The Anthropological Encounter and its Shadows

• Published in: Anthropologie et sociétés Vol. 34; no. 3; pp. 23 - 39
• Main Author: Devisch, Rene
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: French
• Published: 01.01.2010
• Subjects: Anthropologists; Belgium; Borders; Collective Memory; Colonialism; Democratic Republic of Congo; Family; Lacan, Jacques; Lacan, Jacques Marie Emile; Language; Phenomenology; Psychoanalysis; Trauma; War
• ISSN: 0702-8997
• DOI: 10.7202/1006199ar

Adopting a phenomenological view coupled with some Lacanian psychoanalytic insights, this study will first scrutinise how references to the horrors of the two World Wars were dodged during my younger days in the 1950s. I came to view the Flemish language as a fabric binding the people-from-below in Belgium ; the solidarity of this speech community demarcated itself from the French-speaking bourgeois class. The traumas of war, which dug a hole in, or cast a darkening shadow on, these people's memory and language, formed my peasant society's positioning in the world as well as their way of being and adjusting to the Other, strongly marked by affects and the unspoken, and riveted on the propensity of things, betweeness and life's shadows. The second part of my essay examines my eagerness in the early 1970s to become adopted as an anthropologist in the subordinate milieu of the Yaka in the South-western Democratic Republic of Congo. And the present after-event reflexivity is an attempt to mull over ways in which the family trauma triggered by the two World Wars indirectly informed my sensitivity within the Yaka context for both the intergenerational memory traces of colonial or family trauma lurking behind the unspeakable, and between, or at, the border of words, as well as for the ritual devices seeking to disclose that unthought-in-thought. Adapted from the source document.