Techniques de l'action directe : variations miao-yao dans l'intervention chamanique

Résumé En

Techniques of Direct Action: Miao-Yao Variations in Shamanic Healing by Jacques Lemoine Shamanism among the Miao-Yao group, here represented by the Hmong and the Mien-Yao, is a healing technique, its only concern being the curing of pernicious disease. It is a way of communication with the unseen part of the phenomenal world by direct intrusion of the shaman through trance. The trance of the shaman operates as a signal of the arrival of his spirit helpers. From then on part of his self has entered the unseen world, but as a blind man. He is guided and informed by his spirit helpers, who execute his orders to search for devils and missing vital souls. At this point Hmong and Yao shamans show some discrepancy. For the Hmong, who wants to restore his patient's psychosomatic integrity, a thorough examination of the different individual vital souls takes him from his patient's house and close surrounding to the paths in the beyond, where some of the souls - the unstable souls- may have run away. The patient's problem has become a quadratic linear equation, and the shamans journey is a graphic spatial representation of it, the two unknowns being the identity of the runaway soul and the place or supernatural custody in which it may be found. For the Yao, who have adopted Taoist liturgy and metaphysics, the shaman's role, while still being a means of direct action on his patient's fate, is incorporated into the Taoist theological framework. According to the "bureaucratic metaphor", the shaman has to identify the guilt involved as primary or secondary cause of the disease and to reintegrate the patient into his family, where the case is solved as an episode in his family's relations with the supernatural administration.