Actually, I did not really know Bernard Juillerat. In addition, my French was and is not good enough to comprehend fully his profound explanations of philosophical and psychoanalytical questions. My memories of him are letters, Christmas cards and two personal meetings – one in Berlin shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1991 and another one in Paris where Marie-Claire Bataille-Benguigui had invited us for dinner and where it turned out, during a conversation, that we knew each other. Bernard Juillerat, who was living on the same housing estate, agreed spontaneously to forsake a very interesting TV discussion about the situation in Afghanistan, which had absorbed his attention, and to keep us company. It was a very agreeable evening.
Our point of contact was Richard Thurnwald (1869–1954) and his two monographs about the Bánaro. (i) 1916 Bánaro Society. Social Organization and Kinship System of a Tribe in the Interior of New Guinea, in Memoirs of the American Ant...