“The Chinese believe in spirits”: belief and believing in the study of religion

A recent round of books, both popular and scholarly, reveal that as a society we are, once again, fascinated with the issue of belief. While the more popular books tend to adopt a fairly straightforward and uncomplicated notion of believing and then find major problems of rationality, the more scholarly books readily accept a type of rationality to beliefs while problematizing the act of believing in other, more involuted ways. Both types of argument remind the scholar of religion that the academic discipline of religious studies has not contributed much to this discussion for quite a while. As described in Rodney Needham\u27s 1972 work, Belief, Language and Experience, which was both a fulsome anthropological treatment of the problems and a cautionary tale for further studies, the concept of belief poses particular problems for comparative analysis since belief does not appear to be identifiable or similarly important in religions we want to compare and from which we want to abstract more general descriptions. Moreover, it is a commonplace that many of our assumptions about the centrality of belief in religion have emerged in a decidedly Christian context, making comparison a distortion of other religious views. Anthropological studies since Needham have tended to collapse belief into “culture,” which has worked well enough most of the time, but it not only avoids the explicit problem of why and how “beliefs” and “believing” become prominent in the way in which many people participate in a culture, it also retreats from the problem of various ways in which any one person may appropriate parts of the culture

A tradição não é mais o que era...

O artigo parte das reflexões de P. Boyer e de J. Pouillon para retomar o problema da tradição, indo além da experiência dos etnólogos para introduzir uma perspectiva histórica: da historicidade da tradição, à problemática do fazer a história da tradição. A noção de tradição é abordada por meio de um fio condutor que permite compreender o quanto a percepção moderna da história como mudança/ruptura cria a própria tradição, e o quanto as definições mais correntes ensejam equívocos, como o da conservação no tempo, o da mensagem cultural e o de um certo modo de transmissão

La mesure de l’excès

L’article met d’abord en évidence quelques-uns des problèmes soulevés par l’emploi de la notion d’interprétation, notamment celui de la relation entre activité d’interprétation et situation de compréhension. Il soutient ensuite que l’activité d’interprétation met bien en œuvre une psychologie dans la mesure où l’interprète a pour objectif de reconstruire les « motivations » (Max Weber) des auteurs des conduites étudiées. Enfin, sans soutenir la thèse absurde selon laquelle toutes les interprétations se vaudraient, il essaie d’expliquer, en faisant valoir le principe de contextualité, pourquoi il est impossible de tracer une frontière entre interprétation et surinterprétation : aucune motivation, repérée par l’interprète, ne saurait exister à l’état isolé. En d’autres termes, une conduite humaine, comme le rêve selon Freud, est, pour celui qui l’analyse en tout cas, surdéterminée ; elle ne saurait, par conséquent, avoir une signification unique, arrêtée par décret.The article exposes some of the problems raised by the use of the notion of interpretation, especially that of the relationship between the act of interpretation and the state of understanding. It then contends that the act of interpretation clearly uses psychology to the extent that the interpreter’s objective is the reconstruction of “motivations” (Max Weber) of authors whose behaviour is studied. Finally, without supporting the absurd thesis according to which all interpretations would have the same value, it tries to explain, by asserting the contextual principle, why it is impossible to draw a boundary line between interpretation and overinterpretation: no motivation, identified by the interpreter, could exist in an isolated condition. In other words, human behaviour, like the dream according to Freud, is for one who analyses it, in any case, overdetermined ; consequently, it would not know how to have a unique meaning, fixed by decree

D’aujourd’hui à avant-hier. Un évolutionnisme bien tempéré

fig. 1 Dessin du squelette masculin Sunghir I avec ses parures de dents et d’ivoire, paléolithique supérieur (environ 25000 ans avant J.-C) , in Otto N. Bader, « Sungir : inhumations paléolitiques » article écrit en russe publié dans Nikolai O. Bader (dir.) Posdnepaleolitischeskoje posselenije Sungir, Moscou, Nautschny Mir 1998 : 5-160, planche 1. DR. L’ouvrage d’Alain Testart, Avant l’histoire. L’évolution des sociétés de Lascaux à Carnac répond à une ambition qui n’est pas mince : reconst..

