Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Ontology

Monsters

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 15:54:41 +0000

Initially published 15 Oct 2021

Abstract:

Monsters are not only key protagonists in myths, legends, fairy tales, fiction, and films; they also haunt cellars, cyberspace, and crossroads. Based on encounters with monsters in their fieldsites, anthropologists define monsters as inherently social entities but with a defiant relationship to order. This entry showcases that monsters haunt humans in culturally distinct ways. Emphasising the comparative potential of monsters, it highlights the ways in which their study reveals much about what monsters are, about society, and about time and space. Anthropology has made key contributions to the study of monsters: from the meticulous documentation of local monsters in early ethnographies, via regional theoretical frameworks and a gradual increase in singular works concerned with individual types of monsters, to recent comparative monster anthropology. Anthropology continues to have much to offer to those interested in monsters, especially in these times of planetary crises, disasters, catastrophes, ruination, and their accompanying rise of monsters.

Introduction

We are living in a time of monsters. As the planet is ravaged by climate change, pandemics sweep across the globe, fires and floods consume entire regions, extinction rates rise exponentially, and waste clogs up the environment, globalised media and popular culture conjure up new monsters at breakneck speed. There is a contemporary profusion of monsters, which far exceeds the recent renaissance of vampires and zombies in variation and volume (think anything from the re-emergence of dragons, via new creatures of the deep, to the abundance of creatures hunted in assorted monster-hunter movies, books, and TV series). This explosion of new monsters into popular culture serves well to highlight their capacity to colonise the human imagination in times of crisis. There is something infectious in this far beyond pop culture. Anthropology, certainly, is being swept up in the momentum: attention to monsters as monsters is steadily proliferating in twenty-first century anthropology.

Interestingly, though, while it was not until recently that the term ‘monster’ entered the anthropological canon (Mikkelsen 2020: 6), the ethnographic record has been teeming with creatures that can be subsumed under the umbrella term ‘monster’ since its earliest beginnings. This entry showcases what anthropology can contribute to general concerns with an interest in monsters. It first draws on ethnography to contour a broad definition of what monsters are. The entry then illuminates different trends in anthropological engagements with beings that can broadly be defined as monsters across the ethnographic record. Lastly, it identifies the promises that a new engagement with the category of monsters in anthropology carries both for anthropology itself and for others interested in monsters and their meanings. Overall, this entry shows that monsters are exemplary agents which convey the weight of radical sociocultural transformation and change. At the same time, anthropology is a treasure trove showcasing that monsters are much else besides.

Monsters are key actors in myths, legends, fairy tales, fiction, and films, but they also haunt cellars, cyberspace, and crossroads. Anthropologists are concerned with monsters because they frequently encounter them in their fieldsites, via stories told by interlocutors, by observing social action relating to or caused by them, or by sharing experiences of being haunted. These monsters thus possess agency in spades, which distinguishes them from their fictional pop culture cousins. While the primary characteristic of fictional monsters is being metaphors, anthropologists, as Michael Dylan Foster puts it, work ‘with monsters productively not (only) as metaphors or reflections of human imaginings but as real actors capable of changing society and culture, and capable also of being changed’ (2020: 213).

Monsters are also wily. They not only unsettle the orders of the people they haunt, they also easily escape the confines of any definition you might try to catch them in. What exactly they are, what exactly they do, what exactly they mean—the answers always crucially depend on the people they haunt, anthropology tells us. This entry therefore proposes a broad anthropological understanding of monsters as non-human social actors who are other-than-the norm, always contingent on the humans they haunt, the times and the places in which they operate, and with a profound awareness of social rules, taxonomies, and classificatory schema that they then subvert—including, naturally, this very definition. Why then, you may ask, try and define them at all? As Geir Henning Presterudstuen and I put it, ‘it allows us to gather, contrast, and compare (ethnographies of) a great variety of different beings that otherwise would not be considered in the same conceptual space’ (2020a: 2). In addition, employing the term ‘monster’ in anthropology opens up avenues of communication between anthropology and interdisciplinary monster studies—a young but rapidly growing field spanning literature, media, film, cultural and gender studies, history, geography, and psychology, among others.^[1] An anthropology of monsters thus enhances not only comparisons between different types of entities (say, fictional monsters and social ones) but also deepens cross-engagement with the theorisations that accompany such different monsters, respectively.

This entry offers an overview of what an anthropology of monsters has to offer. It does so in two distinct parts. The first is concerned with ethnographically contouring the details of the aforementioned monster definition with a focus on four topics central to anthropology: the monstrous body, monsters and place, monsters and time, and monsters as social beings. This first part emulates Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (a medievalist widely acknowledged as a founding father of interdisciplinary monster studies), who offered ‘a set of breakable postulates’ (1996: 4) in lieu of a fixed definition. It emphasises that monsters’ very trait of habitually disrupting categories, undermining taxonomies, and violating order makes them ‘a walking anthropology’, as Rupert Stasch puts it (2014: 196), which is why monsters ‘compel us to rethink the parameters, methods, and objectives of anthropological inquiry’, according to Foster (2020: 213).

The second part ponders the utility of the general term ‘monster’ in anthropology by looking back and re-examining some past studies through the lens of monster as a category. It also highlights the benefits of employing the broad category of monster in this current time, by exploring key directions of contemporary anthropological analyses of monsters, focussing in particular on monsters and alterity, monsters and environmental crises, and monsters and change.

The conclusion reflects on anthropology’s main contribution to the interdisciplinary study of monsters: insights arising out of ethnographic explorations of the intimate entanglements between monsters and the humans they haunt.

Contouring the anthropological definition of monsters

What do a dwarf, an octopus so large it could cover an entire village, an invisible sorceress, a water leopard, a zombie, and a ghost have in common? From an anthropological point of view, the one commonality they share is that they all violate order: one is too small, one too large, the next one is there but invisible, another exists in an element it does not belong in, one lives when it is dead, and the last is neither dead nor alive.

As Stephen Asma, a philosopher and eminent historian of monsters formulated it, ‘monsters, from Aristotle’s time to the present, always disrupt neat categories of taxonomy’ (2009: 125). Looking at this anthropologically means that monsters are not a pre-existing category of phenomena that share this feature, but that this feature is what makes a phenomenon a monster. Monstrous bodies have in common that they disrupt taxonomies, and as any anthropologist will tell you, taxonomic systems are socio-culturally distinct. Any particular monstrous body, as a taxonomic disruption, is equally socio-culturally distinct. Put simply, only if people classify, say, animals and humans as distinct categories can a monster take a shape by disrupting this taxonomy.^[2] That is to say, their very bodies place monsters in the realm of culture, as they depend on subverting the taxonomic schema of the people they haunt. Monstrous bodies are ‘always impossible; they always cross un-crossable categories’ (Musharbash & Presterudstuen 2020a: 4); yet, importantly, they always do so in culturally legible ways. The monstrous body is fantastic, especially if we consider ‘fantastic’ in its original Greek meaning, where phantastikós signifies that which is imaginable as opposed to imaginary (see also Musharbash 2014a: 8-11).

There are a number of ways in which monsters embody taxonomic transgression.^[3] Hybridity is one, and early monsters are exemplary of this; so much so that David Wengrow (2014), who explores monsters from the Bronze to the Iron Age, calls them ‘composites’. Their bodies are literal assemblages: the head of one animal, wings from another, a body from a third. Examples of early hybrid monsters with which we are still familiar include griffins, sphinxes, and centaurs. A multitude of other kinds of hybrids across any number of taxonomic categories, of course, is not just conceivable but is recorded across the anthropological record.

Transgressing states of animation is another way for monsters to disrupt taxonomies. The most prominent among these are the states of being dead or alive: ghosts, spirits, zombies, vampires, and more fall into this category. Monstrousness in these cases hails from being neither dead nor alive, or being both, dead and alive. The anthropological literature records ghosts and spirits across the globe (see, among many others, Blanes & Santo 2013, Bubandt 2012, Mills 1995), and note that neither zombies nor vampires are in any way limited to popular culture. While the contemporary cinematic zombie’s genealogy is commonly related back to the Haitian zombi, which in turn made the transatlantic journey from Africa to the Caribbean in the slave boats, other zombies never left Africa and proliferated there (see, amongst many others, Cannon 1942; Comaroff & Comaroff 2002; Niehaus 2005). Vampires—undead monsters who drink the blood of humans—appear across time and space in countless cultures (see Weiss 1998 and White 2000 for examples from Africa).

Other ways of taxonomic transgression are more fluid. One example of this are shapeshifters, creatures who are sometimes human, sometimes animal. Further significant aspects of the monstrous body are its size (often much larger or much smaller than the original category, such as dwarves or the giant octopus). Then, there are culturally specific markers of monstrosity which render a monstrous body unnatural, such as horns (on beings to whom they don’t ‘belong’), or long nails, hirsuteness, and so forth. Lastly, the monstrous body is often endowed with powers that far exceed what it should ‘naturally’ be capable of, including excessive speed and/or strength, the ability to become invisible or teleport, and so forth. These literal superpowers highlight the monster’s supernaturalness.

Next to embodiment, anthropologists take the physical presence (or, emplacement) of monsters to signify meaning in multiple ways. First and foremost, monsters as a rule are local, vernacular, and environmentally contingent. In other words, monsters are deeply emplaced. An illustrative example of this is summed up by Mathias Clasen:

We find different shape-shifters in different ecologies: a were-tiger in India and other Asian regions, a were-bear in North America, a were-leopard in Africa, a wereboar in Greece and Turkey, a were-crocodile in Indonesia and Africa, and so on (2012: 225).

To turn this on its head:

An Anito [an Indigenous Taiwanese malicious spirit] in Paris, Huldufólk [an Icelandic type of fey] in the Australian tropics, or a Minmin Light [central Australian luminoids] in LA would elicit either very different, or just as likely, no responses at all from humans there (Musharbash 2014a: 11).

Within their deep emplacement, however, monsters often are simultaneously ‘out of place’. As Stasch puts it, they are ‘physically present in the place but clashing with the ideas understood to go with it’ (2014: 211). This is why we often find monsters in the margins, at crossroads, in the dark, underground, under the bed, and so forth: they should not be there, so this is exactly where they are! This is also why indicator events that happen ‘out of place’—such as the flowering of a shrub out of season, the cry of a diurnal bird at night—indicate monstrous presence (see also Musharbash 2016, Turpin et al. 2013). Often, their presence ‘out of place’ signals danger, but this must not necessarily be so. Consider, firstly, that monsters can signal danger also by being exactly where they are expected to be, in naturally dangerous places. To give some examples from the aquatic realm: it is in the vicinity of rip currents and whirlpools that mermaids are said to dwell, the deepest and darkest waterholes are home to rainbow serpents, and a treacherous salt lake in Australia’s Western Desert is where ngayurnangalku (malevolent cannibal beings) haunt. Secondly, and demonstrating monsters’ cunning ability to escape too-tight definitions, they can also be exactly where they are meant to be and signal safety. For example, the vicinities of shrines and altars often are dwelling places of protective spirits, and the presence of milarrlpa (benevolent place-specific spirits) in Australia’s Tanami Desert is a sign of well-cared-for ancestral Country.

Perhaps even more complex than monsters’ relationship to place is their relationship to time, but here as well there are some distinct patterns as well as exceptions to the rule. Generally, monsters are deeply contingent on the temporal schema of the humans they haunt. For example, monsters tend to prefer nighttime over daytime to be active in contexts where this inverts the temporality of human sociality. This way of monsters ‘being in time’ can be expanded from a day/night cycle, to annual cycles and seasons, and on to epochs. In other words, monsters find their niches in each society’s temporal schema, so that the presence of certain monsters, say, at night, in spring, during the full moon, has a dual effect: emphasising the monstrousness of the monster and simultaneously re-enforcing the meaningfulness of temporal schemata.

For anthropologists, this means that it becomes possible to look comparatively at different temporal schemata through the times when monsters haunt. This is possible not only on daily or seasonal cycles, but also by looking at deep understandings of time. For example, if people have a time before the beginning of history, monsters may or may not hail from there. If people live in an unchanging and eternal ‘everywhen’, monsters may or may not be part of this, and so forth. Much as temporal ontologies differ, so do the ways in which monsters integrate or subvert the temporal ontologies within which they haunt. The point here is that no matter how monsters relate to time, that relationship always reveals something about a society’s temporality (and, in the process, helps define monsters).

Another way to investigate the relationship between monsters and time is to explore how monsters change across time. This is a major trope in monster studies, where often fears and monsters are related to each other, and a common argument is that as societal fears change, so do monsters (see, amongst many others, Asma 2009 and Pool 2011). Such diachronic work is rarer in anthropology, but where it exists, it presents exciting insights into temporality as much as into monsters, as for example Foster’s (2009, 2012) work on Japanese yōkai (supernatural beings) across time.

The monster, says Cohen ‘is born as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment’ (1996: 2), and—once translated into anthropology—this is probably the primary way in which anthropology relates monsters and temporality. Anthropologists recurrently highlight how monsters are expressive of profound socio-cultural change. In anthropological analyses, monsters seem to herald change in ‘the times’ and pinpoint the consequences of this change through changing themselves. For example, Katie Glaskin (2018) investigates cultural change among Bardi and Jawi people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia through analysing the fading of complexity among spirit beings, showing how the knowledge about spirit beings becoming less differentiated is intricately linked to Bardi and Jawi experiences of colonialism and capitalism. On the other side of the world, Paul Manning (2005) critically engages with capitalism through tracing the transformations of tommyknockers (gnome-like creatures who dwell in mines) as they migrate with the miners from the Cornish mines to the US. Rupert Stasch (2016) investigates social ruptures experienced by Korowai people in Indonesian Papua through the movement of their dead to the ‘big city’, and Nils Bubandt (2008) explores the repercussions of violent communal clashes in North Maluku, Indonesia, through the emergence of traumatised ghosts.

Parallel to the particular ways in which monsters are embodied, emplaced, and temporally contingent, they act both in accordance with and by rupturing the social norms of the people they haunt. Haunting, in the anthropological literature, is not necessarily loaded with negative connotations. In this vein, this entry uses the verb ‘to haunt’ as a catchall phrase to capture the manifold ways in which monsters are inherently social (even when they are anti-social). I have argued that anthropologists understand monsters as social actors deeply embedded in the cultural fabric ‘not least because they are intimately familiar with their interlocutors’ responses to the presence of monsters’ (2014a: 6). This entry singles out two types of response to exemplify anthropological understandings of monsters as social beings: the variety of emotions engendered by them, and examples of the kind of social practices performed in the presence of monsters.

Against popular understandings, the emotions that monsters elicit when encountered by anthropologists in the field far exceed fear. It is true, many monsters are terrifying: they can frighten, hurt, and potentially kill people—think only of the bunyip, which lurks in deep black pools in the River Murray in southeastern Australia, and is known to drown people in the river’s depths; or, the windigo of Algonquian-speaking First Nations, whose greed and selfishness propels its cannibalistic blood thirst. But not all monsters terrify humans. Many monsters are more ambivalent—think Cornish tommyknockers or Islandic huldufólk, for example, who may warn people about imminent dangers, play tricks on them, or lure them away from their kin, but for a while only. Others, again, are protective; many emplaced spirits, for example, are conduits between people, ancestors, and land, and their presence steeps the living in a sense of wellbeing and safety.

In turn, humans react to the presence of ‘their’ monsters in culturally specific ways, be they embodied or ritualised. These are practically limitless, but include actions and practices such as flight, avoidance, greeting, calling out, singing, leaving gifts, chanting, keeping lights on at night, bowing, specific hand gestures, turning the body, hurling abuse at them, brandishing fire sticks, fighting them, and so forth. The specific social practices humans engage in response to ‘their’ monsters can be read as a mirror that reflects back to the observer who people are and what haunts them.

Monsters across the anthropological record

From its earliest beginnings, the anthropological record has been populated by beings that fit into the definition of monsters put forward in this entry. However, how monsters were included differs across time. The different ways can broadly be classified into four distinct (if at times overlapping) trends, the first three of which did not employ the term monster. In the foundational phase of anthropology, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, anthropologists meticulously described multitudes of local monsters (as per the entry’s definition) and included them in their ethnographies. They soon began to focus on fewer monsters (broadly defined), such as malicious spirits, analysing them and their presence in more sustained manners. This lead to regional paradigms, such as the anthropology of witchcraft.

Over the last three decades of the twentieth century, anthropology saw a gradual increase of works that concentrate on single, specific monsters (not labelled thus) outside of well-established regional paradigms. This included, for example, ghosts, the devil, and aliens. Over the past decade, works emerged that employ the term ‘monster’ strategically, quite possibly in response to the ways in which the new century is permeated by monstrousness.

By providing an overview of key ethnographic examples from each trend, this entry highlights the enduring presence of monsters in anthropology as well as some of the different kinds of frameworks within which they have been conceptualised. In tandem, these trends underscore the meaningfulness of monsters as an analytic category and they provide a path towards more fully grasping the great contemporary importance of the concept.

There is nary a classical anthropological work that does not include descriptions of local monsters; they are teeming across the pages of The golden bough (Frazer 1890) and populate many an ethnography that followed. Look at ethnographies by early anthropologists, and you will find mulukuausi, deadly flying witches; an octopus so large it could ‘cover an entire village with its body; its arms […] thick as coco-nut trees’; and ‘big, live stones, which lie in wait for sailing canoes, run after them, jump up and smash them to pieces’ (all in Papua New Guinea’s Trobriand Islands, as described in Malinowski 1922: 76, 234-5, 241). Across the sea, in the Andaman Island, there are lau, spirits who eat the flesh of the dead, may cause illness or death, are considered to be more dangerous to strangers than locals, but can also be friends with magic users (Radcliffe-Brown 1922: 136-9). And up in the Arctic, Inuit are haunted by the kalopaling, a ‘fabulous being’ that appears like a human in a feathered outfit but lives under the sea and can capsize ships; the uissuit, a ‘strange people that live in the sea. They are dwarfs and are frequently seen’; and the tornit, a people who shared the land with the Inuit many years ago, ‘much taller than the Inuit [with] very long legs and arms. Almost all of them were blear eyed. They were extremely strong’ (all in Boas 1964: 212-3, 226-8).

These examples are but the tip of the iceberg of a veritable cornucopia of monsters in early ethnographies—except that early anthropologists did not employ the term ‘monster’ as a category for these creatures. Even though they were not collated under any umbrella term, they were as matter-of-factly included in early ethnographies as were descriptions of local climate, fauna, flora, kinship, or ritual. As an example, consider how Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (1956), a leading British social anthropologist, includes beings who easily fall under the broad definition of monsters in his note on the ways in which the Azande of north-central Africa categorised their totems (emblematic species with which different social groups identify) in the early half of the twentieth century. Evans-Pritchard lists the totems by category: first, named ones (based on mammals, birds, reptiles, and crustaceans) followed by an unnamed category which he describes as ‘creatures [that] may be supposed not to exist, though the experiences they stand for are, or may be, actual’ (1956: 108). These creatures include a crested water snake called ngambue, a rainbow snake called wangu, the moma ima, which is a water leopard, and the gumba, which is an entity known as thunder-beast (1956: 108.). The point to note is that the inclusion of monsters as totems is not what Evens-Pritchard finds striking, but rather that there are no plant totems. In other words, monsters were taken as a given. Their presence, or, minimally, people’s belief in them, was not an issue early anthropologists grappled with. The concern rather was with ‘where’ in an ethnography and in analysis they belonged. In this vein, Bronislaw Malinowski (dubbed the founding father of participant observation, anthropology’s core method), when mentioning deadly flying witches called mulukuausi in a paper about spirits of the dead, explains:

But all these data really belong to the chapter about sorcery and evil magic, and have only been mentioned here, where the mulukuausi interest us, as especially connected with the dead (1916: 357).

The foundational phase of anthropology is thus characterised by expansive inclusion and meticulous description of multitudes of local monsters—and, an implicit and sometimes explicit understanding of monsters and humans cohabiting the worlds studied. Early anthropology’s preoccupation with ‘discovering’ the ‘Native’s point of view’ meant that how people made sense of monsters was at stake, not the fact that monsters existed in the fieldsites visited by anthropologists.^[4]

The expansive inclusion of all beings retrospectively catchable under the broad definition of ‘monster’ is countered by the development of regional theoretical paradigms. A number of anthropologists soon focused on one regionally salient ‘monster’ (never called that), leading to more sustained analyses of these respective monsters and the developments of specific theoretical frameworks. An illustrative example is witchcraft as an anthropological topic where it relates to more-than-human witches—either known or unknown persons endowed with superhuman and magical powers.^[5] Such witches may be able to fly, become invisible, kill with magic, and more. They can be wholly evil or are protectors, and are often embroiled in local misfortunes on a wide scale, from making a person slip to being entangled in disasters from pandemics to natural catastrophes (for an overview, see Moro 2017).

As anthropologists increasingly focused on witches, they often abandoned other local monsters. However, this allowed them to develop in-depth, complex, influential, and lasting theoretical engagements. Take two prominent works in the field of African witchcraft studies, for example, by Evans-Pritchard (1937) and Peter Geschiere (2013). The counterpoint to the time-depth is that these engagements are regionally distinct. So distinct, in fact, that anthropologists working on witchcraft in Africa and anthropologists working on witchcraft in Melanesia had progressively less and less to say to each other (Patterson 1974)—and even less to discuss with anthropologists who were focussing on monsters other than witches (say, malicious spirits or ghosts, two other monsters responsible for vast bodies of anthropological work). Stasch sums up the effect of this process of specialisation on the studies of monsters in anthropology by affirming that ‘in anthropology, scholarship on monsters has been quite dispersed, despite the existence of a strong tradition of work on witchcraft and many excellent accounts of other monsters in specific settings’ (2014: 195).

Revisiting such regional paradigms with an understanding of their protagonists as monsters impels new conversations that open up fascinating comparative possibilities, and in return offer ethnographically rich, fine-grained analyses of specific monsters.

A gradual but distinct shift took place in ethnographies from the later twentieth century onwards, towards beings that fall under the monster definition given here. While rarely theorised as monsters, these beings are employed as a lens through which to explore sociocultural aspects of inequality, gender, and race in contexts of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and extractivism. Among countless others, examples of this development include studies of aliens in the US (Lepselter 2016), demons in Sri Lanka (Kapferer 1983), ghosts in Indonesia (Bubandt 2012), spirits (Blanes & Santo 2013) and the wildman (Forth 2008) across the world, yōkai in Japan (Foster 2015), and zombies in Africa (Comaroff & Comaroff 2002). These works do not form a canon as other regional paradigms do. However, if gathered together as works which share in common that they are dealing with monsters in one shape or form, they become a productive source displaying the rich and nuanced comparative potential of monsters in anthropology. This can be analysed in a multitude of ways, exemplified in the following by a focus on ethnographies of monsters and alterity (from the Latin word alter, for otherness).

In anthropology, perhaps the best-known monsters of alterity roam in South America, where they have generated many fascinating analyses, not least since Michael Taussig’s seminal work, The devil and commodity fetishism in South America (1980). Here, Taussig analyses how displaced peasants in Columbian sugar cane plantations and Bolivian tin mines make sense of the injustices of capitalist exploitation through worshipping a devil figure known as el Tío. Almost forty years later, Anders Burman (2018) took this vein of analysis of monsters as alterity the furthest in his study of the kharisiri, a monster haunting the Indigenous populations in the Bolivian Andes. The kharisiri looks like a white man, said to have its roots in either Spanish soldiers and/or friars, and steals the kidney fat of locals. He shows how not just the monster and the ‘white man’ (standing in for colonialism), but also the anthropologist as well as anthropology as a discipline, can be said to share four characteristics: ‘(1) they are ‘strange’; (2) they are powerful (relatively speaking); (3) they are exploitative; and (4) the resources they extract are used in “strange” contexts’ (Burman 2018: 52). Other analyses of the kharisiri play on the roots of the monster and capitalism trope, but then examine how it extends itself to acute contemporary issues, for example, racial violence (see, among many others, Canessa 2000).

The Ecuadorian and Peruvian counterpart to the kharisiri is the pishtaco (Weismantel 2001), another body-fat-stealing monster. Its evil exploits epitomise gender, race, and class alterity perfectly: a white male figure, with church, military, and business associations, who steals the kidney fat of local people. The equivalent of kidney fat (life, power) in the Andes seems to be blood in parts of Africa, where monsters of alterity take the form of white vampires who steal the blood of locals. Much as in South America, the genealogy of these monsters goes back to the roots of colonialism, so much so that Luise White (2000) speaks of ‘colonial bloodsucking’ in her analyses of countless examples of stories about Africans being slaughtered (or kept in pits) for their blood to be used for the treatment of anaemic diseases. Contemporary forms of these vampires continue to haunt and steal blood (life, power) in contemporary guises (see, amongst many others, Weiss 1998).

In Indonesia, seventeenth-century Portuguese soldiers, transmogrified into animal-like wild-but-Western giants, continue to haunt locals in ways that uncannily speak to the Anthropocene (Bubandt 2019). In Malaysia, the jenuing, who existed as evil female spirits with maggots in their hair, are now driving logging trucks (Rothstein 2020). Their transition perfectly encapsulates how monsters not just embody alterity, but can also and with ease change over to the Other’s side. The same is true of kurdaitcha in central Australia. They are pre-colonial monsters—human-like but endowed with supernatural strength and speed and driven by a lust to kill—who are said to have cohabited in the desert with humans since time immemorial. Today, however, they are allied with non-Indigenous Australians. This allows them to pursue their life’s desire of killing Aboriginal people even more successfully than before (Musharbash 2014b).

The most recent developments in anthropology concerned with monsters build on previous, more comparative work to employ the term ‘monster’ strategically. Some anthropologists now theorise a vast multitude of beings as monsters. Presterudstuen and I (2014, 2020b) call this new field ‘monster anthropology’. Bringing together interdisciplinary theorisations about monsters and ethnographic material about all manner of creatures, beings, and other-than-humans, we propose that employing the umbrella term ‘monster’ drastically increases anthropology’s comparative possibilities in areas that were previously investigated in either geographic or analytical isolation (Musharbash 2014a: 15). This approach aims to bridge the conceptual gap between monsters encountered in the field (by locals and/or anthropologists) and interdisciplinary monster studies. It demonstrates that theoretical debates in interdisciplinary monster studies can very productively inform anthropological understandings of monsters, up to a point: the nub lies in the tension between empirical experiences of monsters and understandings of monsters as fictional or part of folklore (see especially Musharbash 2014a). In turn, the empirical experiences of ‘living with monsters’ are the primary contribution anthropology can make to interdisciplinary monster studies (for narrative ethnographies vividly capturing various ways of living with monsters across the globe, see contributions in Musharbash and Gershon forthcoming).

