Cultes de fertilité chez les Drung du Yunnan (Chine)

Among the Drung of Yunnan, the absence of any clearly identifiable territorial rituals calls into question the relationship between ancestrality, territory and political power within the framework of a common ritual goal: achieving fertility. This article presents an ethnographic description of two rituals associated with the notion of fertility—the ox sacrifice and the mountain cult—that used to coexist in Drung society. The links between these two rituals and their respective political implications are thus explored. While both rituals can be defined as fertility rituals, they each exhibit a different relationship to territory in its political acceptation. On the one hand, the ox sacrifice is exemplary of the dynamic and competitive characteristic of political relationships, linked to the notion of prestige, with no discernable spatial anchoring. On the other hand, the mountain cult exemplifies a strong territorial embedment that reveals the past hierarchical political structure within which the Drung people were infeoded to local Tibetan chiefs whom they considered the masters of the land. At yet another level, both fertility rituals convey a complex relationship to the territory understood as a communal space within which relationships between humans and spirits take place.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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