A Political Anthropologist\u27s Journey from the Local to the Global: An Interview with Irène Bellier (CNRS-EHESS)

Irène Bellier is a political anthropologist, a research director in the French CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique [National Center for Scientific Research]), and the head of LAIOS (Laboratoire d\u27Anthropologie des Institutions et des Organisations Sociales) at the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris, France. Trained at the Institut d\u27Études Politiques, she earned her PhD in anthropology at the EHESS. Her dissertation was based on four years of fieldwork among the Maihuna in the Peruvian Amazon and focused on gender. She then turned to more complex systems, studying the École Nationale d\u27Administration (ENA), which trains the French power elite, and then the European Commission. In 2001, she began studying the Indigenous Peoples movement, using the United Nations as her field site. Since 2010, she has been leading a research project on Scales of Governance: The Irène Bellier at home. (Photo courtesy of interviewee) UN, States and Indigenous Peoples (SOGIP) funded by the European Research Council; this interdisciplinary project (anthropology, law, and public policy) involves comparative analyses at the global and local levels in ten countries on four continents. She has 115 publications, including books, articles, book chapters, and DVDs, in French, Spanish, and English. Among her books are the following: El temblor y la luna. Ensayo sobre las relaciones entre las mujeres y los hombres mai huna (1991); L\u27ENA comme si vous y étiez (1993); An Anthropology of the European Union: Building, Imagining, Experiencing Europe (2000, with coeditor Thomas Wilson); Savoirs et politiques de développement: Questions en débat à l\u27aube du XXIè siècle (2008, with four coeditors); Peuples autochtones du monde: Les enjeux de la reconnaissance (2013); Rajasthan-Shekhawati: Puits et réservoirs (2014, with three co-authors); and Terres, Territoires, Ressources. Politiques, pratiques et droits des peuples autochtones (2015)