Myth and body may seem rather independent concepts but they are, in fact, deeply interrelated. In my master's degree thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), I tried to identify in Northern Paiute subsistence and rituals some emic gestures that appeared regularly in the historical literature such as scratching, exemplified by the digging-stick and the scratching stick, and associated to femininity; and piercing, the male technique for hunting. The current step of my research is to continue discerning emic techniques and gestures in the Northern Paiute myths previously recorded, but also to conduct fieldwork and collect more stories. My focus on gestures implies an analysis of the concept of body I will try to sketch out in this paper.
This paper examines “Coyote, Whirlwind, and Ravine,” a long tale told in the Northern Paiute language by McDermitt storyteller Pete Snapp and recorded by folklorist Sven Liljeblad in the early 1960’s. It weaves in traditional episodes of western Numic folklore to narrate the history of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone community as witnessed by an elder born shortly after the beginning of the colonization of this area of the Northwestern Great Basin in the western United States. This paper explores how the bodies of certain characters who emanate from landscape, mainly monsters, are tools for the narrative expression of social change, for the telling of history, and the expression of Indigenous spiritual frameworks. It places the experience of the Indigenous social body, embodied by Coyote, through the grinds of the ultra-material Ravine and confronts it to ethereal nefarious powers. Poetics of materiality applied to the body of Coyote operate a structural transformation. Mythical turmoil expresses social experiences and change in the colonial context, but also makes manifest the transformation of the social body that result in the contemporary form of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone community.
Cette monographie aborde brillamment un sujet relativement nouveau dans la littérature anthropologique et géographique française que le rodéo américain, tout en se situant dans le champ maintenant classique de l'anthropologie des relations hommes-animaux. L'expertise et l'érudition des auteurs en matière de jeux d'arène et d'histoire des représentations de l'ouest américain permettent au lecteur une plongée dans la Californie taurine, facilitée par l'élégance de leur style.
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