Resume.html

Research

    Since the beginning of my training in Anthropology, three passions have driven my work: ethnographic research, theoretical investigations and the communication of both kinds of endeavors. These have been interwoven in most of my work.
    I have conducted and am currently engaged in extensive fieldwork among the Turkana and the Nyangatom pastoralist populations of East Africa. In the past I also did shorter field studies among the Eastern African Toposa, Pokot and Samburu, and among Brazilian rubber-tappers.
    I received training in and am working on general problems of cognitive anthropology, especially concerning the ritualization of action, its psychological and cultural effects.
    I very much like the challenge of communicating to student how to transpose theoretical claims and hypotheses into real-life ethnographical examples. My teaching philosophy is to help and challenge students to understand the intimate connection between anthropology’s grand questions and the practice of fieldwork.

From the start of my research among the Turkana and Nyangatom, I have been fascinated by the cultural and cognitive processes involved in ritual phenomena. The Turkana and Nyangatom engage in intense ritual activity. Rather than supernatural entities, rituals generally focus on quite specific matters such as illness, contagion and social strife, and on the “ritual recipes” suited to correct such problems. No systematic and stable exegeses are provided that would explain the efficacy of the ritual procedures.
Illness and misfortune are treated both as something that must be fought, often with violent sacrifices, and as a clue to other more basic disorder, to the fact that someone has failed to comply with the social order and thus is somewhat culpable for what befalls him/her. (Liénard 2003; Liénard & Anselmo 2004). Conflict resolution and prevention too is the focus of important ritual activities, together with the prevention of foreign intrusion and raids (Liénard 2003, 2006; Liénard & Anselmo 2004).

As part of my research on ritual, I have documented the connections between individual worries and anxieties, individual precautions, ritualization and collective ritualized precautionary endeavors. Living conditions in Turkana and Nyangatom homeland are very harsh, because of severe drought and extended famines, as well as the consequences of civil wars, in the region. Frequent droughts mean repeated pregnancy failures or children’s death. Recurrent pandemics plague the region. Also, pastoral life exposes people to numerous health, contagion and contamination dangers, as well as complications from unhealed wounds and other conditions. The Turkana also face a constant threat from predators, intruders and enemies and from the potential dissolution of vital coalitions).

I plan on regularly revisiting the populations with which I previously worked in East Africa. In September 2007, I will be back among the Turkana to collect more ethnographic data on ritual.

I am presently finishing a book on the ritual among the Turkana and Nyangatom (about 3/4 completed). I plan on submitting the manuscript for publication in December 2007. In this book, I reconsider the question that motivated my doctoral work: Why are ritual phenomena among the Turkana and the Nyangatom amazingly stable and so enduring, as seems to suggest the anthropological literature? To answer that question, I carefully analyze the interconnections of various socio-cultural institutions (kinship, age-set, generation-set, and clan systems, war, coalitional politics, herding economy) in Turkana and Nyangatom ritual.

I attached Chapter 4 of the book to this application. The chapter includes an unedited written description of one of the most striking collective rituals I have had the opportunity to witness while in Kenya. Chapter 1 of the book provides a synthetic ethnography of the Turkana and Nyangatom, including models and types of sociability and salient institutions. Chapter 2 presents the environmental and ethnic context in which the Turkana and Nyangatom dwell. I describe land-use (pastoral economics, herding) and its consequences on social organization. Chapter 3 describes learning and cultural transmission. Chapter 4 describes and analyses a central Turkana ritual. Chapter 5 focuses on ritualization of reorganized ordinary behaviors to serve new functions. Chapter 6 analyzes the relations of the ritual described in chapter 4 with other collective/public representations (rituals, sayings etc.). The last chapter (7) tackles a complex matter: the effect that intuitions about basic emotions have on conceptualization, forms and morphologies of rituals.

2.1   Research so far

Humans like other animals are faced with two kinds of danger that require appropriate decision-making:
•   Imminent danger: enemy attack, predator attack, starvation, illness, ostracism.
•   Potential danger: risk of enemy presence, predator proximity, objects that are sources of contagion and contamination, situations of social strife or exclusion.