A parallel development is taking place at the interface between anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS): Anna Tsing et al.’s volume, Arts of living on a damaged planet (2017) draws on monsters and ghosts to grapple with how to understand local repercussions of the Anthropocene. They put forward that monsters lend themselves ideally to readings of what ails the planet, as they ‘have a double meaning: on the one hand, they help us pay attention to ancient chimeric entanglements; on the other, they point us toward the monstrosities of modern Man’ (Swanson et al. 2017: M2.). Scholars in this tradition make a categorical distinction between monsters on the one hand and ghosts on the other, and employ monsters in analyses of different forms of embodiments while ghosts serve to explore how people relate to place (their ‘emplacements’).^[6] As Heather Anne Swanson et al. put it: ‘ghosts […] help us read life’s enmeshment in landscapes, monsters point us toward life’s symbiotic entanglements across bodies’ (2017: M2). Their approach highlights the fruitfulness of making monsters central to anthropological investigations into change and transformation, generally, and the crises of the Anthropocene most specifically.

It is no accident that monsters are resurging in anthropology as the Anthropocene reveals its force, and planetary crises in a multitude of shapes and forms reach all points of the Earth. As climate change worsens and its effects brutally impact the lives of people across the planet, monsters come to the fore of anthropological analyses as monsters. Monsters seem to jump at the new opportunities granted and wreak havoc in new but always culturally legible ways—even if what they say is that there is no legibility to what is happening. Their acts can be almost trivial, like minis, spirits living in the treetops around a temple in Tamil Nadu, India, who refused to catch the rice balls thrown up to them during an annual festival (Arumugam 2020) in a response to environmental degradation, or like ghosts starting to haunt differently as cyclones become more destructive (Presterudstuen 2020). Yet even these small monstrous acts poignantly illuminate what it means to live in crisis. They can become quotidian, just as the never-ending series of disasters may be, or they can be momentous and apocalyptic.

The ways in which monsters change, not just allegiance but in all manner of ways, has been identified by Presterudstuen and I (2020a) as a crucially salient aspect of what they are. We suggest six axes along which to analyse monster change and transformation, namely: examining the ways in which new monsters emerge (e.g., Frankenstein’s monster, during the Industrial Revolution); investigating how monsters adapt to new circumstances (for example, how new infrastructure like electricity may repel some monsters and draw new ones nearer); how monsters might be appropriated (say, by capital, or the settler-colonial state); the ways in which monsters can amalgamate (like the Algonquian windigo, who acquired more werewolfish features as French-Canadian voyageurs started intermingling with local Indigenous people), as well as their extinction (which often goes hand-in-hand with missionisation) and, of course, monster succession.

We also argue that analytical attention to how monsters change may provide anthropologists with perceptive insights into crises that occupy the lives and minds of the people they study. As long as monsters play central roles in their humans’ struggles in dealing with all kinds of catastrophes—from new infrastructures and species extinction to neo-colonialism, environmental degradation, and climate change—the anthropological study of monsters is likely to grow in the years to come.

Conclusion

Anthropology, more than any other discipline, deals with monsters who are part and parcel of social life: the monsters that anthropologists encounter in their fieldsites do not only appear in myths and rituals but shape people’s daily lives. Monsters turn out to live with the people they haunt: they know them, their systems, rules, and orders, their problems and their crises. The lives of local monsters and ‘their’ people are thus deeply, intricately, and intimately entangled. The fact that, until recently, anthropology did not use the category ‘monster’ to class all the beings that can be captured by the definition given in this entry is triply significant: it pinpoints something of a turning point, as it goes against the grain of most arguments in anthropology by highlighting that it is not a multitude of local concepts we need at this point, but also perhaps big, universal ones. In the case of monsters, at least, using such a broad category is productive, as it deepens our understandings by comparatively including all sorts of ethnographic material under a general banner of monster studies. Lastly, it seems this new category of monster in anthropology gels well with the times and carries much promise, as monsters abound in this unceasingly globalised world visited by endless strings of crises. The study of past and present monsters promises novel insights not only into them, but into the ways in which different peoples deal differently with what haunts them. Taking seriously the capacities that monsters have—of hybridity, transgression, adaptation, and shape-shifting, among many others—will be instructive also for investigations into human imaginations of and the potential to deal with change and transformation. This entry has foregrounded global environmental, colonial, and economic crises as examples, and it forecasts that anthropology will never cease to find new monsters. Just consider the rise of digital monsters (see Asimos), or, the rocketed popularity of Amabie, a Japanese yōkai that serves as a protector from COVID-19 (Springwood 2020). From there, it is not far to considering that cyborgs, robots, bioengineered beings, androids, ghosts of post-industrial ruins, and nuclear and plague zombies are in the process of leaving science fiction and becoming part and parcel of everyday life. Tackling them and the next wave of monsters that will surely follow will be easier when it is possible to draw on broad comparative material—from across time and comparatively across the planet—as well as bringing together ethnographic expertise with other disciplines studying monsters.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Felix Stein for their wonderful in-depth engagement with the first draft of this entry. Their comments, queries, and reflections have helped immensely in reworking this piece.

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Note on contributor

Yasmine Musharbash is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the Australian National University. Since the 1990s, she has been conducting participant observation-based research with Warlpiri people in Central Australia. She is the author of Yuendumu everyday (2008) and of a number of co-edited volumes, including Monster anthropology in Australasia and beyond (with G.H. Presterudstuen, 2014), Monster anthropology: ethnographic explorations of transforming social worlds through monsters (with G.H. Presterudstuen, 2020), and Living with monsters (forthcoming, with Ilana Gershon).

[1] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) Monster culture (seven theses) is generally accepted as the foundational work.

[2] This might be a key reason why anthropologists tend not to talk about monsters in ethnographic contexts where animals and humans are counterparts of each other (parts of Amazonia, for example).

[3] The ‘fantastic’ embodiment is what sets monsters apart from Mary Douglas’s (1966) classic taxonomic transgression example of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.

[4] For an eminent critique of the ‘Native’s point of view’, see Clifford Geertz (1974).

[5] The most renowned example in anthropology of all-too-human witches is Jeanne Favret-Saada’s (1980) Deadly words.

[6] While this separation of ghosts from monsters galvanises the fertile literature on haunting, from Derrida’s ‘hauntology’ to Avery Gordon’s (2008) Ghostly matters, it does less for theorising monsters themselves.

Cannibalism

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 02:06:17 +0000

Shirley Lindenbaum

Graduate Center, City University of New York

Initially published 5 Jun 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21cannibalism

Abstract:

Cannibalism, the eating of one’s own kind, is a practice that occurs in both humans and non-humans. Some people consumed their own kin to ensure that their spirits joined those of their ancestors; others ate their enemies in anger in the context of warfare, in some cases to acquire the powers of those they had defeated; and others ate sorcerers who they thought brought them disease and death. Archaeologists provided evidence of prehistoric cannibalism among different peoples as well as among many of our ancestors. In the twentieth century, anthropologists published well-documented accounts of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa. Resisting the image of primitive people as cannibals, anthropologists often wrote about cannibalism as a metaphor, in the form of human alligators, zombies, and witches. In the 1970s cannibalism was at the centre of three widely-publicised debates. The first two featured a small number of distinguished scholars who held different views about who had the right to speak about and to evaluate conflicting claims about other people’s pasts. The third was provoked by one anthropologist’s argument that, except in the case of cannibalism in the context of survival, the cannibals described by anthropologists were mythical creatures. This gave rise to a passionate response by anthropologists who viewed the critique as an attack on their discipline in general, and on their research methods. Contemporary descriptions of cannibalism, seeming to echo the archaeological accounts, now argue that in one form or another, we are all cannibals.

Introduction

The term 'cannibal', defined as eating one’s own kind, is a legacy of Columbus’ encounter in 1492 with the Caribs of the Antilles, said to have been consumers of human flesh. Studies documenting the practice of cannibalism among non-humans, identified in more than 1,500 species (Polis 1981: 225), have led to the distinction between human and non-human cannibalism. The term anthropophagy, from the Greek anthropophagia (‘the eating of men’), is retained to refer to the eating of humans by other humans. Cannibalism is used to describe both the human and non-human practice.

Cannibalism represents the ultimate forbidden behaviour for many Western societies, something to relegate to other cultures, other times, and other places. New archaeological research has provided evidence that long before the invention of metals, before Egypt’s pyramids were built, before the origins of agriculture, and before the explosion of Paleolithic cave art, cannibalism could already be found among many different people, as well as among many of our ancestors (White 2001: 88).

As this entry illustrates, the cannibal was also an object of fascination in the ancient literature recorded by historians, theologians, and philosophers, and then in the accounts of explorers, merchants, and ambassadors during Europe’s Age of Exploration. Distant people were often portrayed as cannibals: that is, as strange, animal-like creatures. In the twentieth century, anthropologists depicted cannibalism as another example of the many ways of being human, answering the question of what the practice meant for those who consumed the dead. Some people ate the bodies of enemies killed during warfare, and some killed and ate sorcerers who they believed had brought them death and misfortune. Others consumed the bodies of deceased relatives in mortuary ceremonies, expressing love and grief for those they had lost, a sentiment that unites us as human beings. The diversity of cannibalism as practice, and of the contexts in which it occurred, is evident in the three regions in the world where the practice has received the most attention, namely Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa. In the 1970s, cannibalism was at the centre of three anthropological debates, which raised methodological issues about how we know ‘others’. A new approach to cannibalism (Nyamnjoh 2018) extended the meaning of the term from ingesting others to considering others as food for the body, the mind, and the soul. This broader notion of cannibalism conveys a more ethically sensitive understanding of the nature of human relationships. The entry ends with a reflection on the future of the cannibal in anthropology.

Historical reports of cannibalism

Early reports of cannibals can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman times, where they were often part of stories about mythical creatures in unexplored reaches of the world. They include fabulous and bizarre tribes of men, such as the man-eating Cynocephali, dog-headed people held to be living in Asia in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. Homer, the presumed author of the epic poem The Odyssey, composed between 800 and 750 BC, depicts a tribe of giant cannibals living on an island native to the Laestrygonians, who pelt Odysseus’s ships with boulders, sinking all ships but his own. In Histories, a book published between 426 and 415 BC, Herodotus wrote about cannibal nations that inhabited the margins of the world. Pliny the Elder’s Natural history, drew on Herodotus’ broad mix of myths, legends, and facts to recount rumours of strange peoples on the edges of the world. This inspired medieval bestiaries and the illustrations of old maps (Sandys 1911). The European catalogues of other peoples and marvellous creatures, Liber monstrorum and Tractatus monstrorum, thought to have been written in the eighth century, stressed the threatening nature of their material. One list of creatures that provoked the greatest terror included harpies, crocodiles, boa constrictors, enormous ants, and cannibals. From the 1240s through the late fourteenth century, Europeans set out for Asia in increasing numbers as missionaries, ambassadors, explorers, and entrepreneurs, recording their experiences for a growing audience at home. The Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who made two extended Asian voyages in the second half of the thirteenth century, described cannibals as cruel beings who liked to eat strangers raw and highly spiced (Daston & Park 1998: 24-6).

The discovery by Columbus of cannibals in the Americas did not just lead European observers to recycle ancient theories around cannibalism. It also raised questions on the appropriate nature of funerary rights and the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, for example. When one man ate another, in what body would the eaten person be resurrected? Would the owner’s flesh be restored to him, or would it remain part of the cannibal? These questions also arose in the case of shipwrecks when fish ate the body of a drowned man and the fish were then eaten by other humans. The rise of modern science and discourses, notably those of physics and chemistry as the scientific study of substance and particles, led to the disappearance of many of the theories and styles of philosophical language that cannibalism inspired. As a result, a world of arguments, values, and sensibilities has been lost (Avramescu 2009).

The literal ingestion of human flesh, not surprisingly, had also evoked the Eucharist, its sublimated variant, and the ritual commemoration of the Last Supper. Debate over the Eucharist, fraught with cannibal associations since the earliest days of the Christian Church, became a major point of polemic contest in Reformation Europe (Rawson 1997: 4). Following his encounter in Rouen with the Tupinamba people of South America, who said that they ate the bodies of their dead as a matter of honour, Michel de Montaigne denounced the cruelty displayed by Christians during the religious wars in France:

I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs (as we have not only read about but seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among our fellow-citizens and neighbours – and, what is worse, in the name of duty and religion) than in roasting him and eating him after death (1991: 235-6).

Montaigne’s essay On cannibals, first published in 1580, is viewed now as an early statement of cultural relativism, which calls attention to the importance of local context in understanding the meaning of particular beliefs and activities, without thereby asserting that all value systems are equally valid.

Papua New Guinea

Francis Edgar Williams, a government anthropologist in Papua from 1922 to 1943, was among the first to publish ethnographic material about cannibalism in New Guinea (Williams 1930), a Trust Territory at the time administered by Australia. Williams suggested that his accounts of the practice provided a long and perhaps ill-assorted menu from which the anthropological diner was invited to take what tempted him (1936: x). He reported that the Orokaiva had once been a high-spirited and warlike people, who frequently raided, killed, and ate one another. Their reason for cannibalism was said to be the simple desire for good food (Williams 1930: 170-1). War-parties by the Keraki included raiding their neighbours, clubbing, and beheading them. Back home, a period of rejoicing and feasting followed, which Williams describes as ‘not cannibalism’, except for morsels, such as eyeballs or snippets from the cheek. After this, they resumed ordinary life until they were raided in turn and lost some of their own heads. A brief outbreak of head-hunting in the Moorhead district in 1928 was judged to be the last (Williams 1936: 26).

In the early 1930s, nearly one million previously-unknown people were discovered living in the New Guinea Highlands. Following a hiatus during WWII, as the number of anthropologists increased, New Guinea provided an opportunity to undertake research in the unexplored regions of the world. Well-documented cases of cannibalism were described for a number of populations in the Eastern Highlands. Charles Julius, another government anthropologist, sent his survey of the beliefs and practices of the South Fore peoples, living in today’s Eastern Highlands Province to the Department of Public Health, and observed that in most areas women and uninitiated men had both the right and duty to eat dead relatives (Julius 1981 [1957]). Based on data collected in 1951 and 1952, Ronald Berndt’s ethnography Excess and constraint: social control among a New Guinea mountain people (1962) provided information about the intra- and inter-district manifestations of cannibalism. It showed that the North Fore ate their own dead (endocannibalism) as well as the bodies of enemies killed in warfare (exocannibalism). Berndt offered his work as a contribution to the sociology of conflict, but he also said that ‘Dead human flesh, to these people, is food, or potential food’, and ‘the diet of the region is apparently deficient in protein’ (1962: 270-1). In 1961, Robert and Shirley Glasse (later Lindenbaum) arrived in the South Fore region with a charge to provide cultural information which might support the hypothesis that genetics could explain the epidemic of kuru, the neurological disease afflicting the Fore people (Bennet et al. 1959). Their data did not support this premise, and they proposed instead that the epidemic was related to the consumption of deceased relatives by women and children of both sexes. Robert published an account of the hypothesis in 1967. In 1976, Carleton Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for confirming that kuru was infectious. Gajdusek did not doubt that the Fore were cannibals, but he initially dismissed the hypothesis that cannibalism was the mode of transmission. Instead, he proposed a variety of non-oral routes of transmission (Sorenson & Gajdusek 1969; Gajdusek 1970; Gajdusek 1971).

A new chapter in the history of kuru and cannibalism began in 1996 when an interdisciplinary team of investigators composed of neurologists and an anthropologist, later known as the MRC Prion Unit, began to study the disease. Their studies were informed by Gajdusek’s research, and by Stanley Pruziner’s discovery of prions, the infectious agent responsible for fatal neurodegenerative disorders in humans and animals, for which he had received the Nobel Prize in 1997. Jerome Whitfield, the anthropologist who was located in the South Fore, working with a group of Fore research assistants sent bloods collected from women as well as cultural information about mortuary practices to the rest of the group (Whitfield et al. 2008; Whitfield 2015). The MRC Prion Unit published three important findings. In the first, elderly women known to have consumed deceased kin, but who had not developed kuru, were shown to have a distinct type of prion protein gene, protecting them from the disease (Mead et al. 2003). A second study, using a larger sample, identified the epicentre of the epidemic in the South Fore Purosa Valley (Mead et al. 2009), and a third showed that a naturally occurring variant of the human prion gene completely prevents prion disease (Asante et al. 2015). Asante noted that the collapse of the Fore population had been prevented by the cessation of cannibalism in the late 1950s, which had interrupted the route of transmission and led to a gradual decline in incidence. However, if transmission had continued at the epicentre of the affected region, the area might have been repopulated with kuru-resistant individuals.^[1]

Some studies in the region explored the links between cannibalism and peoples’ beliefs and cosmologies. Drawing on Freud, Gillian Gillison’s ethnography Between culture and fantasy (1993) revealed the complex ideas held by the Gimi of Papua New Guinea about sexuality and conception and the rights of cannibalism performed in Oedipal dramas. The Gimi, like their neighbours, the South Fore, only practiced endocannibalism, as part of mourning rituals governed by convention and filled with emotion. A more recent ethnography of the Ankave people living in Papua New Guinea’s Southern Gulf Province described invisible cannibal creatures called ombo’, held responsible for bringing fatal illness to humans with the goal of feasting on human flesh of Ankave corpses (Lemonnier 2005). The ombo’ represent the transformed spirit of a long-deceased person that members of the Ankave hold within themselves and that they can direct towards a victim. Pierre Lemonnier suggests that comparing the ombo’ with the image of cannibal characters by other groups reveals the ways in which the human mind imagines death, evil, and misfortune.

A number of anthropologists wrote about cannibalism in the context of warfare. In his ethnography The making of great men, Maurice Godelier (1986) described Baruya great leaders meeting in single combat. When one felled an enemy, he carried the body back home where he severed the right ‘fighting’ hand and daubed his body with the victim’s blood. He sometimes cut off the arms and legs, which he cooked and ate to appropriate the powers of the vanquished enemy. Elsewhere on the island of New Guinea, Gerard Zegwaard (1959) described cannibalism in the context of warfare among the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea. K.F. Koch (1970) said it was a component of cannibalistic revenge among the Jale in the province of Irian Jaya. And among the Baktaman, a group of 183 people occupying a tract of mountain rain forest in West Sepik Province, cannibalism was said to be an escalation of warfare, done in anger and a lust for revenge (Barth 1975).

Cannibalism could also be a form of punishment for people considered to be malefactors. From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, a number of linguistically and culturally related peoples in the Strickland-Bosavi region in inland South Papua gained a degree of notoriety for their reputed anthropophagic practices. Almost all deaths among the Kaluli (Schieffelin 1976), the Etoro (Kelly 1993), the Samo (Shaw 1990), the Gebusi (Knauft 1985), and the Onabasulu (Ernst 1999), were attributed to witches and sometimes sorcerers, who were executed and often consumed (Ernst 1999: 144-7).

The Korowai people of southern West Papua were said to be preoccupied by the threat to their lives posed by a category of ‘witches’, pathologically deviant men who lived amidst the human population and caused death by eating people’s bodies. Outraged mourners could seize the accused men and transfer them to people living several miles away, who shot, butchered, and consumed the witches. At some future time, the consumers might send a witch in return, a balancing of negative transactions that ameliorated the outrage felt in the initial exchange. An execution also often led to the transfer of a woman to the witch’s relatives in anticipation of her bearing children as a form of regenerative long-distance social interaction. Cannibalistic belief thereby contributed to the Korowai’s previously high homicide rates (Stasch 2001).

Among the Daribi who occupy the volcanic plateaus south of Simbu province, only adults and aged persons were eaten and were permitted to eat the dead. Members of nuclear families did not normally eat one another. Daribi clan membership was based on sharing wealth, symbolised by sharing or giving meat. Consuming the flesh of clan members was seen as akin to sharing ‘vital wealth’. Members of a clan were held to ‘eat meat together’, while those of other clans ‘give meat’ or ‘are given meat’. Meat also served as currency, in that a man could marry the sister or daughter of someone with whom he shares meat, for example. In this and many other instances, the study of cannibalistic beliefs and practices shows that Indigenous social structures included symbolic systems that are usually relegated to the areas of religion or myth (Wagner 1967).

Cannibalism disappeared rapidly in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s following contact with missionaries and colonial officers who tended to abhor the practice. However, many of the cosmological perspectives in terms of which cannibalism made sense locally have persisted in mortuary rituals, which are now the largest and most expensive ceremonial events in the Pacific.

South America

Hans Staden’s The true history of his captivity (2008 [1557]) is considered to be a foundational text in the history of the European discovery of Brazil, and a work of ethnographic significance. While serving as a gunner in a Portuguese fort on the Brazilian coast in 1550, Staden was captured by Tupi Indians. He took notes on their skill in shooting wild animals and catching fish, the nature of their government by chiefs, and many other aspects of daily life. He also witnessed cannibalism, and recorded occasions when he feared he was about to be killed and eaten. This was the earliest European account of the ritual execution and consumption of war captives among Tupi people who would become a quintessential case of cannibalism in native South America. In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries sent reports and letters to headquarters about the customs and practices of cannibalism among the Tupian-speaking Indians. Their accounts proved to be valuable, because these coastal groups had disappeared as a result of disease, warfare, enslavement, and assimilation by the time serious anthropological research began (Forsyth 1983). The relationships of the Tupi with enemy groups were not always negative. When the work of explorer Jean de Lery (1536-1613), was examined closely, it was apparent that warfare also provided the means for establishing reciprocal relations among warring groups that were essential to the maintenance of culture (Levi-Strauss 1976).

In contrast to endocannibalism in Melanesia, which aimed to preserve, perpetuate, and redistribute elements of the deceased, endocannibalism in South America more often had the objective of eradicating the corpse in order to sever relations between the dead person’s body and spirit, and between living people and the spirits of the dead. Endocannibalism, as part of funerary or mortuary ritual, is thought to have been more widely practiced in lowland South America than anywhere else in the world. It usually took place in one of two forms: people consumed the ground, roasted bones or bone ash, the more common practice, or they consumed cooked flesh. Bone-eating was especially concentrated in northern Brazil, the Upper Orinoco regions of southern Venezuela, and western and northern Amazonia (Conklin 2001: xxiv-xxv). A poignant account of bone ash cannibalism among the Amahuaca in southeastern Peru portrayed a mother wailing while she prepared her deceased daughter’s body for cremation, grinding the bones into a powder, mixing them with a maize beverage ready to drink, and then throwing the remaining ashes into the river. The ritual had taken almost two weeks (Dole 1974).

Flesh-eating was less common in South America, but it was reported in several areas, including in Paraguay by the French ethnographers Pierre and Helene Clastres, who attended a Guayaki funeral in 1963 at which the participants said they ate almost an entire corpse (Clastres, P. 1974). A case in which the secondary father^[2]ate a child, thinking that this could cure his illness, was reported by Pierre Clastres and Lucien Sebag (1964). Once the child’s meat had been consumed, the bones of the corpse were broken, sucked, and thrown into the fire. The skull was also crushed and burned, the smoke rising from the fire allowing the child’s soul to ascend to its heavenly abode.

Some South American ethnic groups practiced both endo- and exocannibalism. The Wari’ of Rondonia in Brazil ate their enemies killed during warfare as well as the corpses of fellow Wari’ at funerals (Conklin 2001: xxiii)). A southern Amazonian group of the Wari’ are also said to have eaten their dead and their enemies until at least the beginning of the 1960s (Vilaca 2000). A curious case blurring both categories of cannibalism took place among the Tupinamba, a Tupi ethnic group who regularly consumed their prisoners of war. According to analyses by Helen Clastres (1972), a number of rites first integrated a prisoner into the community. Fattened up and given to a woman in marriage, he changed his status from enemy to that of an ally. He was then killed by the woman's brother ^[FS1], a process that is driven by desires for revenge as well as attempts at suppressing social differences.

Much has been written about the Uitoto people who live on the lands between the Putumayo and Caqueta rivers in Southeastern Colombia and Northeastern Peru. Eugene Robuchon, a French explorer, was the first to write about the Uitoto practice of exocannibalism (1907, 2010 [1907]) a practice that fascinated him greatly but that he never got to witness. Konrad Preuss (1984) provided additional recordings, transcription in the native language, and translations of the cannibalistic bai ritual, in which only men ate the flesh of their opponents, to appease the souls of those who were devoured, to protect the souls of the devourers, endowing them with supernatural powers useful in warfare.

The Uitoto had suffered greatly during the Rubber Boom from the late 1890s to the late 1920s, with the arrival of the Peruvian Amazon Company, a British-Peruvian venture devoted entirely to the extraction and sale of wild rubber from the Putumayo area. The opulence of the Rubber Barons was exceeded only by their brutality. They hired their own armies to defend their claims, to acquire new land, and to capture native labourers. The first accusations of rubber violence were compiled in texts by Walter Hardenburg (1913) and G. Sidney Paternoster (1913). First-hand reports on the atrocities can be found also in a book by Carlos Valcarel (1915), and in the report and diary of the British consul, Roger Casement (1912, 1998 [1912]). Based on these reports, the anthropologist Michael Taussig argued that the Rubber Boom violence was due to a ‘synergistic relation of savagery and business, cannibalism and capitalism’ (Taussig 1984: 482). Fear of Indigenous cannibalism drove the colonists’ imagination, and was used to justify the torture, enslavement, and mass murder of Indigenous people. It is said that at least 100,000 Indigenous people had died during the Rubber Boom.

Cannibalism was also a prominent theme for many native South Americans whose images of cannibals appeared in their myths, cosmologies, and eschatologies (the component of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the ultimate destiny of the soul and of humankind). One theme is that death itself is a form of cannibalism. The Yanomami, for example, think of every death as an act of cannibalism in which the human soul is devoured by a spirit or an enemy. The Araweté Tupian speakers of Para, Brazil, believe that at death, human spirits are cannibalised by the gods, then rejuvenated and transformed into gods themselves. The Kulina, Arawakan speakers of Acre in Brazil, hold that when a human spirit journeys to the underworld, it is ritually welcomed and devoured by Kulina ancestors, who have become white-lipped peccaries, a pig-like hoofed mammal (Conklin: xxvi).

