BS: Could you tell us about how you came to be a researcher and more specifically a social anthropologist?

GT: I chose anthropology (a very approximate translation of the French word “ethnology”) in my early years because I traveled a lot during my childhood due to my parents’ profession – they were diplomats. I lived in Japan from the age of 9 to 12. That was my first experience of Asian civilizations and more generally of cultural differences. I found myself in a rather brutal way "elsewhere", confronted with a foreign world that prompted me to make some pre-ethnographic observations, for example through photography. And, at the end of my secondary education and at the beginning of my university years, I traveled with friends for entire summers around the Mediterranean, especially its eastern part. There, I was confronted with a number of different languages and cultures. All this led me, quite naturally, once I had passed my two baccalaureates, plus the propaedeutics year at Paris-Censier (at the time, you had to go through three successive levels of selection...) to choose to study ethnology. I then enrolled at the Sorbonne to do a degree in sociology and began with a certificate program in ethnology. My path to anthropology was therefore through sociology, not philosophy, unlike many of my anthropologist colleagues. And that makes a real difference! After that, I did two years of training in ethnology at EPRASS, an institution run by the 6^th section of EPHE (the École des hautes études en sciences sociales did not exist at the time, it was created sometime later from this 6^th section). So, it was gradually but with a certain constancy that I became a social-anthropologist. I was especially interested in broadening my knowledge of cultural differences and in living, if possible, outside the social environment in which I was born.

BS: Was it something you’d always wanted to do?

GT: It was not something I’d envisaged from the start but it came to me in an obvious way. And circumstances helped me along the way.

BS: How did you come to choose the Himalayas for your fieldwork?

GT: It was totally by chance. Like Marc Gaborieau (a well-known researcher in Indian and Himalayan studies), who began his career as a researcher in Kathmandu by working on Muslim minorities and then on possession phenomena in western Nepal, I arrived in Nepal where I was to do my voluntary service overseas (in lieu of national service). I was appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as cultural attaché to the French Embassy in Kathmandu. I also taught French over there, at Tribhuvan University. There were no scholarships at that time for doctoral students, so for those who wanted to go abroad to conduct ethnographic fieldwork, that was the only way to go in decent conditions.

BS: So it was during the first year of your PhD?

GT: I’d started to learn Persian (pharsi) at INALCO. My doctoral supervisor was Maxime Rodinson, a great Arabist who taught at EPHE. At the time, I wanted to work on Baluchistan, on the nomadic pastoralists of Iran. I’d read the work of the American-Scandinavian professor of anthropology Fredrik Barth whose book on the Basseri pastoralists had made a strong impression on me: he showed the interaction between the living conditions of these nomadic pastoralists, their social and political structure. So that made me want to focus on Iran. I’d already traveled there during my university years. The Pahlavi Shah was still ruling at that time and it was possible for a young doctoral student from the West to carry out fieldwork in some of the more remote parts of Iran. So, I signed up with Maxime Rodinson.

“At that time, there were very few researchers working on the Kathmandu Valley”

BS: You’re a known expert on the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley. Have you done fieldwork in the Himalayas on other topics?

GT: The Newars have been the major thread that runs through my research. They’re my main area of expertise. I began by studying the original aspects of their material life, then focused on society and religion: Hinduism, Buddhism, and a powerful vernacular tradition that constitutes an indigenous heritage. I’ve written many articles and books on this Indianized civilization, which has both an oral and written tradition.

However, I’ve conducted fieldwork among other groups or on other subjects, notably on the Tamangs, a fairly Tibetanized, Tibeto-Burman speaking group living around the Kathmandu Valley. I worked among them in an area that had barely been studied before: in Ganesh Himal, northwest of Kathmandu, which at the time was a 3–4 day walk from Trishuli. The villages were situated at an altitude of 1,800–1,900 m in a very mountainous landscape. I made a first reconnaissance of this area– also called Ankhu Khola after its main river–in 1973 during the monsoon season, an extremely difficult time for traveling. It’s easy to get lost on the paths because of the persistent fog. And leeches are always on the lookout for walkers! On top of that, you have to follow the ridges because the rivers at that time of year are difficult to cross. My initial aim was to complete a leaflet for an ecological map of Nepal.

