Le prochain séminaire des études sibériennes / Siberian Studies Seminar aura lieu le mercredi 3 avril 2024 de 14h à 16 h. Nous accueillerons Roza Laptander (Université de Hamburg), pour une présentation intitulée “When we geese were hiding from hunters, I thought: “I am a human ‐ I must survive!”.

Résumé.

.In contemporary Siberian anthropology, Western theorists developed a persistent image of indigenous Siberian peoples, which presented them as successful hunters, for whom harvesting wild animals is very similar to an act of seducing prey which makes wild animals sacrifice themselves to humans. This does not apply to domestic animals, since, unlike wild ones, they work for humans like slaves. Differently , wild animals have freedom, but they are also those who can be hunted. Not all wild animals can protect themselves and defend against the omnipotent power of humans and their instruments of death. In Siberian shamanic legends, a person can invite wild animals to live with him and his family by promising them protection from predators and other humans. A shaman can also turn into a wild animal, but not into a domestic one. By turning into a form of wild animal the shaman gets the power to communicate with spirits, custodians of animals and the land. If this person, who turned into a wild animal or a bird finds himself in a situation where hunters lead a mass slaughter of a herd to which he joined or a flock of birds, then usually only he manages to escape death. The shaman says that when he transformed into a goose he still thought like a human. It helped him to hide from hunters. At the same time, he talks about that hunt not as a sacred act of animals sacrificing themselves to humans, but it is more like the stories of survivors after mass executions of human beings during a genocide or in a situation of war. In my presentation I want to say that any hunt is not the so‐called “Act of offering animals themselves as a gift to humans”, but it is an act of taking away the energy of another living being for the interests of humans. Taking the life of others, even animals, remains to be a sin. Maybe therefore during a sacrifice and a special feast Siberian hunters don’t talk directly about the prey of a large animal, but they make a narrative that it was done not by them, but by somebody else whom they do not know

Le séminaire aura lieu au Campus Condorcet (14 cours des Humanités, 93322 Aubervilliers), en salle 5.067 du bâtiment de recherche nord. Il est également possible d’y assister en ligne.
Métro Front Populaire (Ligne 12) /RER B La Plaine – Stade de France

Dmitriy Oparin (UMR Passages) et Virginie Vaté (GSRL)