Dear Colleagues

In this early spring, renewal is also taking place in the management of the EFEO, as my term of office comes to an end in the first days of April. Almost five years have passed since I took office as Director of Studies and then as Director of the School.

During this period I strived to provide the best possible support for the various projects and dossiers undertaken by the EFEO and to represent our institution with conviction facing our many partners in France and abroad. In a trying period, the task of defending the missions and uniqueness of the School, enabling it to maintain its excellence, its influence, and its resources, without forgetting the interests of its staff, was  the focal point of my tenure. The development of the network of the five French Schools abroad, of which I have assumed the presidency in 2019, has enabled us to place our action in an even wider environment.

As I hand over the mantle, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the entire management team who have accompanied me in this adventure with professionalism, starting with Christophe Pottier who has assisted me on a daily basis in the directorate of studies, the administrative staff at the headquarters and in the centres in Asia, and the teacher-research colleagues. The exchanges with each of you were always a source of enrichment.

My successor, Nicolas Fiévé, will take up his post on April 6. I wish him every success in his mission. For my part, I am delighted to be able to devote myself once again to my research and to return soon to my field, Japan.

Christophe Marquet
Director of the EFEO

EFEO Paris Seminar

Andrew Hardy (EFEO) speaks on "Problématiques de mobilité autour de la muraille de Quang Ngai (Vietnam)". This seminar is part of the sequence 5: Migrations et circulations of the common core of the Master in Asian Studies.

From 10:30 to 12:00. The conference will take place online on prior registration.
Once registered, you will receive the elements to connect (seminar link and password).

As part of the Kyoto lectures, Carla Tronu (Kansai University of International Studies) presents: "De-Christianizing Nagasaki: Building temples and shrines in the early Edo period".

At 6pm (Japan time) on the Zoom platform. The password for logging in will be posted on the Kyoto Center's blog and the ISEAS website on the 14th.

Legend: Postcard depicting the Suwa Shinto festival in the city of Nagasaki (late 19th century?).

Upcoming events:

- April 8: "Redefining Vietnamese diasporas in times of transnational dynamics", par Vietnamese Diaspora Studies Group, Anne-Cécile Delaisse, Dan Le, Julien Le Hoangan, Cuong Nguyen.

- April 15: "The South Vietnamese Urban Opposition to the Nixon Doctrine in Asia", par An Thuy Nguyen

Contact: Olivier Tessier

In conjunction with the research conducted by Nora Bourquin, a doctoral student in history at the EPHE, the sculpture conservation workshop of the National Museum of Cambodia (MNC) - EFEO is making observations and gathering documentation on the sculptures, all fragmentary, of the goddess Durgā Mahishāsuramardinī, kept in the reserves of the National Museum.

Legend: Flexed legs and finely draped pelvis, fragment of a sculpted representation of the goddess Durgā Mahishāsuramardinī, whose bust and the demon-buffalo she is defeating have disappeared. Brought back in 1934 by R. Dalet from Kuk Khvet in the province of Kompong Cham. H. 22 cm / Inv. Ka1685.

The workshop also reviews all the sculptures that have arrived at the National Museum since 2002, linked in one way or another to the "art dealer" D. Latchford.

As part of this methodological round table, Lim Kannitha and Alexandre Longelin will give a lecture at the EFEO Center in Siem Reap on Monday, April 4, 2022, at 6:00 p.m., on the topic "La céramique d'Angkor Thom à partir des fouilles de la mission MAFA et du projet ModAThom.

The activities carried out within the framework of the CHAMPA project in the Laotian provinces of Champassak and Savannakhet are continuing at a steady pace.

The two excavation sites (VSO5 and HSH2) led respectively by Christine Hawixbrock and Nicolas Nauleau will be completed by mid-April.

Damian Evans, Pelle Wijker and Vissa Chantaphasouk, accompanied by the IT Lidar laboratory team, are undertaking field surveys.

The five Lao students who are currently participating in the excavations will be introduced to the various tools of the IT laboratory (GIS, photogrammetry, ortophotos) and field tools (georadar, RTK) in mid-April.