“These collective rules impose a very communal lifestyle”

BS: The Centre for Himalayan Studies is a small dynamic team. Could you trace back briefly over its history?

GT: It's a small research unit but it’s always developed joint projects with other research organizations. Corneille Jest initially created research groups of the RCP and GRECO type, interdisciplinary CNRS groups of a limited duration, therefore only temporary, which had to be renewed every four years. The second RCP (N0. 253) devoted to Nepal, set up in 1970, worked xithin the fields of geology, ecology, botany, biology and ethnography. This structure carried on over into the GRECO Himalaya Karakorum. Corneille Jest, Jean-François Dobremez who ran a botanical laboratory in Grenoble, and the geologist Michel Colchen succeeded each other at the head of this group. The problem was that these structures might suddenly disappear!

I was encouraged by the CNRS Social and Humanities Directorate to apply for the creation of a permanent unit, a UPR, a CNRS-own research unit, directly under the CNRS’s supervision, in order to ensure long-term assignments for the support staff who worked with us. It was also a question of making research in the social and humanities sciences on the Himalayas more visible. So, I created UPR 299 on 1 January 1985. It was called Milieux, sociétés et cultures en Himalaya. The name was later changed and became the Centre d’études himalayennes. The year 1985 was a good year for the CNRS’s UPRs working on Asia because the CeDRASEMI, a large research conglomerate on South-East Asia, managed at the time by Georges Condominas, was split up to become four or five individual units, all UPRs and headed by senior researchers. I was director of UPR 299 for 10 years. Fernand Meyer succeeded me, then Joëlle Smadja. After that, Philippe Ramirez took over and today Nicolas Sihlé runs the unit. The CEH has always been a small dynamic unit focused on field studies and interdisciplinary research. At the outset, human geography and ethnography/ethnology formed the two pillars of this UPR. Fernand Meyer (who published a book on Tibetan medicine in 1981 with the Editions du CNRS) created within the team a pole of researchers specialized in Tibetan culture.

“From 1990 onwards, Nepal went through a period of increasing political instability”

BS: Having been the driving force behind the creation of the Himalaya team, how do you feel about the future merger with the CEIAS?

GT: From a personal point of view, I had very close links with the CEIAS throughout the 1970s, thanks in particular to Marc Gaborieau who was very keen for me to be part of the research unit. I took part in the Saturday morning seminars and even presented my work there. Madeleine Biardeau, Charles Malamoud, Jean-Luc Chambard, Catherine Thomas, Daniel and Alice Thorner, Marc Gaborieau, among others, took part, as did the historian Eric Meyer. I also took part in the "Village" seminar that Marc Gaborieau initiated, the first years focusing on the types of localities where social anthropologists used to work in South Asia, then on migrations (Philippe Sagant was in charge of that). It was a top-notch intellectual milieu, oriented towards classical studies, but which didn't neglect the historical facts. In the years that followed, I published two issues of the journal Puruṣārtha, one on priesthood, the other on pantheons with CEIAS researcher Véronique Bouillier, who worked on Nepal before turning to India. What is more, I was strongly influenced by Louis Dumont even if, for me, certain aspects of his theories seemed far from the reality, for example concerning Hindu royalty. Dumont had also written that the Newars do not have any actual castes but status groups. My work showed quite the opposite. In the end, I was recruited by the CNRS via the RCP Nepal (and the Musée de l'Homme social science research unit) because I was obviously more useful at the time to them — who had funded my early research — than to the CEIAS.

So, for me, there is no real barrier between India and Nepal. There’s a real continuity. Generally speaking, the whole southern slope of the Himalayas is largely influenced by Indian Sanskrit culture. Modern Nepal can’t be understood without referring to contemporary India. This country is clearly part of the same South Asian cultural area. I organized two conferences in Delhi in the last few years, one on notions of belonging, the other on notions of ethnicity among the janajati/adivasi, in which many Indian scholars took part.

