Adieu Bernard (1936-2025)

Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, 2014, Livre 1. Enfance et vocation, Les possédés et leur monde. YouTube

As a graduate student at Université Laval, I was fascinated by Bernard Saladin d’Anglure. He had a talent for showmanship. Once he taught our class with the room completely in darkness, and it was only at the end that he slowly turned the lights on, to prevent us from being “blinded by the light.” It was his way of showing how a new way of thinking can completely overturn a society.

He also had a talent for fieldwork. Unlike many professors, he never left the “field.” He remained in contact with the Inuit of the far north and worked with them to promote their culture through films like Atanarjuat, the fast runner and novels like Sanaaq. He felt that Western culture was destroying Inuit communities by creating the wrong norms and expectations. Culture should belong to the people who live it, and not to outsiders.

Finally, he had a talent for noticing patterns, as shown by his work in structuralism. By examining the cultural production of a people — stories, beliefs, artefacts — one could, so he thought, identify “structures” that ultimately reflect structures in the mind itself. I wanted to push this analysis further, in the belief that these mental structures were created by a coevolution between a population and its culture. But Bernard himself never went that far.

He was better known than any other professor in our department, but that renown was the one thing I had mixed feelings about. To increase the reach of his ideas, he would partner with key groups and individuals whose ideas seemed to overlap with his own … more or less.

This was particularly true for his work on “the third gender.” Initially, he was interested in transgendering among the Inuit: Inuit newborns were traditionally named after a deceased ancestor or relative and raised according to their namesake’s gender. If a boy was named after a woman, he would be raised as a girl until puberty — which meant being dressed in girl’s clothing and taught how to sew. Conversely, if a girl was named after a man, she would be raised until puberty as a boy — which meant being dressed in boy’s clothing and taught how to hunt.

As Bernard saw it, such children were a “third gender” that challenged the male-female dichotomy. He went on to argue that this ternary group existed in all human societies, being encouraged in some and repressed in others, particularly in our own.

The rest of the anthropology department disagreed [this was in the late 1980s]. As they saw it, there are only two sexes, and some variability exists within each of them. Some men tend to be feminine, and some women tend to be masculine. But these men and women don’t form a group of their own. In fact, they differ as much from each other as do men as a whole and women as a whole.

These counter-arguments didn’t seem to bother Bernard, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether his term “the third gender” was simply a marketing ploy.

It certainly won him a lot of attention, particularly from the emerging discipline of “queer studies.” Initially, he enjoyed the attention. His work became better known, especially at colleges and universities across the English-speaking world.

A few years ago, however, during my last conversation with him, he expressed concern about his work being misinterpreted. He outlined several points that bothered him:

• These Inuit children were not exercising a right to self-expression; in fact, they were fulfilling the wishes of their deceased relatives and ancestors.

• These children were also expected to assume their biological gender upon reaching puberty. This is not at all the case in modern Western societies, where gender identity is increasingly seen as a personal choice to be made at any age and for any reason … or no reason at all.

• Finally, Inuit transgenderism was always confined to a minority of children. Among adults, it was completely absent. The situation was not unlike that of Western societies until the early 20th century, when little boys were commonly dressed as girls.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the age of two and a half (Wikicommons)

There seems to be a cross-cultural tendency to see little boys and girls as neither male nor female, probably because they share a similar basic phenotype that can pass for female. This is indeed the “third gender” that Western societies have sought to erase over the past century.

This erasure has been accompanied by a sexualization of little boys and girls to a degree that would seem perverse in other times and places and which has led to sexually immature children wondering about themselves. It doesn’t take much to convince a 5-year-old boy that he isn’t a man, since he clearly isn’t.

Bernard went on to say that sexuality was being turned into an act of individualism, whereas traditionally it had been the bond that held a society together. The same point came up in one of his last interviews:

… around that [the issue of sexual orientation], [they] want to bring together all the minorities who feel oppressed by an oppressive majority … So everyone can choose. It’s a mixture of individualism and … we are very far from the social bond that constitutes the basis of a society. [In their opinion] it is the individual who chooses, who wants to be [an individual], and in the name of human rights. But human rights are again an individual vision. At the beginning of the century, the first sociologists and anthropologists — Mauss, Durkheim, etc. — saw the social bond as something essential. (Saladin d’Anglure, 2014).

Soon afterwards, his health took a turn for the worse, and his public life came to an end. Today, he is remembered as a supporter of certain ideas that he actually did not support.

I understand the difficulties of being a public intellectual. To promote your ideas, you have to align yourself with influential groups. But such alignment comes at a price. You must make compromises between your ideas and theirs …

Yes, my dear readers, I hear you! “Don’t worry Peter! When I get to be famous, I’ll set things straight and say what I really think!”

But what if that day never comes? Or what if it comes, and you no longer have the strength — physically or mentally — to speak your mind?”

References

Saladin d'Anglure, B. (1986). Du fœtus au chamane: la construction d'un «troisième sexe» inuit. Etudes/inuit/studies, 25-113. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42869539

Saladin d’Anglure, B. (2007). Troisième sexe social, atome familial et médiations chamaniques: pour une anthropologie holiste: Entretien avec Bernard Saladin d’Anglure. Anthropologie et sociétés, 31(3), 165-184. https://doi.org/10.7202/018381ar

Saladin d’Anglure, B. (2012). The “Third Gender”. Revue du MAUSS, 39(1), 197-217. https://shs.cairn.info/journal-revue-du-mauss-2012-1-page-197?lang=en

Saladin d’Anglure, B. (2014). Livre 19. Les dangers du rationalisme moderne et de la biologisation: l’anthropologie de la naissance chez les Inuit, le cerveau reptilien et le travestissement. Les possédés et leurs mondes, March 28. Interviewer: Frédéric Benjamin Laugrand.