Journée d'étude "Images visionnaires. Anthropologie de l'art visuel des hallucinations". 3 Octobre 2017, Collège de France [Programme Complet] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Images Visionnaires. Anthropologie de l'art visuel des hallucinations [2019]
Cahiers d'Anthropologie Sociale 17, L'Herne , 2019
Visionary images, whether induced by the ingestion of psychotropic substances, elicited by ritual devices or captured during a perceptual overflow, are true agents of social life. This volume explores, from a comparative perspective, the nature of the relationship between these images and the cultures that inspire them or are inspired by them. Modes of attribution of agentivity, ontological status of images, processes of constitution of identities and collectives, relations between figuration, memory and present are all themes to which the anthropological study of visionary images offers a significant contribution. Approaching these images in the light of criticism of the great sharing between nature and culture, this volume pays particular attention to the intersection of biological and social processes as well as to the transformations taking place in the global panorama of image circulation.
2019
"Voices and visions" Crossed views on hallucinations Symposium organized by David Dupuis (Durham University/Hearing the voice) and Mathieu Frèrejouan (Paris I-Sorbonne University) Ecole Normale Supérieure 45 rue d'Ulm, Paris From 24 to 26 October 2019 When we describe as hallucination what others say "hear" or "see", we immediately put ourselves in the medical perspective, which since the advent of psychiatry, has understood this phenomenon as a perception disorder (Esquirol, 1817). While this concept has certainly evolved since the 19th century, we are still inclined to approach the hallucinatory phenomenon from what it lacks: objectivity, exteriority, reality. It is still today as a psychopathological fact that hallucination is first and foremost studied, at the risk of limiting its analysis to the individual level. In contrast, the terms of voices and visions, which refer in the West to a period before the advent of psychiatry, have continuously been mobilized in order to qualify the hallucinatory phenomenon outside a psychopathological perspective (Shanon, 2002), or even in reaction to any form of pathologization (Romme & Escher, 1993). Beyond a simple question of vocabulary, looking at "voices" and "visions" is therefore an attempt to free oneself from the medical tradition to approach from other perspectives what the subject says "hear" or "see". This "other discourse" has also been supported by historical, anthropological and philosophical approaches, which have seen it as something other than a "perception without object". Without denying the methodological divisions that traditionally distinguish these disciplines, these days aim to bring them together around their common desire to approach voices and visions beyond the medical perspective. Thus, from a comparative perspective, it will be necessary to document the different modes of "socialization of hallucinations" (Dupuis, 2019) - i.e. the vectors by which collectives inform their content, their symbolic function and the relationship that is maintained with them - in order to identify and question the relationships that human societies have with hallucinations and what the latter reveal to us of the societies that implement them. First of all, historians must have emphasized the institutional, theological or aesthetic functions that voices and visions may have played at different times, but also to have proposed another history of psychiatry and psychology (Carroy, 2012) which, far from being limited to the pathogenesis of hallucinations, explores its relationship with dreams (Maury, 1861) or psychotropic substances (Moreau de Tours, 1845). Sociology and anthropology have shown that, far from being reducible to the biological and psychological dimensions to which the medical perspective is confined, "voices" and "visions" constitute true social facts (Durkheim, 1894). The meaning and place attributed to them originate outside individuals, in collective ways of doing and thinking. In this perspective, hallucinations can be approached as the product of "techniques du corps" (Mauss, 1936) that reveal in a particularly prominent way the articulation between the individual and the collective. This desire to contextualize "voices" and "visions" can finally be found in contemporary philosophy which, after having long reduced hallucination to a sceptical problem - are our perceptions true? -now emphasizes that "what plays a role in the hallucination, as a general rule, is not the dubious truth of the perceived, but its reality" (Benoist, 2017). In this sense, returning to "voices" and "visions" means abandoning the traditional questions of the philosophy of perception, to question the way in which hallucinations participate in perceived reality through their epistemic (Gonzalez, 2004), aesthetic or pragmatic (Thomas & Leudar, 2000) functions. What place is given to "voices" and "visions" by the human societies across time and space? Through what techniques and for what purposes do collectives seek to induce, control or eliminate them? What does their treatment reveal about the social, symbolic, and economic infrastructures of a collective? Through which epistemic, aesthetic or pragmatic functions do they participate in the institution of a common reality? It is to these questions that these symposium will attempt to formulate answers, through a dialogue between anthropologists, historians and philosophers.
