Jan Borm, director of the Institute of Arctic Research Monaco-UVSQ, will deliver a guest lecture in the research seminar at the Centre des savoirs sur le politique : recherches et analyses (CESPRA), EHESS : École des hautes études en sciences sociales (France) on 4 December 2024.
This talk will retrace the exceptional career of the man who went ‘from stone to man’, from the study of scree to the Inuit and other indigenous Arctic peoples and will then present the work of the Malaurie Institute of Arctic Research Monaco-UVSQ (MIARC), officially affiliated with UVSQ’s environment and sustainability studies faculty OVSQ since 2024. It will notably focus on the Center for Arctic Studies he founded at the prestigious Ecole des Hautes Etudes in 1957, his own interdisciplinary methodology and views on anthropology, narrative ethnography and life writing, as well as his actions in the field of science diplomacy.
Jean Malaurie (1922-2024) was undoubtedly the best-known French researcher in the field of Arctic studies at international level over the last 70 years. Trained as a geomorphologist and author of The Last Kings of Thule (1955), the most widely distributed book on Greenland in the world, Jean Malaurie undertook 31 missions to the Far North (Greenland, the Canadian Central Arctic, Alaska and Chukotka), which he described in his masterly account Hummocks (1999). Born in 1922 in Mainz, where his father was a history teacher at a time when the Rhineland was occupied by France, Jean Malaurie began his education in Versailles in 1930 before moving to the Lycée Henri IV to prepare for the competitive entrance exam to the École normale supérieure. In 1942, he refused to join the STO (compulsory labour service) imposed by the Nazi occupiers and became a recalcitrant going underground, wanted by the Vichy police.
Founder and director of the famous ‘Terre Humaine’ book series published by Plon, which includes his own accounts The Last Kings of Thule (1955) and Hummocks (1999), he never ceased to defend the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and the rest of the world. Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études (EHESS) from 1957 and Director of Research at the CNRS from 1979, Jean Malaurie received numerous awards, including the Nersornaat gold medal from the Greenland government and the Royal Geographical Society’s Patron gold medal. He has also been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Polar Regions.
