Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Totemism

Animism

Felix Stein — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 13:42:52 +0000

King's College London

Initially published 25 Jun 2019

Abstract:

Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits, the environment, or even items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Through ethnographic examples drawn from animistic societies worldwide, this entry examines key themes in the study of animism, from principles of animation to attributing sentience to animal spirits and animistic places. Since early and contemporary anthropological approaches to animism are often grounded in the principles, philosophies, and conclusions of modern science, anthropologists use a variety of concepts such as immanence, transcendence, or disenchantment to understand animistic sensibilities. By contrast, animistic persons do not rely upon the concepts of scholars to understand their own worlds. Recently, anthropologists have approached animism as a particular ‘ontology’ in the world, bringing it into conversation with related ontologies such as totemism, analogism, naturalism, and a newly proposed homologism. These and other terms are briefly explained while humour and reflexive awareness are explored as themes that push anthropologists to re-envision the effects of imagination and creativity in a variety of animistic worlds.

Introduction

Animism is both a concept and a way of relating to the world. The person or social group with an ‘animistic’ sensibility attributes sentience – or the quality of being ‘animated’ – to a wide range of beings in the world, such as the environment, other persons, animals, plants, spirits, and forces of nature like the ocean, winds, sun, or moon. Some animistic persons or social groups furthermore attribute sentience to things like stones, metals, and minerals or items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Principles of animation and questions of being are thus key to animism. That said, animism is best understood not only in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it is not. At first glance, animism seems to conjure up a coherent and deliberate ideology of sorts, as it ends in an ‘ism’. But animism is really more a sensibility, tendency, or style of engaging with the world and the beings or things that populate it. It is not a form of materialism, which posits that only matter, materials, and movement exist. Nor is animism a form of monotheism, which posits a single god in the universe. And, it is not a form of polytheism that posits many gods.

Instead, to an animistic person or social group, sentience is often envisioned as a vital force, life force, or animated property that is ‘immanent’, accessible, and ‘ready to hand’ in the everyday world, even if this property is usually latent and not perceivable. There is often an important contrast between the ‘immanence’ of animistic sensibilities and the ‘transcendent’ qualities attributed to a monotheistic god or polytheistic gods, which are related to as beings that exist apart from the everyday lives of human beings.

Just what it is that animates any particular being or thing can vary between different animistic persons and societies. Urban shamans in Stockholm tend to approach the world with an animistic sensibility that is rather different to that of Lutheran Swedes, when they consider that ‘everything is alive and permeated with “Spirit”’ in a world comprised of both the “ordinary”, physical reality we live in [… and] another, “alternative” reality, inhabited by living forms or energies sometimes seen as “Spirits”’ (Lindquist 1997: 13). Yet another kind of animistic sensibility is found among the indigenous Siberian hunters known as Yukaghir, who ‘differentiate between conscious and unconscious beings’ (Willerslev 2007: 73). 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. lyudi kak my) because they move, grow, and breathe, but they are distinct from inanimate objects such as stones, skis, and food products, which, he claimed, are alive but immovable’ (2007: 73). Some Yukaghir further consider that static things are not people because they only have one soul (known as the ‘shadow-ayibii’), while active things are considered to be people since they have additional souls, which make them move and grow (the ‘heart-ayibii’) as well as breathe (the ‘head-ayibii’) for example (Willerslev 2007: 73).

These two ethnographic studies point to seminal themes in the study of animism. One theme is the existence of various kinds of ‘spirits’ and ‘souls’. Spirits are understood in a broad sense that encompasses the spirits of beings or things, deities, and energies. Souls are often the spirits of beings and things, depending on the social context. There is no set definition for animism, just as there is no set definition for spirits or souls. Yet a general feel for how the terms animism, spirits, and souls are understood can be gleaned from the ways that scholars (and, in some cases, animistic persons) apply them to social contexts. Urban Swedish shamans and Siberian Yukaghirs, for example, hold in common the animistic logic of immanence. Animistic sensibilities may appear at any moment and thus pervade the societies of Swedish urban shamans and Yukaghirs alike.

A second theme in the study of animism revolves around the attribution of personhood. For the Yukaghir, active things like animals, trees, and rivers are ‘people like us’ because, like human beings, they possess certain kinds of souls. It is these shared souls that imbue animals, trees, and rivers with a sentience that enables them like humans to move, grow, and breathe. By contrast, static things like stones, skis, and food products are ‘not persons’ because they only share one soul in common with humans and lack the kind of sentience that would enable them to move and show signs of animated life, consciousness, and motivation. Not all beings or things have the same animistic sensibilities in the Yukaghir ‘life-world’, which is quite literally a world that is largely alive to sentience. Yet – and this might perhaps go against the reader’s expectations – we find a more comprehensive case of animistic immanence in the life-world of urban Swedish shamans, who relate to ‘everything’ like a living person who is filled with Spirit.

Given this difference in animistic sensibilities, the following questions arise: Is there an archetypal form of animism in which spirits or souls animate all beings, as is the case among urban Swedish shamans? 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? Would disenchantment explain why Yukaghir view their stones, skis, or food products as being ‘not people’? Conversely, have Swedish urban shamans sought to inhabit a ‘re-enchanted’ world, where everything has Spirit?

Note that while these terms and questions need to be explained by scholars of animism, they do not need to be explained to animistic persons who already relate to the world with animistic sensibilities. Yukaghirs would not need to use scholarly terms such as immanence, life-world, disenchantment, or diminution in order to understand how an animistic sensibility works. They already inhabit a life-world in which there are clear relationships between souls, beings and things – relationships that separate ‘people like us’ from those that are ‘not people’.

Anthropologists, ethnologists, ethnographers, folklorists, religious studies experts, and popular experts alike have grappled with the aforementioned specialist terms when reflecting upon the multitude of animistic societies, both in the contemporary world and historically. It is thus important to note the sometimes subtle but key difference between the persons who live animistic lives and those who study animistic persons but are not necessarily animistic themselves. Revealing discrepancies often arise between the animistic sensibilities of the persons of study and the sensibilities of scholars. This is particularly obvious among anthropologists, who have been leading figures in the study of animism. Both early and contemporary anthropologists often approach animism in an ‘as-if’ manner that suggests they themselves do not relate to the world in an animistic way. Nonetheless, many current anthropological works on animism are subsumed under what Graham Harvey, in a neo-pagan and eco-friendly vein, dubs the ‘new animism’ (2017 [2005]: xvii-xviii). With this term, Harvey describes the approach of anthropologists who are aware that their concepts contrast with the assumptions of early anthropologists. But this does not mean that scholars of the new animism always refute modern beliefs that nothing exists beyond the natural world, which is grounded in the philosophies, principles, methods, and conclusions of the sciences.

Animal spirits and animistic places

Studies of animism often point out the importance of animal spirits and places that are sacred or charged with animistic potentialities. Animal spirits refer to the spirits or souls attributed to animals that may be considered the seat of an animal’s consciousness and motivation. These studies show how animistic potentialities go beyond the human subject.

In animistic societies, animals frequently show their sentience, awareness, and motivation to act through their relationships to human beings. Diverse ways of relating to animal sentience are revealed by the ways that hunters and shamans in particular treat animal spirits. Siberian Eveny, for example, consider that the spirits of the animals they hunt in the harsh Arctic climate are master-parents to all humans. As parents, animal spirits may take pity on their children – which include Eveny persons – by offering themselves up as food to eat. A hunted animal does not make this sacrifice lightly, but ‘will “give itself up” only when the relation between hunter and prey is hierarchical’ – that is, when the human being needs to eat meat to survive (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 55). But like parents, animal spirits are manipulated by Eveny, who trick them into giving themselves up to justify their acts of killing. To this end, hunters seek to establish ‘social contact’ with prey animals in a way that makes them appear vulnerable and child-like (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 53). This is no easy task, since Eveny hunters acquire a ‘closed body’ with age that protects against attacks from the spirits of game animals. Hunters therefore must ‘re-open’ their bodies to mimic a child or use a child as ‘bait’ to attract a game animal that will pity the hungry child (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 55). The child’s first hunt is organised around this tactic, in which the animal is attracted into close range by the child so the adult hunter can kill it. Then the hunter tasks the child with carrying the prey home on the back of a guardian reindeer, which wards off revenge from the animal’s spirit. While the animal’s spirit will pity the child and its guardian reindeer, both of which it considers to be its children, it may take revenge on the adult hunter for tricking it into giving itself up. Thus, the Eveny hunter implores the animal’s spirit after the kill that, ‘“you came to me out of your own free will, please have pity on us and do not harm us”’ (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 55).

