Art • Rituel • Mémoire

Une réunion de coordination des membres de l’ANR s’est tenue le 16 juin 2011 au musée du quai Branly. Le programme suivant de l’atelier mensuel de l’équipe a été fixé selon le calendrier suivant (le mercredi de 14h à 17h00, salle de cours 2, musée du quai Branly):

23 novembre 2011:  Carlo Severi

4 janvier 2012 : Julien Bonhomme

18 janvier: Bérénice Gaillemin

8 février : Andrea-Luz Gutierrez

21 mars : François Berthomé

4 avril : Arnaud Halloy (à confirmer)

9 mai: Tommaso Montagnani

Juin : Discussion collective

En plus des séances d’équipe, viendront s’ajouter d’autres séances avec des invités étrangers :

2 mai : Anna Maria Busse Berger

30 mai, 6 juin, 13 juin: William Hanks

Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer la parution du numéro 13 de Gradhiva. Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des Arts, publiée par le musée du quai Branly, dont le dossier spécial, dirigé par Carlo Severi, est intitulé “Pièges à voir, pièges à penser. Présences cachées dans l’image“. Ce dossier spécial est le fruit des recherches menées dans le cadre du projet franco-brésilien CAPES-COFECUB et dans le projet ANR.

Dossier coordonné par Carlo Severi

Carlo Severi : Présentation

Carlo Severi : L’espace chimérique. Perception et projection dans les actes de regard

Carlos Fausto : Le masque de l’animiste. Chimères et poupées russes en Amérique indigène

Els Lagrou : Le graphisme sur les corps amérindiens. Des chimères abstraites ?

Bruna Franchetto et Tommaso Montagnani : Flûtes des hommes, chants des femmes. Images et relations sonores chez les Kuikuro du Haut-Xingu

Joffrey Becker : Récursions chimériques. De l’anthropomorphisme des robots autonomes à l’ambiguïté de l’image du corps humain

Jean-Hubert Martin, Carlo Severi et Julien Bonhomme : Jean-Hubert Martin et la pensée visuelle (entretien)

Dario Gamboni : Nubes cum figuris. L’interprétation des nuages comme paradigme moderne de la création et de la perception artistiques

Atelier Voix et Performance, dirigé par Carlo Severi

L’Atelier Voix et Performance propose à des anthropologues et à des acteurs d’explorer ensemble, de manière expérimentale, le registre de la performance vocale, et notamment les formes de l’iconisme vocal et verbal. Dans ce cadre, trois acteurs italiens, Massimiliano Sbarsi, Luca Nucera, Paola De Crescenzo, réciteront des passages d’un chant chamanique des Kuna du Panama.

* musée du quai Branly
11 mai 2011, à 16h30
salle de cours 3

Dans le cadre du séminaire “Anthropologie de la mémoire” de Carlo Severi, du projet ANR et du programme de chercheurs invités du musée du quai Branly.

Caroline Humphrey
Professeure au Département d’Anthropologie Sociale, Université de Cambridge (Angleterre)

présentera ses recherches sur  “Cosmologie et Sociétés contemporaines” :

mercredi 23 mars - 14h - salle de cours 2
La Fortune et Le Vent : une  subjectivité impersonnelle

vendredi 25 mars - 14h - salle de cinéma
Cosmologies, Concepts de Civilisation, et la Frontière de la Russie avec la Chine

mercredi 6 avril - 14h - salle de cours 2
avec Grégory Delaplace
Qu’y a-t-il de nouveau dans le Néo-Chamanisme?  Agencements et acteurs à Ulaanbaatar

*musée du quai Branly
218 rue de l’université
75007 Paris

Workshop, University of Austin, October 2010, 14th-16th.

RITUAL SPEECH AND
SUBJECTIVITY
(click here for program)

In this workshop, we will take a comparative approach to discuss a wide range of phenomena centered on ritual speech. Presentations will describe works in progress coming from diverse theoretical backgrounds but with a common focus on the context of ritual. Materials for discussion will be drawn from geographically diverse locations ranging from Siberia to Africa to Central and South America.

The study of ritual speech poses a range of problems that demands a multifaceted approach in which language and the context of its production must be considered at the same level. Departing from the crossroads of Anthropology and Linguistics, this workshop aims to explore the complexity of ritual speech and the ways in which its content, form and effects can be analyzed.

‘Ritual’ has been defined at different levels, from Goffman’s everyday practice to the collective rituals celebrated by every culture in the world. These diverse social phenomena have in common a certain formalization of actions. In this sense, when we approach speech facts, it may be necessary to talk about ritual as a process −that is as ritualization− and find the answer to some of the following questions: What does ritualization do to speech that makes it distinctive? Is it really different from ordinary speech? Is it a particular register or is it different because of the process of ritualization in which it is involved?

From the vantage point of action, ritual speech is not just a matter of communication. It is of course related to the transmission of knowledge, but it is also fundamentally linked to the way(s) in which that knowledge is distributed socially and to the relational context of its performance. By considering all these other components of ritual speech, we want to include in the analysis the subjects and the objects that are part of the performative situation: the ritual specialists and their audience, the material elements used by them and the space they occupy.

