June 5, at 16:15, presentation of the book "The voice of the dead. An anthropology of dead people’s subjectivities"

June 5, at 16:15 - Ülikooli 17, room 218.

Prof. Gregory Delaplace (École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris) will give a presentation of his new book "The voice of the dead. An anthropology of dead people’s subjectivities" and the lecture "Scattered considerations on playing cards in Mongolia".

More details:

Book - The voice of the dead. An anthropology of dead people’s subjectivities.
In a recent book (La voix des fantômes. Quand débordent les morts. Paris, Le Seuil, 2024), Gregory Delaplace takes a new comparative perspective on ghosts throughout human cultures. While human collectives strive through funerary and mediumnic devices to educate their dead into becoming certain kinds of persons, defined by their own subjective quality, they can never be certain that dead people will always comply. Exceeding, rejecting or sidestepping (in a word, subverting) projects of the living as to what kind of subjects the dead should become, ghosts overflow - thus demonstrating paradoxically a distinctive subjective existence, irreducible to that which graves, rituals, and scripted interactions may have hoped to confine them to. Taking examples from Mongolia, drawn both from the published literature and from the author’s fieldwork, but also from the Amazon and from Europe, Gregory Delaplace both considers the ways the living place and educate the dead, and explores situations where ghosts prove to happen outside of the social and cultural frameworks set up to circumscribe their existence.

Lecture - Scattered considerations on playing cards in Mongolia
There are few social occasions, in the small villages of Mongolia's far north-west, which fail to be accompanied by card games. Whether for a simple neighbourly visit or for such occasions as weddings and New Year celebrations, hosting seldom goes without a few games at least, sometimes a series of rounds lasting several hours. Far from being a substitute pastime that everyone indulges in for lack of anything better, card games compete with fierce rivals, such as television since the early 2000s and smartphones for the past ten years. Card games may involve betting, but financial stakes are not essential to the excitement they generate every time. Here, I will describe these different games, their rules, the way they typically unfold, as well as the type of strategy and relational involvement they require from participants. Drawing on my own hours spent playing cards, I will try to understand what makes them so exciting for the participants in these small events, and how they may contribute to the tuning of a proper « tone » (Humphrey 2012) for hospitality relations.

Our guest - Grégory Delaplace is a social anthropologist, professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, where he holds the chair of the anthropology of religions. His ethnographic work is rooted in Mongolia, where he has been conducting ongoing ethnographic work since the late 1990s, although he has also made forays into the archives of the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge for comparative purposes.

His research on the place given to, and taken by, the dead in the daily lives of nomadic herders in north-western Mongolia, has led him to explore possible grounds for an anthropology of the invisible. Accordingly, his research interests have included spirit apparitions, mediumnic practices ("shamanic" or other), the memory of colonisation, cross-border relations, wrestling and, more generally, situations in which Mongolians, both in urban and rural areas, are concerned with dwelling well.

A student of Roberte Hamayon, under whose supervision he defended his PhD at the EPHE in 2007, Grégory Delaplace held a postdoctoral position at the University of Cambridge (2007-2011), working with Caroline Humphrey and the Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit. In 2011, he became a lecturer at Paris Nanterre University, where he headed the department of anthropology (2013-2016), before becoming a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France (2017-2022). He was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2015 and in 2020 he obtained his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) under the supervision of Anne de Sales. Between 2020 and 2024, Grégory Delaplace has been co-editor-in-chief of the French journal of anthropology L’Homme. He is the author of three books, as yet untranslated: L’invention des morts. Sépultures, fantômes et photographie en Mongolie contemporaine (Nord-Asie, 2009), Les intelligences particulières. Enquêtes dans les maisons hantées (Vues de l’esprit, 2021), and La voix des fantômes. Quand débordent les morts (Seuil, 2024).

Image