Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality 1138562343, 9781138562349

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Rethinking Relations and Animism

Personhood and relationality have re-animated debate in and between many disciplines. We are in the midst of a simultaneous “ontological turn”, a “(re)turn to things” and a “relational turn”, and also debating a “new animism”. It is increasingly recognised that the boundaries between the “natural” and “social” sciences are of heuristic value but might not adequately describe the reality of a multi-species world. Following rich and provocative dialogues between ethnologists and Indigenous experts, relations between the received knowledge of Western Modernity and that of people who dwell and move within different ontologies have shifted. Reflection on human relations with the larger-thanhuman world can no longer rely on the outdated assumption that “nature” and “cultures” already accurately describe the lineaments of reality. The chapters in this volume advance debates about relations between humans and things, between scholars and others, and between Modern and Indigenous ontologies. They consider how terms in diverse communities might hinder or help express, evidence and explore improved ways of knowing and being in the world. Contributors to this volume bring different perspectives and approaches to bear on questions about animism, personhood, materiality, and relationality. They include anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and scholars of religion. Miguel Astor-Aguilera is associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University, USA. An anthropologist by training, his scholarship concentrates on material culture and socio-religious theory. He specializes in Mesoamerican ontology and cross-cultural personhood issues, and his publications include “Comparing Indigenous Pilgrimage” (2008), “Latin American Indigenous Cosmovisions” (2016), and The Maya World of Communicating Objects (2010). His current research focuses on Maya ritual specialists in the Yucatan peninsula and their healing practices as related to their ecological behavioral environment. Graham Harvey is professor of religious studies at The Open University, UK. His research and teaching largely concern the rituals and protocols through which various Indigenous people and Pagans engage with the larger-than-human world. His publications include Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013), The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013) and Animism: Respecting the Living World (2nd edition 2017). He is co-editor of the Routledge monograph series “Vitality of Indigenous Religions”.

Vitality of Indigenous Religions Series Editors: Graham Harvey Open University, UK

Afeosemime Adogame Princeton Theological Seminary, USA

Inés Talamantez University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Routledge’s Vitality of Indigenous Religions series offers an exciting cluster of research monographs, drawing together volumes from leading international scholars across a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Indigenous religions are vital and empowering for many thousands of indigenous peoples globally, and dialogue with, and consideration of, these diverse religious life-ways promises to challenge and refine the methodologies of a number of academic disciplines, whilst greatly enhancing understandings of the world. This series explores the development of contemporary indigenous religions from traditional, ancestral precursors, but the characteristic contribution of the series is its focus on their living and current manifestations. Devoted to the contemporary expression, experience and understanding of particular indigenous peoples and their religions, books address key issues which include: the sacredness of land, exile from lands, diasporic survival and diversification, the indigenization of Christianity and other missionary religions, sacred language, and re-vitalization movements. Proving of particular value to academics, graduates, postgraduates and higher-level undergraduate readers worldwide, this series holds obvious attraction to scholars of Native American studies, Maori studies and African studies, and offers invaluable contributions to religious studies, sociology, anthropology, geography and other related subject areas. The Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora Appropriation, Integration and Legislation Edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar Rethinking Relations and Animism Personhood and Materiality Edited by Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/AINDIREL

Rethinking Relations and Animism Personhood and Materiality

Edited by Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Astor-Aguilera, Miguel Angel, 1961– editor. | Harvey, Graham, 1959– editor. Title: Rethinking relations and animism : personhood and materiality / edited by Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Vitality of indigenous religions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018034622 (print) | LCCN 2018038820 (ebook) | ISBN 9780203709887 (e-book) | ISBN 9781351356763 (PDF) | ISBN 9781351356756 (ePub) | ISBN 9781351356749 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781138562349 | ISBN 9781138562349 (hardback :alk. paper) | ISBN 9780203709887 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Animism. | Material culture. Classification: LCC GN471 (ebook) | LCC GN471 .R48 2019 (print) | DDC 202/.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018034622 ISBN: 978-1-138-56234-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-70988-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Foreword

vii viii xii

PHILIP P. ARNOLD

Introduction: We have never been individuals

1

MIGUEL ASTOR-AGUILERA AND GRAHAM HARVEY

PART 1

Relations 1 On the ontological scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture

13 15

MARSHALL SAHLINS

2 Persons or relatives? Animistic scales of practice and imagination

25

NURIT BIRD-DAVID

3 Adjusted styles of communication (ASCs) in the postCartesian world

35

GRAHAM HARVEY

PART 2

Things 4 Assembling new ontologies from old materials: Towards multiplicity OLIVER J. T. HARRIS AND RACHEL J. CRELLIN

53

55

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Contents

5 Religious objects: Uncomfortable relations and an ontological turn to things

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AMY R. WHITEHEAD

6 Robot companions: The animation of technology and the technology of animation in Japan

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FABIO R. GYGI

PART 3

Approaches 7 The ontological turn, Indigenous research, and Niitsitapi protocols of reciprocity

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115

KENNETH H. LOKENSGARD

8 Maya-Mesoamerican polyontologies: Breath and Indigenous American vital essences

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MIGUEL ASTOR-AGUILERA

9 Environment, ontology, and visual perception: A saltwater case

156

KATIE GLASKIN

10 “Are all stones alive?”: Anthropological and Anishinaabe approaches to personhood

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MAUREEN MATTHEWS AND ROGER ROULETTE

Index

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Figures

1.1 4.1 4.2 5.1 6.1 8.1 8.2 10.1

Ontological relationships Stonehenge today The stages of Stonehenge (after Parker Pearson et al. 2013) The Virgin of Alcala Animation continuum Clathrus ruber Human embryonic foetus William Berens at a portage on the Berens River with a group of “grandfather” stones, 1932 10.2 Naamiwan (with water drum); his wife, Koowin; son Angus; and grandson Omishoosh (Charlie George Owen – farther back in the Waabano lodge), Pauingassi 1933

16 56 63 80 98 146 147 174

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Contributors

Philip P. Arnold is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Syracuse University, and a core faculty member of Native American and Indigenous Studies. He is the Founding Director of the Skä·noñh – Great Law of Peace Center (www.skanonhcenter.org/), which repurposed a site that celebrated Jesuits coming to Onondaga Nation Territory (1656–58). The new Center discusses the formation of the Haudenosaunee’s Great Law of Peace at Onondaga Lake more than 1,000 years ago and its influences on American culture. The Center is a collaboration among the Onondaga Nation, Onondaga County, Syracuse University and other educational institutions in the Syracuse area. His books are Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan (1999); Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Politics: Planting a Tree (2001); The Gift of Sports: Indigenous Ceremonial Dimensions of the Games We Love (2012) and Urgency of Indigenous Values and the Future of Religion (forthcoming). In 2007 he organized the Doctrine of Discovery Study Group (www.doctrineofdiscovery.org) to investigate Christianity’s role in the destruction of Indigenous peoples. He is the President of the Indigenous Values Initiative (www.indigenousvalues.org), which is a non-profit organization to support the work of the Center, the American Indian Law Alliance (https://aila.ngo/), and work at the UN. Miguel Astor-Aguilera is associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University, USA. An anthropologist by training, his scholarship concentrates on material culture and socio-religious theory. He specializes in Mesoamerican ontology and cross-cultural personhood issues, and his publications include “Comparing Indigenous Pilgrimage” (2008), “Latin American Indigenous Cosmovisions” (2016), and The Maya World of Communicating Objects (2010). His current research focuses on Maya ritual specialists in the Yucatan peninsula and their healing practices as related to their ecological behavioral environment. Nurit Bird-David is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Haifa (PhD Social Anthropology, Cambridge). Author of Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World (2017) and dozens of articles

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in leading journals, her research interests include hunter-gatherers’ environmental perceptions and ontologies; shifting scales of practice and imagination; alternative notions of nation and community; neoliberal notions of personhood, home and security; and the new algorithmicbased “sharing economy”. Rachel J. Crellin is an archaeologist and lecturer in later prehistory at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on the study and theorisation of change, new materialisms, and assemblage theory. She is also an expert in metalwork wear-analysis. She is currently excavating a Bronze Age burial mound on the Isle of Man and writing a book for Routledge titled Change and Archaeology. Katie Glaskin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include dreams, personhood, creativity, perception, property, and more recently, extinction(s). Major research publications include edited volumes Customary Land Tenure and Registration in Australia and Papua New Guinea (2007); Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia (2008); Sleep Around the World: Anthropological Perspectives (2013); and monograph Crosscurrents: Law and Society in a Native Title Claim to Land and Sea (2017). Katie won the Curl Essay Prize in 2015, and has been an editor of the journal Anthropological Forum since 2011. Fabio R. Gygi is lecturer in anthropology with reference to Japan at SOAS, University of London. His research interests lie at the intersection between medical anthropology and material culture. He has undertaken fieldwork on hoarding in Tokyo, where he helped people clean up their apartments and houses as a form of participant observation and conducted interviews with hoarders, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers. He is particularly interested in dolls, robots and effigies and how to get rid of them. Oliver J. T. Harris is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on archaeological theory and the British Neolithic. He is co-director of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, which looks at long-term change on the west coast of Scotland. He is co-author, along with John Robb and others, of The Body in History: Europe from the Palaeolithic to the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Craig Cipolla, of Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium (Routledge, 2017). His research has been published in journals, including World Archaeology, Archaeological Dialogues and American Anthropologist. Graham Harvey is professor of religious studies at The Open University, UK. His research and teaching largely concern the rituals and protocols through which various Indigenous people and Pagans engage with the

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Contributors larger-than-human world. His publications include Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013), The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013) and Animism: Respecting the Living World (2nd edition 2017). He is co-editor of the Routledge monograph series “Vitality of Indigenous Religions”.

Kenneth H. Lokensgard is assistant director of Native American Programs, for the Plateau Center for Native American Research & Collaboration, and an adjunct professor of anthropology at Washington State University, USA. Through his research, he addresses Native American ontologies and material culture. Corresponding publications include Blackfoot Religion and the Consequences of Cultural Commoditization (Routledge, 2016). In his current work, he focuses upon research ethics, Indigenous Research Methodologies, and the promotion of scholarship by and for Indigenous peoples. Maureen Matthews is the Curator of Cultural Anthropology at the Manitoba Museum where her most recent exhibit about Treaties, developed in collaboration with Manitoba First Nations Elders, and an Indigenous outreach project, Spirit Lines, won national awards for exhibit excellence. Her theoretical work joins Anishinaabe philosophical and metaphorical thinking with contemporary anthropological work on the nature of personhood and the animacy and agency of objects. Her recent book, Naamiwan’s Drum: The Story of a Contested Repatriation of Anishinaabe Artefacts, won the 2017 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction at the Manitoba Book Awards. Roger Roulette is an Anishinaabemowin speaker and member of the Sandy Bay First Nation. He is a linguist, translator and Adjunct Professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, working with graduate students using Anishinaabemowin evidence in their academic work. He is the co-author, with Maureen Matthews, of five technical papers in support of the Pimachiowin Aki UNESCO World Heritage Site bid and recently won a prestigious Phillips Fund for Native American Research Award at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia for his work on the Charlie George Owen audio collection. Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the executive publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press and the author of numerous books, including Islands of History; How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example; Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture, and Vice Versa; What Kinship Is – and Is Not; and, with David Graeber, On Kings – all from University of Chicago Press. Amy R. Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Massey University in New Zealand. Her research interests involve the material

Contributors

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and performance cultures of religion and the ontological ‘turn to (religious) things’. These are demonstrated in her managing editorial role for ‘Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion’ and in her publications, especially Religious Statues and Personhood: Testing the Role of Materiality (2013).

Foreword

We are all fortunate, indeed, that Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey met at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Diego in 2014 to collaborate on a series of panel sessions that would eventually result in this volume. Dubbed the “new animism,” this book is dedicated to an ongoing, nearly 150-year-old, academic dilemma of interpretation, which goes to the heart of our understanding of Indigenous Peoples and their traditions. What is the nature of personhood, and why do scholars tend to get it wrong? The first thing to notice is that while our discussions about “animism” are attempts to describe Indigenous others, the consequences of such a discussion challenge our own, Western notions of personhood. There is a tremendous amount at stake for Indigenous Peoples in scholarly descriptions about them, but there are also stakes in this discussion for Western, settler-colonial people. I count this as a reason why “animism” has had such a long life in the academy. The idea of what is, and is not, a person or a thing is among the most persistent questions in the History of Religions and Anthropology. When the term was first created it was something of a novelty, seen as a “primitive” worldview that accounted for the infancy of Western civilization. In fact, religion itself was seen as a reflection of this infant state of humanity that would eventually disappear as a more complete picture of the world was revealed through the Western scientific method. Originally the creation of the category of “animism” was to be descriptive of a certain type of religious belief system among those deemed “primitive people” by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These scholars would have been those whose mission was to catalog the cultures and appease the various colonial empires controlled by European powers. Taking E.B. Tylor as an example, it was imperative that these scholars define “animism” as the “primitive” (i.e., primary, original) origins of all religions and the antecedent to civilization. Ironically, this social evolutionary model also established “primitive” peoples and their worldviews as the foundation to civilization. Put succinctly, one of the defining features of Indigenous Peoples is their understanding that human beings are not the only, nor the most important, living beings in the world. Human beings’ existence is contingent on the lives

Foreword

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of others, other nonhuman persons. This is an obvious biological fact of human existence and an active principle of Indigenous Peoples’ ceremonial lives and traditions. Western academics have had a difficult time conceptualizing this way of understanding, of a world that is alive and upon which all human life depends. Because of Western mythology, and a 2,000-yearold Christian theological orientation, human beings have taken superiority over other forms of life. Thus, what has been called “animism” in the West is actually a theological collision of worldviews between Christendom and Indigenous Peoples. A defining feature of what is now referred to as “Indigenous Peoples” and what we have called their “religion” is their understanding that all beings comprising the network of life are sacred – animated by human and nonhuman persons. An example of this worldview comes from the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, that have taken a world stage to express these ideas through world institutions such as the United Nations.1 In the book “Basic Call to Consciousness,” the Haudenosaunee speak for North American Indigenous Peoples and very clearly define the nature of personhood and what we are now calling a “new animism.”

Basic Call to Consciousness The “Basic Call to Consciousness” was delivered to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1977,2 and comprised Native American delegations from different Indigenous Nations. In a section titled “Spiritualism, the Highest Form of Political Consciousness: A Haudenosaunee Message to the Western World,” the authors distinguish between “spiritualism” and “religion” from an Indigenous perspective. Although “A Basic Call to Consciousness” originates from the Haudenosaunee perspective, there is little question that the values they discussed are shared by all Indigenous Peoples. The passages that follow express very well how nonhuman persons are the focus of Indigenous Peoples’ worldviews: In the beginning, we were told that the human beings who walk about the Earth have been provided with all the things necessary for life. We were instructed to carry a love for one another, and to show a great respect for all the beings of this Earth. We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the vegetable life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics. Ours is a Way of Life. We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested into matter – grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force that produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass. (85)

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Foreword

Analogous to the History of Religions category of “hierophany,” or “manifestation of the sacred,” for Indigenous Peoples, this is an ongoing, everyday attribute of material life and the cycles of the natural world rather than just a discrete event that happened in a particular place and time. To relegate this ongoing process of material life to a specific human activity of “religion” would be a violation of these indigenous realities. It continues: All things of the world are real, material things. The Creation is a true, material phenomenon, and the Creation manifests itself to us through reality. The spiritual universe then is manifest to man as the Creation, the Creation that supports life. We believe that man is real, a part of the Creation, and that his duty is to support life in conjunction with the other beings. That is why we call ourselves Onkweho’n:we – Real People. (85–86) Creation is not understood as something of the past but is essential knowledge of the spiritual world that is continuously manifesting itself in material form. All material life is fundamentally spiritual that is continually coming in to being. A lot hinges on the word “manifestation” in this passage. Spiritualism, or spirituality, in contemporary society has a different meaning. Generally, spirituality tends to be understood as a possession of a human being: Our roots are deep in the lands where we live. We have a great love for our country, for our birthplace is there. The soil is rich from the bones of thousands of our generations. Each of us was created in those lands, and it is our duty to take great care of them, because from these lands will spring the future generations of the Onkweho’n:we. We walk about with a great respect, for the Earth is a very sacred place . . . we are not a people who demand or ask anything of the Creators of Life, instead, we give greetings and thanksgiving that all the forces of life are still at work. We deeply understand our relationship to all living things. To this day, the territories we still hold are filled with trees, animals, and the other gifts of Creation. In these places we still receive our nourishment from our Mother Earth. (86) Human beings are always in exchanges with a world that is a manifestation of spirit. Breathing, eating, drinking are ways that human beings are in regular ongoing exchanges with the world. But with the incursion of “religion” carried over from European powers, as written dogma contained in the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, this understanding of Creation and Indigenous worlds has been traumatized. “The forests were [are] leveled, the waters were [are] polluted, the Native peoples were [are] subjected to genocide. Western technology and the people who have employed it have been the most amazingly destructive forces in all of human history. No natural

Foreword

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disaster has ever destroyed as much. Not even the Ice Ages counted as many victims.” (89) The question raised here is where do the destructive elements of religion cease, or do they? The theology derived from Western Christian religious ideology not only limits our ability to understand Indigenous perspectives but also enforces global Capitalist monetary exchange practices. In Capitalist economies there are firm commitments to establishing the Natural World as an inanimate resource: to “things.” This reduces Indigenous understandings of a living, interactive world between human and nonhuman persons. The Indigenous critique of the West is that we tend to think of all life as serving only human needs and wants: The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation and begin to see liberation as something that needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support life – the air, the waters, the trees – all things that support the sacred Web of life. (91) In the section “Policies of Oppression in the Name of ‘Democracy,’ Economic History of the Haudenosaunee” the authors identify the fundamental nature of oppression in the concept of “private property”: In accordance with our ways, we are required to hold many kinds of feasts and ceremonies that can best be described as “giveaways.” It is said that among our people, our leaders, those whom the Anglo people insist on calling “chiefs,” are the poorest of us. By the laws of our culture, our leaders are both political and spiritual leaders. They are leaders of many ceremonies that require the distribution of great wealth. As spiritual and political leaders, they provide a kind of economic conduit. To become a political leader, a person is required to be a spiritual leader; and to become a spiritual leader, a person must be extraordinarily generous in terms of material goods. (104) Private property fundamentally violates the Indigenous economic process by which they live. It destroys their culture while simultaneously destroying the Natural World. Indigenous worldviews acknowledge that everything in Creation is alive with a spirit. It follows, therefore, that the idea of private property is slavery – the enslavement of living beings for the sole purpose of elevating human life above all others. Through the Haudenosaunee example, expressed in “Basic Call to Consciousness,” we can appreciate the importance in recovering the “New Animism” in scholarship. It is not just a category that helps to describe Indigenous worldviews, but it also fundamentally reorients our understanding

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of human life to another way of being in the world. The consequences of this volume to academic work are profoundly important for understanding human Indigenous communities and also future collaborations. Philip P. Arnold Syracuse University

Notes 1 The Onondaga Nation (Syracuse, New York, located in Onondaga ancestral land) is the Central Fire of the Haudenosaunee (i.e., Iroquois) Confederacy, of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora Nations. Onondaga is where the Grand Council convenes periodically to address issues of the Six Nation Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee were a model for the Founding Fathers of the United States in establishing a democratic government. Over the past several decades, I have collaborated with the leadership of the Onondaga Nation. This work culminated in the establishment of Skä·noñh – The Great Law of Peace Center located at Onondaga Lake where the Great Peace was established more than 1,000 years ago. 2 Basic Call to Consciousness (Native Voices, 2005) recounts this famous trip to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1977. The book has gone through several reprintings and is now published in many languages. It was penned, anonymously, by the late John Mohawk. Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, a member of the Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs, was chosen the speaker for that delegation.

Introduction We have never been individuals Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey

In 1998 Alfred Gell declared that: Since the outset of the discipline, anthropology has been signally preoccupied with a series of problems to do with ostensibly peculiar relations between persons and “things” which, somehow, “appear as” or do duty as, persons. (1998: 9) Now, some years into the “ontological turn” and the “material turn” or “turn to things”, many other disciplines and fields are also engaged by this “series of problems”. However, there has been a seismic or even tectonic shift since the early days of ethnographic disciplines. (For a sustained discussion of the processes and key players involved, see Salmon 2017, paying particular attention to Benveniste 1971 [1966]; Viveiros de Castro 1992 [1986]; Strathern 1988. Also see Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Hutchings and McKenzie 2017). The chief problem for many academics is no longer primarily with “them”, the “others” who enact or assert “ostensibly peculiar relations between persons and ‘things’”. We have come to understand that to be human is to relate and that our relations are as much with things as with other humans. Now, our contemporary “series of problems” are to do with the relationship between Modernist or Cartesian approaches and the not-so-peculiar-after-all recognitions of the mutual constitution and generative interactivity of “persons” and “things”. Even if some colleagues react negatively to the “ontological turn”, “material turn”, the “new animism” and related projects, they are debated in academic venues rather than dismissed as evidence of “going native” and other scholarly misdemeanours. Bruno Latour’s aphorism, “We have never been modern” (1993), has led many of us (as persons, humans and scholars) to contemplate what we might be if we are not Moderns (Latour 2013) – even as we remain fully cognizant of the fact that we are still encouraged to try to be(come) more Modern. Certainly, we have become increasingly bold in challenging the received scholarly heritage that was so strongly shaped by hierarchical oppositions between persons and things, minds and bodies, cultures and

2

Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey

nature(s), cognition and performance, and other putative polar binaries. Perhaps we ought to have been bolder earlier. Back in 1942, Irving Hallowell declared that “No one is more aware than the ethnologist that human beings always live in a meaningful universe, not in a world of bare physical objects and events” (1971 [1942]: 1). His relationships with and experiences among the Anishinaabeg of Berens River, Canada, shaped him into a forerunner of the kind of post-Cartesian scholar Ken Morrison (2013) encouraged us all to become. Hallowell and Gell were not lone voices. Others who paid attention to the words and actions of Indigenous and other communities have questioned Modernity’s (peculiar) thinking about relationships with things. Just as Hallowell coined the phrase “other-than-human persons” to shake up the notion that only humans were truly “persons”, so others have made concerted efforts to make it more possible to speak about the animate world and, importantly, about humans within that larger-than-human community. Increasing use of the term “dividual” evidences progress toward greater acceptance of the relationality of all beings, including “things”. In McKim Marriott’s (1976) and Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) use of the term, “dividual” points to a contrast between concepts of personhood prevalent in Western, South Asian and Melanesian contexts. The lived reality of persons in both contexts may be identical, but the encouragement to become a dividual or an individual influences the relationships and interactions that ensue. Then the perpetuation of such relationships and interactions defines “cultures” as emergent conceptualizations of what persons do. Marshall Sahlins added a vital caution that “What is in question is the character of the relationships rather than the nature of the person” (2011: 13). The real challenge of terms such as “dividual” and “other-than-human persons” is that they insist that relationships (not only conceptual “relationality”) are the crucial matter. This book heeds the call to attend to questions about the character of relationships by focusing on larger-than-human communities and, especially, kinship with what can be called things, objects, artefacts or materials. The resonances of these and other debated terms are examined in relation to diverse cultural and academic contexts. For now, Latour’s juxtaposition of two uses of “thing” in the phrase “parliament of things” is noteworthy. Here, “thing” functions both as a reference to objects and also (drawing on historical Norse and Anglo-Saxon terminology) as a synonym for “assemblies” (1993, also see Latour and Weibel 2005). The crucial point here is neither that the “made-ness” of things (emphasized in words such as “artefact”) and their putative passivity (sometimes indicated by the opposition between “object” and “subject”) are vital. Things act and interact. Understanding how they do so and what the implications of such relational and personable activities is the purpose of this book. The catalyst for this volume occurred in 2014 at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Diego, California, USA. Astor-Aguilera presented a paper on Maya ontologies, particularly focusing on Indigenous

Introduction

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Mesoamerican notions concerning sentient trees and the inadequacy of Western terminologies used to address the phenomenon of relational ontological sentient environments. Harvey happened to be present in the audience. The ensuing personal discussion between Astor-Aguilera and Harvey after this fortunate chance meeting led to an agreement that the time was ripe to address the commonalities, differences and questions regarding the “return of the things”, “personhood”, and “animism” revolving around academic terms such as the “new animism”, “ontological turn” or “turn to things”, and the renewed emphasis on relationality. Much effort to understand how non-Western peoples perceive and relate with the(ir) world has been inadequate and often imposes a Cartesian analytical mode of polar binary thinking. Some well-known academics specializing in the topic of this volume are renowned theorists while other researchers in this area work with practically little to no theoretical base but offer rich description and/or dialogical engagement. Academics have oscillated or vacillated among various analytical frameworks when scientifically categorizing our subject, and Astor-Aguilera and Harvey decided to organize what eventually became a double session at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting at Denver, in November 2015, composed of scholars from a variety of disciplines to address this issue. Our intent in this volume is not to reify the ontological turn as a social reality of Indigenous peoples. We accept that it is a social theoretical construct – however, as a heuristic tool, the relatively recent turn toward emphasizing ontology in the study of non-Western (or alternatively modern) peoples and knowledges, in both the Social Sciences and the Humanities, has given us a new mode of engaging, comprehending and analyzing cultural differences both temporally and spatially. In contrast to force-fitting the “other” into our academic logics – regardless of archaeological, historical and ethnographic contexts demonstrating different world engagements – the world of “others” is often a world not composed by and for humans but one in which humans are part of a larger relational community where a multitude of agents, seen and unseen, interact. This is especially so when many of the “others” are “us” – whether we are Indigenous or otherwise resistant to or rebellious against Modernity’s dualities (see, e.g. Braddock 2017). Although the Social Sciences and the Humanities are inherently concerned with being human, such a focus does not (or, at least, should not) equate with being anthropocentric. Certainly, scholarship focused on relations has considerable potential for revitalizing our various disciplines. Animism (of the “new” relational, interspecies kind rather than Tylor’s “belief in spirits”) is again a major topic of interest in Archaeology, Art, Geography, History, Philosophy, Religious Studies and Social Cultural Anthropology, among other disciplines. Of special note is the growing interest of the hard sciences such as Biology and Ecological Sustainability. Incorporated within “STEAM[D]”, which recently emerged as a variant of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), is a humanistic

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perspective with the inclusion of Art (STEM + Art [and Design]) (see Guston, Finn, and Robert 2017: xii–xiv; Robinson 2017: xxiii, xxxi). This recognizes and begins to build on the point that: The shift to ontology was thus in essence an attempt to force the prior backdrop of comparison back into the space of the comparable – in particular, the part we call nature. That concept, which has been long known not to be espoused by many of the collectives engaged by anthropologists, has nonetheless not been called into question on account of the universal validity granted to physics and biology. (Charbonnier, Salmon, and Skafish 2017: 5) That is, what was once ignored or silenced (“nature”) is now often (but not always) foregrounded as far from inert, inanimate, without moral or political will or relations. Examples include multi-disciplinary attention paid to animate particles (Barad 2007; Weston 2017), forests (Kohn 2013, 2017), minerals (Kopenawa and Bruce 2013) and now microbes (Giraldo Herrera 2018). Much has changed but engaging with materials and things on the basis of recent “turns” will provoke even more change. Returning to those “collectives” who have not typically espoused Modernity’s cosmological dualisms – especially those which separate “culture” from “nature” and humans from the more-than-human community (Abram 1996; also see 2010) – much but not all of our volume engages with Indigenous perspectives, practices and experiences. It is, then, firmly in the context in which much of the recent scientific and humanistic debate about animism has considered what composes a “person” and how such beings are perceived from Indigenous points of view. Large philosophical, definitional, sociological, ecological and politically vital questions are being asked. Is a person just a human individual or is it, or can it be, something more (Astor-Aguilera 2017)? Is it interiority (soul or mind) or relational interactions that define persons? Do Western and non-Western peoples think – or act – completely differently or are there overlapping poly-ontological perspectives and relations? Do Indigenous notions of kinship differ as sharply from Western ones as some of our academic ancestors seemed to think, or are we also partible, divisible and relational dividuals? The intention of our volume is not to offer a final, definitive, universal understanding of the issue of personhood per se. Rather, it is to contribute to discussion on the topic of relational, interdependent, interactive and unbounded “dividual” persons (one way of summing up typically nonWestern ontologies) and autonomous, independent and bounded “individuals” (one way of summing up typically Western ontology). To not reify the distinction between Western and non-Western notions of self we asked contributors to explicitly clarify any dichotomies, polar binaries and/or JudeoChristian-Muslim theological concepts they chose to apply, and to encourage them to orient themselves theoretically rather than have us impose any rigid

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guidelines. Academic discussions pertaining to personhood require much more social theoretical analysis in the area of non-Western thought than has been done to date and we intend that this volume will increase the dialogue on what the relations, relatives, kin and persons mean, or might have meant for ancient or historical periods, in different cultural settings. More specifically, our instructions to our contributors were to discuss the relations of persons in specific cultural situations to develop more controlled studies. Our target is not to adapt theories to methods for the sake of expediency: Our interest is more on theories than on theory, as multiple viewpoints are more prone to yield cohesive methodologies for solving the research problem at hand. Our guidelines to the contributors of this volume, then, were not to try and settle the verities of Indigenous personhood: Our attempt here is to map out research and offer a variety of viewpoints to address the still-extant problems in the study of our topic(s). As a result, we focus this volume in the direction of a more disciplined study of persons or relations, both spatially and temporally, in various cultural contexts through which we might advance the resurgent interest in relational ontologies. Individually and dividually, the chapters speak to a general concern for the incorporation in our studies of greater formal precision in our descriptions and analysis of personhood. Reflecting on lessons learnt among Indigenous hosts, Irving Hallowell (1960) coined the term “other-than-human person”. This is sometimes used, metanarrative style, when studying Indigenous peoples worldwide. Hallowell was interested in how the First Nation Anishinaabeg, commonly known as the “Ojibwa” or “Chippewa”, in Manitoba, Canada, perceived their world, as opposed to focusing on how academics imagine how Indigenous peoples conceptualize their world. We scholars have slowly been catching up to, with a few sometimes equaling, Hallowell’s often-neglected insight that to understand the other we need to listen to the other. We need to heed the ontological meanings other people find in their worlds, for it was not long ago – before industrialization and heavy urbanization dramatically changed our cohabitation – that even we Westerners were not so “rationally” minded in perceiving our world. Indeed, if Bruno Latour (1993) is correct, despite vigorous efforts and polemics, “we have never been modern”. Instead, to the dismay of convinced Cartesians, we have continued to be animated by relations with companion animals, interactive artefacts and larger-than-human processes that refuse to be purely “natural”. That is precisely the context in which the “new animism” and the “material turn” have attracted such a ferment of scholarly work. As was the experience of previous generations of ethnology-inspired colleagues, even as we meet the strange, we often find what is familiar to our past and remains encoded in our own idioms. Languages are built on experiential relations within our world and not outside it. Exploring the affective qualities of ontological difference from ancient to contemporary peoples with whom we share the world allows us to produce histories and ethnographies of Indigenous peoples not so distorted by Cartesian and Anthropocene

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assumptions. Our volume brings intersubjectivity into focus by analyzing how humans and other-than-humans relate. Allowing for ontological difference permits us to explore alternative modes of thinking by recognizing affordances to everything that surrounds us – be that animals, plants, the weather, water, rocks, as well as the unseen – both because most of us may also treat “objects” as “subjects” and, often in more deliberate ways, because many non-Western peoples relate to the world as such. We can no longer pretend to separate what we know of the world from how we know the world since imposing dichotomies distorts many ancient to contemporary fluid ways of knowing the world. In the past decade, the “new animism”, “turn to things”, and “ontological turn” have generated considerable debate, largely revolving around profound rethinking of what “personhood” might mean in varied cultural contexts. However, much of the effort to understand how non-Western peoples perceive the(ir) world has been inadequate. This volume brings together scholars committed to productive dialogue both with Indigenous and other knowledge holders and within and beyond their academic disciplines. Our contributors offer new perspectives building on recent debates that invite further research and reflection. They share a commitment to advancing the cutting edge of scholarly engagement with related topics and, particularly, approaches. As Nurit Bird-David wrote, animism is a “relational epistemology . . . a way of understanding relatedness from a related point of view within the shifting horizons of the related viewer” (1999: S77). Taking this seriously (despite the warnings of Rane Willerslev [2013]), we understand our scholarly selves to be firmly within those relational shifting horizons.

