In 1898, a French scholar came to Nepal in order to study ancient monuments, inscriptions, texts and manuscripts. They had been preserved here better than in India, thanks to the mountain climate and benevolent political and religious institutions. In spite of a policy of isolation, the Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumshere granted Sylvain Levi permission to spend two months in the country. S. Levi´s short visit led to the publication, in 1905, of Le Nepal: Etude historicjue d´un royaume hindou (Nepal: A Historical Study of a Hindu Kingdom).
Le Nepal was the first historical synthesis of the country in a European language, based on the works of British officials as well as the author´s own research. This remarkable book is not free from the prejudices of a Sanskritist who looked at Nepal from an Indian perspective, and its forthcoming translation into English will no doubt lead to controversial commentaries. However, Le Nepal may be considered as the pioneering work of French anthropology in Nepal. Because there are now numerous French works concerning Nepal in print, it is worth examining the direction that the research has taken.
Levi describes himself as "a philologist in the field (en mission)/ being obliged by profession to go about with princes and pandits, halted at the threshold of the society by tremendous caste prejudices, but who from the outside observes passionately the stream of men and things as if it were the living commentary of vanished ages." For him, "the past remains an incomprehensible enigma if isolated from the present."
Half a century later, when French researchers—institutionally consecrated anthropologists—started visiting Nepal, they took up with Levi´s statement, even if in their approach they inverted the terms of the enigma; the present remains indecipherable if isolated from the past Right from the beginning, these French-speaking researchers in Nepal tended to distance themselves from the positivist and scientific trend that was dominating the theoretical debate in the 1 %0s. The structuralist methods that were flourishing in France at that time did not seem to appeal to them; neither did the quest for formal models and general laws. Most of their work is therefore characterised by an ethno-historical approach.
Region of Multiple Contacts
When in 1973 A.W. Macdonald was appointed to head INAS {now CNAS, the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies at Tribhuvan University), he stressed the need for students of Himalayan communities to combine ethnography and textual research and to study events that transform structures. Later on in France he would train several students in this perspective. Most of Macdonald´s papers, written between 1952 and 1984, have been translated into English and are easily accessible. The widesweep of the subjects he wrote about, ranging from Southeast Asia to Tibet, from Buddhism to local jhankris, and from the Muhikia in (the civil code of Nepal) to the Tamba Kaiten (a collection of Tamang genealogies, customs and songs), indicates that Macdonald saw the Himalaya as an area of multiple contacts, intelligible only if there searcher is willing to go beyond the small-scale studies and specific research.