    The focus of my present work is a cross-cultural analysis of the precautions people take against the latter kind of hazard. This is work I started in collaboration with Pascal Boyer at Washington University in St. Louis.
On the basis of anthropological, biological and neuro-physiological evidence, we proposed that human minds comprise “Vigilance-Precaution Systems”. Those cognitive systems evaluate signals of potential danger from external cues (e.g. dark corners where an enemy may lurk), and re-order current goal-priorities (e.g. make a detour, avoid dark corners). They also suggest appropriate precautionary behaviors, e.g. avoidance (of suspicious or unreliable people), contact avoidance (against contamination), attention to traces and indirect signals (against intrusion and predation), hyper-vigilance and heightened anxiety (against enemy coalition or attack).

    In some cases, those Vigilance-Precaution systems are defective, creating such pathology as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in which patients’ decision-making includes pathological worries and precautions. They may also be impaired through a traumatic experience, leading to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) characterized by generalized avoidance and fear.

2.2   Publications so far

Our model of Vigilance psychology was presented in a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Boyer & Liénard 2006), with commentaries from 20 scholars and a reply to comments.

2.3   Research plan

   My work will address two main questions:
   How is precautionary information transmitted? In many domains we have no clear information about the effects of our precautionary behaviors. So we depend, to a large extent, on precautions that are socially transmitted (eat game but not road kill, etc.). This means that the sense of potential danger and appropriate behavior will be dependent on culturally specific parameters.

    Does vigilance psychology change with culturally different danger cues? In the Western world, we are not exposed anymore (or a lot less) to many of those potential threats. This is clearly not the situation of the Turkana for instance. Does this mean that the vigilance systems operate in different ways?

    To address this, I plan to run experiments among both Eastern African Turkana and Westerners. An essential part of that work is to devise easy experiments transposable to my field locations, which can sometimes be very tricky, especially when working with people who only have little contact with modernity and literacy.

    In September 2007, I will be back in the field among the Turkana to collect preliminary data relevant for this research agenda. I will also run a study of life-time changes in anxiety and precaution among specific categories of persons in two societies (Western, Turkana). As a preliminary investigation, I will work with Turkana pregnant women. I will inquire about the modification of precautionary thinking among pregnant women. All the experiments run among Turkana will also be run among comparable populations in the USA.

2.4   Publication plan

   After my fieldtrip to Kenya among the Turkana, in 2007, I plan to submit articles to peer-reviewed Journals in both Anthropology (e.g. Current Anthropology) and Psychology (e.g. Cognitive Sciences).

3 Research Project 3. Cross-cultural aspects of ritualized behavior

3.1   Research so far

   In a variety of circumstances, humans engage in ritualized behavior, characterized by compulsion (one must perform), rigidity (performed the right way), redundancy (actions are often repeated) and goal-demotion (actions are divorced from their ordinary goals).

    What makes people engage in such actions? Obviously, there are many reasons (e.g. coercion, commitment) why a particular person should find a particular collective ritual worth participating in. But these obvious reasons vary a lot between cultures and individuals. They cannot explain the cultural recurrence of ritualized behaviors as such.

   In our collaborative research, Pascal Boyer and I have proposed that the special features of ritualized behavior (compulsion, rigidity, redundancy, goal-demotion) may have particular cognitive effects, which would make them compelling and attention-demanding. If that was the case, then people would (all else being equal) find collective ceremonies that include such ritualized actions intuitively more appropriate than ceremonies without this very special kind of action. This would make them more culturally stable. After all, recurrent and stable ceremonies are those which had (and still have) features that made them seem better than available variants.

    Also, ritualized behavior is generally associated with specific themes, namely pollution and cleansing, the need to establish symbolic boundaries, the description of invisible dangers, as anthropologists like Alan Fiske have noted (Fiske. & Haslam 1997 )

   So why those themes and that form of behavior? We proposed that these themes activate the Vigilance-Precaution systems described above. When people talk about invisible danger, pollution and contamination, potential attack and the need to re-order the environment, these are all cues that Vigilance systems interpret as requiring specific precautions. As for the actions required in many cultural rituals, they mimic the precautionary behaviors that humans spontaneous engage in when faced with such dangers: avoidance, separation, cleansing, etc.

   We proposed that ritualized behavior consists in a specific way of monitoring one’s actions, when people focus on the correct execution of low-level actions (e.g. precise gestures, moving one’s hand in a particular way under a flow of water) rather than goal-directed actions (e.g. washing one’s hand). We presented this as a description of ritualized behavior in some cultural rituals but also in obsessive-compulsive patients, and in normally developing children, most of whom engage in such rituals between the ages of 2 and 6.

