Paul Mus was born with Bourges in 1902 and deceased in 1969. It grew in the north of the Vietnam to strong current of the rice plantations, until adopting the country step on the small floodbanks in checkerwork and the step of jungle of the mountain dwellers and their mentality. It devoted the essence of its work to the India and the Southeast Asia. Member of the French School of the Far East EFEO as from 1926, it was elected professor with the Collège de France in 1946.

He had the authority of the one of the largest specialists in the South-East Asia religions in the world. Its study of the temple of Borobudur, published in 1934, republished in 1977, remains traditional until our days.

During the Second world war, Mus adopted the free France, made its drive at the British Commandos with Ceylon and was parachuted in Indo-China north, as Commissaire of the Republic, just like Jean Sainteny and Pierre Messmer, on behalf of the Résistance. In 1945, it was used as political adviser near the general Leclerc and was at its sides during the signature of Japanese rendering on US bay Missouri of Tōkyō.

It was in Tōkyō at the first night of the peaceful unloading of the first detachment of the US Navy and noticed the Japanese discipline of the military region of Tōkyō whose soldiers could easily have pushed back this unloading. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni already made this study on “compliance” in the relation authority-obedience among Japanese.

Although he became adviser of the government of Charles de Gaulle for the Indo-China, he very early realized of the power of modern nationalism Vietnamese, since he grew and lived in their villages, on their premises, which encouraged it to preach a policy of decolonization for France, made public in his articles published in the newspaper Christian Témoignage at the end of the Années 1940. But Mus will become especially famous to have written a remarkable book on Vietnam in war: Vietnam, sociology of a war published at Threshold, Paris, 1952.

It was very affected by death into 1961 of his Emile son, killed with the combat in Algeria during the Guerre of Algeria.

Work of Paul Mus continues to arouse the interest of the French and foreign researchers.

The man and his work

Born in a family from teachers, where, very young person, his intellectual faculties could open out. All the childhood of Paul Mus proceeded in Indo-China, with deepest of the local population, the elementary school of her parents, as for the young person Marcel Pagnol, then it returned to France to make its studies, with the manner of Marguerite Duras, native of Gia Dinh, in suburbs of Saigon, at these “small white” of Indo-China. Raise Khâgne with the Lycée Henri-Iv, it has as a Master the philosopher Alain. He turned to the Orientalisme and became disciple of Sylvain Lévi in Sanskrit and Tibetan, and of Arnold Vissière in Chinese. He also learned the Siamois and the Vietnamese that he used already with the “natives” of his childhood.

He became member of the EFEO (French École of the Far East) in 1927, supported in 1933 a thesis of doctorate very noticed on Borobudur.

In 1937, it was named director of studies in Ve section of the Practical École of the High Studies. At the time of the Second world war, he was officer of the free French Forces in Africa. At the end of 1940, it gained Calcutta and the free France for which, in 1944, it was parachuted with the Tonkin. At the time of the takeover by Japanese force of the March 9th 1945, it was with Hanoi and worked on behalf of the special services. He escaped the Japanese, joined with foot Its, then Kunming thanks to the complicity of the Vietnamese peasants with whom he grew, this “face of villages” of which he will make the fundamental character and founder of Vietnam, which was worth many adventures to him. Kunming was the operational center of the Détachement 101 of the OSI and General headquarter of the allied forces in China of the South.

After the Japanese capitulation, it became for some time political adviser of the Leclerc general, and intervened in favor of a policy clearly granting independence to Vietnam. It was withdrawn on a failure. It was then named, in France, Directeur of the National school of France of Overseas. In 1946, it obtained the pulpit of civilizations of the Far East at the Collège de France.

A few years later, it agreed to in parallel assume a teaching at the university of Yale, man of ground become man of study. In its work, Mus privileged in-depth comprehension on diversity. What made its writing difficult to seize by diversity and the depth. It felt the significant distance between the “man of ground” and the “scientist of cabinet”. Its requirement is of “ not to take a library for the equivalent of a country ”, like “the chart for the territory”, at Alfred Korzybski.

