Le fantôme et l’anthropologue : retour sur une scène primitive

Abstract

This article ventures to demonstrate that the beliefs in ghosts and the debates around their existence went along with the birth of anthropology, before the latter came to be recognised as a discipline in the 16th cent. More specifically, more remains to be done on the “spectral functionalities”, and namely the spectre’s influence on the anthropological discourses. Ghost quickly turns out to be a very effective operator. It could be used as a demarcation line, between the Pagan and the Christian, the Protestant and the Catholic, the Civilised to the Barbarian, the literate and the vulgar, the sociologist, the anthropologist and the folklorist. The encounter between the ghost and the anthropologist could be seen as a primal scene in so far as it pointed out to the likely origin of the discipline of anthropology. But furthermore, in the 19th cent, when anthropology became an institutionalised discipline, it lends itself to be defined as a form “primitive” religion. In its psychoanalytical understanding, the primal scene also refers to an image of the taboo: a place which is hard to contemplate for the socio-anthropologist of the so called “modern” Western societies.

Keywords

• ghost
• proto-anthropology
• discernment of spirits
• Primitive Culture
• folklore