Pascale Bonnemère

The Materiality of Relational Transformations: Propositions for renewed analyses of life-cycle rituals in Melanesia and Australia

Keywords: Initiations, Mortuary Rituals, Re-enactment, Repetition, Relational Transformations

This paper introduces this special issue and analyses Papua New Guinea and Australian initiation and death rituals as moments of relational transformations. Although the general argument is not completely new, it has often remained an undemonstrated statement. The paper hence focuses on the specific ways people make these changes effective and express them in their rituals. It is suggested that an invariant modus operandi is in play in which, for a relation to be transformed, its previous state must first be ritually enacted. Towards the end of the ritual, the new state of the relationship is itself publicly enacted through a manifestation of the form the relation takes after the ritual. The paper suggests that a relationship cannot be transformed in the absence of the persons concerned. The relational components need to be either directly present, such as in initiations, or mediated through objects, such as in death rituals.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank James Leach and Borut Telban for their insightful comments and suggestions, Jessica De Largy Healy and Eric Venbrux for pointing out relevant materials on Aboriginal Australia, and the anonymous reviewers for encouraging me to engage in a comparison of initiation rituals in Melanesia and Australia.

While Amazonia is considered a favoured area for theorising relations between humans and non-humans, and Africa for understanding lineage systems and sacred kingdoms, the Pacific has been seen as a privileged region for anthropological research on gender and personhood. Many ethnographic descriptions, analyses, and powerful theories have emerged from and for the area, that defend the idea of a 'relational personhood', which is, following the phrasing of Rachel Morgain and John Taylor, 'mutually constituted, and transmuting over the life-cycle' (2015, 1). In a not-so-distant past and in many places still today, the course of life is marked by rituals performed at various and specific moments: when boys and girls reach their teens, when they accomplish an important deed for the first time, when, for boys, their betrothed becomes fertile, when they become fathers, and at death. 1 The argument that life-cycle rituals affect relations is well-established for Melanesia. Most scholars versed in male initiations have stressed that becoming adult men entails the necessity of separation from the female world, thus requiring the transformation of the novices' relationship with their mothers. Specialists in mortuary rituals underline that, by respecting taboos and organising large-scale exchanges, the living appease the spirits of the dead and recompose relationships, allowing life to go on. However, more often than not, the statement that life-cycle rituals transform relations lacks a demonstration of the actual processes at stake. This observation prompted Sandra Revolon and myself to organise a workshop on the specific ways people in the region make these changes effective and express them in rituals. We had both collected detailed ethnographic information on how relational transformations take place; respectively, during mortuary rituals of the Owa in the south-east Solomon Islands, and male initiations among the Ankave of Papua New Guinea. We were thus able to document transformations affecting relations not only between persons (as in initiations) but also between persons and spirits (as in mortuary rituals). Our aim was to investigate what we called 'the materiality of relational transformations': who is involved, what are the gestures performed, what objects and substances are manipulated, and what is the order of ritual actions?

1 Rituals performed for boys usually demand the engagement of more people and resources and are more complex and numerous than those for girls (Lutkehaus andRoscoe 1985, Telban 1998, 196-207, andMoisseeff, this issue). It has also been reported that while the first are said to trigger reproductive maturity, the rituals performed on the occasion of first menstruation celebrate an event that has already occurred. Often, people say that girls spontaneously mature while boys need to be assisted by ritual means. The same reason is provided for places where female initiations are not organised.

The idea that life-cycle rituals transform relations was so common in anthropology that it was considered a given by the participants in the two workshops that preceded this publication. The first was held in Marseille in 2014, the second at the ESfO conference in 2015 in Brussels. 2 We sought to identify regularities in the ways relations are transformed during lifecycle rituals in different Australian and Melanesian locations, and to suggest a general schema for these transformations.

Apart from the main proposition shared by our colleagues (life-cycle rituals are moments of relational transformations), our perspective entailed several secondary hypotheses to be tested, as it were, in other contexts. We posit that a relationship cannot be transformed if the termsthe persons-that are party to it are not present, either directly, as in initiations, or mediated through objects (Revolon 2007, 64-65), as in mortuary rituals. 3 Moreover, underlying the necessity of this presence is the idea that, for a relation to be transformed, its previous state must first be ritually enacted (Bonnemère 2014b). I added that in Melanesia the course of life was conceptualised as relational transformations organised in an ordered series. This implied viewing the rituals that mark out life as moments that cannot be analysed independently of each other. Although this apparently obvious statement was probably in the minds of earlier ethnographers, the different stages of a life-cycle ritual have not always been considered as a sequence of actions that are linked in an ordered and consistent way.

The hypotheses stem from the analysis I made of Ankave male rituals, grounded on observations of female and male activities during collective initiations in 1994, as well as on that of several rituals organised at the birth of a man's first child between 1998 and 2002. 4 During collective initiations, while my co-ethnographer Pierre Lemonnier was in the forest accompanying men and boys, I spent the days with their mothers, for whom a large shelter had been built on the village outskirts. By undertaking a comparison of what was asked of them (in terms of behavioural constraints and food taboos) with what the boys had do to -or rather not to do -I was provided with the confirmation that collective initiations operated a transformation of the mother-son relationship. In addition, the modus operandi of this transformation was the enactment of, first, the mother-son relation as it was before the ritual, and secondly, at the end of the three-weeks seclusion period, of the form this relation had subsequently taken. 5 In-between, the period of seclusion made the behaviours of both mother and son progressively divergent. This model does not vary and is repeated throughout the three initiation stages, which correspond to the successive relational transformations taking 2 In the 2014 workshop, P. Bonnemère, F. Brunois, L. Coupaye, J. De Largy Healy, J. Leach, D. Monnerie, S. Revolon, and B. Telban participated. In 2015, besides the convenors and the authors of this issue, the participants were S. Chave-Dartoen, L. Coupaye, S. Galliot, P. Lemonnier, D. Monnerie, M. Mosko, and A. Pickles. 3 Venbrux's article in this issue reveals another type of 'materialisation' we did not think of, namely a singer who speaks in place of the dead. 4 Since then, several such initiations have been organised, but I was not in the field at the time. Thus, Ankave initiation rituals are not obsolete, and Christianity, which is poorly established in their valley, has had no observable influence on them. 5 The question of making visible the outcome of an action in or on a person's body has been dealt with by several Melanesian specialists, in particular Marilyn Strathern (1988, 241) but also for example Eric Hirsch (2001, 244-245), and earlier Andrew [START_REF] Strathern | Why is Shame on the Skin?[END_REF].

place between mother and son, brother and sister, and husband and wife (see Bonnemère 2014b[START_REF] Bonnemère | Agir pour un autre. La construction de la personne masculine en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée[END_REF]. Another and methodological conclusion was that male rituals should be studied as part of a series, each stage being linked to the preceding one not only through chronology, but also because each takes up exactly where the preceding ended, reproducing the very gesture that terminated it. This analysis of Ankave initiations differed from what had previously been written on male rituals in the same cultural and linguistic set of groups (the Anga), where they mostly have been interpreted as an institution for reproducing and maintaining male domination [START_REF] Godelier | The Making of Great Men. Male domination and power among the New Guinea Baruya[END_REF][START_REF] Herdt | The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea[END_REF]). 6 The main shortcoming of these analyses was that they did not pay attention to the deeds of the whole set of participants and forgot the women altogether. 7 In general, past analyses tended to take into account gender relations independently of other kinds of relations that infused them. Maleness and femaleness were considered in essentialist terms as attributes that could suffice to characterise individuals. Yet, in small populations, kinship relations are intrinsically linked to gender. More generally, people are obviously not only gendered. They have a status, they are related to others, they perform actions, etc., all of which are 'characteristics' that cannot be excluded when conceptualising the way people apprehend others and relations in life. The Ankave male rituals emphasise this multitude. Moreover, the fact that women participate in them counters a vision (for example G. Herdt 1987, 97 for the Sambia-Anga) of the social world as made up of two separate spheres, male and female.

