Contenu du sommaire : Les morts utiles

It is not unusual nowadays to hear of people telling us that individuals who had been close to them have helped them after death. These people may have told them what to do when they were faced with difficulties, comforted them, sent them messages of reassurance or even have given them advice. We find this kind of phenomenon in a remarkable number of cultures throughout the world. In this way then it is possible for the dead to continue to help and to engage in fruitful post mortem careers which enrich the lives of living people who may have been close to them and in some cases of strangers who can become the channels for this unexpected help. In this way vocations may be created, whether these be those of the departed or those who benefit from the received guidance acting either as experts or merely as helpers. These post mortem destinies do not simply follow from the realisation of such a vocation. All sorts of careers are open to the dead, whether these result from their own free will or not. They are called upon to participate in exchanges of services or of goods; they may be asked to reorganise solidarities. Sometimes the dead may even be expected to participate in political projects.

Death is often talked of in terms of a frontier. This paper looks at some ways of expressing this (re)definition and shows that these are far from straight forward. From the 1950's onward the appearance of new technologies leading to innovative medical practices and the desire to challenge traditional medical ethics resulted, first of all, in a scientific approach to the problem. The invention by the committee of the Harvard Medical School of “cerebral death” in 1968 result from these developments. Paradoxically, however, it is the development of medical knowledge itself which led to making the new definition a source of controversy. The ethical of the innovations implications could at last be clear. Was this enough?

Among the Warao of the Orinoco Delta, in Venezuela, dead people hardly exist save and except as objects of grief. However, the sorrow they evoke must not only be overcome, but can also be actively sought by the Warao, in some specific circumstances. Funerary laments in front of the corpse, and the celebration of the Day of the Dead in cemeteries, represent the contexts that cause the living to experience deep sadness and distress, which they display through their crying. This paper shows how the Warao make use of such emotional experiences for moral ends: the grief caused by the dead (and by the absent) enables them to prove their morality and to justify themselves ethically, by revealing their attachment to the living, and exhibiting their regret not to have been able to escape the unsolvable dilemmas and the unavoidable exclusions that constitute social life. This sorrow is also constantly anticipated, so that the living often also appear as potential dead people: vowing to cry when someone dies is the most efficacious means to convince one's interlocutors of a flawless affection.

This paper concerns the redistribution of benefits which accrue from dealing with the dead, whether these be material or symbolic, following the decision by the Catholic Church of Dahomey in southern Benin to revise the historic compromise that was in place until very recently and which enabled the combination of catholic and lineage funerals. The author examines the consequences of the institutional radicalisation of the Church from different points of view. He looks at this in terms of the divisions within families which this initiative has created and also of the creation of new and as yet unstable compromises which the change has required of the different parties involved in the organisation of funerals. The paper pays particular attention to the different ways in which parties might benefit from the dead.

How does one create the useful dead in France today and what is the source of their utility? The study is based on interviews with people who bear witness to what are sometimes difficult relationships with dead persons and the ways they have attempted to modify these. Having first explored the specificity of the ways the dead have manifested themselves to the living the paper examines the practical steps taken in order to answer to what was understood to be their requests. The relation can take the form of reciprocal practices of worry and care which involve the association of human and non-human mediators. As the dead person assumes their new function better, whether this is as a founding ancestor, as a mediator or in other ways, the living also discover a new ability to live with a more confident personal or genealogical identity.

Historians are people who rarely contribute to the continued vitality of the beliefs they study. Since the 1970's they have written a lot about purgatory, the third place in the catholic beyond. This is situated in between hell and paradise. The belief was the basis of a very popular cult which peaked in popularity in three different periods, one at the end of the Middle Ages, another in the seventeenth and a third in the nineteenth century. The dogma and the belief in purgatory have thus for long periods powerfully structured the relation to the dead in catholic cultures and have given these a particular “usefulness” whether this concerns material, institutional, pastoral or anthropological aspects. The paper attempts to explore these issues.

The paleros are practitioners of the Afro-Cuban initiation cult Palo Monte. They are greatly renowned throughout Cuba for their magical skills. They are called upon to deal with the problems of life amongst which affairs of the heart take pride of place. These are such matters as how to seduce a man, how to prevent a spouse committing adultery and how to stop separations occurring. In order to do these things the paleros call upon their nfumbus. These are all powerful dead who they have tamed. This paper deals with their involvement in love relationships and shows that things are very different from the point of view of the occasional clients of Palo Monte and from that of the paleros themselves. For the former the dead are simply impersonal tools to be used in love relationships, but for the latter they are intentional agents with whom one must negotiate and accommodate at every moment of one's love life whether this for better or worse.

“Home funerals” are a small, grassroots North American movement in which the dead body is cared for at home by friends and family rather than in a funeral home by professionals. This paper argues that home funeral practice offers a generative view of the tension between the body as biological and social construction, matter and meaning, object and subject. In home funerals, the dead body is enacted as possessing a fading spark of agency and subjectivity, animating the dead against the grain of medical and scientific conceptions of the corpse as inert object. Home funerals provocatively engage questions of the forms of care and affective attachment available between the living and the dead.

When somebody dies in Mongolia it is customary to make a funerary portrait of the deceased based on an identity card photograph which is then enlarged, coloured and touched up. Such a portrait is used during the funeral and is then placed near religious images close to the hearth of the house where the deceased lived before his, or her, death. These portraits are a kind of double of the dead via which the deceased can receive offerings from close kins during the period of mourning and afterwards. Photographs have an indexical and iconic value which derives from the fact that they are both a trace of the deceased and that they resemble them. In Mongolia as elsewhere this gives them the magical power of reaching a person who is either far away or absent. In touching up the portraits of dead relatives the Mongols seem to go further in such magical uses of photography. When they retouch the image they are not only creating a support for their relation to the dead but they also seem to give themselves the means of transforming them.

It is argued that is not enough to define the meaning of “naturalism” from an anthropological perspective by taking only in consideration the ontological contrasts between different cultures and societies. Rather, one should acknowledge the fact that such categories are not only problematic but also currently debated in our own society. We intend then to show in this article that some of the main questions —at the core of the anthropological debate in this domain today— are questioned today in robotics, both from a theoretical and from a pragmatic point of view. By studying the nature of the interaction between the visitors of a museum and an humanoid robot (designed by ourselves and by other roboticists), one may then find, we believe, new ways of approaching the question of naturalism from an ethnographic perspective and from an anthropological one.

The basketball “made in USA” is the standard of reference for a large number of young basketball players in today's Parisian suburbs. Some of these youngsters re-appropriate the codes of the “hip-hop ball” to build for themselves a form of hybrid identity with cultural attributes inspired by Afro-American culture but appropriated to their social environment. The research is based on a five year ethnographic study in the heartlands of basketball in Île-de-France. It aims to capture the cultural and identity issues which create and determine the new modalities of this suburban identity. In conclusion, how and why these young people from working-class areas are so much turned towards the United States of America?