Pierre Liénard (1968–2023)

Pierre Liénard died on August 1st, 2023, after a long and painful battle with cancer. Liénard contributed to the empirical study of East-African pastoralism and social organization, as well as to the theoretical understanding of ritual behavior and of the process of radicalization in extremist movements.

Pierre studied anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and obtained his PhD in 2003 with a study of the social and ritual institutions of Turkana populations in Kenya. He then proceeded to post-docs at Washington University in St. Louis and Queen’s University Belfast, from 2004 to 2007, before joining the faculty at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he taught until his death.

Pierre’s first and ongoing professional passion was the ethnography of Nilotic populations of East Africa, resulting in years of fieldwork on the social organization and rituals of Turkana nomadic groups. Pierre was especially fascinated by the emergence and stability of the region’s age-group systems that bring together members of a cohort from different clans, and require their joint participation in warfare as well as ritual activities. For Pierre, the gradual build-up of that institution in the region was a fascinating case in the emergence of social complexity outside state structures (Liénard, 2014, 2016).

Starting with his first post-doc in St. Louis, Liénard focused most of his research on the cognitive and social dynamics involved in ritual behavior. From his experience of Turkana ritual, he found standard anthropological approaches deeply flawed, mostly as they did not provide a unified account of the phenomenology of ritual (the fact that ritual actions seem mandatory, that they are scripted, etc.) as well as the obvious thematic similarity between much religious ritual and individual pathologies like obsessive-compulsive disorder, a resemblance often noted but never fully explained. Pierre convinced Pascal Boyer to collaborate on an extension of some clinical models of OCD pathologies, that led to a unified model of ritualized behavior in individual and collective situations, with evolved threat-detection systems as their background. Liénard and Boyer published a series of articles exploring the anthropological (Boyer & Liénard, 2020; Liénard & Boyer, 2006) and psychological (Boyer & Liénard, 2006, 2008; Liénard, 2011) implications of that model.

After his appointment at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), Pierre focused on three primary areas of investigation: the study of informal institutional designs for social complexity, precaution and trust allocation in an uncertain world, and coalitional dynamics and coordination. At UNLV, Pierre mentored several students to the completion of their doctorate degrees, including Mathew Martinez, Michael Moncrieff, and Maileen Ulep. Early research with his graduate students focused on the emergence of costly signals in complex systems, showing how, in certain harsh social environments, costly signals may be used to communicate strategic reputation-enhancing qualities to community members (Martinez & Lienard, 2015; Moncrieff & Lienard, 2017). Martinez and Liénard studied the relationship between specific features of families and political orientations, demonstrating that larger family size correlates with a range of politically relevant factors. Pierre’s work with Moncrieff, starting with fieldwork in Croatia, focused on the sudden shrinking of moral accommodations witnessed during periods of ethnic strife (Moncrieff & Lienard, 2018) and the coalitional psychological dynamics of ethnic conflict (Moncrieff & Lienard, 2019, 2021). Ulep was the last Ph.D. student Liénard directly mentored, applying anthropological theory and methods to understanding the impact of Alzheimer’s disease on cognition and the organization of semantic knowledge in the brain.

Pierre felt strongly that collaboration was critical for scientific progress. Working with colleagues at UCLA, he carried out experimental research with the Turkana supporting the hypothesis that infant-directed speech is universally recognizable due to the form-function relationship between acoustic signals and their communicative purpose (Bryant et al., 2012). Another research project with international colleagues demonstrated that Turkana children clearly understand merit in the allocation of collectively produced goods (Liénard et al., 2013). Those are only a sample of his many collaborative projects, in which he invested the same energy as in his own projects.

In 2019, Liénard and Moncrieff began better conceptualizing “radicalization” and discussing its potential causes. After two years of discussion, theorizing, and numerous discarded drafts, Liénard hit upon an idea, writing, “I am not entirely sure how to explain what is at stake, but it has to do with the coupling of envy and spite, and the zealotry that springs from it” (personal communication, January 30, 2021). Subsequent work would help establish the boundaries of the radicalization phenomenon using a game-theoretic approach (Lienard & Moncrieff, 2023), experimentally examine the hypothesis that envy and radicalization are related (Moncrieff & Lienard, 2023), and delineate the theoretical elements of the envy-as-radicalization model (Moncrieff & Lienard, in press).

Pierre was a very demanding and exceptionally committed mentor. His students were struck by his scholarship, intellectual prowess, and the tremendous enthusiasm he put into his teaching. Students who visited his office for a quick chat about their grades would find themselves speaking to Pierre a great deal longer, usually about science or life. Pierre cared deeply about his mentees and saw it as his duty to devote all his energy to their success.

Pierre Liénard had a wonderful sense of humor, and nothing but disdain for academic pretension or arrogance. His eagerness to share his curiosity for life and often brilliant scientific insights was palpable. When writing or reviewing academic manuscripts, Pierre worked with intensity and precision, spending hours choosing the perfect word, never underestimating the power of a carefully crafted and well-turned phrase. Pierre worked tirelessly and with great zeal for life until just days before his passing. While Pierre may no longer physically be with us, his contributions to social science will remain, as well as his enormous impact on the lives of his friends, students and colleagues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).