It is undeniable that attempts have been made to go beyond the classical analyses of male initiations (for example [START_REF] Strathern | The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society[END_REF] or to point to the potentially androcentric perspective on male-female relations. However, although many women anthropologists went to the field in the hope of counterbalancing existing descriptions of male-female relations and gender symbolism, none worked in a society where male initiations were still performed. 8 My analysis of Ankave male rituals is in accord with Strathern's idea that relations are of prime importance in explaining Melanesian views of the person, but develops in a different direction from her view that persons are constituted of relations. I would rather say that relations are internal in the sense that bodily substances are constituted by -or stem frompersons to whom individuals are related, and external because they are embodied by other 6 The Angans, whose number is around 100 000, are divided into some fifty local groups speaking twelve different languages. According to studies by linguists, geneticists and anthropologists, they have a common origin, which could go back as far as 10,000 years BP. As demographic pressure and endemic warfare drove them from one valley to the next, their languages, social organisations, systems of representations, and modes of using the environment evolved in different ways. Several of these groups have been the subject of long-term anthropological fieldwork: Kapau (Blackwood), Baruya (Godelier), Sambia (Herdt), Iqwaye-Yagwoia (Mimica), Ankave (Lemonnier and myself), and Kamea (Bamford). 7 The reasons for not having looked at women's activities during male initiations were linked to the assumptions of Western academic anthropologists, but not exclusively so, as feminist scholars tended to present it (for details on this topic, see [START_REF] Read | Male-Female Relationships among the Gahuku-Gama: 1950 and 1981[END_REF], 67-68 as well as Bonnemère 2004and 2014a, 164). 8 Gewertz & Errington's (1991) work is an exception but their observations of the place of women in male initiations did not really call into question previous analyses. people than oneself, hence their necessary presence when their relations are to be transformed (see Bonnemère 2015, 201-212 for details).

Repetition, iteration, and similar processes

Repetition9 is indeed an essential operation for enacting the transformation of Ankave boys into men. The Ankave resort to it when they act on the boys' bodies, repeating actions that they consider best to epitomise what should happen and how10 . They also use this modus operandi to bring about relational transformations. As already mentioned, for a relation to be transformed, its previous state must be first ritually enacted, and so repeated. This is done by asking both persons being related through the ritual (mothers and sons during the collective stages of initiations, and a man and his elder sister when his wife is pregnant with his first child) to act in order to manifest the nature of their former and then present relationship, demonstrating in what way it has changed. The relationship between mothers and sons is considered to be symbiotic, a state that is expressed and rendered visible during the ritual by making the two parties respect the same food taboos and behave similarly in many ways. This repeats the condition of pregnancy, a period when what the mother did had an effect on the foetus. Ankave women say that they need to be present when their sons are initiated because they carried them in their wombs. A ritual expert told them: 'You are one body with your sons.' Repetition is therefore a requisite for the transformation to occur. At the end of their seclusion, the new state of the relationship is itself publicly enacted when the boys give small game to their mothers and receive specially prepared food in return. These gestures express the separation from each other, manifesting the form the relation takes after -and because of -the ritual.

When children, Ankave siblings are considered very close to each other. This proximity stems from having dwelled in the same womb and been fed with the same maternal milk. When a boy is initiated, his elder sister is not secluded in a collective house as their mother is, but nonetheless, she has to respect the same food taboos as he does (on eating red pandanus juice, a vegetal substitute for blood, and on chewing betel). An elder sister plays her most important role when her brother's first child is to be born. Again, both respect the same taboos and wear the same piece of clothing: a bark cape on top of their head. It is so unusual for a man to wear a bark cape on his head that it is an explicit sign that he is expecting his first child and is in a state of taboo (see Bonnemère 2015, 26). He cannot remove the cape until his wife has given birth. The intended outcomes of the ritual, which involve establishing a new parental couple, necessitate the transformation of the relations a man has with his two closest female kin: his mother and his sister.

I have shown elsewhere that, in having children, a sister allows her brother to become a maternal uncle, which is a highly valued position endowed with a capacity to act for others that women are considered to have naturally (Bonnemère 2014b[START_REF] Bonnemère | Agir pour un autre. La construction de la personne masculine en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée[END_REF]. The sole fact of siblings becoming parents is not enough to transform their relationship, though, and ritualised actions have to be performed for the brother to become a maternal uncle. 11 The nature of their link is first expressed during the collective initiations, and repeated during his wife's pregnancy. Repetition is the condition for the relationship to be changed. In this case, the transformation is a process that, although starting when the brother becomes a father, is fully realised when his sister becomes a mother herself.

Repetition 12 is thus the means to which Ankave people resort in order to enact relational transformations and render them effective. This implies the presence of both terms that compose the relation and, methodologically, makes it necessary to take into account the entire sequence of rituals even though they are separated from each other by years.

Interestingly, a similar process occurs among the Tiwi of Australia (on whose mortuary rituals Eric Venbrux offers a contribution in the present issue). The early anthropologist Baldwin Spencer witnessed rites of passage for boys and girls on Melville Island at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were organised in seven phases that took place over several years. The main phase concerned boys aged 15. At the end of the ceremony, a wooden curved band with a cord attached to both ends -forming a collar of sorts-was attached around the neck of the initiate. The same was done to his mother and it was said that if one of these two objects fell off, the person who wore its double would get sick. 13 Venbrux (2000, 96) argues that the wearing of such a collar by both the boy and his mother represents 'the past status of their relationship' and that the rite was necessary for him to detach himself from the maternal world. In the terms of this introductory paper, we can state that the definitive removal of the collar materialises the transformation of their relationship, which first entailed re-enacting its previous state.

Writing on the then so-called Murngin (now Yolngu, see De Largy Healy, this issue) of northern Australia, [START_REF] Warner | A Black Civilization: A Social Study an an Australian Tribe[END_REF]Warner ( [1937]]) provides information pointing in the same direction. Small children, he writes, 'are carried astride their mothers' necks and put their hands around the mother's forehead', adding in brackets: 'This method is used in the initiation ritual when the little boys are carried by the men, to indicate the age status of the neophytes' (1958[1937], 126). The boys to be initiated are thus treated as when they were small, thus repeating a previous state before transforming it. 11 We would have to add 'and for the sister to be a paternal aunt', but this is not the case since her role is much less prominent than that of the maternal uncle. This asymmetry is for the most part linked to the role of the maternal kin in the child's well-being. Relations with the maternal kin are prevalent throughout life and even beyond (see Bonnemère 2015, 169-173 andLemonnier 2006, 324-354). 12 For a discussion of iteration and repetition (although not in ritual contexts), see M. Strathern 2013, 193-198). 13 I am grateful to Eric Venbrux who pointed this ethnographic example out to me and to Helena Meininger who translated the short article in Dutch that Venbrux wrote about this collar (2000,94).

Reiteration also occurs in mortuary rituals. Robert Hertz's famous 1907 essay speaks of death as a 'true initiation' [START_REF] Hertz | Death and the Right Hand[END_REF](Hertz [1907]], 73). For him, death is 'a step exactly analogous to that by which a youth is withdrawn from the company of women and introduced into that of adult men ' (1960, 80). And there is another repetition during the second funerals performed by people who live in the island of Mabuiag in the Torres Strait, since 'in order to become a legitimate and authentic inhabitant of the land of the dead he must first be killed ' (1960, 73). People disguised as spirits in the presence of the deceased's kin and close friends act out this 'killing' and 'strike the new soul on the head with a mass of stones ' (1960, 73), thus separating the deceased from the world of the living. We see here again a re-enactment-that of the death-as a prerequisite for the deceased to be definitively integrated in the world of the spirits.

Another example is the mortuary rituals of the Owa of the eastern Solomon Islands studied by Sandra Revolon. These rituals are organised in two stages separated by several years. The first stage is the funerals (manunga) which include the burial, the mourning period and two ceremonial meals made up of pork meat and a pudding of yam and taro mixed with Canarium nuts. The first meal takes place 10 days after the burial, the other 100 days later. The second stage of the mortuary rituals (farunga) is performed several years after the death and consists of two moments, one when stones or cement are put on the grave, the other, the end-ofmourning ceremony (muri ni muni), when many aspects of the manunga are replicated. For example, the pigs to be eaten are tied to an edifice erected to host a large ceremonial bowl (apira ni farunga) that represents the deceased (see below), as other pigs had been to the house where the deceased had been mourned years before (Revolon 2007, 62).

Owa farunga re-create the previous situation when the death had just occurred and the deceased were still close to the living. This re-enactment is a condition for the mourning period to end and for the dead to become spiritual beings. Hence, for the dead to be transformed into spirits and for the survivors to be able to change their relationships to them, the dead are made present through objects. This re-enactment of a previous situation to be able to change it, in the presence of objects that represent the dead, is comparable to that which I have drawn from the analysis of Ankave male initiations. In both cases, the terms of the relations to be changed need to be present, either in person when possible, or represented through objects if not. Here, as elsewhere in Melanesia, if we are to follow Strathern, 'it is not what the object "says" or "expresses" that is the key issue (…), but what it does; what forms of action and social relations the object elicits' (Hirsch 1995, 61).