The links between our two units have strengthened over the last two decades: Blandine Ripert started her work as a researcher at the Centre for Himalayan Studies; Oliva Aubriot spent several years on secondment at the French Institute of Pondicherry; both Tristan Bruslé and Blandine Ripert spent a few years on secondment at CSH in Delhi to work on research programs devoted to Nepal. And though Daniela Berti is a permanent member of the Centre for Himalayan Studies, she has been associate member of the CEIAS for many years. It’s true that the CEH Studies also conducts part of its research in the Sino-Tibetan environment on the northern slopes of the Himalayas, far from the Indian subcontinent. However, this association can lead to some interesting encounters!

The future merger is a marriage of reason, prompted by the CNRS authorities, but based on multiple collaborations and long-standing ties, as well as on common geographical territories marked by the same cultural influences. The two units also share the same scientific values.

BS: You're emeritus senior researcher. What are the topics you’re working on at the moment?

GT: After focusing on change, I switched my attention in recent years to the Newars’ ancient social and cultural heritage. I'm currently researching this ethnic group’s religious theatre. The Newars have their own classical theatre, ancient princely plays dating back to the Malla period, 16th–17th century, written in Sanskrit, Maithili, Newari and even Bengali. With a few exceptions, these plays are no longer performed today. However, most Newar villages and towns still have their own troupe, with specific local repertoires and performers. They are non-professional, unpaid theatre groups. The plays, which are accompanied by music and are dance performances, are essentially religious: they’re associated with temples, the characters are masked and embody deities from the Hindu or Buddhist pantheon. There is generally no libretto. The roles are handed down within the Newar castes, in particular through lineages, mostly from father to son. This theatre, which is still very much alive today and often includes comic sketches, plays an important role in understanding local culture. It sheds light on Tantric religious practices and on the way local populations view possession by supernatural entities. I've collected extensive documentation on several of these troupes and am researching a satisfactory way of defining the general characteristics of these plays. The comparison with southern or eastern India (Bengal) is part of this project.

I’ve also developed another field of research, a new domain, yet again on the Newars. It’s a study of the indigenous heritage of the Kathmandu Valley’s religion: the way in which local culture has merged with Buddhism of the Great Vehicle and Hinduism. This interaction with the vernacular elements is not often studied. I published a paper on this in the latest issue of the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (2021), as well as several articles in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia (2021), which also covers Nepal and parts of the Himalayas and to which several CEIAS researchers have contributed.

BS: Do you have any other topics you’d like to research in the years to come?

GT: I’m no longer young! However, if I have the time and the intellectual capacities, I’d like to trace back over my personal and intellectual itinerary during my fifty years of research. My life as a researcher has been marked by the constant back and forth between fieldwork and my desk in Paris. I would like to clarify the main theoretical orientations that have governed my work and the way in which I have navigated through the theoretical paradigms that have succeeded each other or have coexisted: Marxism, structuralism, deconstructionism and, today, cognitivism. The first two currents left a strong impression on me. I remember André Leroi-Gourhan, who was a professor of mine in my undergraduate studies at the Sorbonne: he said, in a reassuring tone of voice, that he associated himself with the way cultural anthropology was practiced in the United States. The influence of Louis Dumont on my work also deserves to be discussed and explored. Today, the astonishing return of philosophy within the ethnographic discourse, a viewpoint long banished, including in general by Lévi-Strauss, doesn’t fail to raise questions. I’ve had to deal with all of these intellectual currents. Then there’s another type of question: how do these explanatory schemes account for the customs and rites I witnessed very closely? One thing is certain: I started from very 'materialist' research, for example techniques and the links between the economy and social life, and came quite naturally to focus on the religious order and the symbolic. In the groups I’ve worked on, economic activities are still permeated by conceptions of the sacred or ancient values that are not strictly economic. I’ve shown, for example, the essential role of the gift – far removed from the notion of profit in our modern societies – in social life and in traditional types of exchange. Over time, one of my favourite topics of interest has become South Asian populations’ different relationships to the divine. Another important focus is the articulation of values and symbolic life within political and economic structures in today’s rapidly changing Himalayan societies. These are some of the topics I would like to return to and to explore further.

