THE DANCES SHAMANS OF THE RUPESTRAL SITE OF DAHONGYAN, PROVINCE OF GUIZHOU, SOUTH CHINA
CAO Bo, ZHANG Pu, DAMBRICOURT MALASSE Anne, SHEN Guanjun, YOU Qian Sheng present us exclusively for PLASTIR an exceptional exploration stemming from a search led on a major prehistoric site in South China. The results were presented in Guiyang at the 1st Congress of Rock International Federation of Art Organization (IFRAO) in July 2014 in China. « Dahongyan, the ‘ big red cliff ‘ of Shizu, the district of Zhenfeng in the South of the Chinese Province of Guizhou, is a site of rock art of an exceptional beauty. Unique in China, even in Southeast Asia, the impressive cliff kept the track of at least 10000 years of usual human attendance linked to ritual scenes as the hunting then to the economy of production. More than hundred hands, negative and positive, observe on various scenes of prehistoric, historic and certain periods associated with dances with the steady rhythm. But the magnificence of this site is, undoubtedly, a remarkable scene of dances of shamans in trance, associated to the ox, the rice and the snake, an unknown symbolism of the current ethnic minorities, a language to be learnt again, which unites the spirit of the Man as that of the animal kingdom to a sacred meaning of the Life. » So summarized, this contribution of the very first order declines the rock art at an excellent level. Splendidly illustrated, it is signed by five authors: Cao Bo, archaeologist, deputy director of the Institute of the Cultural Vestiges and Archaeology of the Kweichow, (Guiyang, China); Zhang Pu, prehistorian, Professor in charge of the collections of Prehistory to the Institute of the Mountainous Resources of the Kweichow, Academy of Science of the Kweichow (Guiyang, China), PhD of Prehistory of the National Natural History Museum (MNHN, Paris, France); Shen Guanjun, Professor specialist of the datings at the ENS (Ecole Normale Superieure) of Nanjing (China), the works of which allow regularly to revise the former datings, in particular those of the oldest skull of the Man of Beijing (cave of Choukoutien); You Qian Sheng, photographer-film-maker, author of numerous works on the Province of the Kweichow , Director of the Kweichow Culture Sound Press (Guiyang, China) and finally Anne Dambricourt Malassé, paleoanthropologist at the CNRS (National Center for the Scientific Research), HDR, attached to the Department of Prehistory of the MNHN and vice-president of the PSA (Plasticities Sciences Arts) association, the searches for who concern the mechanisms of the hominization proceeding by punctuated equilibriums and the evolution of the human lineage in Continental Asia where she pursues missions since 1996 (Pakistan, then India and China). The detailed handwriting of the animal symbolism and the human masks which we discover live in this Chinese parietal art, in particular described since Antiquity, then in the IIIth century about the ecstatic states of Baopuzi, teaches us more that many speeches on the ancestral practice of the shamanism, its high cultural and symbolic value and this unpublished hyphen realized between the spirits of the nature and the human being. Merger sometimes qualified of initiatory, sometimes purely « animistic », but which, although it or there, calls out today still as for its efficiency of ground (economy of hunters-fighters, collectors, breeding, medicines), to its rites or to the meticulous description of the » timeless journeys of the soul » which it was able to produce. So, the analysis of Cao and collaborators to Dahongyan, in Southeast Asia brings us to wonder about » the shaman hypothesis » connected to the cultures of the Paleolithic and described in the North of the planet as on the basis of the Indian religions of ‘Americas’. More still, it constitutes a unique testimony of the way these western cultures as oriental ones designed their environment of life and thought.
