ZemplÉni András
Ethnology
Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (LESC)
France
Biography
After studying ethnology, psychology and African linguistics and the Sorbonne and the Museum of Man, Andreás Zempléni initially combined ethnographic methods with a clinical approach in order to describe mental illness interpretations and traditional therapy among the Wolof and Lebou people of Senegal. His 1968 doctoral thesis and his other writings – on possession (ndëpp), on the nit ku bon child, on the socialising properties and projective interpretations of illness, on the link between the social causality of illness and its socio-political customs, on the path leading from symptom to sacrifice, on the role of denial in the effectiveness of magic, and on the transition between persecution and culpability in Ivorian prophetic therapies – are among the foundational works of the “Dakar school” of ethnopsychiatry, which he co-founded with Dr Henri Collomb and Marie-Cécile Ortigues.
Research Interest
Ethnopsychiatry, anthropology of illness, ritual, divination, possession, initiation, matrilineality, “visiting husband systems”, secret, secret societies, national rites, museology
Publications
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1991, L’amie et l’étranger: hommes et femmes en société matrilinéaire, Autrement: 57–75 [German edition,1993; Hungarian edition, 2004].
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2003, La politique et le politique: les assemblées secrètes du Poro sénoufo, in M. Détienne (ed.), Qui veut prendre la parole? (Paris, Éditions du Seuil): 107–147.
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2011, Le reliquaire de Batthyány: du culte des reliques aux réenterrements politiques en Hongrie contemporaine, in G. Vargyas (ed.), Passageways: From Hungarian ethnography to European ethnology and sociocultural anthropology (Budapest, L’Harmattan): 23–89 [Hungarian version: 2009].