Specific modes of relational materiality in mortuary rituals

The Owa situation is also relevant for the part of our analysis that focuses on "matters of relations". It illustrates how objects materialise the presence of the dead depending on how death occurred.14 'Ordinary' deaths are distinguished from 'violent' ones (murder or suicide). The relations to the dead and the mortuary procedures and objects involved are accordingly partly different.

In the case of violent death, the blood spilled generates spirits of blood that contain mena, a quality that resides within all spirits of the dead (ataro). This mena -a local version of the concept of mana, defined as a 'power of influence over people and objects' (Revolon 2007, 60)-is located in the skull, linked to the life force, figona, present in the head (Revolon 2007, 60). The mena of the blood spirits is very powerful, and a male descendant or a brother of a man or woman who has died a violent death may want to appropriate it and honour him or her with a cult held every year. The appropriation of the mena consists in 'removing the skull from the dead body some time after the burial and, for a man only, placing it in an ossuary, or immediately beginning the cult on his or her grave or on the spot where the blood was spilt' (Revolon 2007, 63). Then a meal consisting of a pudding of taro and Canarium nuts, and pork meat is prepared before calling the name of the deceased, telling him that the food is for him, and finally eating part of it. This has the effect of introducing 'the power of the ataro in his body in a permanent way, that is, until he himself dies and one of his descendants decides to appropriate the mena in turn' (Revolon 2007, 64). Subsequently, a carver is asked to make a bowl, called apira ni mwane ('men's bowl'), similar in form to the apira ni farunga ('large ceremonial bowls', see below) but much smaller. This bowl is used at least once a year during the ceremony for the deceased whose mena has been appropriated. It consists of a meal of Canarium-nut pudding and pork, which men possessing the mena of ataro in their own bodies eat for the dead, 'thereby renewing the powers inside them' (Revolon 2007, 64).

The Owa thus make their dead appear to them differently depending on how death occurred. During the end-of-mourning ceremony for an 'ordinary death', the large ceremonial bowl (apira ni farunga) -carved specially for him or her and filled with food-re-presents the deceased. As Revolon writes, 'everything happens as though the big house was not filled with food bowls but with the deceased themselves, who partake of the last meal offered to them. To some extent (…) the apira bowls play the role of the dead' (2007,(64)(65). When the ceremony is over, the building is destroyed and the apira ni farunga is left aside and forgotten or, as is often the case today, sold to art dealers (Revolon 2007, 62, 65). From this moment on, the ordinary dead are no longer interacting with the living 'and each is free to have his own existence in his own world' (Revolon 2007, 65).

As seen, people who died violently are also made present through food bowls, but these are smaller in size and kept by the man who decided to appropriate his or her mena and so to devote an annual cult to them (Revolon 2007, 65). The process of appropriating this mena has two consequences on the relations between the living and these violently deceased. At the individual level, a part of them comes to be located in their kinsmen who chose to honour them through a regularly held cult. During such cults, the deceased are fed and worshipped, thus engendering a continuing 'ambiguous influence, potentially positive or dangerous' (Revolon 2007, 65). At the collective level, these particular dead are not completely banished from the world of the living. Consequently, and as Revolon notes, 'although they share the same designs, the two types of bowls can therefore be seen as the materialisation of two different types of relationships between the living and the dead' (2007,65).

Understanding the process of materialising the deceased and manifesting their relations to the living in real terms thus needs to take a number of factors into account. Who are the deceased, how did they die, what moment of the mortuary rituals is concerned? The question of the relationship between persons and objects, particularly relevant for analysing mortuary rituals, has stimulated an abundant literature. Anna-Karina Hermkens' recent article on Maisin tapa cloth, for example, is useful for our discussion because it considers tapa as personified objects not only 'in that they share similar substances with people, but that they can "act" like people ' (2015, 20). Because, 'like persons, Maisin tapa is composed of gendered and ancestral substances (…), when applied or removed from the body, [it] effectively conveys or embodies new social identities ' (2015, 19). When Maisin girls menstruated for the first time, they received a facial tattoo and were dressed with a red loincloth, which marked their new status as fertile and marriageable women (2015, 16). 15 Upon death, 'the body of the widow (or widower) is ritually undressed, neglected (the hair is not combed and trimmed), isolated from the rest of society ' (2015, 18). As the author makes clear, 'during ceremonies such as mourning rituals (…), clothing and removal of clothing change the body, integrate and resocialise it into various social settings, and mediate relations among social actors and among the living and the dead' (2015,18). Hermkens' analysis offers a means of better understanding the role of objects in life-cycle rituals in general. 16 The Special Issue

The rituals described and analysed in this issue allow for a dialogue in the realm of relational transformations, including also the examples presented above. Three contributions are concerned with Aboriginal Australia, one focussing exclusively on mortuary practices and the other two analysing mortuary ceremonies in conjunction with initiations. One paper deals with initiation and marriage in Papua New Guinea, and the last contribution discusses exchanges acknowledging the place of fathers in a matrilineal society of the Solomon Islands.

Jessica De Largy Healy's contribution is an analysis of initiation ceremonies and mortuary rituals as they are performed by the Yolngu of north-eastern Arnhem Land. The author interprets the paintings applied on boys' bodies and on corpses (nowadays coffins) as materialising various sets of relations that are transformed through the rituals. These include those between the novice and the ancestors of his and related groups, and between himself and the members of his clan and other kin groups. In Aboriginal contexts, dealing with ancestral beings is not restricted to mortuary ceremonies, and the first initiation ritual, during which circumcision takes place, is the occasion to apply an ancestral clan painting on the boy's chest. The designs are clan-owned, and the colours used come from deposits linked to mythical stories of the group. Through these body paintings -which are 'special kinds of relational artefacts'-and through sacred artefacts that materialise the presence of ancestral beings, the novice harnesses their spiritual power. The entire life-course may be understood as a process of accumulating the ancestral spiritual force that brings individuals progressively closer to the beings that embody this force, and ultimately transform them into ancestors. Initiation and mortuary rituals are thus part of an integrated process that progressively transfigures boys into men and men into ancestors.

The act (painting the body), the designs, the songs and dances that 'instantiate the actions of particular ancestral beings across the lands of the participating clans' (De Largy Healy, this issue) are similar at initiation and during the mortuary ritual performed for a particular individual. May we thus suggest that the situation is a re-enactment after death of what had been staged when the boy was initiated? Of course, the parallelism of the two ceremonies is a way of reinforcing both, as the author writes. But it might also indicate a process in which the mortuary ritual repeats the initiation of the now-dead person as a first step required for transforming his relations with the ancestors and becoming one of them. If this is the case, then there should be a ritual action that indicates the change of the relation. I suggest that the painting of the mortuary receptacle, 'itself painted like the waŋarr [ancestral beings] and like the clan's sacred well' (De Largy Healy, this issue), is the action that expresses the deceased's change of status. How to see the role and meaning of repetition in ritual contexts is a matter of interpretation, and De Largy Healy is clearly in the position to decide what interpretation best reflects the ethnography. Whatever the case in this particular matter, the article confirms elegantly the need to consider life-cycle rituals as an integrated sequence in order to understand their meaning.

Based on the ethnography collected by Spencer and Gillen at the turn of the 20 th century on the Arrernte of central Australia, Marika Moisseeff's contribution is another illustration of the heuristic value of analysing initiation and mortuary rituals together. She argues that in these two cases, where the objectives are similar (to 'render a son autonomous from his mother [and] emancipate a widow from her deceased husband' (Moisseeff, this issue), the same procedures for enacting relational transformations are engaged.

As in New Guinea, the relation between a mother and her son has an aspect of a physical intimacy which is potentially harmful. To gain autonomy and engage in new intimate relations, particularly a conjugal one, he has to be 'extracted' from it. The process begins soon after birth when a boy is ritually assigned a baby girl who will become his mother-inlaw -thus anticipating his future as a married man. 17 It continues in several stages of his initiation -including circumcision and subincision-and ends when he is identified with his tjurunga, 'a stone (or wooden) fragment of his country intimately linked with the spirit he incarnates'. This identification enables him to participate in rituals intended to promote the multiplication of his totemic species.

The same process of separation is enacted for women at widowhood. When a woman's husband dies, she retires to a special camp, has to remain silent and coats her body with white clay. As Moisseeff explains, she is assimilated to her dead husband (to the point that she is herself contaminating when her husband's corpse decays) and wears a string ('chaplet') of animal bones when he is supposed to have become a skeleton. She will be detached from him and able to remarry when, at the end of the mourning period and of the ceremony that follows, she destroys the bone chaplet and buries it in her husband's grave.

