Contenu du sommaire : Reconfigurer le vivant

The anthropology of life considers the theories of life as two types of technical activities. Interactions with living beings rely on inferences regarding the functioning of organisms, while objects belonging to material culture or technical processes can serve as analogies to represent vital processes, for example when digestion is compared to a cooking operation or the body to a machine. Bringing these two dynamics together, the transformation of organisms into artefacts is another field for investigating conceptions of life, particularly in ritual contexts. The challenge is to understand the articulation between a metonymic logic, which poses the material continuity between the vitality of a living being and that of an object, and a metaphorical logic which establishes links of similarity between the forms given to biomaterials and living beings. Beyond the analysis of figuration, the investigation will gain value in exploring the processes implemented to configure and reconfigure the living.

Like animals trees are often used in ritual practice in different parts of the world. This needs explanation. While trees and humans are usually considered in some ways as being « alive » this does not lead always to the same classification. Scott Atran argues that the concept of being alive is innate in all humans that this needs no further explanation. Frank Keil on the basis of psychological work argues that the concept of being alive joins together a number of theories. The work of Susan Carey goes further : it argues that the different theories contained in the notion of being alive are separable and therefore not straightforwardly similar and that in every instance one theory may be stressed rather than others. Her work concerns the development of the notion of life, and she shows how children construct this notion in stages and with different emphases so that very young children and adults normally remain uncertain whether some categories of being are alive or not.

Drawing on classical ethnography and stories collected in Nunavut (Canadian Arctic) during several workshops on knowledge tranmission, I examine how Inuit conceive certain objects used for hunting. These objects give vitality or death. I argue that relational dynamics prevail over substantial dynamics, these two logics being co-present, however. In other words, the power of hunting objects derives less from the substances and materials that they are made of, or even from their own agency, than from their own circulation, and therefore from their intentionality, the gift and their exchanges that follow. The power of Inuit objects is activated as soon as they are received from a donor, beyond the intrinsic power of the materials that go into their composition. Bodily substances, in particular menstrual blood, occupy a unique place, causing death. Breath, meanwhile, produces vitality.

This article deals with the vitality of artifacts as conceived by Northwest Coast societies based on the study of two examples. The question of the living and animated object is approached through the qualities of materials, the study of the technical processes and ritual tasks that contribute to the emergence of living forms. It also examines the conditions of agency of artifacts as expressed in the relationships between humans and non humans. It concludes by addressing the question of biological vitality and transcendental vitality in the context of the transmission of privileges associated with artifacts.

This article deals with some ritual objects of Afro-Cuban religions that are considered to be alive : necklaces of the santería that « speak », dolls of spiritism that « smoke », drums of the Abakuá that « procreate », cauldrons of the palo monte that « think they are alive ». For the followers of these religions, these objects are more than mere representations of deities and spirits, but their true incarnations ; they are endowed with intentionality and capacity for action, but also with the properties and needs of living beings : thirst, hunger, warmth, growth, desires… The aim of this article is to examine the technical, material and ritual processes by which life comes to these artefacts. What actions, interactions and gestures are involved in the operating chain that transforms an assembly of inert materials into a living, active entity ? The study also focuses on the material composition of this artificial life and will try to reveal the intrinsic logics that attribute to certain substances and actions the capacity to generate life. Finally, it will look at the life of these objects in their « natural habitat ». We will see how their environment impacts their way of interacting with practitioners but also with other objects.

This article explores notions of temporality emerging from the ethnographic study of ritual woodcarving among Guna people from Panama. Drawing on Alfred Gell's concept of « time-maps » it argues that Guna woodcarving is a time-navigation tool that allows people to access manifold images of time through the qualities of these artefacts that acquire meaning through intersubjective relations. Ritual wooden figures give access to the deferred action of the time of origin by establishing synchronicity with human biographical time and with the time of their spirit owners. Woodcarving is therefore to be considered a material process that engages recursively with both historical knowledge and lived experience rendering them mutually meaningful, thereby bridging individual and collective time-sensitive processes.

The question of the agency and, consequently, the ontological status of ritual artefacts has stirred debates in anthropology for almost two decades, as have discussions on the notion of festish. The article aims to better grasp the latter notion through the analysis of Mande ethnographic data in a comparative perspective. It shows that fetishes are conceptualized by « their humans » as gods-plants that are cultivated, and reproduce on the model of cuttings and whose appearance is similar to that of plants. However, the generic names used for them in Mande and many other African languages do not designate the reigns of nature or the botanical classes, but rather point to a category of matter conceived as acting and affecting several sensory registers. The critical return on this last category allows us to better grasp fetishes as (living) matter-gods, organic and active, shapeless and in constant formation, for this very reasons perceived as divine.

In the ancient funerary rites of New Ireland (Melanesia) a « reconfiguration of the living » occured when the preserved skull of the deceased was associated for a few hours with a wooden sculpture (malanggan) made during the ceremony and later on (then instead of later on) destroyed. The search for the meaning of this practice leads to the discovery of multiple ritual analogies between human bodies and artifacts in all the rites of the « life cycle », people being treated as sculptures and funerary sculptures as persons (where people are assimilated to sculptures, while funerary sculptures are treated as persons). From birth to death, through female and male initiation, these rites operate at key moments in the articulation of the vital spiritual principle and the human body, when the person's relatives must contribute to making, strengthening (reinforcing) or undoing this association. As an incarnation of a supernatural presence, the funerary sculpture through which the birth and death of the person is replayed is also conceived as a mental image that temporarily materializes in a wooden body and survives its destruction by remaining in the memory of men. The reconfiguration of the human at work in the assemblage of the sculpture and the relic happened at the very moment when the reconfiguration (or reproduction) of society is ensured by the multiple transfers of material and immaterial goods carried out during funeral rites, including the copyrights of Malanggan sculptures.

If there is one technique that is systematically confronted with the difficulties and miracles of reconfiguration, it is taxidermy. What do we make with what has been alive, associating it closely with chemical compounds, metals, glass, wood, etc. ? How does the collection of specimens become an operator of reconnection through the intervention of artists in the natural history museum ? What are these new challenges when species are disappearing in a frightening way and ecosystems are disappearing without having time to adapt ? As we can see, the questions raised by taxidermy and its processes affect our ways of making the world, the division of knowledge, the renewal of perspectives. They invite us to a major reconfiguration of which the re-shaping of bodies becomes a pretext.