Such cannibalistic beliefs and practices from South America have advanced anthropological theory. The publication of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s From the enemy’s point of view (1992) presented a new way of looking at the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Viveiros de Castro analyses the belief held by the Araweté people that the souls of their dead will be devoured by the gods, an act by which their souls become immortal. To explain this assertion, he presents Araweté society as composed of gods and men, in which human destiny is to remain in a process of constantly becoming other beings. In this society, cannibalism is an important practice that enables them to change from one entity to another. These insights were fundamental to question what it means to be human. According to Viveiros de Castro, intentionality and reflexive consciousness might no longer be attributes of humanity, but potentially available to all beings in the cosmos. Animals, plants, gods, and spirits were also potentially persons, and could occupy a subject position in their dealings with humans (Fausto 2007: 497). The adoption of such ‘perspectivism’, led to an ‘ontological turn’ in anthropological theory, suggesting that difference could be understood not in terms of different world views, but different worlds, and that all of these worlds were of equal validity. Viveiros de Castro’s publication had also provided a framework for the comparative analysis of predation as a key process and metaphor for socio-cultural analysis and practice (McCallum 1999: 445).

Africa

Early accounts of cannibalism in Africa refer to the Azande, especially the ‘Niam-Niam’, racist stereotypes of Central African people who were depicted in medieval Arab sources as naked creatures with filed teeth and dog’s heads, living at the end of the known world. Stereotypical accounts of cannibals came also from west-central Africa in the sixteenth century (Heinze 2003). With the exception of the German, Ewald Volhard, who in 1939 published a 500-page study on the worldwide practices of cannibalism, classical social anthropologists are said to have been extremely hesitant to take up the subject (Behrend 2011: 8). In his legendary account, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande, the anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1937) mentioned the topic of cannibalism only once, noting that it was interesting to hear well-travelled Azande speak about the pygmies of the forests and of the artificially deformed heads of the Mangbetu, their curious crafts, and the cannibalism of the Abarambo who shouted at them ‘nombi! nombi!’: ‘flesh! flesh!’ (1937: 278).

In a later review of a study of Azande Cannibalism (1955), Evans-Pritchard agreed with the study’s author Renzo Carmignani that some of the Azande had practiced cannibalism, but he doubted that it could anywhere have been a regular occurrence. His inquiries on the subject had led him to believe that there was no other reason for eating human flesh than the desire for meat. In 1956 he published ‘Cannibalism: a Zande text’, an account of the practice written by his Zande clerk, which had a detailed description of dissecting a corpse, the process of cooking and eating it, and the assertion that in the past almost all Azande ate people, including that the author himself had done so. Evans-Pritchard refuted the latter claim a few years later when he concluded that Azande cannibalism had not in fact been widespread, and that if it occurred, it did not bear cultural meaning but was driven by hunger and a taste for meat (Evans-Pritchard 1960).

In the 1970s, information about cannibalism in Africa was sometimes arrived at indirectly while the anthropologist was investigating other topics, such as witchcraft. Peter Geschiere reported that he often heard the term ‘In such and such a village we couldn’t eat’ to be a prohibition against eating together, but the real meaning the interlocutors wished to make was that they could not eat its inhabitants (1997: 33). Restrictions on cannibalism, it seemed, constituted a sort of map of the region, permitting one to distinguish between kin-linked villages (potential allies) and others (Geschiere 1997: 33). The stereotype of the Africans as cannibals had featured in the texts of traders, explorers, and missionaries ever since the sixteenth century. In Cameroon, the Germans were obsessed with cannibalism, so anthropologists tried to keep their distance. Another complicating factor was that African elites spoke strongly against the stereotype of Africans as cannibals (Gingrich pers. com. 10.1.2021 - 3.2.2021). This might throw light on Evans-Pritchard’s cautious approach to the topic.^[3]

In varying degrees, discussions of cannibalism are part of grappling with the question of how to represent Africa, and how to translate experience there to the rest of the world (White 2003: 632). The topic of cannibalism was discussed in the literature on modernity and the occult in postcolonial states experiencing economic distress. Contemporary images of the occult were said to be mediated by colonial memory. In some parts of Africa, experiences of colonialism were themselves configured by traumatic memories of earlier trans-regional processes of the slave trade. The postcolonial condition might be the most recent historical predicament in which commodification and rupture were experienced and made sense of through images of occult beings, such as cannibals (Shaw 2001). Cannibalism, presented in accounts of propaganda describing ‘man eaters’ in west-central Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century, was shown to be a colonial-imperialist stereotype, said to coexist with an internal African version (Heinze 2003). An anthropological account of cannibalism among the Sherbro of Sierra Leone combined historical and ethnographic material, with an analysis of the symbolic and political implications of cannibalistic belief (MacCormack 1983). Here, allegation of cannibalism was a strong political weapon used to menace people, and a technique for controlling a rival political faction. It was also used against chiefs, government officials, and allegedly even a prime minister, said to have been brought down by the accusation. It was a way of saying, ‘This person is a willful, selfish seeker after antisocial personal power and not fit to rule’ (MacCormack 1983: 59-60).

Different African and European images of the cannibals may often intersect and influence each other. Cannibalism, food, eating, and being eaten in its many variations were explored in Resurrecting cannibals, a book about Tooro, a small kingdom in Western Uganda (Behrend 2011). Behrend wrote about people who felt threatened by cannibals, churches who combatted cannibals, and anthropologists who found themselves suspected of being cannibals. The book shows how the figure of the resurrecting cannibal drew on both pre-Christian ideas and church dogma of the bodily resurrection and the ritual of Holy Communion.

In the 1990s, Western journalists wrote about cannibalism in the context of warfare, focusing on rape, torture, and atrocities against civilians. A social and historical analysis of the conflict in Liberia, which lasted from 1989 to 1997, examined how Liberia had descended into conflict and why it took such a violent form. The author suggested that the causes were not only political but could be explained in religious or spiritual terms. Impoverished young men who attacked people, boasting of eating human hearts, were performed in the familiar language of secret society rituals now out of control. Ritual murders were no longer carried out by officers of established cults, such as the Poro society, but by unqualified adolescents, their quest for power fulfilled by the consumption of the vital organs of others (Ellis 1995: 165-6; Ellis 2006).

Debating cannibalism

For several decades, beginning in the late 1970s, the topic of cannibalism was at the centre of three well-publicised anthropological debates. Marvin Harris (1977) proposed that the endless varieties of cultural behaviour can be explained as adaptations to particular ecological conditions, a materialist theory adopted by Harris from the work of Michael Harner (1977). Anthropophagy was thus said to be a rational response to the shortage of protein, which resulted in the slaughter of war captives by Aztecs during times of famine, for example. The statement that cannibalism was a form of meat consumption was a constant theme in the anthropological literature, and the question of whether it had relevant nutritional value was investigated. For tropical people living at low-medium population densities exploiting a diverse range of animal foods, the answer was yes (Dornstreich & Morren 1974). For prehistoric cannibalism, probably not, as the value of human meat compared unfavourably with the nutritional value of huge animals, such as mammoths consumed during Paleolithic times (Cole 2017).

Critics of materialist approaches argued that it left out that ‘the practical function of institutions is never adequate to explain their cultural structure’ (Sahlins 1978: 45). Theories such as the one by Harris were held to be also at fault for reducing human populations to being quantities rather than societies, consisting primarily of organisms with biological requirements rather than people with cultural interests. Utilitarian explanations of cannibalism and of human behaviour more broadly may thus falsely incorporate meanings other people give to their lives within the kind of material rationalisations that we might give to our own (Sahlins 1979: 53). Harris’ approach to cannibalism and human behaviour stood accused of a ‘bourgeois’ conflation of the more or less efficacious ways that people maintain themselves with the optimising or maximising behaviour characteristic of enterprise.

A second debate around cannibalism arose first over the question of how we were to understand the death of Captain Cook at the hands of the Hawaiians in 1779 and, in particular, whether Cook was perceived by some of them to be a manifestation of their god Lono. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1995) argued that upon arrival, Hawaiian priests objectified Cook as the said god of growth, reproduction, and fertility. Thus, Sahlins held that Cook’s violent death just a few weeks after his arrival, when he was trying to abduct the local king, should be understood with reference to local ritual and metaphysics. Sahlins defended the view that there are distinct cultures, each with a total cultural system of human action, and that they are to be understood on their own terms.

This view was challenged by Gananath Obeyesekere (1992a), who argued that Hawaiian natives likely never considered Cook to be a god. Myth might have been at play in his encounter with Hawaiians, but the myth is a European one that propagates ideas of a redoubtable European travelling to ‘savage’ lands as the harbinger of civilisation. Discourses about Cook might thus reveal more about the relations between Europeans and other peoples than about the nature of anthropophagy (Obeyesekere 1992b; Barker, Hulme & Iversen 1998). Obeyesekere’s interpretation of events relied on the wider approach to studying socio-cultural phenomena, in which people’s actions and beliefs are assumed to pursue particular, practical functions in their lives that should be understood along psychological lines.

Sahlins (2003) returned to the debate years later, arguing that cannibalism in the Pacific was a complex phenomenon whose myriad attributes were acquired by its relation to a variety of ‘elements of society’, and that anthropologists had to be as wary of exaggerated accounts of cannibalism that stand in the service of imperialism as they had to be of a baseless denial of cannibalism practice that romanticises the people under study. The Lono story, which depicts the body of Captain Cook dismembered and parts of it possibly eaten, posed a question, fundamental to anthropology, about how to understand non-Western cultures. Cannibalism as a practice or an accusation has the mark of the greatest imaginable cultural difference, and is thus the greatest challenge to our categories of understanding (Hulme 1998: 20-1). Obeyesekere and Sahlins together are said to have posed – in a way they could never have done separately – fundamental theoretical questions and had raised critical methodological issues with respect to the delicate business of ‘other-knowing’ (Geertz 1995).

A third debate began soon after Arens published The man-eating myth (1979), a book that attracted the attention of anthropologists and the popular press. Arens said that, excluding survival conditions, he had been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society. Rumours, suspicions, fears, and accusations abound, but no satisfactory first-hand accounts exist (Arens 1979: 21).

Anthropologists were quick to respond with The ethnography of cannibalism, edited by Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin (1983) and The anthropology of cannibalism (1999) edited by Laurence Goldman. Arens’ critique received some support. Michael Pickering’s essay in the Goldman volume, for example, had asserted that there was no evidence to support the claim that Australian aboriginal societies had engaged in cannibalism. The sources relied upon were said to be of poor quality, with a paucity of evidence. The majority of reports were based on innocent misunderstanding and misinterpretation, or on deliberate lies and attempts to belittle, denigrate, and dehumanise Aboriginal people, usually as a prelude to denying them basic human rights and usurping their lands (Pickering 1999: 51-68). Overall, however, Goldman observed that the great number of studies from the region published after WWII provided the tombstone for Arens’ denial of cannibalism.

Arens’ hypothesis also received criticism from scholars working in South America. Neil Whitehead (2008) provided reliable historical evidence of cannibalism among the Caribs and other Indian groups in the ‘New World’. In response to Arens’ assertion that people alleged to be cannibals always deny it, Beth Conklin (2001: 22) argued that the Wari’ told her that they once ate human flesh, and talked about it in detail. She also provided a detailed record of endocannibalism in Lowland South America (Conklin 2001: xxiv-v). Anthropologists working in Africa were also critical of reducing the accounts of anthropophagy to the inventions of missionaries and other Westerners. There was evidence that the Maka in Cameroon had ritual prohibitions that allowed only adult men, elders, and champions of war to eat human flesh (Geschiere 1997: 235). Making the authenticated Western eyewitness the yardstick of the reality of cannibalism risked falling back on a position of Eurocentrism which Arens had originally contested (Behrend 2011). The debate about the existence of cannibalism was also one about the nature of anthropological evidence. Arens held that people’s descriptions of their own practices could not be trusted, a strict definition of evidence that many anthropologists challenged. Several others defended that proving or denying cannibalism should not depend on direct observation as many intimate and forbidden behaviours tended to be conducted in secret (Brady 1982). Contrary to the assertion that no one had ever observed cannibalism, Peggy Sanday (1986: 9-10) cited reliable eyewitness reports of the Jesuits in South America, and a missionary’s description of the practice during a war in the Cook Islands in 1897. Ultimately, Arens presented his ‘somewhat revised thoughts’ on the topic in a book in which the contributors discussed the discourse of cannibalism rather than cannibalism itself (Hulme 1998: 16). The controversy had usefully heightened both scholarly awareness of the ideological potential of ‘cannibalism’ and empirical rigor in studies of cannibalism as a culturally embedded, institutionalised practice (Tuzin 2001: 1454).

Conclusion: The future of the cannibal

This entry has discussed cannibalism in places where the practice was recent, and people who ate the dead could provide detailed information. The reports of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa had presented seemingly boundless accounts of the practice. However, anthropologists were said to have been unsuccessful in disturbing or unsettling Western systems of knowledge, and there was insufficient treatment of cannibalism as a theory-building part of Western science (Ernst 1999: 155). Types of literal cannibalism were also said to vary according to motive and circumstance, the diversity so great that it tended to overwhelm the common feature of ingestion and to confound efforts to understand cannibalism as a unitary phenomenon (Tuzin 2001: 1453).

And yet, a new way to think about cannibalism has recently emerged (Nyamnjoh 2018), expanding the definition of the practice to include both the actual eating of human flesh and fantasies of eating other humans, being eaten by other humans, and being seen to eat other humans. Eating is here understood in its most inclusive and elastic sense to imply consumption in general, directly and indirectly, actually, symbolically, metaphorically, and in fantasy (2018: 73). Incorporating perspectives from the Global South, Francis Nyamnjoh developed the key observation that to feed on someone’s life chances may be tantamount to feeding on someone’s flesh. He considers humans to be fundamentally incomplete and cannibalistic, a condition of the powerful no less than of those they prey upon. Nyamnjoh thereby provides an alternative to the identity-obsessed ethics and politics of the twentieth century (Englund 2018: x), one that leaves room for the possibility of a common humanity and equal access to human dignity. It was cannibalism’s ubiquity and capacity for presence in simultaneous entities and multiplicities that pushed Claude Levi-Strauss (1960) to argue that, in one form or another ‘we are all cannibals’, ‘whether or not the humans we consume are served through our palates, injected, inserted as transplants or grafted onto our bodies’ (Nyamnjoh 2018: 6). As a reflection of our moral sense of self, the concept of the cannibal seems destined to remain with us forever.

Notes

This entry is an extension of topics covered in Lindenbaum (2015a).

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Note on contributor

Shirley Lindenbaum is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was awarded an MA from the University of Sydney in 1971, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Melbourne in 2016. She co-edited The time of AIDS with Gilbert Herdt in 1992, and Knowledge power and practice with Margaret Lock in 1993. An updated version of Kuru sorcery: disease and danger in the New Guinea Highlands was published in 2013.

[1] Later ethnographic research about the handling of contaminated tissue did not support the likelihood of self-inoculation by oral, nasal, and conjunctival routes during mortuary feasts (Whitfield et al. 2008; Whitfield 2015). A detailed account of the sequence of events that led to the cannibalism hypothesis, as well as the different ways in which anthropologists and medical investigators studied the disease, was published by Lindenbaum (2013; 2015a; 2015b).

[2] The father’s brother is often classified as a father in patrilineal kinship systems.

[3] See also Ernst (1999: 156) on the reluctance of anthropologists in Papua New Guinea.

Latin America

Felix Stein — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 10:40:45 +0000

John Gledhill

The University of Manchester

Initially published 4 Jan 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21latam

Abstract:

‘Latin’ America is a region constructed in a context of imperial rivalries and disputes about how to build ‘modern’ nations that made it an ‘other America’ distinct from ‘Anglo’ America. Bringing together people without previous historical contact, the diversity of its societies and cultures was increased by the transatlantic slave trade and later global immigration. Building on the constructive relationship that characterises the ties between socio-cultural anthropology and history in the region today, this entry discusses differences in colonial relations and cultural interaction between European, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American people in different countries and the role of anthropologists in nation-building projects that aimed to construct national identities around ‘mixing’. It shows how anthropologists came to emphasise the active role of subordinated social groups in making Latin America’s ‘new peoples’. Widespread agrarian conflicts and land reforms produced debates about the future of peasant farmers, but new forms of capitalist development, growing urbanisation, and counter-insurgency wars led to an era in which indigenous identities were reasserted and states shifted towards a multicultural politics that also fostered Afro-Latin American movements. Anthropology has enhanced understanding of the diversity, complexity, and contradictions of these processes. Latin American cities are characterised by stark social inequalities, but anthropologists critiqued the stigmatisation of the urban poor as ‘marginals’ and used their ethnographies to produce novel insights into the nature and determinants of urban violence and the role of criminal organisations. Other areas in which Latin American anthropology has been innovative are analyses of transnational relations and new social movements, including women’s movements and feminism, although issues of gender, religious transformations, and cultural mixing run through this entry’s entire discussion, which concludes with Latin American debates about the decolonisation of anthropology itself.

Introduction: Building nations in the shadow of empire

Latin America is a vast and socially and ecologically heterogeneous region. Brazil, colonised by the Portuguese, is more extensive than the whole of Europe (excluding Russia). Most other countries in the region were colonised by Spain, but the French colonies of South America and the Caribbean are generally also included when identifying the region. Emerging in the wake of the nineteenth century division of the Americas into independent nation states, ‘Latin’ America was defined in opposition to an ‘Anglo’ America established through British colonisation. The division was not simply a matter of whether English or a Romance language became the principal language of government, but rather was a consequence of competing imperial ambitions. In the 1860s, the United States of America supported the Mexican republican forces that ended the reign of Maximilian Habsburg, installed as ‘Emperor of Mexico’ by a French military invasion backed by Britain and Spain. Yet Mexico had already lost almost half of the national territory that it inherited from the colonial Viceroyalty of New Spain to its northern neighbour, whose opposition to European imperialism reflected ambitions to make the Americas an exclusively US sphere of influence.

For some elites in the Latin American republics, the United States represented a model to emulate, yet those who looked there or to Europe for models of ‘progress’ often saw the nature of the peoples that they governed as a barrier to achieving it. Most ‘Latin’ Americans were the product of biological and cultural mixing of Europeans with the original indigenous population and African slaves. Whether their concern was with the continuing existence of culturally distinct indigenous communities considered ‘backward’ or rebellious, or prompted by ‘scientific racist’ theories that the mixing of ‘races’ deemed unequal in their capacities produced ‘degeneration’, many who saw themselves as descendants of Europeans born in the Americas (criollos) aspired to ‘whiten’ their nations through new immigration from Europe.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, new nationalist visions were taking a more positive view of the ‘mixed’ character of Latin American peoples. Cuban revolutionary nationalist José Martí met the issue of growing US domination head on. Insisting that, in contrast to the segregated United States, there could be no racism in Latin America’s future ‘because there are no races’, Martí argued that Latin Americans should develop institutions adapted to the ‘nature’ of their own peoples rather than imitate a threatening northern neighbour ‘who does not know us’ (Martí 1891). Yet more positive views of the capabilities of the ‘mixed’ peoples did not necessarily entail rejecting the United States and Europe as models for ‘progress’. Peruvian socialist José Carlos Mariategui argued that revolutionary politics in his country could not be based on Western models because the role of indigenous Peruvians would be crucial. Yet he also wrote in 1928 that ‘the only salvation for Indo-America lies in European and Western science and thought’ (Mariategui 1971). Positive evaluation of the capabilities of people of mixed European and indigenous ancestry did not eliminate the idea that Latin American countries needed to address an ‘Indian problem’. Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (1948) turned scientific racism on its head by portraying the country’s mestizos as a ‘cosmic race’, a ‘fifth’ race that brought all previously existing races together in a fusion that provided the region with the ability to develop a ‘universal’ civilisation free of racial oppression. Yet when Manuel Gamio, who was both an archaeologist and socio-cultural anthropologist, asked Vasconcelos, as a government minister, for resources for his research on living indigenous people as well as the archaeological heritage of pre-Hispanic Mexico, Vasconcelos refused, saying that it would be better to imitate the gringo solution to the ‘Indian problem’: ‘the rifle’ (Vértiz de la Fuente 2019: 62).

‘Whitening’ policies were sometimes pursued with genocidal force, exemplified by the Argentinian military conquest of the territories still controlled by indigenous people in the Patagonian Desert to make way for white settlers at the end of the 1870s. The promotion of new immigration from Europe brought migrants from Germany and Eastern Europe as well as ‘Latin’ Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Yet new immigration was not restricted to ‘white’ Europeans. The region’s population includes significant numbers of people with Middle Eastern and East Asian ancestry. Connections across the Pacific as well as Atlantic oceans remain relevant to Latin America’s geopolitical and economic options for the future. Yet Sidney Mintz (1974) distinguished the plantation societies of the Caribbean islands from mainland Latin America because their indigenous populations were replaced by culturally, ethnically, and racially heterogeneous workers drawn from Africa, Asia, and Europe, producing ‘new peoples’ made up of ‘strangers’ bound together only by European domination. White elites used other ethnics or mixed-race people as middle-ranking ‘buffer classes’ to strengthen their control over black labouring classes (Allen 2014).

The study of Anglo and Latin America cannot be entirely separated (Shukla & Tinsman 2007; Fine-Dare & Rubenstein 2009). The transatlantic relations created by European expansion and reproduced through slavery and commerce shaped both. New migration from the south has contributed to making people who self-identify as ‘Hispanics’ or ‘Latinos’ the largest ethnic minority identified by the US census, at over eighteen percent of the population. Exploring similarities and differences in systems of ethno-racial stratification in the US and Latin America is long established. Points of similarity today include the militarised policing of poor people of colour (Graham 2011), ethno-racial social inequalities increased by deindustrialisation and neoliberal models of urban development (Smith 2002), and what Paul Farmer (2004) termed the ‘structural violence’ underlying the health inequalities so starkly underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic. Narco-violence in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia is clearly related to the demand for drugs within the United States. Endemic political corruption, authoritarianism, and violence sometimes foster a view of Latin America as a region of ‘deficits’ relative to the liberal capitalist societies of the North Atlantic. Yet although this does not absolve Latin American elites of their own share of responsibility, authoritarianism, civil conflict, paramilitary violence, and gang violence in Central America, are directly related to US meddling in the region, which replaced democracy with military dictatorship and counter-insurgency war during the Cold War and continues to undermine left-leaning governments today.

From its beginnings as an academic discipline in the twentieth century, Latin American anthropology has addressed social and political problems. Many anthropologists who were Latin American citizens played important institutional, public intellectual, and political roles in nation-building projects. Later generations have engaged with the demands of social movements as well as state policies. Studying issues that directly affect one’s own life and those of one’s fellow citizens does produce differences of perspective between ‘native’ and foreign anthropologists. Nevertheless, differences of class, gender, and ethnicity complicate anthropological work irrespective of nationality. George Stocking’s (1982) distinction between ‘Euro-American’ and ‘native’ anthropologies as a distinction between anthropologies dedicated to the construction of empires versus anthropologies dedicated to the construction of nations may have been too simple (Archetti 2006). Yet, the tensions between anthropology with a global comparative orientation and nation-centric institutional missions prompted anthropologists such as Myriam Jimeno (2007) in Colombia and Otávio Velho (2003) in Brazil to argue that rethinking of theory and practice by ‘native’ scholars was in fact necessary.

Although Latin American anthropology has addressed social injustice, oppression, violence, and conflict, it is also about intense cultural creativity, in religion and ritual, popular culture, art, music and dance, highlighting social and cultural practices that enable people to maintain resilience in difficult circumstances.

Indigenousness, mestizaje and state-building: historical perspectives

Although the mixing of diverse cultures and the creation of new cultural forms makes studying Latin America attractive, the region was born of genocide. Wherever they came from, the bodies of the European invaders carried germs to which indigenous people had no acquired resistance. Although violence and exploitation also played a role, the indigenous population was decimated by infectious diseases, causing a global fall in temperatures as abandoned agricultural fields reverted to secondary vegetation that absorbed more carbon (Koch et al. 2019). Although Africans shared the immunities of Europeans, contributing to the infection of native Americans, inhuman conditions on the slave ships meant that at least fifteen percent of the more than ten million slaves transported from Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries died before even reaching the Americas, and the trade had devastating effects on the societies from which they were taken (Manning 1990). Yet by the final decades of the twentieth century, social movements founded on the assertion of indigenous and Afro identities were increasingly active in Latin American politics, despite assumptions that these differences would cease to be significant in societies in which states fostered national identities based on ‘mixing’.

Anthropologists often distinguish Latin America’s ‘highland’ zones, dominated by urbanised pre-colonial imperial states such as the Andean Incas and Mesoamerican Aztecs, from ‘lowland’ zones in which indigenous societies were ‘egalitarian’. However, archaeology shows that European colonisation destroyed lowland societies that were different from those that anthropologists studied ethnographically. The lost lowland societies were integrated into stable and extensive regional networks of exchange and ceremonies, in some cases presenting evidence for social and political hierarchy that challenge the notion that social ‘complexity’ was impossible in lowland environmental conditions (Roosevelt 1999). The comparatively small number of Portuguese invaders of Brazil’s coastal regions were able to exploit the indigenous Tupi-Guarani custom of incorporating male strangers into their communities by making them ‘brothers-in-law’ by giving them an indigenous girl to marry. This was the starting point for anthropologist, novelist, educator, and politician Darcy Ribeiro’s (1995) account of the ‘formation and meaning of Brazil’ as a mestiço nation. Ribeiro documented the role of the mixed-race children of Portuguese fathers, and indigenous groups that allied with the Portuguese against others allied to French or Dutch invaders, in the expansion of slave-raiding into the interior. This, along with Jesuit missions, progressively transformed those indigenous people that conserved distinctive ways of life into what is today a small minority (0.4%) of the national population (compared with 21.5% in Mexico, the country with the largest absolute number of indigenous citizens). Ribeiro adopted an evolutionist perspective on the development of ‘civilisation’ which meant that he did not see indigenous people as significant in the future of mestiço Brazil, a country of ‘new peoples’ produced by cultural mixing. According to Ribeiro, Brazil stood in contrast to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico and Guatemala, formed from the remnants of pre-Hispanic civilisations, and Argentina and Uruguay, where new European immigrants had greatest demographic weight (Ribeiro et al. 1970).