Many questions emerge from here: What kinds of ritual speech are the sole province of ritual specialists, and how do they differ from the mundane rituals of ordinary interaction? How do people learn ritual speech, use it, and transmit it? What other practices are performed within the speech act? What effects do they have? In what ways does ritual speech change through articulating with an ever-changing phenomenal present? How does the practice of a ritual speech event transform the experience of the participants?

As with any other discourse form, ritual speech implies the action of a speaker. However, in the case of ritual speech, the subject seems to define himself by a lack of intentionality, at least as we can find it in ordinary speech. Sometimes considered as anonym, ritual speech seems to achieve a supra-intentional status, standing over and above the subjectivity of the individual who performs it.

Other times, ritual speech is attributed to the intentionality of other agent(s) that relate in various ways to the speaker, but are different from him or her (e.g. particular animals, spirits or gods). In these cases, we may ask ourselves: How does the speaker define the new subject(s)? Does he use elements of the speech itself? Does he use external supports, like objects or images? Is it through his interaction with the actual audience of his speech that he presents external agent(s)?

The necessity of transmission is also an important characteristic of ritual speech and will be one of our concerns. The transmission of ritual speech is generally related to a great variety of objects, designs, places and gestures that are often present in the speech situation. We would like to explore the different uses and roles played by this materiality through which ritual speech is articulated. We also would like to explore the relationship between ritual and history and the ways in which the different historical contexts may transform ritual speech as well as the concept that people have about it. Even when we can all agree about the effectiveness of ritual speech, and its capacity to generate its own reality, we may have different perspectives on how this is done.

Another vantage point that will be taken in this workshop is linguistic. From its performance to the details of its form and content, ritual speech is often involved in the production of opacity of its content. That is why we want to analyze, in addition to the communicative aspect of ritual speech, its capacity to be poorly intelligible and, thus, intensely significant. If we consider ritual speech as being highly significant and poorly intelligible, then we may see its translation as a particular procedure involving more than just linguistic skills. What other aspects of ritual speech should be taken into account in such a process? Are ritual languages (registers or genres) definable in terms of linguistic mechanisms? Is ritual speech any more or less universal in its features than non-ritual speech?

Considering these elements, language becomes just one of multiple manifestations of ritual speech, in addition to melody, musical patterns, breath, and the production of extra-linguistic sounds. The study of these elements may also be supposed to take into account the use of objects, the interactions generated through it, and the settings where these elements are displayed. This particular conception of speech may have implications for the linguist’s analysis: will he learn things about the language from ritual that would be unclear or even unknowable otherwise?

Some of the foregoing questions point to the reflexive capacity of ritual speech. While saying things about the world, ritual speech is constantly making reference to itself. This production of metalanguage is often situated in stylization, but also in other aspects of ritual speech. We would like to explore the mechanisms by which the ritual speech becomes reflexive and the effects these processes yield in interactions among the participants of a particular ritual event. Can the ethnographer, by studying the words and grammatical structures used in ritual, learn things about ritual that otherwise would be impossible to discern?

In this workshop we encourage discussion of these and other aspects of ritual. Our hope is to open a theoretically and empirically-informed discussion of the social, cultural and linguistic bases of the ritualized word.

Image credits: Nahual by César Núñez

L’équipe ANR “Art • Rituel • Mémoire” vous invite à un débat autour de l’exposition La Fabrique des images (musée du quai Branly)

avec la participation notamment de Tim Ingold, Carlo Severi, Denis Vidal, Claude Imbert, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Thierry Dufrêne, Yolande Escande, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Giovanni Careri

et les commissaires de l’exposition, Philippe Descola et Anne-Christine Taylor

le 6 mai 2010, de 10h à 13h

à la Maison Suger (16-18, rue Suger. 75005 Paris).

Dans le cadre du séminaire “Anthropologie de la mémoire” de Carlo Severi,

Baptiste Gilles présentera une communication intitulée:

Cognition et représentation chimérique. Une nouvelle perspective.

le mercredi 5 mai 2010 de 14h à 16h au musée du quai Branly (salle de cours 2).

Dans le cadre du séminaire “Anthropologie de la mémoire” de Carlo Severi,

Charles Stépanoff (EPHE) présentera une communication intitulée

Le perspectivisme en question

le mercredi 31 mars 2010 de 14h à 16h au musée du quai Branly (salle de cours 2).

On peut télécharger l’article “Devouring Perspectives: On Cannibal Shamans in Siberia” sur son site (cliquez ici).

Throughout Siberia, shamans are suspected of ‘devouring’ other humans. This article, based on ethnographic literature about Siberian peoples and on fieldwork conducted in Tuva, examines different theoretical interpretations of this conception. A ‘perspectivist’ approach explains that shamans become cannibal because they see humans as prey animals. The paradoxes of this interpretation lead to a critical discussion of the philosophical premises of the perspectivist theory. Another approach is then proposed: Siberian traditions demonstrate two distinct understandings of the kinds of body connected with different pragmatic contexts. Legendary narratives elaborate a definition of the body by its position in an interaction. The logic of practices is ruled by distinctly more essentialist schemas. The theme of shamans’ cannibalism contributes convincingly to broader hypotheses about the internal properties of the shamanic bodies which are necessary to their ritual practices.

