Contenu du sommaire : Images visionnaires

In the debate between Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Wasson couple, Claude Lévi-Strauss presents the hallucinogenic experience as strictly informed by culture. Although this thesis is widely shared by anthropologists, they have remained silent on how shared representations of a social group structure the effect of hallucinogens. This article aims to outline some ideas to shed light on the nature of this operation, which I propose to refer to as the “socialization of hallucinations”. To this end, I rely on ethnographic data collected in Takiwasi, one of the main shamanic centres in the Peruvian Amazon, which offers to an international clientele practices inspired by the region's Métis shamanism, as the ritualized use of the psychotropic brew ayahuasca. The stereotypical nature of the visual hallucinations reported by the participants in these practices appears to be the result of a progressive learning process, the driving forces of which I am trying to analyse here. I thus show that the discursive and pragmatic interactions framing the consumption of hallucinogen gradually lead to the shaping of expectations and the education of the participant's attention, whose visionary experience is thus organized according to the schemes proposed by the social group.

What order of reality can be attributed to visionary images obtained without psychotropic intake? In which ways does the production of artifacts shape visionary experiences? What are the intersections between the seen and the believed? The ethnographical focus of this article is grisi siknis (GS), a hallucinatory trance seizure perceived by the Miskitos of Nicaragua as a contagious disease. Grisi siknis contagion is produced by exposure to its images, whether they are evoked during the trance or represented on a material support. By adopting an experimental methodology, I studied the transformation of grisi siknis visions into graphic representations. The practice of drawing has been interpreted as a therapy by my interlocutors. Far from being unanimated representations, grisi siknis-induced drawings are living interfaces characterized by a differential ontology, as the object of representation can be perceived as existent by the observer while it ceases to exist for the author. Visionaries images, thus, become spaces of Self-reconfiguration, where the boundaries between subjective consciousness and the external world are constantly renegotiated. By the notion of orchestrated disruption of expectations, this article proposes a model of the interactional, image-mediated shaping of the Self.

This article deals with the “mastery” of hallucinations that matsigenka shamans exert by means of sound symbols during the ritual ingestion of psychotropic drugs. During the ritual, the shaman performs songs whose semantics remain elliptic to the non-initiated. As a result, listeners elicit that communication between the shaman and the invisible spirits is underway. To this end the poetics of these songs, called marentakantsi, combine symbolically codified utterances and words supposed to evoke hallucinated forms. However, the iconicity of the songs does not limit itself to induce the representation of an extraordinary communication, but also helps the shaman to master the forms and sounds that occurred during his intoxication. The poetics of the songs to which these words belong is one of the devices used by shamans to perform the ritual action. To better grasp the public and private effectiveness of the shamanic mastery called iragaveane, I will analyze the sound symbols in the light of their relationship to other ritual devices such as the graphic repertory and the redefinition of space in cosmographic terms.

Visionary experiences play a major part in Chinese Buddhism by contributing to the quest for Enlightenment. They often involve using images portraying deities that devotees perceive as alive and able to perform miracles. Such images are incorporated into rituals and often play a key role in mythological narratives by which buddhist's conceptions on how to distinguish between the human and the divine, the phenomenal and the supernatural, are shaped and spread. By focusing on two statues of the Putuoshan island (Zhoushan archipelago, Zhejiang province), a major place of Chinese Buddhism since the 10th century visited by many thousands of visitors coming from different Asian countries to worship Guanyin, the famous bodhisattva of compassion, this article explores the ways in which images participate to the apparition of the divine. Starting from the viewpoint of pilgrims, I analyse how they are led to see Guanyin through icons whose efficiency comes from both their location in Putuoshan, and their qualities, the latest beeing defined in relation to the equivocal Chinese Buddhist notion of visible.

In this article, resolutely descriptive, it is a question of exposing visions of geniuses collected in Burkinabè lobi country near a former diviner, today planter in Ivory Coast. These visions are no more than a series of drawings or graphic scenes. The heuristic added value of Diniate Pooda's drawings lies in this ethno-projective approach rooted in a visual anthropology of these geniuses never put into contextual images in the writings of Africanist anthropologists. The requested exercise is like a graphic challenge where the author is the image and speech carrier of these non-humans.Disturbing perceptions attest to effects of presence. A human « pulls » on an animal, but the ball does not reach him because a genius rides him in amazon. His torso faces the human while his feet go in the opposite direction. Mental images of these confusing « body techniques » circulate and they are embodied by this methodological device where the observer makes the graphic experience of the discomfort felt by those who rub shoulders with the geniuses without seeing them.Marrying the narrative point of view of Diniate Pooda participates in this company of graphic unveiling of geniuses seized in action against humans despoiling their relatives (bush animals, forest plants or gold). The drawn image is a destabilizing vision. It hurts such a revelation with accents of mise en abyme.

Do hallucinogenic experiences determine cultural contents, or alternatively, does culture determine the contents of hallucinogenic experiences? Some authors have championed the neuropharmacological determinism thesis while others have endorsed the cultural determinism thesis. Both theses have important weaknesses: they are based on the study of a restricted number of ethnographic cases (anthropological comparativism is missing) and they are based on the study of a restricted number of hallucinogenic substances (neuropharmacological comparativism is missing). I will champion a third position: weak and plural neuropharmacological determinism. After having identified different classes of hallucinogens and pinpointed their mechanisms of action and their respective psychological effects, I examine the way rituals are distinctively shaped by neuropharmacological determinisms. Datura-based rituals (i. e., anticholinergic rituals) of North American are thus compared to ayahuasca-based rituals (i. e., serotoninergic rituals) of Amazonia, and subsequently compared to Jivaro rituals of the Montaña involving the use of both anticholinergic and serotoninergic hallucinogens. In conclusion, it is shown that far from being always competitive, cultural and neuropharmacological factors often prove synergetic.

