During
World War Two he joined the
French Resistance in the
Vercors. He began his career by teaching philosophy in the secondary school system from 1947 to 1956 (philosophy is taught in France at high school level), and then became a university
professor of
sociology and
anthropology at the
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 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 the prestigious
Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle. On 14 March 2007, in
Chambéry, Durand was raised to the title of Commander of the
Légion d'honneur, which was bestowed on him by a personality of his choice, in this case
Raymond Aubrac on behalf of the President (as is customary). Durand died on 7 December 2012. ==Bibliography==