Mythe et chant rituel chez les Sharanahua

• Main Author: Pierre Déléage
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative 2010-09-01
• Series: Ateliers d'Anthropologie
• Subjects: epistemology; evidentiality; myth; ritual; transmission
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/8566

The problem of the relationship between myths and rituals is re-evaluated from a linguistic and epistemological perspective. A myth and a chant (of the shamanic Sharanahua of Occidental Amazonia), sharing the same narrative content are compared in a detailed manner. One observes in them the workings of three processes of mythical discourse “ritualisation”: a poetic structuring of language, an opacification of the lexicon and a modification of the wordings’ evidential marking. Studying each of these techniques offers a glimpse of the different usage rules applying to these two types of traditional knowledge. This result constitutes a first step in the elaboration of a theory of traditional knowledge transmission conditions.