Interview with anthropologist Sandrine Chenivesse (Part One)

Also a writer, she is the author of the essay La forteresse des âmes mortes (Actes Sud, 2024), a journey of discovery which, ‘from the secret to the sacred, the visible and the invisible, from the unspeakable to the perceptible, the social and the political, unveils the unsuspected dimensions of being, amongst the living and the dead, unmasking the deepest recesses of the Earth’s voices, of ancestral and collective memories’…

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From the anthropology of religion to Chinese anthropology, tell us more about your inspirational career path…
    
I discovered political anthropology in 1981 through the anthropologist, sociologist, political scientist and specialist in the Arab world Bruno Etienne (a professor at the IEP in Aix-en-Provence, specialising in the anthropology of religion). In 1995, I defended a doctoral thesis entitled ‘Mount Fengdu: the emerging geography of the afterlife’, supervised by Kristofer Schipper (an extraordinary professor and director of research at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the CNRS in Paris, and professor emeritus of Oriental studies at Leiden University).

In the early 1960s, Schipper carried out fieldwork in Taiwan on the living liturgical tradition of Taoism. He received esoteric teachings from Master Chen, a distinguished Taoist master from Tainan, a city in the south of the island, of whom he had become a disciple and adopted spiritual son, memorising an impressive number of Taoist rituals handed down through an oral tradition dating back more than a millennium. Following this initiation, he was himself ordained as a Taoist master. Having become a scholar of immense erudition, his pioneering work has since informed fundamental research into ‘the high religion of China’ and has revitalised an entire field of Sinological studies, both in the West and in the East. It was an extraordinary privilege to have been able to work with him all these years.

Since then, I have continued to refine my knowledge in a world in a state of constant change. My therapeutic practice is deeply informed by my entire journey, which began with the ancient manuscripts of the Taoist Canon, in particular two chapters of a text entitled ‘The Revelation of the Perfect Ones’, a monumental work of spiritual literature from the 4th century, the equivalent of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’.

A young shaman named Yang Xi is then commissioned by the dignitaries of a royal court south of the Yangtze River, who, terrified by the sudden deaths occurring within their families, send him into the afterlife to resolve these spectral vendettas. During spectacular trances, like a shrewd detective – a psychogenealogist ahead of his time – he traverses unknown imaginary lands which he names Fengdu, the ‘Capital of Abundance’, and which become the first Taoist representation of a world of the dead.

Until then, since ancient times, Taoist initiates had been primarily concerned with the question of immortality and the principle of nourishing the life force through various physiological and dietary techniques. This is what I shall call the mythical Fengdu. Then, shortly before the year 1000, another Fengdu emerged: a mountain situated in Sichuan, a central region of China bordering the Tibetan foothills. Mount Fengdu gradually established itself as a major sacred site, imbued with a sacred geography that enabled pilgrims – often travelling from great distances – to journey through the afterlife to untangle transgenerational knots with their ‘unrestful dead’ and heal from the psychic ghosts that haunted them. These spectacular pilgrimages are documented as late as the 1930s.

The ‘ill-dead’ (mal-morts) are clearly distinct from ancestors, who are ‘good dead’ (bons morts) in the sense that they have completed their life cycle and are entitled to a form of worship that sustains them as ‘the living of the afterlife’. The ‘ill-dead’, on the other hand, are condemned because they were brutally, prematurely and unjustly torn from their lives. As a result, they float in a liminal space between two worlds, like orphaned links, outside the family tree. Perceived as extremely harmful, they are barred from worship and languish, seeking at all costs to return to the world they left behind, for they are marked by the ‘non-forgetting’.

A long ethnological study

As part of my PhD, whilst I was a young ethnologist aged 25, I lived for four years in this small, remote village on the Yangtze River. This long ethnological study proved to be very difficult. I had to contend with the residents’ silence, and it led me to tread, at my own risk, the porous boundaries between the world of the living and that of the ‘unrestful dead’. But above all, following a tragic accident in the field, it helped me to resolve an unsuspected personal quest linked to the impossible mourning of my mother, who had died four years earlier. It was only years later, through psychoanalysis, that I realised I had had to take this immense detour in order to attempt, clumsily and candidly, to conceive of the inconceivable, to visualise the visualisable: my mother’s tragic ‘bad death’.

In all, I have spent around twenty years in China as an independent researcher, having been affiliated with the Centre for the Study and Documentation of Taoism (EPHE/CNRS, Paris) since 1996. Between 2005 and 2012, I continued my field research and taught Chinese culture and thought at Sciences Po Paris, the IEP in Aix-en-Provence and the University of Paris 8; since then, I have continued to give masterclasses and lectures.

Clinical psycho-sociology in prisons and the psychiatric sphere

On my return to France in 2008, having become a clinical psychosociologist – no doubt influenced by my earlier readings of Michel Foucault, one of my mentors – I wanted to rediscover a society in which I had never lived as an adult, through its extremes, that is to say, through its places of confinement: I then began working in prisons and within the psychiatric sector.

There was a clear link with the ethnological research carried out in China on the world of the ‘unworthy dead’ – a world described as a place of confinement, riddled with fortresses, dungeons and dark caves; a place of deprivation, punishment and, at times, degradation, where individuals are cast aside by society. I observed that the state of prisons does indeed provide an in-depth insight into a society. Prisons in the Nordic countries have many empty cells which are leased to southern European countries where prison capacity is at breaking point.

There is a gulf between the two cultures regarding the concept of punishment: punishment that destroys, or punishment that rebuilds. It is worth noting that Fengdu literally means ‘Capital of Abundance’.

The second part of our interview with Sandrine Chenivesse will follow mid-July.

Many thanks to Sandrine Chenivesse for her contribution to UzEssentiel.com.

Photograph©Diane de Ferron.

The right address: L’arbre dénoué, 14 rue des Amandiers, Montaren-et-Saint-Médiers. Contact: larbredenoue@yahoo, Tel: 06 12 99 84 77. Follow Sandrine Chenivesse on Instagram. La forteresse des âmes mortes is published by Actes Sud.