Yet his classification can be misleading. Indigenous people living beyond the southern frontiers of the Spanish Empire interacted culturally and economically, through trade and raiding for cattle, with the areas settled by the Spanish, who created diplomatic institutions to negotiate with the representatives of what became more politically hierarchic societies that also built new relations with each other across the Andean mountain chain (Boccara 2002). Argentina’s genocidal ‘War of the Desert’ in the 1870s was not simply about making new territories safe for white settlers, but also about ensuring that the people of the Patagonian Desert became Argentinian and not Chilean (He 2018). This reinforced racist discrimination that discouraged people from identifying themselves as indigenous. The founders of Argentina’s professional anthropology included immigrants associated with ‘racial science’ in fascist Europe, for whom indigenous people were of archaeological interest as a superseded ‘race’ but not worthy subjects of ethnographic enquiry, a perspective that regained traction whenever the country suffered a military coup (Ratier 2010). Yet the local Mapuches as a ‘new people’ created through a colonial process of ethnogenesis did not go away but regained social visibility. Along with relatives of the Quechua-speaking indigenous peoples of Peru and Bolivia in the north, they participated in ethnic social movements, struggled for indigenous rights, sought to regain lost lands, protected themselves from environmental devastation caused by fracking, or simply accommodated themselves to state-sponsored development programmes (De la Maza Cabrera & Bolomey Córdova 2019). In Argentina, as in Brazil and Mexico despite their different classifications in Ribeiro’s typology, ‘invisibilised’ indigenous people who had lost their lands but maintained many of their cultural practices after they became farm labourers or herdsmen on lands owned by others joined struggles for rights and recognition in new movements that became urban as well as rural (Gordillo & Hirsch 2003).

In the Andes and Mesoamerica, the number of indigenous people who survived the ‘Great Dying’ enabled the rulers of the Spanish empire to reject indigenous slavery in favour of a system in which the supply of tribute by indigenous communities, in commodities or forced labour, became the foundation of the colonial economy. The Spanish repurposed the Inca labour draft system, the mit’a, to supply labour to the silver mines in Potosí, Bolivia. Indigenous patterns of settlement and socio-political organisation were transformed radically, but provided that they met their obligations to the state and the Catholic Church, colonial indigenous communities were granted a degree of self-government in a ‘Republic of Indians’, with communal control over their own lands, forests, and water. Although usurpation of these resources by non-indigenous outsiders became an increasingly serious problem, their defence formed part of the ‘Closed Corporate Community’ model developed by Eric Wolf (1957), which argued that restriction of membership and property rights to those born within the community was a strategy to protect its collective patrimony, accompanied by obligations to expend resources in community rituals to limit consolidation of wealth differences between its members. Wolf insisted that the indigenous communities that ethnographers studied in Mesoamerica were the product of four hundred years of colonial history. Although he accepted criticisms that his original model paid insufficient attention to cases in which enduring inequalities did emerge between families (Wolf 1986), his insistence that indigenous people were active actors in history and did not live in unchanging ‘traditional’ social worlds was paradigm changing.

Tributary exactions and exploitation based on forcing indigenous communities to buy goods often prompted protests and rebellions. These intensified from 1760 onwards because Spain’s Bourbon rulers, who sought to increase the wealth extracted from the colonies, ignored complaints about extortion by colonial officials and priests, and undermined the power of indigenous authorities. An uprising that had lasting consequences despite its ultimate defeat was the ‘Neo-Incan’ rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in Peru. Born José Gabriel Condorcanqui, he was both an indigenous authority (kuraka) descended from the last Inca ruler, and a merchant and muleteer who crossed the borders between Spanish and Indian society. Adopting the name of his ancestor, he declared a multiclass, multiethnic rebellion against abusive authorities rather than the Spanish Crown (Walker 2014). Yet after Túpac Amaru II, his wife, Micaela Bastidas, and part of their family were executed, the brutal Spanish repression of the rebellion turned the violence of indigenous people towards anyone who spoke Spanish or wore European clothes, as had already been the norm in a separate rebellion of Aymara-speakers in the south between Lake Titicaca and La Paz, led by a peasant coca trader, Túpac Katari. Both Micaela Bastidas and Túpac Katari’s wife, Bartolina Sisa, played leadership roles in these rebellions, indicating continuities in Andean principles of (hierarchised) gender complementarity (Silverblatt 1987). In Peru, as elsewhere in colonial Latin America, the rebellions provoked conflicts even amongst indigenous people of the same ethnicity, but a weakening military situation led the colonial authorities to offer a peace agreement to Túpac Amaru’s surviving sons. When the colonial elite subsequently reneged on this agreement, exterminating the rest of the family, they not only brought the original colonial ‘pact’ with Peru’s Quechua-speaking peoples to a definitive end, but enhanced the mythical appeal of the neo-Incan rebellion for later movements, not simply in Peru but elsewhere in the region, including in Haiti. There, a slave revolution expelled the French to make Latin America’s first independent nation one that was ruled by people of colour, in 1804 (Walker 2014: 249).

The nineteenth century produced conflicts for control of Latin America’s new nations between conservatives who sought to maintain the social and political structures of colonial Spanish America, and liberal reformers who saw the indigenous communities as a barrier to the creation of a modern society based on equal rights for all citizens rather than ethno-racial ‘castes’. The liberals included Mexican president Benito Juárez, whose own indigenous Zapotec descent did not inhibit him from moving to abolish the corporate properties of indigenous communities as well as the Catholic Church. Some indigenous people accepted that they would be better off as ‘citizens’ than remaining in a caste hierarchy in which they were subject to discrimination. Yet it proved difficult to deliver ‘citizenship’ as equality before the law to people who remained structurally unequal in terms of access to justice and economic opportunities. Mexico’s liberal ‘reforms’ redistributed property in a way that converted many indigenous people into rural proletarians whose adoption of mestizo identities Guillermo Bonfil (2010) characterised as forced ‘deindianisation’.

Indigenous people lost control of communal resources throughout Latin America, although some retained enough land to subsist as migrant labourers working on agro-export plantations after being ‘hooked’ into debt-bondage. This laid the basis for heightened twentieth century agrarian conflict throughout the region. Mexico was a special case, since the national revolution that began in 1910 eventually produced Latin America’s first redistributive agrarian reform. That reform was less focused on restoring land that had been lost by indigenous communities than it was on making grants of land to build a solid rural base of political clients for the post-revolutionary regime. This logic was extended by allowing landless workers on large estates to petition the government for land redistribution in the 1930s, eventually dividing the countryside into a ‘social sector’ of state-sponsored land reform communities (ejidos) and a capitalist farming sector. The state wanted land reform beneficiaries to think of themselves as members of a mestizo ‘peasant’ (campesino) social class. Land reform was therefore intended to support a national state-building project based on ending indigenous identities for good. Anthropologists were enlisted into the process of ‘Mexicanizing the Indian’ by employing them in field stations set up in different parts of the country. The aim was to understand the details of different indigenous cultures in order to change local ways of life through education, and to encourage ‘Indians’ to think of themselves as mestizo citizens of the whole Mexican nation rather than the ‘little nation’ of their village.

This ‘official indigenism’ was replicated in other countries (De la Peña 2005). An interesting case to compare with Mexico is Bolivia. The National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) that overthrew a military dictatorship in 1952 with the support of the country’s mine workers’ union (Nash 2001) also sought to promote a mestizo national identity through land reform. However, they encountered resistance from a novel indigenous movement in the 1970s. The founders of this katarista movement, named after eighteenth-century rebel Túpac Katari, were Aymara university students whose families had benefitted from the MNR agrarian reform. Their politics were based on the premise that indigenous people suffered from a combination of class oppression in the Marxist sense and ethnic oppression that should not be ignored in government policy. They soon formed the largest peasant union in Bolivia, independent of the ‘official’ union which had been created by the Bolivian government as an instrument of control using the same model as Mexico’s National Peasant Confederation. Mexico’s ‘national revolutionary’ regime proved more enduring than Bolivia’s, which was repeatedly interrupted by military coups. Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) enjoyed unbroken national power until the year 2000. Yet by the 1970s, socially mobile indigenous intellectuals in Mexico were also arguing that ethnic inequalities could not be reduced simply to class issues. Thereby they contributed to the collapse of the ‘official’ indigenist project.

The foundational work of Mexican indigenism had been Manuel Gamio’s book Forjando Patria, published in 1916 while the revolutionary wars were still raging (Gamio 2010 [1916]). Gamio did not advocate immediate suppression of indigenous cultures and languages, even in the case of what he called ‘savage’ groups such as the Yaquis, whose communities straddled the US-Mexico border. He argued that priority should be given to addressing socio-economic inequalities, and that the longer-term objective of anthropological studies of indigenous people was to make their integration into nation states less painful, ensuring that it benefited them and not simply the ‘white race’ of their colonial conquerors. The regional projects of what became the National Indigenous Institute did bring indigenous people some material benefits (Nash 2002). Yet modernising revolutionary nationalism was often implemented in an authoritarian manner, exemplified by the punishment of indigenous children for not speaking Spanish in schools that the government provided for them. Official indigenism created a new group of Spanish-speaking community leaders tied to government who often used the leverage this gave them to turn themselves into local political bosses, called caciques (chieftains).

Because caciquismo was so pervasive and frequently violent, its study became one of Mexican anthropology’s contributions to understanding how national state power was implanted at regional and local levels in the twentieth century. It unveiled the limitations and contradictions of that process in a socially and culturally diverse country in which that state was far from being an all-powerful ‘Leviathan’ in terms of its ability to manage heterogeneous regional cultures (Bartra 1976; Friedrich 1986; Lomnitz-Adler 1992; Rubin 1997). While the direct institutional presence of central governments remained precarious, local and regional boss rule was significant in rural regions throughout Latin America. In the Andes, these figures were called gamonales (Cotler 2005). In Brazil’s First Republic (1889-1930), local affairs and patron-client relations were managed by agrarian oligarchs called ‘colonels’ (Roniger 2005). All acted as political ‘brokers’ intermediating relations with the national state, but Mexico is distinctive because rural caciquismo has persisted up until the present, enabling drug cartel bosses to take on this role. It also developed in urban shantytowns, trade unions, and universities (Maldonado 2005; Pansters 2005).

Agrarian conflict, neoliberalism and multiculturalism

Mestizo peasants became disillusioned with the ejido system as the Mexican state’s promise to deliver ‘material improvements’ as well as an end to discrimination to indigenous people lost credibility. Many peasants who had received irrigated lands rented them to agricultural entrepreneurs with the capital to grow more profitable crops and invested in migration to the United States to improve their own living standards. Even outside the areas where farming was transformed by incorporation into a global food system dominated by transnational agro-industrial corporations (Friedmann & McMichael 1989), agrarian conflicts developed over illegal logging and the extension of cattle-raising to supply meat to urban and export markets. The corruption of the public officials administering the land reform added to feelings of injustice and efforts to develop peasant organisations not controlled by the state. It was in this context that, in 1969, a group of Mexican anthropologists led by Arturo Warman published a series of polemical essays repudiating indigenism (Warman et al. 1970). By this stage, the political context had become explosive. Mexico’s eternal ruling party had created a civilian regime free of coups, but in 1968 the government massacred student protestors in Mexico City and unleashed an anti-communist counterinsurgency ‘dirty war’ in the state of Guerrero similar in its barbarity to those pursued by Central and South American military dictatorships (Bartra 1996). Although left-wing militants who left the cities to solidarise with peasant rebels in Guerrero were to find that their ‘communism’ owed more to Christian than Marxist principles, Marxism played a prominent role in academic anthropology as the 1970s advanced, much of it reworking earlier European debates around ‘the agrarian question’.

A key issue for Marxists was whether peasants would survive or face mass proletarianisation as the capitalist transformation of rural Mexico deepened (Hewitt de Alcantará 1984). Some protagonists in these debates, including Warman (1980), favoured the theory of peasant economy that Alexander Chayanov was killed for defending in Soviet Russia. Chayanov had argued that, although some peasant families were richer than others and might employ other peasants as wage labourers, the logic of the peasant economy was about securing an acceptable standard of living, not the accumulation of capital. According to Chayanov, this made it possible to develop a socialist society on the basis of peasant family farms and cooperatives. A deepening crisis in basic food production coupled with growing agrarian conflict promoted a new round of state intervention in the ejidos in the later 1970s, but after Mexico was hit by the debt crisis that made the 1980s a ‘lost decade’ economically for the whole of Latin America, the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari embraced neoliberal economic policies. These had been pioneered in Chile after the 1973 military coup and were generalised throughout the region in the 1990s, under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund. In the case of Peru, the government of Alberto Fujimori carried out a ‘self-coup’ that closed the congress to allow neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ to be implemented. By ending land redistribution and opening the door to privatisation of ejido land, Mexico’s ‘reform of the land reform’ was widely considered to pose an existential threat to peasant agriculture. Yet ‘bottom-up’ social movement resistance remained an impediment to the neoliberal project (Pechlaner & Otero 2010).

1994 saw an armed uprising in the southern state of Chiapas that called for a global war against neoliberalism. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was the product of the coming together of segments of the indigenous peasantry with non-indigenous urban leftist revolutionaries whose outlooks were radically changed by the encounter (Leyva Solano & Ascencio Franco 1996). Although it contributed to broader reassertion of ‘indigenousness’ (Rus, Hernández Castillo & Mattiace 2003), its anti-capitalism and eagerness to build a national coalition of ethnically diverse dissident forces led Leandro Vergara-Camus (2014) to argue that the neo-Zapatista movement was closer to the non-indigenous Brazilian Movement of Landless Workers (MST) than a conventional indigenous rights movement. Nevertheless, as the EZLN turned to sustaining long-term civil resistance in Chiapas in the indigenous communities where it retained support, after failing to construct its broader coalition, indigenous practices did provide inspiration for the movement’s approach to establishing ‘autonomous’ forms of local and regional organisation. These rejected all relationships with the ‘bad government’ of the state, and based themselves on the principle of ‘governing by obeying’ through sovereign communal assemblies and rotation of representative offices.

Another aspect of the shift to neoliberalism was, however, the adoption of multicultural state policies. The Mexican government under President Salinas changed the Constitution to define Mexico as a nation with a ‘pluri-cultural’ composition ‘originally based on its indigenous peoples’, adding indigenous rights to universal social rights. Neoliberal multiculturalism offers indigenous people the right to keep their own language and culture, coupled with a modicum of sensitivity to cultural difference in the judicial system. Charles Hale (2006) argued that its aim is to contain more radical demands, such as new agrarian reform or control over the exploitation of natural resources within indigenous territories. He also showed that in Guatemala, state resistance to more radical demands for indigenous self-determination was fortified by an anti-indigenous ‘backlash’. When indigenous people start occupying local political and bureaucratic offices that non-indigenous people previously monopolised, lower-class mestizos can become resentful of what they see as unfair privileges resulting from social and educational programmes targeted at indigenous people. Work by the EZLN had not managed to avoid this tension. The EZLN challenged the post-revolutionary state builders’ undifferentiated mestizo national identity, seeking to persuade citizens to re-identify with their ‘indigenous side’. However, it failed to create a ‘rainbow coalition’ of popular forces. This suggested that mestizo peasant farmers, working class people, and even some indigenous people in the north and centre of Mexico, still saw indigenous Chiapas as a culturally alien world.

Multicultural politics were adopted throughout Latin America (Assies, Van der Haar & Hoekema 2000; Sieder 2002), reflecting both changing national situations and global processes. In Brazil, the 1988 democratic constitution that followed twenty years of military dictatorship also assigned territorial rights to indigenous groups and Afro-Brazilians occupying lands settled by communities of escaped slaves (quilombos). Mexico was the second country, after Norway, to ratify International Labour Organization Resolution 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples, but by the end of the 1990s, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia went further in making constitutional changes that opened the way for indigenous people to obtain jurisdiction over autonomous territories that would allow for self-government. The next decade brought further reforms in Bolivia after the Aymara leader of the coca growers union, Evo Morales, was elected president in 2006 in the wake of popular revolts against neoliberal economic policies. Although Colombia’s indigenous ‘reserves’ (resguardos) were a legacy of the colonial era, the 1990s brought new laws on indigenous territorial rights that were extended to include Afro-Colombian people, and new territories were created (Rappaport & Dover 1996). Progress towards strengthening autonomous local self-government over those territories was, however, limited by interconnected transnational capitalist interest in exploiting their resources and paramilitary violence. Activists therefore worked on linking individual communities into wider social movement networks that could strengthen negotiations with government and increase support from domestic and international NGOs (Escobar 2015).

Although return to civilian rule after military dictatorships created a political climate in which international agencies and NGOs promoting indigenous and Afro-descendent rights could advance their global strategies, neoliberal multicultural policies clearly did not resolve longstanding problems arising from the importance of natural resource extraction and agricultural exports in Latin American economies. Yet it is important to understand in detail how and why differences in national circumstances and histories produce differences in the local social and political consequences of these general problems.

Central America suffered socially devastating US-backed Cold War violence. In Guatemala, a democratic regime was removed from power in 1954 after it expropriated land controlled by the United Fruit Company for redistribution to peasant farmers (Adams 1970). As a result, leftist mestizo guerrilla movements that had difficulty mobilising indigenous communities intensified their campaigns from the late 1960s onwards in the absence of democratic alternatives (Le Bot 1992). Even when mestizo and indigenous groups united at the start of the 1980s, and genocidal repression made indigenous communities more receptive to rebellion, the guerrillas proved incapable of defending them against counterinsurgency operations that involved forced displacement and massacres of civilians on a massive scale. Anthropological research made important contributions to understanding such contradictions. It showed that ‘modernising’ indigenous leadership sympathetic to the guerrillas existed, that it had emerged as an unintended consequence of interventions by the Catholic Church, and that it was motivated by the frustration of some younger indigenous people with established age-based and patriarchal systems of communal authority (Wilson 1995; Warren 1998). The revalorisation of indigenous identity and culture, and the—largely urban—creation of a Pan-Maya movement by intellectuals who sought to build an ethnic politics transcending community-based identities, was the work of a new generation of leaders emerging from the violence that exterminated their modernising predecessors. Some anthropologists who analysed Central American counterinsurgency wars documented US responsibility. Leigh Binford (1996) not only reconstructed the circumstances behind the mass slaughter of civilians at El Mozote in El Salvador, but also humanised the victims by investigating the social biographies of the people behind the numbers. Guatemalan specialists observed that conflicts also occurred between indigenous peasants, but most related this to a context in which they were forced to colonise agriculturally marginal areas because most of the country’s land remained in the hands of large landowners, receiving very low wages as migrant workers on their estates (Smith 1999).

Andean specialists, however, found themselves asking why the Shining Path movement that convulsed Peru between 1980 and 1999 had come as surprise (Starn 1991; Rivera Cusicanqui 1993). Most Andean anthropology had focused on historical continuities in the economic and politico-ritual systems that governed the way Andean indigenous communities related to their environment and to each other, inspired by classics such as John Murra’s model of how those communities were organised into ‘vertical archipelagos’ based on the exchange of complementary products between highland and lowland ecological niches (Murra 1980). Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1993) argued that the problem was not that this vision of the ‘Andean community’ was irrelevant, since indigenous alternatives to European models for exploiting the environment provided useful ideas about how to promote more ecologically sustainable and socially equitable ‘alternative development’ in the future. The problem was what it was leaving out in the later twentieth century, in particular the impacts of growing cities and rural-urban migration on peasant activism and agrarian conflict.

Military dictatorships reflected elite anxieties that the growing activism of peasant farmers and rural workers threatened a repeat of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. During the following two decades, accelerating urbanisation made it impossible to understand even indigenous agrarian movements without considering links between town and countryside (Schryer 1990). In Peru, peasant invasions of landed estates to recover lost lands were accompanied by militant action by peasant unions whose political networks transcended the urban-rural divide (Smith 1991). In response, a Peruvian military regime embarked on a programme of expropriating big estates and turning them into peasant cooperatives at the end of the 1960s. Yet many who benefitted from this land redistribution were not happy about the imposition of collective forms of production. These meant that they continued to be rural workers subject to top-down management in a state-capitalist rather than privately-owned enterprise, whilst most of the indigenous communities that continued peasant family farming but wanted more land were not included in the reform (Kay 1982).

The Shining Path guerrilla movement was an unanticipated consequence of this intervention by a military government. It was led by university intellectuals from Ayacucho whose regional elite families lost their local power as gamonales as the military regime promoted rural development through state capitalism, strengthening central control. Shining Path was a movement based on cadres, university students in the first instance, who diffused its ideology in both urban and rural areas. That ideology was partly inspired by Maoism in advocating agrarian communalism based on peasant cooperatives, but Shining Path rejected both ‘backward’ indigenous culture and the technological modernisation of agriculture advocated by established left-wing movements and peasant unions. Arguing that the state needed to be completely destroyed by violence, the movement not only killed the leaders of these rival organisations but also carried out symbolic ‘executions’ of tractors. The first peasant communities that came to support Shining Path were relatively prosperous and socially differentiated, which is why their young people got into university (Degregori 1991). Rural grievances in the movement’s heartland were more closely linked to the low prices paid to local farmers by mestizo merchants than to agrarian conflicts with landed estates. Ayacucho had the highest rate of migration to Lima in the country, although Shining Path had less support in its urban shantytowns than other left-wing organisations (Poole & Rénique 1992). Like the indigenous leaderships that supported the guerrillas in Guatemala, young indigenous people joined it because it offered a route to transcending community authority systems. However, Shining Path provided a different ideological solution to the problem of securing what Peru’s class and racial hierarchy denied them: ‘knowledge’ of how to build an alternative future in which they could feel empowered (Degregori 1991).

Shining Path was therefore not an attempt by impoverished ‘traditional’ peasants to restore an Andean indigenous utopia, but an effect of contradictory ‘modernising’ processes. Rivera Cusicanqui (1993) insists that change and interactions with the wider society had been a feature of Andean communities throughout their colonial and national histories. Yet she also observes that Peruvian social science had differed from Bolivian social science in terms of the dominance of left-wing class-focused perspectives in Peru, whose coastal capital city, Lima, is characterised by an ‘integrationist’ suppression of indigenous ethnicity in a ‘melting pot’ that also includes many citizens of African and East Asian descent. This stands in contrast to La Paz, where the division between the Spanish city and the indigenous city of El Alto produced ‘a permanent contradiction between an imported citizenship model and the Andean communitarian model that organizes both the practices and collective perceptions of its inhabitants’ (Rivera Cusicanqui 1999: 157, my translation). Nevertheless, Marisol de la Cadena (2005) argues that when market women in the Peruvian highland city of Cuzco define themselves as mestizas, this is to mark their difference from rural indigenous people, rather than to abandon indigenous identity completely, as the assimilationist model of mestizaje normally implies.

‘Indigeneity’ itself is not a simple category. Not only can people think of themselves as being ‘indigenous’ (or not) in different ways that change as social situations change, but there are also differences between what indigeneity means to people and indigeneity as defined by states (Canessa 2014). The proportion of Bolivians self-identifying as indigenous declined from the sixty-two percent majority registered in 2001, to forty-two percent in 2012. The governments of Evo Morales (2006-2019) had promised to transform the country’s ethnic hierarchies in favour of its indigenous population, the principal components of which are Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani. Morales’s attempt to renew his mandate for a fourth term in 2019 was blocked by a coup that temporarily re-empowered non-indigenous elites, although his Movement for Socialism Party easily won new elections held in 2020 with former economics minister Luis Arce as its candidate. The Morales governments’ macro-economically successful strategy of increasing state revenues from gas exports and other extractive industries to improve the economic situations of poorer Bolivians had, however, provoked conflicts between the indigenous president and some indigenous groups that felt threatened by it. Nancy Postero (2017) argues that the root of that contradiction was that the state constructed by Morales remained a ‘liberal’ state, despite its deployment of Andean indigenous symbols in new state rituals designed to emphasise its indigenousness and talk about pursuing an indigenous concept of ‘living well’ as an alternative to capitalist accumulation.

Rethinking race, cultural mestizaje and ontological differences

The concentration of Afro-Latin American populations in cities is the principal factor determining the nature of their politics and social movements today. Afro-descendants have a history of working in urban occupations that goes back to the colonial period. Africans had originally been used as labour on plantations and landed estates, in particular sectors of the export economy and in places where indigenous labour was scarce or extreme heat was considered to make African labour more suitable. Recognisably ‘black’ rural communities emerged in Mexico, as in Colombia and Ecuador, on the Pacific Coast, principally in Guerrero, as well as Atlantic-facing Veracruz (Aguirre Beltran 1946). Yet as bearers of a particularly stigmatised racial identity, most preferred to blend into the ranks of the mestizo population. Although African intangible cultural heritage is detectable in regional cultures generally seen as mestizo, embedded in styles of music and dancing and religious rituals and carnivals, it was when multicultural policies opened up possibilities of claiming land rights that rural communities began to make them as Afro-descendants, generally following the lead set by indigenous movements (Wade 2010).

In Latin America, in contrast to the US in the past, having some African ancestry was never sufficient to define a person as ‘black’. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888, and the emancipated slaves were socially and economically marginalised as the First Republic, established by a military coup in the following year, focused on ‘whitening’ the nation. It exterminated millenarian movements that brought indigenous, black, and poor mestiço people together in the backlands beyond the coastal cities. But the dictatorial regime that Getúlio Vargas constructed after the First Republic in 1930 was more inclusive. Vargas incorporated the cultural contributions of Brazil’s Afro-descendants into his project of national integration, promoting samba music and carnival, albeit in a tightly controlled way under what was a police state. This conformed to Gilberto Freyre’s positive interpretation of racial and cultural mixing in a patriarchal plantation society (Freyre 1986 [1933]). For Freyre, the Brazilian slavocracy combined absolute domination and intimacy, such as the recognition by slave-owners of offspring that they sired with enslaved women. He argued that the roots of this system lay in the close cultural relationship between Portugal and the Islamic Arab world, whose slave systems served as a model for Brazil, as well as in the need for a small Portuguese elite to populate and dominate a vast country (Souza 2000: 78-9). Freyre’s ideas were used to present Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’ from which the racially segregated US might learn. This notion was undermined by a series of anthropological studies published in the 1950s under the aegis of UNESCO, which found abundant evidence of prejudice and discrimination in Brazil even if their expressions differed from US forms of racism (Wade 2010: 54-9).

