Galinier Jacques

Biography

Since 1969, Jacques Galinier has been studying the Otomi Indians of the Southern Huasteca (eastern Mexico). He lived among them for two long periods (1969-1972 and 1975-1977) and has continued to visit them regularly since then. As this region was undocumented, Jacques Galinier initially undertook a salvage ethnography, studying first its material culture and technology and then its social organisation (PhD). Gradually learning the vernacular enabled him to contemplate a systematic study of the ritual system, in particular the isomorphisms revealed by native exegesis, between images of the body and those of the cosmos (thèse d’État). In light of this data, Jacques Galinier gradually turned his attention to research into native psychic apparatus theories, then into analogies with the major principles of Freudian metapsychology, as well as into the radical differences between these two systems of thought. These results led to a better understanding of the fundamental assumptions of Otomi ontology, and more broadly of native epistemologies in Mesoamerica.

Research Interest

Shamanism, cosmology, rituals, anthropology and psychoanalysis, museology, anthropology of the night