Fernand Meyer

Fernand Meyer

Fernand Meyer interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 14th November 2016
0:04:16 Born in Strasbourg on the German border in 1947; both of my parents came from poor peasant families in the north of Alsace; my father left his family at about fifteen and came to Strasbourg to work and was trained as an apprentice in a butchery; my mother joined him after he became a master butcher and opened his own shop; I have an older brother who did not want to go on with my father's profession and my father hoped for a long time that I would take it on; I did not like the job although I helped my parents; I was not a very hard-working schoolboy so my primary school teacher told my parents that I would not do well and should be orientated towards technical training; I was sent at fourteen to a technical school where finally I did better and took my baccalaureate in mathematics and technology; after that I was accepted at an important engineering school in the south of France because I wanted to become an engineer and I wanted to go to Africa to work; in the summer before joining the school I had to find a summer job and finally ended up at the hospital in Strasbourg where I was sweeping the floor for a while; it was a section of the hospital which had been under repair and when the patients came back I was of no use; however, the sister in charge knowing I could read and write decided that I could accompany the doctor visiting the patients; I discovered the human relations between doctor and patient, and within one week had decided to become a doctor; I then had to try to convince my parents that I was not going away to engineering school but would stay to become a doctor, so I started my doctor's studies in Strasbourg; during those medical studies I was also interested in literature, especially travel literature and technology ethnology; in my spare time I would go and listen to lectures at the university department where they were teaching ethnology, so I got a strong interest in the subject but just as a hobby not the idea that some day I could be a professional anthropologist; I lost my mother when I was eleven; my father married again and my step-mother's father had been a seaman and had travelled to China and Indo-China; when I was a child he showed me the pictures and postcards he had brought back; these made me want to go to Asia; when I had to do military service [after qualifying as a doctor] I asked to do civil service instead, and to do it somewhere in Asia; I had already started my internship when I got a phone call from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to say that they were just creating a new post for a doctor at the French Embassy in Kathmandu and would I like to go there; I knew of Nepal but nothing about what it was like; I was sent to Kathmandu where my job was partly to take care of the French ex-patriots there, who were not very numerous, and especially to take care of the hippies because at that time, in 1973, there were no medical facilities for them, and especially for psychiatric problems; the Embassy did not know what to do with such people so wanted to have a doctor to look after them
6:37:04 Knowing that I would be posted to Kathmandu I went to a bookshop to try to find a book on Nepal; the only one I found was by Toni Hagen, a geologist who had done fieldwork in Nepal from 1950 onwards. Népal, royaume de l’Himalaya (1rst edition 1960) was one of the first general survey of the natural and human geography of Nepal. It had beautifull pictures; I remember one picture which fascinated me which was of Pokhara with Machapuchare in the background which decided me to go there; I arrived in August 1973 and at the time the airport was still very small; When landing in the Kathmandu valley, seing all the rice fields and ocre colored villages I felt that this country will become in a way my second country; this was my thought before the plane even landed because there were always buffaloes grazing on the airfield and the plane had to go down to chase the buffaloes before it could land; I could see nice small thatched houses, so neat, such a beautiful light; I always remember this moment; I was quite lucky because when I arrived some French expatriates had gone back to France for a while so they suggested I stay at their house; one of them had been working for the burgeoning Nepal Airlines so he had a nice house on Lazimpat with a garden; the Embassy said I could stay there for a few weeks until I found my own place; there are two things I remember very clearly; one was, having come from a simple family I had never had a cook or "didi", but there was such a person in this house; when I arrived there in the afternoon the cook came to see me and asked me what I would like to eat in the evening; I had no idea what you could eat in Kathmandu; I suggested vegetables, and he shook his head from side to side which I thought meant "No"; I said that if he had no vegetables, meat would do, and got the same response; after the same response to fish, I said anything he could find would be fine; then at dinner I had meat, fish and all sorts of unexpected things; the second thing I remember was that I put my luggage in one of the rooms and went out to the bazaar; I was fascinated by all the wood-carving; it was so medieval and so quiet at the same time; it started to rain and I had to walk under the house eaves; I felt something on my shoulder, put up my hand, and it was a rat which has fallen down; there were not many tourists though there were quite a number of hippies who were all staying in the same area; it was not Thamel at the time, but what they called Freak Street, near Durbar Square