Moisseeff sees the Arrernte life-course as 'a succession of permutated couples'. For a man, the succession goes from (1) the mother-son pair to that formed by a man and his tjurunga, to (2) in between, the relation of a boy to his future mother-in-law, followed by (3) the conjugal couple. For a woman, there is no need to be separated from her mother to engage in a reproductive relationship. When her husband dies, the conjugal relationship, even though no longer present as such, becomes harmful because female bodies and corpses are less differentiated : both are characterised by their moisture. The mortuary ceremonies for widows play an equivalent role and are organised similarly to the initiations of boys. In both cases, the outcome is the acquisition of autonomy and the capacity to enter into a relation of intimacy that is potentially productive. Eric Venbrux's contribution presents the elaborate mortuary rituals of the Tiwi, who live in the Bathurst and Melville islands of northern Australia. His analysis argues that these ceremonies contribute to the construction of a 'postself', a concept originally coined by Shneidman, to which the author adds a social dimension. The Tiwi have 'institutionalised the mechanisms for producing posthumous reputations' (Venbrux, this issue). Death rituals create an image in the memory of the survivors that is in accordance with the dominant value of personal achievement in Tiwi culture, and 'the size, quality and number of grave posts, for example, are an index of prestige, not only of those who organise the mortuary rites but also of the dead person' (Venbrux, this issue). Creating the deceased postself is a transformative and relational process that involves making the deceased present through an enactment of events that occurred in his life. Participants perform dances and songs referring to moments specific to the relations they had with him. The widow (or widower) evokes sexual intercourse by undressing and singing with the voice of the deceased.

The detailed description of the different rites that constitute death rituals helps us in thinking about the notion of presence in the mortuary rituals. While the Owa make their dead present through objects, the Tiwi mobilise kin who either make the dead speak or recall their relationship. The deceased's life-course is remembered, with particular emphasis on the first years of his life, with his 'grandparents' and his 'mothers' and matrilineal 'children' acting in concert.

Venbrux's Tiwi ethnography reveals another way of making the dead present in that, similar to what has been observed in Ankave initiation rituals, people reiterate their relations, including, in Tiwi mortuary rituals, the part of the deceased. These processes support the idea that, for a relational transformation to be effected, both persons constituting the relation must be present.

The three contributions dealing with Aboriginal Australia reveal connections between initiations and mortuary rituals. Moisseeff considers them as analogues of each other, while De Largy Healy and Venbrux observe that initiations may be interwoven with death ceremonies. Their interpretations are similar in that they consider these rituals to be reinforcing each other. I may suggest that, in accord with the idea of life-course rituals being ordered in a chronological and logical series, these ritual operations are organised in such a way that a new phase starts by repeating or re-enacting the preceding one. Among the Ankave, as already explained, this is the prerequisite for a relational transformation to take place.

Arve Sørum takes us away from Australia and from mortuary rituals. His contribution focuses on the acts, gestures, dances, gifts, distributions of food, etc. that take place during male initiations and bride-capture (marriage) ceremonies among the Bedamini of Papua New Guinea. The ritual dramaturgy creates, emphasises, or gives a new content, to specific relations. At initiation, the giving of a palm spathe belt (pulu) by the father's brother to the novice permanently transforms their relation into one of mutual assistance. The wearing of a special necklace (gisegisu) given and tied by a woman classified as a 'mother' creates a close relationship between them. 'By tying a gisegisu around the neck of her initiand, the mother's brother's daughter takes the responsibilities of a true mother towards him, and he takes on the duties of a son towards her'. Co-initiates (sama) develop a marked relationship as well. This is the only one to be 'modelled on a genuine sharing on equal terms, replicating a personal friendship'. A special object (a bone-tipped arrow) is involved in the establishment of the relation.

At marriage, the relations established are not so much of support as they are of sharing. A special relationship (gahia) is defined between men (or women) who have married sisters (or brothers), which 'will replace any pre-existing relationship among the parties' and is extended to all men of different clans who have conjugal relations with women of the same clan. Bedamini people say: 'We are brothers because we marry the "same" women'(Sørum, this issue), meaning that affinal relations with the same group create siblingship. Sørum goes as far as to propose that 'a shared agnatic identity may thus be positively claimed by making co-marriage an essential part of being a kinsman or kinswoman'. Moreover, the children of people linked as gahia are in a gawia relationship between themselves, that is defined as 'a relation codified as matrilateral siblingship formulated in the idiom of "having one mother". It emerges through the fact of two (or more) persons being children of women of the same other clan. In opposition to gahia, the gawia relationship [has an] associated idiom of physically sharing an identical female substance' (Sørum, this issue).

These examples show that the main objective of Bedamini life-cycle rituals is to reconfigure, if not create, the relational network of any male person from initiation to marriage and beyond. The author writes that 'his initiation signals an incipient transformation of the relational field into which he has been thrown, creating the seeds for a more personalised network' (Sørum, this issue). By placing emphasis on the role of the different agents and in considering that they 'have effects on the processes through which relations are given their form', Sørum's analysis follows our of looking at how relationships are transformed in the course of ritual. Johanna Whiteley's contribution also looks at the concrete ways through which relations are transformed in a ceremonial context. It is a presentation of a particular bereavement, and of how rituals transforming relations with fathers affect the position of in-married wives, children, and land. This discussion differs from the preceding Australian and Papua New Guinean examples in interesting ways. The West Gao people of island Melanesia follow a rule of matriclan exogamy, and 'land, as elsewhere in the Solomons, is the most highly valued resource' (Whiteley, this issue). These two distinctive features make the fangamu taego ceremony a place where an apparent contradiction between 'the interplay between relationships that are given and those that are constructed' (Whiteley, this issue) is addressed, if not resolved. The paper details the material transactions that transform relationships, and the connection between the rituals that make sense of each one. It therefore offers a good sample for evaluating the validity of considering life-cycle rituals as an interdependent sequence and hopefully provide a basis for refining the hypotheses.

The fangamu taego ceremony comprises different and well-identified successive moments, made up of exchanges involving matrilineages around a man, his wife and their children. Unlike initiations, the West Gao ceremony does not involve ordeals or secrecy and is not centred on one person's body and relations. It is made up primarily of food exchanges of different kinds, which illustrate the way a father publicly transfers to his children use rights on the land of his matrilineage. While these processes seem to be different from what are generally called life-cycle rituals, they nevertheless interestingly evince how very specific and explicit manipulations of everyday food items enact and effect relational transformations. These items are made to serve as specific and active elements pertaining to particular matrilineages. Their appearance and exchange make present kin relations as they are transformed.

Planning a fangamu taego is the decision of a married woman, together with her children, but it is a public ceremony for which food is brought in great quantities by members of her own matriclan (kokolo) and that of her husband. First, reciprocal and equal exchanges are made between these two matriclans. The contribution of each is distinguished through two piles of food placed symmetrically at the centre of the ceremonial ground. During the distribution, the pile constituted by the work of the woman's matriclan goes to the members of the man's clan and vice versa. Later on, more items of food are given to the husband -and father-, among them the malahu pudding (an 'ancestral food'), which Whiteley (this issue) describes as 'the source of the most significant relational transformation to occur during fangamu taego'. The father will 'answer' these gifts with a public transfer to his children of use-rights on his matrilineage's land. Of the various acts of recognition in that process of land-rights transfer, the communal consumption of the malahu pudding is the most powerful in that it produces relational effects. A land-dispute case illustrates: '[it] effects a bodily transformation that removes a person's ability to dispute both kinds of land-person relationships in the future' (Whiteley, this issue). These two kinds are, first, those obtained by being born in a matrilineage and, second, those transferred by a father during the fangamu taego.

This final contribution analyses an ethnographic situation that is different in many ways from the preceding ones: exchange ceremony vs life-cycle rituals; matrilinearity vs patrilinearity; land as the most highly valued resource; relational transformations to land that entails a change, for one generation, in the mutual relations two related groups have rather than relational transformations between categories of people. This being said, and as the author makes clear, 'In using landscape to extend his relationships to his children, a West Gao father achieves what his body cannot'. Whiteley's underlying concern thus bears on the central issue entailed in initiation, marriage, and mortuary rituals: how necessary relational transformations are put into operation at specific moments in life.