Astrid GUILLAUME is a lecturer HDR at the University Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV) in Literature s and Human Sciences and the vice-president of the European Observatory of the Multilingualism (EOP). Deputy director of the EA4349, » Study and Publishing of medieval texts « , she is specialized there medievistics, in traductology (in particular Scandinavian and Germanic) and in semiotics of the cultures, board member of the CIRET (International Center of Researches and Transdisciplinary Studies) and the LFDA (Foundation Animal, ethical right and Sciences). Knight in the order of the Arts and Letters, she also manages the Collection Traditions and Faiths in the Press of the University Paris – Sorbonne (PUPS). She co-managed in particular the work “Multilingualism, Interculturality and Employment: challenges for Europe” with François-Xavier d’Aligny, Babette Nieder, François Rastier, Christian Tremblay and Heinz Wismann (L’Harmattan Editions, Paris, 2009), contributed to the works: » The history of humanity (Vol VI) and « History of humanity » (Vol VII), sponsored by the UNESCO in association with Marc Bensimon (Los Angeles), introduced by Koïchiro Matsuura, Managing director of the UNESCO, Multiple History Series, UNESCO, Paris – New York, on 2008 and Chapter 26.1 in “The Literature of the XXth century »: History of the Humanity », Collection Plural History, UNESCO’s Eds. (Paris, 2009) and published very numerous essays in literature, in linguistics (synchrony and diachrony), in cross-cultural symbolism or in semiotics (cf. bio). Her domain of predilection and the subject of her HDR recently steady (2013) concerns the transferability of the meaning of yesterday and today looking at the words, at the signs and at the cultures. She approaches it here in a resolutely transdisciplinary way from the point of view of the evolution of the theories by giving us a scoop for PLASTIR ! « The theories, she so summarizes us that “ are processes modeled by thought. When they evolve in time, they are transformed and become new theories. They may cross from one academic discipline to another, then open up to new areas of human knowledge, mixing together the humanities, art, science and even spirituality. The way they are modelled reveals their plasticity and their elasticity is tested in their potential for transfer from one domain to another, while the different contacts they make and mergers they undergo generate a certain hybridity. Plasticity, elasticity and hybridity are the triad which make the transfer of theories possible. Like theories, cultural objects may be transferred so that they become either recycled objects or toxic waste. In this context, transferogenesis describes the semiotic process at the heart of every operation transferring meaning from one time period or genre to another, from one word or expression to another, from one sign or symbol to another, from one culture to another, but also from one theory to another. Transferogenesis is part of the intertheoretical process which brings together linguistics, art, science, philosophy and spirituality making it possible to perform intercultural analyses in cultural semiotics and bring greater recognition and understanding to the field of cultural studies. ». We can only acquiesce as far as, not only this transferogenesis identifies clearly the closeness and the essential differences between the notions of plasticity, of elasticity and hybrid processes, but still it updates an intertheoricity and a plasticity of the theories until then evaded (skipped) or approached under the purely epistemological angle as well as its ideological, religious consequences or sociobiological. More still, Astrid Guillaume explores and models this plasticity through the art (Kandinski, Viola), sciences (geometry, abstraction, temporality), of the history (medieval, mythological) or mysteries of the language by tracing on the internal geometry and the potential hybridity of the concept of transferability. Gets free of it one or several genesis of the meaning (De Saussure, Rastier, Eco, Pierce) as well as the attributes and the semiotic limits of the intertheoricity. Between the lines, the future of the cultural objects – in particular linguistic and civilizational – in diachronic transfer and the transversality essential to be established and to strengthen between the topology and the typology on one hand, and between and beyond disciplines and cultures on the other hand.
POCKET’S ‘THINKER’ – FRAGMENTS OF A WORKING THOUGHT
Virginie BOUTIN is an artist, an essayist and at present a PhD student at the Sorbonne Nouvelle on the following theme: » From the corporeity to the abstractivity of the human thought. For a theory of evolution of our species. » In the continuation of her plastic searches led during various residences of artist and inseparable of the writing, she collaborates in several University magazines publishing in particular “Little scenology of the thought, experiment on human idiopathy (L’harmattan Eds., Philosophical Openings collection, Paris 2008), an essay the natural selection of which is the conceptual frame since which she questions the thought – by observing our conceptions of the world given birth by the sciences and the philosophy – from the emergence of the human phenomenon to our contemporaneousness. She sketches here an experimental entitled work “Pensoir de poche” or “Pocket thinker”, fragments of a thought in the work, a manifesto for an art to think who would allow to feel how form our representations and our ideas, that is how invents our thought by experimenting exactly its propensity in the invention as essential of its identity, so characterized by its perpetual future or its permanent play. This search for an artist thought, more still, of a thought revealed in itself, asserting itself in the creation and claiming to be in the exhibition of its own reality, gives body