JKV: Perhaps we could begin with you telling us a little about your work at the CEIAS?

MT: I arrived at the CEIAS in September 2020 for a two-year postdoc funded by a Marie-Curie fellowship, to carry out a project on martyrdom among Tamil Catholics. I developed an interest in the topic while working on my dissertation at the University of Chicago, which was on Catholic production and circulation of learned literature in Tamil in the 18^th century. While studying the way missionaries and their local collaborators interacted through and around literary practices, I came to realize how, in the early days of the Jesuit mission to Tamil-speaking South India, local converts could not be ordained. The model of holy life that the mission and the Church could and did offer them from the 17^th to the 19^th century was that of martyrdom—laymen could become martyrs, if not priests. And so, I started asking myself: what did people do with that? How could martyrdom—which is, in a way, a mode of renouncing life—become a model for living in the world? What were the strategies that local Christians used to make martyrdom into, on the one hand, a source of legitimation vis-à-vis the global institution of the Church, and on the other hand, a source of spiritual and social authority in their towns and villages? In order to answer these questions, I began to think about martyrdom over the long term. What were the mechanisms—of memory, narrativization, genealogy—through which lay Tamil Catholics used and incorporated martyrdom in their lives over time?

Paravar fishermen’s boats in the Christian village of Kuthenkully, on the Coromandel coast.

In practice, since I arrived at the CEIAS, I've been tackling these questions through the study of the history and the memory of two figures: João de Brito, a Jesuit who died at the end of the 17^th century and was canonized in the 19^th century; and Devasahayam, a Catholic layman who died in the 18^th c entury and is about to be canonized. Documents on these two martyrs are kept in Rome, where I spent a month to do archival research last year during a break from the pandemic, and in Paris too: several Tamil manuscripts at the BNF talk about these two figures, and I've been busy deciphering them. I'm also conducting a seminar at the EHESS this year, titled Histoire, biographie et écriture de soi en Asie du Sud, which engages with many of the questions that underlie this research project. I'm especially interested in life-writings, and in the way exemplary lives are read and appropriated by individuals and social groups over time to act in the world.

Paravar fishermen’s boats detail.

Paravar fishermen’s boats detail.

JKV: You've now been part of two different educational infrastructure—the French and the American. Could you perhaps give us a glimpse of these two worlds? Considering that both the CNRS and the University of Chicago have a sustained engagement with projects related to South Asia, do you recognize any intersecting points? How different are these traditions?

MT: Taking the entirety of my trajectory into account, I've been part of four educational systems, since I did my BA and MA in Italy; and I spent quite some time working in Indian universities too, through a six-month exchange with the University of Pune as a master’s student alongside my work as visiting researcher at Lady Doak College and American College in Madurai in 2015 and 2016–17, while doing my PhD. In my experience, the way South Asia is conceived as an area of studies, and the practices connected to its study, vary in all these places due to different academic trajectories. Of course, there are similarities too, but it is easy to feel out of place as one moves from one context to the other, and is unable to understand the terms of the discussion; I ended up giving a whole lot of thought to the issue. In fact, I'm organizing a conference on South Asia as a Transnational Area of Study in March 2022 at the University of Chicago center in Paris, where colleagues from different Parisian institutions studying south Asia, from Chicago, from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and from the South Asia studies department of Ashoka University will be engaging in discussions precisely around their intellectual genealogies and practices—about the things they have in common, and the things that set them apart in the study of South Asia.

My practice and my reflection on it in recent years mostly center around the relationship between philology and the social sciences, especially history. As I see it, in Chicago, the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations is home to professors and students who try to combine both approaches, but take philology as a preliminary stepping stone. The study of languages is an integral part of the curriculum, and even the most senior professors often teach language courses. While language study and the philological practices connected to it are at the center of academic practice, different people use them to make interventions within different disciplinary fields—history, comparative literature, anthropology. But perhaps the disciplinary aspect is less clear in Chicago, or more part of an individual than an institutional journey; I should also say that Chicago has been for some time at the center of an ongoing reflection on the status of philology as (possibly) a discipline in itself. I think at the CEIAS, the balance is somehow inverted—as a historic center of the EHESS, the reflection on disciplines and social sciences is much sharper and more sustained. Both researchers and students seem to me much better equipped to understand the questions and stakes of their respective disciplines; but perhaps the question of language—and of the necessity of language learning to access any sort of archives in South Asia—is less thematized. But then again, Paris in itself is a constellation of centers working on South Asia from different perspectives, so it is difficult to look at any one center outside of this network.