The aerial Lidar acquisition operations carried out by Sintegra have just been completed for the provinces of Champasak and Savannakhet. The data is now expected before the end of this year.

Christine Hawixbrock, Christophe Pottier, Michel Lorrillard, Brice Vincent, Bertrand Porte, and David Bazin are taking part with the local partners in discussions concerning the other parts of the CHAMPA project in which the EFEO is involved, notably those relating to the museums of Vat Phou and Savannakhet.

Most of them will also participate in the first steering committee of the CHAMPA project, which will take place on April 6, 2022.

Michela Bussotti is participating in the international seminar "Carletti's World: An Early Modern Global Voyage", to be held on 27 and 28 April at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.

On April 8, Élisabeth Chabanol will speak on the theme "On both sides of the DMZ: history and content of a meritorious stele" as part of the EHESS Master's seminar entitled "Intelligences de la Corée", whose referent teacher is Isabelle Sancho, CNRS research fellow.

Legend: Sunset on the Namdae gate, Kaesong. 10 March 2017. © Élisabeth Chabanol.

From 19 to 24 April, Élisabeth Chabanol, accompanied by Francis Macouin, former chief curator at the Musée Guimet, will undertake a study of the Korean collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon, with Salima Hellal, chief curator in charge of the museum's objets d'art.

Illustration: Lyon Museum of Fine Arts..

On 6 April 2022, Arlo Griffiths will present "How to celebrate a Sima foundation: epigraphy meets food history in 10th-century Java", as part of the lecture series organised by Ashoka University.

Christophe Pottier will take part in the 2nd edition of the Printemps de l'Archéologie de Saint-Dizier. He will give a talk entitled "Angkor : au delà de la monumentalité de ses temples" on Saturday, April 2, at 10:30 a.m.

Christophe Pottier will be visiting Siemreap, Cambodia, beginning on April 12 to direct a new excavation campaign of the MAFKATA archaeological mission.

Since March 14 and until April 8, Dominique Soutif has been conducting an excavation campaign on the eremitical site of Pœng Ta Roet, located on the eastern slope of Phnom Kulen (Cambodia).

This work is part of the Yaçodharâçrama archaeological mission (MAEE, ERC Dharma: Chea Socheat, APSARA, Julia Estève, ITK/ISIC, Bangkok, Dominique Soutif and Edward Swenson, University of Toronto). They will feed the doctoral research work of Chloé Chollet (EPHE-PSL doctoral student, DHARMA project). They are carried out in collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Chevance (archaeologist, Archaeology & development foundation, Phnom Kulen Program).

Daniel Perret & Jorge Santos Alves (dir.), Archipel Hors-Série no. 2 : Patani Through Foreign Eyes: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Association Archipel, 2022.

Christine Hawixbrock, "Fouilles à Vat Phu (province de Champassak, Sud‑Laos). Recherches archéologiques sur le site de Vat Sang’O 5 (2014‑2020)", Bulletin archéologique des Écoles françaises à l’étranger, Asie du Sud-Est continentale, mis en ligne le 02 mars 2022.

The conditions of access are as follows:

- The library will be opened Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

- It will no longer be necessary to reserve a seat in the reading room, but you will have to be registered or pre-registered on the online catalogue for the "Maison de l'Asie"

- The documents will be communicated 20 minutes after their reservation from your reader's account, and will be made available on the shelves on the patio side of the reading room

- The library will welcome 15 readers per day. In case of overcrowding, priority will be given to readers consulting EFEO documents.
The health pass will not be required, but the wearing of masks and the respect of protective measures will continue to apply. If you are experiencing Covid-19 type symptoms, please postpone your visit to the library.

Check the EFEO's Facebook page and Twitter account regularly for any updates on the terms and conditions of the public reception service.

With a view to celebrating its 120th anniversary, the École française d'Extrême-Orient is launching a series of video vignettes, entitled "EFEO's Asian Treasures", designed to make the rich holdings of its library and archives better known: prints, published works, manuscripts, maps, plans, photographs, images, etc.