A concluding note

The life-cycle rituals described and analysed in this special issue are for the most part initiations and mortuary rituals. While the former are organised to transform the relations that bind the novices to their female kin, the latter disrupt existing relationships and create the conditions for the survivors to reorganise them. As De Largy Healy did in this issue, other scholars have established links between initiation rituals and death ceremonies for Aboriginal Australia. Interpreting initiation as a 'symbolic death', Glowczewski for example (1983), analyses the gift of female hair strings to maternal uncles that takes place at death together with the gift of male hair strings to other men via their sisters. She concludes that, 'the Warlpiri, Kaitish, and Aranda examples show complex symbolisms of value circulation at work, as if life reproduction and social reproduction were cycled by this image of the detached -hair cut as an analogy with the separation of the dead from the living group-to be attached once again to recirculate in an exchange that allows the forming of alliances ' (1983, 238). Sometimes, as seen, the reason for parallelism between initiation and death is not based on this idea of detachment but on the hypothesis that these ritualised moments are linked by both a temporal sequence and a structural rationale.

A recent chapter by Alexis von Poser constitutes a rare case where a systematic comparison of actual actions in male initiations and mortuary rites (both as they were performed in the past and today) is made for Papua New Guinea. His analysis would tend to indicate that identical procedures are performed at both occasions. He shows how both rituals have the same structure: the similarity between the number and organisation of the different events lead him to write that 'the two cycles seem to mirror each other ' (2016, 166). Moreover, the last phase of initiation, which ends with a parade of the young men through the village and a presentation of their decorated bodies, is symmetrical to the beginning of the death rites, where the corpse is decorated in the same way (2016,167). This recalls where I began this introductory piece. In Ankave male rituals, each stage is 'linked to the preceding one not only through chronology but also because each stage takes up exactly where the preceding ended, reproducing the same gesture that terminated it'. This parallelism alone, which has temporal as well as structural dimensions, justifies both dealing in more depth with other Aboriginal and Melanesian examples of life-cycle ceremonial activities as well as extending the comparison to other parts of the world.

Repetition does not here refer to 'repetitive forms of behaviour that are carried out on socially prescribed occasions' on which most specialists base their definition of ritual(Hicks 2010, xvii), but about the reenactment of a relational configuration which allows its transformation. It is thus a process rather than actions or simple behaviours, which links together different stages of the ritual, illustrating the ordered series that it constitutes.

 10 For example, the smearing of red pandanus seeds and red clay on the head and shoulders of the boys when they emerge from a corridor of branches is no doubt an enactment of their birth, and the smearing of yellow clay by women when the boys come back from the forest, fully adorned, clearly re-enacts their mother's anointment of their bodies with the same clay when they were born.

As Keane wrote in 2009, 'it is because things in their very materiality exceed any particular concepts, times, and projects, that they persist across different concepts, times, and projects'. Here, the same bowls -which only differ in size-stand for different kinds of dead persons, thus extending their use as it were inside the concept of death, but also exceeding their single referent.

I use the past tense here since the last female initiations were performed in the late 1990s[START_REF] Hermkens | Mediations of Cloth: Tapa and Personhood among the Maisin in PNG[END_REF]

16).16 See also Lemonnier's recent analysis of the objects used in male initiations that 'allow important beings of the past to be present among the living' (2012, 78).


Jobard Fabien

Dieudonné M'bala M'bala

between anti-racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial

The next day (March 19), Dieudonné is again sentenced by a Paris court, this time to a €22.500 fine for hate speech. In December 2013, Dieudonné stated the following in a public show about Patrick Cohen, a famous French journalist who had appealed his ban from French broadcast: "You see, if the wind ever turns, I am not so sure he will have time to pack his suitcase. When I hear Patrick Cohen speak, you see, I think to myself: 'Gas chambers… well, too bad.'" It should be noted that the show during which he expressed this heinous anti-Semitic position, Le Mur (The Wall), was banned by the government once the hate-filled position about Cohen became known. This very rare decision found the acquiescence of the administrative Supreme Court 1 . Some years earlier, by the end of December 2008, Dieudonné had offered the notorious Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson his highest and (rather unexpected) "moment of fame". 2 On the occasion of a show held in one of the largest theatres of Paris, before a crowd of around 5,000 with special guests including the French extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, Dieudonné let his assistant dress up as a concentration camp detainee and wear a large yellow star ("a lightening dress" -according to Dieudonné). He then awarded Faurisson the "prize for being an insolent outcast"; judging from audience reactions on YouTube, the show was warmly received. 3 Dieudonné was sentenced to a €10,000 fine for "anti-Semitic insult committed in public" as a result of his actions. In June 2008, a few months before he invited Robert Faurisson to step on stage with him, Dieudonné was sentenced to a €7,000 fine for characterizing Holocaust commemorations as "memorial pornography", and in November 2007 for describing Jews as "slavers" (in French: "négriers").

Still, this is only an incomplete list of cases against Dieudonné, who faced the criminal justice in 2016 again for "incitement to hatred" with a two-months on probation and a 10.000 € fine sentence -he was sentenced for a show in which he ironized on the Holocaust dressed in a 1 Conseil d'Etat, Décision en référé n°374508, ord. 9/1/

Introduction

French recent history has been marked by a wave of deadly attacks (human bombings, machine guns, track used as a killing weapon, knife strangulation …) mostly claimed by the Islamist State in Iraq and the Levant. Three years after a young French named Mohammed Merah killed 3 French soldiers of North-African descents and 4 people in a Jewish school, among them 3 kids, January 9 2015 by a young Black French man, Amedy Couliably, launched an attack in a kosher supermarket in Paris, killing four. Couliably was an accomplice of the Kouachi brothers, the two men who two days before killed a dozen of people (most of them journalists of the weekly paper Charlie Hebdo, and two police officers) as an act of revenge in the lasting controversy of "the prophet's cartoons". French society was deeply shocked by these events, and approximately 1.5 millions people gathered and marched in Paris the Sunday following the shootings.

At the end of the day on January 9, a French black humorist Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala (known as Dieudonné) posted a Facebook message stating: "As far as I am concerned, I feel I am Charlie Coulibaly." This position was a mix of the popular slogan "Je suis Charlie" used to support the memory of the journalists killed in the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices, and a reference to the supermarket's gunman Amedy Coulibaly. On March 18, Dieudonné was sentenced to two months of prison on probation for "incitement of terrorism." This was a crime issued from a law adopted in November 2014, the week of the appeals for support of middle-east terrorist activities on the Internet. As one should note, Dieudonné expressed solely support to the one of the three gunmen of January 2015 whose action explicitely consisted in targetting Jewish people.

Guantanamo detainee outfit4 . It is tempting to cast him as one of only a few extremists amidst a small crowd of radical right-wing supporters who regularly breach the rules on the freedom of speech. However, Dieudonné enjoys a large popularity in France, and most of the judicial cases filed against him make for passionate discussions throughout French society. His mix of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and conspiracy theories is even more surprising given that in the early stages of his career Dieudonné was initially viewed as an anti-racist activist with a strong personal commitment fighting the radical-right party Front National. Dieudonné is now at the center of a curious constellation of people who were once foes but are now finding common ground through his hate speeches. My goal in this article is then to try to understand how such a constellation developed, and analyzing what role Holocaust denial plays in this set of popular ideas and representations. In order to do so, I will briefly summarize Dieudonné's career, highlight the extent of his social resonance, and finally analyze the nature and role of the kind of Holocaust denial he promotes.

Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala

Dieudonné has undoubtedly been one of the most talented humorists of the last 20 years in France. He began as a salesman selling cars, cell phones, and copy machines -an activity that surely impacted the way he viewed the impact of speaking and rhetoric in the citizens' lives. From the beginning of the 1990s he enjoyed substantial success both on stage and on TV, performing together with fellow humorist Elie Seimoun. The duo used the contrast between a thin white Jew (Cohen) and an average Black Frenchman (Bokassa) to exaggerate stereotypes and confront casual everyday racism.

Dieudonné turned to a solo career in 1997, making more and more appearances in French blockbusters movies. At the same time, he developed a stronger off-scene political commitment. In 1997 he received eight percent of the votes in a legislative election for a city in the greater area of Paris; it was a city where, in 1983, the Front National had reached its then highest electoral support. The same year, Dieudonné staged his first one-man show. His act described a murder from the different accounts of the witnesses and wannabe witnesses, and the show gained favor with the critics. The act was also welcomed by the press, which underlined the humorist's power to provocatively deal with controversial issues, often targeting race relations and religious faith. The months between the attacks of 9/11 2001 and the 2002 elections were Dieudonné's political turning points. On the national scene, these months were marked by heightened youth unrest in the deprived suburbs of major French cities, mostly migrant young males, and the rise of the Front National, which culminated in Jean-Marie Le Pen reaching the second stage of the presidential race for the first time. On the cultural scene, controversies surrounded an eminent philosopher and publicist, Alain Finkielkraut, who once authored a recognized book on Holocaust denial and was now lauding Oriana Fallaci's views on the clash of religious groups in Europe. 6 On the international scene, the 9/11 attacks had a sudden and major impact on French public opinion. 7 Further, the Israeli army's massacre at the Jenin refugee camp caused a vivid emotional reaction among the Arab population in France (a population which totals approximately up to 4 million individuals, or nearly seven percent of French residents) 8 .