Bonini Baraldi, Filippo. 2018. « L’ethnologue, les images et les fantômes. Trois histoires de science-fiction tsigane et leurs implications pour l’anthropologie visuelle. » Ethnologie Française 172(4) : 715-728. DOI 10.3917/ethn.184.0715, 2018
Dans un village tsigane de Roumanie, les vidéos produites par un ethnologue, un réalisateur et un cognitiviste ont provoqué un mélange rocambolesque de rôles, ainsi qu’un renversement des genres cinématographiques. Loin d’être anecdotique, cet amalgame révèle une manière particulière de concevoir les catégories ontologiques de personne, de personne‑image (acteur), et de personne‑squelette (fantôme), fondée sur une ambiguïté persistante entre « être soi‑même » et « jouer un rôle ». Une ambiguïté qui s’efface dans des moments éphémères, quand la personne « vraie » se manifeste.
Dès 1960, l’artiste américain Robert Smithson s’intéresse à la question de la vision : pratiquant la peinture, il réalise des compositions centrées sur le motif de l’œil ouvert ; exposant à Rome, il s’émeut de la manière qu’ont les visiteurs de fixer son travail. Mais quand, quatre ans plus tard, il abandonne la peinture et réalise une série de dispositifs et de sculptures, son rapport à la vision se modifie radicalement. Si les peintures utilisaient l’œil comme motif iconographique, les sculptures seront de véritables démonstrations d’optique. Pour réaliser ses sculptures, Smithson s’inspire des ouvrages et revues scientifiques dont il est un fervent lecteur. Il s’informe sur les structures physiologiques, psychologiques ou culturelles de la vision et emprunte à des dispositifs optiques tels que le stéréoscope de Wheatstone, lequel lui fournit la structure de l’œuvre Enantiomorphic Chambers (1964), sorte de stéréoscope désaccordé travaillant à la mise en échec de la vision binoculaire. Car peut-on sereinement voir sa vue ? Smithson « opticien » répond par la négative et travaille à déconstruire la vision : s’il la sculpte, c’est pour pointer ses dysfonctionnements, déconstruire ses réflexes physiologiques et ses impensés culturels. « To see one’s sight means visible blindness » écrit Smithson, et cette sentence est tout aussi bien un manifeste : donner à voir la vision, c’est problématiser son fonctionnement et enrayer le supposé « naturel » dont elle relèverait. En analysant le corpus restreint des sculptures de 1964-1968, mais aussi les écrits et documents préparatoires mis au jour dans les archives de Robert Smithson, nous souhaitons analyser les enjeux épistémologiques et plastiques de cette « source optique » et la manière dont ils informent l’œuvre subséquente de Smithson.
Croisement de regards. La phénoménologie de M. Merleau-Ponty et art vidéo de Bill Viola
2008
Considérant avec le dernier Merleau-Ponty la phénoménologie plutôt comme un mouvement philosophique caractérisée par un réapprentissage du voir que comme un système de pensée récursivement fermé, Matos Dias nous parle du maintien de cette attitude dans les pratiques artistiques les plus contemporaines dans lesquelles sʼinscrit lʼart vidéo. Analysant en particulier des vidéos de Bill Viola (son fameux I do not know it is I am like), la philosophe portugaise signale lʼengagement phénoménologique dʼun artiste qui est toujours à la recherche de la spécificité de lʼunion de lʼêtre humain avec la nature, du voyeur et du vu.
Cahiers d'Anthropologie Sociale. Images Visionnaires, 2019
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 statements 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.