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). Waorani fear these killings, which can set in motion a dangerous cycle of deaths that may continue even after the errant shaman has died. Here, the logic of animal consciousness and motivation is different to that found among the Eveny. Since the shaman’s body ‘is inhabited by his adopted jaguar-spirit (meñi)’ at night, when it may attack and kill any named persons, Waorani warn each other against speaking with shamans during this dangerous time. Note that, unlike Eveny who trick animal spirits and plead with them not to take revenge, Waorani jaguar-spirits must be avoided at all costs. Their danger is compounded by the fact that Waorani shamans relate to jaguar-spirits like adopted children who will reciprocate care to their masters. Thus, when Waorani carry out revenge killings, they may find that the shaman’s ‘orphaned jaguar-spirit continues to live and kill people out of sadness and anger for its adopted father’ (High 2012: 130).

Consciousness and motivation in animistic societies is attributed not just to animals, but also to certain places. For example, Yup’ik residents of the Bering Sea coast consider that the ocean has eyes, sees everything, and does not like it when persons fail to follow the traditional abstinence practice of avoiding the waterfront after a birth, death, illness, miscarriage, or first menstruation (Fienup-Riordan & Carmack 2011: 269). Since the ocean brings disasters on people when it is upset, Yup’ik consider that it is best to wait until early spring before visiting it after one of these events. Spring is the season when grebes arrive and defecate in the water; it is also when ringed seals come and their blood soaks the ocean as predators attack. According to Yup’ik hunters, these events make ‘the makuat [ocean’s eyes] close and become blind’ so that the hunters can safely approach the waterfront again (Fienup-Riordan & Carmack 2011: 270).

Similarly, consciousness and motivation can be found in the fires of sacred hearths, which must be treated with respect as spirits reside in and around them. Among the Nenets tundra dwellers of the Siberian Yamal peninsula, women of reproductive age do not cross through the sacred space by the fireplace or hang clothes to dry above it that would be worn on the lower part of their bodies (Skvirskaja 2012: 151). Nenets men, however, store their possessions in this sacred space that serves as the place for hosting respected visitors. The Nenets fireplace reveals ‘the capacity of “things” to objectify some forms of gender relations at the expense of others’ (Skvirskaja 2012: 152).

Moreover, in animistic societies, places may be imbued with memory. Certain burial sites for Daur Mongolian shamans in northeast China have been covered by stone cairns known as ovoo, where Buddhist rituals now attract ‘all manner of princes, dignitaries and foreigners’, while drawing upon the memories and powers of both the shamanic spirits and Buddhist deities that were imbued in these locales (Humphrey with Onon 1996: 133). In a related light, the Western Apache of North America consider that certain locations contain memories and the wisdom to help people to make the right decisions. To Western Apache, a ‘visually unique’ place is like ‘a watertight vessel’ that holds ‘wisdom, [which] like water, is basic to survival’ (Basso 1996: 76). Since ‘wisdom sits in places’, they learn to memorise wisdom-filled stories about wisdom-filled places that can help them to address problems in a measured way (Basso 1996: 67).

Animism in early anthropology

Building upon the findings of historians, folklorists, travellers, traders, missionaries, and expedition members about the religious lives of peoples around the globe, Edward B. Tylor introduced the study of animism within anthropology. Although the term ‘animism’ can be traced to the Latin anima for breath, life, or spirit, Tylor borrowed it from George Ernst Stahl, an eighteenth-century chemist and physician, who proposed that the spirits or souls of living beings or things control physical processes in the body. Like Stahl, Tylor wanted to discuss the relationship between the soul and all forms of life. However, Tylor set out to shift the meaning of animism to encompass what he called ‘the groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion’ (1977 [1871]: 426). According to Tylor, animism is a form of religion in which the spirits and souls of humans and other beings are considered necessary for life. As Tylor was interested in the origins of religious views and how they develop over time, he hypothesised that persons adopt an animistic sensibility when reflecting on ‘the differences between a living body and a dead one’ as well as on ‘those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions’ (1977 [1871]: 428). He illustrates how human spirits appear in dreams or visions through numerous examples, like this one of the Zulu in Southern Africa:

the Zulu may be visited in a dream by the shade of an ancestor, the itongo, who comes to warn him of danger, or he may himself be taken by the itongo in a dream to visit his distant people, and see that they are in trouble; as for the man who is passing into the morbid condition of the professional seer, phantoms are continually coming to talk to him in his sleep, till he becomes, as the expressive native phrase is, “a house of dreams” (Tylor 1977 [1871]: 443).

According to Tylor, experiences such as these suggest that human beings have a soul that can appear to them. Through his extensive catalogue of dreamt phenomena, Tylor showed that persons dream of animal souls (1977 [1871]: 467-74), plant souls (1977 [1871]: 474-6), and even the souls of objects (1977 [1871]: 477, see also 478-80). On this basis, he suggested that persons who attribute souls to human beings, animals, plants, or objects gradually consider that the soul is not only a vital force to specific beings but is pervasive throughout the cosmos and imbued in all beings. Thus, he argued that the souls of humans, animals, plants, and objects survive death and bodily decay in an animistic cosmos, while inhabiting a world that is populated with spirits and deities (Tylor 1977 [1871]: 426).

Tylor championed the social evolutionary approach in anthropology that suggested that people progress from a ‘primitive’ stage of social life, in which they try to control the world around them with magical or religious practices, towards a so-called ‘modern’ life based on the philosophies, principles, and conclusions of science (1977 [1871]: 26-35). The influence of social evolutionism waned in anthropology in the early twentieth century, as anthropologists started to undertake their own fieldwork and obtained findings that cast serious doubt on the idea that societies represent levels of linear human progress. Despite extensive criticisms of it, social evolutionism never entirely disappeared from anthropology or from popular understandings in Euro-American societies about human cultures. Moreover, since Tylor presented his study of animism as evidence for the social evolutionary approach, the two became synonymous for some time. However, it is possible to study animism without the comparative evolutionary angle. Contemporary anthropological approaches show that modern technologies and science are also incorporated into animistic worlds.

Contemporary approaches and the ‘new animism’

In the shamanic journeys of the Chewong hunter, gatherer, and shifting cultivators of the Malaysian rainforest, new items of technology and ‘some species previously not thought of as people, may reveal themselves as such’ (Howell 2016: 63). Technological items can become people in the Chewong world through the assistance of shamans, who use the same word to refer to their spirit-guides and their consciousness. Thus, shamans ‘who have established a permanent relationship with a spirit-guide (ruwai) can send their consciousness (ruwai) on a journey into space [… where] any being or object may appear as a conscious being’ (Howell 2016: 63). Japanese airplanes, for example, became recognised as new spirit-guides that have consciousness after they flew over Chewong forests during World War II. A Chewong shaman’s song, still sung today, ‘refers to the ruwai of Japanese airplanes’ (Howell 2016: 63). In a not dissimilar way, several American pilots who crashed into the Liangshan mountains of Southwest China and were rescued by the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman pastoral and agricultural group, have been incorporated into their animistic creation epic known as the ‘Book of origins’. As folklorist Mark Bender and Nuosu poet Aku Wuwu explain, these WWII pilots and the early twentieth century French, English, and American explorers who visited the Liangshan highlands appear to have been lumped together in this Nuosu animistic myth, which contains recent additions on the ‘Foreigners’ lineage’ and ‘Migrations of foreigners’ (2019).