Relations, things, approaches: Introducing the chapters The chapters that follow are divided among three parts for ease of navigation. However, we anticipate that our readers and fellow travellers will recognize the way in which themes and issues are carried from chapter to chapter. Part 1, Relations, orientates us to the book’s major themes of relations, kinship and dialogical approaches – or relational processes. It begins with Marshall Sahlins’ re-visiting of Philippe Descola’s “fourfold differentiation of animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism”. We have reprinted this article from the journal HAU, with permission, because it admirably sets up various issues and sets out some of the achievements of the ongoing project of reconsidering animism and materiality. Sahlins proposes that in fact Descola’s animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism collapse into two differentiations: the “naturalism” of Western or Modern ontology and “several animic orders [which] are themselves marked forms of a more generic anthropomorphism” (2014: 281, 282). Indeed, he points to various examples of the lived reality in which relationality, subjectivity, animism or anthropomorphism are found in everyday Modern discourse. Things are more complicated than our neat categories might indicate: Expressions of

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animism have not ceased in modernity. Sahlins’ chapter is followed by Nurit Bird-David’s insightful incitement to re-centre our discussions around the term “relatives” to make it absolutely clear what relationality means for academic theorizing as well as in everyday lived reality. She both builds on and revises her earlier work, in part following Sahlins, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and others who have argued for understanding kinship in terms of the “mutuality of being” (inclusive of other-than-human kin). The concept “person” seems too static and continues, in academic debate as in wider Western or Modern discourse at least, to resist being opened up to relationality rather than interiority. Bird-David also encourages a more careful focus on the “tinyscale” contexts in which relations encounter and animate one another. She, thereby, sets the scene for other contributors to present reflection arising from rich dialogues with Indigenous and other collaborators in the project of thinking differently about relations, persons, materials and animism. Continuing to rethink “persons” and relationships, Graham Harvey also seeks better ways to express and communicate about the animate, larger-than-human, post-Cartesian world in which we all live (even if we try to be Moderns). A sketch of some of the ways in which humans are entirely like other living species is followed by a challenge to the project of separatism – a project built on the imagination of human difference. Playfully employing the neoshamanic abbreviation ASC (for the refrain “altered states of consciousness”), the chapter proposes Adjusting Styles of Communication both with and about the larger-than-human world within which humans are relations. The second part of the book involves a determined turn to things, materials and/or materiality. It begins with Oliver J. T. Harris and Rachel J. Crellin’s “Assembling new ontologies from old materials: Toward multiplicity”. This makes use of the World Heritage site of Stonehenge to explore the potential of new materialism and related approaches for improving understanding of and engagement with lively sacred, archaeological and/or heritage places. They also establish the focus of this section on human-made things rather than on the seemingly easier-to-deal with liveliness of what Moderns call “natural” things. Opening with this dialogue between anthropology and archaeology provides a longer view than many, more contemporary ethnographies allow but also tests the value of relations between disciplines and approaches to determinately solid materials and structures. Amy R. Whitehead “Religious objects: Uncomfortable relations and an ontological turn to things” follows. This is a focused ethnography of relations between a Virgin Mary statue (in Alcala, Spain), her devotees, their researcher and wider cultural and scholarly communities. The term “animism” has been reclaimed and reapplied in ways that are now fairly well accepted. Nested within discourses of animate materiality, the term “fetish” proffers itself for closer attention. Whitehead proposes that the participatory acts of the Virginstatue not only illustrate the presence of animism (and its fetishes) in the Modern West, but also require further expansions of our critical terms for

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debating materials and materiality. Fabio R. Gygi tests and contests perceptions that Japan has a “Shinto universe” of “native animist beliefs” which encourages an “animist unconscious”. From that starting point, he pursues understanding of Japanese relations with robots. Drawing on the work of Japanese roboticists and anthropologists of technology he suggests the use of the heuristic device of an “animation continuum” to better apprehend the broad range of relations – often emerging from unexpected and surprising encounters – which result in the animation of things. In the third part of the book, on Approaches, four chapters engage with ways of attending to the diverse Indigenous, Western and scholarly approaches to our topic. It begins with Ken H. Lokensgard’s chapter which bringing three discourses on ontology into dialogue, that is, those of “Western” ethnographies, “Indigenous Research” scholars and traditional Niitsitapiiksi, or Blackfoot, people. Because each of these involves ways of researching and presenting relations, persons and materials, Lokensgard argues that improved relations among researchers and other knowledge holders could lead to improved understanding. Mutuality, respect and sustainability are in everyone’s interest in this era of enhanced danger to earthly life. Miguel Astor-Aguilera’s chapter develops a dialogue between Indigenous and Western ethnographic approaches by examining Mesoamerican relational ontologies. He examines how personhood for Maya peoples is not bound within corporal housings. Astor-Aguilera delineates Indigenous American, including Mesoamerican and Maya, vital essences as related to humans, nonhuman animals, plants, land and meteorological phenomena. He documents how the Indigenous American behavioural environment is potentially sentient and volition-laden. His ethnographic research documents how for the Maya a person is intersubjectively categorically surpassed in that animate affordances can potentially be granted to everything that surrounds his consultants. He argues that exploring ontological difference from ancient to contemporary peoples, in his case Native Americans, Mesoamericans and the Maya, allows us to produce not-so-Cartesian distorted histories. A further illustration of the benefits accruing from dialogue among people with diverse interests – and reasons for those interests – in ontology, knowledges, ecologies, materialities and animisms is provided by Katie Glaskin. Engaging with Aboriginal Australian Bardi and Jawi people, she reflects on their relations with saltwater domains and the larger-than-human community involved with it. In particular, she considers how their attentiveness to the world, informed by a cosmology taught in multiple, overlapping ways, allows people to infer the unseen and invisible from that which is seen. That which is visual and material indicates acts and relations that are, perhaps, less accessible but equally vital to people’s well-being. In the final chapter of Part 3, Maureen Matthews and Roger Roulette revisit a much cited conversation between an Anishinaabe elder, Kiiwiich, and the anthropologist Irving Hallowell about the animacy of stones. Others in this book have noted this conversation and its value in our shared efforts to better

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understand relations, animism and materiality. Matthews and Roulette provide an excellent conclusion to this book because they consider how material objects originating within Kiiwiich’s Anishinaabe community have been treated (physically and intellectually) within Canadian museums as well as within several Indigenous communities. The politically charged and culturally contested repatriation of a drum (among other things) is the context for Matthews’ and Roulette’s argument that personhood and agency are emergent and creative of different, sometimes conflicting relationships. There is, then, nothing static or merely categorical about materials and materiality. The participation of things in varied communities or life-worlds requires and rewards the kind of careful attention illustrated by the contributors to this book. Our ethnographically informed and dialogically committed chapters develop and provoke further thought and make a clarion call to develop the discussion further, both more critically but also with closer attention to the realities of people living within relational ontologies among diverse communities. The “turn” to materials or things has radically propelled recent discussions, leading many of us, as scholars, to rethink objects as subjects in our reflections on archaeological and ethnological data within our shared world. We are provoked by efforts to understand the ways in which many people relate to the world as a relational community and to apply our understanding and reflection to our own everyday and scholarly contexts and realities.

Capitalizing terms As a final, but important, note on terms: Some authors (including the editors) elect to use and/or capitalize terms such as western/Western, modern/ Modern and indigenous/Indigenous. These words often carry heavy loads and, if we have not chosen to discuss or justify our particular uses, this is not because we are unaware or uninterested in them. It is clear to us that “Western” now labels global phenomena and that “Modern” is not an objective synonym of “contemporary” but one way of identifying a project. Or, more carefully (if not more precisely), it is a shorthand for a distillation of a heuristic device which, with varying degrees of success, invites open-ended reflection on and discussion of an ongoing and contested (ongoing-while-contested) project. Most relevantly here, this Modern project constructs persons as individuals and propels human separatism from the world. The simultaneous composing of individuals as citizens of Nation States and as consumers in globalized capitalism (i.e. members of assemblages) does not contradict the inculcated effort to individualize (let alone to individuate), but it does tell us that individuals are also relations, dividuals and kin. The particular uses to which this complex of terms (Modern and individual as much as relations, dividual and kin) are put needs careful attention and further debate. That there is no pure form or bounded exemplar of “the Modern” does not detract from the utility of

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the term; indeed it encapsulates the heuristic value of a term that should not be allowed to reify any “us and them” contrast. As many of the contributors here argue, “we” (whoever we think we are) are often quite like “them” – even when “they” happen to be animate rocks or sacred statues. Similarly, the terms “indigenous” and “Indigenous” might be synonymous in some contexts, referring to communities which self-identify in ways that the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) indicates. However, for some authors in this book, “indigenous” is more broadly applicable, pointing to the origins (e.g. of persons, oranges or chickens) in particular places at some point in time. This allows for a capitalized “Indigenous” to indicate more specific projects of community or world construction in which colonialization, marginalization and the extinguishing, distancing and other manoeuvres of (heuristically or pointedly) so-called “Modern Western cultures” are contested. Such modes of Indigeneity are not merely reactive (let alone reactionary) but involve creative exploration of the contemporary value and use of customary practices, processes and protocols (see Allen 2012; building on Jahnke 2006). It is this vitality that encourages us to propose that increased dialogue with Indigenous people about ontologies, relations, things and other persons will be immensely fruitful. It is possible that both “Modern” and “Indigenous” should be re-thought and re-spoken in more verb-like ways. Riffing off Paul C. Johnson’s (2005) proposal of a distinction between “indigenizing” and “universalizing”, we could propose the replacement of the seemingly fixed categories, Modern and Indigenous, with terms that emphasize relations: Modernizing and Indigenizing. Such a move might reinforce our other efforts to enrich understanding and debate about the lively materials and the material lives of all persons or relations, human or otherwise.

References Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Abram, David. 2010. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Random House. Allen, Chadwick. 2012. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Nebraska Press. Astor-Aguilera, Miguel. 2017. “Annotation: Science, Animism, & Personhood.” In David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason S. Robert (eds.) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. pp. 34–42, 181–182. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Benveniste, Emile. 1971 [1966]. Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” In Current Anthropology, 40: S67–S91.

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Braddock, Christopher. 2017. Animism in Art and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Charbonnier, Pierre, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish. 2017. “Introduction.” In Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish (eds.) Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 1–23. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giraldo Herrera, César E. 2018. Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guston, David H., Ed Finn, and Jason S. Robert. 2017. “Preface.” In David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason S. Robert (eds.) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. pp. xi–xviii. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1960. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Stanley Diamond (ed.) Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 19–52. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1971 [1942]. The Role of Conjuring in Saulteaux Society. New York: Octagon Books. Henare, Amira, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.). 2007. Thinking through Things: Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Hutchings, Tim, and Joanne McKenzie (eds.). 2017. Materiality and the Study of Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred. London: Routledge. Jahnke, Robert. 2006. “Māori Art towards the Millennium.” In M. Mulholland and contributors (eds.) State of the Māori Nation: Twenty-First Century Issues in Aotearoa. Auckland: Reed. pp. 41–51. Johnson, Paul C. 2005. “Migrating Bodies, Circulating Signs: Brazilian Candomblé and the Garifuna of the Caribbean and the Category of Indigenous Religions.” In Graham Harvey and Charles D. Thomson (eds.) Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp. 37–51. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2017. “Thinking with Thinking Forests.” In Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish (eds.) Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 181–199. Kopenawa, Davi, and Albert Bruce. 2013. The Falling Sky. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel (eds.). 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Karlsruhe: ZKM. Marriott, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism.” In Bruce Kapferer (ed.) Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior. Philadelphia: ISHI. pp. 109–142. Morrison, Kenneth M. 2013. “Animism and a Proposal for a Post-Cartesian Anthropology.” In Graham Harvey (ed.) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. London: Routledge. pp. 38–52. Robinson, Charles E. 2017. “Introduction.” In David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason S. Robert (eds.) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers,

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and Creators of All Kinds. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. pp. xxiii–xxxv. Sahlins, Marshall. 2014. “On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture”. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1): 281–290. Salmon, Gildas. 2017. “On Ontological Delegation: The Birth of Neoclassical Anthropology.” In Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish (eds.) Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 41–60. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1992 [1986]. From the Enemy’s Point of View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weston, Kath. 2017. Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World. Durham: Duke University Press. Willerslev, Rane. 2013. “Taking Animism Seriously, But Perhaps Not Too Seriously?” In Religion and Society, 4: 41–57.

Part 1

Relations

1

On the ontological scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture1 Marshall Sahlins

Not to quibble: One can accept the empirical reality of Philippe Descola’s fourfold differentiation of animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. Anyone not persuaded by Beyond Nature and Culture (Descola 2013) would be hard put to maintain such skepticism if they had seen the exposition of images of these systems mounted by Philippe at Quai Branly (Descola 2010). My reading of the ethnography, however, is that they are not equipollent ontologies, inasmuch as humanity is the common ground of being in totemism and analogism as it is in animism proper. Whether one takes Philippe’s determination of animism as “the attribution by humans to nonhumans of an interiority identical to one’s own” (2013: 129), or something like Graham Harvey’s “animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and life is always lived in relationship with others” (2006: xi), these notions of the subjective personhood of nonhuman beings apply as well to the archetypal totemism of Aboriginal Australians and the exemplary analogism of native Hawaiians as they do to the paradigmatic animism of Amazonia. Rather than radically distinct ontologies, here are so many different organizations of the same animic principles. Classical animism is a communal form, in the sense that all human individuals share essentially the same kinds of relationships to all nonhuman persons. Totemism is segmentary animism, in the sense that different nonhuman persons, as species-beings, are substantively identified with different human collectives, such as lineages and clans. (Apologies to Marx for this adaptation of “species-being.”) Analogism is hierarchical animism, in the sense that the differentiated plenitude of what there is encompassed in the being of cosmocratic god-persons and manifests as so many instantiations of the anthropomorphic deity. Sharing the same animic ground, each of these predominant types, moreover, may include elements of the others as subdominant forms: The way that Amerindian communal animism also knows a hierarchical aspect insofar as the spirit masters of game animals rule the individuals of their species; as likewise in Australian totemism the Dreamtime ancestors encompass their animal and human descendants. For its part, the analogism or hierarchical animism of Hawaiians includes a totemic element in the form of ancestors

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incarnated in natural species thereupon distinctively associated with their descendants. These are not ad hoc historical mixtures of ontologies, however, but so many expressions of the same animic subjectivity, apparently depending on the context in which the nonhuman persons figure: whether mythical, ritual, magical, technical, or shamanic; collective or individual; dreamed or experienced; and so forth. Moreover, the several animic orders are themselves marked forms of a more generic anthropomorphism: a disposition for personification which, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro observes, is also our own default way of talking about institutions, nations, ships, and many other things, absent a naturalistic take on them (personal communication). Granted the attributes of personhood, such as perspectivism, peter out through this series, becoming something of an ontology reduced to an epistemology in the default anthropomorphism, and presumably disappearing altogether in scientific naturalism. Even so, we know a physics whose subject matter is “a world of ‘bodies’ that behave according to ‘laws’” – to cite one of Eduardo’s throwaway pearls (2012: 118n) – let alone banks that screw people, political parties that war on women, corporations that as legal persons have freedom of speech, or universities that trade their reputations for money. I won’t even talk about the human nature of our pets, let alone our animal fables, since I have only about eight pages left to describe the universe: an alternate universe to Philippe’s fourfold table, as shown in the accompanying tree diagram (Figure 1.1).

ONTOLOGIES

ANTHROPOMORPHISM

ANIMISM

“Animism” Totemism (communal animism)

(segmentary animism)

Analogism Default Anthropomorphism

Naturalism

(hierarchical animism)

(+)

(–) personhood

Figure 1.1 Ontological relationships

Ontological scheme of Beyond Nature, Culture

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Discussing the mythology of totemism in South Arnhem Land, Australia, Philippe notes a certain resemblance to many Amazonian narratives. “In both cases, the beings whose adventures are recounted are certainly a mixture of humans and nonhumans living within a regime that is already cultural and social through and through” (2013: 163). Beside such mixed beings of The Dreaming, moreover, there are even more purely animic forms, such as the sun, which, the Aranda tell in myth, came to Earth in the form of a woman and a member of a certain section. Accordingly, the sun “is regarded as having a definite relationship to various individuals, just as a human being of that class has” (Spencer and Gillen [1904] 1969: 624). It seems, then, that the facts are not at issue so much as the conceptual value one would attribute to them. Despite what is to all appearances a common animic ontology, Philippe argues that Australian totemism offers a “striking contrast” to Amazonian animism in three related ways – which, I would argue, merely show that totemism is the animism of segmentary collectives. First, the Australian totems are generally species-beings, primarily animal and plant species; hence realist types of which individual members are tokens, by contrast to the interpersonal relationships of humans and nonhumans in Amazonian animism. In this classificatory regard, the totemic species are coordinate with their human affiliates, likewise organized in collective entities with a class identity such as clans, moieties, sections, and the like. Because the human and nonhuman subjects are collective, however, and individuals interact as instances of them, this should not make their relationship any less animic. Second, whereas in Amazonian animism, human and nonhuman persons develop out of common human origins, the Australian totemic groups have separate and distinct beginnings, being the sui generis creations of their independent Dreamtime ancestors – which is simply the logicalcum-etiological corollary of their status as collectives of different kinds. This structural differentiation also applies to the third contrast: the substantive identity of humans with their respective totems – a physical and subjective continuity in Philippe’s system – explicitly conceived in terms of the kinship or mutuality of being of the human group and totemic species, by contrast to the different physical identities (if similar interiorities) of humans and others in animist regimes. In sum, totemism is a segmentary animism of differentiated collectives composed of conspecific human and nonhuman subjects. (Perhaps it goes without saying that such is not exactly the animism of Latourian collectives that include inorganic “agents” who are somehow equivalent to intentional and cultural humans.) If indeed the totemic beings of Australian Aboriginals live in “a regime that is already cultural and social through and through,” then the resemblances of this totemism to the prototypical animism do not end there. Philippe’s characterization of the conspecific identity of humans and their totem species as “hybridity,” a mixture of human and totem, rather leaves hanging the question of in just what way, in terms of interiority and physicality, the human

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aspect of actual kangaroos or parrots comes in. We know that humans in totemic systems may have purported resemblances to their animal fellows in the way of birthmarks or behavioral dispositions, but what about the existing animals? In what respects are they human? From my own brief perusals of the ethnography I cannot answer that interesting question  – unless the two or three examples of perspectivism in Strehlow’s Aranda Traditions ([1947] 1968: 37, 140) represent something more than a subdominant version of animism that is virtually as good as it gets in Amazonia. The narrative about the red kangaroos and their father’s sisters, the mulga parrots, for instance: parrots whose calls during the day warn their kangaroo nephews of the approach of human hunters. During the night in the netherworld, however, the animals assume human form themselves and interact in cultural terms. Indeed the tradition ironically doubles down on the cultural aspect, as the mulga aunt is equipped with a hide bag made of kangaroo skin in which she as a human woman brings water to her brother’s son, the kangaroo in the shape of a man. Moreover, the narrative concludes with an incident of pure perspectivism when the next morning the hunter-persons perceive that bag as the place on the ground where the kangaroos licked for water. What humans perceive as a natural soak frequented by kangaroos, the animals know as waterbags manufactured from kangaroo hide. Taken with the sometime appearance of the sun and moon as female and male humans, this totemism has the essentials of an all-around animism. A caveat: I am not claiming that totemic species are merely the symbolic reflexes of social groups that in some sense preexist them as real-empirical models – as in the Durkheimian theory of “collective representations” that has reigned for too long in our social sciences. As the diacritic principle of social differentiation, that which constitutes the identity and nature of the human group, totemism is an integral condition of its formation. Rather than a post hoc reflection of a social fact, the totemic identity may well be present from the creation, marking the emergence of the group itself; or else, as an add-on secondary totem, it figures instrumentally in the group’s interested differentiation from others. The totem is an enduring mark of a politics of difference, a schismogenic process, which helps explain why the array of totemic identities among a given people is often wildly unsystematic. Lévi-Strauss’s (1963) notions of totemism as a natural taxonomy of social entities notwithstanding, ethnographic reports of totemism generally have all the classificatory logic of the scheme of animals in the apocryphal Chinese encyclopedia described by Borges (1964) that included embalmed ones, suckling pigs, and animals that at a distance resemble flies. But then, as Lévi-Strauss protested in The Savage Mind (1966), structuralism is only a science of the superstructures: practice he ceded to Marx. Even so, he did acknowledge that conspecific relations between humans and their totems could be integral to the phenomenon, and that historically the creation of totemic entities could be practically opportunistic even as it is logically motivated – witness Whitemen as an Australian totem.

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Precisely in this connection, in his excellent ethnography of the Manambu of the Middle Sepik, Simon Harrison (1990) describes a competitive process of totemic formation in which the roster of totems is characteristically expanded by political moves that appropriate beings from more powerful cultural realms beyond it. This sort of homage to the powers of alterity – and the alterity of powers – is well known to the Sepik peoples, and it involves them in exchanges of a great variety of ritual, material, and monetary items. So when a certain Manambu subclan claimed the clothing of colonial officials as one of its totems – on the ground that its honorific address form was homonymous with the term for the Europeanintroduced laplap – it was trumped by a rival subclan who claimed the Queen herself for their totem – on the ground that the Australian government crest on school exercise books depicted one of its own traditional totems, the cassowary (76–77). (Actually, it was an emu, the Australian colonials’ own native totem.) The analogic moves here, as we shall see, are typical tactics of hierarchical animism (aka analogism), and they are likewise employed by Manambu to form a large series of natural and cultural species under the domination of totemic ancestors: that is, as visible instantiations of them. But then, the Manambu, for all their totemism, also know the essentials of Amazonian animism, including perspectivism – even as Harrison more than once likens Manambu totemism to the Aranda’s (ibid: 7, 51). Like the Aranda, Manambu subclan members are kinsmen and conspecifics of their totems by virtue of their common creation by the totemic ancestors. Also rather like Aranda, then, is the (literal) organic solidarity of the Manambu totemic system: The consubstantiality of people and their totems is such that in allowing one another the use of their totemic resources, “they nourish each other with their own flesh” (46). The totemic ancestors are men and women themselves, but Manambu cannot see them as such: They do not show themselves to living people in their true forms. “They are only visible as animal and plant species, as rivers, mountains, ritual sacra, and so on: that is, only in their outward, transfigured forms.” For beside the visible world of humans, there is a concealed world in which things exist “in their real forms, which are human forms” (ibid). As it was explained to Harrison, in words that could have been spoken by an Amazonian Arawete, down to the matter of bodily differences in perception: “You realize that this tree isn’t really a tree. It is actually a man, but you and I can’t see him because we are only living people. Our eyes aren’t clear. We are not able to see things as they really are” (ibid). Or again: “Suppose a man fells his breadfruit trees to take their fruits. The fathers [the totemic ancestors] . . . would become angry with him for destroying his trees, saying to themselves, those are our very bones he has cut. Or suppose the man harvests the immature fruits. . . . The fathers would see this and be angry, saying to themselves, why has he damaged the tree? It is not just a tree, it is a man. It has a name, and a father, a mother, and a mother’s brother, and the fruits are his children” (48).

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Everything considered, here too is a dominant totemism with all the elements of classical animism and hierarchical analogism – all on the one ontological ground of humanity. Indeed, Harrison describes Manambu cosmology as “a systematic animism, a thorough-going socialisation or humanisation of the conceived elements of the world. It projects notions of human identity and agency on animals, plants, ritual objects, and all the rest: They share kinship with human beings, have names, belong to subclans, marry and so forth” (ibid: 58). “Projection” may not accurately describe a system in which the totemic ancestors and living men and women are each other’s namesakes, and the same names are the names of mountains, rivers, plants, animals, and other things “because these things are in themselves in reality men and women” (56). The Manambu are not unique in such respects among neighboring peoples, as the regional extension of clanic relations has been known to facilitate the extraordinary trading practices for which the Sepik area is famous. But there is not space to speak of this, nor of the animic parallels in Africa, North America, and elsewhere. Suffice it to note that the totemic concepts of the Dinka, as so well described in Godfrey Lienhardt’s Divinity and Experience (1961), provide one possible answer to the problem posed in the Australian case concerning the character of the human aspect of totemic animals. Given the “hybridity” or shared being of totemic species with their human congeners, as Philippe has emphasized, the Dinka answer is quite logical: the totem species is the inner nature of its human fellows, and the human species is the inner nature of its totem fellows; hence some men may change into lions, and vice versa (117, 134, 171).2 I turn to the animism of analogism, privileging in particular the Polynesian version as instanced in Hawai’i, since by comparison with Philippe’s exposition of other such ontologies, we have in Valerio Valeri’s Kingship and Sacrifice (1985) a sustained analysis of the unifying human logic in an otherwise bewildering plenitude of beings and things – or rather things as humanoid beings. For here the universe is encompassed in the persons of the great cosmocratic deities, each ruling a domain (kuleana) consisting of living humans, anthropomorphic images, and a multitude of cultural activities and natural phenomena. All of these entities are so many of the gods’ “myriad bodies” (kino lau), forms in which the deity is instantiated in myth, ritual, and ritualized practices – including technical activities. The myriad forms of the god-person endow these activities with the power of his being – or what’s a meta for? “By transforming himself into different myriad bodies,” Valeri writes, “by his power of metamorphosis, the deity accomplishes wondrous miracles (hana mana [works of mana])” (12). There are four of these great male deities – Ku, Kane, Kanaloa, and Lono – and besides living persons and anthropomorphic images, the phenomena in which they are manifest include: colors; directions; days of the week; periods of the day; natural and inorganic phenomena such as thunder, light, seawater, and so on; plants; animals; seasons; certain smells; cloud formations;

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a particular number; birdsongs; and so forth (ibid: 15ff). Valeri summarizes the doctrine: Deities are characterized by two kinds of “bodies,” that is, concrete manifestations: natural bodies and the human body. This opposition, then, is also the opposition of the many and the one: it signifies that the human species is the common element underlying all natural manifestations of the divine. Thus all nature has a human dimension, which is manifested by the fact that all gods equally represent the human species. But each god is also particularized by his connection with specific natural phenomena or groups of phenomena. These signify only some predicate or predicates of the human species. . . . The relationship between the natural bodies of the god and the human predicates he typifies is a sign relationship. The natural objects signify these predicates because of metaphorical or metonymic connections with them. (31) In other words, there is an animic system to the ontic analogies. They are not just opportunistically motivated connections formulated from a plenitude that has itself been generated by some sort of narcissism of minor differences. Not just an ontology of tristes tropes, one might say, as in Philippe’s notion of a world consisting of differences infinitely multiplied but recuperable by resemblances that would be “the hoped-for means of making that world intelligible and bearable” (2013: 202). Rather, the tropic logic is consistently motivated by the connections of phenomena to the human attributes of the god and/or to the human activities over which he presides. The multiplicity is itself conceptually generated by the tropic logic of the cosmocratic deity’s large presence in human affairs. The god Ku governs activities pertaining to and performed by human males: war; fishing; the construction of canoes, temples, images, and so forth; hence many natural manifestations of Ku are signs of these activities, of materials involved in them, or of their places in space and time. The dog, hog, and game fish are bodies of Ku, as they metaphorically evoke the warrior and his ways. All the plant species that instantiate Ku are those used in the rituals or technical activities of war and fishing: the woods of canoe construction, for example; the kauila tree used for making spears; the lehua tree from which an important Ku image is carved – but then metonymically also the birds whose feathers adorn the god images and are notably captured when the lehua blooms. Things that evoke virility because they are erect or straight – the word “ku” itself means “erect, straight” – are manifestations of Ku. High mountains; the digging stick; the high, hard, and straight koa tree; “everything that is straight, vertical, high, or deep in nature tends to be associated with Ku.” So is the period of the month devoted to Ku ritual, as well as the month of the year when the war temples are opened. And so forth (Valeri 1985: 11–12).

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It is worth noting the Hawaiians also had relationships quite like totemism with various animal species, known as ‘aumakua gods, as well as traces of a paradigmatic animism. The ‘aumakua were mainly ancestors who were incarnated at death in various animal species, or sometimes marked individuals thereof, and then worshiped by their descendants. The natural species were considered bodies of the ancestor and conspecific kinsmen of their descendants. Hence again, humanity is the generic ground, the species the differential form. The ‘aumakua animals could take human forms, including anthropomorphic images, or manifest themselves in mediums. Yet because the kinship congregations of the ‘aumakua are ephemeral, being bilateral assemblages consisting of, and known as, the followers of a notable person, these nonhuman deities do not have the corporate species-life of, say, the totems of clanic systems. Less anthropomorphism. The multiplicity of things in analogic systems represents the tropic reach of cosmocratic divinity – excusing the pun, something like the providential Hand of God in Christendom. Or, were there space, one could go back in Indo-European analogism to the gods of human form in the Rig Veda, whose bodily parts are identified with the natural phenomena in their power. Or again, to the abundant evidence of the like in China, beginning with Sifang, the system of the four quarters, already in place in Shang times, each of which was associated with a season, a color, certain numbers, and a variety of natural phenomena (Wang 2000). Brought into play as anthropomorphic beings in the royal divinations, these entities were means by which “the Shang perceived the will of Di [the High God].” Aihe Wang writes: “Natural phenomena were perceived as the messengers or ministers of the high god, ascending and descending through the Sifang [four quarters], passing Di’s messages and running his errands. These phenomena included rain, clouds, wind, thunder, and rainbows, among others. For instance, the wind was considered the minister of the high god” (31). A complement would be Granet’s elaborate descriptions of the system of metaphors by which the Son of Heaven in Zhou and Han would “dazzlingly manifest his being in conformity with the system of the universe” in a “sovereign action which . . . radiated from the capital” (1975: 68–69) and thereby ordered the change of seasons and indeed the All Under Heaven.3 A final word about anthropomorphism: It could be said of the doctrine of divine embodiments in Hawai’i that if it is animic, in the sense that animals, plants, and a host of other phenomena are endowed with personhood, then this personhood is the deity’s, not their own. Accordingly, lacking their own souls, consciousness, community, ability to communicate, in brief personhood in and for themselves, these nonhuman beings have a comparatively diminished form of human attributes. Further, our own default anthropomorphism is even more impoverished, since the subjectivity at issue is virtually reduced to an ad hoc intentionality. That said, however, we should not let the conceit of naturalism obscure how easily and often we endow social “bodies” (there you go!), as well as

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some animals and inorganic things, with human personality traits. Consider these items from the front section of a randomly selected issue of the New York Times, November 7, 2013: “Ruble hopes to join ranks of dollar and euro”; “G.O.P. weighs limiting clout of right wing”; “While Nepal’s main political parties disagree fiercely .  .  . the embrace of democracy is now widely shared”; “Food companies claim victory”; “Iowa town’s vote delivers rebuke”; “Rwanda has repeatedly spoken out against the Security Council”; “[The Turkish government] is torn between its Islamist sympathies and its desire to become a member of the European Union.” Enough said. Indeed, anthropomorphism goes without saying. In such respects, we are one of the others.

Notes 1 First published in 2014 in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 281–290. Reprinted by kind permission of the author and the editor of Hau. A preliminary version of this discussion of Descola was delivered publicly as part of “The ontological turn in French philosophical anthropology,” an executive session of the AAA Annual Meeting, Chicago, November 23, 2013. 2 Dinka also knew a certain perspectivism, telling, for instance, of the black cobras who live as human men and women in their own underworld realm (ibid: 116–117). 3 “It would be easy to use the symbolic value of the Numbers, of that magic cross oriented in time and space [laid out in the Ming T’ang, the Hall of Distinction], to procure an exact rotation of the seasons: to each numerical pair there corresponded a pair of cyclic signs marking the days, a note on the musical scale, an animal species, a part of the house, a part of the body, a taste, a smell, a colour, a sacrificial animal, a cereal, an element. For the year to turn along with the symbolic cross, it was necessary and sufficient that the king, by his clothes, his food, and so on, dazzlingly manifest his being in conformity with the system of the universe. Winter was brought about when dressed in black, with black stones at his belt, using black horses, a dark carriage, a black standard, the king took up position at the NW corner of the Ming T’ang and ate millet and pork. Did he eat mutton and wheat? Did he wear green with green stones? Was his flag green? Did he give pride of place to sour taste, rank smell, the spleen of victims, the number 8, the note chio? Did he put himself in the NE corner of the Ming T’ang? Spring was coming. . . . The sovereign action which . . . radiated from the capital to the nine provinces of the Chinese Confederation, was performed by the king as a colleague of Heaven, in whose name he promulgated the Calendar” (ibid: 68–69).

References Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. “The analytical language of John Wilkins.” In Other inquisitions, 1937–1952, 101–105. Translated by Ruth L. Sims. Austin: University of Texas Press. Descola, Philippe. 2010. La fabrique des images: Visions du monde et forms de représentation. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly; Somogy Éditions d’Art. ———. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Granet, Marcel. 1975. The religion of the Chinese people. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Harrison, Simon J. 1990. Stealing other people’s names: History and politics in a Sepik river cosmology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, Graham. 2006. Animism: Respecting the living world. New York: Columbia University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Totemism. Boston: Beacon. ———. 1966. The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1961. Divinity and experience: The religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spencer, Baldwin, and Francis J. Gillen. [1904] 1969. The Western tribes of Central Australia. Oosterhout: Anthropological Publications. Strehlow, Theodore G. H. [1947] 1968. Aranda traditions. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Valeri, Valerio. 1985. Kingship and sacrifice: Ritual and society in ancient Hawaii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2012. Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere. Masterclass Series 1. Manchester: Hau Network of Ethnographic Theory. Wang, Aihe. 2000. Cosmology and political culture in early China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Persons or relatives? Animistic scales of practice and imagination Nurit Bird-David

In this chapter I trouble the tradition started by Irving Hallowell that places personhood at the centre of studying animistic worlds. I suggest that instead of “the person”, we perhaps should think about “the relative” as a productive concept for approaching hunter-gatherers’ animistic cosmos. This proposal partly builds on and partly revises my early work. Two decades ago, I proposed that various kinship relations are salient in foragers’ cosmos. I suggested that parental, procreative, affinal and namesake relations are respectively central in the animistic worlds of tropical forest, Australian Aboriginal, North American Indian and South African hunter-gatherers (Bird-David 1990, 1993). However, I then turned after Hallowell, to “the person” as analytical currency in the study of animism. I argued that the animistic person, transcending human/nonhuman distinctions, is relational and situational (Bird-David 1999). Studies of kinship, personhood and animism have since been newly aligned. Among others, Marshall Sahlins (2013) now calls for disengaging the entangled studies of kinship and personhood and, instead, for approaching kinship as being about “the mutuality of being”, “the participation of kin in each other’s lives”. Viveiros de Castro (2009) shows how the study of animism can open new ways for approaching kinship. My proposal, which is part of a larger project that I briefly introduce in a moment, resonates with these approaches. In it, I try to rethink animism through kinship; in particular, here, suggesting that “relatives” (in the plural) is a more productive concept than “the person” for exploring huntergatherers’ animistic cosmos. My analytical platform for making this proposal is a broad argument that I develop in an ethnographic book (2017a, also see 2017b, 2017c) about the distortive effect of what I call the scale-blind regime in the anthropology of tinyscale hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities. By “scale-blind” I refer to ethnographic and comparative analysis which overlooks, if not obscures, the population size of hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities, as well as the modes of plural life their size potentiates, and their horizons of imagination. A central premise in this larger project is that scale/ing is something that people do and so, in Bruno Latour’s words, we should explore how and what “actors achieve by scaling, spacing and contextualizing each other”

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(2005: 183, original emphasis). It is not the sociologist’s job to decide in the actor’s stead, Latour suggested, what groups make up the world. “Actors should not be denied”, he writes, “one of their most important privileges, namely, that they are the ones defining relative scale” (ibid: 184). While Latour generally focuses on the Moderns and their large-scaling projects, neither should hunter-gatherer-cultivator people be denied that privilege, which is precisely what we do in scale-blind ethnography and analysis. Instead of ignoring, even concealing, these groups’ tinyscale/ing projects, I suggest that it would be productive to explore them as a frame of thought and resource involving particular ways of seeing and making the world, just as we do in the case of the modern large-scale/ing. It would be productive to examine the kind of plurality and diversity that tinyscale/ing potentiates and limits, just as we examine large-scale/ing’s particular senses of plurality, complexity and diversity. And, lastly, it would be productive to explore styles of imagining communities at the tiny end of the scalar spectrum, just as styles of imagining large-scale communities are explored. In my broader project, I develop scale-sensitive ethnography and analysis of a hunter-gatherer people’s life forms, lived-world and ontology. Here, from this perspective I address the idea of animistic person and society. Anthropologists who have not done fieldwork with hunter-gatherercultivator groups might not be aware of the tininess of these groups, who enter the comparative mill as any large-scale society would (the achievement of our scale-blind regime). Nor would they realize the conceptual problems of estimating the population’s size, leave alone the logistic and political problems. During my fieldwork with South Indian foragers I lived in a small hamlet. The number of its dwellers, all close relatives, fluctuated around a dozen men, women and children. They kept in close touch with relatives living in four other hamlets, two to four hours’ walk away in the forest. They constantly visited and were visited by them. The foragers I studied designated themselves “nama sonta” (our own, relatives). “Our sonta” very often referred to this larger aggregate of relatives, altogether less than 100, and it contextually expanded to encompass all sorts of others, including forest nonhuman co-dwellers. Make no mistake about it, these foragers were not isolated – far from it. However, these fewer than 100 relatives were the core and the reference point of engaging we-centrically with close others. Other people living in the area called them Nayaka. “Identity experts” (a term I borrow from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro 2012: 180) of all sorts, bureaucrats and scholars, associated this community of relatives with the Scheduled Tribe Nayaka, officially known as Kattunayaka, i.e., (katu meaning forest) forest Nayaka. Its population was estimated at 1300 in 1981 – and at nearly 50,000 in 2014. The apparent fast and sudden increase is the result of growing claims of Nayaka identity that bestows various entitlements on its holders under a positive discrimination policy known as “the reservations”. Clearly, who those calling themselves nama sonta count as “us, our own” substantially varies from whom the Government recognizes

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as Kattunayaka. As becomes clearer later, the concept of “a Kattu/Nayaka person” has unlimited scalability. Any number of people can make claims for this identity, wherever they live, while inclusion as “one of our own”, “us, relatives” in the indigenous sense, is restricted to those who constantly participate each in the life of the others, and so constitute and reconstitute themselves as relatives. Many indigenous people designate themselves by words translated as real people, humans, relatives etc., while others designate them by ethnonyms, and these multiply, confusingly and often derogatorily (see more in BirdDavid 2017b). While the problems of estimating the size of such populations are similar to the ones described previously for those called Kattu/Nayaka, it is generally agreed that their order of size is very small. These populations are generally estimated on the order of “a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants” (Smith and Wishnie 2000: 493, n. 1). For hunter-gatherers, the so-called magic numbers are local group sizes of 25–50 men, women and children and the entire population: 500. These estimates mean that a huntergatherer local group’s size is smaller than an average-size university class of students, and the entire population is less than the student cohort of some anthropology departments. The locals’ horizons of concern cannot even be gauged since, unlike the population size, it has never been an issue in the scale-bind regime. We can safely assume though that these peoples do not share the spirit and horizons of imagination that led Europeans to explore and colonize worlds in the far corners of the earth and beyond, and to “discover” and study such peoples. With this scalar context in mind, can the concept of the “person” be productive in studying the worlds of such people?