In the time preceding this crystallization of events, Dieudonné's commitment became more and more linked with the promotion of Black consciousness. In 2002, the main public funding organization sustaining cinema in France refused to financially support one of his movie project on the Code Noir, the royal edicts codifying slavery in the French colonies from the end of the 17 th century onwards. Dieudonné publicly and resolutely attributed this decision to the "Zionists" who supposedly led the funding organization and who were willing to protect the memorial interests of the Holocaust to the disadvantage of the memory of the slave trade. He later described Judaism as "a sect, as fraud, which is the worst of all since it is the first one ever" (an expression for which Dieudonné later faced a sentence confirmed by the highest criminal court, Cour de cassation) 9 and Jews as "a people which cut prize of the Holocaust, which sold suffer and death in order to build up a country and to make money." 10 In the following years, Dieudonné's core anti-Semitic views were diversified and amplified. His views were more and more oriented against the Jews, signaling a clear radicalization of his positions. The radicalization of his views caused him to lose more and more of his supporters among fellow humorists and in the media. Dieudonné then shifted to different allegiances, from radical Black associations to Iran and Hezbollah's organizations (with a welcome in 2009 by President Ahmadinejad in Iran), Holocaust deniers, extreme-right publicists, and even Jean-Marie Le Pen, who is now allegedly the god-father of one of Dieudonné's children.

8 Insee 2012. Beside the « arab population » (which is here understood as the migrants from North Africa and their immediate descents, so that only two generations are taken into account), one should mention the muslims living in Francewhich is particularly difficult since there is no central registration of the religious belonging in France. The largest inquiry on migration in France (« Trajectories and Origins » Survey, see Beauchemin et al. 2015) gives an estimation of a bit more than 4 Millions people living in France and defining themselves as « muslims ».

Dieudonné's turn to radical anti-Semitism and support of Holocaust denial was the result of his failed interactions with certain social and political institutions, institutions in which he believed Jews played a predominant role. In this respect, Dieudonné's situation is original.

Usually, deviancy is characterized by the growing socialization of the deviant among groups of peers, and the subsequent isolation from the rest of the society. Dieudonné, for his part, has certainly lost some of his fans as he gathered supporters from different extreme-right corners.

But he succeeded, in the same time, in keeping some bonds with his earlier fans, a group mainly made up of members of ethnic minorities and left-oriented young people who are themselves sometimes targets of the Dieudonné's newer supporters from the extreme-right. As such, Dieudonné's place in French society can offer a better understanding of the social reception of these popular forms of Anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

Dieudonné's place in French society

What is the place, role, and importance of Dieudonné in French society? One aspect is the size of the Dieudonné's audience, its social composition, and the degree of political support by his public. Another dimension of this includes the kinds of networks he might be part of, and the characterization of these networks.

Despite the fact he is practically banned from public broadcast for a sketch perceived as being anti-Semitic, more than 8,000 spectators comes to Dieudonné's performances in France, and he is perhaps the most well-known humorist in all French-speaking countries -even if his performances are controversial outside of France. In 2012 police interrupted one of his shows in Brussels -a decision then rebuked by the Belgian justice system, and Brussels mayor forbid his show planned in 2015 in the Belgian capital, and some months later Liège's criminal court sentenced him to a 2 months prison sentence for incitement to hatred, and for anti-Semitic and negationist stances [START_REF]Dieudonné condamné à 2 mois de prison ferme après son spectacle à Herstal[END_REF] . His 2012 shows in Montreal were also cancelled and he even was barred from entering Canada in 2016 when he was about to perform a series of sold-out shows in Montréal, despite the protesting position of Montréal mayor. However, his performances are far too politicized to attract the same large masses as other humorists. In comparison, Dieudonné's audiences are only a quarter or a third of that of other prominent humorists in France (based on the estimation of the director of Nantes' theatre in 2014). [START_REF] Laurent | Pour le directeur du Zénith de Nantes, 'il faut relativiser le succès de Dieudonné[END_REF] Dieudonné's shows on the Internet channel youtube.com, however, manage to reach hundreds of thousands of viewers. Some anti-racist sketches without reference to Jews attracted between one and two million viewers over the last five to ten years. Other sketches with heinous views on Jews and Holocaust denial stances attract the same amount of viewers. Among these is a video on Dominique Strauss-Kahn ("a Jewish billionaire all the same"), in which anti-Semitism is linked to statements of deception. In this sketch, Dieudonné states that there are good and bad conspiracies. His example of "a good conspiracy" is Dominique Strauss-Kahn actually being innocent of sexual violence. As for his example of "a bad conspiracy", he states: "do not even try to doubt on the gas chambers … in France, beware, there are laws, there are official versions of historical accounts that shall not be questioned." His videos in which he invites anti-Zionist Jews, Robert Faurisson, or some second-ranking figures from diverse extreme-right camps, however, attract fewer viewers (some hundreds of thousands at the most). As another sign of public success, Dieudonné may have recently gathered up to 1,500 financial contributions in the wake of his various convictions, reaching a total amount of approximately €500,000. [START_REF] Le | Dieudonné mis en examen, un vrai problème de fonds[END_REF] So far there is no systematic study on the public gathering at Dieudonné's shows. News reports of recent shows do not differ from the assessment made by John Lichfield at a 2014 Dieudonné gig in Bordeaux: "The audience of at least 5,000, which fills the venue to capacity, is predominately male. It is mostly a white and working class audience. There are older people and some students, but the great majority seem to be in its thirties and forties." 14 These smaller groups suggest that Dieudonné also succeeded in gathering a motley political network around him as soon as he took clear positions about Jews and the Holocaust.

The first of these groups were radical Black activists inspired by the Nation of Islam, which places an emphasis on the allegedly prominent role Jews played in the slave trade 15 . Anti-Semitic Islamist groups joined them and helped Dieudonné raise money to overcome financial hazards.

Like Maurice Bardèche and Roger Garaudy before him, Dieudonné was welcomed in Libya, Lebanon, and Iran, even giving interviews on Iranian public broadcast, and applauding Gadhafi and Ahmadinejad for their roles in helping the world preserve peace against war-like Zionists and US American imperialists. In this, Dieudonné joined a certain French tradition inherited from far-left groups as he tried to merge anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, support of Palestinian movements, Holocaust denial, and systematic suspicion of historical accounts long embodied by intellectuals like Roger Garaudy. [START_REF] Rousso | Valérie Igounet[END_REF] Dieudonné's success contributed to the re-birth of a far-right movement on the sole basis of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Since the mid 2000s, Dieudonné has closely collaborated with the essayist Alain Soral, an influential Internet propagandist struggling against "Judeo-Zionist communitarianism" and a "Judeo-Protestant alliance" (or "Wall Street -Jerusalem alliance") that allegedly rules the world. 17 Dieudonné's position is, strictly speaking, neither a blatant denial of the Holocaust nor of the existence of gas chambers in Nazi extermination camps, but rather a doubtful "questioning" of the knowledge collected on the destruction of European Jewry. As such, Dieudonné continues in the classical French "revisionist" tradition, which Paul Rassinier first formulated at the end of the 1940s as he returned from the Buchenwald camp. 18 Contrary to explicit deniers like Robert Faurisson who point to the "the alleged extermination of the Jews," Dieudonné restricts himself to expressing "doubts" about the genocide without going into much detail about what exactly should be questioned. His "doubt" almost plays the same semiotic role as using the word "Zionist" when naming Jews; such tricks are used to avoid explicit Holocaust denial, which would expose him to criminal charges (Holocaust denial has been classified as a crime since 1990). Expressing doubts, rather than stating that Jews were never systematically exterminated, helps to maintain an ambiguity. In turn, this ambiguity helps him maintain a diverse audience of supporters. "Doubt", like "Zionist", is a word used for its semiotic value. Using the word "doubt" allows the speaker to hint at denial while avoiding the term itself, since denial itself is a criminalized act. Dieudonné's "doubt" fits a specific kind of Holocaust denial based on a hypertrophic form of rationality that develops but misinterprets Cartesian skepticism, a cornerstone of French academic and intellectual criticism. This criticism's hypertrophy has been enjoying a longstanding influence on small circles of Left-wing intellectuals and has unwillingly (sometimes willingly) led to legitimizing Holocaust denial even in Left milieus 19 . As an example, in his act "Mahmud" (for Ahmadinedjad), Dieudonné stages an encounter between him and his "old pal" Robert Faurisson. The aim of his visit is to challenge Faurisson and to make him drop all these stories about Jews, Auschwitz, and the like. Faurisson protests and pleads the indispensable defense of the truth. Dieudonné replies: "The truth? Truth is only for dummies. Lies lead the world! Wake up! … Truth: Just take it, eat it, and shut your mouth." 20 Dieudonné, acting as himself, then lists some examples of truths -trusts he says he is forced to say in order to comply with societal expectations: the gas chambers, "the 9/11 official version ('true, I did my best')", the news on the main French TV channel TF1, and the swine flu epidemic.

