Gilbert Durand

Gilbert Durand (1 May 1921, Chambéry – 7 December 2012, Moye) was a French academic known for his work on the imaginary, symbolic anthropology and mythology.

He was teacher of philosophy from 1947 to 1956, then professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Grenoble II. Gilbert Durand was the co-founder — with Léon Cellier and Paul Deschamps in 1966 — and the director of the Centre de recherche sur l'imaginaire and a member of Eranos. In 1988 he founded the humanities and social sciences review Les Cahiers de L'imaginaire. He participated in the resistance in the Vercors.

He was a follower of Gaston Bachelard, Henry Corbin and Carl Gustav Jung and the teacher of Michel Maffesoli. Gilbert Durand gained a worldwide notoriety and his Center is currently the small group of an international network of over sixty laboratories. In his most famous work, Les Structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire (1960), he formulated the influential concept of the anthropological trajectory (sometimes translated anthropological dialectic or anthropological course), according to which there is a bijective influence between physiology and society.

In 1984, Gilbert Durand supervised the thesis by Michel Gaucher on L'Intuition astrologique dans l'imaginaire (Université Grenoble II).

In 1991 a special colloquium organized by Michel Maffesoli was held in his honour at prestigious Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle.

On 14 March 2007, in Chambéry, Durand received from Raymond Aubrac the title of Commander of the Légion d'honneur.

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