Which traveler, passing through the rural communities of Asia, has not been intrigued by the existence, on the periphery of the village, of shrines, piles of stones, trees, or caverns ornamented with offerings which, at certain key moments during the year, become the focal points of an intense religious activity? These sites are in fact consecrated to chthonian forces that, next to the ancestors, occupy a high rank in the relationship that the peasants of Asia or other regions around the world establish with the divine. To be sure, the earth gods and the ancestors do not put themselves at the top of the pantheon that each society neatly builds for itself; but they nevertheless dominate the immediate sphere of individuals and social groups. They are at the center of their most routine cultic activities, and they are bestowed with a crucial role in the perpetuation of the groups with which they are identified and whose unity they symbolize.

What Nepalese village or plot of land does not have a sacred tree or grove? The altar devoted to the earth gods is often the only collective shrine in a locality. Usually it is a natural site on the outskirts of the village, combining rocks and trees, and sometimes wooden shapes instead of rocks. It can also be associated with a cavity or hole in the earth. Thus among the Tamang of West Nepal: “The site of worship, which is known by the Nepalese term bhumithan, is located on a sharp incline overhanging the village; it is set up in a small sheltered area in the rock and divided into two areas by a raised flat stone.” Furthermore, we might add B. Pignède's description of the sanctuary as one finds it among the Gurung on the southern side of the Annapurna: “Three walls of rock hold up a little roof of flagstones, the facade being open to the outside. The wall at the back is cut by a large tree that covers the whole area with its shade, with the tree and rock forming a single mass … Three raised rocks, the top of which is crudely rounded, are placed on a kind of tier. In the left corner is a little stone statue of a four-footed animal … Finally, on the outside, in front of the sanctuary's open facade, a wooden post is set up … The ensemble of the sanctuary includes a mixture of Indo-Nepalese and local elements.”

The military conquest of the Magarant, the Magar land, took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Thakuri petty kings and their dependents (priests, artisans, soldiers) fled India to settle there. The Magar resistance appears to have been weak, due to their lack of unity and the alliances the conquerors formed with some of them. The Magar people quickly opted for assimilation into the royal caste of the Thakuri, adopting most of their cultural traits, notably their language and religion. Nevertheless they retained or developed particularisms in their relationship to the earth, as we can see in the rites they devote to Bhume. We should emphasize first and foremost that the name Bhume is itself Nepalese, derived from the sanskrit bhû, bhûmî. This goddess is neglected by the Hindi of high caste, whereas she is central to the Magar. This paradox has two possible sources: the Magar might have identified one of their principal goddesses with a minor Hindu deity by virtue of a common relation to the earth, conferring an unusual importance on the latter. Or they might have constructed a divine being on the basis of Hindu concepts, as the result of a new-found need to defend their rights to the earth in the face of the Hindu invaders. The second hypothesis seems more likely, since there is no trace of a Magar earth goddess before Bhume. Even in the regions where the Magar retained the use of their original language (such as in Palpa, Syangja, or in the Kham country) and where, consequently, some of the gods have Magar names, the earth goddess is called by Nepalese terms, such as Bhume, Bhuyar, or Bhayar. Furthermore, even if the Magar themselves once had an earth goddess of their own, the renaming of this deity would indicate a change of identity, given the importance of a divinity's name.

In Burma, the rituals connected with the earth concern the relationship between the local communities of rice-growers and the political whole that encompasses them. The structure of this totality is a result of the history of the Burmese Buddhist monarchy which was, from the tenth century to the end of the nineteenth, the dominant political institution of the Irrawaddy valley. The Buddhist kings were viewed as the masters of the earth, a role symbolized by the ritual of the first furrow, which they “traced” in the soil in order to inaugurate the work season. Moreover, the native Burmese religious system does not include a deity exclusively associated with the earth and who could, by this right, be the object of a systematic cult. This complex religious system, dominated by Buddhism, includes another cult, that of the thirty-seven nats, whose history is linked both to the Burmese monarchical system and the adoption of Theravada Buddhism as the state religion. The fall of the monarchy in 1886 did not bring about its disappearance. On the contrary, this cult is still quite alive and touches all levels of Burmese society. It is especially vibrant in those local communities that worship the thirty-seven nats of the national pantheon, viewed as the protector of their land.