11:19:13 I treated people from the Embassy and the hippies, and I had a small pharmacy at my disposal; slowly I started to become acquainted with the hippie community because I noticed it would be better to know who was in town before they had big problems, in order to anticipate them; when they had psychiatric symptoms like running naked through the streets etc., the Nepalis were so frightened that they would just put them in jail; there was this old prison close to Hanuman Dkoka which was like a medieval gaol, it was terrible; often I had to go there when we learnt from other hippies that their comrade had been put in gaol because he had run amok; I had to go there and try to get them out, and usually, as there were no facilities, I had them at my home and started to treat them before they could be put on a plane back to France; after a while I became depressed because I could see all these Westerners, often from wealthy families, just coming because they felt dissatisfied with Western life, and did nothing, while at the same time children were dying in the streets from diarrhoea; it was shocking to me so I decided to use part of my time to treat the local people; there was a clinic in Kalimati run by an American N.G.O. for poor people; so I became the doctor for the clinic for a year; every afternoon I was there to take care of the people; so I had to learn Nepali to be able to speak with these people; my idea had been that I would do my civil service which was a little bit longer than military service, nearly two years, and then would return to France and continue with my medical career; I thought that during my stay in Nepal I would save some money and do a world tour before going back; then one day I heard about a Tibetan doctor, Amchi Kunsang, practising in town and decided to go to see him to find out what he was doing; I had little idea of Tibetans and Tibetan culture, but I went and met him and through another Tibetan we could speak in English; he was nice and welcomed me; I tried to see what he was doing, found there was not much written on Tibetan medicine; the third or fourth time I went to see him he suggested I stay and study Tibetan medicine with him; his idea was that although I was a Western doctor I could also become a Tibetan doctor, trained in Tibetan medicine, so that I could have two tools to treat patients; it was clear to me that I would have to stay longer, learn Tibetan, so I said I would have to think about it; at the time I had a small house in Bansbari, so I walked back through the rice fields, thinking that it would be absolutely stupid to lose my position and to do something really useless; then I thought that maybe it was the last time in my life that I could do something useless, a luxury I could have now, and later build up a practice; finally I decided to stay longer although I had no precise idea of how long; I wrote to my master at the medical faculty and asked if he would mind if I stayed longer; he agreed that I had time and I stayed altogether for three years; this has changed my life; of course my interest in anthropology could find some nurturing there, working with and getting involved in Tibetan culture; on the other hand, although I could never be a Tibetan doctor as it was too far away from my own culture, and to be a mixture of both was not a good idea, what I wanted to do was to try to understand the way he looked at things, the way he treated patients, because I was discovering that there were other ways to practice medicine; until then medicine was what I was doing and I couldn't imagine doing it in another way; then suddenly I discovered this person, very kind, very intelligent, full of good-will, having success with patients who were very satisfied, but looking at things and practising in a very different way to what I was doing; Amchi Kunsang was very open minded and said that I didn't have to become a Tibetan doctor but could come and work with him as a Western doctor; so in his small clinic he put two tables, one where he was consulting with patients, the other for me with my small pharmacy; people would come to see him or me, and sometimes I would send a patient to him or him to me; he was from a family of wood-carvers and his father had built a number of temples in the Tingri region of Tibet; the doctor had come as a refugee in the sixties to Kathmandu, and he was also very good at wood-carving and had opened a small training centre for young Tibetans to learn to carve; in the morning we would see patients, and in the afternoon he would attend his workshop while I learnt classical Tibetan at Tribhuvan University; in the evening between five and six we would sit together with a young Tibetan, able to translate from Tibetan to English, getting training in Tibetan medicine; he became something like my father; his family became my family, and this has really changed my life because I got completely outside my own practice; I was of course faithful and coherent in my own work but I could see that it was just one way among many others to practice medicine; so I started to feel the need to have time to think about my own medical tradition; I became more acquainted with the Tibetan medical tradition and saw that my medical practice and knowledge was the outcome of a specific history; so I also wanted to do research into the history of medical practice in