2006, Departement d'Anthropologie: Des entites invisibles qui font vivre les humains : Une approche cosmocentrique de la differenciation, de la preseance et leur articulation l'egalitarisme chez les Iban de Sarawak (Malaysia).

Beguet, Veronique, 2006, Des entites invisibles qui font vivre les humains : Une approche cosmocentrique de la differenciation, de la preseance et leur articulation l'egalitarisme chez les iban de Sarawak (Malaysia). Ph.D. these, Departement d'Anthropologie, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada.

This thesis proposes a resolution of what we perceive to be a paradox : a group, the Sarawak Iban (Malaysia), that is egalitarian on the social, political, economical and judicial levels, yet encourages differentiation and marks precedence on a ritual level. It is based on an ontological anthropology, especially Tim Ingold's approach of dwelling in the world, which promotes a revisting of animism through a cosmocentric approach. The thesis also insists on the need to take seriously animism, including the existence of invisible entities as a real phenomenon, questioning the agnostic foundations of anthropology.

The thesis explores Iban animism through three types of metamorphosis or transformation. The first allows a passage between co-natural living beings (human, animal, vegetal and mineral) and invisible beings (antu). It establishes their ontological distinction, but also, simultaneously, their consubstantiality. The second type, the metamorphosis of the dead into animals, renews notions of ancestrality. The benevolent entities (petara) appear as transformed ancestors who connect humans to the animal and aviary kingdoms. Finally, the invisible entities have not only the power to transform themselves at will, but also that to transform living beings; that power, along with their sociality, is at the core of their personhood which is at the same time similar (because of the sociality) and different (because of a highest mastering of metamorphosis) from that of humans. This thesis examines, thirdly, the relational modes and the transformations caused by the antu, especially petrification which is at the origin of charms and modifications of the human body. Differentiation and precedence are built in these relationships with invisible entities. The support of the latter allows one to climb progressively the steps of one or many prestige ladders, and to acquire the corresponding ritual capacities. In that process, the human "matures" and "gains strength," progressively in all dimensions, visible and invisible. Ritual precedence corresponds to an ordering of human beings according to their "strength, maturity" and their capacity to sustain the proximity of more and more dangerous invisible beings. Hence, differentiation and precedence stem from relationships with invisible entities. Egalitarian morality and practices, on the other hand, rule relationships strictly between humans (author).