But all of these are questions that I hope to discuss collectively, and in much more detail, during the conference in March.

JKV: Tamil Catholicism is at the heart of your work. Coming from the region myself, I see it as a religio-linguistic paradigm that attempts to engage with the many manifestations of Catholicism in the southern region of India, while in fact specifying a distinct set of parameters. For instance, my work too involves questions of Christian identity in the region but I have not yet encountered a notion such as Malayalam Catholicism. What are the factors that both mobilized an idea such as Tamil Catholicism and legitimized it?

In yellow, the (heavily restored) eighteenth-century church of the village of Vadakkankulam, where Devasahayam was baptized, surronded by newer buildings.

Church of the village of Vadakkankulam detail.

MT: First of all, I take the expression Tamil Catholicism from the work of anthropologists. A. Sivasubramanian, a retired Tamil anthropologist who has long been associated with the Folklore Center at Xavier College in Palayamkottai, has at least one book titled Tamiḻ kirittavam, “Tamil Christianity”; Selva Raj, another Tamil anthropologist and ex-Jesuit who studied at the University of Chicago, has elaborated his definition of “vernacular Catholicism” on the basis of popular forms of Tamil Catholicism. For both scholars, but especially for Sivasubramanian, who is a self-declared Marxist, studying village Catholicism in Tamil Nadu was part of a way to study non-élite—let’s call it subaltern—cultural expressions in the region. So, the adjective Tamil has, for them, the function of showing that this is the way these people, in the southernmost corner of India, express and represent themselves in the world. Both these scholars were less interested in looking at the way a universal and global religion like Catholicism (centered in Europe, etc.) had been adapted locally, than in taking its local forms seriously.

Church of the village of Vadakkankulam detail.

Church of the village of Vadakkankulam detail.

Church of the village of Vadakkankulam detail.

Church of the village of Vadakkankulam detail.

JKV: Does Tamil Catholicism exhibit a hierarchy of Christian experiences? As an analogy, Syro-Malabar Catholics, who claim allegiance to the legends of St. Thomas, were largely an endogamous group, refusing to marry outside of their community and especially to someone from the other significant Latin Catholic faction. The reason for this was caste and class anxieties and the larger network of prejudices circulating in the public sphere. There is therefore a hierarchy of experience of Catholicism. Do you observe any such phenomenon in your engagement with Tamil Catholicism?

MT: Historically, caste and class have played a major role in the articulation of Catholicism in the Tamil region. The first people to convert to Catholicism were Paravar fishermen, in the 16th century, and that was a caste decision which created all sort of ambiguities, well described in Susan Bayly’s classic study, since the caste leader also become a religious leader. When in the 17th century Jesuits tried to apply the strategy of accommodation in South India, as their colleagues had been doing in China for a few years, the main social institution to which they tried to adapt Christianity was caste. So, in the 17^th century, caste separation, ideas and practices of purity and pollution, etc. played a huge role in local Catholic life. This choice of accommodation relied on the interpretation of some Jesuits—chiefly Roberto Nobili—of caste as a social and political (he would have said “civic”) institution deprived of any religious significance. But this interpretation was already controversial at Nobili’s time, and the choice of accommodation to caste in South India engendered a great debate within the church, better known as the Malabar Rites Controversy. Church authorities at the time—very much like anthropologists in the 20th century—could not decide whether caste was a religious or a “civic” (we would perhaps say secular today) institution. In the end, the Church banned most accommodation practices that were directly related to caste, such as segregation of low caste Catholics inside churches, for instance.