the West, feeling the need to have time to think about those questions; why do I do things this way, what is the rationale for it, it could be done in another way, how does it happen that the patients are satisfied with what he was doing because he was practising totally differently from me? so during this stay I really started to want to do some research, but of course this was not the curriculum I have had in mind; after three years I had to go back to France and resumed my internship; when I finished that I became Assistant Professor; during that time I was very happy with my medical practise and had a marvellous master whom I liked and admired very much; medicine was really a vocation for me, but at the same time I was busy from morning to late night and I was longing for time to think over things; I was also more and more attracted to ethnology and anthropology, but of course I was a doctor and not a researcher and I had no connections with Paris or university research centres; I thought I would try to find a post in Paris; this would allow me to be closer to libraries where I could find materials on Himalayan studies and Tibetology; after a while I was lucky enough to be proposed for the post of assistant professor at one of the university hospitals in Paris, The Pitié-Salpêtrière; this was in radiology; I had in fact specialised in internal medicine; but radiology being more technical would allow me to have more spare time to go to lectures or libraries because I could interpret radiographs late at night; again the head of the department was very kind to me and accepted this; so slowly I got in touch with the Tibetological sphere in Paris, with Mr and Mrs Macdonald and Corneille Jest for example; I had met Sandy Macdonald in Kathmandu and Corneille Jest was often there; he had come to see me at Amchi Kunsang’s clinic and had proposed that I have a connection with CNRS and get some support in terms of bibliographies etc.; the main encounters which have given me more confidence in doing this work on Tibetan medicine were firstly Gene Smith who offered me my first Tibetan book, then there was David Snellgrove who was really very supportive and encouraging 25:11:20 At the time of my first meeting with Corneille Jest he was head of the team of different researchers working in Nepal; when he came to see me, I showed him what I was doing and he said it was OK but I would never become a Tibetologist so shouldn't waste my time, and just make a collection of medicinal plants; it seemed to me that this was the condition of his help for me so I refused and said I would do what I wanted to do without his support; finally we became very good friends, and strangely enough I later became head of the research team he had founded in Paris, David Snellgrove and another professor at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes, Professor Grmek, who was my teacher in the history of Western medicine, knew that I was looking for a position so that I could earn my living; at that time I was not yet sure of getting the post at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital; Snellgrove said I should apply for a fellowship at the Wellcome Institute in London, which I did; then at the same time I was given a post at the hospital in Paris I was granted a fellowship, so did not know what to do as I would have been very happy to work with David Snellgrove in London, but it was more reasonable to accept the position at the medical faculty because if I failed to get a research position at least I could be a doctor; after a few years at the medical faculty in Paris I was able to join CNRS as an anthropologist and was posted to the research team founded by Corneille Jest, which I later took over from Gerard Toffin who had succeeded Jest 28:23:18 Toffin was about my age and when I was in Nepal he had been just previously also doing his civil service, but teaching French; he had been trained as an anthropologist and was working on the Newars; phrase deleted; later we have done some common fieldwork among the Tamangs of Salme; I do not notice any real difference between French and British anthropology in the study of the Himalayas; I think there are as many differences inside French anthropology as in British; I never could understand why either was supposed to be monolithic; there are so many different approaches and personalities; at the time in the sixties and seventies structuralism was so much a la mode in France but not in Himalayan studies at all; Dumont was never strongly involved though he influence Pignede and other scholars working on Indo-Nepalese populations; I understand why, because we had no basic material; we had to do the ethnographic work and collect data; how could you interpret things when you had so little knowledge; Indian anthropology was much richer in sources and material; your work on the Gurung was going along the same lines as many French works
31:37:00 One of the major contributions of French anthropology was to introduce the idea of doing common multidisciplinary fieldwork in teams working in a given place and trying to understand the society, the culture, the economy of production, from different angles: ethnography, geography, agronomy - for example, what we did in Tamang communities of the Salme’s watershed; I think that this was really something quite new at the time and was something that Corneille Jest wanted to do, and I think succeeded in doing; all of us had and have our private interests but there is a certain capacity of trying to have different disciplines working together on a given subject; there is also the contribution of Corneille Jest to Tibetan anthropology because he was one of the first to really document the deep ethnography in a given Tibetan society of Nepal; Furer-Haimendorf had done it in his way for the Sherpas but there was not much more than that at the time when he started; I don't know whether this is peculiar to French anthropology but there was also the wish and will to link anthropological fieldwork to development; I was never very much convinced by this I must say, but it was a sort of ideal goal
