Anne-Christine TAYLOR

Early on in her graduate studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Anne-Christine Taylor flirted with the idea of doing fieldwork in Central Asia or Mexico. At Lévi-Strauss’s behest, however, she and her husband Philippe Descola immersed themselves in holistic ethnographic fieldwork among the Jivaroan Achuar of Ecuador—against the grain of the political preferences for urban and peasant studies in French anthropology of the 70s, but greatly to the benefit of Amazonianist anthropology. She was recruited by the CNRS in 1983, and went on to produce important work on how Achuar perceive and inhabit history, their sociality, their understandings of psychic processes and of knowledge, their experiences of selfhood, and their cosmologies, all on the basis of lengthy fieldwork, years of archival work, and a creative use of structuralist theory.

Professor Taylor was President of the Association pour la Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale (APRAS), and Director of the Équipe de Recherche en Ethnologie Amérindienne (EREA) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). In 2005 she was commissioned to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, where she headed the Research and Teaching Department until her retirement in 2013.

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