The Diet and Path of an Amazonian Shaman

Autor/in

Rodríguez Yucuna, Fermín | Fontaine, Laurent

Laurent Fontaine is a linguistic anthropologist who received his PhD in anthropology in 2001 and his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) in 2015 from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3. He is an affiliated member of the LACITO (Languages and Cultures of Oral Tradition), a multidisciplinary research laboratory of the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and a Director of Research at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3.His PhD thesis was about the rules of gifts and exchanges which are implicitly and explicitly used in every form of speech (mythology, conversations and ceremonial dialogues) of the Yucuna Indians (arawakan language) in the Colombian Amazon, near La Pedrera. Developing a corpus of transcription of the Indian's speech acts collected in different situations, he has analysed it to distinguish Yucuna's institutions (kinship, shamanism and ceremonial residence of roundhouse) with White's institutions.He has developed the corpus and tried to use the deontic logic of Von Wright to formalise the analysis of the Yucuna Social System in order to study its historical transformations and to show the possibility of comparing it with other societies or cultures. Now he is specialised in the yucuna incantations and ritual songs, and he is developing a corpus of mythology and incantations from the Tanimuca Indians (tucanoan language) who intermarry with the Yucuna. His co-author Fermín Rodríguez Yucuna, is one of the last Yucuna-speaking shamans, called lawichú (or brujo in Spanish), who are generally considered by Yucuna Indians as the most powerful medicine-men.