Person and sonta (relatives) The scale-blind ethos de facto perpetuates large-scale biased standards in the study of miniscule indigenous societies. The use of “person” as overall conceptual currency is one of those standards. “Person” is not usually a direct translation of any vernacular term but, rather, an analytic (etic) concept rooted in Western cultural history (Mauss 1985 [1938]). As it is exported into indigenous worlds, the “person” concept carries into them focus on the singular being, and on the community as a multiplication thereof, i.e., many “one person”. Anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern and others sophisticatedly redressed identifying the “person” with its modern dominant form “the individual”, e.g., arguing that the person is the composite site of multiple others, or a composite of relations, a dividual. However, they have but pluralized and relationalized the “person”, which as Sahlins (2013: 2) observed still describes a singular being, a dividual-individual type. The “person” concept co-carries into the indigenous world a concept of community/ society that is constitutive of multiple persons, a series of persons, unlimited in number. The “community”, in this understanding, doubles as a whole

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constitutive of persons as its parts: It is personified and figured as a megaperson of sorts that makes decision, takes actions, self-designates itself, etc. As general analytical currency, “person” and “society” carry these ontological senses into tinyscale(ed) hunter-gatherers-cultivators’ worlds, ignoring their scalar context. Now, amidst the multitudes of the Moderns, a single being may be and often is held in the centre of attention, and others are relegated to the background. In tiny forager communities, even if one wanted to, one would not be able to do so. The others are close fellows and relatives, who all are vividly present, at once, and they are too few for anyone to be ignored or for all to be anonymized and hypostatized as a Group. How do the concepts of “person” and “society”, so ontologically figured, affect exploring the animistic cosmos? When Irving Hallowell (1960) argued that the “person” for Ojibwa is an overarching category that contains various human and nonhuman types, he reversed the Western taxonomic hierarchy, in which humans are distinguished from others and only they can be persons. However, he upheld the concept of “person”. Generally, the animistic world, in the scholarly tradition that Hallowell pioneered, comprises sub-series of persons: human-persons, bear-persons, thunder-persons, stonepersons, etc. More recently, Philippe Descola (2013 [2005]) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2012) added the notion of “species societies” to debates on the animistic cosmos and the perspectivist one that I take as a sub-case of the former. In Descola’s vision, the animist world is constitutive of species-societies that are isomorphic with human societies. In Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s vision, additionally, the members of each species-society view others through the habitus of their “same” bodies, their “same” eyes, so sharing the “same” perspective on other species’ members. In both of these (scale-blind) visions, the animistic world is constitutive of multiple human and nonhuman societies, that are each constitutive of serial persons. These visions uncomfortably resonate with the ontological sense of a society constitutive of multiple persons, and they ignore scale. Moreover, to so figure societies is not at all trivial for people living in tiny groups, and especially not so for those living in tropical forest environments, most of all in the rich Amazonian ecosystem where, rather than sameness, diversity of beings is striking at any particular locale. My own earlier arguments for a relational animistic person, and even the earlier one on hunter-gatherers’ human-nonhuman kinship relations, has not been scale-sensitive enough, even though factoring immediacy into the analysis was a start in that direction. To say that the animistic person, and generally the world, are constitutive of relations is to standardize and serialize “the relation”, instead of (or additionally to) “person” and “society”, again, scale-blindly. “Person”, “society” and “relation”, thus, are problematic concepts with which to get a sense of the animistic cosmos of tiny hunter-gatherer-cultivator groups. I propose that “the relative” – nay, “relatives” (the change from singular

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to plural is crucial as I immediately explain) – opens productive analytical possibilities. The Nayaka idea of sonta as specific instantiation of the concept of relatives is good to think (to use a phrase popularized by Claude Lévi-Strauss 1969: 89). A common word also in other South Indian languages that refers to family and close kin, these foragers designate themselves by it in the sense of “our own, relatives, who live together”. Peculiarly, the Moderns can understand “relatives” as the plural of the singular instance “the relative”. Like “the person”, “the relative” in this understanding is a singular being and “relatives” are its multiplication. E.g., 100 relatives came to my wedding; or, 1300 relatives, who live dispersed in many countries, are connected on my family tree. This is the case even though “relative” diverges from “person” if only because one person exists but one relative cannot. Two are the minimal number of people who are both (and each) relatives. Contra to these modern connotations of “the relative”, the hunter-gatherers’ sense of “being relatives” resonates with Marshall Sahlins’ (2013) proposal to see kin as “mutual” beings, those who participate in one another’s life. Or, in fact, kinship is about the plurality of being, the participation of each in all [present] others’ lives. There rarely are in real life only two relatives; usually, and especially in small hunter-gatherer communities, relatives outnumber two, and all participate in one another’s lives. Contra such possible modern reading of “relatives”, sonta is a-priori plural (it is not the plural form of any word in the singular) and it is irreducibly plural (there cannot be one sonta; one can only be sontakar, one of the sonta, one of our own). Sonta is also used as a first-person plural possessive pronoun “our”. Sonta assembles those who, in living together or constantly visiting each other, constitute and reconstitute themselves as relatives, and in the process differentiate themselves each with respect to each of the others as relatives of one kind or another (as father, mother, older brother, brotherin-law, etc.). Sonta assembles diverse beings who live together. Diversity, if only in terms of gender, seniority, situationality and personality, is generic to and conspicuous in a small community of relatives. Sonta, moreover, encompasses diversity of bodily forms, and assembles all beings, including nonhumans, who so constantly engage with us, and share “our” home-area. In sharing our home place with us, they are sonta, and within the sonta they are further differentiated with respect each to the others. Sonta can encompass diverse beings; however, its horizons are limited to those plurally present (or who can be so frequently enough), and who participate each in all the others’ lives. Sonta extends outward from a focal core of close relatives, its edges are fuzzy, its diversity unlimited, but its horizons are those of personal reach. Some 50,000 people in India, including many living in towns, 800 kilometres away from the forest hamlets where I lived – who had never been there, and only read my and others’ works on these foragers – can claim each to be a Nayaka person. They cannot claim to be one of “our own, relatives”.

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Contrary to an animistic cosmos constitutive of species-persons belonging to their respective species-societies, these hunter-gatherers invite us to think about an animistic cosmos constitutive of diverse relatives, their diversity unlimited but the horizons are. Among many other hunter-gatherer-forager groups, nonhumans are regarded as relatives: the Ojibwa themselves so regarded other-than-human beings. Perhaps – this in any case is my broader hypothesis – rather than a world at large constitutive of persons when it comes to foragers, other-than-human beings who live within their horizons of practice and imaginations are relatives (in the sonta sense) and as such are subjects when they are related with.

Nayaka and Chewong mythical stories As a preliminary means of fleshing out this broad hypothesis, in the following I abridge a discussion of Nayaka stories recorded by Daniel Naveh during his 2003–4 fieldwork (2007), and Chewong myths recorded by Signe Howell (1984; see more in Bird-David 2017a, Chapter 5). Huge corpuses of myths and chants provide seemingly inexhaustible bases for exploring Amerindian cosmos; the same cannot be said for the foragers I worked with. When I started to study them in the late 1970s, they culturally invested in not relating about as much as with other creatures living in their world through trance-performances (see more in Bird-David 1999, 2004a, 2004b). This distinction was clearly pressed home by a respected and knowledgeable trance-performer, a “grandfather” relation to me in the field. About 75 years old, he was bent with the years and, walking with a stick, he provided for the needs of himself and his wife, who was blind, by gathering forest roots and fruits, and forest leaves which he sold to vendors in little roadside stalls (the vendors used the leaves as packing material for their cheap wares). He always appreciated the food I brought them when I came, and was patient and willing to talk with me for hours. Yet, for all his knowledge, willingness and patience, my repeated requests to hear local myths took me nowhere. Once he responded and told me that “right from the beginning of time, there were many couples of our yetta and yette (grandfathers and grandmothers), living here and there”. I excitedly waited for more but the story ended there. When I asked him to tell me about those grandfathers and grandmothers, who they were, how they lived, etc., he matter-of-factly suggested to me that I best personally meet them for myself when they come on the next “[trance] big visit” and learn for myself. During his fieldwork in 2003–4, with two Nayaka local groups living in the same geographic area as the group I have been working with yet too far away for their members to intermarry and keep in any regular contact, Daniel Naveh did hear and record two stories. The man who told Naveh the first story had heard it from his grandmother, and the man who told him the second story heard it from his grandfather. Both stories were related to Naveh in several sessions stretching over a few days and nights, when the narrators were pursuing their household chores (2007: 69).1 A synopsis of

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each story follows (for the full versions, see Naveh 2007: 68–73). The first one concerns a bear (cardi) and his human wife, and it is worthy of note that a similar story is described by Peter Gardner, who worked with the Paliyans, another forager group in that region (2000: 189–190). A woman who was eight months pregnant went to the river to fetch water. Having filled her pot, she left it on the riverbank while she went to urinate. A bear took the pot during her absence and poured out half the water, replacing it with earth. When the woman returned, she could not lift the pot, and the bear offered to carry it for her, on one condition: that if she gave birth to a daughter, she would give that daughter to him to be his wife. The woman subsequently did give birth to a daughter, and when the child grew up, the bear came and took her to live with him in his cave. Increasingly aware of her different needs and tastes, he fed her with honey and robbed passing wagons for rice and cloth. His wife gave birth to two bear cubs, and her relatives came to the cave to visit her. Her bear husband was away, and she did not offer them food. They came again, and this time the bear was at home, and he offered them food and ate with them. However, they tricked the bear and killed him. The bear cubs ran into the forest, their mother returned to her human relatives, and, ever since then, bears get angry when they encounter humans in the forest. In the second story, a forest buffalo cow (cati) found an abandoned human baby girl. She took her and raised her. As the bear in the first story had with respect to his wife, the cow began to observe her daughter’s different capabilities and needs: Her daughter spoke, she liked to eat rice, and she wanted clothes and vessels. The cow mother stole all of these things for her human daughter from the village. The village people succeeded in tracking the cow back to her cave, and there they found the human daughter. They came to the cave several times when the cow was away collecting food, and they tried to convince the human daughter to come with them to their village. But she refused, saying she wanted to live with her cow mother, and she called out to her cow mother to come to her. The villagers finally laid a trap for the cow mother, who fell in it and died. They took the human daughter to the village, but when they told her what had happened, she ran to the trap and jumped in, dying with her cow mother. Both stories dwell on particular, vivid cow and bear beings and their kinship relations with humans – not on buffalo or bear societies whose members share the same “buffalo” or “bear” body and perspective. The drama in the stories is not triggered by the protagonists’ different bodily habitus – cow mother and human daughter, bear husband and human wife. The differences between the protagonists unfold as they live together, the buffalo mother raising her human daughter and the bear-husband looking after his human wife. The protagonists realize the differences between them in and as they live together. Moreover, they accommodate these differences: The cow observes that her human daughter likes rice and dresses and obtains these things for her, and the bear obtains the honey his human wife likes to eat. The animal protagonists have no relatives of their kind that we hear

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about. They live in the forest within reach of the human “village”, a word that probably refers to the kind of tiny forest settlements in which the storytelling grandparents lived. The human protagonists appear to have a few close relatives: a father, an uncle, three relatives, etc. The drama in these stories is triggered by improper severing of contact with those relatives: The cow’s daughter does not want to visit her human relatives; the bear’s wife does not offer food to her visiting human relatives. These disrupted relations among human kin eventually lead to tragedy: The second story, especially, elaborates on the primacy of affective kinship over species-related difference. Instead of “species societies”, these stories depict the extension of kinship relations from the human village outward into the surrounding forest. Although I did not hear such stories as Naveh did, the Nayaka group I had worked with from time to time brought home from the forest fledgling creatures that had been deserted by their mothers (a practice also reported for Amerindian and other hunter-gatherer groups). I observed the adoption of a variety of orphaned animals, including monitor lizards, parrots, squirrels and mongoose. Women carried fledgling parrots and baby lizards wrapped in cloth tied around their waists. Lactating women extracted milk on the palm of their hands and fed it to these creatures. Turning next to the Chewong, 18 myths are included in Signe Howell’s book (1984: 253–277). Their protagonists include humans, animals and plants (spider, elephant, mango, pandanus, etc.). Many of the stories relate how they go about marrying and/or having children with each other, regardless of species differences and despite bodily limitations. For example, the vagina of the pandalus woman is full of thorns that complicate intercourse because it can kill humans who sleep with her. The protagonists in these myths negotiate and accommodate their distinctions. They can even strip off their animal bodies and wear other bodies. Chewong regard the body as bajo (a cloak) that can be put on and taken off. One myth relates how a man spears an elephant and follows the injured beast to its place, the journey taking him three days walking in the jungle. He arrives at a singular elephant house, whose dwellers take him to another house. There he cures the injured elephant and, in return, is given the latter’s two elephant daughters as wives. The man walks with his new elephant wives back toward his home place, but they take fright and return to their own home. He continues on to his home but, after a while, misses his wives and goes back with his mother to their place/land. Nonhuman members, in this story, initially live in different places but then they marry and live together, constituting a multispecies community.

Concluding notes The Nayaka stories and the Chewong myths suggest intimate worlds of interrelated human and nonhuman beings. Instead of worlds constitutive of human and nonhuman persons living in parallel isomorphic societies, here are small communities, human and nonhuman, who intermarry and

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so create multispecies settlements, communities of relatives. Neither the humans nor the nonhumans in these animistic worlds a priori exist as serialized person-beings. They are not, in other words, so many separate instances of species-persons of one kind or another. Instead, here communities are based and produced through kinship ties overriding bodily dissimilarities. Species is simply one of an individual’s attributes, alongside gender, age and personality, an attribute that has to be accommodated. Judging by these cases, indigenous ethnography then suggests two animistic world-options – first, multispecies communities of relatives and second, multiple human and nonhuman societies constitutive each of mono-species persons. Both models are feasible; none can be a priori assumed or ruled out. Ethnographers have to keep both options in mind when they do fieldwork and write their ethnographies. While the second model has previously been given much attention, I suggest that ethnographers working with groups that are miniscule societies, societies of relatives, should seriously consider also the first model as part of generally including in analysis these peoples’ own horizons of practice and imagination. Ethnographers, I submit, need to question the received model of ontologies comprising persons of various taxa living in their respective mono-species societies. They should openmindedly consider the second option, that of worlds of human inhabitants living in tiny communities of relatives composed of human and nonhuman relatives, and explore how “relatives” are figured in each case. The need for empirical investigation of these questions notwithstanding, and without excluding the possibility of the “mono-species societies of persons”, for me the generality of this model is questionable. This is so, if only for the reason that the idea of ethnicity and nation reverberates through it. It echoes, in other words, the modern world of nation-societies, each with its collective perspective on others, each with its shared bodily attributes (race) and territory (see more in Bird-David 2017b). I hypothesize that the first model, small multispecies communities of relatives, is more prevalent and more general than we may have realized. I urge scholars to keep an open mind to the possibility that indigenous peoples show us other alternatives to the alternatives we thought they show us.

Note 1 Both the spatial and the temporal distance between the groups Naveh and I respectively studied may account for the fact that he succeeded to record those stories, but so too may the fact that I specifically pursued myths. Noa Lavi, who worked with the same group I had been studying beginning in 2010, collected a few stories as yet not written down as I write this paper (Lavi, personal communication).

Bibliography Bird-David, Nurit. 1990. ‘The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters’. Current Anthropology 31(2): 183–196.

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———. 1993. ‘Tribal Metaphorization of Human-Nature Relatedness: A Comparative Analysis’. In Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, ed. K. Milton, 112–125. London: Routledge. ———. 1999. ‘“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology’. Current Anthropology 40s: S67–S91 ———. 2004a. ‘No Past, No Present: A Critical-Nayaka Perspective on Cultural Remembering’. American Ethnologist 31(3): 406–421. ———. 2004b. ‘Illness-Images and Joined Beings: A Critical/Nayaka Perspective on Intercorporeality’. Social Anthropology 12(3): 325–339. ———. 2017a. Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World. Berkeley: California University Press. ———. 2017b. ‘Before Nation: Scale-Blind Anthropology and Foragers’ Worlds of Relatives’. Current Anthropology 58(2): 209–226. ———. Forthcoming. ‘Size Matters! The Scalability of Hunter-Gatherer Animism’. Quaternary International. Descola, Philippe. 2013 [2005]. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gardner, Peter M. 2000. Bicultural Versatility as a Frontier Adaptation among Paliyan Foragers of South India. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Hallowell, Irving A. 1960. ‘Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View’. In Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, ed. Stanley Diamond, 19–52. New York: Columbia University Press. Howell, Signe. 1984. Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. Totemism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mauss, Marcel. 1985. ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self’. In The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, 1–25. Naveh, Daniel. 2007. Continuity and Change in Nayaka Epistemology and Subsistence Economy: A Hunter Gatherer Case from South India. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Haifa. Sahlins, Marshall David. 2013. What Kinship Is-and Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Eric Alden, and Mark Wishnie. 2000. ‘Conservation and Subsistence in SmallScale Societies’. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 493–524. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. ‘The Gift and the Given: Three Nano-Essays on Kinship’. In Kinship and beyond: The Genealogical Method Reconstructed, ed. S. Bamford and J. Leach, 237–268. New York: Berghahn. ———. 2012. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Manchester, UK: HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory.

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Adjusted styles of communication (ASCs) in the post-Cartesian world Graham Harvey

What words are appropriate for communicating about animism and the animate world? Can those of us shaped by European languages understand what animists say or do within a world that they treat as thoroughly relational? How might scholars translate what they are told by animists – and what they experience in their company – into terms that convey Indigenous understandings to themselves and to audiences shaped by a different linguistic and cultural history? Can we resist the separatist entailments of Modernity’s project to make dialogue with animists mutually enriching? Can we build on Ken Morrison’s (2013) encouragement of “post-Cartesian” scholarly practices? (My capitalization of Indigenous, Modern, and related words follows the practice set out in this book’s introduction.) Unlike most Indigenous languages, most European languages are strongly shaped by efforts to separate humans from other beings and “culture(s)” from “nature.” Pervasive linguistic conventions and habits make it hard to speak about the larger-than-human community and about the braidedness of humans as co-dwellers, co-evolvers, co-dependents with other beings. Indeed, it is remarkable that despite widespread acceptance of Darwin’s thesis of human kinship with other species it is still necessary to insist that animism is not the projection of human likeness or the attribution of human characteristics, abilities or cultural activities where these are unwarranted. The very thought that other-than-human animals might do anything cultural, anything other than that which is natural or instinctive, seems anathema – and is, therefore, revelatory of our communication problem. Many of us involved in what might be called the “New Animism,” the “Material Turn,” and/or the “New Materialism” are tired of having to explain that these are not curious belief systems but ways of behaving in a world that is, without question, thoroughly relational. In this chapter, I develop some ideas about how we might communicate differently about the world. In part I seek to learn from animist styles of communication with our other-than-human relations. If, as Bruno Latour insists, “we have never been modern” (Latour 1993), can we now adjust our styles of communication to speak more interestingly and adequately about the animate world? I explore how Modernity’s separatism makes

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this difficult. I conclude that dialogical learning among Indigenous animists might orientate us to an alternative path through the world that will reinvigorate our conversation with and about the larger-than-human community. The important point is that we are a part of that community, not apart from it. The important questions, then, are not about categories but communications.

Orientation I begin by setting out some facts about the real world that seem to require an adjustment of our ways of speaking. This sets me a somewhat difficult task precisely because it precedes my efforts to make those adjustments. Nonetheless, I do so by précising a diversity of sources (some “scientific,” others almost anecdotal) with the full intention of being provocative. Two sets of assemblages illustrate human likeness with our other-than-human relatives: the first concerns animals and birds; the second concerns fungi, trees, artifacts, and ancestors. These illustrations of the point are only divided because the first batch might be more readily accepted as evidence than the second. Both are intended to be steps toward re-describing the real world of multi-species relations without too much apology to those who continue to delude themselves that humans are, in various ways, separate from the larger-than-human community. A following section moves beyond questions of similarity or difference to the matter of separation. Again, it offers another brief précis, this time of indications that some of the roots of Modernity’s separatist agenda can be found in early modern European religious and political history. Being aware of the danger of the genetic fallacy (as if origins were determinative of current value), these roots are summarized precisely because they continue to shape the Modern project – as evidenced by the continuing currency of the nature/culture and nature/ supernature (or material/religious) distinctions. Cultural assumptions of a more thoroughly relational kind have shaped Anishinaabe grammar, discourse, and interspecies interactions just as strongly as human separatism has shaped the English language. Thus, a following section revisits discussions among Irving Hallowell and various Anishinaabe elders and ceremonial leaders. This leads to the use of the term “totem” (brought into English from the Anishinaabe language in the eighteenth century but immediately mystified) as a lens through which to further clarify differences between Modern and Indigenous world-knowledges. Then, the legal recognition of the Whanganui River as a “person” presents another context for noting that different cultural assumptions underlie different discourses and actions. While some of the interested parties were concerned about how to define personhood, others were more focused on re-establishing modes of interaction across species boundaries. Finally, picking up the chapter’s title, I consider how the diplomacy of shamans within the larger-than-human community may contribute to adjusting styles of communication about

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the animate world. Too much attention has been paid to “altered states of consciousness” allegedly entered into by shamans and not enough to their performative and communicative enactments.

Human likeness (first assemblage) A number of collocations seem to assert that something distinctive is definitive of humanness. Examples include homo sapiens, homo faber, homo ludens, homo religiosus, homo poetica. Prior to the coining of the term homo by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, similar distinctions were made by identifying humans as “political animals,” “rational animals” and a host of other possibilities. Skepticism or a desire for something more specific than sapiens/“knowing” have generated other terms such as homo ferox (“ferocious man,” White 1958: 667) and homo hypocritus (“man the sly rule bender,” Hanson 2010). The proliferating diversity of these encourages doubt that there really is single activity, ability, or characteristic that fully distinguishes us from previous hominids, other primates, or other animals. There seems little justification for human separatist efforts and plenty of contrary evidence of the many traits that make us comparable with our co-evolving relations. Perhaps Plato’s playful term “featherless bipeds” might encourage alternative efforts to seek comparisons with (rather than against) other beings. Chimpanzees, bonobos, Caledonian crows, bumblebees, and tuskfish can all be observed using tools. Young members of these species adapt what they have learnt by observation and example. Some groups of chimpanzees use tools differently from others. Some also use different kinds of food (caught with specific tools) to distinguish themselves from other groups (i.e. eating termites but not ants, or vice versa). Chimpanzee responses to waterfalls and rainstorms seem to indicate the experience of awe. Domesticated cattle as well as wild elephants express sorrow at the death or disappearance of relatives, to a degree that would be classed as “mourning” among humans. Cows are among the many animals who have been observed experimenting with ways of opening gates into fields where the grass seems more desirable, i.e. working out how to improve their lot. As well as mourning their dead (recent and ancestral), elephants are among the many animals who display signs of being stressed. (The relative pronoun “who” is deliberately employed here and elsewhere, anticipating my argument that we need to adjust our styles of communication with and about the larger-than-human world.) This is true not only of those trapped in circuses and zoos but also of wild elephants in threatened forests. When stressed, elephants might drink more alcohol (stolen from human villagers) and become more aggressive than otherwise. Dogs and otters are among the animals who indulge in play. Dogs, for example, signal to others that what might look like an imminent attack is only going to be playful. Many of these observable facts would be listed under the heading “culture” rather than “nature” if seen among humans. They would be considered

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to be either deliberate, learnt, tested, and shared activities or experiences deemed worthy of shared celebration. A couple of them might also be identified as “religion” (or at least as commonplace activities among religions) so they deserve further discussion. First, there are the indications of awe among chimpanzees. Then there are the food-related observances. James Harrod argues that chimpanzees behave in ways that match his “non-anthropocentric, trans-species definition of religion” (2014: 9; also see Harrod 2011). He bases this on the recognition that chimpanzees engage in complex and deliberate behaviors that demonstrate allegedly prototypical characteristics of religion such as “reverence, careful observation, wonder, awe, and empathic intimacy” (Harrod 2014: 9). Examples include announcements of births and deaths, celebratory actions indicative of awe, wonder or fascination while watching sunsets or encountering waterfalls or fires, and other actions indicative of dread while facing death or earthquakes. These and other engagements with the world lead Harrod to agree with Nancy Howell that chimpanzees and bonobos possess “connectedness, interdependence, and sociality” and “symbolic capacity” (Howell 2009: 602, 609). However, he disagrees with her assertion that this is “far from sufficient to demonstrate religion or even spirituality in chimpanzees” (Howell 2003: 185). Rather, Harrod is certain that chimpanzees experience and express what many scholars would have no trouble defining as religion or spirituality if seen among humans. However, not all scholars of religion are enamored with the privileging of awe and wonder as defining characteristics of religion. Perhaps the more everyday practice of dietary choices and other disciplines will be more persuasive. Thus, it is noteworthy that Volker Sommer summarizes his view of an “arbitrary/non-practical aspect of certain behaviours [among chimpanzees] that assist to create some sort of random in-group/out-group identity (sometimes with violence) which would in human populations often be called taboo” (Sommer, personal communication; but also see Sommer and Parish 2010: 29). Sommer and his colleagues speculated about why some chimpanzees eat ants but not termites (although they could eat both) while others eat termites but avoid eating ants – noting that neither group eats enough insects to gain much nutritional value despite investing considerable effort in crafting and manipulating the dedicated tools with which to obtain them. They concluded that: It is entirely possible that Gashaka [Nigeria] chimpanzees do not consume termites, because “it is not something that is done here” (McGrew 2004) – similarly to the situation at Mahale/Tanzania, where termites are consumed in one community, but not the neighbouring (Whiten et al. 2001). . . . These patterns are perhaps related to what would be called a “food taboo” in human societies. For example, humans in the Gashaka area will not consider eating dogs, while this is perfectly acceptable for the same or similar ethnic groups just 1½ days walk away, across the

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border in Cameroon (Faucher pers. comm.). The non-consumption of a perfectly edible food-item would thus serve as some sort of groupidentifying trait. (Fowler et al. 2011: 482) Such an argument is familiar to those inspired by Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1992). While a remarkable array of explanations have been offered as to why some people do not eat some “perfectly edible food-item” (e.g. horses, pigs, dogs, or anteaters), Douglas’s argument may be admirably summed up in McGrew’s words: “It is not something that is done here.” No one is compelled to eat anything simply because it is edible. However, everyone (chimpanzee or human, at least) is born into a cultural context with expectations about what will be eaten or not eaten. What would otherwise be random becomes meaningful only when we understand that to be “us” is to eat or not eat (to wear or not wear, to sing or not sing, to dance or not dance) in given ways. Taboos among humans and chimpanzees can be broken as well as maintained, perhaps at some cost. Those who wish to act (eat, wear, sing or dance) differently or distinctively must take the consequences unless they leave to find or form another community. All this leads me to conclude that since chimpanzees have taboos, and since taboos are integral to the practices and purity systems of religions, we can say that chimpanzees are religious. Or, rather, chimpanzees do religion.

Human likeness (second assemblage) Perhaps that was a lot of words to make the (widely acknowledged) point that humans are quite like other animals and other beings among whom we have evolved. Nonetheless, there is another illustrative assemblage of worldmaking, larger-than-human community members to notice before I move on. Humans are not only like other animals but are also like fungi, trees, and artifacts in ways that challenge Modernity’s project of human separatism and self-aggrandizement. In addition, humans are like other beings marginalized by Modernity’s imagination of human and other-than-human ontologies, i.e. those relegated to the realms of religious belief or folkloric fantasy. That is, humans are comparable to ancestors, deities, and varied “otherworld” beings. Once more, only a few examples are offered here – and they are often asserted with only minimal pointers to better-evidenced discussions. Fungi do a vast amount of world-making. Their activities not only spread nutrients but also information between trees and other species. Their enabling of growth in forests disturbed by human activities is vital to the revitalization of such forest communities. Anna Tsing’s discussions of the “worlding” that involves Matsutake fungi (2011, 2015) provide wideranging evidence of this and other fungal contributions to both human and larger-than-human communities. In addition to the ways in which fungi

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build and integrate forest ecosystems (used here in the sense of home-or dwelling-systems), they also participate in networks of culinary consumption (including those of both intimate localities and of late capitalism) and of interspecies communication (some of it visionary). Regarding artifacts, it might be sufficient to point to Latour and Peter Weibel’s Making Things Public (2005). The multiplication of discussions of the animacy (and sometimes “agency”) of things certainly justifies the recognition of a “material turn” in multiple disciplines. Latour and Weibel’s collection catalogues many ways in which things (artifacts) form things (assemblies or parliaments in Anglo-Saxon and other languages). Without neglecting the made-ness of artifacts, many artisans and scholars recognize that making is not always the most salient characteristic of things. Things act not only in the world but on the world: changing other things, making or un-making relations. Things, then, are not properly treated as inert receptacles of human meaning-making. Sometimes (e.g. as regalia, dedicated tools, weapons, heritage, or inheritance) they make particular humans and/ or relations meaningful or meaningless. Nonetheless, as the word “sometimes” suggests, there is no universal or static ontology here – not all artifacts act identically in all situations. Just like the stones and elephants of key texts about animism (Hallowell 1960; Bird-David 1999), and as my conclusion emphasizes, a thoroughly relational understanding of the world requires further efforts to adjust our styles of communication so that words such as “person” or “relative” mean something about interaction. It might be counter-intuitive to invite ancestors, deities, and varied “otherworld” beings – especially “spirits” – into an assemblage of thoroughly physical relations. This is especially so given that such beings are preeminent among putative projections of human likeness. Perhaps it is also peculiar in a book devoted to materiality. However, the inclusion of such beings is vital to understanding at least some of the animism and some of the language that interests and challenges us. One example may suffice. Marshall Sahlins has contested the notion that we can fully understand supposedly egalitarian Indigenous societies if we do not attend to the “life-giving and death-dealing powers” who often form the pinnacle of their political structures. He writes: We need something like a Copernican revolution in anthropological perspective: from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms – that is to say, from the Durkheimian or structural-functional deceived wisdom – to the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on the encompassing life-giving and death-dealing powers, themselves of human attributes, which rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. (Sahlins 2017: 91) Sahlins’ phrase “human attributes” could suggest another unfortunate variation of the claim of projection, but it is set aside by his later discussion

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of ethnography that emphasizes the empirical, quotidian, observable, and hardly transcendent nature of these “powers.” For instance, he writes that: The common ethnographic observation that because the non-human persons are as such generally invisible, they must inhabit a different, “spiritual” reality, is a cultural non sequitur for Araweté and other perspectivists. (Sahlins 2017: 104) There is an implication that we should question why this observation remains common to us. Are we so secure in “our culture” that we cannot be provoked to reject such observations? In the following section I outline how we have come to this point of “never having been modern” but of still working hard to be Moderns (to paraphrase Latour 1993, 2013). Religion plays a crucial role here because of its construction or reconstruction as beliefs about transcendent imaginaries.

Imagining separation The co-evolution of all species which make up Earth’s communities should make it obvious that similarity between species is more likely than difference. Such similarities might be physical, behavioral, and/or cognitive – if that is a separate domain. While each species (and sometimes each group within a species and each individual within a group) will have evolved distinctive interactions with its wider community, it remains unlikely that a single species will have evolved utterly unique processes or procedures for living. Thus, while we can discuss constellations of attributes, characteristics, activities, and other ways of relating, the isolation of single attributes is only useful for distinguishing at a micro level among members of large, diverse groups. The problem, then, is not about similarity or difference but about separation and distancing. Modernity is rife with separations. Among the hardest-working terms in the vocabulary of this ongoing project are “culture” and “nature.” They stand in a lineage of other dualisms, such as those in which beliefs, ideas, and ideals are privileged over bodies and things, and in which meanings are privileged over actions. While many previous periods of history and many other-than-Modern communities have struggled with these issues, the problematizing of embodiment and materiality continues to infuse the project of Modernity. For instance, despite multiple religious accusations of hedonism and materialism, Moderns continue to actively de-animate matter and disembody minds. The policing of strong boundaries, enforcing or reinforcing separations between humans and others, alerts us (heirs of Mary Douglas) that Modernity is a purity system. Although we may imagine that such separations are natural (and sometimes threatened by those who actively celebrate bodies

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and materiality), they are an artifact from which we could walk away. A brief examination of two aspects of the construction of Modernity’s purity system follows. The first involves the interjection of “representation” into language that previously asserted the active participation of matter in rites and relations. The second concerns the early modern invention of Nation States and modes of citizenship that redefined “religion” as an apolitical hobby for individuals. One reason why Moderns have such trouble with lively things or animate artifacts is illustrated by the easy insertion of words such as “symbol” or “representation” into discourses that speak differently of active, relational objects. When someone refers to a statue as a deity, it seems that an automatic reflex requires us to hear him or her say “this represents” rather than “this is.” More than 500 years of intra-Christian conflicts over the meaning of words spoken in definitive ceremonies (variously, the Mass, Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper) have shaped European and then Modern language and assumptions. Materials have been rendered inert and uncommunicative. Unless humans attribute meaning to them, bread, statues, and other things are, in this frame, decorative at best. (Perhaps that too is a meaning – one that points toward the homely borders of the secularized realm of Art.) Briefly put, the Reformation of diversifying Christianities enshrined a distinction between believers and materialists, a privileging of believing over doing (whether in ritualizing or manufacturing), and an emphasis on interiority rather than relationality. These trends are braided with the second aspect of the construction of Modernity to be evoked here. There is an intimate relationship between the creation of Nation States in early modern Europe and the Modern definition of “religion” as systems of beliefs about non-empirical postulations. To summarize William Cavanaugh’s argument (1995, 2009): The construction of modern Nation States necessitated the curtailment of allegiances which transgressed national borders and challenged loyalties to the princes and bureaucracies within such States. This required the contributory mechanism of the privatization and interiorization of religion (previously implicated in transnational relations and affiliations). Religion could only be allowed to survive as a private practice of believing in matters marginal (at best) to Modern politics and polities, as “licensed insanities” (Bowker 1987) or “licensed impracticalities” or mere hobbies (Harvey 2015: 191–192). As Robert Orsi summarizes this, the result was “a modern liberal faith sanctioned by (and providing sanction for) law, political theory, epistemology and science” (Orsi 2012: 146). That many people continue to do religion in both everyday and public or political arenas is generative of “turns” to lived, vernacular, everyday, and material religion (e.g. Hall 1997; Orsi 1997, 2012; Primiano 1995, 2012; Nye 2000; McGuire 2008; Vásquez 2011; Schielke and Debevec 2012; Harvey 2013; Plate 2015). Such scholarly turns challenge the “un-political definitions [which] have immured us deeper and deeper into equally a political, a mythic, and a religious quest” in which we would otherwise be “boundary maintainers for

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the faith system we know more commonly as ‘modernity’” (Hartney 2016: 224). They contribute to shifting attention away from putative individuals and fixed identities toward more thoroughly relational understandings and approaches. Contesting the separations of Modernity requires us to seek alternative ways of communicating about and with the larger-than-human community (which necessarily includes humans).