33:59:11 I did my PhD on Tibetan medicine; by then I knew enough literary Tibetan to be able to broaden my interest in Tibetan culture and literature; I went regularly to the lectures given by Mrs Macdonald at the Ecole pratique where she had a Chair in Tibetan history and philology, also I was asked to lecture myself at the Inalco [Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales] Tibetan department, on history and Tibetan culture; this was also one way for me to broaden my knowledge of Tibetan history and culture; I was a full-time researcher and not supposed to teach but I always thought that teaching was very important; I taught at Inalco for about fifteen years and that is how I could accompany students on their courses, and some of them became my colleagues; until 1982 we could not enter Tibet so I did fieldwork among Tibetan populations, of course refugees in the Kathmandu Valley, and also I did some fieldwork north of the Ganesh Himal; I also worked on Tamang in Salme on a collective research programme; I was interested in the impact of diseases on local populations because of my own life experience; as a doctor I noticed things that another anthropologist might not take into account; when you live in a Tamang village you very quickly notice biological ailments are a very heavy weight on those people at every age, and that many rituals that anthropologists record and are interested in are motivated by biological ailments; I tried to understand how far disease plays a role in a culture; when you assist at a shamanic session for a patient all the local culture is revived and expressed, and transmitted to younger children on this occasion; the cultural transmission very often happens because of disease because it is so common; very often in the morning the local population would come to see me as a doctor to get medicines etc.; In Salme, for example, I was struck that many would complain in a stereotyped way; for instance that they had a frog inside their chest and when they were going up and down the steep slope of their habitat for fieldwork the frog was jumping; how as a Western doctor would you interpret this symptom? I could not make any sense of it; then on one occasion I realized that most of those people suffer from strong anaemia; their skin pigmentation hid the paleness associated with anaemia; but then I checked specifically and could see that they were; so next time I came back I brought with me the material to do blood counts and found they were extremely anaemic, to such a degree that in the West you would be in hospital; no wonder walking up hill caused problems; They had to breath heavily, and their heart was violently beating, thus feeling like a jumping frog; so where did this so common anaemia come from? I did some research and found that they were all suffering from parasites, from ancylostoma; the cycle of ancylostoma, a very tiny worm which contaminates through larva in faeces; in Salme the children excreted on the paths, notably those commonly used to fetch water at the fountains ; so everybody would pass through here barefooted, and the parasite would enter through the foot and finally settle in the duodenum where they induce a slow but continuous bleeding, which would explain the chronic anaemia; so you had a culturally shaped stereotyped symptom, the “jumping frog”, making no biomedical sense at first sight, but revealing a local epidemiological situation which burdened this population, restricting to a high degree their capacity of fulfilling their life sustaining everyday work in a mountainous environment; so I started to do some training, providing on how to avoid contamination at the fountains, and so on; we started also constructing toilets in Salme after this.
42:30:22 [Professor Xu Jun asked about his involvement with Tibetan studies in France] When I was teaching at Inalco I was also asked to teach at the University of Paris X Nanterre where there was an important department in anthropology; Alexander Macdonald and Philippe Sagant had also taugh there Himalayan anthropology; I attracted students so they wanted to do their PhDs with me and came to do so within the frame of our research team; Tibetan studies developed at the time, not only in anthropology; As I was also working on texts as a philologist and historian; we diversified Tibetology in our research team; at the same time Tibet opened to foreigners, so in 1982 I had the opportunity to go to Central Tibet but officially as a doctor to accompany a group of French geologists who had a common project with the Academy of Social Sciences in China; I did this for several years so I got in contact with the Academy of Social Sciences in Lhasa and in1987 the head of the academy and the head of the newly created university came to Paris and told me they would like to sign a research agreement with us; this was the beginning of my involvement in connections between China and France in terms of Tibetan studies.