Société des Américanistes

Dear members, we are pleased to announce that the next conference of the Society will be held on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in Salle de Cours 2 at the Musée du Quai Branly.

Catherine J. Allen (Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, George Washington University) will present: Every Stone Is Unique. Ethnographic Perspectives on Inca Stone Masonry

“The wall was stationary, but its lines were seething and its surface changeable, as that of flooding summer rivers” (J. M. Arguedas, Los Ríos Profundos).

Inca stone masonry has long been a cause of wonder and curiosity. Rather than carving out identical blocks of stone and joining them with mortar, Inca masons treated each stone individually, Thus, every stone in a great wall like Hatun Rumiyuq in Cuzco is unique. Each one was lightly finished and then fitted with the others, seamlessly and without mortar, The irregularity of the stones and absence of mortar make the walls resilient in earthquakes, for the stones can move around during the tremor and settle back against each other when the crisis has passed. Moreover, some Inca walls, like those at Sacsahuaman and Ollantaytambo, are composed of truly gigantic monoliths that had to be transported considerable distances from their quarry sites. Research has cast light on how these feats were achieved, yet what was the point of all that time-consuming effort? Grandiose expressions of imperial dominance? Art for art’s sake? Perhaps. But before leaping to conclusions, we need to understand Inca masonry in terms of what Carolyn Dean has termed a “culture of stone.” What ontological assumptions informed the Inca masons’ relationships with their stone medium? I suggest that ethnographic research into contemporary Andean understandings of stone may shed some light on this question.

The conference will be held in english

Please present yourself directly at the museum entrance (37 quai Branly), without going through the cash desks. The Vigipirate plan requires museum security staff not to allow suitcases (even cabin bags), travel bags, backpacks, sports bags, etc. to be brought into the museum.

Dear member of the Société des Américanistes,

We are pleased to invite you to an Extraordinary General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes, which will be held just before the next conference on Thursday, October 3, 2024, at 6 pm in the cinema room of the Musée du Quai Branly.
In anticipation of the forthcoming election of a new Board of Directors, the agenda for this meeting will include a vote on a change to the bylaws concerning the number of Board members.
Please present yourself directly at the museum entrance (37 quai Branly), without going through the cash desks. The Vigipirate plan requires museum security staff not to allow suitcases (even cabin bags), travel bags, backpacks or sports bags into the museum.

We are pleased to invite you to the General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes on Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 6:00 pm in the classroom 2 of the Musée du quai Branly.

This will be followed by a conference by

Lourdes de Leon

Professor in Linguistics and Anthropology, CIESAS-Mexico, who will present

Between the poetic and the ludic:

Repetition as a key to children’s communicative competence in Tsotsil.

Repetition is ubiquitous in discourse and central to communicative development in childhood. The pragmatic effects of repetition are contingent on the specific discursive activities in which it is inserted, whether in conversation, verbal play, argumentative discourse, ritual speech, among others. There are abundant studies on repetition in Mayan languages in ritual discourse (Bricker 1974, Monod-Becquelin and Becquey 2008, Vapnarsky 2008), above all, but also on the function of dialogic repetition through conversational turns (Brown 1998). The present study shows an overview of different discursive practices in which Tsotsil children use repetition. Productions are analyzed from the stage of one-word utterances in early conversation, the verbal game, the playful recitation, the argument in reciprocal reply, as well as structures with discursive parallels (de León 2007, 2019). To this end, the architecture of repetition and its pragmatic functions in the development of children’s communicative competencies in Tsotsil is examined. The study is based on longitudinal linguistic and anthropological research with ten Tsotsil children. It is rooted in more than four decades of research in Tsotsil communities in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico.

The lecture will be given in Spanish.

Dear members of the Société des Américanistes,

We are pleased to invite you to the General Assembly of the Société des Américanistes on Thursday, December 14, 2023 at 6 pm in Salle de Cours 2 of the Musée du Quai Branly.

This will be followed by a lecture presented by Olivier Le Guen, Profesor-investigador at CIESAS, Mexico:

A new approach to the prophecies of the Chilam Balam based on a reasoned translation

Existing translations of the prophecies of the so-called Chilam Balam books, whether in English (Edmonson 1982; 1986) or Spanish (Barrera Vázquez y Rendón 1948), have often suggested that the content of these writings contains an esoteric dimension, hinting at a mystical world of the Maya and their pre-Hispanic past. The reason for this “mystery” derives largely from the cryptic nature of the texts, and more precisely of their translation. In fact, if the texts appear opaque, it’s usually the result of a word-for-word translation that ignores the grammatical rules of the language.

Although recent work has uncovered some of the diphrasisms present in older texts (stelae and codices) (Raimúndez Ares 2021), the majority of prophecies are in fact adaptations of Christian texts, revisited by the Maya. As some authors have clearly described, with colonization and the onset of evangelization, some Mayans became literate and converted to Christianity, but decided to join the rebel Mayans, where they became prophets and proposed a “Mayanized” rereading of biblical texts.
In this presentation, I will attempt to show how a linguistic approach to the texts, taking into account their historical context, not only offers the possibility of an intelligible reading of the texts, but also demonstrates the agentivity of the Maya during the process of Christianization of the Yucatecan peninsula.

The conference will be held in French

For information, the Society’s next meeting will be held on January 11.

Please present yourself directly at the museum entrance (37 quai Branly), without going through the cash desks. The Vigipirate plan requires museum security staff not to allow suitcases (even cabin bags), travel bags, backpacks, sports bags, etc. into the museum.

Dear Member of the Société des Américanistes,

We are pleased to invite you to the conference to be held on Thursday, April 27, 2023, from 5 to 7 pm by visioconference on the following link:

https://zoom.us/j/93875592450?pwd=c0JYYUhWSDRLN2cxUjkzL0VOWlRCUT09
ID de réunion : 938 7559 2450
Code secret : 971196

Guilherme Moura Fagundes
Associate professor at the University of São Paulo
and recipient of the 2022 Society of Americanists Prize

will present:

Making it Burn: Fire Techniques and the Government of Life in the Brazilian Savanna

Making it Burn: Fire Techniques and the Government of Life in the Brazilian Savanna is an ethnographic work on the different ways of conceiving wildland fires, as well as their effects on the treatment of human and non-human alterities. Alongside with Quilombola communities, environmental managers and firefighters from the Jalapão region, the study examines in detail the emergence of integrated fire management in Brazil and the place of local agropastoral knowledge in this new global environmental policy. Based on fieldwork, archival research, and audiovisual production, the study argues that different fire techniques (convivial, suppression, prevention, and management) provide not only specific ways of dealing with the pyric phenomenon, but also produce ecological systems and political institutions for the government of life forms.

The conference will be given in English