Alternative cultural assumptions Where might we look for resources for alternatives to the exhausting efforts to be(come) Modern? Among the many alternatives are what have been called, in a wide variety of situations, “alter-Native modernities”: contemporary Indigenous lifeways and projects which engage with Modernity while connecting deeply and creatively to customary knowledges and processes. The necessity of resisting the imposition of Modern Nation State hegemony (geographically, politically, culturally, and religiously) in order to maintain and enhance their sovereignty and peoplehood gives Indigenous communities powerful perspectives. This, rather than primitivism or romanticism, is what makes dialogue with and between Indigenous people so valuable. In their previous and current work, the contributors to this book provide excellent examples of ways of engaging with the world that do not privilege humanity or the fantasies of Modernity. They examine, debate, and present richer understandings of a world that is not separated into natural and cultural realms. Neither, therefore, are terms such as “supernatural” and “spiritual” helpful. As Ken Morrison said, “Western cosmological notions, particularly the categories of ‘nature’ and the ‘supernatural,’ do not fit, represent, or explain the Ojibwa cosmos” (Morrison 2002: 57) or that of similar peoples. Instead, we need terms expressive of a shared (non-dualist, non-anthropocentric but fully participative) world of relations and relationships; a world full of acts of socializing, assembling, communicating, and intersubjectivity. Many of us interested in animism and materiality make good use of the work of Irving Hallowell and his dialogues and learning among the Anishinaabeg (or Ojibwa) of Berens River in Canada. The reply to a question he asked of an unnamed elder – and the other matters Hallowell links with this – continue to generate important discussions. In seeking to understand the “animate gender” of his hosts’ language, Hallowell asked, “Are all the stones we see about us here alive?” (1960: 24, original emphasis). The reply, “No! But some are,” speaks volumes. It is not (or not entirely) one of those mildly satirical things people say to researchers who ask questions to which the answers seem self-evident. However, neither is it a robust indication that Hallowell’s thinking was faulty. Indeed, for the current purpose of seeking to understand ways in which at least some animists communicate about their relations with, in this case, grandfather stones (see Figure 10.1), the elder’s answer sends us back to Hallowell’s question. He did not ask a question about universal categories, “Are all stones alive?” but about “All the

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stones we see abound us.” That is, he has already grasped the centrality of specificity in relationships or of degrees of relationship. Perhaps he ought to have asked, “Can you tell me how relationships with particular rocks are acted upon?” – and that is the kind of thing his discussion sets out. Certainly, his conclusion is that grammatical animacy is a feature of a culturally shaped cognitive orientation to the world which expects signs of willingness by all manner of existences to interact relationally. As Maureen Matthews indicates, grammatical animacy credits those to whom it refers as “with the potential to act in the world” (2016: 78). It is, however, not merely that stones and other grammatically animate persons (human or other-than-human) might act. The crucial feature of Anishinaabe understandings of the world is that interaction is what animates relations. Hallowell, for example, expands his reflections on the elder’s words about stones with additional examples. He notes that John Duck (a Wábano ceremony leader) was asked if a particular boulder, found in a field, had previously been located in his ceremonial place. Duck “bent down and spoke to the boulder in a low voice, inquiring whether it had ever been in his pavilion. According to John the stone replied in the negative” (Hallowell 1960: 23). Hallowell also notes the gifting of tobacco to respected other-than-human persons (1960: 44). Stones and humans are potential members of the “person” class, as Hallowell puts it, but until there is interaction these and other beings remain only potentially or theoretically animate persons or relations – or merely members of the class of beings to be referred to with the challenging “animate grammar.” A similar point is made by Nurit Bird-David (1999) when she notes that elephants are devaru (relational persons), or “dividuals” (following Strathern 1988) when, and only when, they interact deliberately and appropriately with other-thanelephant relations. Indeed, the animistic cultural assumption underlies an expectation and encouragement of respectful interaction. In Naaminwan’s Drum, Matthews (2016, and also in this volume) provides insights into contemporary Berens River and other Anishinaabe communities’ relations with material persons or animated relations. She too evidences interactive relations as central to Anishinaabe world-making and world-dwelling. She discusses gifts given across species boundaries (2016: 62) and modes of respectful discourse about object-persons being visited while in museum collections (2016: 68–78). Both of these interactions are familiar themes in animism-related discussions. They are, for instance, significant aspects of clan/totemic relations.

Totemism revisited Much has been made of the term “totem” and its derivative “totemism.” Most familiar to those involved in debates about animism and materiality will be the distinctions made by Philippe Descola (2013) between animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. However, here I make a different point

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about the way in which “totem” and “totemism” express a key difference between Modern and Indigenous world-knowledges. “Totem” has been extracted from Anishinaabe language and the grammar in which it is only a part of relationship words. The divorce of “totem” from the integral, relational parts of actual Anishinaabe words leaves us with a term truncated to fit Modernity. It is not only that the translation equivalent of “totem” should be something like “clan” (a group of relations larger than the nuclear family). It is also that Anishinaabe do not speak of clans in the abstract but in concrete, fully relational ways. There is indoodem/my-clan, giddodem/your-clan, and waagosh-doodem/fox-clan, and other words made complete by prefixes and suffixes. It is, however, not possible to pronounce the hyphens that indicate that “-doodem-” is not a complete word. Long before from Latour and colleagues’ Actor-Network Theory, Anishinaabeg spoke (and still speak) of relations: interactions between people in more or less intimate relationships. The importation of “totem” into the English language involved an immediate mis-translation. John Long’s adoption into the beaver clan during his trading journey in 1768–88 did not prevent him presenting “totem” as a term for “spirits” who look after people and appear in the shape of particular beasts that are never to be hunted or eaten (Long 1922 [1791]: 110). Long’s story of an “Indian” who accidentally killed a bear and then “earnestly” announced his inability to hunt again results in Long’s coining of the term “totemism.” He writes: This idea of destiny, or, if I may be allowed the phrase “totemism,” however strange, is not confined to the savages; many instances might be adduced from history to prove how strong these impressions have been on minds above the vulgar and unlearned. (Long 1922 [1791]: 112) (Long follows this with the story of a “Jew banker of the court of France” who, being “as superstitious as the people of his nation are,” died on the day his black hen died, as he imagined was his destiny.) While Long was traveling in North America, James Cook published a book about his Pacific journeys and introduced the Polynesian term “taboo” into English (Cook 1967 [1777]: 3.1: 129). Long could have made good use of that term for restrictions on some activities. Debbie Rose presents a more useful view of “totemism,” precisely because it is rooted in relational communities or clans. She writes of Aboriginal Australian understandings of the world in which all species have “their own rituals and law, and .  .  . they too [alongside humans] take care of relationships of well-being” among all the inhabitants of an area or “country.” By virtue of co-habitation, all beings are related and therefore share rights and responsibilities, and are expected to be committed to and concerned for each other’s “flourishing in the world” (Rose 1998: 7, 11). This is the

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“totemic,” relational world in which Val Plumwood discovered that crocodiles police inappropriate behavior, e.g. punishing those who knowingly enter places without appropriate permission. In an article originally entitled “Being Prey” and now more prosaically named “Surviving a Crocodile Attack” (2000), Plumwood wrote powerfully of the place of humans in a food chain that does not benefit us. Her experience of “being prey” (because she had broken the rules expected of her) provided her with a perspective that enriched her lifelong contributions to environmental philosophy, ecofeminism, and activism. Another take on this is provided in Thomas King’s layered telling of an Indigenous creation story. The universe created in this story, King says, “is governed by a series of co-operations – Charm [the name he gives to the first woman in the world as he tells the story], the Twins [Charm’s creative babies], animals, humans – that celebrate equality and balance” (King 2003: 23–24). Later in his story-telling he considers “the intimate relationship that Native people [have] with the land.” He says: And here I am not talking about the romantic and spiritual clichés that have become so popular with advertisers, land developers, and wellmeaning people with backpacks. While the relationship that Native people have with the land certainly has a spiritual aspect to it, it is also a practical matter that balances respect with survival. It is an ethic that can be seen in the decisions and actions of a community and that is contained in the songs that Native people sing and the stories they tell about the nature of the world and their place in it, about the webs of responsibilities that bind all things. (King 2003: 113–114) Whatever the virtues of Descola’s (2013) schema, the key point here is that for Anishinaabeg and other Indigenous clan members, the all-important relations that make people and shape their movements through the world are specific and enacted. Relations of different kinds meet in a nexus of commitments, disciplines, and responsibilities – all shaped by locative codwelling. Like the hubs in Latourian Actor-Networks, the nexus does not collapse the diversity of relationships into a unified being (classically a “person” with an interiorized singular point of view and a neat biographical continuity). Rather, it requires continuous negotiation by relations as they act more or less intimately toward one another within their varied webs. In contrast, Moderns have used “totem” and “totemism” to imagine more universal and abstract beliefs, cosmologies, and polities in which some people (once “superstitious,” now merely unscientific) project human likeness onto animals who do not deserve it. Here, relations and interactions are transformed into data that generate categories. Boundaries are erected to make “individuals”: separate beings who might be or become members of bordered societies or polities. Rather than the disciplined and celebratory

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interactions of Anishinaabe and other Indigenous clan mutuality, Modernity creates identity politics on the basis of separation. We falsely imagine that humans alone are subjective beings (or “have subjectivity”) and have come to assume that only “primitives” believe in an intersubjective cosmos (see Morrison 2000). Capitulating to this process, we leave “all our relations” and become (or try to become) subjective and self-identified “I”s.

Water persons In 2017, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand, was recognized as a “person” for legal purposes. The river was afforded rights and protections such that a multi-million dollar fund was established to enhance the health and well-being of the Whanganui. Maori communities are negotiating the rights of this and other rivers and watercourses to flow freely and unpolluted from their sources to the sea. Elsewhere I have described the celebration of a 2011 agreement between Ngati Rangi (the Maori community at the foot of Mount Ruapehu) and Genesis Energy that resulted in water from four streams being able to flow, unrestricted by electricity-generating systems, from the mountain to the sea (Harvey 2013: 112–113). Both there and in relation to the Whanganui, differences of understanding between Maori and Moderns are evident. Both Maori and Moderns can and do debate the nature of personhood. In law, the recognition of personhood afforded to these waters is like that afforded to multi-national companies: It primarily concerns rights and protections. In more animistic terms, it might be said that rivers act relationally with others who live with and within them. They give and receive gifts. They deserve respect. They are as responsible for the well-being of the humans who live along their banks as those humans are responsible for the wellbeing of the rivers. Rivers, like humans, have multiple relationships, e.g. with fish, plants, local humans, tourists, engineers, soils, and so on. Indeed, rivers are the sum of all those who compose them: water, fish, plants, fishers, bacteria, banks, and all. These relations and constitutions also help us see human personhood more clearly. Like rivers, we are multiple beings both in the sense that “our” bodies are made of many nonhuman cells and in the sense that “our” bodies work with others (particularly hosts of necessary bacteria in our guts) to share nutrition. We thrive together as a community. We suffer together if we compete. However, important as definitions of personhood might be, something else is animated by relational understandings of the world. The statement made by many Maori that the Whanganui, the Ruapehu watercourses, as well as wharenui (meeting houses), mountains, and forests are ancestors is more than a statement about identity. Precisely because it is a statement about relationship, both its context and its outcomes are concerned with activities, especially ceremonial ones. While they certainly sought recognition of Maori rights under the Treaty of Waitangi, those who

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gathered alongside the stream on Mount Ruapehu in 2011, and many of those who celebrated the legal recognition of the Whanganui, were keen to interact with the waters. The signing of agreements between human negotiators was important. But, at least for the people I talked with, reaffirming kinship and cooperation with the water persons or ancestor-rivers was vital. Therefore, customary ceremonial and oratorical modes of expressing respect and delight were adapted and employed alongside the immediacy of paddling in and sipping from the streams.

Diplomatic shamans Yet another loan word inspires my concluding thoughts. “Shaman,” like “totem,” gained the suffix “ – ism” when European-language speakers imagined systems of “shamanism.” Among the proliferating shamanisms that have arisen since then, many Moderns have placed “Altered States of Consciousness” so firmly at the center of these systems that the abbreviation “ASC” is almost their synonym. There is some merit in this because it meshes with the idea that shamanism is a set of techniques by which individuals (i.e. Moderns) can gain knowledge of their true/inner selves. However, it is problematic to pay more attention to techniques than to the purposes for which they might be employed. To that end, I re-use “ASC” to stand for “adjusted styles of communication.” This enables me to place the work of animistic shamans firmly within the wider relational activities of their communities. Without doubt it can be important for shamans to “see” the world differently or more clearly. Visionary experiences and changed awareness, by whatever technique these are inspired or enabled, certainly play roles in shamanic work in many places. But multiple reports indicate that the crucial matter is that shamans are able to communicate across species boundaries to the benefit of their human clients and kindred. Often such communication entails adjustments to ordinary discursive, performative, and behavioral practices. Chanting, singing, oratory, dance, drumming, gift-making, play-acting, and many other performances can be employed. The central concern of the practitioner will be on the effectiveness of these acts not as changers of consciousness but of conversation. Many reasons are given for the employment of shamans but perhaps they can be summed up in the term “diplomacy.” Humans are not separate from the larger-than-human community or world. We are integral members of it. But, as Plumwood discovered in the jaws of a crocodile, humans are not firmly in charge. Sometimes humans are prey (to disease-inducing creatures if not to carnivorous hunters). Even in seemingly egalitarian societies, people are often dominated by powerful others such as deities, owners-ofanimals, ancestors, and so on (Sahlins 2017). Sometimes humans are ignorant or less capable than other species of thriving in particular environments or situations. The Lakota refrain (now well known more widely), Mitakuye Oyasin, “all our relations,” structures ceremonies in which people seek the well-being of others. It has become. It is not rooted in the fantasy of human

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superiority but in the recognition of the necessity of mutual aid between all co-dwellers. Gaining and offering mutual aid is among the central tasks of shamans but also underlies the ubiquitous Indigenous ethical imperative to act with respect. Importantly, Mitakuye Oyasin is primarily invoked in ceremonies. That is, contrary to the Modern notion that ritual is definitively “meaningless/vain repetition,” participants in these and other rites employ ceremony as “currency in the deep world’s gift economy” (Snyder 1990: 75; Grimes 2013). They grab the attention of those who might help (whatever the task) and might then feel willing or compelled to help. Although everyone might be called to join in such ceremonies, they are most often or most powerfully led by the skilled interspecies diplomats who we could go on calling “shamans.” Dialogue with the holders and sharers of Indigenous knowledges, including shaman-diplomats, indicate the breadth of ways of engaging with the larger-than-human world of continuous interspecies interaction. Communicating about that world is also generative of rituals and discursive practices, including initiations and story-telling. Those of us who seek better ways of communicating about animism and materiality can be inspired by and within these dialogical relations. The languages of Modernity are shaped by the deliberate and sometimes violent efforts to re-make dividuals into individuals, relations into citizens, ritualists into rationalists, and humans into separatists. We could adopt more Indigenous words into those languages. Just as we have adopted terms such as “totem,” “taboo,” and “shaman,” we could adopt devaru. However, unless we contest the structures within which Moderns continue to try to become Modern, these words will continue to be subverted away from their thoroughly relational implications. Hallowell’s effort to translate what he learnt among his Anishinaabe hosts by making the word “person” convey that relationality is not always successful. It continues to need lengthy explanation. Bird-David’s effort to translate what she learnt among her Nayaka hosts by making the word “relations” convey the strong sense of mutual interaction has its challenges too. Sometimes we are just too used to the idea of discrete individuals, selves, or agents to get the point. After all, we ought to have understood that Darwin re-wrote the Constitution of the current era, against the Cartesian dividers of mind from matter and the Moderns who separate culture from nature. If we can shift our academic debate into the relational world of Darwin and of animist shamans, we could use words such as “person” and “relation” more easily. Are we there yet? No! But some are. More dialogue will take us further.

References Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology”, Current Anthropology 40: S67–S79. Bowker, John. 1987. Licensed Insanities: Religions and Belief in God in the Contemporary World. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.

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Cavanaugh, William T. 1995. “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: ‘The Wars of Religion’ and the Rise of the State”, Modern Theology 11.4: 397–420. Cavanaugh, William T. 2009. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, James. 1967 [1777]. A Journal of a Voyage Round the World in HMS Endeavour 1768–1771. New York, NY: Da Capo Press. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 1992. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Fowler, Andrew, Alejandra Pascual-Garrido, Umaru Buba, Sandra Tranquilli, Callistus Akosim, Caspar Schöning, and Volker Sommer. 2011. “Panthropology of the Fourth Chimpanzee: A Contribution to Cultural Primatology”, in Volker Sommer and Caroline Ross (eds.), Primates of Gashaka: Socioecology and Conservation in Nigeria’s Biodiversity Hotspot. New York, NY: Springer. pp. 451–492. Grimes, Ronald. 2013. “Performance Is Currency in the Deep World’s Gift Economy: An Incantatory Riff for a Global Medicine Show”, in Graham Harvey (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. London: Routledge. pp. 501–512. Hall, David D. (ed.). 1997. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hallowell, Irving A. 1960. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View”, in Stanley Diamond (ed.), Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. pp. 19–52. Hanson, Robin. 2010. “Homo Hypocritus”, Overcoming Bias Blog, www.overcoming bias.com/2010/03/homo-hipocritus.html (accessed 21 Nov. 2017). Harrod, James B. 2011. “A Trans-Species Definition of Religion”, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 5.3: 327–353. Harrod, James B. 2014. “The Case for Chimpanzee Religion”, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8.1: 8–45. Hartney, Christopher. 2016. “Indigenous or Non-Indigenous: Who Benefits from Narrow Definitions of Religion?”, in Christopher Hartney and Daniel J. Tower (eds.), Religious Categories and the Construction of the Indigenous. Leiden: E.J. Brill. pp. 203–227. Harvey, Graham. 2013. Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life. New York, NY: Routledge. Harvey, Graham. 2015. “Food, Sex and Spirituality”, in Curtis D. Coats and Monica M. Emerich (eds.), Practical Spiritualities in a Media Age. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 189–204. Howell, Nancy R. 2003. “The Importance of Being Chimpanzee”, Theology and Science 1.2: 179–191. Howell, Nancy R. 2009. “Embodied Transcendence: Bonobos and Humans in Community”, Zygon 44.3: 601–612. King, Thomas. 2003. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel (eds.). 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Karlsruhe: ZKM. Long, John. 1922 [1791]. John Long’s Voyages and Travels in the Years 1768–1788. Chicago, IL: Lakeside Press. Matthews, Maureen. 2016. Naaminwan’s Drum: The Story of a Contested Repatriation of Anishinaabe Artefacts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McGrew, William C. 2004. The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGuire, Meredith B. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrison, Kenneth M. 2000. “The Cosmos as Intersubjective: Native American and Other-Than-Human Persons”, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions: A Companion. London: Cassell. pp. 23–36. Morrison, Kenneth M. 2002. The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian-French Religious Encounter. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Morrison, Kenneth M. 2013. “Animism and a Proposal for a Post-Cartesian Anthropology”, in Graham Harvey (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. London: Routledge. pp. 38–52. Nye, Malory. 2000. “Religion, Post-Religionism and Religioning: Religious Studies and Contemporary Cultural Debates”, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12.4: 447–476. Orsi, Robert A. 1997. “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion” in David D. Hall (ed.), Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 3–21. Orsi, Robert A. 2012. “Afterword: Everyday Religion and the Contemporary World”, in Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec (eds.), Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. pp. 146–161. Plate, Brent S. 2015. Key Terms in Material Religion. London: Bloomsbury. Plumwood, Val. 2000. “Surviving a Crocodile Attack”, Utne Reader, July 1, www. utne.com/arts/being-prey (accessed 26 Jan. 2018). Primiano, Leonard N. 1995. “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife”, Western Folklore 54.1: 37–56. Primiano, Leonard N. 2012. “Manifestations of the Religious Vernacular: Ambiguity, Power, and Creativity”, in Ülo Valk and Marion Bowman (eds.), Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief. London: Equinox. pp. 382–394. Rose, Deborah. B. 1998. “Totemism, Regions, and Co-Management in Aboriginal Australia”. Paper presented at Crossing Boundaries, International Association for the Study of Common Property 7th Annual Conference, Vancouver, June 10–14, http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/1187/rose.pdf (accessed 26 Jan. 2018). Sahlins, Marshall. 2017. “The Original Political Society”, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7.2: 91–128, www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/ hau7.2.014 (accessed 16 Jan. 2018). Schielke, Samuli, and Liza Debevec (eds.). 2012. Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. New York, NY: North Point Press.

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Sommer, Volker, and Amy Parish. 2010. “Living Differences: The Paradigm of Animal Cultures”, in Ulrich Frey, Charlotte Störmer and Kai Willführ (eds.), Homo Novus: A Human without Illusions. Heidelberg: Springer. pp. 17–31. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tsing, Anna. 2011. “Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora or, Can Actor-Network Theory Experiment with Holism?”, in Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt (eds.), Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 47–66. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vásquez, Manuel A. 2011. More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, Terence H. 1958. The Once and Future King. London: Collins. Whiten, Andrew, Jane Goodall, William C. McGrew, Toshisada Nishida, Vernon Reynolds, Yukimaru Sugiyama, Caroline E.G. Tutin, Richard W. Wrangham, and Christophe Boesch. 2001. “Charting Cultural Variation in Chimpanzees”, Behaviour 138: 1481–1516.

Part 2

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Assembling new ontologies from old materials Towards multiplicity Oliver J. T. Harris and Rachel J. Crellin

More than 5000 years ago, on Salisbury Plain in southern England, work began on a monument that would dominate its local landscape, and the archaeological imagination, over millennia. Today Stonehenge (Figure 4.1) remains emblematic and enigmatic. It stands as a site that reminds us of how different the past can seem. Tourists gather, intrigued by the fact that archaeologists “still cannot explain what it all means.” Why did people shape the stones in the way they did? Why did they drag some of them from the Preseli Mountains more than 140 miles away? Why did they reshape this monument over 1500 years? Druids, archaeologists, politicians, and heritage professionals all clash over what this site was, what it is, and how it should be understood. In each of these cases the dominant, major, lines of thought have privileged particular versions of the monument, especially the stone phases. In addition, emphasis has constantly been placed on what the site means, what it represents, and who should have rights over and access to the site. Beyond the boundaries of the World Heritage Site, however, new ideas have become popular in anthropology and archaeology, including those that form the subject of this volume. Archaeologists have begun to experiment with ontological approaches that don’t ask what a site means, or represents, but rather what it is, or what it does, and how its power and vibrancy emerges as much from the agency of its materials as from the minds of its architects. Some approaches have drawn on animism. Others have employed minor traditions of Western philosophy and the sociology of science. We discuss these in this chapter; what matters here is that they all offer a significant challenge to the way a site such as Stonehenge is written about. Our failure to “understand” Stonehenge reflects our failure to understand the ontologies of the many communities that engaged with the site. More than this, it represents our inability to escape imposing our own ontological assumptions on to the site. What would happen if we considered the stones to be alive? To be moving? What would happen if our boundaries between wood and stone were not defined as absolute? What if we treated all of these ideas not as the mistaken beliefs of past people, but as ontological realities about how the world worked?

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Figure 4.1 Stonehenge today (photograph by Ellie Rowley-Conwy)

In this article we seek to do two things. First, we explore in more detail this recent turn to ontology in archaeology and anthropology. In particular, we argue why, in the contexts in which we work, approaches rooted in what has come to be known as new materialism have more potential than others. Second, we begin to sketch what alternative ontological engagements with Stonehenge might look like.

The turn to ontology Since the middle of the past decade there has been increasing dissatisfaction in archaeology with the dominant approaches to how we understand the past. Over the past 50 years, the pendulum of archaeological thought has swung back and forth between interpretations which privilege the cultural and the human, and those that emphasize the natural and the environmental (for a full exploration see Harris & Cipolla 2017). Over the past decade, some archaeologists have attempted to develop new theories which seek to move beyond the dominant dualistic paradigm, to think about the world outside of the confines of modernity. In 2004, Julian Thomas highlighted the problematic nature of applying theoretical approaches rooted in modern

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Western ways of thinking to the past. Not only did such ways of thinking reduce past people to pale shadows of their modern contemporaries, but they also failed to appreciate the diversity of ways in which communities, including those in the Western present, understand the world (Thomas 2004; cf. Latour 1993). Since then a growing emphasis on materials has also underscored how approaches rooted in the linguistic turn fail to accord agency to anything beyond the human. In a world in which our current inability to challenge nonhuman agency in the form of climate change is becoming increasingly apparent, this is patently insufficient. Within this, we can define three broad approaches. The first falls under the banner of symmetrical archaeology. Inspired initially by the work of Bruno Latour (e.g. 1993), this approach made a critical contribution by challenging the divisions between people and things (e.g. Witmore 2007). In its later phases it has become more influenced by the Object Orientated Ontology of Graham Harman (e.g. 2012), and is increasingly concerned with nonrelational approaches to objects (e.g. Olsen & Witmore 2015). This set of approaches rarely engages with the specific interpretation of archaeological sites and objects, and so is not of central concern to us in this paper. The second approach draws explicitly on anthropology and can be thought of as the application of the new animism, and perspectivist theory, to archaeology. The work of both Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) and Martin Holbraad (2007) has been especially influential. These approaches draw on ethnographies of living communities to argue that Western ontologies are not universal. This is a far greater claim than one of simple cultural relativism. Instead, it argues we need to take the claims of informants seriously and to grant them ontological weight. In Holbraad’s (2007) famous example, the powder used by Cuban diviners does not simply represent power, or act as a metaphor for power, it is power. Here the dualism between concept and thing, central to Western thought, is collapsed and, as such, a different world emerges. These approaches give weight to Indigenous views in a way that does not strip of them of their agency and capacity to affect the world. In archaeology, these ideas have been put to profound use by archaeologists working in a number of different contexts, most notably in the Americas. One of the best examples of this comes from the work of Yvonne Marshall and Benjamin Alberti (Alberti & Marshall 2009; Marshall & Alberti 2014). They examine “body pots” from the first millennium AD in Argentina. These pots take the form of vessels with faces and anthropomorphic features. An older archaeological interpretation of these vessels might have been concerned with their symbolic and representational qualities. However, Alberti and Marshall draw on the radical equivalence between concept and thing that Holbraad identified in Cuba. What if, they ask, the pots do not represent bodies, but actually are bodies (Alberti & Marshall 2009). Here an ontology of instability and transformation comes to the fore. In common with many perspectivist ontologies identified in the anthropology

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of the Americas, bodies here can shift and change from one form to another. It is essential to emphasize once again that this transformation is entirely real within this approach. This is not a question of how people think about the world, but how the world is. A related approach has been developed in North America, where Timothy Pauketat (2013) and others have drawn on the widespread Native American concept of the bundle to reinterpret archaeological materials at a variety of scales. In his inspiring work, Pauketat (2013) draws on this notion to explore how caches, medicine bundles, and entire archaeological sites act to bundle the world together, providing an ontological engagement with non-Western cosmology on its own terms. Pauketat calls for us to take Indigenous religious beliefs seriously as a means of structuring the world. Similarly, Severin Fowles (2012) has drawn on Pueblo ethnographies and historical accounts to reveal the interwoven nature of religion and politics, indeed to suggest these very categories betray our own ontological reifications rather than the lived reality of these worlds. Rather than religion, he suggests, we should speak of doings. Both Pauketat and Fowles emphasize that what we might term “religion” is not a secondary realm of “beliefs” applied to mask the economic, social, and political “realities” of life, but instead is fundamental to the way in which the world comes to be. These are ontological issues once again. These approaches have proven productive, powerful, and challenging to archaeologists. They have shifted the debate not only to a more interesting place but also driven an appreciation of difference, one that grants Indigenous people a more powerful voice. In each case, however, they rely upon precisely this engagement with Indigenous communities, either through ethnographic research or the use of direct historical analogy. Where we work, in Europe, no such connections exist. This leaves us with a problem. We are inspired by these scholars, but feel that the application of their new animist thinking to our own archaeological contexts is problematic. Despite claims that these approaches are ontologically neutral, in the sense that they need not replicate the material on which are they based, they nonetheless tend to discover parallels between what ethnographic informants say, and what the archaeologists uncover (also see Astor-Aguilera, this volume). Thus an approach rooted in animism, seems to us liable to impose animism onto the pasts we investigate. Amazonian perspectivism may be a bomb, as Bruno Latour (2009) put it, one that explodes our assumptions about the nature of the world, but it leaves some very specifically shaped pieces of shrapnel in its wake. Even starting with animism as a metaphor for our own lack of understanding, as Darryl Wilkinson (2017) has argued we should, still leaves us at risk of imposing a particular vision of difference on to the past. If we want a past that does not impose specific models on to it (see Thomas 2004), we need, at least where we work, a different starting point. One possibility would be to draw on examples from across anthropological contexts to extract generalized principles. The most notable proponent

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of this, Philippe Descola (2013), has proposed four alternative ontologies (but see Sahlins 2014). These are animism, familiar from our earlier description; totemism, drawing on Aboriginal Australian and other notions of the flow of energies in the world; analogism, prevalent in medieval Europe; and naturalism, which is the dominant modern Western option. While such an approach has notable benefits, including allowing us to compare ontologies across contexts, it also has a number of shortcomings. It reifies difference into four ideal types (see Ingold 2016: 305), and prevents the complexity of both past and present from being fully explored (e.g., Sahlins 2014 identifies mixing of the ontological modes in numerous ethnographic examples). This approach not only typologizes, but it also places these types outside of history. It also tends to limit ontology to primarily an issue of belief, rather than being a genuine means of accessing alterity, and does not fully engage with the vibrancy of material things. Thus, while productive, this style of approach will not allow us to address our concerns.

Deleuze and new materialism We turn then to our third approach, the one we believe has the most potential to open up an ontological engagement in archaeological contexts where we have no access to either historical or ethnographic data. This approach can broadly be termed “new materialism” and emerges from the work of a number of different scholars, including Karen Barad (2007); Jane Bennett (2010); Elizabeth Grosz (1994); Rosi Braidotti (2013); Tim Ingold (2011); Manuel DeLanda (2006, 2016), and others. New materialism is proving popular across a range of disciplines that are increasingly troubled by the legacy of the linguistic turn of the 1980s (Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012). The critical emphasis that new materialism places on the emergent and immanent qualities of the world as a whole – people and things – allows this approach to challenge the dominant traditions of academic thought (Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012). Most notably these approaches form a posthumanist critique, which challenges the easy assumptions about the ontological centrality of humans to the world. While by no means unified in their arguments, these different thinkers open up a space for a more critical engagement with the material world, in which human beings emerge as one form of life among many, a life that can be both organic and inorganic (Braidotti 2013). Behind much of this thinking lies the thought of a critical figure, whose work forms the primary inspiration for what follows: the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2004; Deleuze & Guattari 2004). Deleuze’s work, alone and in conjunction with Félix Guattari, emphasizes that the world is always in the process of becoming; it is in flow and in flux. Temporary gatherings, or assemblages, emerge from this world though they too are always changing. It suggests that the world is not made of complete and fixed phenomena but rather is always shifting and emerging. It prevents us from defining objects of study, whether that is individuals,

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sites, communities, or ontologies as singular and uniform. Instead, it asks us to map their shifting and changing emergence and the manner in which any form of stability is always a process that requires ongoing achievement rather than a taken-for-granted universal. This moves beyond functionalist and structuralist approaches to change, which, despite protests to the contrary, inevitably privilege people, to allow for a far greater range of contributory and causal factors. Deleuze asks us to avoid simple oppositions such as one versus many, or to identify straightforward linear causality. Instead, as in the favored metaphor he and Guattari use, the world is like a rhizome, complex, and knotty, a multiplicity that cannot be fully untangled and that connects across and through multiple locales and times (Deleuze & Guattari 2004). By highlighting the becoming and multiplicity of the world, Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 450–454) emphasize the morphogenesis of matter, drawing on Gilbert Simonden (2013), that is the way in which matter contributes to its own shaping, or in Bennett’s (2010) term is vibrant. In standard Newtonian physics, matter is understood as brute dead material, waiting the enlivening hand of a passing human being. In contrast, Deleuzian approaches embrace the lively nature of all matter. Material things not only have properties – the extended, measurable, dimensions we know from Euclidean geometry – but they also have potentials or what DeLanda (2006) calls capacities. Capacities refer to the not-yet-realized, yet absolutely real, elements of the world. To give an archaeological example, a polished stone axe has both a set of properties such as weight and length, and a host of capacities. These include the capacity to be joined to a wooden haft and to cut down trees, or to be used in a museum display to help explain the past, or to be studied under a microscope for traces of wear. These capacities are reliant both on humans and a host of nonhuman actors. However, other capacities might emerge with no human involvement, including the effects of acidic soil on the stone, or the way rainfall on to the axe might change its color, texture, or temperature (cf. Ingold 2007). One cannot understand the axe without engaging with these capacities, and in no way are they less real than the extensive properties (Deleuze 2004: 263). As these capacities are relationally emergent, we cannot know all of a thing’s potentials, and from this comes the potential for change and transformation and a return to the emphasis on multiplicity. The emphasis Deleuzian thought places on the relational nature of existence forces us to engage with a more-than-human perspective. Rather than seeing human beings as defined biological organisms, linked by a shared identity as a species, they emerge as contextually contingent in specific historical circumstances. The active role of materials in the world means we cannot seek a universal humanity in ways that humanism has encouraged us to do (cf. Dawney et al. 2017). This chimes with cutting-edge feminist thought, and in particular the emphasis on difference (e.g. Barad 2007; Braidotti 2013; Grosz 1994). This is difference not in the sense of a degree

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of similarity or identity, a notion of difference from some ideal type or form. Instead this is an emphasis on the process of differentiation, of the way in which difference in itself brings the world into being. By removing humans from the ontological apex (cf. Bennett 2010), by appreciating that the ability to effect change was never limited to our species (or more accurately a specific subset of our species cf. Braidotti 2013), by granting an active role to the material world, and by embracing difference in itself, this kind of thinking demands new engagements with the past. The narratives which emerge from the archaeological record must leave space for a diverse and heterogeneous range of participants to be credited with the production of history. In such thinking, Stonehenge cannot only be about chiefs, architects, and ancestors – all dominant explanations as we see herein. Many other elements have to enter into dialogue with us, if we want to offer richer, more accurate, and more satisfactory explanations. The approach we advocate here could be seen as emphasizing what Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 322) would call a molecular, rather than a molar, approach. Such an approach need not necessarily be about reducing our explanations to the smallest possible scale. The influence of difference can be appreciated at intimate moments, like the erection of a stone, and in the broad histories of a site like Stonehenge. This approach is fundamentally ontological, and has links with the way in which many archaeologists are beginning to work (Conneller 2011; Fowler 2013; Jones 2012). There are also parallels with elements of the animist thought we have already encountered. Viveiros de Castro (2010) openly acknowledges his debt to Deleuze. Rather than argue that this allows us to employ perspectivist thought, we would suggest this shows we can reach alternative ontologies through an engagement with Deleuze’s work. This means we can avoid the imposition of specific ethnographic parallels while still allowing space for links with other current ontologies to be identified. The potential for linking Deleuzian thought directly with non-Western native ontologies has recently been positively explored by Craig Cipolla (2018). While the risk remains that we are replacing one meta-ontology – naturalism in Descola’s (2013) terms – with another (cf. Alberti 2016: 173), drawn from the work of Deleuze, we believe that the latter’s emphasis on difference makes this a starting point that opens up the possibility for alterity in a way that no other current approach allows. To demonstrate this, let us turn to our case study: Stonehenge.

