Société des Américanistes

Dear member of the Société des Américanistes,

We are pleased to invite you to an Extraordinary General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes, which will be held just before the next conference on Thursday, October 3, 2024, at 6 pm in the cinema room of the Musée du Quai Branly.
In anticipation of the forthcoming election of a new Board of Directors, the agenda for this meeting will include a vote on a change to the bylaws concerning the number of Board members.
Please present yourself directly at the museum entrance (37 quai Branly), without going through the cash desks. The Vigipirate plan requires museum security staff not to allow suitcases (even cabin bags), travel bags, backpacks or sports bags into the museum.

We are pleased to invite you to the General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes on Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 6:00 pm in the classroom 2 of the Musée du quai Branly.

This will be followed by a conference by

Lourdes de Leon

Professor in Linguistics and Anthropology, CIESAS-Mexico, who will present

Between the poetic and the ludic:

Repetition as a key to children’s communicative competence in Tsotsil.

Repetition is ubiquitous in discourse and central to communicative development in childhood. The pragmatic effects of repetition are contingent on the specific discursive activities in which it is inserted, whether in conversation, verbal play, argumentative discourse, ritual speech, among others. There are abundant studies on repetition in Mayan languages in ritual discourse (Bricker 1974, Monod-Becquelin and Becquey 2008, Vapnarsky 2008), above all, but also on the function of dialogic repetition through conversational turns (Brown 1998). The present study shows an overview of different discursive practices in which Tsotsil children use repetition. Productions are analyzed from the stage of one-word utterances in early conversation, the verbal game, the playful recitation, the argument in reciprocal reply, as well as structures with discursive parallels (de León 2007, 2019). To this end, the architecture of repetition and its pragmatic functions in the development of children’s communicative competencies in Tsotsil is examined. The study is based on longitudinal linguistic and anthropological research with ten Tsotsil children. It is rooted in more than four decades of research in Tsotsil communities in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico.

The lecture will be given in Spanish.

Dear members of the Société des Américanistes,

We are pleased to invite you to the General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes on Thursday, December 14, 2023 at 6 pm in Salle de Cours 2 of the Musée du Quai Branly.

This will be followed by a lecture presented by Olivier Le Guen, Profesor-investigador at CIESAS, Mexico:

A new approach to the prophecies of the Chilam Balam based on a reasoned translation

Existing translations of the prophecies of the so-called Chilam Balam books, whether in English (Edmonson 1982; 1986) or Spanish (Barrera Vázquez y Rendón 1948), have often suggested that the content of these writings contains an esoteric dimension, hinting at a mystical world of the Maya and their pre-Hispanic past. The reason for this “mystery” derives largely from the cryptic nature of the texts, and more precisely of their translation. In fact, if the texts appear opaque, it’s usually the result of a word-for-word translation that ignores the grammatical rules of the language.

Although recent work has uncovered some of the diphrasisms present in older texts (stelae and codices) (Raimúndez Ares 2021), the majority of prophecies are in fact adaptations of Christian texts, revisited by the Maya. As some authors have clearly described, with colonization and the onset of evangelization, some Mayans became literate and converted to Christianity, but decided to join the rebel Mayans, where they became prophets and proposed a “Mayanized” rereading of biblical texts.
In this presentation, I will attempt to show how a linguistic approach to the texts, taking into account their historical context, not only offers the possibility of an intelligible reading of the texts, but also demonstrates the agentivity of the Maya during the process of Christianization of the Yucatecan peninsula.

The conference will be held in French

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For information, the Society’s next meeting will be held on January 11.

Please present yourself directly at the museum entrance (37 quai Branly), without going through the cash desks. The Vigipirate plan requires museum security staff not to allow suitcases (even cabin bags), travel bags, backpacks, sports bags, etc. into the museum.

Dear Member of the Société des Américanistes,

We are pleased to invite you to the conference to be held on Thursday, April 27, 2023, from 5 to 7 pm by visioconference on the following link:

https://zoom.us/j/93875592450?pwd=c0JYYUhWSDRLN2cxUjkzL0VOWlRCUT09
ID de réunion : 938 7559 2450
Code secret : 971196

Guilherme Moura Fagundes
Associate professor at the University of São Paulo
and recipient of the 2022 Society of Americanists Prize

will present:

Making it Burn: Fire Techniques and the Government of Life in the Brazilian Savanna

Making it Burn: Fire Techniques and the Government of Life in the Brazilian Savanna is an ethnographic work on the different ways of conceiving wildland fires, as well as their effects on the treatment of human and non-human alterities. Alongside with Quilombola communities, environmental managers and firefighters from the Jalapão region, the study examines in detail the emergence of integrated fire management in Brazil and the place of local agropastoral knowledge in this new global environmental policy. Based on fieldwork, archival research, and audiovisual production, the study argues that different fire techniques (convivial, suppression, prevention, and management) provide not only specific ways of dealing with the pyric phenomenon, but also produce ecological systems and political institutions for the government of life forms.

The conference will be given in English

Dear members of the Société des Américanistes,

 

We are pleased to invite you to the General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes on Thursday, December 1, 2022 at 6:30 pm in the cinema room of the Musée du Quai Branly.

