Marc-Adélard Tremblay

He attended the Collège Saint-Ignace and Collège Sainte-Marie before enrolling at the Institut agricole d'Oka. A growing interest in rural sociology led him to study for a master's degree at Laval University. Like most social scientists of this generation, he had to go abroad to continue his studies at the doctoral level. He received his doctorate in anthropology at Cornell University in 1954, where he remained for two more years as a research associate. While at Cornell, he began to study Acadian communities in Nova Scotia and also worked among the Navaho Indians of New Mexico. These experiences laid the foundations for his lasting interest in the often adverse impacts that rapid social and economic changes have on diverse cultural communities and on the mental health of individuals who live in them.

Dr. Tremblay returned to Laval University in 1956 where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1993. He founded the Department of Anthropology in 1970 and was dean of the graduate school from 1971 to 1979. Successive generations of students benefitted from his courses on general anthropology, research methods in the social sciences, social organization and disorganization, applied anthropology, and the anthropology of health. He also initiated a large number of research projects that provided practical training for a growing number of graduate students. These projects embodied his conviction that effective social action had to be based on a detailed, empirical understanding of local groups. He continued to study Acadian communities in Nova Scotia and from 1965 to 1976 directed an intensive study of francophone communities along the Lower North Shore of the St. Lawrence.

As a result of his growing reputation as a researcher, he was often invited to carry out investigations for governments and public institutions. Between 1964 and 1968 he was the associate director of a survey of the contemporary Indians of Canada mandated by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development to advise on improvements in Indian policy. While many of the recommendations of this report, based on the work of a large interdisciplinary team of researchers, were ignored in the White Paper of 1968, the Hawthorn-Tremblay report's documentation of the suffocating paternalism of federal government policies played an important role in stirring a public debate that is still in progress concerning the place of First Nations within Canadian society. Dr. Tremblay also servedd from 1967 to 1969 as research consultant to the Commission of Enquiry on Health and Welfare in Québec.

Dr. Tremblay's research has resulted in the publication of 25 books and monographs, as well as approximately 180 articles and short research reports in Québec, Canadian, and international journals. Many of these works address social issues vital to the quality of family life, health care, and mental health in Québec. Early in his career, Tremblay published an influential methodological study, Initiation à la recherche dans les sciences humaines (1968) and later, in L'identité québécoise en péril (1983), he considered what it means to be a Québecer and how that sense of identity relates to changing regional, social, and economic diversity.

Dr. Tremblay has played an important role in the development of anthropology both in Québec and across Canada. He belongs to numerous scholarly organizations and has served as preseident of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, the Canadian Anthropology Society, and the Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies. From 1981 to 1984, he was president of the Royal Society of Canada, which achieved new heights of national importance during that period. From 1987 to 1991 he was president of the Conseil québécois de la recherche sociale.

Dr. Tremblay has received many honours in the course of his long career. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada ans was awarded the Innis-Gérin Medal of the Royal Society of Canada for his achievements to date in 1979, the prestigious Molson Prize from the Canada Council in 1987, and the Prix Marcel-Vincent from ACFAS in 1988. In 1992, the Society for Applied Anthropology in Canada established the Weaver-Tremblay Prize, named in his honour and that of a deceased colleague from Ontario.

Dr. Tremblay combines abiding attachments to ancestral lands and family with a concern for individual and collective well being that knows no boundaries. He has repeatedly shown by example that information collected by a dedicated social researcher can assist, both materially and morally, in the development of a society that provides the resources needed to sustain such research.

Professor Bruce G. Trigger
Department of Anthropology
McGill University

Other texts in English :
Convocation Address
A First Fieldwork in Acadia : How I Became a Cultural Anthropologist without Planning It
Leighton's Legacy