Paru le 17/07/2019 | Broché 385 pages
Public motivé
foreword Erwan Dianteill
This book is at the crossroads of the anthropology of religion, imagery and morality. It explores a major ambivalence in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church - the images they revere and the people who create them.
Specifically, it addresses Orthodox image traditions and the moral identity of its « image-producers ». Its central thesis is that image-producers are socially problematic. They create objects that not only mediate relationships and exercise social power or agency, but also have the capacity to incite a moral discourse. Images in this context can have a spiritual impact that entangles their producers in a web of relationships with the visible, invisible, the material and immaterial : they necessitate an examination of the social agency that defines and obscures them. This book particularly looks at how certain Orthodox image-producers also function on the margins of the Church and treat, using talismanic images, « socially reprehensible » emotional disturbances.
Siena-Antonia de Ménonville is an ethnologist associated with the laboratory Canthel at Paris Descartes. She received her degree at New York University and her PhD at the Sorbonne Paris Descartes. Based on her work in Ethiopia, she explores the social discourse behind the production of Orthodox imagery.
