User:Hermionita/Isac Chiva

 Isac Chiva Isac Chiva, born september 7, 1925 in Iași (Roumania), died april 30, 2012 in Paris, is a French anthropologist, specializing in social anthropology and close collaborator of Claude Lévi-Strauss. He is the brother of psychologist Matty Chiva. He was a centralfigure of French rural ethnology.

Biography
Born in a Jewish lower middle class family in Romania, Isac Chiva has to stop his normal schooling, due to the rise to power of far-right, fascist and anti-semitic nationalist organizations from 1935 on.

During Second World War, he was the terrorized witness, on 28 and 30 June 1941, of the mass slaughter of Jews in his home town, a tragedy that would mark him throughout his life with such intensity that he cannot himself recount his memories in writing. It is only at the end of his life that he confides in Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine in an interview published in Les Temps modernes in 2003.

In 1948, he flees his country which falls under the yoke of another totalitarian power, the Stalinist regime. He arrives in France and settles in Paris.

Isac Chiva studied at the Sorbonne et obtained a diploma in social sciences. In 1951, he starts working at the CNRS. He then works at the Musée des Arts et traditions populaires, and specializes as a "ruralist" ethnologist by conducting surveys in various villages in France, particularly in collaboration with Unesco. He also studies rural areas in the French West Indies, in Haïti and in French-speaking Switzerland.

In 1960, Claude Lévi-Strauss is elected at the Collège de France and asks him to second him in directing the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (LAS) he is setting up. In the 1960s, he enters the École pratique des hautes études where Fernand Braudel asks him to organize a symposium on "The three-year rotation in Europe" at the end of which will be launched the magazine Etudes Rurales (assisted in this task by the anthropologist Françoise Zonabend et the historian Yves Lemoine) of which he will take the editorial direction until 1982.

In 1970, Isac Chiva is elected director of studies at the EPHE (École pratique des hautes études).

It is thanks to Isac Chiva, who introduces her to Clemens Heller, administrator of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, that the seminar of Anne-Lise Stern was held from 1992 on.

A convinced European, Isac Chiva worked to publicize the work of his colleagues from across the Rhine and promote exchanges between German and French-speaking ethnologies.

Works

 * Letter from Isac Chiva, 1933-1994 Correspondance between Isac Chiva and Jean Gottmann, Paris, 1964
 * Les études rurales en France, éditions de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1972, ISBN 271320805X
 * Les Baronnies des Pyrénées: anthropologie et histoire, permanences et changements, édition de l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1999
 * Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, L'affaire Eugénie Goldstern, L'histoire d'une non-histoire, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, décembre 2002
 * Le magicien des vitrines: le muséologue Georges Henri Rivière, éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2003