Danser par la voix de l’écriture. À propos des chamanes scripteurs des Yi-Sani (Chine)

Abstract

Among the Yi-Sani of southwest China, mastery of a peculiar script is a condition for local shamanic practices. In mythology, the texts of bimo religious specialists are associated with the sounds of drunkenness and a form of asceticism. For the voicing of these versified writings in rituals, which are perceived not as written words but as graphic chants linked to the body substances of the officiants, it supposes a change of state pertaining to ecstasy and trance perceptible only by the spirits. In order to discuss Roberte Hamayon’s works, the question of feeling and the idea of the shaman as a “seized-being” in the sense of Erwin Straus is introduced with references to movement and music, notably through Anne Boissière. Finally, the article proposes to perceive chanting (graphic or verbal) and movement (internalized as well as externalized) as fundamental modes of shamanic interaction from which an opening to the world is created, and a connection is made between different entities located in the acoustic and metaphysical space elaborated by the shaman who animates it through the trepidations of his body.