« Les naq sont là ! »

Abstract

Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière « Les naq sont là ! » Représentation et expérience dans la possession d'esprit birmane S'il est considéré par certains bouddhistes birmans avec une certaine suspicion, le culte des Trente-sept Seigneurs est toutefois un versant bien connu de leur religiosité. Ce culte réunit en un panthéon national un certain nombre d'esprits (naq) qui sont principalement les figures tutélaires de Birmanie centrale. Il donne lieu à des cérémonies hautes en couleur et éminemment festives (nague 'na bwè) au cours desquelles ces esprits s'incarnent chacun à leur tour dans leurs médiums, dansant, consommant les offrandes qui leur sont présentées et échangeant avec leurs dévots. Nous le verrons, cette forme de possession, positive, ritualisée et institutionnalisée, caractérise le culte des Trente-sept Seigneurs. Elle est la principale « manifestation » de ces derniers dans ce monde, celle par laquelle dévots et médiums en font l'expérience.

Unveiling

“…83 The widespread claim of a deliberate recruitment of prostitutes probably refl ects more a propaganda bias than any reality, 84 but some undoubtedly were domestic servants, of whom there were from 12 to 20,000 in the city, by far the largest category of employment for Algerian women in Algiers (70 to 80 per cent). 85 The dominant Algerian ideology was that women should not enter the labour market, but remain within the home raising children, a keen point of male honour since employment threatened to breach domestic seclusion, and those women who did have to work from necessity because they were single, repudiated or widows, what Willy Jansen calls aptly 'women without men', constituted a 'dangerous' or liminal category since they threatened to escape from male control of their sexuality. 86 The most interesting and richest source of information on the mental universe of these poor, single women is provided by Caroline Brac de la Perrière's oral history project based on interviews with domestic servants.…”

“…Mme F., a domestic, was forced to travel to work in an army lorry, 'I did not like this since I was afraid that the others on seeing me with them would think that I was passing on information', and when her son was rushed to a military hospital this was 'annoying because they could think I was an informer'. 99 Mme B., a Europeanised Kabyle Protestant who did not wear the veil, was treated at work by others with derision as an apostate ('m'tournia'), 'They criticized me a lot because I went out without a veil'. This became particularly threatening when she travelled from the European into the Algerian urban zones: 'I went down with a neighbour into the Arab quarter, we went together because of my European looks [for protection].…”

From the Sétif Massacre to the November insurrection

“…While the situation of Algerian women can be understood against this wider background, in general, as the 'prolétaires des prolétaires', they experienced an even more deprived and oppressed way of life than their husbands and brothers. 8 On the eve of war in 1954, while virtually all European children aged six to fourteen years received primary schooling, this was true for only one in fi ve Algerian boys, and one in sixteen girls. 9 In 1948 some 90 per cent of males aged over ten years were illiterate in French and Arabic, and 96 per cent of women.…”