The Shaping of Ancestors

Presentation

The essential challenge for human societies is to ensure their continuity, despite the vagaries of individual destinies and historical events. Continuities are thus operated in time (connections between past, present and future) for the transmission of values on the basis of which each community establishes its order and the rules that preside over it. Continuities are also achieved in space, which is bent to social perceptions and logics, to their principles, to their effects.

Ancestrality then appears as an almost universal means mobilized to organize all or part of these continuities. Ethnographies relating to different human societies show that the dead are conceived very differently in different cultures, and that not all are treated equally or given the same importance. The question to which the authors of this book seek an answer is therefore less "what is an ancestor?" than "when, and how, is the relationship to ancestors important, significant and, therefore, operative?"

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Directresses

Sophie Chave-Dartoen is a lecturer (HDR) in social anthropology at the University of Bordeaux and a member of UMR 5319 Passages. She works on the society of Wallis Island (Western Polynesia), particularly on social organization, the ritual system and ceremonial circulation. Lately, she has been interested in forms of categorization, semiotic systems and local theories of action.

Stéphanie Rolland-Traina is a lecturer in social anthropology at Bordeaux University and a researcher at UMR 5219 Passages. Her work focuses on everyday life and, more specifically, on identity recompositions in the ex-Yugoslav space following successive political and state transitions.

321 pages
16 x 24 cm
Publication: 16/04/2019
ISBN: 9782858312962