- » Adrián Navigante
Director Alain Daniélou Foundation Research and Intellectual DialogueOwing to its multifaceted and transversal character, Alain Daniélou’s work seems to call for an interpretation free from canonical standards of knowledge reproduction, as also from any form of dogmatism. However, using some of the author’s heterodox aspects to justify amateurish and superficial opinions turns out to be the opposite of what emanates from his work and heritage. This essay is a tentative response to opposite extremes in the reception of his thought: excessive (and stagnating) philological rigor and vulgar (and parasitic) amateurism.
Read » - » Alain Daniélou
INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN DANIÉLOU: A TASTE FOR THE SACRED
This interview, carried out by Jean-Pierre Joecker and Bernard Turle, was originally published in the French magazine Masques in 1984. The English translation in this issue of Transcultural Dialogues is by Adrián Navigante, revised by Kenneth Hurry. It contains minor changes and amendments with regard to the French text.
Read » - » Barbara Glowczweski
Professorial research tenure at the CNRSHEALING BY TAKING CARE OF THE LAND
In this essay, originally published in French in the Journal Multitudes N°77 (winter 2019) and translated by Kenneth Hurry, Barbara Glowczewski shows how Indigenous peoples in Australia or French Guiana reinvest their traditional medicinal knowledge and reelaborate healing rituals to take care of their people and their land. This is also the case in Europe, where rites for well-being and relinking with the earth are reinvented through music and dance, for example in festivals of shamanism as well as in the Zones to Occupy (ZAD) as contemporary attempts to re-enchant people’s ways of living.
Read » - » Catherine Basset
Specialist in Balinese culture, anthropologist, stage director and Alain Daniélou Foundation granteeANTONIN ARTAUD, BALINESE THEATRE, THE “DOUBLE” AND SHIVA
In this text, Catherine Basset seeks to demonstrate (from a Balinese/Shaivite/ Tantric perspective) that Antonin Artaud, poet, thinker and actor, experienced an initiatic process without a master, but based on reality, following a structural logic, after his discovery of Balinese drama in Paris in 1931 — on which he desired to found a supra-cultural sensory and metaphysical kind of drama (“Theatre of Cruelty”) — up to his identification with Shiva in 1937 and subsequent psychiatric internment.
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