The Louis Dumont Fund, which has supported field research projects in social anthropology since 1988, has announced its 2026 laureates. Among them are two representatives from Inalco: Kahina Guillard, a contract doctoral student, and Leyou Li, an alumnus.
Kahina Guillard, a doctoral student in anthropology associated with CERMOM, CESSMA, and the Ifpo, was awarded for her thesis project titled "Se soustraire aux regards. Leçons antiracistes apprises auprès des Doms à la frontière syro-jordanienne" (Evading Gazes. Anti-racist Lessons Learned from the Doms on the Syrian-Jordanian Border). Her work focuses on the strategies of concealment and avoidance against racial violence adopted by the Doms in Iraqi Kurdistan and then in Jordan. She had previously received a special mention for the Michel Seurat Prize in 2025.
Her project analyzes the processes of racialization affecting the Doms Mansour and their strategies for dealing with anti-Roma violence. Based on a fifteen-month ethnographic survey conducted in Jordan between 2024 and 2025, it examines how long-standing inherited representations structure contemporary social relations and produce a continuum of racial violence.
Leyou Li, after obtaining a degree in Tibetan from the Inalco, is currently pursuing a master's degree in Asian studies at the EPHE. His research mémoire focuses on the cult of a category of nature spirits called "klu" in the Tibetan world, with particular attention to the domestic rituals associated with them. He has been conducting study trips and field surveys in Tibetan regions annually since 2022.
His project, "A Study of Domestic Rituals to the Klu (Water Spirits) in Central Tibet," aims to document these domestic practices, which are threatened by urbanization and collective resettlement. By integrating the specificities of these domestic rituals into the analysis, it proposes a new anthropological interpretation of the klu figure. Combining field research and textual studies, this research intends to move beyond a cultural materialist approach to grasp the cosmological scope of the klu and, more broadly, the Tibetan system of natural deities.