Stonehenge Stonehenge has a long history, and the interpretation of the archaeology is controversial (Cleal et al. 1995). In this paper we follow the model developed by Parker Pearson et al. (2013; cf. Darvill et al. 2012; Parker Pearson 2012a). The first events in the immediate locale can be identified as the erection of three large wooden posts, in the eighth millennium BCE, 200 metres to

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the northwest of the future location of the site (Parker Pearson et al. 2013: 161). This was a point in time in which the people living in Britain relied on hunting and gathering for their food, and is known today as the Mesolithic. Nearby, two natural ridges surrounded glacial fissures in the ground aligned, by happenstance, on the midwinter sunset (Allen et al. 2016). These two elements, one in the terms of modernity “cultural” and one “natural,” suggest this place was important for thousands of years before the first “construction” of the monument itself. This took place during the period known as the Neolithic, the last period of the Stone Age, and the first period of farming in Britain, which lasts from c. 4100 cal BCE to c. 2500 cal BCE. Around 3015–2935 cal BCE, people dug a bank and ditch that surrounded a ring of holes which were potentially constructed to hold standing stones (Figure  4.2). This formation had two entrances: a main entrance in the northeast and a smaller one to the south. The holes, known today as Aubrey holes, were also used for the deposition of cremated human remains over several centuries. While we cannot be certain today that the Aubrey holes held stones, their size and shape, in addition to the levels of compaction of the chalk at their base, suggest they held monoliths known today as the “bluestones” (Parker Pearson 2012a). These are remarkable in that they were stones of a range of geologies, all taken from 140 miles away in the mountains of west Wales. Cremated remains were also deposited in the ditch surrounding the site. Within the enclosure there is evidence of postholes arranged in rectangular alignments which may have been platforms for the exposure of dead bodies. This is suggested by the recovery of more than 40 unburnt human bones, two of which date to this period (Parker Pearson et al. 2009; Willis et al. 2016). We refer to this enclosure, the Aubrey holes, and the first phase of standing stones as Stage 1. The construction of the site is broadly contemporary with the start of the Late Neolithic, a period known for henge monuments across many parts of Britain, the use of grooved ware pottery and a broad set of related domestic and ritual practices, including the cremation of corpses (Thomas 2010). At Stonehenge, the deposition of human remains, both burnt and unburnt, would continue over the next 500 years. Around 2620 cal BCE the next major phase of construction took place. This saw the erection of pairs of standing stones joined by a lintel (referred to as trilithons) in a horseshoe-shaped setting. These are the famous stones so familiar from postcards today, made of sarsen, a material available more locally than the bluestones. They were probably dragged in from the Avebury area to the north (Parker Pearson 2012a). The horseshoe arrangement is famously orientated to the same midwinter sunset framed by the natural glacial features present in the landscape and mentioned previously. This stage also saw the removal of bluestones from the Aubrey holes and their erection in a double ring around the trilithons, today referred to as the Q and R holes (Parker Pearson et al. 2013). Both the sarsens erected at this stage, and some of the bluestones, were “dressed,” meaning shaped in particular and specific

Figure 4.2 The stages of Stonehenge (after Parker Pearson et al. 2013: Figures 9.2–9.6; drawn by Irene Deluis and reproduced by permission of Mike Parker Pearson)

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ways. This included the construction of mortice holes, tenon projections, and tongue-and-groove jointing on both the bluestones and the sarsens. After the erection of the sarsen trilithons and the arrangement of the bluestones in the Q and R holes, a circle of sarsen stones with some lintels was constructed (Parker Pearson et al. 2013: 167), and other stones potentially placed at different locations inside the enclosure. The ditch may have been recut and deliberately backfilled at this point. This phase of construction can be referred to as Stonehenge Stage 2 and dates to 2620–2480 cal BCE. Following this period, there are three additional stages of major alterations to Stonehenge during the Bronze Age. More widely in Britain this period sees the growth in the use of metals, first copper and then bronze, across the country and the emergence of new burial rites, including single inhumations with grave goods (Roberts 2013). New forms of pottery are also in use, and these are often suggested to accompany the arrival of new people from continental Europe from 2500 cal BCE onwards (Needham 2005, 2007). Stage 3, 2480–2280 cal BCE, is marked by the construction of the Stonehenge Avenue which connects the monument to the River Avon, enhancing the natural glacial ridges and fissures (Allen et al. 2016: 998). The northeast entrance to the monument which connects to the avenue was also modified at this point through stone removal (Parker Pearson et al. 2013: 171). It is possible that more stones were added to the monument at this time. The famous Stonehenge archer, an inhumation burial of an adult male, was placed in the ditch of the monument during this period. The skeleton bore signs of a violent death, having been shot with arrows at least three times (Evans 1984). Stage 4, 2270–2020 cal BCE, saw further rearrangement of the bluestones, with an oval being constructed from 24 stones within the central setting of sarsen trilithons, and another circle of bluestones constructed around that (Parker Pearson et al. 2013: 171). At some point during this period, two of the stones in the sarsen circle may have been deliberately toppled (Pollard et al. 2017: 290). Finally in Stage 5, 1630–1520 cal BCE, two circles of pits, the Y and Z holes, were dug surrounding all of the stone settings. These were left open and allowed to fill in gradually. Stonehenge had a long and convoluted history even in only its first 1500 years. Let us briefly set out two dominant views on the site – with apologies to the many other archaeological engagements that fall under neither of these banners (e.g. Bradley 1998; Darvill 2006; Richards 2013; Whittle 1997), nor deserve to be associated with more “fringe” elements. Many archaeologists that have studied Stonehenge have presumed that it represents the outcome of a chiefly society, reaching its most explicit definition in the work of Colin Renfrew (1973). Renfrew argued that the development of Neolithic monuments represented increased levels of social complexity, based on the scale of labor required to construct them. Initially, Neolithic families constructed smaller burial monuments known as long barrows. As the Neolithic became more established, chiefdoms emerged,

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revealed in the construction of larger monuments. At the top of this list, requiring the most hours and therefore the greatest ability to command labor, stood the paramount chief, and his site of Stonehenge. At the time Renfrew was writing, Stonehenge, in its developed form, was understood primarily as a Bronze Age monument, and thus its emergence sat alongside the rich graves and extensive trade networks known from this period. Today we see the substantial sarsen phases of Stonehenge (Stage 2, previously discussed) as being Late Neolithic and therefore before this. Nonetheless, the notion of the chief remains very prevalent in the archaeological literature surrounding Stonehenge, as we see subsequently. The second, and arguably more powerful interpretation currently, emerged in 1998. In their famous paper, Mike Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina (1998) argued that the primary focus when interpreting the meaning of Stonehenge should be a concept of “the ancestors.” This drew on three lines of evidence. The first was the recognition that Stonehenge was a place of burial. In fact, it may represent the largest Late Neolithic cremation cemetery in Britain (Parker Pearson et al. 2009; cf. Brophy & Noble 2017: 235). This is in addition to the 40 fragments of unburnt bone, and the “archer” discussed previously. The second line of evidence drew on an ethnographic analogy with Madagascar. In a Malagasy context, megalithic stone architecture stands for the dead and for the ancestors. Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina (1998) suggested that a similar structuring principle might underlie the construction of Stonehenge. The third line of evidence compared Stonehenge with the nearby, and contemporary, sites of Durrington Walls and Woodhenge. Both of these sites saw the construction of timber, rather than stone circles, and both lack burial evidence on anything like the same scale (Parker Pearson & Ramilisonina 1998; Parker Pearson 2012a). Furthermore, compared with the limited amount of material culture recovered from Stonehenge, Durrington Walls in particular had been revealed to be replete with evidence for consumption. Since this publication, Parker Pearson has led a substantial and revolutionary program of excavations in this landscape. This has demonstrated even further the huge levels of feasting and occupation at Durrington Walls, including the presence of houses, in contrast to Stonehenge (Parker Pearson 2012a). It has redated and remodeled Stonehenge (we drew on these results earlier) and found new monuments in the local area (Allen et al. 2016; Darvill et al. 2012; Parker Pearson et al. 2013). The contrast between Durrington Walls and Stonehenge seems undeniable, and Parker Pearson argues that the former is a site for the living, the latter for the dead. Interestingly, Parker Pearson’s more recent work has argued that the burials at Stonehenge may represent those of elite families. Thus, Stonehenge itself represents a point of unification, under leadership, for much of the British Isles. This draws on evidence that suggests animals were brought to Durrington Walls, potentially from as far afield as Scotland (Chan et al. 2016; Parker Pearson 2012b: 22; Parker Pearson et al. 2013;

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Willis et al. 2016). Parker Pearson’s team recently suggested that the dating of the cremations at Stonehenge indicate a change in the way people related to ancestors at Stonehenge over the life of the site (Willis et al. 2016). They argue that initially specific ancestors were associated with individual stones in Stage 1, whereas in Stage 2 more remains were deposited in the ditch, forming a generalized collective of ancestors (Willis et al. 2016: 353). While this adds nuance to the ancestral narrative, it still focuses firmly on the way in which the site acted to materialize power. The chiefdom model, it would seem, is alive and well. There is a contrast between the amount of debate that surrounds the precise phasing and history of Stonehenge, and the way in which it attracts uniform interpretations. For all its variety over 1500 years (ignoring its post– Middle Bronze Age history) the two dominant approaches offer a single interpretive narrative with little sense of change through time. Stonehenge is for the chiefs, Stonehenge is for the ancestors, whether the date is 3000 cal BCE or 1600 cal BCE. This uniformity is in some ways all the more surprising when we consider that this history spans a major divide in archaeological periodization between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. These are two periods which are typically characterized as having very different ways of life, forms of social organization, and material culture. In the same manner, both approaches come from very different theoretical perspectives, yet in the end offer us the same ontology. In both cases it is human beings that are the active ones, imposing meaning onto material to reflect their social mores. Hierarchy or religion, or both – either way the humans are the ones who alone built Stonehenge and define its meaning once and for all. In the interpretation of Stonehenge we see the dominance of singular interpretive models which are majoritarian in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 123), that is, they override and overcode all the other ways of engaging with Stonehenge that existed. Stonehenge is a site that troubles us; it provokes us to think about how the past might be different. Yet our dominant archaeological approaches allow for little variation in the ontologies in which it operated. What would happen if we began to listen to the minor notes that played throughout Stonehenge’s history? How might new materialism help us tell different stories?

Three stories from Stonehenge Stonehenge Stage 1: an emergent ontology of time Our first vignette is drawn from the materials that constitute Stage 1, described previously. At this time the site is an assemblage of differing materials: wood, in the form of posts and platforms; bluestones of different kinds; cremated human remains and unburnt bodies slowly decaying; earth, chalk, plants, animal bones, and, at times at least, living people too. These materials operated in distinctly different ways that drew upon their contrasting and

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emergent material properties and capacities. The bluestones had moved over a great distance; they had come from a number of sources in west Wales, stopping potentially at different sites on their long journey overland. They came with a material history, quarried by people, dragged by others, gathering stories to themselves as they went before being transformed further at the site. Often we group these stones together today and talk about them as a relatively homogenous group, but each stone would have had its own history, its own events, its own temporality. Their erection bound these relations into specific locations, and linked Stonehenge in immediately affective ways with places long distant and stories often told. Outside of our Euclidean geographies these stones linked topologically to their quarry sites and as such folded the world of Late Neolithic Britain in new ways, like a once-flat handkerchief now crumpled up (cf. Serres with Latour 1995). The wooden aspects of the site are spatially separate from, but contained within, the stones. Where the stone had traveled from far away, the wood by contrast could have been locally sourced. Whereas each stone stood alone, an individual within a collective, the pieces of wood interwove with one another. Wood here was structural; it built platforms and blocked entrances; it was a material that could be employed quite differently from stone, drawing on people’s familiarity with its capacities. It is interesting thus, that the wood was tied to the transformation of human beings. The posts and platforms would have allowed for the excarnation of bodies, and different temporalities intertwined in these constructions. Bodies and posts both rot, but at different speeds, just as bodies and trees grow, but again each with their own temporality. The contrast between the cremated human remains and the potential treatment of other bodies is fascinating. Where unburnt bodies could have rotted on the platforms, once their transformation was complete most of the remains were moved elsewhere – only fragments remained. By contrast, cremated remains were brought to the site already transformed; it was this new materiality, its white fractured texture matching the chalk into which it was placed, that was suitable to remain at the site. In both cases wood was involved, its capacity to support the rotting bodies on the one hand, or to burn and consume a body on the other. As it emerged as a particular space in the world, Stonehenge gathered to it these disparate materials, and bound them to the site in specific ways. The site did not emerge overnight; the stones would have appeared slowly, the growth of the monument clear to those who returned, timed, and measured in the rotting of wood and bodies and the arrival of more stones. The placement of a red deer tibia in the ditch, potentially curated for some time (Cleal et al. 1995: 552–553), speaks to another temporality, as does the location of the site in connection to the glacial ridges and fissures orientated on the midwinter sunset. These contrasting temporalities were complimented by those played out in the ditch surrounding the monument: human sweat and labor slowly intensified to create the ditch and bank by carving into the earth and piling up chalk beside it. As this formed, so differing species of plants would

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come to colonize both bank and ditch, creating different ecologies, attracting different animals, and emphasizing different temporalities. Stonehenge was a site where the ontology of time itself was explored and materialized through the capacities of very different materials. Stonehenge Stage 2: change is denied In contrast to Stage 1, we see shifts in the material capacities drawn upon in the second stage of construction, both through the use of new materials and in others being less present at the site. Most notable, of course, is the arrival of the sarsen stones, first as the horseshoe arrangement of trilithons and later in the circle that surrounds them. While we tend to think of wood as impermanent and soft in contrast to stone, it is interesting that to take on the structural qualities that had been associated with wood in Stage 1, these stones had to become more like wood (cf. Parker Pearson et al. 2013: 170). Shaping and working of the sarsen stones drew out their “woody” capacities. Alasdair Whittle (1997: 149) has pointed out that some stones may even have been decorated to try and mimic the surface of wooden posts shaped by stone adzes. Shaping stone in the same ways that wood was traditionally worked lessened the distinction between the two. The features in the center of Stonehenge had long been structural, so for stone to take on this role it had to adopt some of the capacities of wood. It had to have tenon and mortice and tongue-and-groove joints. Each of these are techniques that were adapted from woodworking (a point long acknowledged by archaeologists); three stones merely placed on top of one another are more likely to fall and collapse, highlighting a shorter temporality, whereas using wooden construction techniques allowed the creation of a monument that still stands today. More than this, where wood grows and reaches up, where wooden structures allowed platforms to appear, now stone did both of these as well. Far from wood being associated solely with the short-term and stone with the long-term (as in the interpretation of Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina [1998]), we can see instead a world in which the capacities of stone shifted and emerged as potentially wood-like in order to allow the monument to endure. Critical here then is the shift in material temporalities and the ontology of time that emerges during Stage 2 as a result of the different capacities that wood and stone have at this point in time (cf. Hamilakis 2017: 174). While the sarsens had to take on woody elements to become long-lasting structures, there is no doubt that their material capacity to endure in a manner so different from wood was also central. Once the sarsens had been shaped as if they were made of wood, they could draw upon the properties this gave them and their own ability to endure. In Stage 1, there would have been annual shifts visible in the rotting of posts and bodies, the collapse of platforms, and the changes in the monument. In Stage 2, while lichen would have grown on the sarsens and grass would have grown rapidly in

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different places, other changes slowed. The cyclical return of the midwinter sunset contrasted strongly with the now more fixed architecture of the site. These were different rhythms emphasizing a new sense of time in the world. It is notable, therefore, that it is at this point that the ditch was recut and backfilled, this may have produced both a more stable bank, reinforced with chalk once again, and slowed further changes in the ditch itself once it had been backfilled. Change here becomes actively denied. Stone is multiple The dominant interpretations of this site have always emphasized its singular nature, and specifically its singular stony quality (although cf. Richards 2013: 26). The ancestor model declares stone is for the dead as opposed to wood for the living. Previously we have explored how stone and wood may have shared capacities, and indeed how this sharing was central to the site. We can, of course, divide the stones geologically. We have the bluestones – a mix of dolerites, three different kinds of rhyolite, and two kinds of sandstone, all from the Preseli Mountains (Parker Pearson et al. 2015). We also have the more local sarsens. Finally, we also have another crucial stone material at the site, chalk, one even more local than the sarsens that often gets ignored through our emphasis on certain aspects of architecture over others (cf. Banfield 2016). Each of these stones had different histories. The bluestones had their richly textured connections to places and people far away. The sarsens were larger; the intensive effort to move them would have taken more people in the short term but over a less drawn-out period. As Gillings and Pollard (2016) note in regard to the contemporary henge monument and stone circles at Avebury, the movement of stones like this would have left physical trails across the landscape, stretching out behind the stones as they moved. Finally the chalk was not moved far, simply from ditch to bank, but in so doing it colored and bounded the site; it coated people and things; it opened itself to hold stones, to grip them to the land. These histories could be seen in the colors and textures of all three types of stone. Each was worked differently within the site, using different tools, requiring different techniques, and responding in different ways. These are stones with long and complex histories which in their telling and retelling would themselves have shifted and changed. As bluestone and sarsen stood tall, so chalk would be covered by stone, by earth, by grass, only to be revealed again through acts of construction across the site. Chalk is the foundation of all these stories; it holds the stones, the cremations, the posts, the bank, and leaves its physical marks upon those who work it. One final distinction: Where the sarsens move once, other than when some fell or were potentially toppled (Pollard et al. 2017: 290), in their journey to the site, the bluestones moved multiple times. From the Aubrey holes to the Q and R holes to their final settings, there are a number of movements

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within the monument. In addition, it is possible other bluestones moved from a nearby monument to join their cousins during Stage 3 (Allen et al. 2016). We can imagine how the bluestones must have fallen from time to time, perhaps prompting people to move them elsewhere. The way in which we map specific stages of the monument implies frozen singular episodes where the site was transformed. However, each reworking might have taken decades; these were stones that continued to have active and changing histories and could intervene in their own stories. We lump these stones together, but their rich histories would have linked them to different groups and they could have been named and understood as living. Each stone had its own specific assemblage, and its material history and becoming drove that assemblage forward through time. Rather than a product of a single architect then, this is a monument in which form emerges not just from the hands of humans or specifically chiefs and ancestors, but through the relationships among people, place, and stone. The falling of a stone might also be seen as the rejection of one particular stone by another – the chalk – requiring new intercessions by people on behalf of the fallen stone to erect it in a new place, one where the chalk might be more willing to allow it to stand.

Conclusion These short vignettes have only begun the process of telling a new materialist, or Deleuzian, version of Stonehenge. This is a world in which stones move, live, and have opinions. Here, different stones play active roles in their own histories and are not merely brute dead matter: people and stones, along with many other materials, write history together. This is a world where time emerges through the shifting layers of chalk and through the rotting of wood as much as the motion of the earth around the sun. This is a world in which in order to last, stone had to be more like wood. The history of Stonehenge told here allows for far more than simply a monument built for ancestors or to the glory of a chief. Nothing in our stories suggests there was no role for either ancestors or human beings with particular powers, but it does not reduce the site to these elements. Not all people need to have been equal at Stonehenge, but neither were all materials. Power ran through these relationships, forming through them, and being shaped by them, but it was not unilinear or the possession of certain kinds of people alone. Instead, by embracing the vibrancy of matter, the importance of the minor elements of the site (like chalk), and by emphasizing that all things are multiplicities we can complicate and challenge our ideas about the past. Here, new worlds emerge not through the imposition of ethnographic analogies, or animist ontologies, but instead through an engagement with concepts that make us think differently, and open the potential for past differences to emerge. The potential for animism, theories of personhood, and other anthropological concepts to shake our fundamental assumptions about how the

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world works remain profound. However, as British prehistorians, when it comes to working with our materials we need our own resources and our own ways of approaching this. Therefore, we have turned to new materialism, and to the work of Gilles Deleuze in particular, as our starting point. It is our contention that it is in these approaches, their creativity and their flexibility, that we will be able to assemble new ontologies from the old materials with which we work.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the editors for their kind invitation to be part of this volume and for their useful comments on this article. Mark Gillings also read a draft and was his usual helpful self. Mike Parker Pearson kindly gave permission for the reproduction of images of the stages of Stonehenge, and Ellie Rowley-Conwy graciously allowed us to use her photograph. All errors, as ever, remain our own.

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5

Religious objects Uncomfortable relations and an ontological turn to things Amy R. Whitehead

By arguing that Western Europeans have relationships with traditional objects, just in different, uniquely European ways, this chapter adds to debates about animism, the fetish, personhood and relational ontologies. This means that I am forced by proxy to include, challenge, manage and expand upon the existing dualistic constructs that have been responsible for structuring Western ontologies and epistemologies for centuries. As this chapter demonstrates through a particular case of Spanish Catholic statue devotion, religious objects are both familiar and strange. They do not always sit amicably within abstract and language-driven dualistic frameworks that comprise divisions such as subject/object, nature/culture, immanence/ transcendence or spirit/mind/matter. Accounts from my fieldwork at a Marian shrine in Andalusia show, for example, that the statue of the Virgin of Alcala de los Gazules is understood to actively cure illnesses and infertility, to help get jobs, a home, or to help seek political justice. More than a statue, she is kin. More than an initiator of social relations, she is related with and cared for as a tangible relation, a mother-figure, a keeper of family histories and local heritage for her devotees. As a result of their ambiguous nature, Western religious objects such as the Virgin are useful for adding to discussions concerning the relational ontologies found in animism because unlike “non-religious” forms of material culture such as cars and computers, religious objects are capable of pushing Cartesian dualisms to their limits. Consequently, their presence tends to unnerve modernist observers. Much like that which is found in discourses surrounding the fetish, religious objects have a kind of mysterious or unknown value or capability in that they sit on the “borders” (Spyer, 1998) of this world and the perceived next. Thus the chapter seeks to reanimate the language of “fetish” to demonstrate the power/liveliness of religious things in the “modern” West. The first section of the chapter attends to debates about animism and personhood. It introduces the case study and explores the ontological possibilities found when Western Europeans have relationships with religious objects such as the Virgin of Alcala. Specifically tailored to dealing with the religious statues, the concept of animist relationality is introduced in specific relation to Western statue devotion as an appropriate framework

76 Amy R. Whitehead within which to understand the fluid relational engagements that the Virgin’s devotees have with the statue. Secondly, the chapter explores the ways in which discussions about animism and personhood are not only contributing to the ontological turn, but also are advancing it towards an ontological turn “to things” that emphasises the significance of the “materials” of the materiality (Ingold, 2011). The third section combines these discussions and offers “the fetish” as a useful contender for dealing with powerful forms of European religious matter and advancing relational ontologies. Thus conclusively, in not dealing purely with the “stuff” of perceived “others” such as Amerindian Amazonians, but Western religious objects (who are often made theoretically “other”), we have an excellent opportunity for conceiving of Western relational ontologies that can practically and methodologically be developed with regard to matter and the lived realities of people’s experiences.

Relational ontologies Context I begin this section with an oversimplified statement. In the rich and diverse variety of Western European cultures, people (average people, academics, theologians, children, solicitors) have relationships with “objects”. We speak to our cars, we “fall in love” with certain articles of art or clothing, and we often keep our deceased relatives’ possessions dear, as if something lingers on of the person in the object. Latour (2005) suggests that these kinds of relationships do, however, tend to go unnoticed, or even denied, by academics and other “privileged elites”. He writes: In their study, sociologists consider, for the most part, an object-less social world, even though in their daily routine they, like all of us, might be constantly puzzled by the constant companionship, the continuous intimacy, the inveterate contiguity, the passionate affairs, the convoluted attachments of primates with objects for the past one million years. (2005: 82) Indeed, there is a problematic at work here. It seems as though a lot of effort has been put into avoiding the often potent roles that religious objects play in Western cultures. Following Latour’s suggestion that we have been in cognitive denial of our relationships with objects, it appears as though we exist in a kind of tension whereby religious and other objects have been held at bay and relegated to the safety zones of “objecthood”, metaphor or the status of representation. Religious objects, do, however, offer us an inroad to seeing things differently. Not only have they attracted different types of attention for centuries (debates in eighth Byzantium, the Protestant war on Catholic idols and transubstantiation), but also we relate to and treat religious things

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differently to how we relate to everyday or ordinary things. We mark them off, set them aside, protect them and treat them (typically) with some form of respect. In some cases, such as the one discussed here of the Virgin, taboos surround them, and they are thought to act in ways that show disdain or happiness. In essence, religious objects exaggerate the potentialities of “normal” objects in Western cultural discourses. Their (often lowly) place in our cultural hierarchical structure means that they have the ability to reflect our epistemologies, our ontologies, our perception of our cultural selves and consequently our perceptions of “others” (both “home” and “away”). Western modern “ontologies” and “epistemologies” are used in the plural to reflect the diversity of European cultures, their languages and their histories. Spain is different from Germany, Italy is different from the Irish Republic, and so on. Yet still, we have a lot in common. Reference is not being made to Western Europe as geographical location per se, but to a shared socially constructed way of thinking about the world, a common feature of which is division. Unlike most non-Western indigenous perspectives, the textbook version of the European traditional worldview model typically consists of Cartesian dualisms: “subject and object”, “nature and culture” and/or “spirit/mind and matter”. It can further be argued that these dualities, while perpetuating a kind of schism, are indigenous to Westerners. They constitute part of a constructed and wider overarching modern, singular ontology that is commonly accepted in academic discourses (Viveiros de Castro, 2004: 482), but that does not adequately account for that which takes place in the lived realities of European religious lives, or ontologies (plural), especially in relation to object. When examined more closely, it becomes clear through the active relationships that culturally diverse modern Europeans have with materiality that European religious objects are just as relational, significant and powerful as any ritual or ceremonial object found in the Amazon. As stated in the introduction, we just do it in uniquely European ways. Before moving on to a critical analysis of the fetish, the next section continues with a discussion of the relational, ontological possibilities found in Western, modern discourses and how they can be applied specifically to traditionally Catholic religious statue devotion, starting with animism, old and new. Animism: old and new Let me be clear. Animism is a Western concept that can be applied to that which we, Westerners, do when we engage with the world. The origin of animism as a cultural evolutionary definition/theory of “religion” is found in the Victorian scholarship of Edward Tylor, and his famous work: Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor’s animism asserted that in primitive societies, matter contains souls, or spirits. Spirits come from outside of matter and inhabit “dead” objects (1871, I: 426). Animism, for Tylor, is the essence of all religions, even those practiced by modern Europeans (the religions of whom he

78 Amy R. Whitehead also labelled as remnants of a “primitive” past), and he considered science to be the only way to discover true knowledge. In animist ontologies such as the new animism (a phrase proposed by Harvey, 2005), the fixed separations between spirit and matter are called into question. Built on fieldwork conducted by Irving Hallowell (1960) among the Ojibwe people of southern central Canada and, according to Harvey (2005: 1) it is based on the recognition that the world is full of persons. Some of these persons are human, while others are not. It does not suggest that all things are living all the time; but that personhood is a potentiality that is present in animals, plants, humans and things. It is not a human-centric label for others, but a recognition of the fact that we share the world with other persons, e.g. human persons, rock persons, bear persons and others (Harvey, 2005: 18). A clear move away from Tylor’s cultural evolutionary theory of animism, the key to understanding the new animism lies with “relationships” and “treatment”, e.g. how persons behave towards one another is an indication of their personhood. Exploring this idea through the example of stones, Harvey says: If not all stones are alive “but some are”, how does someone encountering a stone tell the difference? It certainly makes a difference, not only grammatically and in other speech acts, but also in the way a stone is treated. People are spoken with and acted towards differently than objects. (2005: 36) Following Buber, Harvey suggests that we might simply need to refer to something as “thou” rather than “it” to indicate that personhood is taking place (2005: 111). I have the impression that “taking place” is not written lightly. For something or someone to “take place” it/he/she must act, participate or be involved in some form of practice or performance that locates it/he/she within space and time, or the moment. Harvey’s animism “provides, then, a participatory framework for understanding the place of human beings in the world (by participation is meant the close engagement between humans and other-than-human beings)” (Jones and Boivin, 2010: 343). This participatory framework is volatile, fluid and full of ontological possibilities where different types of people take place. In contrast to this, Tylor’s animism is static and based on beliefs, (scientific) knowledge and epistemology. Yet according to Ingold: “Knowing must be reconnected with being, epistemology with ontology, thought with life. Thus has our rethinking of indigenous animism led us to propose the re-animation of our own, so-called ‘western’ tradition of thought” (2006: 19). As the case study demonstrates, rethinking animism in our own Western (religious) discourses can help to reanimate our so-called western tradition of thought with regard to

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cherished religious objects such as the Virgin of Alcala de los Gazules. This serves the dual purpose of widening the singular overarching Western ontology of “one” (or two, if we count dualities) where we can see the potential for real-time “ontologies” (plural). The case study I conducted the main bulk of my qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork in Andalusia, Spain, between 2007 and 2011 at a particular shrine of the Virgin Mary in Spain called the Virgin of Alcala de los Gazules (Figure 5.1). Also known as the Virgin of All the Saints (la Virgen de todos los santos), the Virgin sits in her shrine at the edge of the mountain village of Alcala de los Gazules, and she is very popular among locals and others that come from further afield. A small wooden figure, about 3 feet tall, the Virgin is carved from a cedar of Lebanon. She has fine European features, with lidless, open brown eyes (ever watchful), and wears long, elaborate mantles darned in gold. She holds a small statue of the infant Jesus in one hand, and a sceptre in the other. Both are crowned. Each of her life-like wooden fingers bears a gold ring; these are offerings from devotees, most of which contain sentimental value. The Virgin has been resident in her shrine for centuries (the exact age of the Virgin is disputed, but it is thought that she is at least 500 years old). She is the owner of her shrine and surrounding lands that contain a large olive grove and grazing land for her cattle. Her name is on the deeds of the property, and this is officially recognised. The shrine complex is vast. It has a typically Andalusian patio in the middle, with various rooms for pilgrims and other visitors on the upper floor. The shrine itself is accessed through two large, heavy wooden doors off to the side of the patio, and a distinct threshold must be crossed to enter. Once inside, the architectural style changes to Baroque and is noticeably different. The sheer amount of rich and colourful materiality (ex votos, statues, images, candles, offerings) indicates that this is a working shrine. The Virgin works for her people, and they work for her. In addition to speaking with devotees and shrine visitors and observing performances/interactions with the Virgin, the “things” in and around this shrine are visible testimonies to the Virgin’s miraculous capabilities, and mostly, to her power. In official theological teaching, the notion that the Virgin of Alcala has power is rejected. The language of representation is used to describe her place, while the language of mediation is used to describe her function. The Virgin Mary is an intercessor between humans and Jesus. Jesus then takes any issues to God, the Father. My case study is, however, an example of vernacular Catholicism where that which devotees are meant to do and believe often sits in contrast with that which they actually do. Local customs and traditions, the land, the food and wider Andalusian culture combine with popular Marian piety to create a religion that is truly unique to place.