to its plastic artistic approach which does not consist in representing the reality, but in representing the thought within the reality. Yet, how represent the thought to itself; give to see the reflexive process of any spirit which occurs at the same time as it represents itself? How make sensitive the thought, to realize its abstractivity, to expose its reality? How to be the image and be made the mirror? The thought is the object of reflection of Virginia BOUTIN the reflexivity of which it stages. As such, her tends to dramatize it, that is to transmute its representations ignoring as such in representations aware of themselves; change the illusion into invention … From then on, the most heterogeneous and the most improbable materials are exploited to realize sensitive (perceptible) concepts and print the human future of an animal which found the good idea to have an idea instead of things … At the same time as her searches, she teaches philosophy, the general knowledge and the French expression in a High College of Business, leads activities of consultant in a company and creates this year, » Evolution – The LIFE an artist of which we are.. « , an agency of creation and communication that she co-manage. The experimental work, which she presents us in PLASTIR, proposes a kind of putting in abyss of the intellectual activity, which consists in operating permanently modifications of one. In the continuation or the filiation of the thinkers by fragments, following the example of Montaigne, Nietzsche and Valéry, this non-book, without story, neither at the beginning nor at the end, in the sense that we always think in and with a thought which precedes us and succeeds us, is not a directory of ideas or formulae but the expression of a thought which ventures on itself. Because it is well a question, indeed, of dreading the process of the thought being made and not reaching a result, printing its complexity, what strictly speaking is together weaved, its unusual connections, associations of ideas and fittings of improbable images, as its reality. This ‘Pensoir’ or ‘Thinker’ tends to represent the thought to itself, against the current of our philosophic tradition separating the subject thinking of the object of thought – as if we could cut themselves from one. The eclipse of the thought is the heights maybe well of our thought ignoring as such, persisting in not making return on itself. Now, the reflection consists exactly for the thought to be reflected, also it is necessary to us, to make understandable the intellectual activity, to seize us with its reflexivity as starting point of all our speculations. In other words, this Pocket’s Pensoir, is, dixit the author, a manifesto for an art to think who would allow to feel how form our representations and our ideas, that is how invents our thought by experimenting exactly its propensity in the invention as essential of its identity, so characterized by its perpetual future or its permanent play. Several other opuses of this experimental series are proposed on the author’s blog.
THE TAIJIQUAN: A WAY OF INCORPORATION AND UNDERSTANDING OF NEW PARADIMS
Eric CAULIER is PhD in anthropology of the University Nice Sophia Antipolis (France), ergonomist and professor of Taijiquan in Mons (Belgium). On the theoretical plan, he pursues searches since the end of 1990’s on the various functions of the gesture, collaborating regularly with various University departments, what will bring him to develop an interdisciplinary methodology and to create and to teach an original approach of the ergonomics. Highly skilled practitioner introduced to five major styles of taijiquan (6th Dan), awarded a diploma in internal arts of the Physical Educational University of Beijing. With professor Men Hui Feng (9th Dan), he went deeper into the internal work and the pedagogy of the transmission. Eric Caulier is also a ‘boatman’ among whom numerous followers or teachers taijiquan follow Master’s degree classes since about twenty years. Eric Caulier also wrote several works concerning the practice of the taijiquan or his links with the calligraphy, the myth, the contemporary creation and the modeling. The article, which he proposes us for PLASTIR, highlights its original, initiatory approaches and opening an interdisciplinary reflection, it is to say on this side and beyond the practice of the martial art itself. Actually, Yin and yang, fundamental notions of the Chinese thought, are today well known. The symbol gathering these opposite/complementary poles is familiar to us. It is in fact about the symbol taiji, completed exemplification of the theory of the third include. Could the taijiquan be a privileged way of apprehension of this « new » paradigm, so well described by Stéphane Lupasco? It is what Eric Caulier, practitioner-researcher, shows via round trips between speaking in the first one and in the third person. He takes us to the heart of the multiple forms of the taiijquan, how indicates us entering their plasticity. The author, assuming his double identity and its simultaneous membership in the world of the practice just as much as in that of the research, claims a third identity. Using an transdisciplinary approach, he highlights the constant feedback between action and explicitation. In the course of the text, the links enter Taoist body and enaction become relevant. It is a question in both cases of knowing by body and of sculpturing the environment, which sculptures us. Eric Caulier explains how his practice of the taijiquan and his researcher’s questioning supplied him a ground favored to feel in its own body the major principles of the complexity: dialogical, recursive and hologrammatic. These multiple raids in these territories (outsides and inside) little explored made him walk in an initiatory way. At the end of this text we do not miss to question: would not our new paradigms be a new formulation of paradigms older?