Laurent FONTAINE

Laurent FONTAINE, a linguistic anthropologist, has been traveling regularly to the Colombian Amazon since 1997 to work with the Yucuna and Tanimuca Indigenous peoples. He has devoted himself to transcribing, translating, and studying their oral literature, especially to gain a better understanding of their shamanism. Since obtaining his Ph.D. in 2001, he has been affiliated with the Languages and Cultures of Oral Tradition (LACITO, CNRS, UMR 7107). He has held an HDR diploma ("Habilitation to Supervise Research", the highest academic qualification after obtaining a Ph.D. in the French university system) since December 2015. He has published books and articles on ethnology and ethnolinguistics and has made numerous text corpus, audio and video recordings available to the public, such as myths, conversations, ritual speech, and shamanic incantations in the Yucuna and Tanimuca languages (classified as endangered by UNESCO), translated and annotated on the LACITO website and on his personal website.

In the field of shamanism, he has demonstrated that these Indigenous peoples possess exceptional ethno-scientific and ethno-geographical knowledge by describing how their invocations classify and locate flora and fauna. In a truly original way, he is also one of the few anthropologists striving to collect and analyze such a rich and diverse corpus, while using modal logics to interpret them within their specific contexts and social systems, employing both structuralist and pragmatic approaches.