As noted before, Dieudonné originally comes from the left of the political spectrum in France. He mainly locates his political criticisms in the usual areas of left-wing criticism, such as his doubts on US American foreign policy, his criticism against TF1 (which is owned by a close friends of former president Nicolas Sarkozy), and his attacks against the pharmaceutical industry.

But the most important point here is the association he sketches between undeniable facts (such as the gas chambers or 9/11), his characterization of the sometimes erratic news industry, and the erroneous dramatization of events profiting big industry, such as the swine flu epidemic. This hyperbolic relativism resonates with some radical forms of social constructivism, an unwitting legacy of Pierre Bourdieu's overwhelming success in the French social sciences. Followers of Bourdieu have certainly played an important role in sustaining the view that social reality is a sole matter of social classification so as to define social facts like the mere products of contingent social forces 22 . As such, words like "insecurity", "violence", or "riots" are, for instance, put between quotation marks in order to signify doubt. But the reader alone usually has to figure out what to be doubtful about. It is a common experience in today's France for 21 Frédéric Keck (2014). 22 Cyril Lemieux (2012).

professors and teachers to face a radical skepticism and a hyperbolic relativism in their classrooms. Many teachers and professors feel unprepared for such a "return to sender" reaction from their students. Further, personal experiences suggests that students overwhelmingly rely on the Internet in order to formulate their criticisms but are not skilled at differentiating between the different kinds of criticisms and doubts available on the Web.

Denial and anti-Semitism in a context of Holocaust's sacralisation

Dieudonné and other marginal far-right activists are not solely responsible for fostering radical forms of skepticism and an inclination to doubt historical facts as they have been presented since the end of World War II. Dieudonné's positions are articulated in an overall climate emerged at the end of the 1990s, some years before Dieudonné's first outcry about Jews.

First, Dieudonné's career consists of appropriating and then reformulating academic theses to his specific audience. For example, Dieudonné borrowed a position first articulated by the political scientist Norman Finkelstein in his book The Holocaust Industry. Finkelstein opened a public discussions about Jews, Isrealis, and those who ultimately benefit from Holocaust memory. 23 As we will see later on, Dieudonné translated the controversies raised in the book into an over-simplified and classically anti-Semitic characterization of Jews as obsessed with making money out of any and all opportunities, the Holocaust being the most profitable. A second book, the Belgian historian Jean-Michel Chaumont's La concurrence des victimes, published in the early 2000s, reignited this discussion by focusing on the "victims' competition" for recognition and support. 24 The argument of a "victim's competition" became used as a kind of backlash against the criminalization of Holocaust denial. Dieudonné's positions reflect this wider socio-political context. 23 Norman Finkelstein (2000). 24 Jean-Michel Chaumont (1997).

In 1990 France passed the Loi Gayssot -a bill criminalizing any denial of the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War. The legislation came after a number of public proclamations of Holocaust denial in France, including the aftermath of Faurisson's public positions (the end of the 1970s) and Jean-Marie Le Pen's 1987 proclamation that gas chambers "are a detail in the Second World war." 25 This move to criminalize denial not only contributed to a change in the rhetoric of denial, but it also changed the way Dieudonné used the term "doubt".

Further, the bill helped to establish Jewish organizations seen as a model for successful memory entrepreneurs -efforts that even lead to the creation of a specific criminal charge. In 1995 President Jacques Chirac admitted French responsibility for the deportation and assassination of French Jews from 1942-44, breaking a 50-year myth that held that France's government was in London during the time. Both events, Gayssot bill and Chirac's recognition, were seen as clear signs that Jews were successful political entrepreneurs in France.

As a consequence, Black activists tried to replicate the successes of Jewish associations in achieving Holocaust commemoration in their own efforts toward public recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity. Black French activists used the example of a number of Jewish institutions in their efforts at group organization. The "Sons and Daughters of African Deportees" (Coffad) was founded at the end of the 1990s and modeled after the "Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France" (which was itself founded in 1979 under the umbrella organization "The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation"); and in 2015 the "Representative Council of Black Institutions (Cran) was founded after the example of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (Crif) and the affiliated "World Jewish Council". 26 Indeed, many of the organizations' founding texts clearly reference Jewish efforts. For instance, Coffad's first statement in its first article reads: "Jews' compensation paves the way for Blacks' efforts." 27 The emergence of Black consciousness developed in the context of French history and politics, 25 Henry Rousso (2006). 26 Jean-Yves [START_REF] Camus | The Commemoration of Slavery in France and the Emergence of a Black Consciousness[END_REF]). 27 Coffad (2000), http://www.coffad.net/francais/reparation.htm.

particularly regarding the development of Jewish interests in French society 28 . On May 23 1998, a 40,000 participant demonstration took place in Paris, aiming at the recognition of slavery as a part of France's history. Finally, a bill was adopted in 2001, stating "slave trade and slavery … are crimes against humanity." 29 During the same time, French Armenian organizations intensified their efforts in achieving recognition for the 1915' massacres; they succeeded in having a law passed in 2001 stating in its sole article that "France publicly recognizes the 1915 Armenian genocide." 30 The issue of decolonization emerged alongside these aforementioned battles for recognition, particularly the war in Algeria (1954-1962) and the atrocities committed by French soldiers. Algerian migration accounted for the largest segment of extra-European migration in the thirty years following the war. It was not until 1999 that the term "war" was officially used to describe the Algerian war for independence (the former term was "events"), and in 2002 the French Parliament passed a law commemorating the cease-fire agreement in 1962. However, the conservatives were back in power in 2002, and they bitterly fought against both of these parliamentary initiatives. Conservative leader Nicolas Sarkozy raged against the alleged so-called "cult of repentance". Accordingly, in 2005 the conservative MPs passed a bill that stipulated: "the history textbooks should particularly take into consideration the positive contribution of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa." The government's apologist approach to colonialism resonated crudely in the hearts of the Muslim community in France, even after the constitutional court dismissed the bill for technical reasons. of 2014, for example, they organized large street protests against the Israel government. [START_REF] Chemin | Une nouvelle génération. #Gaza naît dans les rues de France[END_REF] In response to this, the French government has offered more sustained support to Israel, either in forbidding demonstrations in support of Palestine (as occurred in the summer of 2014) [START_REF] Dieudonné | Comment la galaxie Dieudonné squatte les manifestations pour Gaza[END_REF] or in stating, as Premier Minister Manuel Valls did in February 2014, that "assaults on Muslims and Catholics have not as much value as the ones suffered by the Jews." 33 Valls further justified this position in the same interview, including a clear reference to the Holocaust: "I am telling the people sharing this opinion that Holocaust (Shoah), the extermination of Jews, the genocide, have to be sacralised and sacred." As a result of these decisions, sociologist Michel Wieviorka has reached the following conclusion: "In France today … a genuine irritation is perceptible at the realisation of a disproportion between the exaggerated sensitivity of the political class, of opinion or the media to any manifestation of anti-Semitism and the much greater indifference towards other racist excesses … even as victims, the Jews fare better because they have a term to describe their misfortunes." [START_REF] Wieviorka | [END_REF] It is within this context of memory struggles and inclinations to sacralize Holocaust memory that Dieudonné attempts to de-sacralize the symbolic force of the Holocaust and to balance Jewish sufferings and the sufferings of other victim groups, particularly Black and Arab suffering. His spectacle Le Mur (The Wall, 2013) displays Dieudonné's political stances. On different occasions, Dieudonné compares the Jewish compensation for the Holocaust ("we all spared no expense") and the failed attempts of "the Negroes" to receive similar compensation for past suffering. In another scene, he is peeing on a wall he after realizes it is the Wailing Wall.

