L'objet du rituel: Rite, technique et mythe en nouvelle-guinée

Abstract

Male initiations and secondary funerals remain key episodes in the collective life of the Ankave-Anga, a people of forest agriculturalists living in Papua New Guinea. The ethnography of such contemporary rituals leads us to shade particular theoretical propositions found in the many attempts (cognitivist or other) at defining the specificity of ritual actions, which often leave aside the meaning of those same actions. In particular, we need to reexamine the opposition between ritual and technique because it is based on obsolete views about the relationship between techniques, culture, and social organization. However, in the Ankave case, myth, rite, and technique are inseparable. And this in turn raises the question of the role of artifacts, and of the gestures by which they are made or used, in the converging and redundant practices and representations that constitute the specificity of rituals.