A Socio-Cultural Study of the Ritual Practices of an Ancient Hunter-Gatherer Society and Its Shamans

Published by : Fondation culturelle Barbier-Mueller

Drawing on a rich array of oral, written and filmed ethnographic data, as well as on archives and agronomic, geographical and political details gathered in the course of multiple field trips, this socio-cultural study by anthropologist Adrien Viel offers us a comprehensive overview of Nepal’s Chepang community.

With every turn of the page, you’ll discover another fascinating evolution of Chepang shamanic techniques and rituals, as well as of the rites associated with the cycles of life, hunting and producing resources. Unfolding within the context of two centuries of Nepalese history, this exploration highlights the Chepang’s transition from a nomadic to a sedentary way of life.

L’article The Chepang of Nepal est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

Author : Jean-Pierre Jacob

192 pages, 4 maps, 39 colour pictures, 9 black and white illustrations.

Edited by the Fondation Culturelle Musée Barbier-Mueller and In Fine Editions d’art, 2022.

L’article Les Winye du Centre-Ouest Burkina Faso, Mort, mariage et naissance dans une société de la frontière est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

Edited by the Fondation Culturelle Musée Barbier-Mueller and Ides et Calendes Editions, 2020.

The aim of this essay is to acquaint people with the Kararaô, a group of Kayapo Indians in central Brazil, who in 2010 numbered only fifty-four, by focusing on their extremely complex history. The anthropologist Gustaaf Verswijver conducted three years of intensive research on the history of this little-known people. Although the Kararaô did not break away from the other Kayapo groups until the early 1930s, their history is composed of an uninterrupted series of splits and mergers, displacements to escape attacks and massacres, and the disastrous consequences of their increased contact with Brazilian society, which at times they themselves sought. This history not only reflects the Kararaô’s struggle for survival, it also attests to the Brazilian state’s inability to provide adequate assistance to them before the 1970s. Finally it shows the impunity of Brazilian caboclos (and their bosses), who set out to eliminate the indigenous peoples.
It is now urgent to take an interest in the Kararaô, in view of the many threats they face. One of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world was constructed near where they live, affecting their fisheries and creating pools of stagnant water conducive to waterborne diseases and malaria. In addition they suffer from deforestation and the illegal exploitation of their lands’ abundant natural resources. Over the last two decades they have succeeded in defending their forest, the source of life that supplies them with food and medicine. But the pressure is building . . .

L’article The Kararaô of Central Brazil est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

Edition: Fondation Culturelle Musée Barbier-Mueller and Ides & Calendes.

The world of the Kuya described in this book has in great part disappeared. In the last decade of the twenthieth century, deforestation, climate change and Christian missionaries’ instrusion into the region transformed the way of life of this welcoming people, proud of its traditions.

The Kuya belong to one of the smallest but also one of the least-known ethnic groups of Côte d’Ivoire. They speak a language that in 2001 was declared to be among the most threatened on the planet. This people of fewer than twenty thousand individuals had the misfortune of finding itself at the centre of the conflict zone that ravaged the country in 2002-2003 and then again in 2010-2011.

This account retraces the transformation of the traditional way of life and the rapid evolution of a forest society that has found itself caught in the grip of the war between the northern and the southern parts of the country, which has forced an entire population to adapt to a new an unstable situation.

Patiently, over forty-five years, the author has assembled field research, photojournalism, notes and regular correspondence with a Kuya interlocutor and friend, which is finally being published in this comprehensive overview.

L’article The Kuya of Côte d’Ivoire, A Forgotten People of The Forest est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

Published by the Fondation Culturelle Musée Barbier-Mueller.

On Jeju Island, located at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, jamnyo (women divers) meet in the early morning on the shore to enter the sea together. Fifteen days per month they carry out this ritual of free diving, risking their life, staying in the water for between four and seven hours to support their families.

Through the study of the kinship-exchange system (kwendang), and the community and value system of the jamnyo, the anthropologist Ok-Kyung Pak describes and analyses a society “centred on women” in which the women divers’ shamanic rituals for the sea goddess, who offers them her protection, coexist with the influence of the mainland’s neo-Confucianism. In addition, she traces the various steps leading to the formation of this social model promoting the protection of and the symbiosis with nature. This study is all the more relevant as the number of jamnyo divers is shrinking, due to industrial development and the oceans pollution.

