This thesis presents a model of a narrow faculty for music - qualities that are at once universally present and operational in music across cultures whilst also being specific to our species and to the domain of music. The comparative approach taken focuses on core psychological and physiological capabilities that root and enable appropriate engagement with music rather than on their observable physical correlates. Configurations of musical pulse; musical tone; and musical motivation are described as providing a sustained attentional structure for managing personal experience and interpersonal interaction and as offering a continually renewing phenomenological link between the immediate past, the perceptual present and future expectation. Constituent parts of the narrow faculty for music are considered most fundamentally as a potentiating, quasi-architectural framework in which our most central affective and socio-intentional drives are afforded extended time, stability, and a degree of abstraction, intensity, focus and meaning. The author contends, therefore, that music's defining characteristics, specific functionalities and/or situated efficacies are not demarcated in broadly termed "musical" qualities such as melodic contour or rhythm or in those surprisingly elusive "objective facts" of musical structure. Rather they are solely the attentional/motivational frameworks which root our faculty to make and make sense of music. Our generic capacities for culture and the manifold uses of action, gesture, and sound to express and induce emotion; to regulate affective states; to create or reflect meaning; to signify; to ritualize; coordinate; communicate; interrelate; embody; entrain; and/or intentionalize, none of these is assessed as being intrinsically unique to music performance. Music is, instead, viewed as an ordered expression of human experience, behaviour, interaction, and vitality, all shaped, shared, given significance, and/or transformed in time. The relevance of this model to topical debates on music and evolution is discussed and the author contends that the perspective offered affords significant implications for our understanding of why music is evidently and remarkably effective in certain settings and in the pursuit of certain social, individual, and therapeutic goals.

À « l’ère du numérique », cette thèse porte sur le livre défini comme forme médiatique. En réinterrogeant la conception occidentale de la communication portée par ce média, elle met en regard la forme matérielle du livre et sa fonction symbolique. La thèse se nourrit d'une histoire des formes pour analyser les mutations liées à l’émergence du « livre numérique ». Le livre assure une fonction de médiation entre les partenaires de l’échange, irréductiblement absents l’un à l’autre. Cette absence est envisagée comme un principe moteur, travaillant le processus communicationnel du livre dont la matérialisation constituerait l’hypothèse d’une « rencontre ». Dès lors, dans quelle mesure le livre emprunte-t-il au modèle du corps pour prendre en charge sa fonction de médiation et fonder son « opérativité symbolique » ? Renversant le regard sur cet objet considéré comme figé, nous interrogeons son processus dynamique d’inscription dans la vie sociale. Et, envisageant les dimensions « composites » de sa fabrique, nous tentons de saisir les enjeux des corporéités du livre entre langue, texte et support. Notre hypothèse est que le livre se donne comme un corps substitutif porté par une pensée de la co-présence de ses acteurs, en tant que forme dans laquelle ils font alternativement « présence ». Il s’agit donc d’interroger les corporéités du média et en retour d’analyser la façon dont le livre participe de la construction de conceptions culturelles et sociales du corps. En repensant les enjeux de la médiation, cette thèse pose les perspectives d’une anthropologie communicationnelle invitant à reconsidérer les médias au regard d’une réarticulation des rapports entre nature et culture. / In today’s digital age, this Ph.D. thesis focuses on books defined as a form of media. Reconsidering the western idea of the communication conveyed by this medium, it juxtaposes the physical form of books and their symbolic role. This thesis is built on a history of the forms a book can take to analyse the transformations related to the rise of the « e-book ». Books fulfil a role of mediation between the partners of an exchange, who are irreducibly absent from each other. This absence is envisioned as a driving force, shaping the communication process of books, which incarnation would constitute the presumption of an encounter. To what extent are the mediation function played by books and the foundation of their symbolic efficiency built on the very same bases as those of bodies? Although generally considered as being immovable objects, we revolutionize the way books are perceived, and we examine the dynamic process of their acceptance in social life. Accounting for their “composite” features, we attempt to fully apprehend the implications of the corporealities of books, including language, text and physical object. Our hypothesis is that a book may be viewed as a substitute of a body, nourished by the thought of the co-presence of its contributors, in that it constitutes a form in which they are alternatively present. It is therefore necessary to investigate the corporealities of the media and to analyse the role of books in the construction of the cultural and social concepts of the body. Reconsidering the implications of the mediation, this thesis raises the prospects of an anthropology of communication, inviting to re-evaluate the medias from the perspective of a restructuring of the relations between nature and culture.

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Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-03T12:30:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Gleice de Divitiis.pdf: 1966217 bytes, checksum: dd79b940c21c279ecc39f71ed708d8d4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-02-04 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The main aim of this research is to show through an documental analysis life history and interviews, the facts and characters who contributed for the development of anthropology studies, that were responsible for the creation of the subject Communication Anthropology , at Escola de Comunicações e Artes of Universidade de São Paulo . The focus of this research was guided to discover the job performed by Professor Egon Schaden in this process, such as his pupil, João Baptista Borges Pereira, observing the importance of the book Cor, Profissão e Mobilidade: o negro e o rádio de São Paulo , to the Brazilian Communication Thought History.(AU) / O principal objetivo desta dissertação é inventariar, através de análise documental, história de vida e entrevistas, os fatos e personagens que contribuíram para o desenvolvimento do estudo antropológico da comunicação no Brasil, culminando com a criação da disciplina Antropologia da Comunicação , no âmbito da Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo. O foco da pesquisa foi orientado para desvendar o papel desempenhado pelo Professor Dr. Egon Schaden, bem como pelo seu discípulo, Professor Dr. João Baptista Borges Pereira, destacando a significação do livro Cor, Profissão e Mobilidade: o negro e o rádio de São Paulo para a História do Pensamento Comunicacional Brasileiro(AU)