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. It is in this spirit that Kathleen Richardson (2016) has introduced the concept of ‘technological animism’, which describes cases where the boundaries between literature and technoscience are crossed in the production and reception of robots. Like many other robots, the famous ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) was made by Honda in Japan to resemble children so that its human creators and owners would engage with it as a cute, non-threatening, and childlike being. This marketing strategy was particularly important for roboticists in Euro-America ‘to counteract popular notions that robots are threatening to humanity and hyper-sophisticated’ (Richardson 2016: 115). Revealingly, the appeal of childlike robots to their Euro-American or Japanese owners resonates with the appeal of the childlike ‘open bodies’ that Eveny hunters present to the spirits of game animals so that they will pity them and give themselves up.

Relating to other beings as though they were kin is, then, a pervasive theme in current studies of animism (Bird-David 1999, 2018). While some relationships may be conceptualised in a parent-child form or ‘in an idiom of siblingship’, as among the Bentian of Indonesian Borneo (Sillander 2016: 171), it is not uncommon to find that kinship terms are extended to other-than-human beings or things in animistic societies, which may also share a common point of origin with humans (Brightman, Grotti & Ulturgasheva 2012: 8). But to stand the test of time, animistic relationships to other beings or things often need to be maintained. Thus, among the Bidayuhs of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, young Christians who wanted to move away from the animistic sensibilities of their parents have chosen to forget (or never properly learn) how to relate to animistic spirits, which ‘were deemed more forgiving of plain ignorance of the rules than of absent-minded transgressions’ (Chua 2009: 338).

What these studies suggest is the importance not only of thinking about different animisms in the plural, but of recognising – as Morten Pedersen suggests for peoples across North Asia, from Siberia to Mongolia – that animistic sensibilities often only come into focus in the right circumstances, contexts, and moments (2001: 415-20). A person may need certain faculties, such as an imaginative ‘openness’ to the world, to perceive the animistic sensibilities of other beings and things (Ingold 2006: 11-2, see also 18-9; 2013: 739, see also 741-2). Religious specialists, such as shamans, are often attributed with ‘inspired’ qualities that enable them to perceive animistic sensibilities that remain imperceptible to ordinary persons (Humphrey with Onon 1996). ‘Astonishment’ (Ingold 2006, 2013) or ‘wonder’ (Scott 2014) have thus become leitmotifs among scholars who seek to show how persons perceive and relate to animistic beings, things, forces, and experiences.

Much of the expansive thinking in the new animism is traceable to Alfred Irving Hallowell’s 1930s fieldwork among the Berens River Ojibwe of North America, which was punctuated by lively vignettes about the supernatural Thunder Birds, called pinési, which are giant birds that create thunder by clapping their wings. In his 1960 study of ‘Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view’, Hallowell invites anthropologists to rethink their life-worlds and those of animistic societies on the basis of his Ojibwe research. Hallowell ‘deeply identified’ with the animistic sensibilities of the Ojibwe and advocated that anthropologists routinely identify with their interlocutors as a way of enriching their anthropology and lives in general (Strong 2017: 468). His study shows that Ojibwe do not attribute animistic qualities to all beings or things at all times, but that they are open to finding that some beings or things may have animistic qualities in certain moments. Thus, Hallowell observes that while some Ojibwe have seen certain stones move in ceremonies, stones usually do not move and many people do not see them move. Similarly, he gives the story of an Ojibwe boy who claimed to have seen a Thunder Bird during a heavy storm – a story that was at first received sceptically by his parents because seeing ‘other-than-human persons’ is not a common Ojibwe experience. Ultimately, this sighting of the Thunder Bird was accepted when ‘a man who had dreamed of pinési verified the boy’s description’ (Hallowell 1960: 32; cited also in Strong 2017: 470). Revealingly, the boy’s parents were persuaded not by the fact that the Thunder Bird was identified by two different persons, but by the fact that the dreamer had perceived the same qualities in pinési as their son had seen during the thunderstorm. Ojibwe consider that people are especially open to perceiving animistic beings in dreams, where they routinely encounter them. Thus, the astonishing similarity between the inspired visions of a Thunder Bird seen by the boy during the storm, and later in another man’s dream, is what convinced his parents.

Animism as an ontology

As Pauline Turner Strong observes, Hallowell’s Ojibwe study presaged ‘an ontological return’ in contemporary anthropology, which brought a renewed focus to principles of animation and questions of being (2017: 468). While animism (and Tylor’s approach to it) fell out of fashion in anthropology after the 1920s, the interest in animistic sensibilities remained vibrant, as Hallowell’s 1930s fieldwork attests. Ethnographic studies documented animistic ways of being and continued to fill the shelves of anthropology and other disciplines, albeit often without using the term ‘animism’ again until the 1990s, when it regained popularity. This does not mean that ethnography always took the lead in anthropological studies on ontologies, some of which have instead been built upon philosophical or theoretical considerations inspired by ethnography (compare to Scott 2013).

Philippe Descola’s ‘fourfold schema of ontologies’ – comprised of animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism – provides a vocabulary for discussing the kinds of worlds that anthropologists envision philosophically, theoretically, and in the light of ethnographic fieldwork (2014: 275; see also 2013). In Descola’s terms, the quintessential animistic ontology is a world characterised by ‘a continuity of souls and a discontinuity of bodies’ between humans and nonhumans (2014: 275). Each animistic being has a shared interior quality, such as a soul or vital life force. But Descola suggests that there are different kinds of bodies in any given animist world, such as the human body or the body of specific animals, plants, objects, and even spirits whose ‘bodies’ may be composed of an airy, wraith-like, or translucent substance. This difference in bodies makes for different kinds of animist beings, each of which has a soul and ‘possess[es] social characteristics: they live in villages, abide by kinship rules and ethical codes, they engage in ritual activity and barter goods’ (Descola 2014: 275).

According to Descola, there are important differences between animistic, totemic, analogic, and naturalistic ontologies. Totemic ontologies are common in Oceania, where persons and nonhuman beings share the same interior quality, such as a soul, and the same bodily substance, such as a physicality inherited through kinship to other-than-human totemic ancestors. By contrast, Descola suggests that analogic ontologies are common south of Siberia, in parts of Asia where persons and nonhuman beings do not share the same interior quality or the same bodily substance. Animal domestication is a hallmark of analogic ontologies because the use and consumption of animals lends itself to the view that the interior and bodily qualities of humans and nonhumans are different. 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.

Not everyone agrees with Descola’s approach. There have been famous debates, for example, between Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on animism and perspectivism (Latour 2009; Turner 2009: 27). Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004) introduced ‘perspectivism’ as a term that puts a new spin onto what Descola calls animism. Drawing upon ethnographies of Amerindian peoples in Amazonia, Viveiros de Castro suggests that all beings in a perspectival ontology can adopt a human perspective, albeit under certain circumstances that are conducive for them doing so. Whereas Descola considers that animism (and its variant, perspectivism) is one kind of ontology that scholars can analyse and classify from an ‘objective’ and naturalist viewpoint, Viveiros de Castro proposes that perspectivism is a ‘bomb’ that shakes the foundations of the naturalism on which Descola’s scheme is based. Seen in this light, perspectivism is a kind of philosophy that makes possible an entirely different anthropology shaped by indigenous concepts. Thus, Viveiros de Castro argues against Descola’s naturalist view that animism (or perspectivism) only involves humans perceiving animals to have human and social qualities. He suggests instead that ‘animism is not a projection of substantive human qualities cast onto animals’ (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 477). Since Amazonians consider that animistic beings, such as animals, perceive themselves to be human, Viveiros de Castro holds that any animistic being that puts itself ‘in the position of subject, sees itself as a member of the human species’ (1998: 477).

