Individu, famille, communauté. Niveaux d’organisation et émergence de la vie chez les Mixe de Oaxaca (Mexique)

Abstract

Unlike the concept of origin, which treats the moment of appearance as a unique event, the notion of emergence – even more so when it is plural – suggests the idea of a multiplicity of moments during which appear new configurations, according to a logic combining ‘chance and necessity.’ This is why the natural sciences, which study life as an emergent process, develop explanatory models that go beyond the strictly causal approaches to address the dynamic dimension of the phenomenon. For the social sciences, especially the anthropology of life, this problem becomes even more difficult because the analysis should, in addition, take into account the variations, through space and time, in the conceptions of life and vital processes that humans elaborate. Drawing from an ethnographic investigation conducted among the Mixe of Oaxaca, Mexico, this article explores how these Amerindians think the emergence of new individuals in their community. The joint study of life cycle rituals – such as birth and wedding – and political rituals, involving poultry sacrifices made to an entity called ‘He, Who Makes Being Alive’, attests the constant aim to articulate the emergence of a new human life form with the development of competences in conformity with the form of life in which he/she will be inserted as a new center of activity. One of the challenges for the anthropology of life is to understand how the emergence of life – regarding both its physiological/physical dimension and its relational/behavioral dimension – involves several levels of organization (individual, family, community) that connect the biological existence of a human being with his process of becoming member of his community, especially when he fulfills political functions.