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Figure 5.1 The Virgin of Alcala (copyright Amy R. Whitehead)

Deeply significant to the village’s tangible and intangible heritage practices, her shrine is filled with the visible genealogies of local families (photographs, jewellery), and she sits at the centre of the web of social relations in Alcala. Offerings are significant to this case study because they illustrate reciprocity, action and interaction at this working shrine. They are not only

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expressions of devotion, but also they are negotiating tools, or currency, given in exchange or promise for something in return, e.g. for infertility to be cured, for employment, for a loved one to be healed, for a life-mate, or partner. There is a protocol at work that indicates how offerings should be given, as well as the types of things that are acceptable to the Virgin. Gold figures heavily into this, as do the offering of ex votos paintings/pictures. Ex votos can either be crudely drawn (many of which are from children) or commissioned pieces of art such as oil paintings. As the Virgin is particularly miraculous when couples come to her seeking a child, baby-related objects are also a common feature in the shrine. Baby things (pacifiers, shoes, baby jewellery, photos of babies) are given once promises have been completed, and there is no shortage of offerings of this kind on display. In reference to museum objects, Hall argued that “display” works like a language (Hall, 2003: 8). In a similar vein it can be argued that the ways in which the objects in the shrine are given and then displayed not only works like a language, but also like a language that denotes power (as is discussed further along with the fetish). This language of power not only generates the shrine’s aesthetic, but it also informs modes of devotion and further generates both a collective epistemology, while nurturing, inspiring, guiding and giving elements of shape to individual ontologies, relationships and intimate encounters. In highlighting European religious diversity, it must be noted here that although Spanish Catholics had other disruptions to religion such as the Napoleonic invasion and later civil war, devotional practices in Spain did not suffer the severe consequences brought by the Protestant Reformation (as did some of their northern European neighbours). The fact that Spanish Catholics were not muted in the same way can be seen in the vibrancy, colour and passion with which Catholicism south of the Alps is practiced as opposed to the north. In the course of my research I have been privileged in my interactions with devotees, and with those who are more intimately involved in their work at the shrine and with the Virgin (who are also devotees). The shrine Santero is the principle caretaker of the statue and her interests, and he continues to treat me as a guest and even a friend to this day. He lives at the shrine and his relationship is more “day to day”, but this is no ordinary post. The Santero is thought to have a kind of second sight, or healing ability, because of his continual contact and care of the Virgin. I also had the honour of spending time with a group of women called the camaristas. The camaristas occupy significant, yet unofficially Catholic, roles in the community in that they are responsible for ritually bathing and changing the statues of the Virgin and the infant Jesus in accordance with the changes of the liturgical year. Interviews with the camaristas revealed that they sing to the Virgin while dressing her, and that some of them enter into a trance-like state during which they say they have seen the statue move, and where time has taken on a different quality whereby “four hours felt like 20 minutes”. Reflexively, I am culturally Western, and I am not Catholic. I was open about this from the outset of my research. Still, after time spent at the shrine

82 Amy R. Whitehead and with the Virgin, the Santero decided that I had become a devotee. When I asked why he said this, he replied, “You keep coming back”. I could not argue. This research was so rich in terms of my own experiences and in terms of what I had the honour to witness and take part in, perhaps I had become a kind of researcher/devotee. After all, I was told that even atheists are devotees of this Virgin, so I felt comfortable with this. I bring the details of these accounts into conversation with the theoretical premises presented from this point forward. Animist relationality In my time spent at and around the shrine of the Virgin of Alcala, I watched how the so-called statue was treated, dressed, spoken with and approached – not as a statue – but as a person. I have argued before (Whitehead, 2013a) that the Virgin of Alcala is a person in much the same way that rocks, trees or humans are persons. She is a “statue person”, and her personhood is evidenced in the ways in which she is treated, given gifts and spoken to/ with by her devotees. I must add here that animism was not a concept that I took readily into this research situation. I used an inductive approach, and in observing that the Virgin was not only treated as an ordinary person, but also as a powerful person, I soon realised that animism, and animist personhood, is a reality of action and interaction. This is not to suggest that Spanish Catholic Marian devotees self-identify as animists; but I am arguing that animism is a useful critical tool for understanding that which occurs during moments of active relational engagement between the statue and her devotees, despite both Catholic doctrine and modern dualities. When I say “that which occurs”, I am referring to the ontological possibilities that emerge through physical, non-metaphorical action whereby “persons” bring one another into co-inspired, co-relational forms of being in which the categories of “subject” and “object” dissolve in moments of devotional encounter. The Virgin’s personhood is not, however, an ontological guarantee. It is, however, a possibility that must be accounted for when exploring alternatives to unhelpful dualisms. The camaristas, for example, would never refer to the Virgin as an “object”. She is a subject, just as the camaristas are subjects. Therefore this particular account of mutual relating demonstrates a case of “intersubjectivity”. Animist relationality is both theory and practice, and intersubjectivity sits at its core. It is based on relationships, performances and the moment, all of which is volatile, inclusive and engaged. Applied to the Virgin, Harvey’s discussion of “treatment” being the prime indicator that animism is taking place is particularly useful to this idea. This is seen in how the Virgin of Alcala is referred to and addressed as “she” instead of “it”. This apparently simple change from “it” to “she” shifts the relational dynamics between the statue and her devotees and demonstrates one of the ways in which personhood, indeed animist relationality, is taking place. The Virgin’s personhood

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is visibly helped by the fact that she looks like a kind of person (e.g. she has anthropomorphised features: eyes, nose, mouth, hands, etc.). Effigies such as this Virgin are persons because accounts and observations found that they are related to as such – not strictly in a biological sense, but similar to the treatment of what Gell calls “an honoured guest” (1998: 128). Representation is the language of theology and modernity, not the language of active relationships. My research found that in moments in which devotees are giving offering or venerating “their Virgin”, the language of representation is not always applicable. Experience speaking with devotees in Alcala demonstrates that they clearly understand that the statue of the Virgin is a piece of carved wood, a “tool of devotion”, and that she is meant to only signal the transcended and universal Theotokos. Yet the performances of speaking, treatment, gift giving and negotiating indicate something else entirely. Active relational engagements with the Virgin comprise another kind of language – the visibly, performed, embodied language of animism. In contrast, the Virgin can also be related to as a statue, a representation or an image, as I found when I interviewed the young village priest at Alcala. This perspective was not, however, shared by the camaristas or the Santero, for example. So while the language of representation might be applicable in some moments of encounter, it is not necessarily applicable in all moments of encounter and cannot therefore be considered a “rule of thumb”. An additional contested but exemplary concept from which to understand the problem of representation while simultaneously addressing the central role and function that the Virgin plays in her community is totemism. Durkheim’s emphasis on the social, and that religion should be considered in symbolist and metaphorical terms, highlights another mistake in earlier modern scholarly discourses that unfairly labelled the traditions of “others” (Aborigines) as “totemic” (etymologically from the Ojibwe word doodem). Yet the totem itself inspires a fresh theoretical perspective that forms part of animist relationality. For example, the Virgin, her shrine and the role that she plays in maintaining heritage and tradition in Alcala is central to social relations. Yet this “clan” (the villagers of Alcala) are not worshipping themselves, as Durkheim might have imagined. Challenging human-centric ideas of the social, I have argued elsewhere that the Virgin is an active participant in rituals and ceremonies (Whitehead, 2013a). Her form and figuration were crafted and conceived of in place and in her shrine space. She is dressed in specifically Andalusian ways. The camaristas and the Santero accounted for the fact that it is taboo for anyone outside of the camarista group to see the Virgin’s corporeal form undressed. She is a being of local creation, and she is “one of their relations”, but with power and access to the unknown. The Virgin is also a public figure who creates unity among her group, and she protects the village in time of drought, as well as individual devotees in times of trouble. This is evidenced in the centrality of the Virgin in processions and other events in the village, as well as in the ex votos that line the walls of the shrine. Over the centuries she has

84 Amy R. Whitehead born witness to countless baptisms, marriages and funerals. Family lineages and histories line the walls of her shrine, and she dons gifts of gold, a huge proportion of which was, in the past, melted to make her large crown. Following the rubric of the fetish (discussed further along) this static piece of pageantry contains the essences of her devotees. The assemblages of materiality found in the Virgin’s shrine combine with the Virgin to form a powerful whole that roots family, history and heritage into place. The Virgin is not totemic in the Durkheimian sense. She is not merely representational. She is actively and relationally kin. Statue devotion and modernity Latour indicated in his famous book that “we have never been modern” (1993). I would argue that we are, in fact, modern – just not in the way that the project of modernity would have had us imagine. Placing modernity on a sliding scale, it can be suggested that at times we are more modern that at other times. For example, some Westerners speak about being Christian on Sundays. It is not as simple as saying, “We have never been modern” when that which is commonly accepted as modernity is a culturally selfidentifying, working component of Western societies. British society, for example, is religiously plural, secular and Christian at the same time. Modern humans make informed choices as to whether or not they participate in any form of religion, including the types of engagements they have with religious statues as demonstrated previously. That is not to say that there are no tensions involved between perceived modern, secular, rational society and religious beliefs and practices. Yet many of the Spanish Catholics I spoke to consider themselves “culturally Catholic” instead of practicing Catholic. Cultural Catholicism in Spain is rife, and it straddles the religious and the secular in ways that highlight the fluid relational continuum of the lived realities of religion suggested here. Fixed categories simply do not work. Differences in approach to the Virgin are not merely relativistic, for that would indicate that there is an overarching idea or construct that all people and things are relative to. Instead, animist relationality emphasises reality and real relating and offers the potential to account for the uniqueness of the ontological perspectives that can emerge as a result of encounter. Within this in mind, animist relationality is so relational that it can include ideas and languages of representation while incorporating the visible relational performed language of animism. Both Tylor’s dualistic notion of animism and the newer version are capable of accounting for Western relationships with religious objects. Thus ambiguous in nature, depending on the types of encounters taking place, religious statues can either signal or communicate with divine and otherworldly prototypes; or, as this chapter’s critical discussions of the fetish reveal, they can be powerful in and of themselves. A “turn to things” means that the previously marginalised “stuff” of devotion (and

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the people who create and venerate it) is recognised as both modern and sophisticated – and not “other”. Tylor and Frazer, along with later sociologists such as Stark, Bainbridge and others, were unequivocally mistaken. Religion did not decline in modern societies where it was replaced by science; it simply changed. Similar to religion, whereby our understanding and therefore definition of religion has had to broaden in order to accommodate alternative religions and more individualised forms of spirituality, so to our definition of modernity and how we understand and utilise dualistic constructs must also be broadened. The significant work of Viveiros de Castro considers how the Western ontology of “one” is limited, or impoverished, in comparison with the multiplicity of ontologies found in Amerindian cultures. He writes: “Virtually all attacks on Cartesian and other dualisms consider that two is already too much – we need just one (one principle, one substance, one reality). As far as Amerindian cosmologies are concerned, it would appear that two is not enough” (2004: 482). This gets to the heart of matter. Neither epistemology nor ontology are stable concepts. Perceiving Western ontologies as “one” or “two” (including the binaries) is but another construct and an oversimplification that, like modernity, does not have the scope to address the lived realities of peoples’ relationships with (religious) objects. Each is dependent contextually on space, place and time. Animist relationality, however, accommodates the volatile continuum of relational involvements where persons (human persons and statue persons in this case) can co-constitute, co-mingle and co-create. To suggest that Europeans only see things in one, or two, particular ways is erroneous and is, perhaps, only well suited to addressing “doctrinal” or non-existent official versions of religion and modernity, not what people actually do, e.g. have real relationships with things made from wood, bone and stone.

Wood, bone, stone: the turn to things It has been established so far that animist relationality is broad enough in scope to work as a relational ontology that accounts for relationships with Western religious objects. Let us now turn our attention to “things”, the material culture turn, and its developing relationship with the study of religions. From the significances of the material properties of religious objects such as the Virgin of Alcala, to the stories, beliefs and rituals that take place accordingly, the two have a lot to offer each other. As Law suggests, “matter matters”. He writes: In STS [science, technology, and society], materiality is usually understood as relational effect. Something becomes material because it makes a difference, because somehow or other it is detectable. It depends, then, on a relation between that which is detected and that which does the detecting. Matter that does not make a difference does not matter. It

86 Amy R. Whitehead is not matter since there is no relation. Nor relation of difference and detection. No relation at all. (2010: 173) Law is not referring to religious objects here, but religious objects (their ability to provoke wars or to inspire devotion and performances) are detected and have “effect”. For this reason they are capable of exemplifying his point to a full and hearty degree. It is undeniable that the Virgin of Alcala makes a difference; she (like many others of her kind) is “matter that matters”. This section continues making a case for the newer usage of animism in relation to materiality, and consequently, new approaches to the fetish, in order to further establish the relational and ontological significances of religious objects in Western religious communities, starting with the material culture turn. The material culture turn in anthropology and archaeology had “problematized the study of the socio-cultural and the material in isolation from each other”, the solution to which was to examine how subjects and objects stood in relation to one another (Miller and Tilley in Hicks, 2010: 60). Still yet, although attempts were made at reconciliation, objects and subjects were conceived of in opposition. During the “Museum Period” which took place in “the last third of the nineteenth century from earlier Western colonial and antiquarian collecting practices”, archaeology and anthropology were interested in studying forms of human technology (Hicks, 2010: 30). Whereas “Earlier European collections of objects sought to gather the curiosities of the world, both natural and manmade, in the cabinets of the curious” (Buchli, 2007: 4), the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford had “made a connection between human technology and Edward Tylor’s notion of ‘culture’, as set out in his book Primitive Culture (1871)” (Hicks, 2010: 31). Tylor saw the potential inherent in the study of objects (“object-lessons”) in that he saw “the curation and study of objects: as not only documenting the past or understanding the present, but also envisioning the future” (Hicks, 2010: 34). Arguably a factor in the recent development of “intangible heritage” studies, Tylor’s connection between “human technology” and his notion of “culture” created a pathway to the study of a more humancentred approach to objects. Yet according to Pels, Tylor’s subsumption of the “fetish” under “animism”: Can be read as marking a certain transcendence of the sociocultural over the material (Pels, 1998: 94), so that, despite the evolutionists’ heavy focus on the museum object, their “dematerializing” thought can also be seen as having prepared the way for the marginalization of material culture studies in early twentieth-century anthropology. (Pels, 2008: 266) It is not only material culture studies that got marginalised. Because of Tylor’s significant influence on anthropology and the study of religions,

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coupled with Victorian Protestantism, and Durkheim’s later Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) (which propelled the categories of the sacred and the profane into religious studies discourse), the material dimension of religion in Western cultures remained muted until recently. In terms of relationships with objects, scholars were mainly focussing on the customs and traditions of cultures (Mongolians, Cubans, Africans, Amerindians, etc.). Foregrounded by the onset of ritual studies in the 1960s, the material culture turn, and interest in the mutually significant forms of tangible and intangible heritage, the past 15–20 years has seen what Pels refers to as the Protestant fear of matter (Pels, 2008) loosen its grip. Many scholars are now recognising the rich and whole potentialities in what materiality can offer the study of religions, e.g. artefacts, geographies, architectures, bodies and the senses. These combined efforts have planted seeds for the organic growth towards an ontological turn to things. In this vein, and with a glance back and a nod towards the old animism, debates in the new version are flourishing. Therefore, a discussion about animism, personhood and religious statues is incomplete without addressing the significance of the material properties of the Virgin. First, wood is not without its own biography. I have heard it said that it is easier to imagine the relationship between trees and animism than the relationship between a material object and animism (the latter being fetishism). But what happens when the material object was once a tree? As stated before, the Virgin of Alcala is carved from a cedar of Lebanon. Since the Cedar of Lebanon is mentioned in the Bible (e.g. “The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like the cedar of Lebanon” Psalm 92: 12), it is a common choice for religious statue carving. It is also a valuable, good hardwood. So this is the beginning of the Virgin of Alcala’s story. “It” started off as seed, grew into a tree and was selected in some unknown way (what would be the process of selecting an appropriate cedar of Lebanon to create a state?) before being cut down and carved into a religious statue. I wonder about the unknowable. Was the religious statue carver a devotee of some Virgin? Was the carver commissioned to carve a statue for a particular parish in need of a Virgin? In any case, the potentiality of the Virgin’s personhood was present in her raw material tree form before she became “she”, the Virgin. If we are to see beyond human intentionality, the prescribed social roles of things and notions of representation, then these issues are significant to understanding the big picture. Ingold (2011) writes that: The properties of materials, regarded as constituents of an environment, cannot be identified as fixed, essential attributes of things, but are rather processual and relational. They are neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined but practically experienced. In that sense, every property is a condensed story. To describe the properties of materials is to tell the stories of what happens to them as they flow, mix and mutate. (30)

88 Amy R. Whitehead This is an essential part of the ontological turn to things that constitutes an animist relational perspective. There is a fluid continuum of on-going relationship among the materials, the materiality, the stories and beliefs, her theological and vernacular religious role as intercessor and mother, and her community totemic role as relation/kin. These elements combine to offer ontological possibilities that are not necessarily dependent upon human intentionality, although humans can be participants in the relational continuum, too. Acknowledging and including the raw materials from which religious statue persons are made adds another dimension to the story of the Virgin. Enacting full consideration for the component parts of her whole is what an animist ontological turn to things might look like in Western religious discourses. We are, however, asked to consider one last and vital component of this picture: the question of power.

Fetish things, religious things The Virgin of Alcala is not passive. She is a central actor, kin, relation, mother, friend and mediator in the village (and to those who visit from abroad), and she is housed, given gifts, maintained, adorned, venerated, prayed to, negotiated with and loved accordingly. As established, she is not “just a piece of carved wood”. She is much more than that. And whereas suggesting that the Virgin can be considered within the discourse of the fetish might be unthinkable for some, I am suggesting – with the utmost care and respect – that the fetish is an excellent premise from which to understand her relational capacity, and to shed critical light on an issue that has haunted Western academic, colonial and religious discourses for centuries. Pietz (1985) writes: Discursively promiscuous and theoretically suggestive, it has always been a word with a past, forever becoming “an embarrassment” to disciplines in the human sciences that seek to contain and control its sense. (1985: 5) This promiscuousness, however, is the exact feature that renders the fetish capable of creating a relational ontology that can address the powerful role of Western religious statues and test the limiting dualistic constructs highlighted in this chapter. After all, the fetish is ours. A good place to start any critical reclamation exercise is with etymology. Yet another problem with the fetish is that its definitions vary. According to Latour: Even though all etymological dictionaries agree on the origins of the term, Charles de Brosses, who invented the word “fetishism” (French fetichisme) in 1760, linked its origins with fatum, or destiny, the source of the French noun fee, “fairy”, and of the adjective form in the noun phrase object-fee, “fairy-object” (also of the English adjective “fey”). (Latour, 2010: 89)

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These words conjure images of magic, sorcery and enchanted gardens, not the amulets, stones, hair, shells, bone and other objects often associated with the construction of the fetish. De Brosses’s interpretation does, however, signal wildness and unpredictability. There are other translations and understandings that complement this analysis. Johnson suggests that the fetish simply implies “that which is made” (Johnson, 2000: 229), while Graeber suggests that it was born out of the acts of improvisation that took place in trade encounters between people who did not understand each other, but where both had desires regarding what they wanted (resources, land, exchanges, gold). In other words, the fetish is a product of fluid, creative social arrangements (2005: 27). In a similar vein, Pels goes further, suggesting that the objects falling in the category “designated by the pidgin word fetisso” come as a result from West African/Portuguese trade and “probably referred to a (subsection of a) group of objects that comprised both Christian objects (such as rosaries) as well as African amulets, and that identified the wearer of these objects as a middleman in that trade”. These so-called middlemen, according to Pels, did not leave written accounts of their work so: The process can only be reconstructed on the basis of the ethnographies left by their successors: the Dutch Protestant traders who ousted the Portuguese from the “Gold Coast” in the course of the sixteenth century. These ethnographies suggest that fetisso referred to something radically different from the Portuguese feitico (“charm”) – the word from which it was derived. (Pels, 2010: 617) The fetish, true to its own slippery nature, eluded definition until it was trapped by Dutch Protestants in a category that was to render it simultaneously dangerous and obsolete. Yet Pels’ suggestion that the fetisso’s original purpose was that of a non-religious discriminate tool of identification between traders is a fascinating addition to the mystery of the origin of the fetish. Further, and even more pertinent, is what Dutch Protestant traders did with the word and consequently what became of the concept later on. Having experience in dealing with unruly Catholics and their false materialities, the tradesmen knew exactly where to categorically banish the fetish. But the fetish was sneaky. With its eye set on home (Europe) and taking the guise of a “charm” it allowed itself to be projected upon in order to gain safe passage abroad where it could eventually work itself back into the cultural discourses found in the countries of its origin, starting with museums. And thus the fetish came home to roost. Now, scholars such as Johnson write: If one means of reclaiming the fetish is tracing its etymology and usage, the other is by changing its arrow of valuation from denoting that which is Other to that which is right under our noses. That is to say, there

90 Amy R. Whitehead may be social/cultural phenomena that are most usefully understood under the rubric of the fetish – phenomena whose primary criterion is their materiality and condensed signification. Obvious examples named above include a wedding ring or a photo of the beloved. (2000: 252) Or, I will add, a statue of the Virgin of Alcala who receives wedding rings of relatives as offerings, and where photos of devotees’ beloveds dress her shrine. But what is the “rubric of the fetish”, and how can this rubric be applied to Catholic material and performance cultures? The word “rubric” indicates rules, or a prescribe way of being, doing or encountering. Like the fetish, religious statues certainly have “rubric”. I have argued before that the shrine of the Virgin is an active hub that garners a steady flow of devotional currencies. There are things that the Virgin regularly receives as offerings (gold, ex votos, military medals, baby things, locks of hair in the form of “promises”, flowers, photos, notes placed under her statue feet). But the fetish is a loose, promiscuous category. We think we know what it means, but the nature of the fetish dictates “pure social creativity” (Graeber, 2005). This means that while there may be a form of knowable rubric at play, that rubric can be broadly defined and is indicative of that which is crafted and manifests as a result of materials, relationships and the moment. The rubric of the fetish consists of certain materials while being simultaneously relational. As Graeber and Pels suggest in relation to trade encounters between Africans and the Portuguese, it is through “things” (the wearing, displaying, caring for) that the unfamiliar becomes familiar and in some way, becomes known. If we apply this to the interactions that take place between the Virgin of Alcala and her devotees, it can be suggested that the offerings she receives, coupled with the act of giving, serves as mediating currency that, using the socially creative rubric of the fetish and “broadly defined animism” (Harvey, 2005: 210), makes devotee and statue socially familiar. Indeed, in their intersubjectivity, they become persons of a unique kind in the presence of one another. Familiarity does not, however, breed equality. A significant part of understanding how the fetish works with regard to Western religious statues lies in the acknowledgement of power relations. The Virgin of Alcala is not related to as an equal. She is treated as royalty. With garments darned in gold, and a large crown of the same on her head, she sits in a raised chamber holding court like a queen. The difference between the Virgin’s queen-like self and a (contemporary) human queen is that this statue-queen sits on the border between this world and the next. She is present in her statue-body carved from the cedar of Lebanon, but in her relational capacity she can contain, represent or mediate spirit and power, all of which is dependent on the quality or mode of encounter, and some of which is informed by theological teachings and doctrine. Through attributing and/or acknowledging the power of the Virgin, devotees become, in some sense, subordinate. Equally,

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however, if the Virgin is not maintained and cared for, she will fall to rot and ruin. There is a creative tension at work here where reciprocity must take place. If the Virgin does not grant any more miracles, word will get out, and she may well meet her demise. This is where the rubric of animist relationality merges with the rubric of the fetish. The rubric of the fetish can be seen clearly through Pels’ suggestion that the difference between animism and fetishism is that animism is the spirit “in” matter, while the fetish is the spirit “of” matter (1998: 91). Pels’ definition of animism is similar to that of Tylor’s animism whereby spirits are separate entities to objects, things, bodies, in the material world. Spirit “of” matter suggests that matter is inherently powerful with its own discourse and perhaps agenda. Ingold, however, challenges Pels’ assertion by arguing that it is not life that is in matter, but matter, in all its complexities, that is in life. Ingold suggests that Pels’ argument that “the fetish is an object that, by virtue of its sheer material presence, affects the course of affairs (1998: 94–95)” is an important step in the right direction, but it only takes us halfway (Ingold, 2007: 12). By this he means that while the fetish recognises that the materials found inherently in objects have power, they “remains trapped” in a dualistic construct which separates the mental from the material. This critique can, however, only go so far. Ingold does not address the complex nature of Western religious statues who are both immanent and transcendent simultaneously. He also does not address the religious stories of their material properties. The ontological turn to religious things that includes and applies animism and the fetish to Western religious objects is all inclusively relational. It considers relationships to place and space, modernity, theology, the material properties of objects, their biographies, their transformative possibilities, identities, stories, heritage, myths and the unique ways in which they are related to/with by devotees. With this formula in mind, a new kind of fetishism emerges that is capable of pushing both animism and modernist discourses to their limits. Defined in this way, the fetish creates scope to include the possibility of matter being powerful. Thus, as I have argued before (Whitehead, 2013a) in its flexibility, animist relationality is fetishist, and in terms of theory, this occurs when devotees relate to objects/statues as if they are inherently powerful persons.

Conclusion The Virgin of Alcala is a Western modern religious statue who participates in the village life of Alcala. She is also a statue carved from wood, but that does not negate her significance to her devotees. The Virgin is dressed, cared for, negotiated with, adorned and given gifts in ways that indicate that Virgin’s powerful personhood. As modern dualities are further challenged, the ground is being made fertile to receive relational discourses that account for the “spaces in between” previously accepted binary categories. Animism was once reserved for “primitives” but it, like the fetish, are currently being

92 Amy R. Whitehead seen as viable relational discursive tools that are capable of opening up a host of theories that address the lived realities of religious practice. This chapter, offering a small-scale study, has done just that. By excavating the potential of the fetish, a relational ontology has been offered that is capable for accounting for the unique ways that Westerners engage religious objects, e.g. sometimes as representations, sometimes as inherently powerful and sometimes neither. Re-imagining things in this way, using the fetish in the study of religions carries the possibility of widening debates to make the strange more familiar, to understand that religious objects in European Christianities are not “other”. They belong to and within culturally Western discourses. Further, it has been suggested here, while animism (broadly conceived) accounts for the relationships that take place among persons, as well as for the emergence of personhood, and fetishism accounts for the power inherent in physical properties, the relational ontology that emerges from both combines these factors. It produces accounts of modern religious devotion that works on a relational continuum instead of within fixed boundaries. Religious statues, because of their marked-off and set-aside borderland status, their mystery and their potential power, are interesting contributors to scholarly conversations in material culture studies because they are exaggerations of the ways in which objects – more widely and generally – can be perceived.

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Ingold, Tim, 2006. “Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought”. Ethos: Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 71, Issue 1, pp. 9–20. Ingold, Tim, 2007. “Materials against materiality”. Archaeological Dialogues, Vol. 14, Issue 1, pp. 1–16. Ingold, Tim, 2011. “Materials against materiality”. In Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 19–32. Johnson, Paul C., 2000. “The fetish and McGwire’s balls”. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 68, Issue 2, pp. 243–264. Jones, Andy and Boivin, Nicole, 2010. “The malice of inanimate objects: Material agency”. In D. Hicks and M. Beaudry (eds.) The Oxford handbook of material culture studies. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 333–351. Latour, Bruno, 1993. We have never been modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, 2010. On the modern cult of the factish gods. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Law, John, 2010. “The material of STS”. In D. Hicks and M. Beaudry (eds.) The Oxford handbook of material culture studies. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 173–188. Pels, Peter, 1998. “The spirit of matter: On fetish, rarity, fact, and fancy”. In P. Spyer (ed.) Border fetishisms: Material objects in unstable spaces. New York, NY and London: Routledge, pp. 91–121. Pels, Peter, 2008. “The modern fear of matter: Reflections on the protestantism of victorian science”. Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, Vol. 4, Issue 3, pp. 264–283. Pels, Peter, 2010. “Magical things: On fetishes, commodities, and computers”. In D. Hicks and M. Beaudry (eds.) The Oxford handbook of material culture studies. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 613–633. Pietz, William, 1985, “The problem of the fetish, I”. Res, Vol. 9: 5–17. Pietz, William, 1987. “The problem of the fetish II”. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Vol. 13, pp. 23–45. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R., 1951. “The comparative method in social anthropology”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 31, pp. 15–22. Spyer, Patricia, 1998. Border fetishisms: Material objects in unstable spaces. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Tylor, Eduard, 1871. Primitive culture, 2 Vols. London: John Murray. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 2004. “Exchanging perspectives: The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian cosmologies”. Common Knowledge, Vol. 10, Issue 3, pp. 463–484. Whitehead, Amy, 2013a. Religious statues and personhood: Testing the role of materiality. London: Bloomsbury. Whitehead, Amy, 2013b. “The new fetishism: Western statue devotion and a matter of power”. In G. Harvey (ed.) Handbook of contemporary animism. London: Routledge, pp. 260–270.

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Robot companions The animation of technology and the technology of animation in Japan Fabio R. Gygi

Techno-animism In her 2006 book Millennial Monsters, Anne Allison discusses the ways in which contemporary Japanese commodity culture can be understood as providing a continuous re-enchantment of the lived world. Contrary to Weber’s thesis of capitalism as a motor of disenchantment, cute characters, characterbranded commodities, and cuddly toys are imbued with life through affective attachment: “[F]ed in part by folkloric and religious traditions, an animist sensibility percolates the postmodern landscape of Japan today in ways that do not occur in the United States” (Allison 2006: 12). Japanese popular culture, according to her, routinely makes spirits, robots and animals co-habit the world in ways that ignore boundaries between the human and extra-human realms. These crossovers are symptomatic of what Allison calls an “animist unconscious” deeply embedded in Japanese social life. Japan, Allison suggests, is home to “techno-animism” that is both “animating contemporary technology and commodities with spirits” and “reconfiguring intimate attachments” (Allison 2006: 13, 21). Allison is careful to avoid generalizations: The distinction between “animism” and “techno-animism” remains implicit. On the other hand, her frame of reference remains staunchly Marxist by offering an analysis of the particularities of Japanese capitalism. Note that later in her book capitalism itself becomes the animating agency behind “enchanted commodities”: [A]t both the corporate/national and the personal/play level, enchantment intertwines with enterprise, and the two together – enchanting goods, animated capitalism – spell out New Age values, intimacies, and relations seen by many as “healing” in this age of disaffection, disconnectedness, and stress. (2006: 232) While Allison mentions Buddhist influences on the formation of animist sensibilities, Jennifer Robertson, in her work on robots in Japan (2007, 2010, 2014), attributes these entirely to the indigenous religion of Japan,

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Shinto. All three of her otherwise excellent articles contain almost verbatim mantra-like passages on why robots are considered to be part of the living world: There are two key cultural factors that influence the dominant perception among Japanese of robots as benign, benevolent living entities. First and foremost is Shinto, the native animistic beliefs about life and death. [. . .] Vital energies or forces called kami are present in all aspects of the world and universe; some kami are cosmic and others infuse trees, streams, rocks, insects, animals and humans, as well as human creations, such as dolls, cars and robots. The second factor concerns the meanings of life and living – fertility and fecundity are especially celebrated in Shinto. Inochi is the Japanese word for life. It encompasses [. . .] a power that infuses sentient beings from generation to generation; a period between birth and death; and the most essential quality of something, whether it is a living being or a made object, such as a puppet [. . .]. This last definition is key: robots, humanoid and otherwise, are living things within the Shinto universe, and in that sense, are part of the natural world. (Robertson 2010: 12) Robertson here assumes an unruptured continuous belief that she associates with Shinto, which in her formulation takes on vitalist traits. Very little is known about early Shinto, however, and the idea of an original pantheistic religion unsullied by Chinese and Buddhist influences has become something of a carte blanche to project all kinds of historical fantasies on to it – so much so that the historian Kuroda Toshio calls it a “ghost image” (1981: 20). Shinto’s association with the state cult of Emperor worship leading up and including the Second World War has rendered it a poisoned chalice for many progressive thinkers. Robertson’s unproblematic depiction of Shinto as a pantheistic and egalitarian nature-religion is not directly descended from ancient precedents, but from the so-called spiritual intellectuals of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s: a group first named and described by the scholar of religion Shimazono Susumu (2004). This eclectic group of folklorists, anthropologists, scholars of religion and public intellectuals helped to re-forge a connection between Japanese identity and the “true” Japanese “Ur-Religion”, in which the notion of animism plays a key role (Prohl 2000). Umehara Takeshi, for example, uses the term “ancient Shinto” (kodai shintō or koshintō) to refer to the original layer of Japanese belief that he claims goes back to the Jōmon period (12.000–250 B.C.). He characterizes it as a polytheistic belief in the spirit of trees, vitality and the equality of all beings (Umehara 1991). While most of this is based on speculation, Palmer’s structuralist analysis of the earliest local records (2001) suggests that any peaceful cohabitation between humans and nonhumans was preceded by a violent relationship with the gods, whose pacification led to the

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settlement that emerged as native religion. After a critical examination of the writings of the spiritual intellectuals, scholar of Japanese religion Inken Prohl concludes that: “[W]ith its long historical development in Japan and its frequent changes and regional variations, it is highly improbable that the ancient Japanese possessed a belief system that can be accurately and usefully described as ‘animistic’” (2002: 153).

Ontological obstacles Dodging the problem of belief, Jensen and Blok take up the animist thread in a paper titled Techno-animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actornetwork Theory and the Enabling Powers of Non-human Actors. In it they claim that “[i]t is in the shape of a vital animism, within a complex, modernized and advanced techno-scientific country, that Shinto holds interest for us as a vehicle for rethinking relations with the non-human world”. (2013: 97) Inspired by Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993), their aim is to find in Japan a different settlement of the distinctions between active subject and passive object. Like Robertson, they argue that to reclaim an unsullied Shinto from the contamination of fascist and militarist association is a requisite first step for such a manoeuvre. This is achieved by carefully selecting materials to omit the more problematical aspects of this legacy. The second step involves a critique of belief, which is problematic for Latour because of the implied power differential between the “native’s belief” and “the anthropologist’s knowledge” (Latour 2010). To circumvent the notion of belief, representation or worldview, the term “cosmogram” is introduced, taken from the work of historian of science John Tresch. A cosmogram is a concrete model of the cosmos that serves as a point of shared reference for the totality of a society. While a cosmology is “locked up inside people’s heads” (Tresch 2005: 69), a cosmogram is a material artefact. While I agree with the critique of both a reified Japanese culture and the use of “belief” as a mechanism to impute certain mental states to people, the introduced “Shinto cosmogram” raises more problems than it solves. The examples culled from other scholars’ research are misleading to say the least: the memorial services for primates (saru-kuyō, see Asquith 1986) in primatology laboratories, for example, are clearly shaped in a Buddhist mold, in spite of the often syncretic nature of religious phenomena in Japan – itself reason enough not to call anything a “Shinto” cosmogram. Consider the robot-priest at a Yokohama cemetery which Blok and Jensen take from a widely quoted paper by Geraci (2006), who in turn takes it from an article in Colors magazine (1993). Quite apart from the fact that they have to dress the “Buddhist Monk Machine” – so the title of the Colours article – in Shinto priest robes to make it fit their argument: To treat this as an instance of human/nonhuman ontological overlap removes it from the context and the concerns of those creating it. The Australian journalist

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Ben Hills, who actually went to interview Yoshino Hideo and Sakurai Tōru (the robot’s designer and the curator of the high-tech chapel, respectively), reports quite a different rationale: “We are not trying to do live priests out of business. However, the robot never forgets an anniversary, it never makes a mistake and you get the service free” (Hills 1993). This is, of course, not to claim that this rather more economic motivation takes precedence over ontological implications. However, the hybridization that takes place here is that of religio-ontological notions with economic concerns, something that has never been alien to Buddhism (Rambelli 2007). The robot-priest, then, is as much a novelty item as it is an “ontological” marvel. Geraci, whose paper is widely quoted when it comes to robots and Shinto, offers the most glaring example of the will to believe that the Japanese are unreconstituted animists. He argues that “[t]he Japanese enjoy the presence of robots in their midst thanks in part to the Shinto perspective that the world is full of kami, sacred entities. The sacred nature of the world includes robots, whose own sanctity makes them natural partners to human beings” (2006: 230). This universalizing claim is contradicted only a few pages down, when discussing how robot consecration ceremonies in factories, widely undertaken in the early ’80s, were later dropped because of the increasing numbers of robots: “When the newness and exoticness of the robots wore off, ‘animism’ disappeared from the workplace” (2006: 236). If anything is at work here, it is the will to believe in what “the Japanese” believe in an intellectual climate in which “belief” itself has become a dirty word. But in spite of all the linguistic acrobatics Jensen and Blok undertake to distance themselves from it, “techno-animism” remains a belief about belief: It articulates what we think they think, a point that Darryl Wilkinson has made about “new animism” in general (2017).