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. If we return to a discussion of the Waorani, we see that they do not neatly fit the profile of a perspectival ontology that tends ‘to describe the “predator” perspective as denoting a universally human perspective, [because] in everyday life Waorani people often identify themselves as “prey” to outside aggressors – whether in the form of jaguars, spirits, or human enemies’ (High 2012: 132). Unlike the perspectival groups discussed by Viveiros de Castro, Waorani consider that being a predator ‘is antithetical to proper human sociality’ (High 2012: 138). Casey High suggests that the Waorani view may reflect a new morality, brought on by missionary settlement, in which men are no longer ‘said to be actively trained as killers’ and where ‘openly engaging with jaguar-spirits poses too great a threat to the present ideal of “community” (comunidad)’ (2012: 140). People’s worlds can change over time in response to missionary conversion, social change, and a reflexive questioning of the parameters of one’s morality, which throws doubt on the prospect of viewing entire geographic regions as home to just one ontology, such as perspectivism.

Notwithstanding this, the oeuvres of Descola and Viveiros de Castro have been field-setting with good reason. 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). Viveiros de Castro’s work on perspectivism has inspired a volume dedicated to exploring perspectival ontologies across Inner Asia (Pedersen, Empson & Humphrey 2007). Similarly, Descola’s study has led to the recent proposal of the altogether new ontological schema of ‘homologism’, based on Chinese divination, the I Ching, and a Daoist philosophy in which persons and nonhuman beings share the same interior quality and the same bodily substance. In homologism, interior quality and bodily substance are distilled into ‘a single energy-substance, qi, […] knowable via the observation of natural patterns and phenomena’ (Matthews 2017: 266). While this criteria of shared interior quality and bodily substance aligns with Descola’s criteria for totemism, William Matthews proposes that the term homologism better suits the profile of the Chinese ontology, and indeed, of any world that is predicated upon ‘shared intrinsic characteristics rather than analogies’ (2017: 265). Thus, he suggests that homologism ‘logically displaces Totemism as the structural counterpoint to Analogism’ in Descola’s schema (Matthews 2017: 265).

Animistic blending, blurring, and contradictions

Recent work on ontology has stimulated a re-envisioning of the kinds of beings that might populate any animist cosmos. ‘Hybridity’ is a recurrent theme among contemporary anthropologists, whose approaches to ‘chaos’ (Scott 2005) or the ‘fuzzy boundaries’ (Pedersen & Willerslev 2012) between the body and the soul evoke landmark studies on the agency and life force of technological items in transnational science (Latour 1993; Latour & Franke 2010). Bruno Latour (1993) showed that technological items may at first appear to be machines without the agency or life force of human beings. But on closer inspection, machines may take on the qualities of nonhuman hybrids with agency, vitality, a life force, and personhood. Examples of hybrids that an anthropologist might envision in animistic terms range from the part-human, part-machine beings known as ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway 1991 [1985]) to the ‘cosmic theatre’ of ‘outer space’ that hosted the joint travels of US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts (Battaglia 2012: S76). 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. It is instructive in this regard to see that Eveny hunters live in a world where both totemism and animism are operative. The Eveny concept of an open body is actually totemic, as it is based on the principle that animals and persons with open bodies share the same bodily substances and interior qualities (Willerslev & Ulturgasheva 2012: 54). Eveny manipulate this totemic sensibility during the hunt by using children as bait, who lure prey into close range for a kill. But rather than reciprocating this totemic sensibility, hunters relate to prey with an animistic sensibility, that is, as animals with a different bodily substance that is edible. Acknowledging the fuzzy boundaries between ‘concepts’ such as totemism and animism, then, gives pause for thought on how they might become formative to fresh ways of envisioning anthropology and the world at large (Corsín Jiménez & Willerslev 2007).

The serious and humorous sides of animism

Some key anthropological approaches suggest that animism is not always taken seriously. As Willerslev observes, it is possible that ‘underlying animistic cosmologies is a force of laughter, an ironic distance, a making fun of the spirits, which suggests that indigenous animism is not to be taken very seriously at all’ (2013: 42). Yukaghir hunters are not averse to joking about the careful post-hunt handling of their prey to prevent an animal’s spirit from retaliating. Thus, an elderly hunter who, according to the post-hunt custom, crowed like a raven while removing a dead bear’s eyes with his knife was only momentarily shocked to hear a fellow hunter call to the bear, ‘Grandfather, don’t be fooled, it’s a man, Vasili Afanasivich, who killed you and is now blinding you!’ (Willerslev 2013: 51). Moments later, the elderly hunter burst out laughing and completed the work mirthfully with his hunting partner. On yet another occasion, Yukaghir hunters bought a plastic doll and treated it as an idol, feeding it fat and blood while bowing to it and calling out, ‘Khoziain [Russian, “spirit-master”] needs feeding’ (Willerslev 2013: 51). Later, they explained this parody with the quip, ‘[w]e are just having fun’ or the concession that ‘[w]e make jokes about Khoziain because without laughter, there will be no luck. Laughing is compulsory to the game of hunting’ (Willerslev 2013: 51). Humour, after all, appears vital to Yukaghir hunting luck and success.

This playful sense of humour underpins a good deal of New Age animistic practices in Euro-American contexts (Lindquist 1997: 15-6, see also 180-2; Houseman 2016). As the urban Swedish shaman, ‘Marie Ericsson, an artist and a long-time neo-shamanic practitioner once expressed it, “if the sacred does not bear being humoured, it is not sacred enough for me”’ (Lindquist 1997: 180). Reflecting on her interlocutor’s comment, Galina Lindquist adds that ‘the sense of wonderment, and the magical freedom of play, together with the communitas, and with the flow experienced by the performers and the audience, is what makes neo-shamanic practices at their peak moments so fulfilling’ (1997: 181).

If humour, wonder, and play lie at the heart of animistic practices, then it is well-worth considering the effects that the imagination and creativity have in a variety of animistic worlds. Imaginative thinking underpins what I and Mireille Mazard call an ‘animism beyond the soul’, which throws light on the ‘hyper-reflexive’ relationships between anthropologists, their interlocutors, and the animistic beings or forces in their cosmos (Swancutt & Mazard 2016: 2-5). Seen in this light, anthropological thinking may be shaped by interlocutors who have become anthropologically-savvy through formal study or by informally ‘apprenticing’ off of the anthropologists they know. 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). When this happens, the ludic side to animism (Swancutt 2016: 80, see also 86-9) may inform not only ethnographic analysis, but also the imaginative collaborations between anthropologists and their interlocutors that have been the hallmark of anthropology (Chua 2015; Chua & Mathur 2018).

Conclusion

Ethnographies around the world show that animism is a way of relating and attributing sentience to other beings, forces of nature, things, and even technological items. This entry has explored anthropological approaches to animism, from envisioning it as a philosophy of religion to building upon distinct philosophical, theoretical, and ethnographic sources that suggest animism may be more than a distinct sensibility, tendency, or style of engaging with the world. It may be an ontology in its own right.

Animism is approached from numerous directions in anthropology. It is considered to be an immanent rather than transcendent form of sentience. It is a way of revealing and sometimes manipulating the consciousness, motivation, memories, and powers of animal spirits, animistic places, and items of technology. As an ontology, animism may blend and blur with other ontologies, opening it up to contradictions, humour, creativity, imagination, inspiration, and reflexive awareness. Due to the diverse forms of animism worldwide, anthropologists have asked whether certain animistic groups may have undergone a history of diminution or disenchantment, which made them only attribute certain beings with an animistic sensibility. 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. These distinct visions raise important questions about how we might relate to animism as a particular sensibility that can be studied ethnographically, debated about as a philosophical and theoretical possibility, deeply identified with as a way of enriching one’s scholarship and life, or (possibly) taken up as a sensibility of one’s own. What these big questions do is shine a reflexive mirror onto our own humanity, pressing us to articulate what sentience is in the first place and why we relate to others in the ways that we do.

