Fiche du document
9 avril 2019
Ce document est lié à :
info:eu-repo/semantics/reference/issn/0760-5668
Ce document est lié à :
info:eu-repo/semantics/reference/issn/1777-5450
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Mots-clés
omens cosmology human-animal relations morality MongoliaSujets proches
Portents Prodigies (Omens) Signs (Omens)Citer ce document
Caroline Humphrey, « The fateful landing of the hoopoe », Terrain, ID : 10.4000/terrain.16579
Métriques
Partage / Export
Résumé
This paper analyses the omen as a particular technique by which human subjects attempt to understand the uncertainties and misfortunes of their lives by way of receiving signs from the world. This method folds a singular event into a social form, a stabilized way of perceiving and responding to intimations of something about to change in the future. It is argued that perceiving omens is a practice of cosmological engagement and hence that its character is different in monotheist environments from those in which the world is conceived to be composed of disparate and separate elements, such as in in Mongolian regions. In the latter, the things and beings in the world that produce, or ‘offer’, omens are equivalent agents to the people who receive them. Both agents come with temporal and spatial attributes that collide in the event of the omen.