A long-established Afro-Brazilian movement often looks to the state for support for artistic and cultural heritage projects or educational programmes to help Afro-Brazilians achieve social mobility. However, the fact that victims of police killings in the urban periphery are predominantly young black men has provoked campaigns similar to ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the US. Workers’ Party governments (2003-2016) adopted affirmative action policies to widen the access of poor, indigenous, and black Brazilians to university. These, however, promoted debate amongst Brazilian anthropologists about whether ‘quotas’ for ‘black’ students constituted an undesirable ‘racialisation’ of social issues in a mestiço society (Guimarães 2003). It also provoked some ‘backlash’ from light-skinned residents of poor urban communities who claimed they were being discriminated against. Although members of higher social classes tend to classify all residents of the urban periphery as ‘black or brown’ whatever they look like, many poor Brazilians do not identify with ethno-racial politics. Syncretic religions venerating African gods remain important for some Afro-Brazilians, but more now attend evangelical churches that attack these religious practices as demonic and preach the individualistic self-improvement doctrines of ‘prosperity theology’ (Lima 2007).

Modern politics present challenges to defining Latin American nations in terms of the mixing of ‘peoples’. Yet, the significance of cultural mixing remains central to understanding all ethnic groups. The idea that everyone would become assimilated to the same dominant culture through ‘acculturation’ developed in the United States, in the context of thinking about the ‘melting pot’ of immigrants from different parts of Europe. It was extended to Mexico by Chicago social anthropologist Robert Redfield (1950; 1956) in his work on Yucatán. Redfield also argued that the people of Latin America would develop according to an evolutionary model in which rural ‘folk’ would over time become ‘civilised’ into urban societies. US scholars’ confidence in the universality of their own country’s path to ‘modernisation’ was not shared by their Latin American counterparts, despite its affinities with indigenist anthropology. In 1940, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz published a book that introduced multidirectional and multilinear ‘transculturation’, the blending of elements of distinct cultures to produce new, distinctive, and diverse cultural forms, as an alternative concept. Ortiz contrasted the social consequences of the peasant production of tobacco and Cuba’s artisan cigar industry with the slavery, proletarianisation, and foreign domination of sugar production (Ortiz 1995).

Since the indigenist phase, both anthropologists and historians have shown how cultural mestizaje in the Americas involved multidirectional exchanges and hybridisations, based on continuous interaction and adaptation to new circumstances (see for example, Florescano & García Acosta 2004; Gruzinski 2013). What looks like the ‘acculturation’ of indigenous Brazilians to Western eyes might, from an indigenous perspective, be seen as ‘a labor of domesticating, of pacifying us together with our germs and our commodities’, not to mention religion and saints (Monteiro 2012: 29). By the nineteenth century, cults based on the West African gods (orishas) that the slaves brought with them had adapted to the colonial setting in Brazil by associating those deities with Catholic saints, and also included indigenous spirits called caboclos, to produce the religious tradition called Candomblé. Umbanda evolved from that tradition by adding Spiritism to the mix, a European element imported from nineteenth century France. Whereas Candomblé had its roots in a society based on slavery, Umbanda emerged in Brazil’s southern cities in the 1930s, appealing to working and lower middle class people across ethno-racial boundaries. Candomblé also continued to evolve, to be reborn in the 1960s in the Brazilian Northeast as cultural heritage and a religion for everyone, including tourists (Prandi 2000).

Mexican anthropology also celebrated hybridity and plurality when studying indigenous legacies in mestizo cultural practices and urban ‘popular’ culture (Bonfil 1991; García Canclini 1995). The deeper meanings of ritual processes between indigenous and non-indigenous participants might differ in terms of ideas about the significance of death, and the role of the souls of the departed in the world of the living, for example. However, popular Latin American interpretations of illness as provoked by spirit attack (susto) are not restricted to people who conserve indigenous identities or ways of life (Glazer et al. 2004). Popular religious practices continue to evolve. The principal meaning that the contemporary cult of Saint Death carries for urban working class Mexicans, for example, is the promise of a more prosperous life for its adherents, despite an exaggerated media emphasis on its links with drug trafficking. Saint Death is therefore competing in a lively religious market with neo-Pentecostalist churches, and the challenge is to understand why some people choose one option rather than another (Argryadis 2014).

It remains important to recognise the reproduction of distinctive indigenous ontologies. In Peru, peasant leaders, for example, were activists in peasant unions and perfectly capable of talking the same language as the urban left, operating effectively in that legal and political world. Yet, at the same time, they remained part of another world, in which open cast mining is wrong because it kills the mountain as a living entity, destroying fundamental relations between human and non-human beings (De la Cadena 2010). Human beings appear to be able to manage different ways of ‘being in the world’ simultaneously. Differences between Western and indigenous understandings of the relationships between human beings and nature also ground a case for defending indigenous territorial rights in Amazonia (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Nevertheless, as Alcida Ramos (2012) points out, there are downsides to non-indigenous anthropologists continuing to speak in the name of indigenous people who are increasingly able to speak for themselves, and even obtain PhDs in anthropology. Ramos herself has explored the contradictions of NGO activism as well as Brazil’s official indigenist institutions. NGOs often need indigenous people to behave in an idealised way to conform to their own agendas, which causes difficulties when indigenous leaders decide that mining might be good for their communities (Ramos 1994). Indigenous people who have been forced to change their lifestyle as a result of past capitalist transformations of Amazonia have difficulties being recognised as such because they do not conform to the stereotypical image of a ‘rainforest Indian’. The majority of Amazonians now live in cities, and the region as a whole is ethnically heterogeneous (Nugent 1993). If we wish to defend the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination of their future development, it is important not to talk about them as if they had never changed. That false claim is still used to argue that they would be better off being ‘modernised’ through new capitalist transformations.

Urban anthropology, transnationalism and new social movements

Latin American cities are spaces of extreme social inequality and the region now has the highest homicide rates in the world. Urban anthropology initially focused on how rural people obliged to live in informal shantytowns built social relations that helped them adapt to a precarious life of working poverty (Adler de Lomnitz 1977; Roberts 1978). The debt and social crisis of the 1980s, and impoverishment produced by neoliberal policies, produced a change of emphasis. People’s mutual support relations that Mercedes González de la Rocha (2004) called ‘the resources of poverty’ became more difficult to sustain because families faced an absolute ‘poverty of resources’. Crisis also provided enhanced opportunities for political parties to deploy patronage relations in ways that impeded ‘bottom-up’ efforts to build community organisations (Auyero 2000). Brazilian research strongly challenged the idea that people who live in irregular settlements (favelas in Rio de Janeiro), are ‘marginal’ to society and politics. At the same time, it recognises that they face marginalisation in the form of discrimination in the wider society, including from working class people who live in less stigmatised neighbourhoods. Janice Perlman (1976) followed up a critique of the ‘marginality’ concept written against the policy of forced removal of favelas. Based on a forty-year longitudinal study of favela development, she shows that some favela residents succeeded in attaining social and spatial mobility (Perlman 2006). This kind of research challenged Oscar Lewis’s concept of ‘the culture of poverty’, derived from his studies of Mexican and Puerto Rican families, which suggested that living in poverty leads parents to adopt values and behaviours that they transmit to their children, perpetuating a ‘failure to make it’ that persists across generations (Lewis 1959; 1966).

Yet ‘progress’ for some families within favelas was accompanied by greater inequality. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, in a poor community in which some women transcended the limitations of informal local labour markets by migrating to work in Europe, there were differences in the extent to which improvements in income levels and housing continued in the next generation, related to the amount of ‘social capital’ families accumulated through links with other non-resident family members and participation in community politics (Moser 2010). Although racialised class prejudice led citizens who did not live in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to see them as a ‘threat’ to the rest of the city, that prejudice ironically made it easier to argue politically that supposed ‘dangerous classes’ would become less dangerous if they were fully integrated into the urban mainstream through state-financed improvements to the infrastructure of ‘consolidated’ favelas in which residents had transformed their original shacks into multi-storied self-built homes (Cavalcanti 2009). Yet here as in Guayaquil, ‘consolidation’ increased inequality. Rio’s hosting of the World Cup in 2014 and Olympics in 2016 created a real estate boom. The need to improve infrastructure for sporting mega-events led to the forced removal of some favela residents to more peripheral locations in the city, but ‘material improvements’ in some of Rio’s more scenic favelas also stimulated a process of ‘gentrification’ and rising property values and rents within them that also displaced poorer residents (Freeman & Burgos 2017; Cummings 2015).

The problems facing women in favelas include domestic violence and the loss of young male children attracted by enhanced access to commodities symbolising status and to women in what Alba Zaluar (2010) termed the ‘hypermasculine’ subculture of drug gangs. Since police tend to assume that all young men are ‘involved’ in that world (Cechetto, Muniz & Monteiro 2018), people who live in favelas remain ‘caught in the crossfire’ between drug traffickers and police, whose violence and corruption often makes them seem the worse of two evils (Machado & Leite 2007). Zaluar also developed research on the paramilitary groups called milícias (Barcellos & Zaluar 2014). Run by former or serving members of the police, they expelled drug traffickers from favelas only to become criminal organisations in their own right, enjoying the protection of political patrons. Donna Goldstein (2003) showed how evangelical churches might offer an escape route from the world of crime, but her ethnography also revealed the black humour that working women employed in coping with extremely testing lives. An example that female neighbours found hilarious was when twenty-three-year-old Marília recounted how, returning in the early hours of the morning from her night job, she had exclaimed to her husband Celso: ‘Gosh, you’re hard to kill, ehh’. When Celso asked why, she responded: ‘Because I put rat poison in your drink this morning, and you didn’t die’ (Goldstein 2003: 259).

Lynching offers a ‘self-help’ solution to dealing with insecurity in poor communities in which the problem is not the complete absence of the state but the nature of its sporadic presence, as Daniel Goldstein (2012) argued for Bolivia. Teresa Caldeira’s work on São Paulo (Caldeira 2000) offered an anthropology ‘of’ rather than simply ‘in’ the city (Low 1996) by exploring the relations between the social worlds of the fortified condominiums of the rich, lower middle and working classes not living in irregular settlements, and the urban periphery. She showed that many who lived in the latter also subscribed to the view that ‘a good bandit is a dead bandit’, opposed ‘human rights for criminals’, and supported extra-judicial police killings despite being the most exposed to police violence themselves. Yet lynching, homicides, and sexual violence diminished in São Paulo to much lower levels than in Rio de Janeiro after a criminal organisation born in the state’s prisons, The First Command of the Capital (PCC), established a system of ‘criminal governance’ based on their own tribunals with formal procedures in these communities. The police and political authorities were willing to reach tacit accommodations with this parallel authority that made their lives easier and diminished homicide rates (Feltran 2008; Willis 2015). Although this covert ‘pact’ with state authorities periodically broke down, the PCC expanded nationally through the prison system by ‘baptizing’ new ‘brothers’ (Biondi 2016) into a world of crime that became very lucrative and transnationally connected.

As a ‘dark side’ of capitalist globalisation, criminal networks responsible for the trafficking of drugs, arms, and people, including women obliged to work in the sex trade, transcend national borders. Yet Latin American countries are also connected to each other, and to Africa and Asia, by a ‘globalization from below’ that provides livelihoods to informal traders who carry legal commodities across borders (Mathews et al. 2012). The study of these transnational networks has equally transformed our understanding of international migration, since even when migrant families decide to make another country their permanent home, they often maintain ties with their communities of origin. What happens as a result is variable. Nina Glick Schiller & Georges Fouron (1999) show how Haitian migrants in the United States were incorporated into a ‘deterritorialised’ nation-state building process. Thus, even those who had taken US citizenship continued to look to Haiti’s nation-state as the political community to which they owed ultimate loyalty. Whatever they thought about Haiti’s current government or the prospects of the country ever securing ‘good government’, they held on to it as they were victims of strong discrimination in US society. The ‘deterritorialised’ Haitian nation state was mainly built on ‘transnational social fields’ between Haitians abroad and their kin in Haiti. These relationships transcended the particularism of familial networks because migrant remittances were redistributed within Haiti to other families without direct kinship links to the migrants. The downside, Glick Schiller and Fouron argued, was that a ‘bottom-up’ politics based on ‘blood ties’ and racialised personal identity made Haitians in the US less inclined to join larger coalitions to ameliorate their disadvantages. At the same time, poor Haitians at home remained attached to hopes in the informal redistributive networks of the remittance economy. This made them less inclined to challenge domestic elites and their foreign allies and more inclined to try to resolve problems at an individual level through patron-client relations.

Transnational migration of indigenous Mixtec people from Oaxaca provides a contrasting case. The Mixtecs studied by Michael Kearney (1991) and Federico Besserer (2004) remained marginally incorporated into the Mexican national state and many did not speak Spanish. They started migrating working on agribusiness farms in northern Mexico, where they were subject to brutal forms of exploitation and discrimination. This promoted ethnogenesis as they started thinking of themselves as ‘Mixtecs’ rather than people from particular villages. From northern Mexico, they moved across the border as undocumented migrants, working picking tomatoes and in the construction industry, and later finding other kinds of urban jobs. Their ethnic identity thereby sharpened because of discrimination from mestizo Mexican migrants. Today, Mixtecs from Oaxaca and other regions live in colonies in cities and rural areas that stretch from New York through California to southern Mexico. This transnational diaspora still reproduces some indigenous ways of organising things, including communal labour systems, at the same time as it employs new technologies to maintain communication with migrant homelands. For many, English rather than Spanish became their second language. In this case, discrimination north of the border was less likely to produce closer identification with the Mexican nation.

Capital also moves across borders, rather more easily than people, in ways that have implications for gender roles and relations. Latin American and Caribbean countries became sites of offshore production by transnational corporations, in the form of assembly plants, garment factories and agricultural processing and packing plants. Jane Collins (2003) adopted a transnational approach to studying garment production in the US and Mexico. Since these new forms of production offered new employment opportunities for women (Arizpe & Aranda 1981), economic changes impacted on family and household structures. Gender and kinship equally matter in studies of the informal economy, which provides more than half of total national employment in Latin America (Fernández-Kelly 2006). In the case of mestizo migrants to the US, men tended to adapt fully to life in the north, but some resisted full incorporation into the disciplines of northern working class life by continuing to value Mexico as a space of freedom where patriarchal values still ruled and the police did not stop them from beating their wives (Rouse 1991). Although female migration was increasing by the late twentieth century, as their lifestyles changed, women suffered from a major contradiction. They were often being morally stigmatised in their communities of origin but remaining signifiers of the transcendent moral value of ‘the Mexican family’ as mothers and wives wherever they were living. Sometimes they found themselves subject to censure by other women as they tried to renegotiate gender relations within their families (Malkin 2004).

Nevertheless, collective female activism became an important theme in the literature on the ‘new social movements’ of the late twentieth century. New collective movements of opposition emerged within ‘civil society’ under military dictatorships in part because traditional party politics (and the demobilising patron-client relations that went with it) was suspended. The independent trade union movement of São Paulo’s industrialised ABC region laid the basis for the creation of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, led by future president Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva. It promised to do politics in a more democratic way that would give poorer citizens participation in government decisions. Critical anthropological studies have shown that a considerable gap emerged between promises and practice after the party started winning power, first at the local level and, in 2002, at national level (Assies 1999; Albert 2016). Many theorists had seen Latin America’s ‘new social movements’ as politically transformative, assuming that they were democratic in their own internal organisation. Ethnographic research showed that this assumption needed to be questioned.

Women were the principal protagonists in some new movements. Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, for example, demanded that the military produce their children, ‘disappeared’ by a regime of torture, extermination, and theft of its victims’ babies. Feminists were often sceptical about ‘motherist’ movements, despite their contributions to struggles for human rights. The mobilisation of women of different social classes also raised questions of how appropriate Northern middle-class feminist models were for ‘grassroots’ feminisms in Latin America (Stephen 2010), and how Latin America’s structures of class and racial oppression should be factored into the politics of defining the ‘strategic interests’ of poor women of colour in both rural and urban contexts (Alvarez 1990). Women made their voices heard in EZLN-controlled indigenous communities in Chiapas, contesting both patriarchal family structures and their past exclusion from decision-making in communal assemblies (Speed, Hernández Castillo & Stephen 2006). Yet female protagonism was a longstanding historical feature of Andean indigenous movements, and poorer mestizas as well as indigenous women were assuming public roles in marches and protests organised by new rural movements in other regions of Mexico before the EZLN rebellion, sometimes in defiance of husbands committed to the ideology that a woman’s place is in the home (Zárate Vidal 1998).

Throughout urban Latin America, it fell to women to defend the home when the authorities came to irregular settlements to evict families while their men were working outside the community. They faced new problems when men were unable to obtain enough regular work to fulfil their ascribed role as family provider. During the 1980s crisis, women’s informal work often became the main basis for family reproduction, and domestic violence reflected the ‘wounded masculinity’ of men who could not be machos in this positive, provider sense (Gutmann 2006). Yet femi(ni)cide, the torture and killing of women because they are women, represents an intensification of intersections between patriarchy, class, and race. The violence against women practised by Latin American military dictatorships has escalated in the neoliberal era because the armed male actors with the power to abuse women and girls – police, paramilitaries, and criminals – have diversified and are often complicit with each other. Capitalist development has multiplied the number of vulnerable women in public spaces and commoditised them as disposable sexual objects (Monárrez Fragoso 2010). ‘Grassroots feminism’ is, however, continuing to develop within the working classes, as exemplified by the occupations of schools by secondary school students in Brazil in protest against the policies of the new government installed by the ‘constitutional’ coup of 2016 against the country’s first female president. Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Lucia Scalco (2018) show that female school students were actively raising political issues in class and some explicitly declared themselves to be feminists, despite negative reactions from young men faced with mounting economic precarity and physical insecurity. Yet after ultraright president Jair Bolsonaro won the 2018 elections, Brazil also demonstrated the challenges posed for women’s and LGBT rights movements when a transnational evangelical Christian countermovement reaches the heart of government.

Conclusion: contesting the hegemony of ‘Northern’ anthropology

Anthropological research on Latin America has made distinctive contributions to broader comparative analysis of issues of race and ethnicity in colonial and post-colonial settings, agrarian change, insurgency and revolution, religious syncretism and conflict, political anthropology and the anthropology of the state, gender relations, informal economies, urban anthropology, and new social movements and transnationalism. Its strengths include attention to history and its challenges to received wisdoms within Latin American societies themselves and within the North Atlantic world.

Postcolonial theorists such as Enrique Dussel (Dussel et al. 2000) and Walter Mignolo (2000) argue that the notion of ‘Western modernity’ as the fount of historical ‘progress’ depended, ideologically as well as economically and militarily, on a transatlantic colonial world in which ‘Latin’ America became the ‘other’ of Euro-North American ‘civilisation’. Postcolonial critiques were taken up in the context of later twentieth century imperialism and capitalist globalisation by Latin American anthropologists such as Fernando Coronil (2003). Anthropologists living in Latin America became increasingly pre-occupied with the relationship between their anthropologies and the ‘hegemonic’ anthropologies of the North Atlantic countries. The existence of global disciplinary hierarchies is undeniable, given the dominance of English as a language of scholarly communication and differences in the opportunities available for international mobility to scholars from the South who have not studied outside their countries of nationality. Some ‘native’ anthropologists also began to argue that their distinctive perspectives were actually being ‘silenced’ by North Atlantic dominance (Krotz 1997). Latin American critics called for global reappraisal of how all anthropological thinking might be enriched by reflection on differences of vision between North Atlantic anthropology and the anthropologies of the former colonial worlds (Restrepo & Escobar 2005; Escobar & Ribeiro 2006). They argue that the ‘hegemonic’ anthropologies remained limited by Eurocentric or even ‘orientalising’ thinking (Velho 2003) and that disciplinary decolonisation entailed ‘provincializing Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2008).

Latin American state-building projects had their own internal colonial dimensions, and Latin American countries have their own academic hierarchies that are influenced, in terms of ideas as well as career possibilities, by class and ethno-racial inequalities. The decolonising critique is not about closing off regional anthropologies from the wider conceptual and comparative thinking that has always influenced their development, but about enhancing their contribution to developing more universal understandings of the human past, present and possible futures. White supremacist ideas are regaining traction in Europe and North America. Anthropology cannot challenge those ideas effectively unless it is purged of all remaining Eurocentrism. Critics of ‘hegemonic anthropologies’ call for more South-South dialogues but also for anthropologists based in the North to reflect on what different scholarly communities consider strategic objectives for anthropological research and the different perspectives on issues that they may offer. The aim of decolonising anthropology is not to promote ‘ressentiment or nativism’ (Restrepo & Escobar 2005: 485) but to build a more inclusive international and intercultural ‘conversation’ about knowledge, power, and the future of anthropology everywhere (Narotzky 2014).

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Note on contributor

John Gledhill is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of the British Academy and Academy of Social Sciences. He has published in English, Spanish and Portuguese on his ethnographic and historical research in Brazil and Mexico and also writes on broader comparative issues.

Email: john.gledhill@manchester.ac.uk, website: https://johngledhill.wordpress.com.

Emic and etic

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 17:51:42 +0000

Till Mostowlansky Andrea Rota

The Graduate Institute Geneva & University of Bern

Initially published 29 Nov 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20emicetic

Abstract:

The emic/etic distinction originated in linguistics in the 1950s to designate two complementary standpoints for the analysis of human language and behaviour. It has been subject to debates in the humanities and social sciences ever since. Imported into anthropology in the 1960s, etic came to stand for ambitions to establish an objective, scientific approach to the study of culture, whereas emic refers to the goal of grasping the world according to one’s interlocutors’ particular points of view. While the distinction lost traction as an analytical instrument in anthropology in the 1990s, emic and etic have become concepts used by various other disciplines and subfields in the humanities and social sciences. In these contexts, they continue to be used to address a range of different epistemological and methodological issues, such as the relationship between researcher and research subject or the question of how to legitimately interpret social practices. For this reason, the emic/etic distinction remains relevant. It draws attention to fundamental differences in the way scholars and students of various disciplines approach and discuss research, data, and comparison.

Introduction

To most students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, the term emic is probably familiar from introductory courses and casual references to the concepts, statements, and interactions of a researcher’s interlocutors in ethnographic research. While emic has remained in use as part of anthropological jargon, its conceptual counterpart, etic, a term often loosely employed to identify a researcher’s own analytic framework, has fallen out of fashion. As a result, the historical development of these counterparts has likewise faded into obscurity. However, twentieth-century thinking on emic/etic encapsulates and sheds light on central debates in the humanities and social sciences that retain importance today. The terms are neologisms of the 1950s that were introduced to anthropology from linguistics. They have come to stand for major differences in epistemology, methodology, and theory, for example with regard to materialism, religion, theories of the mind, and relativistic versus comparative approaches to studying social life.

To understand the contemporary significance of emic/etic for the study of culture and society, it is paramount to discuss the distinction’s history in anthropology – especially in the period from the 1960s to the early 1990s – as well as its afterlives in various fields in the humanities and social sciences in which the terms are still widely used. This entry’s first section, therefore, analyses the emergence of emic/etic in the process of interactions between linguists and anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s. It follows the trajectories of the main protagonists in this process, linguist Kenneth L. Pike and anthropologist Marvin Harris. The second section turns to the actual contents of the emic/etic debate of the late 1980s, which reflect major epistemological differences in the social sciences of the time. Finally, the third section addresses current scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that continues to debate the emic/etic distinction.

Beginnings

Categories and approaches addressing issues similar to the emic/etic distinction have notable precedents in linguistics and anthropology (e.g. Swadesh 1934; Sapir 1949 [1927]; Malinowski 1944, 1954). However, the introduction and formalization of the concepts emic/etic should be credited to the American linguist Kenneth L. Pike. Pike’s work was informed by both his academic research at the University of Michigan and his missionary involvement in the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a Christian-based organization specialising in translating the Bible into lesser-known languages (Pike 1962). As a specialist of non-Indo-European languages such as the Mixtec language family, Pike’s early career focused on the study of phonetics and phonemics both as objects of theoretical inquiry and as a pragmatic means to research and codify local languages (Pike 1943, 1947).

In linguistics, phonetics is the study of the sounds of human speech and their production. One of the aims of phonetics research is to develop a cross-linguistic representation of all sounds found in human languages. For instance, the French word cher (‘dear’ or ‘expensive’) and the English word sheep begin with the same phone, [ ʃ ]– a voiceless palato–alveolar fricative – according to the notation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Yet not all phonetic differences are relevant to speakers of any given language in their communication. Drawing on this observation, phonemics aims to reconstruct the implicit or unconscious system of sound contrasts that are employed to distinguish meaningful utterances in a given language. For instance, /r/ and /l/ are distinct phonemes in English; thus, rip and lip have different meanings. Conversely, the /r/ in the word great will sound quite different when pronounced by a Scotsman or a Londoner, but the meaning of the word will remain the same, which indicates that English speakers perceive the two phonetically distinct sounds as nonetheless the same phoneme.

In the 1950s, Pike became increasingly critical of approaches that considered language a form of human activity essentially distinct from non-linguistic behaviour, and he sought to develop a theoretical and methodological approach that treated ‘[v]erbal and nonverbal activity as a unified whole' (Pike 1954: 2). An initial step towards this goal was to extend the distinction between phonetics and phonemics to the analysis of all forms of human behaviour. Eliminating the reference to sound units implied by the prefix ‘phon-’ gave rise to the terms emic and etic. Pike defined emic and etic as ‘two basic standpoints from which a human observer can describe human behavior, each of them valuable for certain specific purposes' (Pike 1954: 8).

According to Pike, an etic approach would rely on a generalised classification system devised by the researcher in advance for the study of any particular culture in order to compare and classify behavioural data from across the world, analogous to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet to compare the sounds of spoken language. For instance, a researcher might outline a series of formal criteria to distinguish among different types of speech acts, such as statements, orders, and promises. Such an etic taxonomy could then be employed to compare the use of these distinct functions of language in different settings (see Reiss 1985).