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Note on contributor

Katherine Swancutt is Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King’s College London. She is the author of Fortune and the cursed: the sliding scale of time in Mongolian divination (2012, Berghahn) and co-editor of Animism beyond the soul: ontology, reflexivity, and the making of anthropological knowledge (2016, special issue of Social Analysis and 2018, Berghahn). She has written numerous articles on animistic and shamanic religion. www.swancutt.com

Dr Katherine Swancutt, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6LE, United Kingdom. katherine.swancutt@kcl.ac.uk

Animals

Felix Stein — Wed, 23 May 2018 14:55:51 +0000

Thomas White Matei Candea

University of Cambridge

Initially published 23 May 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18animals

Abstract:

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical trends within the discipline. For much of the twentieth century, animals were regarded as material and/or conceptual resources for humans, with different anthropologists regarding one or the other aspect as more important. More recently, anthropologists have sought to incorporate animals into their accounts as participants in human social life, rather than merely resources. Such approaches question the human exceptionalism of conventional social scientific thinking. Given the roots of sociocultural anthropology in this exceptionalism, however, attempts to move beyond it within the discipline encounter certain methodological and analytic problems, the proposed solutions to which have taken a variety of forms.

Introduction

Humans and other animals have lived in close proximity, and in some cases, in symbiosis, for the entire history of our species. Reflecting on this phenomenon, anthropologists have asked a range of questions about the diversity of ways in which nonhuman animals feature in human lives: as sources of food or labour, as divine beings, as workmates, friends or bitter enemies. Yet, hovering on the edge of these questions is a more fundamental one. Anthropology, its name suggests, is the study of one particular animal: anthropos, the human. But what, if anything, makes humans distinctive? An entire branch of anthropology, biological anthropology, has been investigating that question by focussing on humans as one animal amongst others. Sociocultural anthropology, by contrast, has until recently taken the distinctiveness of humans for granted as a starting point, and proceeded to investigate social and cultural phenomena which were broadly assumed to be distinctive of our species. In particular, the human capacity for complex linguistic and symbolic communication was often a key reference point. It served in anthropology both to set apart humans from other animals, and to explain the role animals play for us, namely as resources for human symbolic activity. As we discuss in the second part of this essay, this division of labour – between the biological study of humans as animals and the social study of humans as radically unlike other animals – is beginning to show signs of strain. On the one hand, biologists have been studying nonhuman society and culture; on the other, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have increasingly sought to study nonhumans as persons or subjects. These two developments are hardly comfortable bedfellows, either for anthropology as classically conceived or for each other.

Until recently, however, the discipline’s interest in nonhuman animals ran along one or both of two very broad thematic axes. One asked about the role of animals as material, economic, and political resources for humans in society. Another investigated the role of animals in human cultural, symbolic, and conceptual schemes. The opposition between the two was famously cast by Claude Lévi-Strauss, a prominent proponent of the second line of enquiry, as one between seeing animals as ‘good to eat’ and seeing them as ‘good to think’ with (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 89). The oscillation between the two approaches and their recombination can be seen by briefly scanning the role of animals in successive anthropological paradigms.^[1] Around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, a number of approaches emerged which sought to add a new parameter – the consideration of animals not as resources (whether material or conceptual) for human society, but as actual participants in human sociality. In this light, animals are not just good to eat or good to think with, but also good to live with (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010: 552). The second part of this entry takes up this second set of questions, and considers the attractions and tensions inherent in attempts to take account of the active role that animals play in human social life.

Good to eat, good to think

Anthropologists have shown an interest in the importance of nonhuman animals for human society and culture since the earliest days of the discipline. Two nineteenth-century notions – ‘totemism’ and ‘animism’, formed the mainstay of those early discussions. Both terms were used to describe what nineteenth-century anthropologists understood to be social and cognitive practices common amongst non-western peoples. Totemism (derived from an Ojibwa term totam or totem) was used to describe the association of a species of animal or plant with a clan or subsection of society. Animism described the broader worldviews in which nonhuman entities, including objects, plants, and animals, were considered to have souls akin to those of humans. These general categories, derived from more or less loosely interpreted accounts of non-western people’s behaviour by missionaries and travellers, became the focus of enduring debates about the origins of religion. Following a now-discredited evolutionist logic, these societies were thought to represent a more ‘primitive’ stage in a singular progressive historical path leading to the ‘advanced’ or ‘modern’ societies of Europe (Kuper 2005). Totemism and animism were thus imagined by nineteenth-century anthropologists as the earliest prefigurations of modern religious organization and religious sentiment. For some, like McLennan or Frazer, religion originated in totemism, understood loosely as a worship of animals and plants as gods. For others, like Tylor, the origins of religion lay in animism – a more general propensity to see the nonhuman world as endowed with spiritual forces (McLennan 1869-70; Frazer 1887; Tylor 1871, 1899; Bird-David 1999).

Leaving behind the evolutionist question of the historical origins of religion, Emile Durkheim (1915) drew on some of these earlier works to a different effect. He noted, like Tylor, that the key feature of totemism was the way it marked out different groups within the same society by associating each of them with a particular totemic emblem. In this way, as Tylor had pointed out, totemism regulated the relationships within and between different subsections of a social group. For Durkheim, totemism played a functional role in the maintenance of social solidarity: members of a clan would unite around their totemic emblem through collective rituals which created a powerful sense of togetherness. This grounded Durkheim's broader functionalist theory of religion. In worshiping god(s), Durkheim suggested, people unknowingly worshipped and maintained the structure of society itself: totems reflected and maintained the sub-divided structure of clan-based societies, just as monotheistic gods became a single focus for a broader, undivided church.

Returning to the earlier distinction between ‘good to think’ and ‘good to eat’, it is important to note that for all of their many disagreements over the nature and import of totemism, the anthropologists above were primarily concerned not with actual flesh-and-blood animals, but with mythical, symbolic, or ritual animals – in other words, with animals as imagined by non-western peoples. It went without saying that they considered these imaginations and conceptions to be erroneous, whether in a crude sense, as when Tylor suggested that ‘primitive animism’ denoted a childlike naivety, or in Durkheim’s more sophisticated suggestion that animal totems (and indeed God(s) more generally) derived their power not from some inherent mystical qualities but from the social groups they stood for (Bird-David 1999).

An attention to animals as material resources was introduced by British functionalist authors such as Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. They combined Durkheim’s insights on the social functions of totemism with an attention to the rationality and pragmatism of non-western people’s concern with the natural species which surrounded them. This was a particularly important lesson for Malinowski:

In totemism we see therefore not the result of early man's speculations about mysterious phenomena, but a blend of a utilitarian anxiety about the most necessary objects of his surroundings, with some preoccupation in those which strike his imagination and attract his attention, such as beautiful birds, reptiles and dangerous animals (Malinowski 1925: 4).

Radcliffe-Brown’s primary focus was on totemism’s role in ordering social arrangements, but he shared the Malinowskian idea that particular species became totems in the first place because of their pragmatic utility to humans.^[2] Radcliffe-Brown thus envisioned totemism as a complex sociological device for weaving nature into human society. Through classification and personification, natural objects would come to find a place within the human moral order, thereby anchoring human society within its surroundings. Totemism, for Radcliffe-Brown, wove together practical ecological relationships (hunting and the exploitation and management of natural resources) and human social organization. In effect, the relations between people and the natural objects which surrounded them became social relations (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 131).

