communautés de langue tibétaine au Népal; an epic monograph, divided into 27 chapters ranging from “Dolpo, pays cache” and the four valleys within it that have an “oral tradition, music and games”, an encyclopaedic and meticulous piece of work in which―in the words of Sophie Houdart and Sylvaine Camelin (L’Ethnologie, 2018)―“the concern with showcasing outweighs the desire to be understood”. The author explains this on p. 383: he deliberately rejected a global approach.In addition to the high valleys in the north of thegreat range―C. Jest’s privileged place for fieldwork―he also carried outresearch in the Kathmandu Valley. From the 1960s onwards, he became involved,in his capacity as consultant for UNESCO, in the first projects aimed atconserving the cultural heritage of Nepal and of the Kathmandu Valley. From1979, he took part in the multidisciplinary project “Versant” centred onSalme, a village in the middle mountains of central Nepal, and launched by theGroupement de REcherches COordonnées (GRECO) No.12–Himalaya-Karakorum which hadtaken over from RCP 253 in 1978; then from 1985–1995 in research carried out intwo districts of western Nepal, Gulmi and Arkha Khanci by the joint CNRS andINRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) “Himalaya team”.Outside Nepal, C. Jest conducted research in Bhutan, which he visited in 1980, 1981 and 1984, then every year between 1991 and 1999, but also in Tibet (1980, 1982, 1985, 1990, 2000, 2003, 2004). He also visited Ladakh (1975, 1976) on two occasions, shortly after the region had been partially opened to foreigners, Mongolia (1985, 1992, 1994, 1998), Pakistan (1979, 1982, 1990) and many countries in Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand).Like his books and articles, the photographic, audio-visual and sound archives, as well as the collections of objects and herbaria he leaves behind for future generations, bear witness to a life spent roaming round the Himalayas and its borderlands, from Pakistan to Bhutan, from central Tibet and the high regions of Tibetan culture in Nepal to the Terai plain, not to mention the Kathmandu Valley and its temples. These archive collections also show the great diversity of his interests: agriculture, trade and livestock farming, manufacturing and processing techniques, rituals, games, oral tradition, painting and architecture, etc.  By Pascale Dollfus (CNRS, Centre forHimalayan Studies)[1]C. Jest’s first two “Himalayan” publications of (1954 and 1961) aretherefore devoted to the Lepcha of Kalimpong district.