Background

Graduating in Roman Philology from the University of Liège, it was to take Lucienne Strivay another few years before she was to return to teach at the university. “When I finished my studies, research was going through a period of crisis and so there were no opportunities for me in this domain. Therefore, I turned to other possibilities”. Lucienne Strivay spent several months working for the publisher Marabout, as an assistant to the literary management team, before turning to teaching. “I went through all the levels of secondary education and I even spent a long spell in non-university higher education, as a lecturer at the ‘Académie Royale des Beaux Arts’ in Mons, which is now the ‘Ecole Supérieure des Arts Plastiques et Visuels’.” But her interest in the natural world remained although this didn’t mean veering away from the study of art. It is the intermingling of that which our knowledge usually separates that has allowed her to develop the anthropology of nature. Among other understandings of the relationship of humans with their environment, this overarching view makes it possible to approach forms of relationships with non-humans, political orientations, types of temporality and spatialization, and different extensions of the subject, through identification processes, in one fell swoop. After 12 years as an assistant on a voluntary basis where she completed her training in anthropology, Lucienne Strivay began her thesis on wild children. It was published by Gallimard sometime later, in the human sciences collection. Since then, she has continued to work in her preferred area: in the nooks and crannies, where the categories are blurred. “That’s where it’s happening, where the scholars are arguing, as Marcel Mauss said.”