Radcliffe-Brown’s concern with the pragmatic utility of animals (and plants) in totemism – the sense in which they were, as it were, ‘good to eat’ – was thus a very small part of a much more complex picture. This structural-functionalist approach stands in contrast, for instance, to the later ‘cultural materialist’ arguments of Marvin Harris about the ecological and economic roots of the sacredness of cows in India. As Harris put it, the essence of his theory is that ‘[t]he practice arose to prevent the population from consuming the animal on which Indian agriculture depends’ (Harris 1978: 208).^[3]

While structural-functionalists such as Radcliffe-Brown were attentive to the material and economic basis of social arrangements, they were not directly seeking to explain cultural phenomena through economic ones. Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) analysis of the role of cattle in Nuer society is a case in point. His classic account of Nuer politics begins with a chapter on cattle, noting that cows are the Nuer’s main means of subsistence, and represent the economic bedrock of Nuer life. The daily round of the Nuer people’s activities, and their broader patterns of movement and residence, are driven by the cows and bulls around which their economy gravitates. Evans-Pritchard examined the way in which this then came to shape a particular sense of space and time (the famous ‘cattle clock’) for the Nuer; the aesthetics of cattle colours and names and the ways these became interwoven with appreciations of individuals; and, most crucially, the role of cattle as mediators of social relationships. From marriage payments to compensations for homicide, cattle played a key role as a medium of exchange in the establishing and repairing of social relations. In sum, it is hard to speak of a primacy of the economic. Rather, as Radcliffe-Brown had suggested for totemism, animals as natural entities are interwoven into human social relations. Evans-Pritchard writes memorably of the Nuer that ‘[t]heir social idiom is a bovine idiom’ (1940: 19).

It is in the context of his extended review of existing arguments on totemism (1963: 89) that Lévi-Strauss made his famous quip about animals being chosen as totems because they were good to think with and not because they were good to eat. It is important to stress, as explained above, that the functionalist approaches Lévi-Strauss was critiquing cannot be reduced to a mere utilitarianism. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss’s own structuralist interpretation of totemism owed much to Radcliffe-Brown’s. However, where the latter had insisted on multiple kinds of functional interrelations, the former picked out and focused on the conceptual structure of totemism. The key thing about animals in totemic systems, Lévi-Strauss noted, was that they formed a series of natural entities which corresponded to a series of social entities, in the same way that flags, for instance, form a series of colours and patterns which stands for a series of nations. To bring this picture into view, one had to stop looking for relationships between particular clans and particular totems – be it in terms of use value or aesthetic proclivity. Totemism had nothing to do, for Lévi-Strauss, with a privileged relationship between particular people and a specific animal – such as that maintained, for example, between the Nuer and their cows. He noted that in many totemic systems, the list of entities invoked as totems included animals, plants, and objects of no discernible value or even aesthetic significance, while many such ‘pragmatically’ significant animals were omitted. Once the particular relationship between individual totems and individual groups of people was seen as entirely arbitrary, one could suddenly bring a broader logic into view: it was the entire system of totems and the entire system of clans which related to one another.

His vision was directly inspired by then-current theories of structural linguistics. Language, in this view, was similarly made up of natural elements (a range of noises made by humans) of which some were arbitrarily selected as particularly significant, then arranged into patterns to create a grid which could in turn be used to convey meanings. Totemism was a language whose words were animals (and plants and objects): it allowed people to ‘speak’, or rather – more profoundly – to think, about the complex relations of difference and similarity between subsets of their societies. For Lévi-Strauss, totemism was just a particular instance of a much broader phenomenon, which he termed ‘the logic of the concrete’:

[the] use of one concrete phenomenon to talk about another, more abstract, realm is part of a much more widespread aspect of human thought; by means of analogy, the complexity, fluidity and inaccessibility of the real world can be visualised and approached through various 'as if' devices (Bloch 1996: 532).

This structuralist approach gave rise to some classic anthropological arguments, such as Mary Douglas’s famous analysis of the logic of the food prohibitions in Leviticus (Douglas 1966). As with Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of totemism, Douglas begins by challenging the various utilitarian (economic or medical) explanations for these food prohibitions. Instead, behind the seemingly random list of prohibited animals – the pig, but also the camel, shellfish, and so on – Douglas detected (or devised) a logical structure according to which excluded animals were each in their own way being singled out as anomalies from a broader type or rule. If typical sea-creatures were fish, this made shellfish (scale-less and fin-less sea creatures) atypical, and if typical ungulates (sheep, cows, goats) had split hooves and chewed cud, animals which had one but not the other of those features (such as pigs or camels) were anomalies. The master logic of the entire system was one of categorization and perfection – a setting apart of the perfect from imperfect, which echoed the setting apart of the chosen people to whom Leviticus was addressed, from the other people surrounding them. Thus without being ‘totemic’, this system also used animal categorizations to reflect on and symbolise human sociological ones. Whatever the merits or otherwise of this particular analysis,^[4] it clearly illustrates the generative possibilities which open up once animals are read as symbolic tokens within a broader pattern.^[5]

Another very different approach to animals as symbolic resources for the human imagination came from American symbolic anthropology. Clifford Geertz’s famous essay on the Balinese cockfight (1973a) showcased the way in which cultural performances could be read and interpreted as one might interpret texts, namely as multi-layered, symbolically rich narratives (1973b). Geertz described actions, listed plays-on-words, innuendos, and jokes, and divined affective attitudes of his Balinese informants, to put together an interpretation of the meaning of the Balinese cockfight as ‘a story the Balinese tell themselves about themselves’ (Geertz 1973a: 448): a rich drama of explosive violence and meticulous control, animality and human prowess, equality and status, challenge and response. Unlike structuralist analyses, of which he was quite critical, Geertz’s interpretivism was not committed to formally elegant structural schemes. The symbolic meanings of cocks, and of cockfights, were as messy, complex, and multi-layered as meanings usually are. Geertz also claimed to be operating in a realm of public signification – picking out the sorts of interpretations which his own informants might generate and recognise – rather than delving deep beneath the visible surface to find (or conjure up) hidden patterns. However, this was still an account of animals as essentially ‘good to think with’. A key point for Geertz, as for Lévi-Strauss or Douglas, was that the Balinese cockfight cannot be explained in functional terms:

The cockfight […] makes nothing happen. An image, a fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them […] but in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds and money, to display them (Geertz 1973a: 443-4).

Good to live with

‘Symbolic’ and ‘materialist’ analyses of the role of animals have occasionally been pitted against each other, as in some of Lévi-Strauss’s critiques of the functionalists, or in the above-mentioned ‘sacred cow controversy’. More often, however, and increasingly in the final decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists chose to study animals as both conceptually and materially significant in a number of ways. One might cite, for instance, Michael Stewart’s complex account of the economic and symbolic role of horses in the lives of Hungarian Roma (1997), or Sharon Hutchinson’s elaborate analysis of the shifting meanings of cattle, and their changing roles as social mediators and instruments of power, as the Nuer economy became monetarised (1996).

Nevertheless, these approaches, however richly ethnographic, still treated animals as secondary in an important sense. Human beings and their social relations sat at center stage. Animals featured as resources (conceptual and/or material) for the humans about whom these anthropological stories were written. A bevy of self-consciously critical interventions around the turn of the twenty-first century identified this as a problem of perspective. As John Knight put it, many felt the time had come to treat ‘animals as parts of human society rather than just symbols of it’ (2005: 1); to treat animals, in other words, as actual participants in social interactions, or, quite simply, as persons.

This reconceptualization of the place of the animal echoed a broad interdisciplinary conversation at the turn of the century within the social sciences and humanities. In anthropology, this ‘animal turn’ has become particularly associated with the idea of ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). The term ‘multispecies’ refers to the broader range of organisms considered by these ethnographers, including insects (Raffles 2010), fungi (Tsing 2015), and microbes (Paxson 2008), and represents an attempt to move beyond the human-animal binary which has long structured western thought. Where, as we have seen, animals featured in earlier anthropology insofar as they were ‘good to think’ or ‘good to eat’, scholars associated with multispecies ethnography (a term they do not necessarily themselves employ)^[6] coalesce around a focus on animals (and other nonhumans) as ‘entities, and agents, “to live with”’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010: 552). Here many anthropologists have been particularly influenced by the writings of the feminist philosopher of science and technology, Donna Haraway (2008), who has used her own relationship with her dog to think about the ways in which humans and animals are shaped by interactions across species boundaries. In thinking about the agency of nonhumans, anthropologists have also been influenced by the work of Bruno Latour (e.g., 2005).^[7] It is possible to delineate various strands to this emergent paradigm, the tensions between which can sometimes be occluded by a shared sense of excitement. In what follows, we discuss some of these strands, and the ways in which they both complement and diverge from one another.