This work of ground precedes the “microsociology” which, according to the proper words of Driven, is not the village against the State, but a sociology which does not have yet dimensions and statistics, a sociology of the proper names, “you” and “ego”, a sociology which is not yet geometrical and crystalline.

Work complexes combinations

To the steps of Jean Przyluski, Sylvain Lévi and Marcel Granet, it endeavoured to seek the old substrates, “ the antecedents, bent and covered by the contributions brahmanic for India (or confucéens for China) ”. For that it combined the results of several disciplines: Linguistic, Ethnography, Archeology, History of the religions. It carried out of it an excellent formulation in a conference of 1934 entitled Indian and indigenous Cultes with the Champa .

For the archeologist of the Borobudur, this monument and the Stûpa in general are among the great sources of reflection and the best framework of reference for its research on the history of the Bouddhisme. Its work is spread in a large range, Anthropologie with the Sociologie while passing by the Philosophie and the Histoire of the religions, as its publications testify some.

As the Middle-class man gentleman of Molière made prose without the knowledge, Paul Mus made use of the ecosystemic Approche and used the Théorie of the contexts before they had even a name. The author of masterly the Barabudur (1935) - true monument on this religious monument - perceived a kind of cultural base protohistoric regional on which gradually had been built and imposed Indian and Chinese civilizations, one and other parts of the central steppes.

This “base” is the base ( Grund said one formerly) ground biophysics which directs and delimits the possible human establishments thinking the production and producing the thought in return. The Southeast Asia, like catch out of clipper by this double civilizing movement of India and China, appeared the last stage of it: at the same time moment (like “moment” and “power struggle”) where the two civilizing forces met, while being contained mutually, and place where the primary education base, because more tardily covered, still exerted - better than elsewhere - perceptible effects. Mekong is the watershed and the dividing line of Chinese civilization with Indian civilization.

The interest for Mus was especially that starting from this referent - this common base - one could try to include/understand an overall movement over the long life: processes of ideological stratifications slow (hindouisation, sinicization), but also certain phenomena of changes (such emergence of Buddhism), and, on this fundamental texture, the texture of the formation of networks (religious, commercial, political, etc) of extensions and variable durations.

Such an aiming claimed to know to exceed the bulk-headings in specialized orientalists fields, like not cutting out the observation under the terms of the only modern political borders. By doing this Mus intended to found the possibility of comparative literature, not only structural but such a historical, where to register the design of these multiple networks of Asia in the trans-civilisationnel contact.

Today, the Social sciences, the Anthropology initially, consider suspect, even inadmissible concepts such those of a base or a substrate, that the Archéologie would be well in sorrow to be able to identify on a so broad scale, too glad already to sometimes be able to show a certain air of family between the lithic cultures subhimalayennes, but also obliged to show, as of the Neolithic era, of the distinct regional evolutions inside the Asian surface.

This “comparative literature” is the interconnection, the intersection and the combinations of the judicious parallels never to meet. Thereafter, the “base” is the common source, the base, before the “schismogenèse” in the contact transcultural described and clarified by Gregory Bateson in Anthropologie which introduced the concepts of “complementary interaction” pacificatory in hollow and relief and of “symmetrical interaction” rivalitaire in climbing of the arms race where a more powerful arrow answers a thicker shield and so on until the exhaustion of the protagonists (cf Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick-Beavin and Donald D. Jackson, a logic of the communication , pp. 65-69, Seuil, Paris, 1972). These interactions complementary and symmetrical correspond, respectively, with “negative feedback” atténuatrice of the variations and with the “positive feedback” amplifying of the deviances in Cybernétique.

However, the question of the comparative literature remains posed, just as that of the refusal to stop the studies at the borders, by national specializations, one remains cannot more current. If a network in Asia of research, like the French School of Far East of Hanoi, it can have there, it is initially the possibility and the interest of comparative studies through Asia which seems to have there to be postulated, and leaving the consideration an Asian field, was it problematic, obliging us, as Mus wished it, to operate certain disciplinary decompartmentalizations and to leave one renfermement, comfort or prudence, in the “room” as in the “total one”.

Still it is necessary that “to think broad” is not a pretext for free developments or assumptions of doubtful paces, as one knew some a long time.

