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Ateliers d’anthropologie is an online thematic journal with a review committee. Open to subjects focused on ethnographic studies combining theoretical innovations and precise observations, the journal publishes anthropology in the making. Since it is published online, it allows authors to include any supporting information and multimedia sources.
We publish one or two thematic issues per year, as well as publishing articles progressively under the Varia section of the journal.

Latest issue
52 | 2022
Anthropologie de l'invisible

Anthropologie of the invisible
Edited by Grégory Delaplace
Couverture d'Ateliers d'anthropologie, 52|2022
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The invisible is constantly appearing. A motley collection of beings and things (or things we hesitate to recognise as beings) seems to exist in human worlds, as they burst into them. In the wake of their apparition event, they mobilise an array of measurement devices, establishment systems, all kinds of intercessors and other recognised mediators. It is to these invisible entities, and to the kind of anthropology they require of us, that this issue of Ateliers d’anthropologie is dedicated.

Of course, it is a matter of ghosts and spirits, those characters of social anthropology that have been recurring since its inception, who are named, welcomed or exorcised in a variety of ways through communities in which their reality is more or less willingly admitted. It is also a matter of other strange, disturbing or ambiguous phenomena, whose spectral, ghostly character seems to immediately determine their methods of anthropological treatment: divinities that suddenly manifest themselves, anonymous corpses that have not even taken the time to become ghosts, potentially hostile extra-terrestrial intruders, and other suspicious presences that proliferate in the shadow of conspiracies. But ethnography also encounters more ordinarily visible things, which are all the more difficult to grasp as apparition phenomena: carbon dioxide molecules that inspire love or fear, landscapes whose natural and cultural beauty must be institutionally supervised, the anecdotal observation of the possibility that every encounter between people, or between people and places, might actually have been predestined.

By ethnographically documenting the circumstances and conditions of the apparition of these things, by comparing—if only by virtue of their joint description—how their forms of existence might be analogous or the same, the case studies assembled in this thematic issue contribute to marking out the boundaries of an anthropology of the invisible and experimenting with its forces.

  • Gregory Delaplace
    Introduction [Full text]
    L’invisible tel qu’il apparaît
    Introduction: The invisible as it appears
  • Maddyson Borka
    Récits de presque-rencontres avec les esprits chez les Inuit de l’Arctique oriental canadien
    “Once I almost met a spirit”: stories of near-meetings with spirits among the Inuit of the eastern Canadian Arctic
  • Tristan Quemener and Clément Renault
    Une approche phénoménologique et pragmatique des apparitions chez les Ashéninka du Haut-Yuruá (Amazonie péruvienne)
    The metamorphoses of enmity: a phenomenological and pragmatic approach to apparitions among the Ashéninka of the Upper Yuruá (Peruvian Amazon)
  • Fanny Tilmant
    Perception et identification des esprits (masheitani) dans les récits de rencontres fortuites et de rêves sur l’archipel de Zanzibar (Tanzanie)
    Signs of spirit-human interaction: perception and identification of spirits (masheitani) in stories of dreams and fortuitous meetings on the Zanzibar Archipelago (Tanzania)
  • Camille Van Deputte
    Pragmatique divinatoire dans le nord de la Côte d’Ivoire (Korhogo)
    Spirits, are you there? Client, get involved! Diviner, be perspicacious!: Divinatory pragmatics in the northern Ivory Coast (Korhogo)
  • Véronique Gruca
    Un rituel chamanique clairement ambigu
    One thousand and eighty candles: a clearly ambiguous shamanic ritual
  • Théophile Robert-Rimsky
    Récits d’apparition et preuves vidéographiques de l’existence d’un complot
    Tracking down reptilians, revealing the truth: apparition stories and video evidence of the existence of a conspiracy
  • Antoine Briand
    Mise en présence des populations vulnérables et lutte contre l’effacement des corps et des identités (Hyderabad, Inde)
    Identification of the anonymous: giving presence to vulnerable populations, and the struggle against the erasure of bodies and identities (Hyderabad, India)
  • Anne-Sophie Milon
    Une histoire du passage de l’enthousiasme des sciences de la Nature à l’effroi des sciences de la Terre à l’égard du CO2 atmosphérique
    Following the trail of CO2 to meet spiritus sylvestris: a history of the transition from enthusiasm for natural sciences to fear of earth sciences with regard to atmospheric CO2
  • Elisabeth Bernard
    Apprendre à être attentif à l’activité des montagnes à Vík í Mýrdal, Islande
    The discretion of the Katla volcano: learning to be attentive to the activity of the mountains in Vík í Mýrdal, Iceland
  • Julia Vogel
    Dans les coulisses du façonnement d’une merveille naturelle et culturelle
    “What is the Grand Canyon?”: behind the scenes of the shaping of a natural and cultural wonder
  • Hélène Bloch
    Pragmatique de la notion d’affinité prédestinée au Sichuan, Chine populaire
    Invincible yuanfen?: pragmatics of the notion of predestined affinity in Sichuan, China
  • Camille Chamois
    On the division of perceptional labour
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