Paulina Alcocer & Johannes Neurath

Preuss’ philologic anthropology is situated between two radically different strands of humanist science: Seler’s Mexican Studies are based on positive archaeological and philological methods, limiting themselves to deciphering and the edition of primary sources. Usener’s comparative philology is defined as anthropology and its aim is the reconstruction of the whole spiritual and material life of a given people. During his lifetime Preuss was recognized as an ethnographer, but his contributions to theory have been rarely acknowledged. We want to point out that his originality is the transposition of German morphologic tradition to the study of ritual practice on an intermediate level between ethnographic particularism and then fashionable anthropological universalism.

Searching for an explanatory principle of religious conceptions, Preuss focussed on the comparative study of ritual expression and developed a set of theoretical tools –like and “magic mode of thinking”—which combine a genuine interest in native theories on the power of ritual enunciation and an appreciation of the transformative capacity of Amerindian deities. Many of his insights can be philosophically grounded in Humboldt’s Sprachdenken and in what is here called the Humboldtian tradition. At the same time we can discover their potential for contemporary debates in anthropology.

Preuss felt attracted to the field of Americanist studies because he perceived the possibility to trace back the ritual origins of drama. He documented rituals dealing with their own origin and featuring all kind of playful mimetic elements that coexist with complex cosmic symbolisms. It is in this field he had a brief encounter with Aby Warburg who published one of Preuss books in his series Vorträge aus der Bibliothek Warburg. The two scholars shared common influences (Usener) and many interests — above all, the conviction that the materiality of gesture and aesthetic expression is much more than an epiphenomenon or embellishment, but a necessity for the existence of culture. The Kreuzlingen lecture makes evident that Warburg actually was inspired by Preuss at developing his ideas on art.

PROGRAM AND READINGS

À l’occasion de la parution du livre d’Alfred Gell, L’art et ses agents. Une théorie anthropologique, traduction française d’Art & Agency. An anthropological theory (1998), aux Presses du réel, le département de la recherche du musée du quai Branly organise une présentation - débat en présence le Vendredi 12 juin 2009 à 18h au salon de lecture Jacques Kerchache du musée.

Il s’agira de discuter de l’actualité et des débats que le livre de Gell a contribué à soulever en anthropologie et en histoire de l’art. La discussion sera lancée par une brève introduction croisée d’un anthropologue (Olivier Allard, University of Cambridge) et d’un historien d’art (Philippe-Alain Michaud, Centre Pompidou). Seront également présents (liste non exhaustive) Maurice Bloch, Philippe Descola, Carlo Severi, Thierry Dufrêne, Ludovic Coupaye, Denis Vidal, Brigitte Derlon, Monique Jeudy-Ballini…

Quatrième de couverture :

L’art et ses agents, ouvrage posthume paru en 1998 sous le titre Art and agency, est sans doute l’une des anthropologies de l’art les plus singulières et les plus fécondes. Plutôt que de penser l’œuvre d’art en terme de beauté, Alfred Gell propose de la situer à l’intérieur d’un réseau de relations entre agents et patients qui manifestent une certaine agentivité (agency) par l’intermédiaire de l’œuvre. Cette théorie a une vocation universelle : il s’agit moins de relativiser le système occidental de l’esthétique que de se rendre sensible aux mécanismes de l’intentionnalité, des ignames décorés de Nouvelle-Guinée aux ready-made de Duchamp.

Pour universelle qu’elle soit, cette théorie demeure bien anthropologique : envisager l’œuvre d’art implique que l’on s’intéresse aux contextes de sa production et de sa circulation. C’est pourquoi Alfred Gell entend produire pour l’art ce que Marcel Mauss ou Claude Lévi-Strauss ont théorisé pour les systèmes de l’échange ou de la parenté. Empruntant à la linguistique d’Umberto Eco et à la sémiotique de C. S. Peirce (sans se plier à leurs principes interprétatifs), les termes qui entrent en jeu dans une combinatoire propre à l’objet d’art sont l’indice (l’objet lui-même), l’artiste, le destinataire et le prototype – le « réseau de l’art » désignant l’ensemble des relations qui font qu’un objet d’art est reconnu comme tel par les différents acteurs sociaux.

Les attitudes que nous avons face à ces objets doivent être comprises en les rapprochant des systèmes de causalité propres à la sorcellerie : nous inférons à travers l’objet d’art la présence d’une personne disséminée. Cette théorie déplace doublement les termes de l’esthétique occidentale (dont le concept de style) car il s’agit non seulement d’abolir les frontières théoriques entre l’art « ethnographique » des musées et celui, bien vivant, qui est produit et circule dans les sociétés, mais aussi de trouver la trame cognitive commune à La Joconde et aux proues de navires mélanésiens. L’objet d’art, dans toute culture, a un certain pouvoir de fascination, qu’on ne peut comprendre qu’en saisissant l’ensemble des interactions sociales qui président à son émergence.