D’aujourd’hui à avant-hier. Un évolutionnisme bien tempéré

fig. 1 Dessin du squelette masculin Sunghir I avec ses parures de dents et d’ivoire, paléolithique supérieur (environ 25000 ans avant J.-C) , in Otto N. Bader, « Sungir : inhumations paléolitiques » article écrit en russe publié dans Nikolai O. Bader (dir.) Posdnepaleolitischeskoje posselenije Sungir, Moscou, Nautschny Mir 1998 : 5-160, planche 1. DR. L’ouvrage d’Alain Testart, Avant l’histoire. L’évolution des sociétés de Lascaux à Carnac répond à une ambition qui n’est pas mince : reconst..

Identité et identités

Je voudrais, avec et quelquefois contre Margarita Xanthakou, discuter certains aspects de son dernier ouvrage, Identités en souffrance. Rien, à vrai dire, ne m’y prédispose vraiment. Primo, je ne suis, ni de près ni de loin, un spécialiste de la Grèce contemporaine. Si les travaux anthropologiques qui lui sont consacrés ne me sont pas tous inconnus, je ne suis aucunement armé pour répondre aux questions suscitées par le sous-titre de ce livre, Une ethnologie de la Grèce : cette Grèce maniote ..

Les éleveurs et l'estive : pour une approche compréhensive des pratiques pastorales

International audienceCattle farmers and mountain summer pastures: a comprehensive approach to pastoral practices. In the Ariège department (French Pyrénées), the restructuring of mountain cattle farming and of pastoralism has brought about profound changes in the relations cattle farmers entertain with the high mountain pastureland. Gaining insight into the endogenous meaning of the practices of cattle breeders traditionally using these summer pastures allows the highlighting of the emergence and confrontation of two technical and symbolic bodies of references on the mountain. While the summer pastures remain the organizing and identitary principle for the mountain farmers who are the traditional "users" of the high mountain area, other "non-local" farmers from lower lying areas who practise short distance transhumance view these pastures as one among other economic opportunities. Strong attachment to customary rights, the sole guarantee for people's and animals' legitimacy to use the "high mountain", enables these high mountain farmers, even though a minority, to keep control over the management methods of grazing resources.Dans les Pyrénées ariégeoises, la restructuration de l'élevage de montagne et du pastoralisme est à l'origine d'une profonde modification des relations que les éleveurs entretiennent avec les territoires d'altitude. La compréhension du sens endogène des pratiques des éleveurs transhumants permet de mettre au jour l'émergence et la confrontation de deux référentiels techniques et symboliques sur la montagne. Alors que l'estive reste le principe organisateur et identitaire des éleveurs "usagers" de haute montagne, elle tend à être envisagée comme une opportunité économique parmi d'autres par les éleveurs "étrangers" pratiquant une transhumance de proximité. L'attachement aux droits d'usage, seuls garants de la légitimité des hommes et des bêtes sur la "montagne", permet alors aux premiers, même minoritaires, de garder le contrôle des modalités de gestion de la ressource pastorale

Among the PALMs1

Born out of the convergence of intellectual traditions and owning a borrowing capacity analogous to the one that engenders creole languages, the study of folklore, or folkloristics, claims the right to adapt and remodel political, psychological, and anthropological insights, not only for itself but for the humanities disciplines of philosophy, art, literature, and music (the “PALM” disciplines). Performance-based folkloristics looks like a new blend, or network, of elements from several of those. What looks like poaching, which is a common practice for folksong and folk narrative, can be examined in the PALM disciplines under names like intertextuality and plagiarism. Nation-oriented traditions of folklore study have convergence, borrowing, and remodeling in their history which are also discoverable in other disciplines. Linguistic and cultural creolization—what happens when people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds are forced together to learn from one another—lies at the center of folklore; its study opens paths for research in all humanities fields. The study of folklore, while remaining marginal in universities, is undergoing a self-transformation which should lead to the acceptance of its methods and findings in the PALM disciplines

V. Flanet, La maîtresse mort. Violence au Mexique

Lenclud Gérard. V. Flanet, La maîtresse mort. Violence au Mexique. In: Études rurales, n°95-96, 1984. La violence. pp. 213-216