    To test this model, we have run experimental pilots on the effect of ritualized behavior for the access to specific type of semantic material (threatening vs. non-threatening) to orient our research and to help us in designing our experimental agenda.

    In 2005-2006, I investigated an offshoot of ritualized behavior research. In collaboration with Jesper Sørensen at the Institute of cognition and Culture, QUB, I studied theoretically and experimentally the role played by ritualized behaviors when tools or instruments are employed in the process of symbolic evocation.

3.2   Publications so far

This research has been reported in various articles (Boyer & Liénard 2006; Liénard & Boyer 2006; Sørensen J., Liénard P. & Finney C. 2006; Liénard & Lawson, forthcoming) and in a book chapter (Liénard & Sorensen, forthcoming).

3.3   Research plan

   Is there a specific association between specific precaution themes (pollution and purification, danger and protection, the possible danger of intrusion) and ritualized behavior?
   I will use recall methods to investigate the connections between threat-to-fitness themes and ritualized behavior. Better recall for those ritualized behavior sequences for which is evoked threat-to-fitness material would support our view of a specific association between ritualized behavior and threat themes and, maybe, of a plausible specific involvement of threat themes in the process of ritualization.

3.4   Publication plan

   When data are available and analyses run, I plan on submitting articles to peer-reviewed Journals in both Anthropology and in Psychology. Publications will then be submitted regularly to prominent journals of those fields.

4   Collaborations

   From the start of my career I have tried to learn from collaboration with specialists from other disciplines. I received training in traditional fieldwork techniques and joined research centers both in Belgium (Theory of Language and Mind: Structures of Representations and Interpretative Mechanisms, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium), in the United Kingdom (Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast, UK) and in the USA (Memory and Development Laboratory, Washington University in St Louis, USA).

4.1   “Culture and the Mind” Project

   Beginning October 2006, I am involved in a 5-year collaboration with the Culture and the Mind Project based in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield under the direction of Stephen Laurence. My participation to the research program entails 3 workshops/year and 3 one-month ethnographic missions. Those missions will be successively focused on three different research agenda: (1) Folk psychology & folk epistemics, (2) Norms & moral psychology and (3) Artifacts & material culture.

4.2   The Vigilance-Precaution network

   Since September 2006, Boyer and I have been engaged in the build-up of a network of collaborators – from neuroscientists to anthropologists – who would be willing to tackle aspects of the Vigilance and precaution project. The next phase of the project is getting the different component teams funded for the research they intend to conduct for the project in their respective institution. Independently of being successful or not in finding funding, the vigilance and precaution project will be a central part of my research agenda

5   Teaching philosophy

   I have a great interest as well as relevant experience in teaching and coaching students. While earning my PhD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, I gained my initial teaching experience as a lecturer (2 years) and then a visiting professor (1 year) at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels, Belgium. I taught entry courses in Anthropology to art school students (advanced undergraduate students). The program of the course, focusing on Representing in Art and in Social Sciences, Problems of representing in science, art, thought and perception, and Humans as biological, psychological, and socio-cultural phenomena, placed a heavy emphasis on contemporaneous theory in anthropology.

   This experience of teaching anthropology to a ‘lay’ public has helped me to develop an effective personal teaching style. My method of teaching is eclectic: formal lectures, class readings and critical discussions. Students had to prepare extensively for classes through assigned readings. Students were also encouraged to react scientifically to contentious issues developed during the course. As part of the course’s requirements, students had to prepare an analytical re-framing (and subsequent criticism of it) of outstanding problems in their own discipline, using the material I provided them in the course. I always tried to present students with a target that is somewhat slightly out of easy reach but still reachable; engage them in surpassing themselves but do not discourage them!

    When I was in residence at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, U.K., I participated in the PhD students’ training program. With the director, Professor Harvey Whitehouse, the co-director Professor Tom Lawson and 2 other staff members, we were in charge of teaching, orienting, supervising and criticizing the work of the PhD students. I also have had the opportunity to teach students in the MA in Social Anthropology, Mind and Culture module, Queen’s University Belfast (Title of interventions: Mind, Culture, and Domain-specificity).

    I consider teaching and coaching as a necessary part of the career I picture: A strong experimental agenda must be match by an equally strong knowledge-diffusion agenda. Both support each other. I also continually strive to enhance my own skills by regularly presenting the advancement of my research at symposia, conferences and scientific workshops.

