Dumont, Louis

The son of a railway engineer, early lost his father. He studied at the Lyceum of Louis the Great in Paris, dropped out of school, changed several professions. He attended meetings of the College of Sociology , where he listened to the speeches of Bataille , Leiris , Kayua . He became interested in ethnography, studied with Marcel Moss , then at the Louvre School. Classes and plans were interrupted by World War II . Dumont was captured, spent five years in Germany - he worked in agriculture, at a factory near Hamburg . He began to learn Sanskrit on his own. In May 1945 he returned to France. He worked at the Museum of Folk Arts and Customs, published a monograph on the beliefs of Provence . In 1949 - 1950 he conducted field research in Tamil Nadu . In 1951 - 1955 he taught at Oxford , became close to Evans-Prichard . In 1955 he defended his doctoral dissertation in Paris. Subsequently, he worked at EHESS , published the journal Contribution to Indian sociology , and often visited northern India ( Uttar Pradesh ). He taught at Princeton and Chicago .

From studying the caste system in India, he passed on to a comparative historical study of hierarchical relations in various societies and, in comparison with them, to the study of ideas of equality and individualism in Western civilization (the ideology of sociology). This approach, in its own way close to Weber's , was contrary to structuralism , which set the tone in French ethnology of the 1950-1970s, which significantly narrowed the spread of Dumont's ideas, which received recognition at home and in other countries only later.

• La Tarasque: essai de description d'un fait local d'un point de vue ethnographique . Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
• Une sous-caste de l'Inde du sud. Organization sociale et religion des Pramalai Kallar . La Haye-Paris: Mouton, 1964.
• La civilization indienne et nous: esquisse de sociologie comparée . Paris: Armand Colin, 1967.
• Homo hierarchicus. Essai sur le système des castes . Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
• Introduction à deux théories d'anthropologie sociale: groupes de filiation et alliance de mariage . Paris-La Haye: Mouton, 1971.
• Homo Æqualis I: genèse et épanouissement de l'idéologie économique ( 1977 ); II: l'Idéologie allemande . Paris, Gallimard / BSH, 1978.
• Essais sur l'individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l'idéologie moderne . Paris: Le Seuil, 1983.

• Essay on individualism. Dubna: Phoenix, 1997
• Homo aequalis, I. The Genesis and Prosperity of Economic Ideology, Moscow: Nota Bene, 2000
• Homo hierarchicus: the experience of describing the caste system. M .: Eurasia, 2001

Foreign member of the British Academy , American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Honorary Doctor of the Universities of Chicago and Lausanne . Alexis de Tocqueville Prize for Humanism ( 1987 ). Amalfi Prize in the category Sociology and Social Sciences ( 1991 ).

• Différences, valeurs, hiérarchie. Textes offerts à Louis Dumont / Jean-Claude Galey (dir.). Paris: EHESS, 1984.
• L'Exploration de la modernité: la démarche de Louis Dumont, études / Gerald Berthoud, Giovanni Busino (dir.). Genève: Droz, 1984
• Way of life: king, householder, renouncer, essays in honor of Louis Dumont / TN Madan (dir.). New Delphi: Motilal Banarsidass Pub., 1982 (reprint 1988)
• Vibert St. Louis Dumont. Holisme et modernité . Paris: Michalon 2004.

• Obituary in The Independent
• Scientific biography (Fr.)