Art • Rituel • Mémoire

En collaboration avec l’Université de Cambridge et le projet ANR “Anthropologie de l’art: création, rituel, mémoire”, se tiendra les mercredi 16, jeudi 17 et vendredi 18 décembre à Cambridge un colloque intitulé:

“Figuring the invisible. An anthropology of uncanny encounters”

et organisé par Grégory Delaplace, Carlo Severi et Julien Bonhomme.

Vous trouverez toutes les informations concernant ce colloque en cliquant sur ce lien. En voici néanmoins un avant-goût :

The aim of this conference is to foster anthropological research on stories of encounters with ghosts, spirits and other invisible things. Ethnographers have long collected narratives of people’s encounters with souls or spirits, sudden and often most unexpected interactions with an otherwise invisible dimension of the world. These narratives of how the invisible might furtively become visible typically describe partial or uncanny interactions, which take witnesses out of the frame of their everyday life, and give them a glimpse of an occult aspect of their ordinary environment.

Recently, anthropological research on people’s encounters with the invisible has tended to develop in three different directions: ghosts, on the one hand, have been studied as facts of perception. Cognitive anthropologists, in particular, have given a new impetus to this field of research by drawing attention to the mental processes underlying the representations about supernatural entities. By doing so, they have shown to what extent the manifestation of ghosts and spirits comply or violate the intuitive expectations of the mind, and how this kind of situation would activate cognitive mechanisms shaped through evolutionary adaptations. On the other hand, invisible entities have been analysed as materialisations of sailliant –and almost always traumatic– events carried by collective memory. Ghosts, in this perspective, draw their significance from the social and historical context in which they are reported to appear. A third group of scholars has suggested to focus on the production of ritual objects and other kinds of images (including mental representations described in narratives), which may account for this kind of experience.

The purpose of this conference is to bring together these three trends of research in a single approach, by studying how perception and imagination meet within a specific encounter with the invisible. In this conference, the common ground for discussion will be based on ethnography and, as much as possible, on the narratives and the images themselves. Ghost stories and anecdotes of people’s encounters with spirits are indeed too often relegated to the background of scientific accounts. The participants of this conference will be encouraged to focus on specific narrated encounters with the invisible, as well as on the processes of generating images that account for this kind of experience. Discussing examples drawn from several societies, contributions will thus shed new light on people’s relationship with supposedly invisible beings, like ghosts and spirits, by analyzing their manifestations in their cognitive, social and aesthetical contexts.