For the Black, White and Red Tai, the universe is composed of three levels: the heavens, the “flat world,” inhabited by man, and the “world beneath the waters,” upon which the flat world rests and in which the ophidian genies, the nguok, live. These ophidians at times transform themselves into men and devour the heart of young girls. The white Tai imagine that the third level is also peopled by dwarves. The soul is multiple, according to the Tai, and its components become distributed post mortem among the two upper levels of the ternary world mentioned above. Indeed, some souls of the deceased migrate to an afterlife in the heavens, others fake up residence in the altar of ancestors where they become tutelary household spirits, while the remainder, bound to the body of the deceased, reside in the cemetery.

Inhabitants of a land that their ancient myths proclaimed to be the creation of divinities, the Japanese have peopled their archipelago with numerous earth gods: giants trees, simple pebbles concealed either in an oratory, a corner of a garden or deep inside a thicket; crossroads stoneposts, steles in the middle of a plot or next to a rice field, tombstones, and rocks that are worshipped on home altars. The imposing presence of these divine proprietors of the provinces and of sites that were once urban settlements, villages, or private residences is still visible in the tall buildings of Tokyo and Osaka. These protean spirits, found on roof tops in the form of stone foxes or redwood porticos, bear witness, even in the heart of the city, to a latent belief: the forces of the earth are still at work in the world, keeping watch over human activities. Although there are very few people left who believe, as the ancients stories tell, that the citizens of Japan are descendants of the gods of the earth and sky, there nevertheless remain many who accept the notion that a single telluric energy inhabits the world of the living, the dead, things, and the gods.

With a total population of approximately one and a half million people, the Hani tribes are comprised of some twenty subgroups (the Lopi, Goxo, Zalo, Yiche, Akha, etc.), each of which possesses its own distinct identity and speaks one of the Tibeto-Burman languages. Most of this population is centered between the middle courses of the Red and Mekong rivers of China; smaller groups can be found inhabiting areas bordering on Vietnam, Burma, Laos, and Thailand. The Hani are a farming people who live in densely packed, hillside villages. Their primary crop is rice, which they grow on irrigated terraces located between eight hundred and eighteen hundred meters above sea level. The focus of this paper will be on one of the soil gods of the Hani people of the Red river area. Studying this god, who is accorded a central role in the religious liturgy of the Hani, we will see how the appropriation of a natural space and the exploitation of its resources depend directly on the cult relation maintained with him.

The Brou people, whom we shall be discussing here, belong to the ancient Austro-Asiatic stock of the Indochinese peninsula. They are spread out on either side of the border separating Vietnam and Laos and settled in particular to the north of Route Nine, which joins Savannakhet (Laos) to Dong Ha (the Vietnamese provinces of Quang Binh and Quang Tri), with their area of the greatest concentration being the district of Huyen Huong Hoa (Khe Sanh) where we studied them.

Is the perfection of a being a result of its perfectibility, that is to say its imperfection? Is the greatness of a human being a function of how much he is a man in the making? Can the human being elude all determination in order to construct itself freely or, at the very least, expose itself to an infinite number of potential destinies? This dream of absolute freedom was at times the humanists’ dream. The following paper will try to show that behind the Renaissance philosophy of existence lay the principles of incompletion and transformation; that these principles were the source both of the power of Renaissance philosophy and also of its irresolution, which is what places it on the threshold of modernity.

The detective fiction of the tradition initiated by Poe and Conan Doyle and continued by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout and others proposes the unquestioning acceptance of cognitive rationality as a virtually-infallible tool for problem solving and as an instrument of knowledge. In the Holmes narratives, linear reasoning, based on observation grounded in the assumption that phenomena can be “read” in terms of a direct correlation between visual detail and connotative or denotative meanings, is presented as the only true path towards knowledge and understanding. Thus, the narratives implicitly discard the critical and autonomous rationality proposed by Kant. Through their dogmatic insistence on a particular analytical method, they advocate a monist rationality which is repressive and alienated from the reader, in that s/he is not required to be a critical participant, but remains a passive admiring onlooker.