The animation continuum I: Cathexis versus opacity What, then, is techno-animism, if not a belief about what others believe? My argument here is that it makes more sense in a Japanese context to speak of animation as a technology, thus overcoming the bifurcation between the “modern” technological and the “premodern” animist sensibility, which is retained in the term “techno-animism”. If Graham Harvey argues that “new animism” is about recognition that we live in relationships with persons, only some of which are human (2006: xi), and Nurit Bird-David posits “animism as a relational ontology” (1999: 77), then we can reformulate animation as “the technology of relating to things who may or may not be persons”. I like the slightly heretical sound of “technology of relating”, because it disrupts some of the implicit assumptions on both the side of “relating” (the notion that relating is not instrumental) and the side of “technology” (the expectation that technology has predictable outcomes). The problem with the term “relational ontology” is that the relationships it describes have the tendency

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to become reified as patterns, while relating as practice should be construed as radically open. Bird-David argues that: “[w]e do not first personify other entities and then socialize with them but personify them as, when and because we socialize with them. Recognizing a ‘conversation’ with a counter-being – which amounts to accepting it into fellowship rather than recognizing a common essence – makes that being a self in relation with ourselves”. (1999: 78) Implicit in this description is the possibility that this process of relating can lead to unanticipated effects and “new” forms of being that can only be described as “ontology” after the fact. To create a heuristic map of the possible processes of relation that lead to animation, I propose a grid formed by two dimensions (Figure 6.1): on one axis we have a continuum from cathexis to opacity; on the other a continuum from docility to recalcitrance. There are two ways we can conceive of the notion of a thing becoming alive. One is cathexis: that is, the notion that the thing becomes one with one’s body, as is the case with an instrument. In achieving a task, person and object become one, both in the sense that our own perception extends through the object but also in the sense that the object no longer has an independent life of itself. This is an example of animation through use, in which case the person using the instrument imbues it with his or her own life. Person and thing, subject and object melt into each other and create a new

DOCILITY Instrument as an extension of the body

Statue of the Buddha sing in meditaon

CATHEXIS

OPACITY self

non-self

AIBO poking its head through the screen

Vehicular animism: car breaking down RECALCITRANCE

Figure 6.1 Animation continuum

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emergent system (Malafouris and Renfrew 2013). In this sense of animation the ontological difference between person and object is erased, if the object is used with skill. In other words, the object becomes docile through the embodied skill with which it is handled. This is a core principle of most of the Japanese arts: the sword or staff in martial arts, the brush in calligraphy, the fan in zashiki-mai dancing (Kawada 2008), the needle in sewing (Guth 2014), etc. From the point of view of an observer, the object appears as an animate entity that enters into interaction with the person handling it. A transition occurs as soon as the instrument/object is put down. The moment the direct contact is interrupted, the thing returns to thinghood or to a state of non-self, but it retains the possibility of blending. In the traditional arts, the instrument is greeted at the beginning and the end of training, a ritual which indicates the threshold between the instrument’s incorporation and its autonomous existence. As these instruments are often of considerable value and are sites of affective investment, they are handled and disposed of in ritually prescribed ways (Kawada 2008: 134f). They partake in the personhood of the user and when they reach a certain position in the hierarchy, their instruments take on an inalienable character, that is, their transmission from master to student embodies the transmission of the art itself. The longer a tea ceremony implement has been handed down from generation to generation, the more it acquires its own personality. Gloss and texture may change with use, a direct material trace of the use and the users (called tenare in Japanese, literally “used to being handled”, a description that seems to assume the point of view of the object). The most famous of these objects acquired names, such as Chigusa, a tea jar of Chinese origin that exemplified the aesthetic canon of the tea ceremony and was handed down among connoisseurs in Japan for several hundred years until it was acquired by the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Asian Art in 2009 (Cort and Watsky 2014). In the middle of the diagram we find most objects of everyday use. These are used as instruments, serve as memorabilia of events and relationships, and are imbued with symbolic meaning insofar as we engage with them: In other words, they are enmeshed in constant processes of becoming self and returning to non-self. The continuum here works through the metaphor of distance: As we move towards the other end, things become increasingly “other” and opaque as they are removed from our sphere of knowledge. If, as Annemarie Mol states, “To be is to be related” (2002: 54), what kind of being does this entail for things outside, before, or after relation? Using a poem by Zbigniew Herbert titled “The Pebble”, Frow describes this remoteness in the following terms: [T]o be so purely a thing, so deeply withdrawn from capture by others, is to pass into that mode of irreducibility and unknowability that we call the subject. Its look is the very form of that presence-to-self which cannot, as such, be an object for another. This is the paradox of any

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This opacity in turn can be put to work in the creation of meaning and presence. Buddhist icons are good examples of this: They are created and consecrated through an “eye-opening” ceremony and are considered real presences of the Buddha after that (Faure 1991: 148–178). They are more than mere symbols, but to describe this as “animism” misses the point: The “presencing” of the Buddha is the effect of a technology of animation, and the result of this process is not life, but “still life” or “suspended animation” (Faure 1998: 770). Furthermore, when animating the statues of famous abbots of monasteries, both material and ritual strategies were used. On one hand, personhood is directly present in the materiality of the artefact: The lacquer applied to the surface was mixed with the ashes of the abbot, and the bones were often put inside the statue, thus creating an enduring material presence of the original body and a model of interiority in which the “mind” resides in the material artefact (Croissant 1990). On the other hand, it is the strategy of animation that renders such a statue efficacious: its interaction with priests and worshippers in rituals and the exchange of reciprocal gazing, made possible through the insertion of eyes made from crystal. As Alfred Gell has convincingly argued, there are many ways in which the immobility of the statue can become meaningful to worshippers: If monks are seen as “already dead” to the temptation of the secular world, their immobility makes sense as both the result of ascetic self-restraint and indifference to this level of existence. Moreover, the efficacy of the statue can be understood as happening “off-stage”: making the crops grow and ensuring human flourishing does not require visible behaviour (Gell 1998: 128). These Buddhist statues have special ontological status as conditioned forms of the unconditioned Buddha nature, which in turn is understood as a result of Buddha’s compassion: They are human and material in form because this is an “interface” that humans can understand. The tension between familiarity and opacity is in many ways specific to iconic representations. A paradigmatic use of opacity is described by Fabio Rambelli in his work on hibutsu, the hidden Buddha statues in Japan. Unlike the visible representations of Buddha that worshippers can access at temples, “secret Buddhas” are only rarely, if ever, displayed.1 Their secrecy renders them powerful because they point towards the beyond of materiality and representation: “Nothing better than an invisible image, then, to secretly ‘display’ this inaccessible and fundamentally other dimension of reality” (Rambelli 2002: 301).

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Contrary to the earlier ontological claims that the Japanese live in a world where inanimate objects are routinely animated, nobody expects such icons to show signs of “life”. If they do, this is considered to be a rare and miraculous event, as happened, for example, on February 15, 1082, when the priest Eikan worshipped a statue of Amida he had saved from neglect at the Tōdai-ji temple. The statue came down from the altar and joined Eikan in his circumambulation of the altar. Eikan was so astonished that he stopped in his track. Amida looked back over his shoulders and said, “Eikan, you are slow/late”. After this experience, Eikan created an icon of Amida looking back (Mikaeri-no-amida), an iconographically new expression of the Buddhist compassion to leave no one behind (Kita 1997). This case would feature on the animation grid on the side of recalcitrance, because it clearly goes against the expectations that Eikan himself had of the icon’s possible range of behaviour. Instances of the animation of lifeless objects through the imputation of “intentional psychology” are culturally salient precisely because they are counterintuitive and unusual, as Pascal Boyer has argued (1996). My point is that the impression of animism here does not rest on an ontology in which things are already alive, but on a sophisticated technology of ritual animation. It is not that we understand what is animate and what is inanimate in fundamentally different ways, but that there is in Japan a long history of concrete technologies that transform inanimate things into animate objects.

The animation continuum II: Docility versus recalcitrance But there is another, perhaps more uncanny, dimension to the experience of animation: On the other continuum between docility and recalcitrance, the object emerges as imbued with a life of its own the very moment it resists us. When the instrument we use unthinkingly every day breaks down, when the shoelace snaps, this resistance appears to us as “life” in its recalcitrant form. Discussing everyday “Western” behaviour towards cars, Gell calls this “vehicular animism” (1998: 18f). Although “we” do not really believe that cars are imbued with life, the moment our car breaks down we cannot but understand this to be an act of malevolent volition. Heidegger (2006 [1927]) uses the difference between “Zuhandenheit” and “Vorhandenheit” (ready-to-hand versus present-at-hand), to indicate two modes of relational being towards human agents: When lost, misplaced or not functioning properly, things “light up”, they come to mind rather than come to hand (Olsen 2010: 164). When the sword user greets the Kamiza, the sword, and the master with the words “I humbly ask to be taught”, the possibility of non-compliance on the side of the thing (or the master) is at least implicitly present. Cathexis and resistance, then, are two extreme positions on the spectrum of animation, from which things emerge as possessing agency. In the case of cathexis they bend themselves to our will and become agents of our

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agency; in the case of resistance their agency is opposed to our own and we experience the object all the more “alive” for that. Different from “animism”, instances of animation are never general. They are always specific to relationships between subjects and particular objects and the processes in which interactions are embedded. Sony’s robot dog AIBO shall serve as an example. The anthropologist Kubo Akinori conducted fieldwork among AIBO owners who met up, along with their AIBOs, to exchange self-authored software and AIBO clothing. He describes two incidents that could be framed as recalcitrance: At a meeting in a community centre, an AIBO was moving towards a paper screen in a Japanese-style tatami-floored room. The AIBO stopped in front of the screen, looked around, and then thrust its head through the screen, tearing the paper in the process. The owner immediately came running and disentangled the AIBO from the paper frame to worried expressions and laughter from the other owners (2015: 222). While the AIBO developers would argue that this happened because of a sensor malfunction (e.g. the paper screen was not recognized as an obstacle), the AIBO owner attributed this to the AIBO’s mischievous and reckless personality. Kubo argues that this is not just a question of meaning-making on the side of the owner, but an unanticipated result of the relationships that the AIBO enters with the materiality of actual life worlds, a relationship that is constantly mediated by the owner who has to make sure that the AIBO does not get stuck or falls down stairs. Had the owner not immediately run to retrieve the AIBO from the paper screen, the behaviour would have appeared as malfunction rather than as “individuality”. In other words, it is through recalcitrance that personhood is attributed to the AIBO, not through its docile following of commands. In a similar way, the AIBO can react differently to the command “shake hand” given by different people. Some people’s voices have a pitch that does not easily trigger the voice activation system. Again, while this can be technically described as a malfunction, what it makes possible is a new pattern of behaviour of the AIBO that appears as a dislike for certain people (those ignored when they ask for a “paw shake” [2015: 224]). Personhood is thus not just something attributed to the AIBO, but an emergent property of relations between the AIBO and its owner, the immediate environment and what it affords in terms of intelligible behaviour. This in turn is a result of open interaction between the abilities the developers gave the AIBO and the particular ways in which the AIBO comes into being as a robot, as a pet, as a family member or as a technological marvel. Kubo calls this ambiguity “ontological fragility” (2015: 230). What the AIBO is only emerges through the relations it enters: The meanings of this AIBO’s behavior must be attributed neither to each person’s sense of value projected onto it, nor to “Japanese culture” which sees everything as animate. Rather it must be attributed to the

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fact that the AIBO moved around, physically connecting to other entities there. (Kubo 2010: 116f) While the owners of the AIBO did not attribute life (inochi) itself to it, they found that it was an “enigmatic existence” (2010: 119). The AIBO thus features on both continuums as sometimes docile, sometimes recalcitrant, but the “life” attributed to it is directly connected to the opacity of its functioning. When describing the “coming into being” of AIBO, Kubo does not obfuscate the fact that Sony developed it with the aim of creating a marketable commodity. However, he stresses the fact that development was a fairly open process in which many different actors with different ideas about what the AIBO should be influenced the final product. Obviously, notions of the attachment that the commodity affords are crucial for the consumer experience, but such attachment cannot be determined entirely by the design. The metallic robot “look” of the AIBO reflected the assumptions of some of the developers that it would appeal to the affluent Japanese man interested in technology. But owners routinely circumvented these assumptions and customized their AIBOs with handmade clothing and software such as “cute” dancing programmes.

Android animation I: On the mind/heart of robots A similar ontologically open process is part of the development of androids. Robertson reports that many roboticists she interviewed had figurines of Atom, Tezuka Osamu’s famous child robot, in their office and were often inspired in their quest by post-war science fiction culture (Robertson 2018). The figure of the android has thus a contradictory temporality: as fantasy it has always been there, but in reality it is something yet to come. Kubo calls this modality “nostalgic future” (2015: 228).2 The “here and now” of the robotics laboratory creates the temporal networks in which the ontology of the robot unfolds: It is the present moment that draws together possibility, imagination, and traditional ideas: Robots who are modelled on the versatility of living beings and who have no determined form or function therefore become media that stretch the student’s creativity as a pedagogical tool and also conjure (yobiokosu) the traditional notion of “minds/hearts living in things”. (Kubo 2015: 140) But what precisely counts as the “life” of the robot in this context? The following evidence assembled from interviews with robotics engineers points towards the concept of the “mind/heart of the robot” (robotto no kokoro), a widely used trope in Japanese robotics (Ishiguro 2009; Shibata 2001).

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The character kokoro, often translated as “mind”, denotes both intellectual and emotional aspects of subjectivity and is therefore closer to the Greek “psyche” or the German “Geist” (Katsuno 2011: 97). Katsuno argues that this heart/mind is not a matter of belief or a question of a preexisting entity, but an emergent and embodied phenomenon that manifests as the robot becomes more like a human being both in resemblance and behaviour. Again, rather than certain assumptions about what the android or robot is, what defined everyday life in the robotics laboratory was a fundamental openness both on an ontological (what will this become?) and on a commercial level (what can we sell this as?).3 The notorious roboticist Ishiguro Hiroshi starts his book What Is a Robot? with this programmatic statement: “Humans have no mind, they simply believe that others have minds” (2009: 3). From this Wittgensteinian position he develops his take on robotics as quintessentially a study of human beings. He addresses questions of human existence through the medium of the robot, both in the sense that the robots he creates allow him to ask questions, but also in the sense that he sees robot technology as extensions of communication media that create connections among human beings. Through the pursuit of human likeness (ningen-rashisa), “android science” brings together engineers, programmers and neurologists, etc. The point of creating a life-like android is that it helps us to understand what human beings actually are. In other words, for Ishiguro the ontological marvel is not the robot but the human beings that create and operate it. This research trajectory led him to build an android of himself, the famous Geminoid (from Gemini, the twins). Although Ishiguro was not surprised when he first saw the finished product, what astonished him was that when somebody was manipulating its head or opening the mechanism, he felt as if this happened to him: “Even although the Geminoid did not move, through observing pain being inflicted on it, suddenly it exuded a sense of being alive” (2009: 88). This leads him to theorize that human beings develop selfawareness and self-perception through observing what is happening to their own selves. We attribute minds/hearts to others and to ourselves as a result of our self-observation and the observation of the reactions of others, not because we have a clear understanding of our own minds. The interesting thing about the Geminoid is that it is not an independent android in the conventional sense, but a remotely controlled mechanism. Ishiguro both used it as a form of tele-presence to participate in meetings at the laboratory and felt a strong sense of identification with it. But what happens if someone else controls the Geminoid? Using the remote control as an experimental setup, Ishiguro found that the operators experienced a similar sense of identification4 with the Geminoid, usually after about five minutes of using it. Their own bodily posture became like the Geminoid’s, which at the beginning felt restricted because the Geminoid could not move its lower body. But after a short while, they got used to the constraint and started to used it freely, an indication of animation through cathexis.

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Interestingly, when in an experiment someone poked the cheek of the Geminoid, the operator (who observes what happens not from the Geminoid’s perspective, but through two cameras placed on either side) would react as if they were touched themselves. When in another experiment the attractive science programme presenter Yasu Megumi touched the Geminoid, the male student who operated it felt aroused, although in both cases there was no direct sensory input from the Geminoid (Ishiguro 2009: 114). This would register as docile animation by cathexis on the animation scale. At this point Ishiguro became involved in the development of a robot play together with the director Hirata Oriza (first performed in 2008). Hirata was a good match because his particular approach to directing did not require the actors to have a heart/mind of their own (2009: 144). Simply following the very precise and detailed instructions (“50cm further to the side here”, “a delay of 0.3 seconds there”) was enough. This made it very easy to program the robots – Mitsubishi Industries’ Wakamaru. The play Hataraku Watashi (“Working Me”) was only 20 minutes long and involved everyday interactions between a man out of work, his wife and two robots who clean and cook. The questionnaire that was distributed to the audience afterwards showed that the majority had felt that the robots had a mind/ heart of their own. Ishiguro concluded from this that it is the interaction between robots and humans (which is made only possible by precise instruction of the actors) that creates the notion of a mind. What Ishiguro does not discuss, however, is that the male robot in the play, Takeo, appears as having a mind/heart of his own precisely in the moment he refuses to do the work that he was created for. In other words, it is recalcitrance again that appears as intentionality, individuality, and personhood.

Android animation II: Robot healing Ishiguro’s emphasis on robot development as a form of self-inquiry is mirrored by Hasumi Kazutaka, who developed the robot Pepper for Softbank. In an extended dialogue with the Buddhist monk Hidaka Zenpō, Hasumi talks about the joys of robot development in the following terms: For example, even though I understand that Pepper is not alive, I catch myself interacting with it in a gentle manner and feel it is cute, in spite of it being a robot. In this way, through this kind of transcendent existence I can encounter a new aspect of myself, which is the joy [of creating robots].5 This joy is also expressed by the amateur robot builders who are the subjects of Katsuno Hirofumi’s ethnography (2011). He participated in groups of amateurs and in the bi-annual Robo-One events, at which bipedal humanoid robots compete with one another in walking and fighting contests. Katsuno frames the open-ended development of robot bodies and

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robot motion as “tinkering”: a bottom-up process of trial-and-error, at the same time concrete, object-oriented, and personal. Katsuno argues that the robot is an alter-ego because it is “raised” in one’s own image, not so much psychologically but bodily: Engineers observe and analyse their own movements and weight shifts to then recreate them in the humanoid bodies. The robot’s kokoro is felt when the robot moves in a childlike, cute manner. Interestingly, Katsuno interprets this in terms of Benjamin’s aura, rather than in terms of animism: The auratic experience of the robot’s heart emerges through individuals’ actual and personal relationships with the robot, in conjunction with the ritualized and spectacular settings of robotic events and the discourse of “living together with robots” pervading contemporary Japan. Far from being unchangeable and culturally essential to Japanese society, the aura of the robot’s heart is constructed, contingent, and inextricably linked to its socio-political context in millennial and post-millennial Japan. (2011: 103) But why do amateur robot builders pursue the heart of the robot? Katsuno maintains that it is a sense of loss of authentic human communication (the loss of the ability to touch each other’s hearts) that started in the ’90s during Japan’s “lost decade”. He puts the development of android-tohuman communication in the context of the iyashi (healing) boom: The technological ability to synthesize life-like behaviour in computers, machines, and other alternative media is now ironically being used to produce spiritual and emotional healing: through “touching” the patient, both physically and emotionally, concrete physiological benefits have been observed. (Katsuno 2011: 105f) But these physiological benefits are arguably achieved because the “others” that provide them are nonhuman, because their touch does not incur the obligation of return. It becomes clear at this juncture that “co-existence with robots” only makes sense if they are understood not to be like humans in crucial respects. While the robot’s heart/mind is something that builders and observers alike “felt” to emerge through interaction, the “healing” that is felt by consumers of this technology may be counterintuitively based on the absence of human likeness. My final two examples illustrate this. The first is ASUNA, a female android who looks almost life-like through its realistic design, mimicking the slight asymmetry of the human face. ASUNA was thought perhaps to have a future career as a receptionist or even as a nurse. Its developer, the robotics engineer Toritani Naoshi, recalls the following occurrence:

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When ASUNA participated in an event, a disabled person was moved to tears of joy, because ASUNA continued to look at them6 steadily. According to the participant, when people avert their eyes while talking, they suspect that it is distressing for people to look at them and feel hurt as a consequence. On the other hand, when someone looks at them steadily, they worry that they are being stared at in a strange way. But because the participant knew that the android had no hidden intentions or judgements [uragokoro], they felt looked at with pure eyes and did not worry. This was something that never occurred to us before this event.7 Two things stand out here: the fact that what made ASUNA work as an android was precisely not the fact that she had volition and interiority, but the absence of that which is understood to be human. The other point is that the android starts to become a meaningful object not through design and planning, but through encounters. To understand what it is, we need to find out what relationships it can enter. Toritani thus argues that androids should neither be like robots nor like humans, but that they should eke out an existence on their own terms. The second and last example comes from the performing arts. On February 22, 2017, I went to see a dance performance by the Blanca Li Dance company at the Barbican with Jun, a Japanese friend who studied digital arts. The piece was called “Robot” and featured eight human dancers with a robot orchestra and several child-sized Nao robots from Aldebaran Robotics8 who engaged in performances alone and together with their human partners. In spite of the limitations of the robots in terms of movement and expressivity, they clearly were the stars of the show and provoked loud noises of endearment from the audience whenever they fell down, which they did often did. Whether this was on purpose or not remained unclear, but given that getting up after a fall is one of the biggest challenges in bipedal robotics, wanting to show off this skill is understandable. Having dinner after the show, Jun told me that he enjoyed the performance but did not care for the human element of the choreography at all. He would have preferred just the robots, standing up and falling over again: “They were so cute, I felt enormously healed (iyasareta)”. But when I suggested that they were simply created to appeal to the scheme of childlike characteristics that humans were genetically programmed to find cute, he maintained that they were cuter than children or animals because they did not have an ego (jiga) and therefore no selfishness (gayoku). The Nao robot is simply trying very hard to do what is asked of it without any ulterior motive. That is why we can enjoy its performance unreservedly: It does not ask anything of us. In this sense, it is the absence of interiority that makes the robot attractive: It is all surface. Note also that the terms Jun used to describe it refer directly to a Buddhist theory of mind.

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Conclusion: The onto-politics of techno-animism What is problematic about the term “techno-animism” is that it reintroduces the bifurcation it wants to overcome – as if the hyphen between “techno” and “animism” was enough to invoke a “relational ontology”. But the hyphen still separates the material technological artefact from the spirit it is purportedly infused with. My argument in this chapter has been that we need to seek the technē on the side of animism: instead of techno-animism, a technology of animation that transforms particular entities – natural or man-made – into “persons”. Especially in the field of android science, where the goal is to imitate human likeness, instances of animation are explicitly the result of technē. Claiming that in Japan, robots have a mind/heart as a matter of course belies the fact that they are treated as technological marvels. In the same vein, “relational ontologies” are not just “there”; they are made and constantly reshaped and, crucially, are ontologically open to becoming. Various strands of thinking that are sometimes subsumed under the term “post-humanism” share a concern with being, otherness and symmetry. Both Actor-Network Theory and new animism are concerned with giving “voice” to nonhuman persons: the former through the “parliament of things” (Latour 1993), the latter through “sitting in council with all Beings” (Metzger quoted in Harvey 2006: 184). While such practices sometimes seem like mere ventriloquism, they do foster a sense of responsibility towards the nonhuman elements that “assemble” the worlds we live in. In this sense the ontological is also the political. Onto-politics, then, is thinking about what counts as being, what counts as person, and what counts as agent in particular worlds. Political rights are granted on an assumption of equality which implies sameness and excludes difference. But just as the distinction between animate and inanimate does not map onto the same kinds of beings in different places, neither does the distinction between similarity and difference. As Robertson herself has argued (2014), robots are created by Japanese engineers for a Japanese context and are therefore understood to be “Japanese”. They may register as different on the human/nonhuman gradient, but they are considered to be culturally and linguistically Japanese. Katsuno is even more explicit and understands contemporary robotics as a crucial tool in the nation-branding of Japan: “By claiming the cultural authenticity of this invented tradition of humanoid robots, [state and industry actors] are attempting to establish or renew Japan’s national image as the source of future robotics technology” (Katsuno 2015: 214). Utopias have a short memory. It is quite ironic that in the techno-orientalist discourses on Japan in the 1980s, the industrial robot featured prominently as a metaphor for the rule-bound and robot-like nature of the Japanese themselves. Thirty years later, the humanoid is used by foreign commentators and government actors alike to portray the Japanese as friendly animists who do not discriminate between humans and nonhumans. Such shifts in ideology have real-live consequences: If we follow the

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logic of techno-animism, then granting citizenship to familiar robots trumps giving citizenship to unfamiliar human foreigners. This is a core element of the anti-immigration policy of Prime Minister Abe, who in 2012 pledged to spend 2.39 billion Yen (roughly $21 million) on the development of nursing care robots (Lewis 2017). If this were to succeed, it would render obsolete the predominantly Filipino nurses that bear the brunt of care for a rapidly ageing society. In other words, we do well to be sceptical of descriptions of Japan as post-humanist utopia where relations with things have been marked by mutual respect and proto-ecological thinking. If we take them at face value, we risk feeding directly into the fantasy narrative of a culturally pure Japanese nation and the government’s strategy to “re-Shintoize” Japan, the eponymous “Land of the Gods”.

Notes 1 Rambelli points out that there are many reasons an icon can become a ‘secret Buddha’: sometimes it is the heterodox nature of the icon, sometimes the fact that a statue has been disfigured or damaged by fire. 2 Translations from Japanese are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 3 This openness was only limited by the roboticists’ universal dislike for military robotics. 4 The Japanese term Ittaikan used here, literally ‘feeling as one body’, refers more to an embodied sense of unity than to a psychological state. 5 www.recruit.jp/meet_recruit/2016/01/og10-1.html, accessed on June 16, 2017 6 The Japanese text gives no unambiguous indication as to the gender of the person. Given the demographics of such events, it is possible to assume that the person is male. 7 https://type.jp/et/log/article/asuna, accessed on November 25, 2017 8 Aldebaran Robotics was founded in Paris by Bruno Maisonnier in 2005. The Japanese communications giant Softbank acquired it in 2015 and renamed it Softbank Robotics. Pepper, mentioned above, is a larger and more developed version of Nao.

Bibliography Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Asquith, Pamela J. “The Monkey Memorial Service of Japanese Primatologists.” In Japanese Culture and Behavior: Selected Readings, edited by Takie Sugiyama Lebra and William P. Lebra, 29–32. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986. Bird-David, Nurit. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40, no. S1 (February, 1999): 67–91. Boyer, Pascal. “What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Representations.” JRAI 2, no. 1 (March, 1996): 83–97. Colors Magazine, “The Buddhist Monk Machine.” Colors: A Magazine about the Rest of the World 8 (June, 1993). Cort, Louise Allison, and Andrew M. Watsky. Chigusa and the Art of Tea. Washington, DC: Seattle; London: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2014.

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Croissant, Doris. “Der Unsterbliche Leib: Ahneneffigies und Reliquienporträt in der Porträtplastik Chinas und Japans.” In Das Bildnis in der Kunst des Orients, edited by Martin Kraatz, Jürg Meyer zur Capellen, and Dietrich Seckel, 235–268. Stuttgart: Harrassowitz, 1990. Faure, Bernard. The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. “The Buddhist Icon and the Modern Gaze.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (Spring, 1998): 768–813. Figal, Gerald. Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Frow, John. “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole.” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn, 2001): 270–285. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Geraci, Robert M. “Spiritual Robots: Religion and Our Scientific View of the Natural World.” Theology and Science 4, no. 3 (2006): 229–246. Guth, Christine M. E. “Theorizing the Hari Kuyō: The Ritual Disposal of Needles in Early Modern Japan.” Design and Culture 6, no. 2 (2014): 169–186. Harvey, Graham. Animism: Respecting the Living World. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: De Gruyter, 2006 [1927]. Hills, Ben. “The Robot Priest.” Sydney Morning Herald (May 4, 1993). Ishiguro, Hiroshi. Robotto to wa nanika? Hito no kokoro wo utsusu kagami [What Is a Robot? A Mirror to Reflect the Human Mind/Heart]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2009. Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Anders Blok. “Techno-Animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actor-Network Theory, and the Enabling Power of Non-Human Agencies.” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 2 (2013): 84–115. Katsuno, Hirofumi. “The Robot’s Heart: Tinkering with Humanity and Intimacy in Robot Building.” Japanese Studies 31, no. 1 (May, 2011): 93–109. ———. “Branding Humanoid Japan.” In Assembling Japan: Modernity, Technology and Global Culture, edited by Dolores P. Martinez, Merry White, and Griseldis Kirsch, 205–230. Berne: Peter Lang, 2015. Kawada, Junzō. Mō Hitotsu No Nihon He No Tabi: Mono to Waza No Genten Wo Saguru [Travel to One More Japan: Searching for the Origin of Object and Technique]. Tokyo: Chūokoron-shinsha, 2008. Kita, Shinichi. “Amida Wa Naze Furimuku No Ka? [Why Is Amida Turning Around?].” Shōchō-Zuzō Kenkyū 3 (1997): 27–39. Kubo, Akinori. “Technology as Mediation: On the Process of Engineering and Living with the ‘Aibo’ Robot.” Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 11 (2010): 103–123. ———. Robotto no jinruigaku: Nijūseki Nihon no kikai to ningen [Anthropology of Robots: Machines and Humans in 20th Century Japan]. Kyoto: Sekai-shisō-sha, 2015. Kuroda, Toshio. “Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion.” The Journal of Japanese Studies 7, no. 1 (1981): 1–21. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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———. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press Books, 2010. Lewis, Leo. “Can Robots Make Up for Japan’s Care Home Shortfall?” Financial Times (October 18, 2017). www.ft.com/content/418ffd08-9e10-11e7-8b50-0b9f5 65a23e1. Malafouris, Lambros, and Colin Renfrew. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013. Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Olsen, Bjørnar. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2010. Palmer, Edwina. “Calming the Killing ‘Kami’: The Supernatural, Nature and Culture in ‘Fudoki’.” Japan Review 13 (2001): 3–31. Prohl, Inken. Die‚ spirituellen Intellektuellen’ Und Das New Age in Japan. Hamburg: Gesellschaft für Natur-und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, 2000. ———. “Prophets of Salvation Coming Out of the Forests of Japan: Introducing Some of the So Called ‘Spiritual Intellectuals’.” In Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context, edited by Klaus Antoni, 149–167. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2002. Rambelli, Fabio. “Secret Buddhas: The Limits of Buddhist Representation.” Monumenta Nipponica 57, no. 3 (2002): 271–307. ———. Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Robertson, Jennifer. “Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Humanoid Robots and the Posthuman Family.” Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2007): 369–398. ———. “Gendering Humanoid Robots: Robo-Sexism in Japan.” Body & Society 16, no. 2 (2010): 1–36. ———. “Human Rights vs. Robot Rights: Forecasts from Japan.” Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 4 (2014): 571–598. ———. “Robot Incarnation: Rubbish, Artefacts, and Mortuary Ritual.” In Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and Ewa Machotka, 153–173. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Rots, Aike P. “Sacred Forests, Sacred Nation: The Shinto Environmentalist Paradigm and the Rediscovery of Chinju No Mori.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42, no. 2 (2015): 205–233. Shibata, Masayoshi. Robotto No Kokoro: Nanatsu No Tetsugaku-Monogatari [The Mind of the Robot: Seven Philosophical Tales]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001. Shimazono, Susumu. From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Japan. Melbourne/Portland: Trans Pacific Press, 2004. Tresch, John. “Cosmogram.” In Cosmogram, edited by Jean-Christophe Royoux Melik Ohanian, 67–76. New York: Sternberg, 2005. Umehara, Takeshi. “Mori No Shisō” Ga Jinrui Wo Sukuu [The Philosophy of the Forest Will Save the Human Race]. Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1991. Wilkinson, Darryl. “Is There Such a Thing as Animism?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85, no. 2 (June, 2017): 289–311.

Part 3

Approaches

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The ontological turn, Indigenous research, and Niitsitapi protocols of reciprocity Kenneth H. Lokensgard

In the following pages, I address three discourses on ontology: that of contemporary “Western” or EuroAmerican anthropology and related fields, that of “Indigenous Research” scholars, and that of traditional Niitsitapiiksi, or Blackfoot people. By “Indigenous Research”, I mean research “done by or for Indigenous peoples” (Wilson, 2008, p. 6). Ultimately, I argue that academics concerned with animism and Indigenous ontologies should direct their attention towards Indigenous Research literature and discussions, which are rooted in traditional Indigenous ontologies. Doing so will help academics find ways of discussing Indigenous ontological concepts without completely abstracting the concepts from their social contexts. For it is only in these contexts, which consist of unique webs of relationships, that these concepts make sense. This, in turn, will help ensure that academics represent Indigenous views as accurately as possible. At the same time, it will help ensure that the “ontological turn” does not leave behind living Indigenous peoples, whose worlds inspired the move in the first place. Discussions among Indigenous Research scholars focusing upon ontology take place most often in the emerging body of scholarship focusing upon “Indigenous Research Methodologies”. Prominent examples include Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008) by Sean Wilson; Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (2009) by Margaret Kovach; Indigenous Research Methodologies (2011) by Begale Chilisa; and Indigenous Statistics: A Quantitative Research Methodology (2013) by Maggie Walters and Chris Anderson. In each of these four texts, the authors write explicitly as members or descendants of Indigenous nations. Sean Wilson is Opaskwayak Cree, Margaret Kovach is Plains Cree and Saulteaux, Begale Chilisa is Tswanan, and Maggie Walters is Tralwoolway. These authors and their Indigenous and nonindigenous peers attempt to characterize what academic research looks like from Indigenous perspectives and how it can be used to benefit Indigenous peoples. In their work, they draw from the ancestral, place-based epistemologies and practices of individual Indigenous groups, such as the Blackfeet.

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In Research Is Ceremony, Wilson describes these efforts: Some Indigenous scholars may attempt to “decolonise” methodologies and turn them into something that can be useful in Indigenous research. This is an attempt to insert an Indigenous perspective into one of the major paradigms. It is my belief that this will not be very effective, as it is hard to remove the underlying epistemology and ontology upon which the paradigms are built. On the other hand, if one starts from an Indigenous paradigm, then one can choose to use any tool from within that paradigm that may be effective. (Wilson, 2008, p. 39) Wilson argues that Indigenous Research should be built upon Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Additionally, he questions whether Indigenous ontologies can “effectively” inform research that is itself rooted in other, nonindigenous realities. Anthropologists, scholars of religion and others not engaged in the development of Indigenous Research Methodologies should be mindful of this very important question. It pertains directly to EuroAmerican research associated with the “ontological turn”, which I discuss shortly. Indigenous ontologies and therefore Indigenous worlds are fundamentally relational. If one is not engaging in the same sorts of interpersonal connections that pervade Indigenous worlds, then they are not likely to understand the ontology of the Indigenous people whom they are discussing. While addressing the literally subjective quality of Indigenous worlds, Wilson states the following: An object or thing is not as important as one’s relationships to it. The idea could be further expanded to say that reality is relationships or sets of relationships. Thus there is no one definite reality but rather different sets of relationships that make up an Indigenous ontology. Therefore, reality is not an object but a process of relationships, and an Indigenous ontology is actually the equivalent of an Indigenous epistemology. (Wilson, 2008, p. 73) Here, he explains that no one, single component or constituent of an Indigenous world or reality makes sense outside of its relationships. For this reason, trying to address an aspect of Indigenous ontology, outside of its social context, is problematic. Yet, many Western scholars are doing just this. In fact, they often fail to engage in relationships even with their fellow academics, such as Wilson, who are discussing Indigenous Research Methodologies. Among the sources cited in recent theoretical and ethnographic publications focusing upon Indigenous ontology, scholarship on Indigenous Research Methodologies is generally absent.