One must justify the relevance of any widening of prospect, and make sure that it does not lead to a less rigor in the design.

In this respect, related questions with the fact of the “pluri-ethnicity” - which appears constitutive of almost all the State-nations of the South-East Asia, and often proposed by them - offer an good example of the interest, if it is not the need, beside studies limited to the national framework, of a treatment except borders. That they are the networks migration Chinese, Indian, hmong, bugis… of populations considered carrying “imported” cultures or religions, or the other transborder ones, etc, one sees well how a double lighting, room and international, are almost always necessary.

But more generally, this repetition of contexts known as pluri-ethnic, that the States put as forward, sometimes believing to be able by securing itself there against very critical towards the fate reserved in the facts with their minorities in general (where the ethnic official one returns as much to cultural that to the monk), seems to lend itself particularly well to comparative studies and a co-operation between disciplines.

The effervescence of the identity debates, by an end of the continent to the other, between cultural majorities, generally politically dominant, and minorities, is accompanied by a recurrence of situations which one sees easily that they are comparable, and that they gain with being compared.

The problem, on the matter, is besides to know if the Asian framework presents any so much specificity the identity question everywhere is posed and médiatisée through the sphere (so much so that for much anthropology tends today to merge with the reflection on the identity). There is certainly never relevant framework of comparison a priori - the unit each time considered having to be with variable geometry according to the needs for the study - and in this direction to allegedly replace the common Asian base built by Mus by a framework in division does not present any kind of progress.

But one can undoubtedly show - on various scales, and according to whole of comparison each time D-elaborate by the analysis - problematic profiles specific to Asia justifying the interest of the comparative literature inside the continent.

Just an example, to return from there to the problems of the pluri-ethnicity: the report/ratio with the history - which sees certain cultural majorities not hesitating to rewrite the national history or regional, in order to justify their domination, their legitimacy on the ground or certain processes of internal colonization. This right of dominant on the manufacture of the past, negationnisms included/understood, continuous to find resonances modern through Asia - undoubtedly more strongly than elsewhere - and the comparison of the rewritings of Japan in Burma, while passing through Vietnam, appears lighting. By reaction, the minorities also reconstitute roots - on bases often quite as arbitrary - and, sometimes under the impulse of ethnic ONG (Christian women or not) - build a cultural history.

Everywhere, the accelerated proliferation of these Re-discoveries of the tradition - which can become cultures of State in the context of new State-nations - requires on a side that one can identify, for each case, the distinct social processes with work but authorizes, of another, an intra-Asian comparative literature which appears often relevant.

For Gregory Bateson, it is the Co-evolution where a change of fact promotion and facilitates the change of the other, of biology, in the évoluion of the species, with the transcultural contact. In microsociology, Paul Mus extends the idea of the “sociality” conceived like “ a certain way of disputing and then to mean, on the ground, gradually ”.

• “ For Driven, the sociality is made of a tangle in alternation and dispute, with the manner of the swirl of the “Ying” and the “Yang”, societation and sociabilisation. The first is the formation of from top to bottom company, whereas the second is its ramification gradually on the ground ” (Thanh H. Vuong, p.595, 1986).

In contrast with the diagram of Marx which places it like a waste ground, mediator of an economic infrastructure to a cultural superspructure, Mus conceives this sociality as the contextual envelope which makes significant and meaning the thought of the production and the production of the thought, the economy and the culture, respectively.

The studies of Driven are about a “Bi-association” from the points of view of the interior and outside at the same time and “dialogical” of complementary with the antagonist. For example, in Vietnam, sociology of a war , the road Vietnamese (pp. 124-137) is at the same time a “benefit of civilization” with its scientists raised in the turns for fast cars of the colonial administration and a “misdeed from abroad” who makes reverse the carts with oxen of the peasant annamite. Descartes and Confucius (pp. 184-217) milked clash of two spirits. Tactical and strategy nationalists and Marxists in Tonkin (pp. 295-313) put in contrast the oscillation system-environment of an instrumental Marxism for a fundamental nationalism where the nationalist strategy was implemented through a Marxist tactic to carry out the policy of independence.

