analogism anthropology

Special issue: animism beyond the soul: ontology, reflexivity and the making of anthropological knowledge.

Pedersen, M.A. Here, the logic of animal consciousness and motivation is different to that found among the Eveny. Analogism, Descola tells us, is an extremely common mode of identification, being indexed in the ontologies and cosmologies of China, parts of inner and south Asia, Polynesia, West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.
Conversely, among the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador, revenge killings can be carried out on shamans who purportedly use animal spirits to conduct witchcraft (High 2012: 130). A second theme in the study of animism revolves around the attribution of personhood.

Thus, shamans ‘who have established a permanent relationship with a spirit-guide (Recent works on animism, such as these, suggest that a broad understanding of different life-worlds and relationships is needed when we reflect upon what is substantively ‘real’ in an animistic world. I also suggest that most turns in the discipline since the 1980s have enacted a triumph of the analogic over the digital. Key concepts in our disciplinary history, including animism, can be playfully cycled through a ‘reflexive feedback loop’ in which interlocutors offer anthropologically-inspired reflections upon their worlds to anthropologists, whose thinking in turn is informed by the conceptual work done by their interlocutors (Swancutt & Mazard 2016: 3, see also 6-7 and 10-1). However, Richardson’s study of technological animism, where robots are treated like children, suggests pushing past ‘the emphasis on hybridity and relationalities between persons and things [which] diminishes human subjectivity in these processes [… since] while humans may interact with things like robots that trigger thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, their interactions are mediated through human socialities’ (2016: 122).What makes these concepts of hybridity, chaos, or fuzzy boundaries useful, then, is that they give a vocabulary for the ways in which animistic and other ontologies blend and blur in real life, thus leading to contradictions or giving rise to contexts in which more than one ontology may be operative. Animistic sensibilities may appear at any moment and thus pervade the societies of Swedish urban shamans and Yukaghirs alike. They have provided new platforms for the comparative study of animism, while opening up vibrant conceptual fora for discussing the resonances between animism, perspectivism, and in some cases also totemism (Pedersen 2001; Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012; Århem 2016). Thus, the methodological practice of explaining local cultures as adaptive outcomes of their particular environments and history… was now replaced with a new “cultural relativism” where all were equal in some ethical sense. Howell, S. 2016. They also relate to animism in distinct ways, as scholars who are not animists, as scholars who advocate identifying with animists, or as scholars who are animists themselves.Cutting across these varied approaches are competing visions of how animistic life-worlds unfold through human, other-than-human, and beyond human sensibilities.

It may be an ontology in its own right.Animism is approached from numerous directions in anthropology. These three examples show how numbers structure and shape worlds that humans also inhabit. ——— 2013. Unless we can attach, to our models of cognition, the way these respond to fluctuations in edible biomass, the ongoing sixth extinction, and changing ecosystems and anthropocentric global climate change, all the relevance and usefulness we anthropologists promised to the world will become a sham.Oy, on the other hand you really need to read Marx (and, especially Marxists like Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams) on the nature of “culture”. Spinoza, by the way, is NOT a pantheist, which is how he’s portrayed. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. 1960. If so, could this form have undergone a process of ‘diminution’ or ‘disenchantment’ in some societies, which caused certain of their animistic sensibilities to become less important or widespread? Introduction – animism and invisible worlds: the place of non-humans in indigenous ontologies. ——— & R. Willerslev 2012. As the anthropologist Rane Willerslev observes, ‘[a]n elderly Yukaghir hunter, Vasili Shalugin, told me that animals, trees, and rivers are “people like us” (Rus. We can also recognize digitality as an epistemic device (Galloway 2014). Finally, naturalistic ontologies are common across Euro-America, where persons and nonhuman beings do not share the same interior quality, such as a soul, but do share the same bodily substance, namely a physicality traceable to taxonomies of species and evolutionary lines of descent. Thus, Viveiros de Castro argues against Descola’s naturalist view that animism (or perspectivism) only involves humans Although Viveiros de Castro has critiqued Descola for generalising animism in a way that does not account for ethnographies of perspectivism, other anthropologists of Amazonia observe that Viveiros de Castro’s theory of perspectivism is not always ethnographically apt among Amerindian peoples. I’m curious, though, to know what Drescola is actually arging. Thus, the basic argument of the book: ‘continuities and discontinuities of varying proportions are established between the entities of the world, classifications based on identity and similarity come to seem-self-evident, and frontiers emerge, consigning different categories of beings to separate spheres of existence’ (233). I don’t know that Drescola has failed to learn these “vital lessons.” I’d like to see some quoted examples from Drescola’s writings to demonstrate this failure.I haven’t read this book and so I’m not in a position to judge.

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