He also sings a popular Belgian song of the 1970s, "Cho-Cho-Cacao", a song mocking African kids and alleged sub-Saharan indolence. However, Dieudonné transforms "Cho-cho-cacao" into "Sho-Sho-Shoananas" and inserts a strong reference to the thesis of The Holocaust Industry: "You have me by the Holocaust, I have you by the pineapple / one must not forget, always a mean to make money." As suggested by the reference to a pineapple, here a symbol for the triangular trade, most of the references to the Holocaust are linked to Jewish financial claims and to the memory of slavery and the slave trade.

In 2014 Le Mur was banned in many cities (the bans were confirmed by the highest administrative court), 35 and a criminal appeal court banned the show's DVD for hate speech and Holocaust denial. 36 Dieudonné was sentenced to a €20,000 fine for the parody. Despite these financial and legal troubles, Dieudonné's anti-Semitic enterprise carefully aims at two different audiences: academics and a general audience. Indeed, his sketches involve multiple historical references and address similar points -and open up similar points of debate -as The Holocaust Industry. To the most popular or uneducated portion of his audience, Dieudonné devotes some grass-root anti-Semitism, as embodied in the pineapple parody or in peeing against the Wailing 36 Lemonde.fr, Reuters, AFP (2015), "La justice interdit la commercialisation du DVD de Dieudonné Le Mur." Le Monde, March 4, 2015. Accessed June 18, 2016. http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/03/04/la-justiceinterdit-la-commercialisation-du-dvd-de-dieudonne-le-mur_4587319_3224.html. 37 Jean-Yves Camus (2004), p. 177.

Conclusion

That a stand-up comedian with sub-Saharan origins who is an anti-racist activist can gather millions of Internet viewers and thousands of live spectators for his sketches on Holocaust denial is something of an enigma to observers of French society. For social scientists, his career took a deviant path in which the deviant and the society both contribute to make him an outcast.

Originally an anti-racist activist, in the early 2000s Dieudonné turned to focus on perceived Jewish and US-American interests as the main forces contributing to the despair of French minorities, including young Blacks and Arabs. His support of the Second Intifada promptly raised huge criticism from the mainstream media, famous intellectual, and the large portions of the political establishment. Michel Wievorka described Dieudonné's skits in the following manner: "they are evidence of the tremendous capacity of the intelligentsia to react to the slightest suspicion of anti-Semitism or, on the contrary, to the slightest attempt to restrict any criticism of Israeli policy (leading to) an ideological struggle where two camps constantly exchange blunders and exaggerations, possibly even degenerating into a form of anti-Semitism." 38 In such deviant careers, outcasts survive in a hostile society by rejoining sub-groups that welcome them and reinforce their deviant orientations. Dieudonné was indeed welcomed by the most heteroclite grouping of Holocaust deniers, anti-Semitic activists, radical Muslims, leftoriented anti-globalization activists, and extreme-right supporters. Among this diverse group of supporters is Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was in the audience when Dieudonné welcomed Faurisson on stage. Yet Dieudonné's radicalization and deviancy did not make him lose the majority of his first followers. Dieudonné is now at the center of a curious constellation gathering people who were once foes. Dieudonné illustrates how in today's France the syncretism of anti-Semitism is able to unite both some extreme-rightists, for whom Jews incarnate Bolshevists or the Anti-Christ, and some extreme-leftists, for whom Jews incarnate Capitalists. 38 Michel Wievorka, et al. (2007), p. 34.

  Dieudonné continued his leftist political involvement: like Coluche, one of the most famous stand-up comedian of the 1970s-1980s, Dieudonné considered running for president in 2002.5 After the 2002 presidential race, Dieudonné ran for Parliament in a precinct that was then a stronghold of the Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He did not reach three percent of the local votes, but he did receive repeated attention from Jewish organizations wanting to repress the humorist-turned-politician's anti-Semitic expressions.

  These new alliances are certainly not anecdotal. Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the Front National has tried to change its profile to a classical anti-European conservative party and to depart from its radical positions, especially on Jews and the Holocaust. The Front National's Aggiornamento let space empty in the far-right of the political spectrum, where overt anti-Semitism and support for overtly anti-American political regimes (from Iran and Syria to Russia) are supported. Dieudonné's sketches share most of these positions. They also insist on the alleged falsifications of news and historical reports by mainstream institutions, specifically as soon as Jews or Israel's government are at stake. As a result, Dieudonné succeeds in attracting a very diverse network of young men from ethnic minority groups, extreme-right activists, Black supremacists, anti-gay activists, anti-globalization activists, esotericism fans, and Islamic and Christian fundamentalists.Dieudonné and the Holocaust: Ambiguity and success of "doubts"Dieudonné's reputation and talent as a humorist resonated with positions of Holocaust denial that had never received such relatively mainstream attention. Interestingly enough, Dieudonné's position on the Holocaust is a clear example of the ways contemporary Holocaust denial is formulated in France. I will develop this point under two main aspects. The first deals with the culture of skepticism that has emerged in France over the last decades. The second focuses on the role of Holocaust denial in the contemporary political atmosphere in France, particularly regarding its relationship to France's historically symbolic acceptance of multiculturalism.

  France's Health Minister had indeed urged for mass vaccination against the swine flu epidemic -a supposed crisis that shortly proved to have been largely over-estimated. By invoking French vaccination policies Dieudonné was also cleverly referring to post-colonialism, particularly the role played by vaccination as an issue in post-colonial politics 21 . More than denying anything, Dieudonné attempts to erase the line between what is, what could have been, and what has not been. In the end, nothing any longer is. If Descartes promoted "hyperbolic doubt" as a method for accessing the lights of reason, Dieudonné shows himself a true follower of numerous French Holocaust deniers in subverting Descartes' claim into a hyperbolic relativism. Where Descartes' hyperbolic doubt was thought of as a "methodological doubt", Dieudonné's hyperbolic relativism abolishes the borders between truth and fable.

Finally

  , such struggles for recognition occurred in a context where Israeli politics and the Holocaust are constantly present at all levels of French politics. Since the Second Intifada of the early 2000s, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict has played a growing role in the political socialization of large segments of the French youth, mainly Arab French youths; in the summer 28 Nicole Lapierre (2009) and (2011). 29 Act 2001-434, 21st May 2001. 30 Act 2001-70, 29th January 2001.

  Wall. Dieudonné seems to be fully aware of both constituencies. In an earlier show called 1905 (an allusion to the 1905 Bill on the separation of church and state) he embodies two young Arabs from deprived suburbs who are frightened by the rather elaborated aspect of the show's title, as well as a bourgeois Frenchman who explains what is meant by such a title. This dual audience is Dieudonné's core contribution in the long-lasting history of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism in France. He succeeds in resuscitating a tradition of the pro-Arab extreme right, which was already active in the 1930s. Indeed, far-right leaders tried to gain the support of Arab leaders in North Africa and encourage black activists to join the far-right by refusing the Crémieux decreea 1970 decree which granted full citizenship to the Jews of North-Africa but not the Muslims. 37 35 John Lichfield (2014).

Agence France Presse, Dieudonné condamné à 2 mois avec sursis pour le spectacle 'La Bête immonde', Le Figaro, 10 Mai 2016, Accessed 4 August 2016.

[START_REF] Bourdieu | La représentation politique[END_REF][START_REF] Bourdieu | Coluche Candidate[END_REF].

[START_REF] Finkielkraut | L'avenir d'une négation[END_REF].

[START_REF] Tiberj | Two-tier Pluralism in 'Colour-blind' France[END_REF].

Cour de cassation, n°552, Feb. 16, 2007.

The interview occurred in October 2002 and was uploaded to the website blackmap.com ; it was later removed.

[START_REF] Brayard | Comment l'idée vint à M. Rassinier. Naissance du révisionnisme[END_REF].

[START_REF] Corcuff | Négationnisme d'ultra-gauche et pathologies intellectuelles de la gauche[END_REF].

See: M'bala M'bala, Dieudonné. "Le copain Robert." Accessed June 18, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgbd4ewP76s.

There are different reasons for the formation of a publicly organized culture of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism in France. The first is the reformulation of denial into a rhetoric of hyperbolic skepticism. This has been largely encouraged by the way social critique has been formulated in France over the course of the last two or three decades. The second is the effect of the "sacralization" of the Holocaust in France, a process in which the Gayssot Act (1990), which prohibited any denial of the so-called Final Solution, plays a central role. Added to this, the Israel-Palestine conflict has a large resonance in France due to the large presence of both Jews and Muslims. These three aspects of contemporary French culture make Dieudonné's positions not that much out of tune.