The nature put in desire: questions on epistemological relations between anthropology and psychoanalysis

Abstract

Romain Jean-Marc Pierre Bragard, no: 2010/52148-3The study I propose is based on ethnographic comparative descriptions of touristic experiences of trekking in France and Brazil. In order to understand what kind of place is invented, performed, experimented, and shared during this practice, we should pay attention to its social-cultural construction. The study of the "excursive phenomena" through its values, objects used, techniques of the body and discourses expressed during the contemplation of landscape, reveals this kind of ritual as a mythic reorganization of urban fragments (or a crossing of flows), performed by a middle class group. The place trekkers temporally create has been imagined and prepared during the everyday life as a scene where "I" will experiment a complete sensation of being. During the practice, a constant attention on corporeity (pleasures, tiredness, power, hurting, physical progress...), a repetitive affirmation of loving nature, and a lack of social and cultural diversity, turns the ritual into an obvious, natural, politically uncriticizable phenomena. Therefore, the experience seems universal to a trekker who lives an heroization of himself. Consequently, the ritual provides a place were a dominant group performs "technics of self". What kind of (bio)power (Foucault) is supported by these seasonal rises of places? Our societies being hallmarked by an aggregative normative obligation of freedom and self-assurance, we would question if the trekkers aren't providing an image of idealized lifestyle to the rest of the society. Stars of a social order, they reproduce the "spectacle society" functions.Within the anthropology of the body, the investigation invites to a theoretic approach, which could enlighten the articulation between body and language, myth and rite, thinking, acting and feeling. In that way, the Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis theory permits a dialog with the Marcel Mauss project of studying "total men" as a "bio-psycho-social" articulation. It may help to better analyze how a being that is born becomes a being that speaks and performs motor projects. Under the supervision of Carina Basualdo and taking part on the Sophiapol's activities, I intend to study the epistemological relations between anthropology and psychoanalysis in order to import pertinent concepts, methods and knowledge. Notions of learning, incorporation, socialization, as well as the paradigm of gift, fundament of the "French school", will be taken into account as results of a science that investigates in details the unconscious dynamic. Consequently, relations between psychology and culture, subject and society, would be described in all its complexity. (AU)