L’article The Jamnyo of Jeju, The Women Divers of Korea and Neo-Confucianism, a Dual Mythology est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

How many Western collectors think only of Yaure art as an art de salon, placing one of their “ravishing” masks on a shelf, not considering that in a village the mask is so sacred that it is forbidden for any woman to see it—at the cost of her life?

The Yaure, a small ethnic group in the centre of Côte d’Ivoire, have created a unique art. All the neighbouring peoples attribute power and menace to animal masks covered in coagulated blood, but the Yaure confer the same sacredness and dread on refined human faces with virtuoso lines, which seem to have been chiselled by a goldsmith. These masks are charms. Giving material form to ambivalent deities—both benevolent and maleficent—they have the aim of beseeching them. The best way to win the gods’ favour? Invite them to the dance, enchant them, include them in choreographies that regulate their energy. It is during nocturnal ceremonies that the celebrations are the most grandiose, when the dancers, galvanized, twirl in the light of the torches. Mystic ecstasy restores a purifying sovereignty to the supernatural spirits that the masks are charged with symbolizing. Did not Nietzsche’s Zarathustra say: “I would only believe in a God who could dance”?

L’article The Yaure of Côte d’Ivoire, Make the Gods Dance est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

The south-eastern corner of South Sudan, the newest country in the world, used to be labelled the “Great Thirst”. It is a remote area marked by a low, and above all, unpredictable annual rainfall. Early Western explorers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rushed through the region from one water point to another, barely pausing to get to know its inhabitants. The Jiye, Toposa, Murle and Nyangatom continue to be relatively unknown, and although some NGOs started working in the area, little attention is paid to the cultural diversity and the social structure of these agro-pastoralist societies whose economy is mainly based upon a mixture of pastoralism and agriculture, whenever and wherever the latter is possible.

This book focuses on the Jiye people and their closest neighbours, the Toposa. The Jiye population is less than eight thousand, which makes it one of the smallest groups in that part of South Sudan. It is a particularly resilient society, which, over the two centuries of its existence, has survived periods of extreme droughts and famines, severe cattle diseases and periods of devastating raids by their more powerful neighbours. Not much has changed since then…

2015, 170 pages.

L’article The Jiye of South Sudan est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

The Na are known to ethnologists as “a society without fathers or husbands”. Their sexual custom is for the men to visit the women in their bedrooms at night. They do not marry. That, at least, is the conventional wisdom, though the modalities of the custom are more complex than they might appear. That custom forms the underlying principle and foundation of the cultural values that give meaning to Na social life and is necessarily associated with external functions, both political and economic.

In the cold mountains of Sichuan (Liangshan), about fifty kilometres from the Lugu Lake region subjected to the glare of the media, the author conducted an up-close ethnographic study of the Na. More than two years of fieldwork allowed her privileged access to the underside of the social fabric. Her immersion in the ordinary life of the Na and her participation in various everyday activities allowed her to shed the anthropological exoticism in which explanations of the group are generally couched. Songs, dances, myths, rites, and mutual aid and exchange all provide windows on to the emotional tenor and logic of the Na system of thought. They make possible an assessment of contextualized practices, based on the justifications the villagers give from within their historical, economic, political and ideological constraints.

L’article The Na of Lijiazui est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

The Altai Republic is located in a mountainous region on the outer reaches of Siberia, on the border of China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. It is home to the Turkic Altaians, a small population group, renowned in ethnography for its shamanism and for the development in the early twentieth century of Burkhanism, a large-scale millenarian movement.

Within the current post-Soviet context, the Altaians are reviving their religious practices. These have diversified, now ranging from “neoshamanism” to “neo-Burkhanism” and also include Buddhism and evangelical Christianity. Major collective ceremonies based on the cycle of the seasons have resurfaced, while throat singing, formerly used for the ritual recitation of epic poems, now resonates well beyond the borders of this small territory, paradoxically spreading the image of traditions exempt from any external influence. This book, while emphasizing the social, political and environmental issues the Altaians now face, sheds new light on that complex and composite religious situation, fuelled by multiple tensions, which until now has not received the attention it deserves.

L’article The Altaians, A Turkic People from the Mountains of Siberia est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

L’article Tabiteuea Kiribati est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.