Study of myth and anthropology of the body

Abstract

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.