 

This assembly will be followed by a presentation-debate around the book

Living Ruins: Native Engagements with Past Materialities in Contemporary Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes, (University Press of Colorado) with the editors:

 

– Philippe Erikson (Université Paris Nanterre, LESC/EREA)

– Valentina Vapnarsky ( CNRS-EPHE, LESC/EREA and LAS )

 

As well as some of the contributors:

– Laurence Charlier ( University of Toulouse, LISST)

– Marie Chosson (INALCO, CESSMA)

– Antoinette Molinié ( CNRS, LESC)

 

and with the participation of the commentators :

– Charlotte Arnaud ( CNRS, ArchAm)

– Cédric Yvinec (CNRS, Mondes Américains)

Ruins and remnants of the past are endowed with life rather than mere relics handed down from previous generations. Living Ruins explores some of the ways Indigenous people relate to the material remains of human activity and provides an informed and critical stance that nuances and contests institutionalized patrimonialization discourse on vestiges of the past in present landscapes.

Ten case studies from the Maya region, Amazonia, and the Andes detail and contextualize narratives, rituals, and a range of practices and attitudes toward different kinds of vestiges. The chapters engage with recently debated issues such as regimes of historicity and knowledge, cultural landscapes, conceptions of personhood and ancestrality, artifacts, and materiality. They focus on Indigenous perspectives rather than mainstream narratives such as those mediated by UNESCO, Hollywood, travel agents, and sometimes even academics. The contributions provide critical analyses alongside a multifaceted account of how people relate to the place/time nexus, expanding our understanding of different ontological conceptualizations of the past and their significance in the present.

Living Ruins adds to the lively body of work on the invention of tradition, Indigenous claims on their lands and history, “retrospective ethnogenesis,” and neo-Indianism in a world where tourism, NGOs, and Western essentialism are changing Indigenous attitudes and representations. This book is significant to anyone interested in cultural heritage studies, Amerindian spirituality, and Indigenous engagement with archaeological sites in Latin America.

The conference will be held in French

 

Please come directly to the entrance of the museum (37 quai Branly), without going through the cashiers. Unless there are changes, you will be asked for your health pass at the entrance of the Museum. The Vigipirate plan requires the museum’s security guards not to authorize the introduction of suitcases (even cabins), travel bags, backpacks, sports bags…

 

Society of Americanists

Quai Branly Museum

222 rue de l’Université

Paris 75343 Cedex

France

Dear member of the Société des Américanistes,

First of all, we wish you all the best for the year 2022.

We are also pleased to announce that the next conference of the Société des Américanistes will take place on Thursday 3 February, at 6pm (Paris time) by videoconference.

We will have the pleasure of welcoming the winner of the Société des Américanistes’ Young Researcher Prize.

Rodrigo Bulamah

.

Circular ruins : life and history in the north of Haiti

Circular Ruins: Life and History in the north of Haiti is a historical work about the village of Milot, where different traces of past times overlap and intersect in the ritual and daily experiences of the inhabitants of the Haitian Mornes. By focusing on interactions with ruins, ancestors, animals and symbols, I propose an anthropology dedicated to the production of the past, present and future in this Caribbean context. Combining ethnography and archival work, I argue that history is a more-than-human process, actively produced by the work of various agents who generate contemporary forms of life in the ruins of colonial and revolutionary projects.

The login link will be sent to you a week before this session.

Dear members, we are pleased to invite you to the General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes, which will take place on December 15, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. (Paris time).

The Assembly will be followed by the screening of the film “Under the Clouds”, directed by Marco Antonio Gonçalves and Eliska Altmann in 2015.

 

Portuguese with english subtitles, 74 minutes

 

In 1961, for the first time in Brazil’s history, a woman, Carolina Maria de Jesus, living in a slum in São Paulo, writes about her daily life and has her diary published. Fifty years later the directors of the film, inspired by this diary, go to look for characters that somehow dialogue with Carolina. In the slum Complexo da Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, five women reveal different experiences and visions of their life in the slum, thus creating continuities and discontinuities with the poetic and critical vision of life expressed by Carolina de Jesus. The voices and visions of these women, Geandra, Iraci, Edilma, Maria da Paz and Vanessa, provide a revigorating and poetically rich image of life in the slums that escapes from the current themes of violence and male dominance, revealing a slum literally lived through a feminine soul. Through the voice of Geandra, an actress, the words written by Carolina gain a new life, in dialogue with the contemporary voices of the other equally strong characters of the women from the Maré complex.

Dra. Carla Jaimes Betancourt

Department of Anthropology of the Americas, University of Bonn, Germany

Archeology of the Llanos de Moxos: wealth is in diversity

For a long time, the Amazon region occupied a marginal position in the pre-Columbian cultural history of the Americas. However, over the past decades, archaeological research carried out within the framework of numerous projects has revealed a surprising complexity and diversity of cultural processes in the region. Based on the case of the Llanos de Mojos in Bolivia, this presentation summarizes the current debates and the different positions on the domestication of plants, the origin of ceramics, landscape transformations, anthropic forests and complex cultural developments in the pre-Columbian era in the southwest of the Amazon.

The plains of Mojos, in what is now Beni in Bolivia, are characterized by an almost entirely anthropized landscape, the result of several millennia of intense human occupation. From 300 AD, hundreds of monumental sites developed there which, thanks to pre-Hispanic techniques adapted to the management of natural resources, left strong imprints on the landscape. Mojos is an excellent illustration of how diversity can be the best driver of cultural development over time. This conference presents an overview of archaeological research in Mojos and case studies in specific fields.