In "Images populaires de Chine. Archiver l'éphémère [Archiving the Ephemeral], Michela Bussotti (director of studies at the EFEO) and Sybille Ngo (master's student at the EHESS and temporary assistant at the EFEO archives) present a number of contemporary Chinese popular images that were purchased before 2006, the date on which many popular print production sites were included in the lists of the intangible cultural heritage of the People's Republic of China (PRC). They are part of a collection of works, which also includes popular books from the 19th and early 20th centuries, assembled by Alain Arrault and Michela Bussotti and donated to the EFEO in 2020.

These images are polychrome xylographs, some of which come from Tantou, a village in the Hunan region: on sale in the workshops of local craftsmen, they offer a snapshot of this production at a precise time and place. The corpus of images has a variety of themes: New Year images, representations of deities, household gods and calendars, paper money to be burned at funerals, paper deities for the creation of temporary altars, etc.

Classified into six sub-fonds, to which is added a small collection of woodcut printing plates, the inventory of this donation has just been put on line on the EFEO's archives site.

The cultural landscape of the Bunong indigenous minority in Cambodia has been included in the list of 25 under-represented heritage sites that the World Monuments Fund (WMF) selects every two years to support their protection.

Catherine Scheer has been involved as a scientific advisor in the development of the project, which is led by the Bunong Indigenous Peoples Association (BIPA). Over the next two years, BIPA, with the help of WMF, will produce a virtual map of the spiritual and historical sites that are important to the Bunong people of south-eastern Mondulkiri, an area that is heavily burdened by economic and tourism development projects.

The aim of this project, which emerged from an exchange between BIPA's Neth Prak, WMF's Ginevra Boatto and Catherine Scheer, is to show a relationship to the land and the world that tends to be de-legitimised in dominant approaches to ownership and exploitation. The aim is not only to locate the sites, for example forest-cemeteries, but also to film people who know how to talk about them.

The GPS and audio-visual recordings made by young bunongs trained and equipped in the framework of the project will result in a virtual map that makes these places visible and allows us to understand their meaning and importance. By seeking to make space for Bunong worldviews, this initiative is a counterpoint to earlier mapping endeavours that used imported categories to better control the shifting populations of this region.

A second aspect of the project is to film and document the Bunong vernacular architecture that is increasingly being replaced by wooden and concrete buildings. The construction process-from the cutting and processing of bamboo to the final finishing touches-will be documented to ensure the preservation of these valuable skills.

Catherine Scheer is accompanying the project with historical and ethnographic sources, drawing on the relationships she has built up over the past fourteen years with the Bunong inhabitants of this region.

In the press:
- Cambodge Mag
- The Phnom Penh Post
- Cambodianess
- The Post khmer

As part of the support provided to international cooperation actions, the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI) offers each year five doctoral contracts in partnership between a doctoral school and one of the five French schools abroad (EFE): École française d'Athènes, École française de Rome, Institut français d'Archéologie orientale du Caire, École française d'Extrême-Orient and Casa de Velázquez (École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques).

Applications should be sent directly to the EFE concerned, in the form of a pdf document including
- A thesis proposal of no more than five pages;
- the CV of the candidate proposed to undertake the research;
- a letter of introduction from the prospective thesis director(s);
- the opinion of the Director of the Doctoral School.

The application documents can be sent until Monday 2 May 2022, 3 pm (Paris time), according to the procedures of each EFE.

For more information.

Conditions and procedures for the EFEO.

Applications for the Master’s degree in Human and Social Sciences, “Asian Studies” (EA) are open for the year 2022-2023 according to a multi-phase registration schedule. The EA Master's degree is a multi-disciplinary, research-oriented programme at M1-M2 level, organised around two training courses of your choice:
- Track 1: "History and social sciences: fields, texts and images" (EHESS-EFEO)
- Track 2: "History, philology and religions" (EPHE/PSL-EFEO)