At the crossroads of psychic sciences, physics and medicine, the detection of auras has been the subject of many experiments since the end of the 19th century. This key component of clairvoyance among theosophists seems to have undergone a revival at the beginning of the 21st century in a completely different context, as a large number of devices to measure “bioenergies” and magnetic fields appeared, giving birth to a therapeutic market of “aura reading”. In the meantime, the invisible seems to have changed radically in consistency. It is now riddled with waves of all kinds and radioactivity has emerged as a mainstream paradigm to read our relationship to the environment. The notion of aura is now commonly applied in various “energy” rebalancing therapies (geopathy, geobiology, etc.) that aim to act, beyond people, on the components of the environment and to build viable environments. Is it the sign of a new vital sensitivity or the constitution of a peculiar hallucinatory pact, linking humans, machines and the environment? The complexity of the issues raised by these detection practices beyond the limits of optics will be addressed here from a case in particular, that of an Indian engineer who worked for more than thirty years at the Department of Atomic Energy. In the 1990s, this engineer developed a device he named Universal Aura Scanner, an improved version of a dowsing device he had designed, the Hydro Scanner, to identify aquifer zones. The Universal Scanner was intended to measure the “auric” frequencies, the emanations of any object (living or inanimate) and their magnetic interactions. His research, he said, went far beyond that of the Russian engineer Semyon Kirlian on electro-photography (dating back to the late 1930s) and would have far greater ecological consequences, as it would be possible for anyone to measure the energy transfers that surround us and thus to detect what is happening in the lower layers (or higher spheres) of reality.

Visions produced after consuming the psychotropic plant iboga have not led to significant iconographic representations produced in the public space in Gabon. First, this article explores several possible explanations for this scarceness in imagery among which: the multitude of different spiritual influences and chapels given the absence of a unified Bwiti church in Gabon; the culture of secrecy concerning iboga visions; the iconographic focus on (tangible) cult artefacts rather than on (intangible) visions; identity and community reappropriations targeting a restricted, international public; and the recent inclusion of iboga and its uses, as per Bwiti spiritual practices, in the global market of shamanism. Second, this article examines the different representative matrices that structure an imaginary museum of “plant allies” and the types of generally audiovisual productions that constitute it and feed these matrices. Finally, based on interviews, this article will show how iboga visions are engendered, envisioned, and invested in Bwiti's new ritual frameworks today in Europe.

Based on several ethnographic fieldworks undertaken in Australia, this essay investigates the relationship between dream revelations and their visual manifestations in the artworks of Australian indigenous artist, Rover Thomas. In the mid-1970s, Thomas initiated a major cultural and artistic renewal throughout North-West Australia. His ochre paintings, on wooden boards or canvas, represent the imprints of totemic ancestors within the landscape, as well as the impact of colonial events in these very same places. I describe the series of dream revelations and visions at the origin of this new art form as reminiscent of a pre-existing past where mythical and historical events are entangled. Recollection of memories is not an individualised process, it occurs via the spirits of the dead and encompasses a large collective of non-humans: spirits, totemic beings, animals, plants, minerals, etc. all bound in the same becoming. This temporal construction is analysed through the ethnographic study of Rover Thomas' series of revelations and making of the Gurirr Gurirr balga ceremony. The paintings originating from the ceremony materialised Thomas' visions and expose a web of connections between memory, event and landscape.

The idea of vision does not easily lend itself to delimitation, and the authors hesitate to define with a single term a field of experiences that, according to context, has different meanings and social uses. This work considers a ritual song recorded in the vicinity of a village on the Dogon plateaux (Mali) during a treatment that was being carried out by one of the most celebrated healers in the region. The structure of the song underlines how place-names, metaphor and synecdoche generate an intense imaginative activity in those taking part, designed to re-evoke past events and establish feelings of belonging and solidarity. In analysing the enunciative and narrative features of the text, the work aims to question the nature of the symbolic effectiveness, which is created by various concurrent factors, each of which is equally decisive: the evocation of a social and moral landscape marked by crisis, the “déclenchement de l'agressivité” (Favret-Saada), the form itself of the ritual utterance (Severi), the “dé-historicisation institutionnelle” (de Martino), but, above all, the production of a “counter-memory” and of a particular form of historical consciousness mediated by the images evoked. The value of the ritual considered here is accentuated by the fact that it takes place in a context of violence, inside which the healer perpetuates references to divinities or recourse to healing systems that are severely repressed in the present religious context.

The Huichol Indians of Mexico are famous for their consumption of a psychotropic cactus, the peyote, and for their yarn paintings. The symbolic content of these pieces is often considered as an expression of the hallucinatory vision that its author would have had. Yet, by comparing historical evidence of the use of peyote with a contemporary yarn painting, one realizes that these practices reflect two opposite concerns: prophetic and “archaic”. The collective rites of absorption of peyote occurred formerly in hunting or warlike contexts; nowadays, the making of yarn paintings is an individual and commercial activity detached from the traditional social organization. Thus, to understand the Huichol hallucinogenic experience, I will rather question the indigenous concept of “vision”, or nierika, in the light of some artifacts designated by this name : the ancient hunting net and its miniature reproduction (also called kaunari, “cord”), as well as the skin of the deer's face fixed on a ceremonial stick. The examination of the material supports of the visions will continue through the example of a story about the metamorphosis of the stick into a “person”. The analysis of the exchange sequence of this object, during a ritual interaction called kaunari, should reinforce the idea of a connection between “vision” and “capture”, and revive the original purpose of the use of peyote, since the donor has access to a faculty of clairvoyance.