Michel Perrin

Course

Michel Perrin, before finding his vocation of Ethnologist, was Physicien. Its meeting with Claude Lévi-Strauss the conduit to present its thesis in 1973 entitled: Contribution to the study of the oral literature of the Indians Guajiro . In 1987, Michel Perrin obtain, always under the direction of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a doctorate of State to the Université of Paris V entitled the mythical thought in acts. Therapeutic myths and dreams, shamanism and rites: the example of the Guajiro Indians of Venezuela and Colombia . This thesis will show “ how, in four distinct fields, this mythical thought is translated into “acts” in an Amerindian company become pastoral and subjected to the change ”.

The work of this specialist in the Chamanisme also concerns the Mythologie, the symbolism, the traditional Médecine, the Rêve, and the Art. Its research topics thus fit respectively in the fields of the religious anthropology, medical anthropology, the anthropology of the dream and the anthropology of the image.

During nearly six years, it shared the life of three Amerindian populations. Between 1969 and 1985, he attends the Indians Guajiro (wayuu) of Venezuela and Colombia. Between 1988 and 1990, they are the Indians Huichol of the Sierra of Nayarit (Sierra Veined Western, Mexico) who interest it particularly. Lastly, between 1989 and 2004, it devotes its research to the Indians Kuna (cuna, tulle) of the islands San Blas of the Panamá. Michel Perrin also undertakes exploratory voyages in the Amerindian companies Bari, Karina, Pemon, Panare, Warao and Navaho.

He still taught and teaches with the École of the high studies in social sciences (EHESS), with the practical École of the high studies (EPHE) and in the universities Paris III, Paris VI, Paris VII and Paris X, like at the university of Neuchâtel (Suisse) and to the university Clermont-Ferrand I. He always directs theses carried out by students French and foreign and has with its credit forty research tasks. Having taken part in many jurys in France and abroad, Michel Perrin acquired university great experience.

Consulting near various official organizations, it remained in the United States to take part in research projects of scale with Los Angeles and Austin.

Lastly, Michel Perrin gave more than two hundred scientific conferences and cycles of conferences in Europe, North America and Latin America. One could not count his innumerable interventions of sensitizing to anthropology, at the request of various institutions.

Scientific literature

Michel Perrin wrote ten books among which one can quote the Way of the dead Indians , the Experts of the dream , the Shamanism and Tableaux kuna . References on the matter, its works, were the object of more than twenty translations in foreign languages. He is also the author of more than one hundred thirty scientific publications.

Catalog of films

Realizer several films including two full-length films and four films short or medium-length film, among which the world of Isho and the descent of Isho like Funeral guajiro. The first burial , the molas Manners of making and molas, an art of America. An exceptional exposure to Clermont-Ferrand.

Translated into several languages the films of Michel Perrin were several times selected in national Festivals.

Quotations

the myth

“ to say it in short and in a caricatural way, the myth returns in the traditional companies to presumedly original accounts and founders who tell how, as from one time of indistinctness, the human beings were distinguished gradually from the other elements of nature which communicated with them and could not cover an identical appearance. The myths tell how the beings and the things diversified and became what they are today. They explore the possible ones while justifying the established order. ”
“ Another property of the myth is to seek coherence by bringing closer the most various fields. It thus tries to bring total answers to the problems of various orders which arise for it by bringing into play intellectual processes common to all humanity, which are those which found symbolism and are with the source of any intellectual creation: the analogy, the homology, the metaphor, the opposition, etc In the myth, the body, cosmos, nature, morals, the climate, the family can be thought starting from identical models. Instead of separating as requires it in theory the scientific step, the myth seeks the unit. It thus develops with the most point the “function symbolic system”. ”
“ the vision which currently the Western man of the myth has is in general limited or rather poor. In teaching one associates it only with Greece and Rome. The official religions savagely separate it from their texts founders - Bible or other - and they often return the myth to an original naivety, with a false interpretation, a pure imagination. It is besides today the direction running of the word: it is a myth, it “mythifie” evokes the illusion, even trickery. ”
“ Pourtant some among us wishes “a return to the myth”, in the direction of a reflection on what could be this search for totality, this capacity of associations symbolic systems generated by the use of the myth. Because they have the impression that its judgment, its disappearance - or its simple survival in the roughest forms, that Roland Barthe tried to put at the day in his “Mythologies” (1957) - represent a true loss. Isn't the capacity of association which it develops that which stimulates more the scientific research, that which underlies any creation? The mathematicians often acknowledge it: they are the analogies, the bringings together which operates a mobile thought and vagrant which caused their discoveries. Unfortunately, the drafting of their work, the formal language that they were essential overlook this aspect of their work. ”

