Mythe et chant rituel chez les Sharanahua

Déléage, Pierre

doi:10.4000/ateliers.8566

Cited by 18 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The use of psychedelics to build or reinforce social connectedness and cohesion has long been observed by anthropologists ( Harner, 1973 ; Furst, 1976 ; Dobkin de Rios, 1984 ). Among indigenous groups of the Western Amazon, ayahuasca 1 is for instance mobilized during shamanic initiation or rites of passage to enable participants to have culturally prescribed experiences, such as encounters with culturally postulated supernatural beings ( Harner, 1972 ; Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1972 ; Kensinger, 1973 ; Descola, 1996 ; Déléage, 2009 ). The properties of so-called “hallucinogenic” or “psychedelic” substances 2 indeed make them strong supports of social affiliation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychedelics as Tools for Belief Transmission. Set, Setting, Suggestibility, and Persuasion in the Ritual Use of Hallucinogens

Dupuis

2021

Front. Psychol.

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The use of psychedelics in the collective rituals of numerous indigenous groups suggests that these substances are powerful catalysts of social affiliation, enculturation, and belief transmission. This feature has recently been highlighted as part of the renewed interest in psychedelics in Euro-American societies, and seen as a previously underestimated vector of their therapeutic properties. The property of psychedelics to increase feelings of collective belonging and transmission of specific cultural values or beliefs raise, however, complex ethical questions in the context of the globalization of these substances. In the past decades, this property has been perceived as problematic by anticult movements and public authorities of some European countries, claiming that these substances could be used for “mental manipulation.” Despite the fact that this notion has been widely criticized by the scientific community, alternative perspectives on how psychedelic experience supports enculturation and social affiliation have been yet little explored. Beyond the political issues that underlie it, the re-emergence of the concept of “psychedelic brainwashing” can then be read as the consequence of the fact that the dynamic through which psychedelic experience supports persuasion is still poorly understood. Beyond the unscientific and politically controversed notion of brainwashing, how to think the role of psychedelics in the dynamics of transmission of belief and its ethical stakes? Drawing on data collected in a shamanic center in the Peruvian Amazon, this article addresses this question through an ethnographic case-study. Proposing the state of hypersuggestibility induced by psychedelics as the main factor making the substances powerful tools for belief transmission, I show that it is also paradoxically in its capacity to produce doubt, ambivalence, and reflexivity that psychedelics support enculturation. I argue that, far from the brainwashing model, this dynamic is giving a central place to the agency of the recipient, showing that it is ultimately on the recipient’s efforts to test the object of belief through an experiential verification process that the dynamic of psychedelic enculturation relies on. Finally, I explore the permanence and the conditions of sustainability of the social affiliation emerging from these practices and outline the ethical stakes of these observations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychedelics as Tools for Belief Transmission. Set, Setting, Suggestibility, and Persuasion in the Ritual Use of Hallucinogens

Dupuis

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…Mythic narratives make extensive use of the reported evidential mah and/or the assumed evidential ‐ ni‐ . As seen in (2) (see also 5 below), the shaman contrasts the evidential‐marked recounting of the Ancestors’ mythical canoe voyage (bolded transcription) with his own metaphysical retracing of the Ancestors’ journey, which are registered as directly and visually witnessed by the absence of any overt evidential marking (see also Déléage ) . His personal authority is further emphasized by the use of nóha’ ‘I say!’.…”

Section: Artistry and Actionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Hup bi'id ɨd: Shamanic incantation at the nexus of language and culture

Epps

Ramos

2019

J Linguistic Anthropol

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In this paper, we explore the genre of shamanic incantation (bi'id ɨd) among the Hup people of the northwest Amazon. We consider the artistic features that characterize bi'id ɨd as both verbal art and powerful shamanic action – most notably the intersecting layers of parallelism, the leveraging of metaphor from both literal and figurative perspectives, and the strategic use of evidentials. We also consider the astonishingly complex taxonomy and cosmography the genre embodies, with its ontological classification of the plants, animals, and other beings within the diverse environments of the Hup world (rivercourse, forest, sky, water, etc.). As we lay out here, Hup bi'id ɨd provides an example par excellence of Sherzer's conception of discourse as the nexus of language and culture, and an illustration of the fact that a rich understanding of language and culture must make reference to both together.

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“…That said, as the same narrative content is often shared by different sorts of discursive genres, one might say that they mutually stabilize one another at the level of content. So the Wayana's kalawu chants contain precise descriptions of numerous initiation ritual sequences and sections of myths, while the Sharanahua's coshoiti chants sometimes incorporate whole myths (Déléage 2010a) or detailed descriptions of plants and animals drawn from everyday knowledge. Alleluia songs, meanwhile, relay the message of a late-nineteenth-century Macuxi prophet.…”

Section: Ritual Chantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an Epidemiology of Ritual Chants

Déléage

2020

Social Analysis

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This article develops an epidemiological approach to the analysis of ritual discourse, comparing three distinct genres of Amazonian ritual chants: Wayana, Sharanahua, and Ingarikó. The aim is not to identify the inherent properties of chants, nor to establish ideal types of ritual context (initiation, shamanism, prophetism), but to analyze the different factors affecting the stabilization of the heterogeneous elements of ritual traditions. First, I identify the different procedures (order transfer, parallelism, intersemioticity, and inscription) that stabilize content. Then, assuming that the spread of ritual chants depends on an institutional apparatus, I explore the chants’ rules of distribution and the types of legitimizing authority involved. Finally, I show how the combined analysis of these different factors offers us a new way of understanding ritual innovation.

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Mythe et chant rituel chez les Sharanahua

Cited by 18 publications

References 10 publications

Psychedelics as Tools for Belief Transmission. Set, Setting, Suggestibility, and Persuasion in the Ritual Use of Hallucinogens

Psychedelics as Tools for Belief Transmission. Set, Setting, Suggestibility, and Persuasion in the Ritual Use of Hallucinogens

Hup bi'id ɨd: Shamanic incantation at the nexus of language and culture

Toward an Epidemiology of Ritual Chants

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