Conversely, following Pike, an emic approach would dispense with a priori means of classification. Focusing on one culture at a time, its goal would be to discover and describe the structured patterns of mental and bodily activities that the members of that culture, consciously or unconsciously, regard as distinct and significant for their system of behaviour. Thus, an emic approach would call attention to the fact that two etically idential behaviours can in fact differ profoundly, depending on the meaning and purpose of the actors. To illustrate this, Pike employed the example of two identical statements on the Parliament floor, one of which could serve to promote a piece of legislation, the other to filibuster it, depending on the intentions of the speaker (1954: 13). Another example is the killing of a fly, which may be a trivial gesture in one place, but may have deeper moral implications in others. Pike thus emphasised that emic and etic standpoints should be regarded as two elements of a stereoscopic image – one that combines two points of view on the same data to represent its object (Kassam & Bashuna 2004: 209-12; Pike 1954: 12). Yet, for Pike, the emic standpoint provided deeper insight into a particular culture because it helps scholars understand the attitudes, motives, and interests of social actors within the context of their cultural wholes.

Pike’s discussion of the emic/etic distinction was just the starting point for the development of tagmemics, a complex system of grammatical analysis devoted to the study of the basic units of language (Pike 1982; Hahn 2005). Within the social sciences, however, the transmission of Pike’s ideas was largely limited to the core terms emic/etic, which found their way into anthropology at least a decade after Pike had coined them (Headland 1990: 15) and became increasingly popular in anthropological publications from the 1960s to the 1980s (e.g. Berger et al. 1976; Durbin 1972; Levi-Strauss 1972; Feleppa 1986). During this period, the lines of transmission led in two directions: a transmission of the concepts emic/etic from linguistics (in the spirit of Kenneth Pike) directly into anthropological studies (e.g. Dundes 1962); and a different trajectory for the terms, which were popularised through the continuously-evolving work of Marvin Harris.

In 1964, Harris, then at Columbia University, published his first major work, The nature of cultural things, in which he refers to Pike and the emic/etic distinction. This book served as an early entry point for the concepts into anthropology. In 1968, Harris published The rise of anthropological theory, which remains one of the most cited histories of the development of anthropological thought. Harris’s history, covering a plethora of anthropological debates from nineteenth-century evolutionism to French structuralism to British social anthropology, ends in the 1960s with a theory – cultural materialism – which he himself coined and which he propagated as a means to return to anthropology’s ‘scientific’ aspirations. Cultural materialism is based on the assumption that ‘human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence’ (Harris 1979: ix), and, drawing on Marxian, evolutionary, and ecological ideas, sought to uncover the material – that is, economic, biological, environmental – determinants of sociocultural phenomena. Harris thereby argued for a focus on the ‘objective’ causes of human behaviour and defended a view of anthropology as a universal science of society devoted to the formulation of general, explanatory, and testable theories (Harris 1979; 1994).

In the proclamation of cultural materialism, Harris tried to build a case against the New Ethnography and ethnoscience movements (Sturtevant 1964) of the same period, which propagated the emic study of cognition and language to examine how different cultures perceive and interact with their environments. Harris particularly criticised the unreflective borrowing of concepts from linguistics, including Pike’s emic and etic. In this process, he also introduced his own, critical reinterpretation of emic/etic as part of the epistemological framework of cultural materialism.

In The rise of anthropological theory, the emic/etic distinction served to differentiate between what Harris called ‘cultural idealism’ and ‘cultural materialism’ in ‘an age dedicated to eclectic middle-ground theories’ (1968: 569). With the term ‘cultural idealism’, Harris (1968: 568) was hinting at a broad spectrum of misguided anthropological approaches – ‘accumulated liabilities of the past two hundred years’ – that aim to explore informants’ mental states and motivations. According to Harris (1968: 576), this emic strand of theory, including the work of his contemporary, Claude Lévi-Strauss, failed to recognise the methodological dilemma that derives from the fact that ‘the ethnographer teaches the informant how to teach the ethnographer to think in appropriate emic terms’. In contrast, Harris fervently promoted an etic approach as the foundation of cultural materialism and a way out of anthropology’s increasing scientific irrelevance. By etic, Harris meant statements and categories that receive confirmation from other scientists, but not necessarily from informants. Etics thus allowed anthropologists to develop their arguments on the basis of scientific frameworks that are rooted in assumedly objective social processes and relations. This would eventually render anthropology ‘the science of culture’.

Harris’s research programme – further clarified in his widely referenced 1979 book Cultural materialism: the struggle for a science of culture – built on Marx and a range of other positivistic thinkers to emphasise societal infrastructure, structure, and superstructure as determinants of culture (Kuznar & Sanderson 2007: 4). In Cultural materialism, as well as in much later work leading up to Harris’s final monograph, Theories of culture in postmodern times (1999), the distinction between emic and etic served to shed light on the difference between social scientists who analyse their informants’ interpretations of events (emic) and those who weigh such interpretations against the forces of economy, ecology, and technology (etic). Harris discussed this distinction using, for instance, his research on ‘bovicide’ in southern India (1979: 32). This research juxtaposed farmers’ statements that all calves – male and female – were treated and fed equally with statistical data that showed that male calves were significantly more likely to die. In a context in which the Hindu prohibition against bovine slaughter was dominant but in which there was no use for male traction animals, Harris argued that the starving and neglect of male calves was emically rationalised as ‘males being weaker’. However, from an etic perspective, local economic and ecological conditions led farmers to actively cull male calves by pulling them from their mothers’ teats.

**The emic/etic debate**

From the 1960s to the 1980s, many anthropologists took up emic/etic, either as a way to position themselves epistemologically or simply to indicate alignment with a major strand of anthropological theory. However, no scholar employed the terms as pointedly and deliberately as Marvin Harris did to promote his own theory – cultural materialism – over such a long period of time. We can thus look at Harris as a node in anthropological discussions on the emic/etic distinction. Such discussions first took place in academic journals (e.g. Harris 1976) and then in person in 1988 when Pike and Harris were part of an invited panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Phoenix, Arizona. In front of an audience of an estimated six hundred anthropologists, the two protagonists of the decades-long intellectual debate encountered each other.

In his introduction to the collected papers presented at the symposium, Thomas Headland (1990), who was responsible for organising the event, called attention to the rising popularity of emic/etic beyond the field of anthropology. During the 1970s, the terms had not only spread to other social sciences, but had also found their way into English dictionaries. Yet, unsurprisingly, the dissemination of the concepts in various fields had led to growing confusion regarding their scholarly definitions. Depending on the academic context, the emic/etic distinction was used synonymously with verbal/nonverbal, specific/universal, description/theory, and in many other ways. Although Headland considered most of these imaginative interpretations to be inaccurate, he acknowledged that they had been heuristically useful in various disciplines and that the extension of the original meaning was therefore legitimate. He also argued that such latitude could prove detrimental to the field of anthropology. A conceptual clarification therefore seemed in order. This, however, proved to be a complex task. As various examples illustrate, what emerged from the debate was less a coherent view of the emic/etic distinction than an interconnected inventory of contested epistemological issues.

Pike and Harris accepted that their uses and understandings of emic/etic diverged from one another. More importantly, however, they used emic/etic in the service of distinct scientific paradigms. Defending a Kantian perspective, Pike portrayed thinking, imagining, and speaking as ways of relating the individual to the world that are inevitably mediated by the ‘emic structures’ of a culture (Pike 1990a: 34). As he suggested in one example, it is only by availing themselves of those cultural categories that the members of a family can say that they are not merely eating together in the morning, but are having breakfast (Pike 1990a: 39-40).

In his opinion, the main task of the researcher was to reconstruct the unexpressed ‘emic knowledge’ that guides human behaviour. Etic concepts were to provide a helpful steppingstone towards this goal – just as a phonetic analysis provided an entry point to decoding an unknown language (Pike 1990b: 64-5; Pike 1954: 11). Harris, on the other hand, championed a neo-behaviourist perspective and vehemently opposed the anthropological ‘dogma’ that identified the ‘distinctively human capacity for expectations, intentions, and ideas’ as the key to explaining human behaviour (Harris 1990a: 55). According to his approach, an analysis employing etic categories was not only a goal in itself, but was in fact essential if one is to account for emergent social phenomena that were not consciously or individually intended.

Pushing this argument further, Harris objected to Pike’s view that thinking, imagining, and speaking are kinds of ‘emic behavior’ (Harris 1990b: 78), insisting that the terms emic and etic were not meant to demarcate particular types of behaviour (for instance, mental events versus bodily movements). Rather, they referred to separate modes of description the researched used – Pike had actually emphasised himself in his early works. In Harris’s opinion, the advantage of emic/etic over similar binary modes of description such as subjective/objective or insider/outsider derives precisely from its inherent epistemological focus. For instance, participants and observers can both be subjective and objective in their descriptions and analyses. However, ‘the discrimination between emic and etic modes depends strictly on the operations employed by the observers’ (Harris 1990a: 50). In this epistemological understanding of the terms, Harris underscored that the validity of scientific results ultimately depends on the consensus of the community of observers, independent of the distinctions that the actors themselves consider appropriate (Harris 1990b: 78). Etic categories are regarded as scientifically sound when they allow for the discovery of objective social patterns and the production of general and verifiable knowledge, and not because they apprehend some subjective account of the world. As Harris put it, etic analyses ‘stand or fall on their contribution to predictive or retrodictive nomothetic theories about the evolution of sociocultural differences and similarities’ (Harris 1990: 53-4).

This argument revealed an even more profound fault line. For Pike, scholars themselves were ‘creatures of their scientifically and naturally categorized linguistic environment’ who may not recognize the ‘local’ or culture-specific nature of their own point of view (1990b: 68). This implied that the etic categories devised by the scholars had no special status, but amounted to nothing more than the emic perspective of a scientific community (Pike 1954: 9). This idea questioned the very possibility of a cross-cultural ‘scientific’ anthropology as postulated by Harris. Harris thus warned that if all scientific concepts were regarded as plain emic constructs, ‘the very notion of etics would have to be abandoned along with all hope of achieving a science of human social life’ (Harris 1990b: 79). Harris insisted that the emics of the scientific community were of a special kind because of their unique responsiveness ‘to the task of building a diachronic, synchronic, comparative, and global science of society and culture’ (1990a: 49). It is this fundamental distinction that, in Harris’s opinion, granted scientific statements the separate category of etics.

Despite the fact that the Pike‒Harris debate happened in the context of a large-scale gathering of anthropologists, it appeared to be the end rather than the beginning of a focused engagement with emic/etic in anthropology. The reasons for this are complex and vary according to local contexts (and this entry can only cover anthropological research published in English as the main site of the emic/etic debate). For instance, Harris, who continued to be the main promoter of emic/etic in anthropology in the context of cultural materialism, remained outside the period’s dominant debates, and his contemporary work was – if acknowledged at all – referenced to distinguish critical approaches from old-fashioned ones, with his being considered old-fashioned and not sufficiently reflexive (e.g. Marcus & Fischer 1999 [1986]: 111).

Furthermore, the significant influence of postcolonial studies and poststructuralism on anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s contributed to a turn away from aspirations to conduct cross-cultural analysis and achieve scientific objectivity – or etics – that had been an integral part of cultural materialism. At the same time, the temporary decline in interest in Marxian historical materialism that came with the end of the Cold War assured that cultural materialism ‒ and thereby Harris’s take on emic/etic ‒ were laid to rest. In his late work, and most explicitly in the essay ‘Cultural materialism is alive and well and won’t go away until something better comes along’, Harris sought to defend his positivistic stance against the constructivist position of feminist theory and the deconstructive approaches of Derrida and Foucault (1994: 74). In Harris’s opinion, the relativism inherent in these paradigms led down a dangerous path towards the rejection of scientific truth and, ultimately, to fascism.

It is against this backdrop that we can understand the receding interest in emic/etic as a heuristic instrument in anthropology. While discussions around emic/etic occasionally resurface (e.g. Ginzburg 2017; Sahlins 2017), they often do so in the form of footnotes and do not seem to affect larger theoretical debates. Although anthropologists continue to employ the term emic to broadly refer to an interlocutor’s standpoint as well as collective ‘local’ practices and perspectives (e.g. Beyer 2016: xix; Her 2018; Knauft 2019), it has lost its analytical significance. Similarly, the epistemological and theoretical arguments related to the term etic have lost traction or appear using other terms, for instance in relation to universal cognitive constraints as foundations for cross-cultural comparison (e.g. Whitehouse 2004) or in debates concerning cultural and ontological difference (Heywood 2017). Meanwhile, emic/etic have emerged in other fields of the humanities and social sciences. The following section discusses selected examples, some of which have fed back into on-going anthropological debates.

Afterlives: language, infrastructure, and religion

In linguistics, Pike’s legacy lives on through the numerous scholars he trained to analyse unwritten languages, in particular in his capacity as director of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) (Wise, Headland & Brend 2001). His original approach to the study of language and behaviour, however, succumbed to the paradigm shift within linguistics towards Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar (Headland 2001). Yet, one of Pike’s students, the anthropologist and former SIL missionary Daniel Everett, has recently revived the conceptual reflection on the emics of culture at the intersection of linguistics and anthropology.

Everett’s discussion of the implications of an emic perspective is set against the backdrop of a widely publicised scientific dispute between him and Chomsky (Everett 2005; Colapinto 2007; Wolfe 2016). Drawing on his analysis of the language spoken by the Pirahã people of Amazonia, Everett questions Chomsky’s thesis of a universal grammar shared by all of humankind and insists on the role of culture in shaping underlying linguistic structures. Developing this argument further, Everett (2007, 2016) criticises the nativist tradition in Western philosophy that, from Plato to Chomsky, postulates a psychic unity of mankind on the grounds of shared innate concepts. In contrast, Everett situates his work in a lineage that extends from Aristotle to Michael Polanyi and emphasises personal experiences and appreciations as the sources of tacit forms of knowledge. Within this framework, Everett deploys the concept of emicization (citing Pike 1967) to characterise the individual internalization of a number of ineffable or unspoken background premises and know-how that constitute a culturally specific ‘insider point of view’ and ground our understanding of the ‘self’ (Everett 2016: 18).

Everett does not conceive of culture as a concrete, static entity that individuals appropriate, but rather as an ‘abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains, and ranked values’ (2016: 79). For Everett, culture resides exclusively in the minds of individuals. Thus, the unity of a culture and the power of culture to influence thoughts and behaviours are not determined at a social level, but rather emerge from the overlapping backgrounds of individuals who share similar – although never identical – experiences in a local context. For Everett, emicization is the process that leads, consciously or unconsciously, from objective experience to the formation of a common subjective appreciation of the world (2016: 116). Therefore, in his opinion, emicization constitutes the answer to one of the fundamental anthropological questions: ‘How is culture even possible?’ (Everett 2016: 116).

As noted earlier, the rise of new trends in anthropology at the end of the twentieth century largely prevented the transmission of Harris’s theoretical reflections on the emic/etic distinction to a broader audience of scholars. More recent anthropological studies on infrastructure (e.g. Appel, Anand & Gupta 2018; Dalakoglou 2017) have once again critically engaged with the legacy of cultural materialism and the claims it developed with respect to the determining force of infrastructure vis-à-vis sociocultural and political processes. For instance, in his study of a highway from Albania to Greece, Dimitris Dalakoglou (2017) observes that early anthropological approaches to infrastructure, such as Harris’s (1968), hindered broader ethnographic exploration through their static, deterministic frameworks. Dalakoglou argues that Harris’s cultural materialism lacked ‘the necessary departure from the Marxist grand narrative toward ethnographic particularity and then back to theory […] in concrete and organized ways’ (2017:11). From a Marxian, positivistic perspective, which Harris largely followed, ‘ontological diversity among the various dimensions of an infrastructure (e.g. the sociocultural, material, historical)’ is replaced by a broad, overarching category of infrastructure that determines everything else. An etic analysis of the sort championed by Harris was, therefore, expected to focus on universal infrastructural processes underlying specific cultures.

It is precisely this much-criticised aspect of cultural materialism that has led anthropologists of infrastructure, and contemporary scholars of materiality more generally (Coole & Frost 2010; Ellenzweig & Zammito 2017), to turn to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and their take on infrastructure as a product of human/non-human interaction. In the kind of materialism proposed early on by scholars of STS such as Bruno Latour (1987, 2005) and Langdon Winner (1989), infrastructures are not a universal or otherwise objective category. Rather, they are part and parcel of sociocultural practices and therefore shaped by class, race, and relations of power at different scales – as demonstrated, for instance, in Stephanie Tam’s (2013) study of caste relations and regimes of purity in Ahmedabad’s sewage system since the time of its construction in colonial India. In this framework, the idea of infrastructure is fundamentally opposed to pre-conceived dichotomies, including epistemological distinctions between mobile/static, subject/object, and emic/etic.

As these examples indicate, in its more recent uses the emic/etic distinction tends to accompany disciplinary debates in various (sub-)disciplines. The study of religion offers a last telling example. The importation of emic/etic and similar distinctions into the study of religion has been largely mediated through the work of Clifford Geertz (e.g. 1966, 1974; see A. Geertz 1997). Since the 1960s, Geertz’s work on religion has provided essential resources to move this discipline away from its original phenomenological concerns with the nature and manifestations of a distinct sacred reality to framing religion as a social and cultural domain of human thought and activity (Wiebe 1984; Gladigow 2005). During this long – and to some extent still on-going – process, the emic/etic distinction became intertwined with contentious methodological and epistemological issues concerning the alleged special status of religious ‘insiders’, as opposed to academic ‘outsiders’. At the heart of the controversy lay the question of whether or not religious ‘insiders’ have privileged access to and understanding of religious matters.

From a methodological point of view, the debate has raised the question of how scholars determine who counts as a religious insider and whether it is possible or necessary for outsiders to acquire such a status if they are to credibly analyse religious phenomena. Recent scholarship questions the validity of the insider/outsider dichotomy as a way to assess the status of an individual with respect to a religious tradition or community. In this regard, George Chryssides and Stephen Gregg (2019: vii) point out that ‘[t]here are not merely insiders and outsiders, but a whole range of positions that those who belong or do not belong to religious communities find themselves in’. Accordingly, they underscore the importance of ‘acknowledging different modes of accepting and rejecting various forms of religious life’.

From an epistemological point of view, the insider/outsider debate in the study of religion highlights significant differences between scholars. On the one hand, there are those who frame religion as a sui generis phenomenon; that is, as a separate reality the appreciation of which would necessitate a form of ‘religious insight’ that only ‘insiders’ could possibly bring to bear. On the other hand, there are scholars who defend the possibility of studying religion by means of sociological, anthropological, and psychological approaches (Mostowlansky & Rota 2016). In this context, various authors have criticised the idea that religion necessitates a special mode of knowing as a normative stance and as a political move in a struggle for (academic) influence (Wiebe 1999; McCutcheon 1997; Jensen 2011).

Russell McCutcheon’s (1999) volume The insider/outsider problem in the study of religion constitutes an important node in this debate, but also contributed to the conflation of emic with ‘insider’ and etic with ‘outsider’. One way to disentangle these dimensions at the epistemic level is to employ Niklas Luhmann’s (2000) distinction between first- and second-order observers (Mostowlansky & Rota 2016). According to this distinction, first-order observers appreciate the world according to a specific perspective. However, they are not reflexively aware of the fact that their point of view is contextually situated. Religious insiders can be equated to first-order observers who relate to the world on the basis of their religious convictions – for instance, the way they conceive of God or the sacred. Second-order observers, on the other hand, examine how first-order observers observe; that is, they appreciate the perspectival character of first-order observations and explore how and why first-order observers uphold a certain perspective. Academics can also be first-order observers, just as religious practitioners can reflexively assume the position of second-order observers. But emic and etic are not synonymous with first- and second-order observations. Rather, emic and etic analyses are both the product of second-order observers, although they imply different standpoints. In sum, as Steven Sutcliffe points out, emic and etic address ‘the question of how, rather than by whom, the object of knowledge is constructed’ (2019: 30, emphasis in original). In the study of religion, emic approaches are favoured by, for instance, scholars in the tradition of critical theory who focus on empirical uses of the term ‘religion’ as an instrument to categorise and control certain aspects of the world (Bergunder 2014). Conversely, examples of etic perspectives can be found in the burgeoning field of the cognitive science of religion, which draws on cognitive, ecological, and evolutionary theories to explain the universality of human beliefs and practices associated with religion (Pyysiäinen 2013).

Conclusion

The historic significance of the emic/etic distinction in anthropology is twofold. The terms emic and etic have provided scholars with a vocabulary that directs the attention of their audience towards important issues of analytical perspective, standpoint, and positionality without having to articulate them in detail. In the case of emic, many anthropologists have employed the term intuitively to point to their interlocutors’ standpoints. While the term etic has largely disappeared with the decline of Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism, similar issues are raised in debates on comparative approaches. What is more, debates surrounding the emic/etic distinction themselves constitute a fruitful object of study in that they provide important insights into the development of anthropological theory over more than six decades.

The explicit theoretical relevance of the emic/etic distinction has progressively faded in anthropology since the 1990s. Yet in other disciplines, the terms have been used in a multiplicity of dimensions and sub-debates. As a result, they do not have a clear definition today. Rather, emic/etic are continuously appropriated and reinterpreted in various fields of the humanities and social sciences, often to express a range of ontological, epistemological, and methodological standpoints. These fields include – in addition to the ones discussed above – cross-cultural psychology (e.g. Eckensberger 2015), history (e.g. Ginzburg 2013), and management studies (e.g. Buckley 2014). One way to think about the emic/etic distinction, then, is that it consists of two adaptable concepts that scholars employ to address issues salient in their disciplines. As such, they are part of on-going struggles between the quest for objectivity and the acknowledgment of its potential elusiveness.

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Note on contributors

Till Mostowlansky is a social anthropologist whose research interests include mobility, materiality, and religion as well as diverse practices of ‘doing good’ (e.g. development, charity, humanitarianism and philanthropy). He is author of Azan on the moon: entangling modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). His current project focusses on Muslim humanitarianism in the borderlands of Central and South Asia.

Department of Anthropology and Sociology, The Graduate Institute Geneva, Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2A, P.O. Box 1672, 1211 Geneva 1, Switzerland. till.mostowlansky@graduateinstitute.ch

Andrea Rota is Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Science of Religion and director of the doctoral program “Global Studies” at the University of Bern. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at the Universities of Bayreuth, Fribourg, and Zurich. His work focuses on philosophical and sociological theories of religion, the entanglement of religion and science in the Long Sixties, and religious education.

Institute for the Science of Religion, University of Bern, Lerchenweg 36, 3012 Bern, Switzerland. andrea.rota@relwi.unibe.ch

Animism

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

Katherine Swancutt

King's College London

Initially published 25 Jun 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19anim

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.

References

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——— 2004. Exchanging perspectives: the transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies. Common Knowledge 10(3), 463-84.

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——— 2013. Taking animism seriously, but perhaps not too seriously?. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4(1), 41-57.

——— & O. Ulturgasheva 2012. Revisiting the animism versus totemism debate: fabricating persons among the Eveny and Chukchi of north-eastern Siberia. In Animism in rainforest and tundra: personhood, animals, plants and things in contemporary Amazonia and Siberia(eds) M. Brightman, V.E. Grotti & O. Ulturgasheva, 48-68. New York: Berghahn.

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

Divination

Felix Stein — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 12:54:34 +0000

Diana Espírito Santo

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Initially published 4 Apr 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19divination

Abstract:

Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s destiny. The classic distinction is that of Cicero’s inspirational divination versus that which requires some form of trained skill. Oracles, seers, and prophets in Ancient Greece would be part of the first category, while African basket diviners, Yoruba priests of divination, and Mongolian shamans would be part of the latter category. Arguably most forms of divination require both inspiration and skill. Divination practices are often based in nature, taking form through its elements. It can be done with things, such as tea leaves, bones, nuts, and water, as well as cards, and other non-nature-based components. It can also be done in and as the body, such as with spirit possession, mediation, and dreams. Furthermore, there are spontaneous forms of divination, such as reading the movement of birds, and more formal ones requiring meticulous human input. But links to the divine can vary, with Western forms of divination often devoid of a tradition or theology behind the use of oracles. As a concept, divination has constituted one of anthropology’s primary tropes for representing its exotic ‘other’. While cognitive and symbolic-intellectualist approaches understand divination as a mostly explanatory device, critics signal to divination’s embodied, worldmaking, and also ontological character.

Introduction

A good first way of approaching divination is to consider it as a means of arriving at answers to a personal or social quandary. As such, divination may be diagnostic, in that it offers advice, guidance, rules, and taboos to be followed. It can also be forecasting, by predicting future events, and it may even be interventionist, by intervening in the receptor’s spiritual and physical health or indeed in their destiny.

That said, divination is also a ritual and a tradition, ‘constituted by, and constituting, an ongoing dialogue with more-than-human agents’ (Curry 2010: 114-115). Nature is traditionally fundamental to divination, whose indigenous metaphorical roots remit to natural phenomena such as stones, water, and animal behaviour (Curry 2010: 115). In some African and Afro-American religious communities, animal blood and other sacrifices are necessary to obtain enough vitality for the gods to manifest in an oracle, as a prelude to interpretation (exegesis) on the part of the diviner. Different concepts of temporality seem to apply in divination. To engage in ‘evil eye’ exorcisms and coffee-cup readings, or tasseography, in Greece, for instance, one has to be able to comprehend multiple temporalities. C. Nadia Seremetakis explains, ‘[l]inear, compartmentalized time advanced by modernity precludes any interpenetration of the present and the future’ (2009: 339), characteristic of divination. For instance, modernity’s temporality has little to say about dream signs from the future and how these penetrate the present, for dreamers. In modern times, the present is something impermeable (Seremetakis 2009), unaffected by the future-telling of oracles such as coffee-cup readings, which interpret the patterns on remaining coffee sediments.

Divination has been documented ethnographically as a phenomenon with an astounding variety of methods and techniques across cultures. In De Divinatione (2007), written in 44 BC, the Roman philosopher Cicero distinguishes between inspirational kinds of divination, such as visions or dreams, and those requiring some form of trained skill, such as astrology. Oracles, seers, or prophets in Ancient Greece would be considered part of the first lot. Indeed, healing sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world promoted forms of dream incubation for the premonition and recognition of ailments (Tedlock 2010). Techniques for skill-based divination tend to involve interpreting diviners, who can be socially recognised and highly respected as experts, or indeed shamans,[1] in their respective societies.