Publications

• Indian and Indochinese Studies. The inscription with Valmiki de Prakaçadharma. Avoided Buddha, its Indian origin, çakyamuni in average Mahayanisme , BEFEO (Bulletin of the French School of the Far East) 28/1-2, p. 81-247, 1928.
• Indian and indigenous Worships in Champa , BEFEO 33/1, p. 367-410, 1933.
• Barabudur. Outline of a history of Buddhism based on the archaeological criticism of the texts , Hanoi, ED. in BEFEO 32/1, p. 269-439; 33, p. 577-980; and 34, p. 175-400.), 1935 [http://guam.org.gu/mystery/borobudur.jpg.
• primitive mythology and the thought of India , Bulletin of the French company of philosophy, May-June, p. 83-126, 1937
• the concept of time reversible in Buddhist mythology , Paris, EPHE École Practices High Studies), Ve section, Annuaire 1938-39, p. 5-78, 1938.
• the light on the six ways , Paris, Institut of ethnology (Work and memories of the Institute of ethnology, 35), 330 pages, 1939.
• Vietnam, sociology of a war , Seuil, Paris, 1952. Undoubtedly its most known work. * the Destiny of the French Union , the Threshold, 1954.
• the smile of Angkor. Buddhist art, faith and policy under Jayavarman VII , Artibus Asiae 24/3-4, p. 363-381, 1961 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bayon.jpg.
• War without face , Threshold, 1961.
• Of new on Rgveda X 90? Sociology of a grammar , in Indological Studies in Honor off W. Norman Brown, American Eastern Series, vol. 47, p. 165-185, 1962.
• a solid cinema. The integration of time in the art of India and the contemporary art , Asian Arts 10/1, p. 21-34, 1964.
• Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, I' Asia , the Threshold, 1971 (posthumous publication).
• Vietnameses and their revolution , Threshold, 1972 (recovery partial of Vietnam, sociology of a war , posthumous publication).

Conclusion

Paul Mus was the model of the complete intellectual, man of ground, man of studies and especially man engaged in the action. Curiously, it had perhaps more disciples in the United States where it taught with Yale than in France where it was born. Paul Mus is impossible to circumvent for any study on the South-East Asia in much of disciplines. With Bernard B. Fall, Paul Mus is the reference on Indo-China. By the globalism transdisciplinaire and the lyric writing, works of Paul Mus are difficult to read for a public accustomed to tiny and restricted works. The density and the diversity of work do not facilitate a speed reading and surface. The intellectual richness and the conceptual fireworks are not reduced easily to some ideas and the “comparative literature” says one, at the time, is much more than one Bi-association and dialogical expensive with Edgar Morin of the antagonistic complementarities which do not cease being complementary antagonisms. This “comparative literature” globalist macroscopic is perhaps the direct ancestor of the Cybernétique and the ecosystemic Approche, contemporary of anthropological work of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.

Bibliographical references

The publications of Paul Mus and the following ones which are based on work of Driven.

• Bernard B. Fall.
• The Vietminh Mode (1954), Vietminh (1960, French translation, Hake)
• The Two Vietnams (1963), two Vietnam (1962, French translation, Payot)
• Indo-China 1946-1962 (1962, Laffont)
• Vietnam Witness, 1953-66 (1966)
• Hell in has Very Small Place: The Sits off Diên Biên Phu (1966), Diên Biên Phu, a corner of hell (1968, posthumous French translation, Laffont)
• Anatomy off has Crisis: The Laotian Crisis off 1960-1961 (posthumous publication 1969)
• Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh , Threshold, Political coll, Paris, 1967
• Jules Roy, the battle of Diên Biên Phu , Julliard, 1963; Albin Michel, 1989

Related bonds

The Contentious sino-Vietnamese.

External bonds

Driven
• documents/articles/GoschaPaulMus.pdf and decolonization.
• Driven Texts of Paul
• Paul Driven, '' Vietnam, sociology of a war ''
• Bibliography on Vietnam
• Borobudur
• Borobudur
• Borobudur
• Paul Driven, '' Barabudur ''
• Borobudur

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