In the voice of a storyteller, the anthropologist Serge Bouchard, who died on May 11, 2021 in Montreal at the age of 73, allowed Quebecers to rediscover those forgotten by history and everyday life. On the radio and through his writings, he has endeavored to make known the culture of the indigenous peoples, the life of the workers, or the fate of those who made America. He also took an interest in the ordinary beauty of things with affectionate irony. His disappearance caused a stir in the province where this unclassifiable intellectual enjoyed the affection of a large public.
Born July 27, 1947 in Montreal, Serge Bouchard grew up in a family of modest origins, while the “Quiet Revolution” was preparing, a period of profound changes in the province in the 1960s. the Quebec state is modernizing. Serge Bouchard, like the generation of intellectuals to which he belongs, approaches this changing society from a new perspective and rids the social sciences of the contempt they maintained for certain populations. Class defector, he acts as a ferryman to make the voices of those who remain in the margins heard.
Innu specialist
His master’s degree (the equivalent of a master’s degree) is the opportunity for a meeting that will be a founding one for him. He then goes up the St. Lawrence to study the Innu, an Amerindian people from northern Quebec. In The Laughing People (Lux, 2018), a work co-authored with his second wife, Marie-Christine Lévesque, he recently returned to this particular moment, when he took the measure of the distance that separated French Canadians from their Innu neighbors. He is particularly interested in the role of women in this society, whereas anthropology had hitherto given them little place. By listening to hunting stories, he plunges into the cosmogony of these peoples that we wanted to Christianize.
Serge Bouchard subsequently undertook a doctorate which he devoted to truckers – or rather to truckers, as they say in Quebec – who roam the roads of the immense province (this thesis will appear at the start of the school year in France in a revised and rewritten version. with its editor Mark Fortier).
In the early 1980s, Serge Bouchard began a career as an independent researcher and trainer. This period was marked by strong tensions between indigenous peoples and the white population over fishing rights. The conflict culminates in what has been called the “Salmon War” which gives rise to clashes with the police. After these events, Serge Bouchard was hired to give courses to Quebec law enforcement officials in order to make them aware of the history of the Amerindians and their ways of life.
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