Divination can be done with things, such as consecrated or significant objects, bones, shells, stones, tea leaves, or cards. But it can also be carried out via bodies, cultivated through spirit mediumship and shamanism, in which there is a communicative prerogative to the possessed: messages come from the mouths of mediums but do not originate with them. A medium’s sensory and subjective information can remain relevant, such as with North American ‘channelers’ (Brown 1999) or with Latvian ‘sensitives’^[2](Skultans 2007). Alternatively, full possession can annihilate the medium’s consciousness altogether and they become pure vehicles for the divine (Wafer 1991). In some cases, trance by a witchcraft spirit can constitute evidence of foul play by others, whereby it qualifies as divination of sorts (see Fontein 2014, for a discussion of this in UK courts).

Links to the divine in divination vary. It can be buttressed by a cosmology of invisible entities, which an oracle mediates, such as with the orisha gods in the Yoruba cowry-shell divination (Bascom 1969). Yet it may also be experienced as a direct configuration of the cosmos as it is, such as with the Tarot, astrology, or numerology, which animate the cosmos with extra-human causal forces, but do not necessarily rely on the existence of a single god or deity. This second category includes conceptualizations by Jungian scholars such as Marie-Louise von Franz, for whom the unconscious is a repository of collective archetypal knowledge, that is catalysed perfectly through divination (1980).

Importantly, divination does not just belong to ‘traditional’ societies. In Western societies for example, experts often use divination without a cultural sanction of any kind, and indeed magical traditions are often associated with the upper classes (Greenwood 2009). Electronic and digital technology can also become important, such as when paranormal investigators contact the dead using white-noise generating machines known as Ghost or Divination Boxes, resulting in so-called Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) (Noory & Guiley 2011). Further, divination has something to say about representational concepts of mediation and transcendence in modern technology. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús has used the ethnography of transnational divinatory practices between Cuba and the United States (2015) to argue that electronic media, such as the Internet, or DVDs, enable the expansion not just of Afro-Cuban religion, but also of the movement and transit of its deities through electric currents. Modern media and spirit here cannot easily be analytically separated.

Some scholars have proposed divination is part of ‘magical thinking’, which we are all capable of, either because it is biologically, evolutionarily innate (Barrett 2004; Boyer 1994; Nemeroff & Rozin 2000), or because we are all in possession of an ultimately ‘irrational’ intuition. Thorley et al. (2010) have even proposed the term ‘essential divination’ to describe the quotidian symbolic thinking, some of which is unconscious, which characterises all human beings. In any case, divination is not an arbitrary cultural practice; it is, in the words of Philip M. Peek, ‘often the primary institutional means of articulating the epistemology of a people’ (1991: 2): both a way of knowing, and a trusted means of decision-making. It is also a source of social and political power.

But as a concept, it has also constituted one of anthropology’s primary tropes for representing its exotic ‘other’. In this entry, I follow the main functionalist and intellectualist-symbolic perspectives that have dominated the anthropology of divination. In broad stokes, structural-functionalism sees cultural elements as fitting together organically and maintaining social cohesion, whereas intellectualist-symbolic approaches see divination as commenting on or explaining the social and natural world. These perspectives are underwritten by the notion that practitioners represent reality in myriad and expert ways with available but limited knowledge, and that divination implies a complex knowledge of social relationships in a given society articulated in symbolic ways. At the end of this entry, I will explore recent approaches to divination that understand it thoroughly in its worldmaking and ontological capacities.

Randomness, interpretation, and language

One of the guiding questions of the anthropology of religion has been, in the words of Dan Sperber, why some people entertain and reproduce ‘apparently irrational beliefs’ (1985). This puzzlement has haunted much of the anthropology of divination.^[3] For Sperber, this assumed ‘irrationality’ can be explained if we take into consideration that evolved minds are capable of having meta-representations, i.e. representations of representations. The paradigmatic example of these are spirits and other beings that perform extraordinary feats with disregard for the laws of physics and biology. Thus, it is because a person can have reflective beliefs (2001) based on a meta-presentational capacity inherent to the human brain that we can believe in, say, dragons (an example in Sperber’s 1982 text), or guiding spirits in the absence of ever having seen them.

Another way in which the anthropology of divination has partially redeemed its denizens of the charge of ‘irrationality’ (see Argyrou 2002) is by working from what is taken as the basic condition of divination – randomness. The assumption of some anthropologists is that oracular systems don’t really work, and that what matters about them is interpretation, not divine or mystical intervention of any kind. Randomness, and chaos, have thus been largely understood as a necessity of divination; namely, as a prelude to an expert’s exegesis in the language of cultural symbols. The key is that randomness provides a blank canvas of sorts for the oracular enterprise, something to be worked over cognitively and socially, which may sometimes be necessary for the survival of a community. In his study of scapulmancy, or shoulder-blade divination,^[4]among the Naskapi Indians of the Labradorian peninsula in Canada, Omar Khayyam Moore argued that divination is instrumental in the tribe’s life-supporting hunting endeavours because it randomises human behaviour in a context where avoiding fixed hunting patterns can be an advantage (1957: 73). Habitual success in certain hunting areas can lead to the depletion of game; randomness, presupposed for divination, is here constitutive of Naskapi livelihood itself.

Indeed, randomness is so taken for granted by some divination scholars that it is widely assumed that the difference between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ divination is the diviner’s capacity to theoretically leap between complete arbitrariness and representational form. This is done through competences and knowledge of social and personal circumstances. Tedlock, for instance, observes that diviners are

[s]pecialists who use the idea of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice. Compared with their peers, diviners excel in insight, imagination, fluency in language, and knowledge of cultural traditions (2001: 191).

Moving from an unbounded to bounded plane is thus informed by theory, cosmology, and knowledge of one’s social cohort and its myriad relations. The anthropology of African divinatory systems has been particularly elucidative of this. The utterances of African diviners often imply linguistic and poetic dexterity, as well as the ability to artfully select or omit certain passages or oracular observations, banish socially problematic implications, as well as infer collectively what the best possible result might be.

The prime example of these social and rhetorical strategies is Richard Werbner’s work on the Kalanga of Botswana (1973; 2017), where he posits a ‘superabundance of understanding’ on the part of diviners, which must be whittled down and tuned to suit a particular situation or client. As in many African societies, Kalanga diviners are persuasive, and have ‘highly stylized language’ – both immediate events and matters of personal history must be part of their divinatory speech (1973: 1414). ‘Transparent talk without counterpoint of hidden and manifest meanings is inadequate for divination’ for the Kalanga, Werbner argues (1415). Divination consists of throwing four separate pieces of ivory, each of which has two surfaces, one marked, the other unmarked. The pieces have characteristics of age and sex at first glance. The ‘senior’ of these pieces is Old Male, while the others include Young Male, Old Female, Young Female (Werbner 1973: 1416-17). Sixteen possible configurations can result from a throw, taking into account that all four pieces are thrown at once, and that some may land with no markings. Most people are familiar with the overt meaning of these configurations. However, Werbner’s argument is that there is a matrix of metaphors to the configurations known expertly only by the diviner:

[a] diviner strings together riddles, paradoxes, and equivocal figures of speech, with barbed emphasis in rhetorical questions, each associated with a cast of the diviner’s four two-faced lots (1421).

He speaks in praises, imagery and evocations, some cryptic. The point is not just one of aesthetics, he says. It is, in essence, the

‘sociologically significant aspects of the ordered relations’ – based on, say prior knowledge of personal circumstances – ‘which free divination […] from the risk of being such a gamble. There is a cognitive control such that contextually relevant meanings within a matrix shape divination, rather than randomness’ (Werbner 1973: 1419).

David Zeitlyn also stresses the interpretive and collaborative dialogues needed to achieve successful divinatory outcomes (2001). The series of operations that manipulating an oracle implies may themselves be random, but the interaction between clients and diviner is indispensable to the processes of interpretation itself, especially when texts are particularly opaque, such as the I Ching,[5] and the diviner must take on the qualities of a ‘literary critic’ (2001: 228). Elsewhere, Zeitlyn writes on spider divination among the Mambila in Cameroon (1993), whose results are presented as evidence in court among, say, chiefs of lineages. Again, oracular meanings are not simple. They involve a host of factors, including a complex negotiation of political, familiar, and personal concerns.

Symbolic and intellectualist approaches

Symbols are of primary importance in Victor Turner’s analysis of divination. We will focus on his ethnography Revelation and divination in Ndembu ritual (1975) and on Ndembu basket divination, nğombu yakusekula within that. It involves shaking up or tossing a series of objects in a round, flat, open basket, a type of action associated with women’s winnowing of millet, and standing for the ‘sifting of truth from falsehood’ (Turner 1975: 213, 215). The objects – figurines – are selected by the diviner from a large group of objects of assorted shapes, colours, and sizes, kept separately. Each one represents the human being in various postures. Before throwing, the diviner asks a question; after the toss (he does three) he examines which figurines were left above the others. More questions can follow. Turner argues that his skill ‘consists in the way in which he adapts his general exegesis of the objects to the given circumstances’ (1975: 214).

Turner’s ethnography is considered to be exhaustive and theoretically innovative (De Boeck & Devisch 1994). For Turner, divination can be thought of as

a form of social analysis, in the course of which hidden conflicts between persons and factions are brought to light, so that they may be dealt with by traditional and institutionalized procedures (1975: 235).

It is, under this light, a ‘form of social redress’, whereby the diviner exonerates or accuses individuals, uncovering ‘unconscious impulsions behind antisocial behavior’ (Turner 1975: 233).

The diviner is all too aware of the precarious nature of his own position. Approached by a family for revealing causes of sickness or misfortune in a family member, his work includes identifying the witch who may be responsible for it. The diviner knows that the witch-culprit may be a family member who stands to gain politically by the death of the victim. His appraisal of the balance of power between competing factions is therefore critical. Turner argues that divinatory symbols open an understanding of the ‘social drama’ at hand, and redirect social action appropriately:

[t]he diviner […] is trying to grasp consciously and bring into the open the secret, and even unconscious, motives and aims of human actors in some situation of social disturbance (1975: 232).

De Boeck and Devish argue that Turner’s symbolic analysis fails to account for the multidirectionality and polyvocality of symbolic and metaphorical processes (1991: 103). While he acknowledges the emotive character of divination, the latter is taken unproblematically as part of a ‘script’ or ‘text’ that somehow represents or condenses social life. Ultimately, for Turner, divination

is a device to help a conscious individual to arrive at decisions about rightdoing and wrongdoing, to establish innocence or allocate blame in situations of misfortune, and to prescribe well-known remedies’ (1975: 233).

The ultimate aim of divination is then to heal social schisms and lead to a consensus. But this view may be too simple: De Boeck and Devish recommend that Turner’s emphasis on structure and social engineering be balanced with one that sensitises agency, praxis, performativity (1991: 103). In the Luunda and Yaka basket divinations studied by these authors, meanings are open-ended and social redress is not necessarily their aim: instead, social dramas multiply into more social dramas. Furthermore, ‘in the act of performing and doing’ divination, the transformation implicit in the oracular process ‘is being embodied by the consultants in the ritual praxis’ (De Boeck & Devish 1991: 111). De Boeck and Devich stress that the performance of the oracle invites the consultants to redefine their relations (of reciprocity, commensality, solidarity) and their involvement with their ‘life-world’ (1991: 112). In this sense the diagnosis that is forthcoming by the diviner already carries within itself ‘the meaningful (re)generation of a new integrative social and world-order’ (De Boeck & Devish 1991: 112).

Sonia Silva, on the other hand, calls the knowledge produced as part of basket divination in Zambia ‘integrative’, in the sense that knowledge is lived as pain in the body, as the configurations of material objects in the basket, and as their interpretation (2014). According to Silva, human bodies, materials and spirits work in tandem (that is, integratively) in the divination process. She says that ‘truthful knowledge in basket divination is not delivered as a set of abstract propositions flushed out of the diviner’s mind’; rather, it is imputed to an ancestral spirit:

[t]his spirit, however, manifests itself through a human body that feels pain and operates the oracle by shaking it. The contrast between the statements of researchers on the topic of basket divination and the statements of basket diviners in northwest Zambia is revealing of a broader, telling story that has defined the scholarship on divination systems in particular, and the study of knowledge in general (2014: 1176).

Silva points to the fact that many of the foundational divination scholars saw diviners as ‘scientists’, whose ultimate aim was to explain, albeit bad scientists at that. Indeed, like some of his predecessors, Turner too says that the diviner ‘does not try to “go behind” his beliefs in supernatural beings and forces’ (1975: 231). He holds that the premises by which the Ndembu diviner deduces his conclusions are non-rational.

While Turner turns to symbols to explain divinatory practice, E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 explanation of the benge poison oracle among the Azande in Sudan is decidedly intellectualist in scope. Here, poison is given to domestic fowl with the result of its life or death impinging upon the question asked. The poison is a liquid mixture from a forest creeper and is inserted in the fowl’s beak. Sometimes the doses prove immediately fatal; often the fowl recovers; other times it remains unaffected. Reasons why people consult this oracle can vary. Mostly, they aim to discover the agent of some misfortune (namely, a witch). In order to answer a question, there are usually two tests involving two fowl, each of which will be administered the poison in sequence. A verdict (say, if X has committed adultery) must be confirmed through the second test. If the results are contradictory, the verdict is considered invalid (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 139). The poison oracle is by far the most important one among the Azande: it has a force of law. For instance, a man wishing to avenge a homicide cannot act without authorization from the poison oracle (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 121).

‘Witches’, Evans-Prichard says famously, ‘as the Azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist. None the less, the concept of witchcraft provides them with a natural philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained, and a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events’ (1976 [1936]: 18). Evans-Pritchard was well aware that the Azande had other concepts of causation that were not mystical. The classic example is that of a granary collapse at a time when people were sitting under it (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1936]: 23). The Azande know that termites undermined the support of the granary ceiling. What is missing is an ‘explanation of why the two chains of causation intersected at a certain time and in a certain place, for there is no interdependence between them’, Evans-Pritchard says (1976 [1937]: 23). The missing link is provided by Azande philosophy of witchcraft. Both natural and mystical causation co-exist, supplementing each other:

[h]ence we see that witchcraft has its own logic, its own rules of thought, and that these do not exclude natural causation. Belief in witchcraft is quite consistent with human responsibility and a rational appreciation of nature (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1936]: 30).

According to Evans-Prichard, the Azande as studied during the period of 1926-30, when he did his fieldwork, did not rely on belief, but on action, conceptually informed as it was. Thus, when the poison oracle did not work, or contradicted itself, the Zande came up with all kinds of ‘secondary elaborations’ to support the thesis that it failed for some reason, whether because of a breach of taboo, anger of ghosts, or wrong variety of poison administered (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 155). In sum, while the Zande were described as fully rational people, Evans-Prichard held that they ‘cannot go beyond the limits set by their culture and invent notions’ (1976 [1937]: 163). Their ‘web of belief’ was not an external structure in which the Zande were enclosed. It was the texture of their thought and they could think that it was wrong (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 194; Horton 1967: 155).

Robin Horton has advanced this intellectualist approach (1967a, 1967b). He proposes dealing with the ‘puzzling features of traditional religious thinking’ through an analogy between theoretical Western science and religious African thought. Horton uses Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of the Azande extensively, as well as his own work among the Kalabari in contemporary Nigeria, to argue that ‘traditional thought’ cannot operate outside itself. According to Horton, while there is valid theoretical thought in ‘traditional cultures’, it is ultimately ‘closed’ because it is based on magic, witches, oracles, and other mystical phenomena inconsistent with ‘reality’. Propositions here are not open to disconfirmation and there is a reluctance to take failure of, say, an oracle as evidence against the existence of spirits or deities. Herein lies, according to Horton, the difference with Western scientists, who operate an ‘open’ thought system, marked by an experimental method that tests hypotheses and advances theoretical claims. The point for Horton is that both African traditional thought and Western science are theoretical and explanatory, in the sense that they explicate particular circumstances through a particular causal context. Horton’s comparison has come under critique for implying in myriad ways that African thought is inferior to Western science (Tambiah 1990: 91). Stanley Tambiah also questions whether the African ‘theorizing’ observed by Horton would not be in actual fact the pursuance of other values and interests (1990: 91). In the next section, I explore a body of literature that has taken this postcolonial critique to heart and tries to break with functionalist, symbolic, and intellectualist approaches to divination.

Counterpoint: ontological approaches to divinatory truths

In an article from 2012 on religious conversion among followers of a Japanese new religion, Philip Swift makes an argument that is indicative of a new direction in the study of religion. He says that conversion is not conceived of as a ‘reordering of one’s world-picture, in which novel representations (or beliefs or propositions) are imported into the mind’ (Swift 2012: 272-3). Rather, it is essentially a bodily process. Thus the need to shift gears, drop the epistemological focus and foreground difference right from the start, by adopting an ontological analysis. Swift says this is a well-trodden path in anthropology; indeed, he cites Victor Turner who argued that rites of passage involve ‘not a mere acquisition of knowledge, but a change in being’ (Turner 1967: 102; Swift 2012: 273). In other words, Turner made a case that rites actuate, not represent, changed states in people. This praxiological understanding of rituals on the part of Turner contrasts significantly with that of divination, which we have seen above.

A paradigmatic case for the ontological approach to divinatory practice is Martin Holbraad’s work on Afro-Cuban Ifá divination. Ifá is an all-male-dominated religious cult in Cuba, in which the diviner, the babalawo, chosen for his role by the gods, undergoes years of rigorous training and extensive study of oracular divinations signs (oddu), of which there are 256. Babalawos divine with a consecrated board, a white-powder called aché, and sixteen palm nuts. Orula, the god of the Ifá oracle, is called, and as different throws are effected, the number of palm nuts remaining in both hands dictates the marks the diviner will draw on the powdered board.

Both Ifá and Santería (Ifá’s more popular religious sibling in the Afro-Cuban field) present a relatively fixed cosmology, and a corresponding world of causality (Holbraad 2010: 76). The latter is articulated extensively in myths (patakies), as well as in divination, through oracular signs with which they associate. Everything that has existed, presently exists, and will exist is regarded as encompassed under the auspices of the oricha-gods and their respective domains and life stories. While the notion that human beings can disrupt a divine social and cosmic equilibrium is rife, and explains misfortune and illness, this is underpinned by an even stronger concept of predestination. Most importantly here is that Orula, the god who has witnessed the destiny of every man and woman, never lies (Holbraad 2007, 2012a, 2012b). Thus, according to Holbraad, oracular pronouncements should not be subject to the truth verification of anthropologists. Holbraad’s interpretation is therefore pitted exactly against the intellectualist (and also cognitivist) analyses described above.

Holbraad proposes a new answer to an intractable problem anthropologists have faced with divination (and religion more broadly): the problem that, when in the face of alterity, they often decide to negate the assumptions of the people they study. According to him, ‘the job of anthropological analysis […] is not to account for why ethnographic data are as they are, but rather to understand what they are’ (Holbraad 2009: 96). The idea is to review and revise anthropological assumptions analytically, so that they become congruent with the said data. Radical alterity demands a fresh conceptual field. Holbraad explains, ‘[r]ather than enunciating the conditions of native error (be they epistemic, cognitive, sociological, political, or whatever), the analytical task now becomes one of elucidating new concepts’ (Holbraad 2012b: 84). In broad strokes, he argues that the job of anthropologists would not be to explain but to conceptualise. He proposes the concept of ‘infinition’ (in other words,‘inventive definition’) as the answer to this conundrum.[6] Just like Cuban diviners infine their clients, gauged through the notion that the oracle is infallible and indubitable, anthropologists too must invent new terms and new concepts to deal with alterity, say, of a divination system in which truth is not subject to verification or doubt.

There have been other scholars of Afro-Cuban religion inspired by this line of argument in their respective fields, myself included (see, e.g., Espírito Santo 2013). Taking Holbraad’s notion of motility as central to the oracular enterprise in Cuban creole espiritismo – in which deities are not seen as individual entities but as motions, such as the markings on the divining board – I have argued that randomness is essential to the divinatory act and its results, and is tied to the movement inherent in the ‘things’ used for such purposes, like water or flames or cards flicked in quick succession. The oracle itself can be secondary to its movement. Movement is what allows spirits to intervene in their messages – it excites a metaphysical domain of beings, and moves potential cosmology into action, bringing it into the concrete world. Relatedly, chaos may not just be a backdrop for meanings but a substance that brings cosmology into concrete existence (Espírito Santo 2013: 33).

Anastasios Panagiotopoulos has also worked with a perspective on ontology, focusing on both diviners and clients. Articulacy, defined as the capacity of a given entity to ‘speak’ through the oracle, cannot be taken for granted. It requires sacrifice, both literal (animal blood, for instance) and metaphorical (taboos, restrictions, good conduct). In a recent paper, he argues that sacrifice should not be seen through the opposition of sacred/profane, but – in the context of Afro-Cuban religion – as the fuel with which oracular perspectives, and thus articulacy, are ignited (2018: 483). This fuel yields words, which in turn yields perspectives and paths (caminos) for the people who seek diviners. As these paths solidify in a given individual, they create centers of oracular production, which are in turn generative of articulacy itself (Panagiotopoulos 2018: 475).

In another article, Panagiotopoulos speaks of spirit ‘affinity’ as the glue through which these paths are revealed (2017). Affinity here, spirit-person kinship if you will, is materialised through spirit representations (dolls), for example, which acknowledge and reify the dead’s voices and perspectives. Importantly, this relies on being seen and manipulated by a medium. Panagiotopoulos thus takes inspiration from Viveiros de Castro in that he argues that points of view matter in the creation of personhood (2018: 479). But they are not simply momentary points of view. Offerings and sacrifices are catalysts for the solidification of divinatory perspectives (‘paths’) that create the conditions for a certain kind of person to exist and modulate her life.

Another anthropologist with similar references is Katherine Swancutt (2006, 2012). In her monograph Fortune and the cursed, she argues that Mongolian Buryat shamans adopt spirit perspectives in their oracular dealings, but that these are characterised by a combination of intersubjective and perspectival encounters (Swancutt 2012: 156). In some cases, the divinatory implements, such as cards, can be ‘hijacked’ by rival shamans resulting in a revelation of only the rival’s perspectives, imbued as they can be with witchcraft. Shamans can thus inadvertently adopt their nemesis’s agency and pronouncements (Swancutt 2012). ‘Buryats, then, try to control the divinatory implements so that they only represent dangerous people, rather than becoming agents-cum-representations of them’: they try to avoid that divinations take on an intensive dimension and turn into outright cursing wars (Swancutt 2012: 162). Instead, they work towards more desirable outcomes such as those of ‘revising’ the clients’ views of the past (Swancutt 2012: 175). Throughout this case there is a tug of war, on the part of the officiating shaman, between representational and ontological dimensions of the divination. It also alerts us to the notion that in divination ‘things’ are not passive, but can take on life, and uncontrollably, for that matter. As Swancutt puts it, objects can ‘carry their subjects within themselves’ (2012: 161). Her work thus alerts scholars of divination to attend to the multiple potential properties of the ‘things’ used for such purposes. In the final section, I turn towards the ‘body’ as the main instrument of divination – often, in the absence of such objects.

Possession, dreams, and divining spirits

Apart from all its cultural concepts and theorisations, divination is also a decidedly bodily thing. As Patrick Curry says, ‘the diviner’s body and everything he or she ‘physically’ performs and experiences is essential to it’ (2010: 115). This is even more so in the absence of divinatory implements or objects. Then the source of knowledge is the diviner’s own bodily manifestations, born as they are from enskilment, expertise, and experience. The prime example of this is spirit possession or shamanism, where oracular pronouncements by the person are perceived to come from a source outside the possessed’s body.

Eliade explains shamanism well among a Siberian community, noting that

[t]he shaman begins by circling the yurt [tent], beating his drum; then he enters the tent and, going to the fire, invokes the deceased. Suddenly the shaman's voice changes; he begins to speak in a high pitch, in falsetto, for it is really the dead woman who is speaking (1972: 209-10).

The shaman is ‘replaced’, somehow, by the divinatory voice. The idea that the dead ‘speak’ through their medium, and that this communication should be taken seriously, is arguably cross-cultural (Bubandt 2009; Lambek 1981; Placido 2001; Rasmussen 1995; Vitebsky 1993). However, these extraordinary individuals do not always lose their consciousness, as Todd Ochoa shows for Cuban Palo Monte (2007, 2013), a spirit possession practice associated with Bantu-speaking slaves. During such possession, there is sometimes no clear boundary between ‘voices’. Even outside of ritual circumstances, Kalunga, a Ba-Kongo derived term referring to the ‘sea of the dead’, may coexist with the medium’s body in varying intensities (2007: 488). According to Ochoa, Palo invites us to linger on the power of sensation and its capacity to dissolve the body’s boundaries. The sea of the dead is not constant, but something that takes one over in waves of saturation, only to recede again. Most interesting is Ochoa’s observation that the dead themselves constitute a play of forces that ‘suffuses and makes the person who lives Palo’ (2007: 488), as people also come into being by sharing the moods, pains, and sensations, as well as thoughts, of the dead. In this dynamism, one cannot wholly distinguish object from subject, matter from spirit. Neither can the bodies and biographies of mediums be separated from the oracular act itself.

Dreams are a field that is understood to be little mediated by the conscious cognition of the diviner him or herself, and thus are seen as spaces where knowledge is freely revealed, including about oneself (Hollan 2004). They are also open to anyone, including entire communities. In an article called ‘Dreams of treasure’, Charles Stewart argues that ‘dreams may be treated as exemplary moments of vision in which imaginative temporal flights fuse and create a present imbued with meaning’ (2003: 483). Stewart describes how in Naxos, Greece, people have been dreaming with the Virgin Mary who tells them about the location of lost religious idols buried in the hillside for more than a century (2003: 490-3). Dreaming revelations are not considered extraordinary in many parts of the world. Indeed, Rane Willerslev describes how, for Siberian Yukaghir elk hunters, ‘the world of dreams and that of waking life are two sides of the same reality, which together constitute one world’ (2004: 410). Hunters penetrate the ‘shadow world’ to lure prey into theirs. Thus, the dream has ontological as well as premonitory effects. In African inspired cosmologies in the Caribbean, dreams may be considered places of encounter ipso facto. Karen McCarthy Brown reports on the dream of a Haitian vodou priestess in New York – Mama Lola – in which a guiding spirit of the pantheon (Papa Gede) appears to answer a specific question (1993); and Diana Maitland Dean analyses the social impact of dreaming in the wider Afro-Cuban religious community (1993). These two ethnographies point to critical culturally-sanctioned concepts of the self in the emergence of dream divination.

