In memoriam Joseph Deth Thach
Joseph Thach was one of the students in my first 'batch' at Inalco, in 1997, where he was learning Khmer and Siamese. Although he wasn't interested in what I was teaching - the political economy of Southeast Asia - he passed the test with flying colors. Irrespective of this relative success, he stood out from the motley crew of Southeast Asian enthusiasts by his unquestionable ease and maturity, occasionally adorned with an enticing smile that drew in his wake a significant number of fellow students.
According to the official forms, the one most often referred to by his Cambodian name, Deth, was born in 1976, making him a contemporary of my eldest son. Regularly bumping into him in the squalid corridors of the 1st floor of the Dauphine teaching center (to the extent that the students ended up repainting them, with the amused support of the then 'chef de center', who supplied the materials), I discovered from third parties that he had arrived in France from Cambodia in 1990, and had spent most of his childhood bouncing from one refugee camp to another. As discreet as he was exuberant, Deth said very little about it, refusing to take advantage of his interlocutors' possible misérabiliste tropism: he knew he was capable of succeeding by his talents alone.
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He had - among other things - passed through the Site 2 refugee camp, located in the Aranyaprathet district (in the Thai province of Sa Kaeo). Covering an area of 8 km², Site 2 housed almost 60% of the refugees stationed in the Cambodian border zone, divided into six residence areas forming separate, guarded neighborhoods, to prevent conflict within the camp while facilitating the confinement of its inhabitants[1].
At Site 2, he was able to attend English classes given by a young American volunteer with a Harvard degree. With the help (among others) of the Jesuit fathers who were able to circulate between the different sectors of the camp, he was able to benefit from a welcome program for young refugees in France. In December 1990, Deth landed in Paris, where he was taken in by an upper-middle-class Catholic family from Marseille, who already had six children. In Marseille, Deth managed to catch up. At the same time, he asked to be baptized and took the name Joseph, which happened to be that of the patron saint of his College, the emblematic protective figure of the "childhood gospels", although it is not known what really motivated this choice.
Although he became Joseph, he did not abandon Deth and returned to Cambodia whenever he could. After obtaining a scientific baccalaureate in June 1996 and a year of searching for his bearings, he finally decided to "move up" to the capital, where he took a double degree in LEA at Paris III and Langues O'. With his higher diploma in Khmer in hand in 2000, he spent a year at Silapakorn University in Thailand - the alma mater of Gilles Delouche, his Siamese teacher - where he taught French, to complete his Siamese course, while continuing his Khmer with a master's degree in linguistics on nominal determiners under the guidance of a brilliant, colorful pedagogue who handled spoonerism like he did gastronomy: Michel Aufray. He obtained a DEA (post-graduate diploma) on spatial deictics, and joined the informal seminar of the dean of Khmer studies, Madame Saveros Pou, who introduced him to the ancient states of the language.
He then enrolled in his thesis and was awarded a doctoral scholarship to pursue his research in Cambodia, affiliated to the Royal University of Phnom Penh. His life as a young researcher was not without its bumps, however: he interrupted his thesis, then ended up resuming it. And he took advantage of a stay in Cambodia to found the Kok Thlok association in 2006, with the aim of reviving the tradition of the "great leathers" of Cambodian shadow theater. But tragedy was never far away: Michel Aufray, his thesis supervisor, died in a road accident a few months before his thesis was due to be defended. Gilles Delouche, Mr. Aufray's fellow student at Langues O', helps him to get back on track and complete the exercise.
With his thesis (Study of two Khmer indefinite markers, na: and ?ej) in hand, he spent two years in Cambodia on postdoctoral contracts. Once the recruitment procedure had been launched, almost twenty years after his departure from Site 2, in September 2009, Deth became a lecturer in Khmer and linguistics at Inalco and joined one of the leading linguistics laboratories in Paris: the SeDYL (Structures et Dynamiques des langues).
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One might have thought that Deth, now settled in 'the quarry', would have finally settled down. In fact, he started a family, fathering a young Célestin in 2014. For all that, he won't stop shaking the sugar palm of Khmer studies to multiply the fruits, in Cambodia as in France. As early as 2012, he launched the Manusastra (Humanity in Khmer) as part of a "Université des Moussons" set up from scratch, where the theoretical and methodological foundations of the humanities (history, ethnology and linguistics) to undergraduate students at the Royal University of Fine Arts (URBA), extended in 2014 to Laos (National University of Laos), then to the Master's level in 2017 (in a double URBA-Inalco curriculum).
We crossed paths many times during this period, in my capacity as head of international relations at Inalco (2013-2017), including during a mission to Cambodia that I carried out in 2014 (alongside our President, Manuelle Franck) for the graduation of the first class of the Inalco-URBA double curriculum. His ability to network the most disparate personalities and get them to work together in the service of a culture they knew virtually nothing about struck me as exceptional. What's more, he had acquired exceptional know-how in obtaining funding, from the Mairie de Paris (he was a laureate of the Émergences program), the AUF, the IRD... The whole thing culminated in September 2017 in his being sent on delegation to the IRD in Phnom Penh, where he was to stay for four years. In addition to his numerous stints at Langues O', we met again there in July 2018, during a seminar organized as part of the European GEReSH-CAM[2] program, which he was piloting.
These talents, too, were cause for concern, as the result was a mad dash, where the one-man band that Deth had become seemed perpetually to be plugging the holes in the Danaides' Barrel, with each set-up requiring the development of a new project to perpetuate the previous one's subsidies and thus keep Manusastra going from strength to strength. Here, too, there was no shortage of hard knocks, such as the theft from Gare Saint Lazare in 2018 of the computer containing the first draft of his HDR during one of his visits to France, even though he had no backup.
Like any death of a young and dynamic person, Deth's death is an injustice, all the more difficult to admit because for many people, myself included, he embodied a double hope: both that of a possible success for those whose childhood was partly shattered, and that of the safeguarding of the most 'monumental' and one of the oldest cultures of the Indochinese Peninsula.
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To evoke one of the stages in its genesis, let us turn to Father Ceyrac, who was one of the great witnesses to Site 2: "You could say that Site 2 is the place of evil. [...] But it is also a place of grace and beauty, more sensitive than anywhere else. Despite a backdrop of anguish, worry, suffering, nightmares of the past, uncertainty for the future, there is a human grandeur that is hardly to be found anywhere else [...]"[3] Deth, more than many others, was the bearer of this: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God..."[4]
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Marie-Sybille de Vienne
University professor of history, economics and international trade, and international relations
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Joseph Deth Thach, his page on our website inalco.fr
[1] See Christelle Thibault, L'archipel des camps. L'exemple cambodgien, Paris, PuF, 2008, ch. 1.
[2] Governance and the emergence of research in the human sciences in Cambodia.
[3] Quoted in "Hommage au Père Pierre Ceyrac", PHARE (Patrimoine humain et artistique des réfugiés et de leurs enfants),
https://association-phare.org/2017/05/05/hommage-au-pere-pierre-ceyrac/.
[4] Prologue to the Gospel according to Saint John, which poses the problem of the link between the Divine and Language.