Still, caste kept playing an important role in the social life of Catholics in the region. Throughout the 19th century, European missionaries kept dreaming of converting the Brahmins (some Catholic Brahmin settlements existed until quite late in Trichy). Besides, local Catholic élites—men who would work as catechists, or be at the head of devotional groups and lay congregations—would mostly belong to upper castes, like Vellalas for instance. So, if I understand well what you call a hierarchy of experience of Catholicism—meaning that different people lived this religion in different ways and, being Catholic, still had to be negotiated with other kinds of caste and class belonging, which influenced the experience of being Catholic inside churches, at pilgrimage sites, during celebrations etc.—this was certainly true historically, and it is still a problem today. At this point, the Catholic Church in Tamil Nadu has a completely local administration (priests, members of religious orders, and so on)—there are no longe missionaries from Europe. Still this institutional hierarchy is fraught with connections to caste and class, in continuity with the early modern and the colonial period; over recent years, there have been protests from Dalit Catholics, for instance, accusing the Church of discriminating against them, and asking for the appointment of Dalit bishops. Even the canonization process of Devasahayam, which I study these days, shows similar issues: for centuries, the saint was called Devasahayam Pillai—Pillai being a caste title. In the most recent documents, however, it appears that the Church decided to canonize him as Devasahayam without a title.

JKV: In your study of religion in a South Asian region, you may have encountered different forms of the archiving process. From a methodological point of view is there a consistent definition to this complex idea that we refer to as the archive?

Palm-leaf manuscript containing the text of an 18^th century ballad on the life of Saint Eustache (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Indien 485, Estākkiyār ammāṉai).

MT: For me, the archive is first of all a plural experience. The topics I've worked on for years, that is the social and literary history of Catholicism in the Tamil region, have brought me to work in the archives of religious orders in Rome, as well as in the Tamil Nadu State archives in Chennai, in parish and village archives throughout South India, and in the Jesuit archives of Tamil Nadu—which are an interesting mirror for the Jesuit archives in Rome. While looking mostly for texts in all of these places, I have also stumbled upon other types of archives—heritage, monuments, images, songs, oral histories, and so on. So, there is nothing consistent about “my archive” if not its enormous variety: but perhaps I could say that across all these archives, I have strived to achieve two things.

Palm-leaf manuscript detail.

Palm-leaf manuscript detail.

JKV: Is it truly possible to conduct a secular study of a religious community?

MT: The way you formulated this question is interesting, and already talks about where we stand in the present; and communalism and identity politics already force us to see only one side of the problem. Why not ask: is it truly possible to write a confessional study of a religious community? So, I think the question could be reformulated as: can we conduct a scientific study of a religious community? In other words, can social sciences deal with religion in society? My answer would be that it is possible, even necessary, but very difficult.

JKV: In many ways, researchers who engage with the many complex aspects of religious identities and the accompanying religious histories have to encounter the realpolitik manifestation of the Secular versus Religious debate. What kind of a role do researchers play in a political climate where religious identities are homogenized and politicized by right-wing outfits? Is there something inherent to the vocabulary of religion that allows for a redundant flattening of human experience?

MT: This issue is complex and thorny. I would like to start by saying something very simple, even banal: studying religions in history shows precisely the kind of complexity that the political debate tries today to flatten out.

“Keeping up the critical and intellectual work is crucial”

JKV: This is perhaps the question that is most relevant to our times. How has the pandemic affected your work? Has it changed your perceptions of research? Do terms such as archives, database, and access have the same connotations they did prior to 2020?

MT: I came back from Tamil Nadu at the end of February 2020, and a couple of weeks later the whole of Europe was in lockdown; that was only the beginning, as we all know, and it has been impossible for me to go back to India since. So, some of my archives have become inaccessible and I had to focus on other sources, closer to home. I have worked a lot on the Tamil manuscripts housed at the BNF, for instance; and their proximity has also pushed me to question the history of the collection, and why certain documents are archived in certain places. So, in a way, I think there is something more reflective and self-conscious in my practice due to the pandemic. Questions of distance and location have become central

“The pandemic has not only changed research practices; it has changed fieldwork too”