    Finally I want to communicate to students both my extensive experience of fieldwork and how to transpose theoretical claims and hypotheses into real-life ethnographical examples. I know all to well about the pitfalls of gathering data in the field. I am also very much interested in developing tools for gathering data in a controlled manner in the field. This experience is worth communicating to students as I believe that learning how to gather data in controlled ways is one of the hardest steps they have to do in becoming field researchers.

Career ~ Details

    Post-doctoral Research Scholar

Memory and Development Laboratory

Washington University in St Louis

Study of the cultural and cognitive processes involved in ritualized behavior, both in spontaneous ritualization (in young children, in obsessive-compulsive patients) and in collective rituals.

Investigation of the ethnocentric bias in thinking of foreigners as sources of threats. What cognitive systems are engaged in representing others as an obvious source of potential danger against which it is important to take precaution? Why is it so easily evoked and manipulated in political discourses? Why and how does so often coalition building almost inevitably imply evocation of such themes? What are the difference and/or similarities between Western urban and East-African bellicose populations?

Cross-cultural study of anxiety disorders (OCD, PTSD, culture-bound syndromes etc.)

Study of the repertoire of patterns of tool uses observable in symbolic endeavors.

Analysis of testimony's value in a world of restricted opportunity. The main question I am trying to answer is "When, why and to what extent do people accept testimony as truthful in situations in which they have a strong incentive to deceive each other?”

Living kind knowledge and classifications, technical know-how, land use, landscape engineering and representations, knowledge acquisition and transmission.

Post-Doctoral Research Scholar, Institute of Cognition and Culture, School of History and Anthropolgy, Queen's University, Belfast (September 2005 to August 2006)

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Memory and Development Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Washington University in St Louis (August 2004 to August 2005)

Visiting Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels, Belgium (September 2002 to September 2003)

Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels, Belgium (January 2002 to September 2002)

Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels, Belgium (January 2001 to September 2001)

University Degrees

1997/2003 – Ph.D. in Social Sciences (summa cum laude), orientation: Anthropology, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. 2003. Thesis: Ritual behavior: communication, cognition and action. Generation, age, filiation and territory: contribution to the ethnography of two Karimojong Cluster's populations (the Turkana of Kenya and the Nyangatom of Ethiopia)

1992/1994 – Bachelor's degree in Social Sciences ,orientation: Anthropology (Licences & special candidature program), (summa cum laude), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Final dissertation: The Ritual Language: For an interpretation of the ritual.

Fieldwork, among the Nyangatom, Omo Valley, Ethiopia. Main topic: collect of comparative data on age and generation systems, ritualized behaviors, economics and politics of pastoral societies (July 2001 to January 2002)

Scientific collaborator, Tsemim (Transmission and Transformation of Knowledge about the Environment in Indigenous and Half-caste Societies), project financed by the European Commission, DG XII, program INCO-DC (April 2000 to September 2000)

Fieldwork, among communities of seringueiros (‘rubber tappers’), State of Acre, Brazil. Main topic: study of the transmission and the transformation of knowledge about the environment (May 2000 to August 2000)

Collaboration in the making of a floristic inventory with FUNTAC (Fundação de Technologia do Estado do Acre, Brazil), TSEMIM project, Transmission and Transformation of Knowledge about the Environment in Indigenous and Half-caste Societies, European Community -DG XII (May 2000 to August 2000)

Fieldwork, among the Turkana, N-O Kenya. Main topic: the ritual phenomenon and its connections to the clan, age and generation systems, politics, and economics (December 1998 to June 1999)

Fieldwork, among the Turkana, N-O Kenya. Main topic: general ethnography, ritual and religious phenomena (March 1997 to February 1998)

Constitution of two collections of ethnographic items (Turkana items) for the MRAC (Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale de Tervuren, Belgium) and for the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi, Kenya) (March 1997 to February 1998)

Fieldwork, among the Turkana, N-O Kenya, general ethnography (April 1996 to September 1996)

Resume~Pierre Liénard

Current Position

Research Interests

Ethnography of 2 Paranilote populations:

Economics and politics of pastoral societies:

Psychology of ritualized behavior:

Precautionary behavior & coalitional psychology:

Ethnopsychiatry:

Pragmatic and ritual uses of tools:

Deception & Truth among the Turkana:

Knowledge about the environment:

Previous Positions

Education

University Degrees

Past Research Activity

Awards & Prizes

Teaching