One might find an unexpected precursor to these recent concerns in Radcliffe-Brown’s suggestion that, through totemism,‘a system of social solidarities is established between man and nature’ (1952: 131). But where anthropologists once sought to explain away the ‘erroneous’ ideas of social solidarity between humans and nonhumans, recent work often regards such thinking as a timely corrective to the ‘dualism’ characteristic of western thought, which allegedly lies behind contemporary environmental catastrophe, as well as the brutalities of the ‘animal industrial complex’. For some scholars (e.g. Best et al. 2007), however, much work done under the rubric of ‘animal studies’ is flawed because of its political quietism, and the ways in which its practitioners ‘[remain] wedded to speciesist values’.^[8] Recently, multispecies ethnography has itself been taken to task for failing to address ‘multispecies injustice, suffering, and unidirectional violence’ (Kopnina 2017: 351). In this section we thus also touch on the ways anthropologists have thought about the political and ethical stakes of multispecies ethnography.

Taking animism seriously

In the 1990s, several anthropologists (e.g. Descola 1992; Bird-David 1999) returned to the concept of ‘animism’ which had preoccupied an earlier generation. However, rather than interpreting this phenomenon as a form of primitive religion or a metaphorical projection of human society, they argued that in order to be faithful to the conceptions of the people they studied, they had to abandon the nature-society (or nature-culture) dualism which had oriented earlier work. This sense that anthropologists have to allow the worlds of their informants to challenge existing categories of analysis nourished what has become known as the ‘Ontological Turn’.

Perhaps the most celebrated exposition of the precepts of this turn has come from the anthropologist of Amazonia, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), who has coined the notion of ‘Amerindian Perspectivism’ to describe the way in which ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ alike are thought by many Amazonian peoples to be ‘subjects’ (to have a perspective), and to share a singular ‘human culture’ made up of villages, longhouses, beer, manioc, etc. What beer is, however, will depend on the perspective of the entity in question, determined by its particular bodily form. What a human sees as its own blood, for example, a jaguar is thought to see as beer. This perspectivism has important implications for hunting and warfare in Amazonia. Hunting is a perilous activity for humans, because from the animals’ perspective, it can appear as warfare, prompting revenge (warfare conducted by animals appears as disease in humans). Hunters take care, through the use of particular language and weapons, to make a distinction between hunting and warfare, in order to prevent the animals from taking revenge (Fausto 2007). Human-animal relations in Amazonia, then, are seen to be characterised by predation as well as perspectivism.

Outside of Amazonia, the peoples of the circumpolar regions have also prompted anthropologists to think again about animism. Here, however, it is reciprocity rather than predation which is thought to be the hallmark of the interactions between humans and their prey. A number of ethnographers have suggested that for hunting peoples in circumpolar regions, the prey animal intentionally presents itself to the hunter to be killed (Hallowell 1960; Nadasdy 2007). According to this conception, hunting is not a violent act but rather part of a trusting social relationship between human and nonhuman persons (including a spirit master who often owns the animals), which is characterised by reciprocity. By performing certain ritual activities, and by ensuring that animals are killed and consumed in the proper manner so that their souls will then be reclothed in flesh, hunters can trust that animals will in turn continue to present themselves to be killed.

Paul Nadasdy (2007) notes the historical tendency of anthropologists to treat such notions of animal reciprocity as purely metaphorical, rather than considering that they might be literally true. Nadasdy conducted ethnographic fieldwork with hunters from the Kluane First Nation in the Yukon. He describes how his own personal experience of hunting what appeared to be animals able to engage actively in reciprocal relations with humans forced him to question this metaphorical reading, and along with it the accounts of animal behaviour provided by wildlife biologists. Other multispecies ethnographers agree that ‘[t]he natural sciences are far from being the only way to know and understand the lives of other species’ (Van Dooren et al. 2016: 9). As we shall see, however, it is not only by way of contrast that anthropologists have related indigenous knowledge to scientific thought.

Some anthropologists have looked to indigenous ontologies to question the primacy afforded to animals over other nonhumans as the subjects of academic attention, ethical deliberation, and political activism. Kim TallBear (2011) writes that ‘Aboriginal thinkers [help to] extend the range of nonhuman beings with which we can be in relation’: trees, stones, and thunder are here held to be sentient beings too. As such, might these beings not also require incorporation into political communities (Nadasdy 2016)? Indeed, some scholars (e.g. Avelar 2013; Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2016) would suggest that it is the continued elevation of indigenous thought beyond the analytical level to that of the political which offers the best hope of salvation in a time of environmental crisis and multispecies extinction.

From trust to domination?

Drawing on ethnographies of circumpolar hunters, Tim Ingold (2000) contrasts the ‘trust’ which these hunters feel towards their prey to the ‘domination’ which he argues characterises pastoralists’ mastery over their animals. Hunters respect the autonomy of these nonhuman persons, who have the capacity to refuse to give themselves up if the hunter mistreats the animals (by wasting their meat or by killing them with unnecessary cruelty, for instance). Ingold juxtaposes this with the status of livestock in pastoralist societies. Here the autonomy of animals is curbed by means of force (whips, bits, hobbles), and the relationship is characterised by the exercise of human will over the animal, rather than by reciprocity. Are reciprocal, trusting, interpersonal relations between humans and animals then the sole preserve of hunter-gatherer societies? On this point there has been significant debate. Some anthropologists have suggested that Ingold’s hunters appear to cultivate relationships with animals in general rather than as individual persons; we cannot then speak of ‘interpersonal’ relationships (Knight 2005; 2012). What is more, the flight response of wild animals, and the one-off nature of the hunter-prey encounter, appears on the face of it to militate against the establishment of enduring interpersonal relationships between particular humans and animals. It is for this reason that several writers have proposed that we look instead to herders and their livestock for instances of what they call ‘human-animal co-sociality’ (Knight 2005, 2012; Willerslev et al. 2014).

Studies of such societies have in turn suggested that ‘domination’ might not in fact be the best way to characterise the relationship between herders and their animals. They have highlighted the fact that herders often live in close proximity to their livestock, resulting in everyday interactions defined not only by human control but also by care, conviviality, and intimacy (Knight 2005: 5; Theodossopoulos 2005; Fijn 2011; Govindrajan 2015).^[9] The contemporary relationship between Mongolian pastoralists and their herds, for example, can be thought of as ‘co-domestic’, based on interspecies reciprocity rather than human domination (Fijn 2011). In a similar vein, studies of reindeer husbandry in Siberia (Beach & Stammler 2006; Vitebsky & Alekseyev 2014) have recently stressed the ‘symbiosis’ that characterises the relationship between humans and domesticated reindeer. Reindeer actively seek the care and protection from predators offered by herders, while the herders in turn benefit from animal products and labour. There exists a ‘circularity of wills’, as reindeer internalise the patterns of movements dictated by herders, who then follow the reindeer across the landscape (Beach & Stammler 2006). The attachments that are fostered between humans and free-ranging reindeer have an intimate, bodily quality, since reindeer are attracted by the presence of salt in human urine (Stépanoff 2012). Interspecies association here is at least in part a product of mundane micturition and not merely human mastery.

