I was saddened — and disappointed — to learn recently that “Jean-Pierre Vernant passed away in January”:http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2144035.ece. Saddened at the passing of such a remarkable scholar, and disappointed to learn of it second hand through personal connections. I am not, to be fair, a francophone classicist, so perhaps it is not surprising that I didn’t hear anything. But at the same time there appears to be little in the English-language press about his passing — as far as I can tell the New York Times didn’t even have an obituary.

As the obituary I linked to above indicated, Vernant was an extraordinary person. I think of him as someone who occupied — indeed, created — the space where anthropology, structuralism, and classics meet. Anthropology has always had a connection with classics stretching back to Moses Finley and, I suppose, Henry Sumner Maine. But Vernant, Detienne, Vidal-Naquet and others demonstrate to me how one can undertake a truly rigorous and truly humanistic social science — comparative, imaginative, and saturated with a theoretical sophistication derived from those great French 20th century schools of thought that have been unfairly eclipsed in the popular imagination by poststructuralism: the annee sociologique, the annales, and structuralism (francophones will excuse my lack of accents — my computer is set up to handle Chinese these days, not French).

People who have read of his exploits in the resistance will recognize that Vernant was extraordinary for more than just his scholarship. I had the chance to see him speak once, and I remember him as an extraordinarily powerful speaker — someone with a personal charisma that was more reminiscent of a movie star than a merely interesting professor. I suppose that this is because, as a superstar academic, he was a sort of a celebrity to me. But even setting aside the tendencies of an impressionable graduate student, Vernant had a charisma that couldn’t be denied.

It is interesting to compare Vernant’s passing with that of Baudrillard. Baudrillard became a sort of pop icon in the US while Vernant climbed to the pinnacle of the French academy. Baudrillard became a foundational (is that too strong a word?) figure in the new post-70s disciplines (cultural studies etc.) while Vernant worked in quite literally the oldest disciplines (classics, history). In an earlier post I asked whether anthropologists cared about Baudrillard’s passing — I feel like I already know what people’s answer will be about Vernant. Maybe readers whose curioisty is piqued — or would like to revisit Vernant — will pick up a copy of “Mortals and Immortals”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0691019312&id=cAxq_6svnOEC&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&ots=QEtVv8KRC_&dq=vernant&sig=jGML6e4of06h14E1mxunQBjo4Io&hl=en and take a look at some of his essays. Is this kind of work relevant today? Does it mark the ‘path not taken’ in sociocultural anthropology’s march towards a ‘theory-heavy’ approach?