Conclusion

Divination, as discussed in this entry, is widespread and varied. It can entail objects, consecrated or not, but it can also be bodily processes, for instance, in dreaming, or in spirit possession. Oracular cosmologies often imply a world of metaphysical processes, causality and beings, and different temporal logics, where the future is at the reach of the present. Divination also implies linguistic and discursive dexterity on the part of diviners. The anthropology of African divination systems has demonstrated that diviners are often individuals who are politically, socially, as well as cosmologically knowledgeable, and can draw on this awareness during séances. While some scholars have understood divination in terms of ‘magical thinking’, it is not generally associated with magic per se. It is a craft – a skill – that must alternatively be learned and sanctioned, and/or embodied in some way, such as with sensitives or mediums. The anthropology of divination has taken a variety of analytical routes, among which is regarding divination as an explanatory drive, on the part of certain cultures. With the ‘ontological turn’, scholars have paid more attention to local, native concepts that promise to challenge and renew conceptions of truth, personhood, and reality as such.

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Note on contributor

Diana Espírito Santo is a social anthropologist teaching at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She obtained her PhD at University College London in 2008, working with Cuban spirit mediums on concepts of self and knowledge. For her postdoctoral fellowship in Lisbon, she worked on cosmological plasticity and religious change in Brazilian Umbanda, and is currently developing a project on ontologies of evidence in Chilean parapsychology.

Dr. Diana Espírito Santo, Programa de Antropología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Vicuña MacKenna 4860, 782-0436, Santiago, Chile. gimmefish@yahoo.com.

[1] Diviners are people who practiced divination and have the capacity to interpret the results; they do not necessarily have special powers. Shamans, while they can also practice divination, are considered intermediaries of sorts between worlds, and in most cases can fall into trance states.

[2] Channelers are people who speak for non-physical beings or spirits, whereas ‘sensitives’, sometimes also called ‘intuitives’, are those who have increased susceptibilities for stimulation of the sensorial kind, often feeling things in their bodies – pains, emotions, spirits in the environment.

[3] Not all anthropologists regard divination as something irrational. Indeed, David Zeitlyn speaks of ‘divinatory logics’ with diagnostic and prognostic implications (2012).

[4] Scapulmancy is divination by means of the observation of the cracks in an animal cadaver’s shoulder-blade, when heated by fire or another instrument.

[5] I Ching is also known as ‘Book of changes’, and is a classic Chinese divination text dating from around 1000 BC. The I Ching uses cleromancy, which relies on the generation of random numbers. Consultants will throw coins or another object, and generate a hexagram with six numbers between 6 and 9, and then look up its meaning in the book.

[6] Holbraad is here inspired by both Roy Wagner’s The invention of culture (1981), and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s take on Amazonian perspectivism – the idea that the point of view makes the subject (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2012; see also Lima 2005).

Ontological turn, the

Felix Stein — Fri, 19 May 2017 18:56:51 +0000

Paolo Heywood

University of Cambridge

Initially published 19 May 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17ontology

Abstract:

‘Culture’ is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline’s history, the most recent of which is the ‘ontological turn’. Proponents of the ontological turn argue that ‘culture’ carries with it significant metaphysical baggage. In particular, they point out that it implies that although human beings may differ in their ideas about or viewpoints on the world and other material or natural objects, such objects themselves do not vary with these ideas. ‘Cultures’ may differ, but nature does not. The ontological turn proposes that we dispense with these metaphysical implications, in favour of a radical methodological openness to difference of all kinds, be it what we would call cultural and epistemological or natural and, indeed, ontological. This entry surveys some of the reasons proponents of this approach have given for adopting it, describes some examples of its use, and discusses some critiques of it, before concluding by pointing to the importance of the questions it raises for anthropology.

Introduction

It may come as a surprise to many non-anthropologists that the discipline harbours doubts about the notion of culture. After all, anthropology has often historically been concerned with cultural and social differences: it has tended to describe the ways in which perspectives on the world vary depending upon the contexts in which those perspectives are to be found, and it has tended to label such contexts as ‘cultural’ or ‘social’, as opposed to, say, ecological, or material. Culture, or society, in other words, have been traditionally understood as things that everyone has, but their content is different in each case (Strathern 1995). Likewise, the perspectives to which different cultures give rise will also be different.

Proponents of anthropology’s recent ‘ontological turn’, however, argue that this concern for differences in cultural perspective implies something else, with which they do not agree (Henare et al. 2006; Viveiros de Castro 1998; 2003; 2004b): that the things upon which people have different perspectives are always and everywhere the same. People see the world in different ways, but the world is still the world. The obvious analogy is with language: earth may be called terra in Italian, terre in French, and zemlja in Croatian, and each word may come with its own distinct array of symbolic connotations, but the object it denotes remains the same. Obviously, the sense of this opposition is echoed by countless others dichotomies: ideas vs. matter, subjective vs. objective, epistemology vs. ontology, and, of course, nature vs. culture. This, roughly speaking, is the orthodoxy that proponents of the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology claim to identify and wish to overturn.

They argue that the very notion of ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ difference implies its opposite, ‘natural’ unity. Indeed, this is of course more than implied by claims about the ‘common humanity’ that is alleged to underlie superficial differences between peoples around the world. This sort of cultural relativism, they argue, is actually not relativist enough (Henare et al. 2006: 10; Holbraad 2009: 84; 2012: 34). It relativises perspectives on the world, and thus by implication universalises the nature of the world itself. It claims that epistemologies (forms of knowing or understanding) vary, but that there is only one ontology (form of being or existing). Many worldviews, only one world. The ontological turn, instead, proposes that worlds, as well as worldviews, may vary.

That idea has significant implications, not only for anthropology, but for the multitudinous contexts in which ‘culture’ and ‘society’ have come to operate in academic and everyday parlance. Many have come to take for granted these terms’ capacity to explain difference in the world (hence the ubiquity of concepts such as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘social construction’). Yet, as this entry will describe, in the discipline for which they have traditionally been primary objects – social and cultural anthropology – they have also become the subjects of considerable debate.

Before going on to elaborate what exactly it might mean for there to be different ‘worlds’ or ‘ontologies’, it is worth beginning by outlining in further depth some reasons why anthropologists might wish to pursue this argument. We can think of such reasons as being divided into two categories, although the distinctive and separate nature of these categories is a part of what the ontological turn aims to unsettle, as we will see.

Ethnographic challenges

One set of reasons why anthropologists may wish to pursue a critique of culture relates to the fact that thinking along cultural lines may hinder anthropologists’ ability to understand some of the people they work with. This is a question of ethnographic accounting; in other words, of how and whether our descriptions of phenomena relate to those phenomena themselves. These reasons emerge in response to particular ethnographic circumstances. Take, for example, Marilyn Strathern’s work among the Hageners of Papua New Guinea. Strathern has made highly substantial and varied contributions to anthropology (including some that have in part inspired the ontological turn itself, cf. Holbraad & Petersen 2009) but one might sum up – for the purposes of present explication – just one small facet of that contribution with the following characterization: she describes Hagen culture as one in which our conception of nature as invariant matter to be cultivated by man, and culture as human elaboration upon that matter, does not exist (Strathern 1980). That might be read as characterising a typical example of what anthropologists do: they identify the relative nature of particular cultural phenomena. However, her argument is, in fact, much more complicated. Consider how I have characterised her description: the term ‘culture’ is used twice, once as explanans (an explanatory term) and once as explanandum (a description of the thing to be explained), despite the fact that its presence in the explanandum is negative. In other words, the concept of culture is used to explain that very concept’s absence from the thing to be explained. So, some would say, my ‘culturalist’ account (‘in Hagen culture…’) achieves nothing apart from to reiterate the difference it is supposed to be accounting for (‘…there is no culture’). Put another way, the relativization of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ implied by the fact that Hageners do not possess such notions undermines the very manoeuvre of relativization itself, which depends on those notions to make sense. What are things relative to, if not culture? And what is the background against which they are relative, if not nature?

A more detailed example comes from anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who has described a range of Amazonian societies with the term ‘multinaturalist’ (1998). By this he means that they understand ‘humans’ (I use the label in inverted commas because as we will see it can refer to subjects that Europeans or Americans would typically understand to be of a different species – animals, for example) to share the same culture, soul, or perspective, but to differ across the bodies they possess and the worlds that they perceive. All subjects, in other words, share the same point of view: they see their appendages as hands and feet, their living quarters as houses, what they drink to be beer, and what they eat to be manioc rice. The difference lies in what they perceive to be these things: if I am in possession of a certain sort of body – one like yours – I will see the same things you see when you see manioc rice, and beer, and houses. However, if my body is different to yours – if it is that of a jaguar, for example – I will see beer where you see blood, a house where you see a den, and rice where you see animal remains. Furthermore, bodies can, with some effort, be exchanged, put on, and discarded like clothing, much as we think of ourselves as being able to exchange viewpoints, whether through religious conversion, for example, or indeed through the practice of anthropology. In this context, in other words, difference and similarity have shifted axes across nature and culture: Amerindians are not culturally relative, for to them all humans share the same culture and view on the world; they are naturally relative, for not all humans share the same body and the same world. If you imagine multiculturalism in diagrammatic form as a circle of viewpoints from differing perspectives onto the same central object, multinaturalism would look the same, only the labels would be inverted: one central viewpoint onto multiple different objects. The point is perhaps best encapsulated in an anecdote from Levi-Strauss: when the Spanish were debating, at a series of now-infamous debates at Valladolid in the sixteenth century, whether or not Amerindians were human on the basis of whether or not they possessed souls, the inhabitants of the Antilles were drowning captured Spanish soldiers in order to answer the very same question, only their concern was whether or not the Spanish had bodies like them, or if they were ghosts (Levi-Strauss 1973 [1952]; and see Heywood 2012; Viveiros de Castro 1998: 475; 2004a: 7; Latour 2004: 460).

Note that as in the Hagen case, there is a problem of description here: given that the schema with which they think about difference is the reverse of our own, how do we explain that difference in a way that does it justice? We cannot say that their culture is different from our own without again simply re-iterating that difference, instead of describing or explaining it in its own terms. As we saw in the Hagen case, if, as ethnographic evidence appears to suggest, the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are relative, then what are they relative to?

To summarise, there are some convincing ethnographic reasons to challenge anthropology’s reliance on notions of ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ difference. There are peoples in the world (or worlds) who appear to differ from us not only at the level of the content of their worldviews, but also regarding the very question of whether difference is to be located at the level of worldviews or not. Some might argue that this does not invalidate cultural relativism, and that our account of difference is simply more accurate than theirs – that thus there is no issue with explaining their difference in our own terms, even if the very act of doing so renders their position conceptually subordinate to our own. Given, however, that for many anthropologists the whole point of the culturalist position is to attempt to do justice to other peoples’ ideas without, in the process, delegitimising them, this is not an easy position to accept.

Methodological imperatives

There are also more a priori reasons, both philosophical and political, to question notions of ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ difference, which do not rely on finding that the meaning of culture and nature differ in other societies. Long before the ontological turn, anthropologists were claiming to have debunked the ‘nature-culture distinction’ as a peculiarly western invention, inapplicable to their specific field site, as if that argument itself were not at least in part reliant on a ‘culturalist’ vision of ‘the West’ or of whatever location was being opposed to it.

Proponents of the ontological turn in anthropology build on ideas from, for example, the prominent sociologist Bruno Latour, who argues that social scientists should not decide in advance what sorts of things constitute ‘society’ and what sorts of things constitute ‘nature’ (see, e.g., 1993; 2004; 2005). Instead, they should proceed as if those categories are the outcomes, not the starting points, of complex negotiations between people and objects. Our understanding of the world is inseparable from the world itself until we make that separation (a process Latour calls ‘purification’) and distil ‘natural’ objects from ‘social’ ones. This idea, of not assuming a division between the natural and the social, the ideal and the material, is a key plank of the ontological turn’s platform. Hence its name: from epistemology and a concern with ideas, worldviews, and cultures, to ontology, and a recognition of the importance of nature and being. As a matter of philosophical rigour and of openness to ethnographic difference, its proponents demand that we allow our empirical findings to determine whether such distinctions should have a place in our conceptual scheme, and how they are drawn.

This position – unlike that which may be thought of as proceeding from problematical ethnographic cases such as those above – does not itself begin from an ethnographic issue (a point to which I will return). It is a more or less a priori commitment to the idea that we should have no prior commitments apart from the methodological injunction to allow our empirical material to transform the concepts we use to analyze it (Henare et al. 2006; Holbraad 2012; Petersen 2011; 2012). This, incidentally, also distinguishes it from another approach to ontology in anthropology, that of Philippe Descola (2013). Descola’s ethnographic work is, like that of Viveiros de Castro, also based in Amazonia, and is also concerned with unsettling the nature/culture binary. In his case this is accomplished through a careful and rigorous typologising of the different schemas through which people classify into those categories. As Latour has noted in a review of a debate between Descola and Viveiros de Castro (2009), the former’s approach is in this sense about how best to describe or characterise alternative classificatory schemas, whilst that of the latter and many of the other anthropologists I discuss here is about destabilising our own forms of classification by investigating the methodological consequences of trying to put such alternative schemas into dialogue with our own.

The notion of having ethnographic concepts feed back into and affect analytical ones is often referred to as ‘recursivity’, and indeed some authors have recently begun to refer to a ‘recursive turn’, rather than an ontological one, on the basis that it is this general methodological imperative that is crucial, rather than any specific case in which nature or ontology is key (Petersen 2012; see also Holbraad and Pedersen 2017 for the most up-to-date statements on this and other issues, at the time of writing). As an imperative it aims to guide us in resolving classic anthropological problems regarding how best to deal with radical difference (or ‘radical alterity’ as it is often called): how should ethnographers describe conceptions that simply do not make sense within our own conceptual schema? If your interlocutor tells you that the tree she is pointing to is in fact a spirit, do you, for example, describe this as a belief? You might, but to your interlocutor it is not of course any such thing: to her, it is a fact. Calling it a belief, as a number of anthropologists writing before the ontological turn have pointed out, is both to mislabel it and to call it mistaken without actually saying so (Needham 1972; Pouillon 1993). The recursive anthropologist, instead, would ask what sort of adjustments to our conceptual schema have to be made in order for it to make sense to think of the tree as a spirit.

Before going on to describe an example of this imperative in action, it is worth making clear that, when couched in this way, the ontological turn is not actually itself a response to a particular ethnographic problem, even though it demands that all good anthropology should meet this standard (Holbraad 2012; Petersen 2012). In other words, if unmoored from a specific ethnographic circumstance and framed as an a priori, the claim may be seen as somewhat self-refuting: ‘thou shalt have no a priori commitments (apart from this one)’ (Heywood forthcoming).

Recursivity in motion

To see in more detail how this methodological principle works, we can turn to the work of one of the ontological turn’s most significant recent proponents, Martin Holbraad (2009; 2012). Working with oracular diviners in Cuba, Holbraad encountered a version of the ‘tree as spirit’ problem. The diviners asserted that their oracles could never be mistaken: not simply that sometimes their oracles were correct, but that they were incapable of error. As a position, that cannot make sense in terms of the way in which we think about truth and falsehood. If I tell you that it is raining outside my office window, I may be correct, but there is no sense in which I must be so. In fact, without getting too bogged down in analytical philosophy, there are very few ways we possess of thinking about unfalsifiable statements, and those that exist – analytic truths, for example, which some philosophers have argued are true by virtue of their meanings, such as ‘bachelors are unmarried men’ – bear no resemblance to statements that issue from oracles, like ‘you are bewitched’, which clearly cannot be true simply by virtue of their meanings.

Instead of dismissing this as a ‘belief’, Holbraad asks what truth must have to mean for it to make sense to think of the claim ‘you are bewitched’ as an unfalsifiable statement. Clearly it cannot mean, as it does to us, that something possesses the quality of accurately representing the world. Representations can be wrong, by definition. I could be correct in claiming that it is raining outside my office window, or I could be mistaken. If, on the other hand, truth did not mean accurately representing the world but transforming it, then it becomes possible for the diviners’ statements to make sense. If by virtue of stating ‘you are bewitched’, a diviner alters the meaning of both ‘you’ and ‘bewitched’ such that they come together to denote the same bewitched person, then of course the statement is bound to be true.

What makes this argument particularly interesting as an example of recursivity is that it is an instance of itself. Holbraad is describing the way in which truth in divination functions to alter the world, and thus making sense of diviners’ statements about oracles. But he is also himself altering the meaning of truth, as we are familiar with it in anthropology (and beyond), such that it comes to mean something that can alter the world. His own description, in other words, resembles the oracular statements it describes.

This doubly complex nature of Holbraad’s argument gives it particular power, provided that you think anthropological analysis ought to mirror the conceptual apparatus of those under study. However, it also opens it up to the charge of circularity: the notion of truth as transformative (one that Holbraad calls ‘infinition’, as opposed to ‘definition’) is both the thing that Holbraad is explaining and simultaneously the manner by which he is explaining it. One might see virtue in such circularity, in that unlike in the problems of description considered above, Holbraad does not need to import an alien concept (like ‘belief’ or ‘culture’) into his explanation in order for it to make sense of the ethnography. But one might also foresee problems with Holbraad’s approach, particularly if it is supposed to be generalizable, as indeed, according to Holbraad, it is (e.g. 2012: 255): if the idea of ‘infinition’ works in this explanation because it derives from the object that it is supposed to be explaining, what use is it in explaining a different object? Why should other anthropologists transform a particular concept in relation to their ethnography if that ethnography – unlike Holbraad’s – tells them nothing about the value of transforming concepts?

Not for turning – critiques of ontology in anthropology

It is important to note – at least as far as this form of the ontological turn goes – that the rhetorical emphasis of proponents of ontology is very much on method. Recursivity is argued to be a way of approaching ethnographic data, not to be a claim about the nature of that data. So, whilst the word ‘ontology’ may mislead some into thinking that explicit claims are being made about the nature of reality or being, what is actually at stake, according to authors such as Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, is a methodological or heuristic issue (2006: 6): do we let data alter our conceptual schemas, or do we impose those schemas onto data? Nobody is asserting that Cuban diviners or Amerindians live in universes that are distinct from our own, or that crossing a national border puts you in a different reality – to claim this would be simply to flip from cultural or epistemological difference to natural or ontological difference without changing what we mean by either of them. What these anthropologists are claiming instead is that we should allow difference or alterity to challenge our understanding of the very categories of nature and culture themselves.

It is also important to note, though, that these are the claims made by the turn’s proponents, and that they – and others – have been subject to dispute and debate. Indeed, there is by now almost as substantial a body of literature devoted to critiquing the ontological turn as there is to describing what it means (e.g. Bessire & Bond 2014; Graeber 2015; Heywood 2012; Laidlaw 2012; Laidlaw & Heywood 2013).

To start with, and to return to the paradoxical nature of the ontological turn as a priori, there is reason to question the idea I have just described of the turn as ‘just a method’. One must, some have argued, have certain ideas about reality and the world to even think that it is possible to approach it in such an open-ended manner – one must, for example, think it possible that concepts and objects, ideas and matter, may not be two distinct categories (Heywood forthcoming; 2012; Laidlaw & Heywood 2013). Indeed, the concept of recursivity – the idea that data can directly transform concepts in the manner of Holbraad’s Cuban diviners example – obligates us to think this way. To think that matter and ideas are not two distinct categories would not be unusual in the least in Euro-America, let alone elsewhere, and indeed there is a significant and highly influential current of western philosophy going back at least as far as Spinoza and stretching up to Deleuze (frequently cited by proponents of the turn) that takes precisely this position. However, it is a position, a claim about the world, not simply an approach to it; and, of course, it is not one shared by everybody, even if it does happen to be one often preferred by anthropologists (Laidlaw 2012; Laidlaw & Heywood 2013). How, then, would these ideas work when applied to people who do see concepts and data, ideas and matter, as distinct? Proponents of the turn would suggest in response that the point of recursivity is to take difference seriously wherever it is to be found (e.g. Pedersen 2012), but this task is complicated by the fact that its method is so heavily reliant on one particular and preferred form of difference.

This question touches on a second problem some have raised with recursivity as a method: does it really take difference as seriously as it claims to? It is striking, as a number of critics have pointed out (Candea 2017; Heywood 2012; Scott 2014), that so many ontological-turn-inspired ethnographies result in remarkably similar arguments that draw on remarkably similar philosophical sources (such as Deleuze). If the point of recursivity is its radical openness to difference in the world, then surely such difference should be inspiring radically different arguments? Holbraad’s response to this critique is to point to the assumption behind it: that arguments are similar because they draw on similar philosophical sources, or make similar theoretical points. This way of identifying similarities between arguments, he suggests, ignores a basic premise of the turn, namely that theoretical or philosophical arguments are inseparable from the ethnographic data that inspire them. He and other proponents of the turn do not ‘draw on’ Deleuze or ‘apply’ theoretical ideas, but combine such ideas and sources with their particular ethnographic material to make something that is inevitably a unique admixture of particular concepts and specific ethnographic data (Holbraad 2017).

A third contentious issue regarding the ontological turn is its politics. Its proponents, such as Viveiros de Castro, Holbraad, and Morten Axel Petersen, have argued that its political implications are inherently progressive: they point out that not only does the approach aim to take indigenous thought seriously in a way that cultural relativism does not, but its openness to difference also makes it fundamentally revolutionary as a way of thinking, keeping us continually on our conceptual toes (Holbraad et al. 2014). Other anthropologists, though, have argued that its focus on somewhat abstract philosophical problems and its emphasis on difference detracts from issues that indigenous peoples face because of their connections with the rest of the world: climate change, neoliberal economic policies, or globalization. These are pressing and material concerns for everybody, regardless of their attitudes toward trees and spirits (Bessire & Bond 2014).

A related critique has been made by anthropologist David Graeber (2015). He effectively highlights the way in which arguments based on the ontological turn tend to rely on premises that we may wish to question. Take, for example, Holbraad’s explanation of divinatory truth. It all proceeds from the idea that oracular statements are unfalsifiable, a claim that Holbraad can make based on his ethnography because people involved in divination have told him this is the case. However, there are other people involved in divination who do not think this is the case. Therefore, it seems that Cubans involved with divination are as confused about the nature of reality as we are, and we have no particular reason to privilege one group of them over another.

Holbraad does, however, respond to this charge before the fact. The reason that we know there are people who do not think oracular verdicts are unfalsifiable is because he himself tells us so, before explaining why this does not cause problems to his argument. People who doubt the truth of divinatory verdicts, he argues, are doubting the divinatory nature of verdicts, not the truthful nature of divinatory verdicts. They are not talking about the same thing, in other words (2012: 71).

Different differences

In this entry we have looked at some of the ethnographic challenges to the concept of culture, which led in part to the development of an interest in ontology, along with more methodological or political motivations. We have also briefly examined an example of the ontological turn’s method, and described some critical interventions upon it. Finally, it is worth noting prior to concluding that the ontological turn is an ongoing phenomenon, as of writing, and that new contributions to it emerge on a regular basis (see in particular: Holbraad & Pedersen 2017)

The ontological turn continues a long tradition in anthropology of aiming to take difference seriously and understand it as best we can on its own terms. Furthermore, whatever perspective one takes on it, it is clear that it has obliged anthropologists to reconsider some of their most cherished and fundamental ways of thinking about difference. The ethnographic challenges it poses to notions of culture and cultural relativism are of particular relevance, not only to anthropologists but also to anyone concerned with the place of notions of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ in the world today. ‘Multiculturalism’, for example, takes culture to be the relative answer to universal questions, questions to which we ‘really’ know the answer: your interlocutor may ‘believe’ the tree to be a spirit, and you may ‘respect’ this belief as much as you wish, but your own belief is probably not what you would consider to be a belief at all; it is what you would think of as ‘knowledge’. You do not think of yourself as ‘believing’ it to be a tree, you know it to be so. ‘Respect’, in such a situation, becomes a synonym for mere toleration, and as philosopher Isabelle Stengers has pointed out, often people want to be more than merely an object of tolerance (2010).

Another salient example is the related and equally popular notion of ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ construction: to call something a social construct is a staple of our contemporary critical vernacular, but doing so implies not only that we can happily divide the world into things that are ‘social’ and things that are ‘natural’, but also that the latter can be taken for granted. To say, for example, that gender is a social construct is, as Judith Butler has famously shown, to assume ‘sex’ as an incontestable natural background against which gender is performed (Butler 1990).

Perhaps the most important thing to take away from readings on the ontological turn is its radical challenge to our ways of thinking about difference. As this article began by suggesting, anthropology is fundamentally concerned with difference, but it has only recently come to be concerned not only with difference per se, as ‘cultural’ difference, but with, as it were, different kinds of difference –with notions of material or corporeal difference as opposed to cultural difference. Often the people we work with are as concerned with difference as we are – and in this sense are ‘doing’ anthropology too – only the differences with which they are concerned may themselves be different to our own. As Roy Wagner, an anthropologist who inspired much of the literature on the ontological turn, put it with reference to his Daribi interlocutors: ‘their misunderstanding of me was not the same as my misunderstanding of them’ (1975: 20).

References

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Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Candea, M. 2017. We have never been pluralist: on lateral and frontal comparisons in the ontological turn. In Comparative metaphysics: ontology after anthropology (eds) P. Charbonnier, G. Salmon & P. Skafish. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Descola, P. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Chicago: University Press.

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Henare, A, M. Holbraad & S. Wastell (eds) 2006. Thinking through things: theorising artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge.

Heywood, P. forthcoming. Making difference: queer activism and anthropological theory. Current Anthropology.

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Holbraad, M. 2009. Ontography and alterity: defining anthropological truth. Social Analysis 53, 80-93.

——— 2012. Truth in motion: the recursive anthropology of Cuban divination. Chicago: University Press.

——— 2017. The contingency of concepts: transcendental deduction and ethnographic expression in anthropological thinking. In Comparative metaphysics: ontology after anthropology (eds) P. Charbonnier, G. Salmon & P. Skafish. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

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——— 2003. And. Manchester: University Press.

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Note on contributor

Paolo Heywood is an Affiliated Lecturer and Research Associate at the Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College. He has published articles on the ontological turn in anthropology, queer activism in Italy, and the anthropology of ethics, and his first book, After difference: ethics, activism, and anthropological theory, is forthcoming.

Dr. Paolo Heywood, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. pph22@cam.ac.uk