Anthropologists and archaeologists have argued that domestication should not be seenas a one-off event for which humans alone are responsible, but as an ongoing process of mutual adaptation in which other species also exercise agency (see also Cassidy & Mullin 2007; Franklin 2007; Francis 2015). For insight into the two-way nature of the relationship between domestic animals and humans, and the imbrication of care and control involved, many multispecies ethnographers have turned to Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, which she has developed in relation to her own experience of dog training in the U.S. (Haraway 2008). In contrast to those who would condemn those who herd animals by reducing all human relationships with domestic animals to the violence which characterises factoring farming (e.g. Nibert 2013), some anthropologists have suggested that we can look to ethnographic accounts of pastoralist interspecies communities, which show how ‘in the interstices of power and violence, spaces for love, care, and mutuality flourish’ (Govindrajan 2015: 507). It is here that we might find resources for thinking about sustainable and responsible animal agriculture (Haraway, in Franklin 2017).

Taking animals (and scientists) seriously

As we saw above, some anthropologists have contrasted indigenous explanations of animal behaviour with those of scientists, regarding the articulation of the former as the proper subject of anthropology. Ingold argues that ‘explaining the behaviour of caribou is none of [anthropologists’] business’; their concern is rather with the hunters’ ‘direct experience of encounters with animals’ (2000: 14). However, the close engagement with the lives of domestic animals that fieldwork in pastoralist communities often requires has led some writers to criticise this exclusive focus on the experiences of human informants, and on their conceptualizations of animals, rather than on the animals themselves (Stépanoff 2017).

Like Viveiros de Castro and Nadasdy, Stépanoff also wants to take animism seriously and reject the nature-culture divide. However, he suggests that this might be best achieved by changing the way that anthropology is practiced, by ‘challenging our supreme divide between the natural and social sciences’ (2017: 378), and incorporating insights from the natural sciences into our accounts of human-animal relations. Rather than contrasting indigenous accounts to those of natural scientists, Stépanoff shows how that they can in fact be complementary. In according an active role to animals in the process of domestication, he suggests, scientists are finally catching up with descriptions of animal behaviour in the myths of Siberian peoples. Indeed, ethnographic studies of scientists themselves can reveal unexpected similarities between, say, Amerindian perspectivism and behavioural ecology (Candea 2012). And both biologists and Amazonian peoples, for example, at times take steps to avoid treating animals as subjects: the scientists in the interests of objectivity, the Amazonians in order to avoid being transformed into those animals (Kohn 2007; Fausto 2007; Candea 2010). Such comparisons work against the tendency to posit a radical contrast between western and Amerindian ontologies.

Other scholars have questioned the human exceptionalism that they find to be embedded within the ethnographic method, in which (human) language plays a dominant role. This has led to methodological innovation; some, for example, have sought to combine ethnography with the close observation of animal behaviour characteristic of ethology (Fuentes 2006; Lestel et al. 2006; Fijn 2011). Piers Locke writes of the transformative experience of doing ethnography in an elephant stable in Nepal, which led to him regarding the elephants not only as ‘subjective actors but also as participating research informants’ (2017: 356). Crucially, while Locke notes the complementarity with developments in animal behavioural sciences, this realization came not from a knowledge of this literature, but from everyday immersion in an ‘interspecies apprenticeship’ as he learned to work together with a sentient nonhuman being. Locke suggests that ethnography must be attuned to the embodied, affective quality of this interspecies relationship (see also Parreñas 2012; Dave 2014). This attunement might involve cultivating new modes of sensing across species boundaries, as in the case of the synaesthetic blending of vision and touch, which Eva Hayward (2010) terms ‘fingeryeyes’ in her ethnography of cup corals.

While the turn to affect suggests a move away from anthropology’s longstanding focus on linguistic semiosis (which involved thinking of animals as symbolic resources), Eduardo Kohn (2013) has recently argued that semiosis should remain at the heart of a new ‘anthropology of life’, which still succeeds in moving beyond human exceptionalism, since the living world is in fact engaged in constant non-linguistic meaning making.^[10] Here he is influenced by, among others, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who also produced innovative work on animal communication (e.g. 1972), in a way that sets him outside the ‘good to eat/good to think’ approaches which were contemporary with his work. Some, however, have argued that Kohn’s account remains ‘all too human’, since his analysis still appears to be guided by the conceptualizations of his human informants, in the manner of the proponents of the Ontological Turn (Descola 2014). This is indicative of some of the tensions within what we have been referring to as ‘multispecies ethnography’.

Conclusion: multispecies multiethnography

We can now delineate, for the sake of clarity, three ways in which anthropologists have suggested that ethnography can be ‘multispecies’. These are sometimes in tension, while at other times they overlap in the project of a single anthropologist. For the sake of argument, we will refer to these as the elevating, complementing, and expanding of ethnography. (1) Ethnography can be ‘elevated’ by raising the conceptualizations of informants to the level of analysis, in order to destabilise the ‘Euroamerican’ naturalist ontology. This is what is proposed by the anthropologists associated with the Ontological Turn. (2) Ethnography can be ‘complemented’ with accounts of animal behaviour by colleagues working in the traditions of natural science. (3) Ethnographic methodology can be expanded to include nonhuman research participants.

In sum, if ‘multispecies ethnography’ has multiplied the entities that ‘count’ in anthropology, it also involves a multiplying of ethnography itself. What we might now think of as ‘multispecies multiethnography’ contains within it a host of organisms and a variety of approaches, some of which thrive together, while others exist in a more antagonistic relationship. Whatever their differences, and the unresolved tensions between them, these various approaches have helped to shine new light on the diversity of relationships between humans and animals.The participation of animals in human social lives has been thought of variously in terms of predation, reciprocity, trust, domination, care, and intimacy (to take but a few salient examples). At the same time, these recent approaches have also problematised the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’, and concomitant notions of human exceptionalism, which sociocultural anthropology had long taken for granted. Such problematization appears to strike at the root of the discipline. Perhaps it will lead to the wholesale reconceptualization of what it means to do anthropology; or, perhaps, the challenges it poses will be quarantined within a specific subfield and within a single encyclopedia entry.

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Note on contributors

Thomas White is an Affiliated Lecturer and Teaching Associate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Inner Mongolia, China, his research focusses on pastoralism, human-animal relations, and political ecology.

Dr Thomas White, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. trew2@cam.ac.uk

Matei Candea is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Corsican fragments (2010) and Comparison in anthropolgy: the impossible method (2018), and editor of The social after Gabriel Tarde (2010) and Schools and styles of anthropological theory (2018). He has written a number of articles on the anthropology of animals in science. See www.candea.org.

Dr Matei Candea, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. mc288@cam.ac.uk

[1] For good overviews of the twentieth century literature, see Shanklin 1985; Mullin 1999.

[2] “I was led to formulate the following law: Any object or event which has important effects upon the well-being (material or spiritual) of a society, or anything which stands for or represents any such object or event, tends to become an object of the ritual attitude. I have given reasons for rejecting Durkheim's theory that in totemism natural species become sacred because they are selected as representatives of social groups, and I hold, on the contrary, that natural species are selected as representatives of social groups, such as clans, because they are already objects of the ritual attitude on quite another basis, by virtue of the general law of the ritual expression of social values stated above” (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 129).

[3] See Shanklin 1985: 386-88 for a discussion of the ensuing ‘sacred cow controversy’.

[4] Gellner scathingly but not entirely unfairly noted that ‘the structuralist method consists of a somewhat arbitrary extraction of polar patterns at the whim of the individual structuralist virtuosos’ (Gellner 1987: 157).

[5] For otheranalyses in this vein, see Leach 2000.

[6] Indeed, they are sometimes actively critical of it (e.g. Ingold 2013). However, we have found it productive to use ‘multispecies ethnography’ in a capacious way to capture a loosely shared orientation among these anthropologists, and an explicit sense of rupture from earlier approaches to animals.

[7] Though, note the critique by Ingold (2013).

[8] Speciesism denotes a form of prejudice, comparable to racism or sexism.

[9] Such intimacy can also be present in encounters with ‘wild’ animals, such as in orangutan rehabilitation centres, where it is commodified as part of the transnational ‘voluntourism’ industry (Parreñas 2016).

[10] One example of what Kohn means here is the way in which the form of an anteater’s snout can be said to ‘represent’ something about an ant colony (its long tunnels) (2013: 74).