the dream

“ the companies of oral tradition makes also a great intellectual and social use of the dream. They regard it as the voice of the “different world”, the “supernatural” world, and it is taken very with the serious one. One must obey to him if it gives clear orders, it should be deciphered if it is obscure. One makes of it a so intense use which it also causes of the stereotyped dreams, that it involves a constant to and from between the dream and the myth, so rich him in images, which it implies a filtering and sometimes even the censure. In all the cases, many traditional companies make these individual secretions which means of communication and a permanent source of reflections and interrogations are the dreams. ”
“ On our premises, one took the practice to associate the dreams with the field of the close friend, or with the trickery of the tellers of good adventure who still play of the system of interpretation of the dreams more mutilating which is: keys of the dreams. All hasty interpretations that one makes today of the dreams are marked by a “égocentrée” approach, intimist, and above all impregnated “wild analysis”, typical attitude of the current Western man. However, with the eyes of an ethnologist, it would be possible to see in number of them cultural representations, transformations symbolic systems of real contexts, etc ”

Creation

“ the relation in the world and creation, and both relate to the relationship between symbolism and practices. ”
“ the tradition, the representations of the world, conscious or not, expressed by the myth impregnates this art: the idea of communication between the beings, fusion sometimes, going back to the indistinctness of the time of the origins, the dualism which pushes the artists to divide each fabric into two spaces, the idea of labyrinth, raising as much of a specific mental geography that technical constraints. ”
“ It occurs for this art the same thing as for the myths: a new reason, caused by social changes or a new experiment can have one very short lifespan, the time of a fashion, or become traditional if it proves adapted to the underlying structures of the imaginary one, of the thought, of esthetics. ”
“ In the traditional companies, the relations between myths, dreams and art is always intimate. Certain narrations of dreams take again mythical elements; sometimes the dreamer even seems to adapt the myth, it becomes the hero about it (see Perrin 1992). Or many oneiric experiments contribute to modify the myth or to nourish plastic creation. ”

the writing

“ For Guajiro, being chamane, it is to be able to communicate at will with the “world-other”, invisible world God's people, of spirits, spectra and ancestors of all kinds. It is to receive from him messages revealing the origin of misfortunes or predicting the future. It is to know to put itself in relation to the “supernatural” beings which determine the destinies of the men and the world. ”
“ Many Guajiro allots the capacity of the White to the writing. The signs traced on paper would be messages come besides, of a supernatural world specific to the White, which would have to seize them “to only make speak paper” or with “speaking with paper”, according to the expressions translating the action of reading. ”
“ the chamane Too' will tora Püshaina opposes the writing, fixed on paper, external with the human body, with the word, emanating from its interior, closely associated with its body. But it as projects on the writing the implicit design as Guajiro have language, considering that “what leaves the mouth”, the words, are like a kind of matter invisible running out in a discontinuous flood, in tablecloths separated by silences. ”
“ the chamanes guajiro is stronger since they reach comparable results without the assistance “of paper”. They are in any case much more deserving, since for them all comes from the spirits which they receive in them at the end of a work on their body, all emanates from their interior, of their belly. ”
“ In language guajiro, “to have a name which goes far” designates the celebrity, who is thus related to space, more than at the duration. It is the case in many companies without writing. That is all the more true in the company guajiro that a taboo prevents from naming late and supports of which the lapse of memory of the name after death. ”
“ For Iisho already, as for other Guajiro today, a historical prospect, related to the writing, took the step on a cyclic design of the time which makes lapse of memory of deaths, their assimilation by essential gods, and of their return on the ground in the anonymous form of rains or pathogenic spirits, the requirement so that the company reproduces and perdure. ”
“ One has been able to measure the way traversed for this time when White with the conquering spirit practiced towards Guajiro the arbitrary one and the violence symbolic system by the means of the foreign names imposed on their new-born babies, and consigned in parochial registers: they are now the Indians who request the assistance of the White or the mongrels to register on fresh cement the Christian name their deaths. And, fascinated, all want to assist at the time of the funeral, with this rite of writing. ”

Others

Prize winner of the Institute.
Named commander of the Order Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, for its research in Panamá.
Member of commissions of specialists in several universities (Paris, Montpellier, Lyon).
Member of the scientific advice of the Laboratory of Social anthropology.
Member of the Company of the Men of letters.
Member of various international institutions like the FFCAR (Funds for the Training of the Researchers and the Assistance with Research) with the Canada, the Outward journey (Asociación Latino Americana para el Estudio) and the ANAT (Association for the Not-Dependence and Autonomisation of the Drug addicts).
Member of various international reviews such as Religiones Latinoamericanas (Mexico City), Psychotropic (Paris), Bulletin of Ethnomédecine, and the review Spaces latinos.
Expert near the National council of research for the Funds Swiss national of the scientific research.
It also developed the teaching of anthropology with CERDI (the E.R.A. 637, Center Studies and of Research on International expansion, Université Clermont-Ferrand 1/CNRS).
Michel Perrin took part in many radio and audio-visual broadcasts.

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