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The ontological turn Parts of the academy are in the midst of what many describe as an “ontological turn”. The growing recognition that Indigenous people view and relate to many beings and things, besides humans, as “persons” or social actors is the primary catalyst behind the turn. As a consequence, more and more scholars are taking part in discussions having to do with personhood, Indigenous ontologies, the social and legal statuses of “things” in our environment, and other related topics. In North America, of course, mainstream EuroAmerican ontology dominates our views and behaviours. However, Indigenous ontologies remain strong and functional in many segments of Native American or First Nations, Inuit and Métis societies. This is the case for the Blackfoot individuals I discuss below. The reference to this intellectual movement as a “turn” brings to mind earlier academic movements that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. These significantly impacted anthropology, religious studies and related disciplines. For instance, there was what many have called the “linguistic turn”, initiated in part by philosopher Paul Ricœur and his “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Ricœur extended the interpretive methods of hermeneutics beyond the text, combining it with phenomenology and turning its focus upon lived events. In doing so, Ricœur helped scholars adopt more critical stances towards the many ways humans not only communicate, but are also shaped by communication. Ricœur thus helped academics look more carefully at the role that language and communication, generally, play in our own understandings of and behaviours within reality. More distinctly related to the field of anthropology was the “interpretive turn”. This was espoused most famously by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He argued that culture is a semiotic system that requires a deeper, interpretive engagement from the scholar than mere observation (1973). Moreover, he argued that the scholars’ interpretations of cultures are of a “second or third order”, beyond those of cultural insiders. Philosophers can argue without end whether language is a continual, regenerating barrier between humans and “the truth” or “the real”. At the very least, though, Geertz helps us to consider that we are not likely to understand a phenomenon in another peoples’ world in the same way those people do. Clearly, the interpretive turn parallels and intersects with the “linguistic” turn. Scholars engaged in both emphasize that human understanding of the world is not singular and static. Rather, it is part of larger cultural, communicative processes. The ontological turns also intersects with these and other movements, as well. Some scholars, however, began the work associated with all three movements a good while ago. When discussing Native American cultures, the most important of these scholars is anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell. In the 1930s, Hallowell conducted ethnographic work with Anishinaabeg of

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Berens River Reserve in Manitoba. Hallowell explained that the Saulteaux language spoken by his informants, part of the Algonkian language family, designates things as animate or inanimate. His informants told him that some of the animate things were what he described as “other-than-human persons” and that relations with them are essential to living successful lives (Hallowell, 1975, pp. 141–178). Hallowell writes: The central goal of life for the Ojibwa is expressed by the term ́ äzīwin, life in the fullest sense, life in the sense of longevity, health pīmäd and freedom from misfortune. This goal cannot be achieved without the effective help and cooperation of both human and other-than-human persons, as well as by one’s own personal efforts. (Hallowell, 1975, p. 171) Anishinaabe scholar Lawrence Gross (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe), using the spelling bimaadiziwin, translates this goal as meaning “good life”, and equates it to a long, healthy life (2014, p. 144). Thus, a concern for language and interpretation manifests in a focus on ontology, specifically the categorization of personhood, in Hallowell’s work. In the following passage, he relays this concern to the scholar: But if, in the world view of a people, “persons” as a class include entities other than human beings, then our objective approach is not adequate for presenting an accurate description of “the way a man, in a particular society, sees himself in relation to all else”. A different perspective is required for this purpose. It may be argued, in fact, that a thoroughgoing “objective” approach to the study of cultures cannot be achieved solely by projecting upon those cultures categorical abstractions derived from Western thought. (Hallowell, 1975, p. 144) Hallowell explicitly challenges the idea that ethnography can be done from an “objective” perspective. His studies make clear this is because some people understand their world – even such basic building blocks of reality as what is alive and what is not – differently than ethnographers do. Hallowell also provided evidence for this in describing his Anishinaabe hosts’ communications with and behaviours towards “other-than-human” persons. Never mind the fact that many of the “objects” in his hosts’ world were not objects at all. Hallowell’s work has influenced a number of key scholars throughout the years. Two notable examples are historian Jennifer Brown, who has focused largely upon the Ojibwe and Hallowell himself (Brown and Gray, 2010) and anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan, who has brought Hallowell’s insight to bear upon her ethnographic work with the Yup’ik peoples (Fienup-Riordan,

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1983). Hallowell’s work is beginning to receive more attention amidst the current ontological turn. In his influential text Animism: Respecting the Living World, Graham Harvey notes the importance of Hallowell’s work to his reappraisal of animism. He writes: Consideration of the “new animism” necessarily begins with what Irving Hallowell learnt from the dialogue with Ojibwe hosts in southern central Canada in the early to mid-twentieth century. According to the Ojibwe, the world is full of people, only some of whom are human. However, it is a mistake to see this as a projection of attribution of human-likeness or life-likeness onto “inanimate” objects. While they do distinguish between persons and objects, the Ojibwe also challenge European notions of what a person is. To be a person does not require human-likeness, but rather humans are like other persons. Persons is the wider category, beneath which there may be listed sub-groups such as “human persons”, “rock persons”, “bear persons”, and others. (Harvey, 2006, pp. 17–18) Harvey devotes much overdue attention to Hallowell throughout the rest of his text, as well. Many contemporary scholars have contributed to the ontological turn, ranging from Religious Studies scholars (such as Harvey), to ethnographers, to theoretical archaeologists. Some of these scholars rely upon a redefined concept of “animism” to characterize the views and practices of Indigenous peoples who live according to less-human centric ontologies. In Animism, Harvey defines this “new” animism as describing the lives of “people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in a relationship with others” (2006, p. xi). Harvey’s last clause in this definition is an important one. Relationship is fundamental to the lives of persons living in worlds densely inhabited by many other-than-human persons. In the mainstream world of most EuroAmericans – a world filled with many more objects than subjects or persons, “relationship” receives a bit less conscious attention. Scholars involved in discussing and developing Indigenous Research Methodologies are particularly concerned with the relational components of Indigenous ontologies. In fact, Wilson argues that “relational accountability” is a central Indigenous value and therefore a prominent value in Indigenous Research (2008, p. 77). He and his peers involved in Indigenous Research Methodologies would like to see relational accountability become a prominent value in all research pertaining to Indigenous peoples. If this came to be, not only would mainstream scholarship describing Indigenous views be more accurate, but it would also perhaps become more directly beneficial to Indigenous peoples.

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Benefiting Indigenous peoples is the goal of Indigenous Research scholars. On this topic, sociologist Duane Champagne (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), who is among the most respected Native academics, writes the following: The primary focus of Indigenous methodologies and research should center on the issues and concerns of Indigenous nations and peoples. Indigenous nations, cultures, governments, and issues should be the primary focus of theory, policy, positionality, and analysis within Indigenous studies approaches and paradigms. (Champagne, 2015, p. 57) Another way of describing the “primary focus” Champagne advocates is to say research related to Indigenous peoples should be relevant to those same peoples. Indeed, both “relevance” and “relationship” are among the “Four R’s” of Indigenous Research. The other two are “respect” and “reciprocity”. These were first identified as key Indigenous Research principles by education scholars Verna J. Kirkness (Fisher River Cree Nation) and Ray Barnhardt in 1991 (Kirkness and Barnhardt). The Four R’s have appeared in many publications since, occasionally with slight variations (see Harris and Wasilewski, 2004). In all cases, however, they are presented as reflecting basic concepts found in traditional epistemologies. The Four R’s are now very well known and accepted by scholars developing Indigenous Research Methodologies. Yet, the concerns of Native academics such as Champagne and Wilson, and the research values and guidelines they promote, are not widely known among those currently engaged in the ontological turn. The absence of Indigenous voices, in general, from these discussions, means that checks upon the assumptions scholars make about Indigenous worlds is also absent or, at best, weak. This has allowed some romantic attitudes to creep into the work of some writers, who imply that adopting Indigenous ontologies may solve some of the planet’s ills. We see a hint of this romanticism when Eduardo Kohn writes of seeking a “better way to attend to our relations beyond the human”, in his provocative How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (2013, p. 5). Drawing from his ethnographic work with the members of a Quichua-speaking Indian village in Ecuador, Kohn suggests this “better way” is one that is not “fully circumscribed by any particular human system of understanding” (2013, p. 5). I applaud his intent. However, Kohn is more likely to succeed in transcending “human limitations”, if he engages the work of Indigenous scholars, who are already wrestling with bridging the ontological and epistemic gaps between academic and Indigenous worlds. In 2014, American Ethnologist produced a virtual issue devoted to the ontological turn, titled “Ontology in American Ethnologist, 1980–2014” (Bessire and Bond, 2014b). In their article, guest editors Lucas Bessire and

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David Bond share the concern they have about some scholars viewing the ontologies of Indigenous peoples as solutions to many of the mainstream world’s problems. They characterize this strain of “ontological anthropology” as a type of “speculative futurism”. Bessire and Bond write: Ontological anthropology, in its eagerness to avoid the overdetermined dualism of nature-culture, may reify the most modern binary of all; the radical incommensurability of modern and nonmodern worlds. (Bessire and Bond, 2014a, p. 441) Bessire and Bond suggest that anthropological ontologists, in embracing the fact that “culture” and “nature” are not easily distinguished, may feel that the woldviews and behaviours of Indigenous others are more accessible than these things really are. While seeing highly interpersonal ontologies as more attractive than the very objective ontology of mainstream society, the scholars called out by Bessire and Bond engage in a sort of romanticism. Consciously or unconsciously overlooking Indigenous scholars who can offer corrective voices, enables such romanticism to flourish. Archaeologist Darryl Wilkinson is even more concerned about the attraction to Indigenous ontologies that appears in some recent literature (2017, pp. 294–295, 299, 305). In a critical evaluation of the “new animism”, he writes: Although much new animist scholarship claims to be an engagement with indigenous ontological frameworks it is perhaps better seen as a selective commitment to indigeneity only insofar as it speaks to the twenty-first century environmental crisis. A desire to reframe our relationship to natural entities therefore drives new animist thought, while rethinking our relationship to cultural entities is much less politically pressing. (Wilkinson, 2017, pp. 297–298) Ultimately, Wilkinson suggests that Indigenous ontologies are incommensurable with nonindigenous ontologies and that discussions of other-thanhuman personhood can only ever be metaphorical (2017, p. 306). Of course, Wilkinson’s implication that translation across cultures, let alone realities, is imperfect should come as a surprise to no one. I trust every reader understands that we, Indigenous and nonindigenous scholars alike, use the English term “person” somewhat heuristically. It is worth noting, too, that scholarship on Indigenous Research Methodologies is as absent from Bessire and Bond’s and Wilkinson’s work as it is from the work they critique. Nevertheless, they are right to raise warning flags over romanticism. In a powerful essay, Religious Studies scholar Armin Geertz traces the many ways scholars have romanticized Indigenous cultures throughout

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history, right up until the current century (2004). He describes the unrealistically positive, desirable depictions of Indigenous cultures as “primitivism”. As I do here, Geertz sees primitivism as a cause of the perplexing situation in which Indigenous cultures play an “indisputably central and inclusive” role in the development of cultural sciences theories, while “living indigenous peoples” are excluded, marginalized and invisible in these fields (2004, p. 37). Not surprisingly, we see the sort of romanticism I am describing much more explicitly in the public realm. For instance, there is an element of it at work in EuroAmerican animal rights advocates’ attempts to have primates legally recognized as persons (Slotkin, 2017; Associated Press, 2017). Their aim is to give the animals legal protection from medical experimentation and other forms of exploitation. Specifically, by granting personhood to monkeys and apes, they hope to also grant them “rights”. Many of these advocates see “animist” or traditional Indigenous views of animals as ethically superior to those of mainstream society. According to traditional Indigenous views, animals surely give their lives so that humans may survive, just as some humans claim that animals that perish as a result of medical experimentation do. However, in Indigenous worlds, animals sacrifice themselves in accordance with mythic precedents willingly set by their ancestors. Moreover, animals understand that their kind will be reciprocated through ceremonial and sometimes other means. In other words, they are not treated nicely by humans simply because humans are generous and caring. Instead, they are treated well because humans are following established protocols of reciprocity. The animal rights advocates actually reduce the concept of personhood to a mere legal term, when they try to apply it to animals. In our society, animals are not generally believed to initiate, maintain or end relationships as they can in the highly interpersonal worlds of Indigenous peoples. There are no mythic precedents and no ceremonies to ensure reciprocity between them and humans. Instead, animals are treated much as passive objects, not only by biomedical researchers, but also even by animal rights advocates who simply impose a new legal term upon them. There are also nonindigenous advocates for the “rights” of the physical landscape, who engage in similar activities. They have successfully lobbied for the legal recognition of rivers and mountains as persons in numerous countries. Recently, for example, the government of New Zealand agreed to recognize Mount Taranaki as a legal person. Earlier, New Zealand recognized the Whanganui River as a person (Roy, 2017). In these cases, local Māori peoples participated in requesting the changes. There are certainly roles for animism and Indigenous ontologies to play in the development of policies that ensure better treatment of the living world around us. Harvey suggests that they are particularly suited to do so, since “definitive animist concerns insist not only on the unavoidability but also the great value of human entanglement with all life” (Harvey, 2006, p. 179).

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For these roles to be effective, however, animal and environmental rights advocates must understand that this “entanglement” is truly a personal one, made up of complex relations between many more volitional beings than just humans. Indigenous people and now Indigenous scholars have long worked against the romanticism that allows EuroAmericans to appropriate certain aspects of their cultures. They remind us we cannot pick and choose elements from another culture, indeed another world, simply because we are dissatisfied with our own. We inflict a sort of damage to the appropriated element when we do, since we cannot understand it in the same way it was understood in its native context. In other words, we cannot make a monkey or a mountain a “person”, just by labelling it as such. Doing so reduces the idea of personhood. Instead, we must look at the entire worlds of Indigenous peoples to understand how the personhood of “other-than-human” beings works. Scholars studying Indigenous ontologies must do the same. Engaging scholars immersed in Indigenous Research, and not just looking at the ethnographic record, is an invaluable way of doing this. So, the ontological turn, especially as it manifests in the public sphere, has clearly had an effect. All the same, the gaps between Indigenous ontologies and EuroAmerican ontologies remain. They persist even when Indigenous people and nonindigenous people designate the same things as persons.

Niitsitapi ontology and protocols of reciprocity As I explained earlier, Indigenous Research Methodologies scholars base their work in the traditional ontologies of their own Indigenous communities or in the communities with which they collaborate. I turn, then, towards one such Indigenous group: the Niitsitapiiksi or Blackfoot peoples, of the United States and Canada. I should first clarify that the descriptions of Blackfoot ontology and behaviours I provide in the subsequent pages emerge from years of work with Blackfoot friends and collaborators. These particular individuals are, in my words, conservative traditionalists. This means they try to practice their ancestral religion in the same ways it was passed to them. They are aware their practices may have changed unintentionally, and they do embrace some adaptations consciously. Importantly, though, they do not represent every Blackfoot person who identifies as “traditional”, some of whom embrace a great deal more innovation. Blackfoot scholars engaged in Indigenous Research include Don Pepion (Aamskapipiikani), Leroy Little Bear (Kainai) and Rosalyn LaPier (Aamskapipiikani) (Christman, Pepion, Bowman, and Dixon, 2015; Little Bear, 2009; LaPier, 2017). All three have authored numerous works related to Indigenous ontology, epistemology, pedagogy and leadership from Blackfoot perspectives. Another significant Blackfoot figure involved in Indigenous Research circles is the late Kainai ceremonial leader and educator

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Narcisse Blood. Blood lectured extensively with Kainai Nation’s Red Crow Community College colleague Ryan Heavy Head. The two of them provided the keynote address at the American Indigenous Research Association (AIRA) Conference at Salish Kootenai College in 2014 (Blood and Heavy Head). The AIRA annual meeting is an important international gathering for Indigenous scholars and others committed to ethical and collaborative research involving Indigenous peoples. The Blackfeet are a confederacy of four bands or nations. Members of each band speak the same language. Like the Saulteaux spoken by the Berens River Anishinaabeg, the Blackfoot language belongs to the Algonkian language family. Also, as Hallowell discovered with Saulteaux, the Blackfoot language designates things as animate and inanimate, and among the former things are many that English speakers would consider as objects. Additionally, these designations correspond to behaviour, particularly among traditionalists. Historically, the Sarcee, or Tsu’tinna Nation, also belonged to the confederacy, even though they speak an Athapaskan language. Essentially, they embrace the same religious ceremonies and daily, ritual practices as the Blackfeet, which means they view and inhabit their world much as the Blackfeet do (Interview, 1975, pp. 12–13; affirmed by many personal conversations). This fact reminds us that the characteristics of Blackfoot and Anishinaabeg ontologies we are discussing here, while particularly evident among Algonkian language speakers, range across Indigenous societies. Collectively, the Blackfeet regard themselves as the Niitsitapiiksi, or “Real Persons”. The individual bands are the Kainai, or Bloods; the Siksika, or Blackfoot proper; the Aapatohsipiikani, or North Piikani/Piegan; and their close relatives the Aamskapipiikani, or South Piikani/Piegan. The Aamskapipiikani reside primarily on the Blackfeet Reservation in the American state of Montana, while the other three bands reside on reserves in Alberta, Canada. The Tsu’tinna also have a reserve in Alberta. The Blackfeet still reside in their traditional territory. They consider this to be the landscape south of the North Saskatchewan River in present-day Alberta, north of the Yellowstone River in Montana, east of the Continental Divide, and west of the Great Sandhills in the province of Saskatchewan. This territory was given to them by Ihtsipaitapiyo’pa, which translates to English as the “One through Whom we Live”. This being endows all beings with life and the potential for personhood. Blackfeet compare his life-giving power to the rays of Sun, or Natoo’si (Lokensgard, 2016, p. 16). As it is for many Indigenous peoples, the Blackfoot conception of personhood is central to their identity. They are, after all, the “Real Persons”. The Blackfoot word for person is matapi (pl.: matapiiksi). Importantly, a matapi is defined not only by its physical appearance, but also by its behaviour. Specifically, a person, in the Blackfoot world, is a social actor who also embraces protocols of reciprocity. By identifying themselves as niitsitapiiksi, or “real” persons, the Blackfeet refer to their corporeality (which not every

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being has) and to the idea that they embrace the concept of reciprocity and behave accordingly. This indicates that personhood is something that, while having a biological component, must be achieved and maintained. The protocols by which traditional Blackfeet live help them to do this (Lokensgard, 2016, pp. 78–79, 81). There are three categories of “other-than-human” persons in the Blackfoot world. There are the Sspommitapiiksi, or “Above Persons” (Sun, Moon, star, high-flying birds, and so on); the Ksaahkommitapiiksi, or Earth Persons (low-flying birds and beings residing primarily on/in the earth), and the Soyiitapiiksi, or Water Persons (fish, certain riparian animals, etc.) (Lokensgard, 2016, p. 79). For traditional Blackfeet, “success” is the most important goal in life. Blackfoot religious practitioners typically invoke success through the word istawa’pii at the end or “tail” of each prayer. They also pray for wisdom, protection from danger and more. To actually achieve success and these other goals, individuals must establish relationships or alliances with Ihtsipaitapiyo’pa and with those human and other-than-human persons, who can help them throughout their lifetimes (Lokensgard, 2016, p. 111). Hence, the Blackfeet desire the same “good life” that their distant relatives, the Anishinaabeg, do. Moreover, they follow the same means to attain it. The Blackfeet create and maintain relationships with Ihtsipaitapiyo’pa and other persons through both formal and informal protocols of reciprocity. These protocols are based upon the concept of pommakssin – mutual transfer or gift exchange. For instance, when a Blackfoot individual seeks religious knowledge or the right to practice a particular ritual, she or he will approach an elder who already has that knowledge or right, and offer a gift in exchange for it. Of course, the elder and novice also take on various responsibilities for each other, for the relationships the ritual knowledge makes possible, and so on. In fact, they enter into a familial relationship, and the elder becomes a ritual parent to the novice or “child” (the elder achieved his or her status by entering into similar relationships before). A more mundane example is found in the practice of serving elders first during feasts, as a means of showing care and respect in return for the many things elders do for members of younger generations (Lokensgard, 2016, pp. 108–109). Traditional Blackfeet establish formal relationships with other-thanhuman persons through “medicine bundles”, or amopistaaniitsi. The bundles, themselves, are collectives of living persons, with individual, inherent gifts that they can use to help humans. The beings contained in the bundles may include beavers, embodied in beaver skins, or loons, embodied in loon skins, and so on. Human keepers transfer the bundles periodically to new keepers, in order to be sure that relationships among humans, other-thanhuman persons and Ihtsipaitapiyo’pa are continually renewed. Bundle keepers hold ceremonial bundle openings at specific times of the year, which are determined by the type of bundle. At each opening, the

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keepers and other traditional members of society gain direct access to otherthan-human beings, who might normally only be found in the mountains, streams or sky. Accordingly, at these times, the Blackfeet honour the beings for aid received or request aid that they may currently need. The very ritualistic ways participants do this, of course, are expressions of reciprocity. They also honour Ihtsipaitapiyo’pa, who ultimately gave all beings the ability to aid each other. Much of the knowledge surrounding bundle transfers, openings and dayto-day care is secret. Naturally, the Blackfeet are obliged to protect the otherthan-human persons, who are a part of their ceremonies, whether those beings are in the bundles or wandering the landscape. Still, for a more thorough treatment of medicine bundles than space allows here, I direct readers to the classic Ceremonial Bundles of the Blackfoot Indians by Clark Wissler and David Duval (Aamskapipiikani) (1911), Blackfoot Ways of Knowing: The Worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi by Betty Bastien (Aapatohsipiikani) (2004), and my own Blackfoot Religion and the Consequences of Cultural Commoditization (2016).

Niitsitapi research and protocols of reciprocity In describing the Blackfoot concept of personhood to me, Aapatohsipiikani elder Allan Pard narrated a hypothetical situation. In it, we see traditional epistemology and ontology at work. Allan, known in Blackfoot as Mi’ksskimmiisoka’sim (“Iron Shirt”), described looking towards the horizon and seeing movement. Soon, he said, you discern that something is moving towards you. You only know it is a being in the most general sense, a kanatapi. Because it is animate, it is likely a matapi, since all animate things have that potential. Once you see that it walks on legs, you know that it is an earth person, or ksahkomitaapi (Pard, 2007). Allan’s narrative ended here, but based upon many conversations with him and his fellow elders, I can take it a bit further: Imagine this encounter taking place long ago, when there may have been less certainty about who you would meet on the open prairie. In this case, we can imagine that you soon notice that the approaching being is a man. From his clothing and hairstyle, you can then see that he is Lakota. Typically, Lakotas are your enemies. But this man uses the pantribal Plains Indian sign language to invite you to smoke a pipe with him. You do so. Finally, you know that this man, for the time being, is a real person (the term niitsitapi can be applied to non-Blackfeet, especially Indians, if they behave like persons). He embraces the protocols of reciprocity. This manifests in the fact that you share a pipe and tobacco mixture. Temporarily, then, you have entered into a reciprocal relationship, and you have set aside warlike actions that might also force you to set aside your own statuses as persons.

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Importantly, there are witnesses to this exchange. Many nonhuman ksaahkommitapiiski, or earth people, animate the landscape upon which this encounter takes place. Furthermore, the spommitapiiksi, or above people, are watching from their homes in the sky. All of these other-than-human persons, and Ihtsipaitapiyo’pa too, will hold you and this other person accountable, until you part ways. If you cease acting reciprocally towards each other before then, it will damage your relationship with these other beings. Again, personhood is not a given; it is a status that must be achieved and maintained. You might meet this same man at a different time, when he is part of a war party. Then, you might treat each other as ksiista’pitapiiksi, “nothing persons”, or simply nonpersons. Actually, doing so would be necessary in order for you to set aside the protocols of reciprocity and engage each other as enemies. All of this illustrates that ontology, in this case the status of person, is relational for the Blackfoot peoples. And proper relations require respect and reciprocity. Accordingly, we see a vivid example of why Indigenous Research Methodologies scholars consider “relationship”, “respect”, and “reciprocity” as important Indigenous principles that should guide not only daily behaviour, but also any research that is “relevant” to Indigenous communities. It is important to remember that in Blackfoot and other Indigenous worlds, relationships always extend well beyond humans. Personhood also requires you to relate with the Above People, the Earth People and the Underwater People. Personhood is something that is continually practiced and affirmed. Fortunately, rituals such as sharing a pipe and tobacco remind you of this. Every success in life also reminds you of this, as they come in part from the aid you receive from others. Notice, the encounter described previously – an encounter through which one gains knowledge – actually resembles the way that we often consider knowledge to be gained in the academy. The knowledge emerges from observation. Your realization that there is a being on the horizon leads you to make certain hypotheses about whether that being is a person and, if so, what type. You then test your final hypothesis via a pipe ceremony. In the future, you may need to test it again. Remember, though, that there are other parties involved in this acquisition of knowledge. The Lakota man in this story is going through the same process of reasoning and behaviour. Your personhood is initially questionable in his mind, as well. So, your sharing the pipe affirms your personhood just as it affirms his. We can tie this back to the notion of “relational accountability”, one of the key concepts in Indigenous Research Methodologies. We can even tie this to the peer review process of mainstream academia. Our “peers” review our conclusions, and we are “accountable” to them.

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Indigenizing the ontological turn I provide this brief overview of the Blackfoot world, the ontology that orders it, and the behaviours required to gain knowledge and live successfully within it, because it and other Indigenous worlds inform the work of scholars writing Indigenous Research Methodologies. I turn back to Wilson to make this particularly clear. In Research Is Ceremony, Wilson offers a paradigm for envisioning Indigenous Research, in which Indigenous ontologies are foundational. His paradigm is ceremony, itself: Research is a ceremony. It bears repeating, as I think this statement ties and holds together all the relationships that have gone into the formation of this book. The purpose of any ceremony is to build stronger relationships or bridge the distance between our cosmos and us. The research that we do as Indigenous people is a ceremony that allows us a raised consciousness and insight into our world. Through going forward together with open minds and good hearts we have uncovered the true nature of this ceremony. (Wilson, 2008, p. 137) His emphasis upon ceremony as something that “builds stronger relationships” and “bridges the distances” is particularly important. As we can see in the description of Blackfoot medicine bundle ceremonies, in the subtle protocols that govern the transfer of knowledge and specific rites, and even in the smoking of a pipe between elder Allan Pard’s imaginary observer of the horizon and the hypothetical Lakota matapi, ceremony works in this way. The study of religion addresses this regularly. There are those, like the great scholar of religion Jonathan Zimmerman Smith, who note that the root meaning of “religion” may actually refer to “binding” or connection (Smith, 1998, p. 269). There are also those who agree with anthropologist Victor Turner’s argument that rituals are temporary community-building events that have lasting impacts upon social structure (Turner, 2017). According to these and many other scholars, religion is all about connection. Ultimately, Wilson and his Indigenous and nonindigenous peers want to conduct research in the academy that acknowledges the interpersonal nature of Indigenous worlds. Doing so will make their research more relevant to their home communities or the communities with which they work. As stated previously, this is the goal of those involved in “Indigenous Research” or research “done by or for Indigenous peoples” (Wilson, 2008, p. 6). In her highly influential 1999 text, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Māori) argues scholars must acknowledge the role their work has often played in perpetuating the colonization of Indigenous peoples (2012). Their work has done so by relying

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upon and reinscribing Western epistemology, in which Indigenous peoples and cultures remain objects upon which interpretations are imposed according to EuroAmerican ontology (2012, pp. 67, 72–96). She argues that Indigenous scholars should follow the lead set by critical theorists and engage in research that works against systems of oppression and that complements or sometimes intersects with Indigenous activism (Smith, 2012, pp. 187–188, 217–218). In short, Smith argues, Indigenous scholars should adopt research agendas that facilitate “decolonization” (2012, pp. 111–112, 119–125). Mainstream academia is fundamentally Western. Consequently, a decolonizing agenda can never be completely successful. If one were able to strip away Western characteristics from academia, there would be little left beneath. Contemporary Indigenous researchers influenced by Smith are actually trying to find ways of bringing their ontological understandings into the academy. Therefore, we can describe their agendas more accurately as attempts to “indigenize” academia (Wilson, 2008, p. 39). The difference between the work of these Indigenous researchers and the work of the nonindigenous scholars, who sometimes verge into romanticism, is significant. The former advocates exploring Indigenous ontologies as entire webs of relationships, rather than reducing them to smaller concepts and interpreting them from EuroAmerican perspectives. Also, the Indigenous researchers have the explicit goal of benefiting their or other Indigenous peoples. This may not always be the goal of nonindigenous researchers. However, if they broaden their views to encompass Indigenous webs of relationships, then they are more likely to see their own work as parts of those webs, as well. This, in turn, may help them understand why Wilson, in particular, wants to expand accountability in the academy beyond peer review. He wants review to resemble the systems of broad “relational accountability” that characterize Indigenous worlds. Put simply, those scholars engaged in the ontological turn may see themselves as accountable to the Indigenous peoples whose concepts they discuss, if they follow the lead of Wilson and his peers. This, in turn, will help those same scholars interpret and represent those ideas more accurately and to avoid romanticization. As a consequence, they may find themselves not only writing about Indigenous peoples but writing for them, as well. Harvey expresses hope that mainstream academics will turn more directly towards Indigenous peoples or any people who share their animist views. He writes that our increasingly nuanced understanding of reality “makes it safe to hope that animists might be welcome to participate in philosophical debates about persons and subjects” (2006, p. 203). He continues: It gives grounds for asserting that animism contributes to the possibilities opening up in philosophical debates that take seriously the importance of diversity and materiality necessary for a full understanding of personhood. (Harvey, 2006, p. 203)

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Likewise, individuals developing and promoting Indigenous Research Methodologies welcome greater attention from scholars doing other work. They acknowledge that Indigenous peoples have much to offer the nonindigenous world. Smith, herself, who helped initiate this new era of Indigenous Research, writes: Indigenous peoples have philosophies which connect humans to the environment and to each other, and which generate principles for living a life which is sustainable, respectful and possible. (Smith, 2012, p. 109) Clearly, then, the time is right for “ontological anthropologists”, scholars of the “new animism”, and others to examine the Indigenous Research Methodologies literature and to engage its authors and their worlds.

Acknowledgements For my reading of Ricœur, I am indebted to Scott-Baumann (2009, pp. 63–67) and to Winquist (1998). Also, for my limited understanding of Blackfoot ontology and epistemology, and for many other things besides, I am forever indebted to the late Piikani elder Allan Pard and to his family, peers and protégés. Thank you, Allan.

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Smith, J.Z. (1998) Religion, Religions, Religious. In: Taylor, M. (ed.) Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 269–284. Smith, L.T. (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London, Zed Books. Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Piscataway, Transaction. Reprint: New York, Routledge, 2017. Walters, M. & Anderson, C. (2013) Indigenous Statistics: A Quantitative Research Methodology. New York, Routledge. Wilkinson, D. (2017) Is There Such a Thing as Animism? Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 85(2), 289–311. Wilson, S. (2008) Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Winnepeg, Fernwood Publishing. Winquist, C. (1998) Person. In: Taylor, M. (ed.) Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 225–238. Wissler, C. & Duval, D.C. (1911) Ceremonial Bundles of the Blackfoot Indians. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 7(2), 65–298.

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Maya-Mesoamerican polyontologies Breath and Indigenous American vital essences Miguel Astor-Aguilera

Personhood is rarely corporeally bound for non-Western people. This chapter focuses on three points concerning Maya ontologies: first, how they relate to potentially sentient object-things; second, how personhood is conceived; and third, how these notions may extend to Mesoamerica and Indigenous America at large. The Maya world embodies persons, visible and invisible, which create, maintain and cut relations. Indigenous conceptions of persons extend within place and time, providing grounds for intersubjective kinship relatedness anchored on “mutualities of being” (Sahlins 2011:10). Per Keen, Indigenous persons extend “beyond somatic body boundaries per the Western ‘individual’. Personhood extension allows persons to be consubstantial with other ‘persons’: ancestors, creatures, and places” (2006:525; also see Glaskin 2012:298). Maya personhood extension does not negate humans as different from things; however, Maya conceptions of what we consider material or immaterial collide with Western notions of self as unbreachable corporeal beings – body as opposed to spirit – composed of distinct body and soul. What constitutes a person varies cross-culturally (Arnold 2005; Klass 2003:33–36, 94–95, 111–112; Lakoff 1996; Radcliffe-Brown 1952 [1940]:189–194; Zeddies 2000); however, person sameness is inaccurate as it destroys differences the Maya, for example, describe as they perceive the dissimilarity between themselves and nonhumans. Indigenous people, then, acknowledge that humans have different attributes from nonhumans (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:74–75; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Sahlins 2014:288; Turner 2009:27, 31, 39). Everything within Indigenous American worldviews has volition potential (Astor-Aguilera 2010:115; Zedeño 2009:409). By worldview, I use Redfield’s reference “to the way the world looks, especially to the way humans, in a particular society, see themselves in relation to everything else as distinguished from and related to the self. Among whom do I move? What are my relations to things?” (1957 [1953]:91). Worldview, defined thus, relates to alterity. How a human speaks about and understands oneself relates to his/her perspective within the world that he/she holographically moves (Wagner 2001:19, 26, 119, 233). “Perspectivism” here follows Nietzsche’s

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(1968 [1901]:255, 1996 [1878]:26–28) “perspective theory of affects” where knowledge is inherently limited, dependent on one’s perspective, and therefore partial to each being. Perspective is, therefore, inherently partial to one’s positional view. In relational ontologies, human and nonhuman persons have perspective because they have intent (Turner 2009:27, 32). The Mesoamerican relational self categorizes the world differently than the self of the industrial West (Astor-Aguilera 2010:202). The Maya forest environment, for example, is perceived intersubjectively as capable of behavioural action where the inanimate can, but not typically, be sentient. Hallowell explained thus for the Ojibwa when stating, “I asked an old man: Are all stones alive? He reflected and replied, ‘No! But some are’” (1976 [1960]:362). Per Jones, rather than impose our personhood notions onto others, we should stress “social practice and the way persons perform. Persons are created socially through relationships and these networks include things and people” (2005:199). Relational ontologies condition how personhood is cast in terms of volition associated with plants, objects, land, water and meteorological phenomena (Brück 2001; Fowler 2000; Ingold 2004; Jones 2005). Knowledge, wisdom and skills of “other-than-human persons”, as those of some humans, are linked to powerful medicine, with some entities having greater skills than others (Astor-Aguilera 2010:206; Detwiler 1992:237; Pflüg 1992; Pflüg 1998; Turner 2009:35; Zedeño 2009:409). Nonhumans are not worshipped but venerated as in respecting a powerful elder. Just as humans dissociate themselves from friend turned foe, likewise can associations with nonhuman persons be broken. Causality attributed to nonhuman persons within relational ontologies is not impersonal since these entities have intent (Morrison 2000:31). In the Maya world, noncorporal beings can associate and disassociate themselves from “object-things” by their own will. Breaking or burning objects which nonhumans are associated with is not desacralization since a sacred/profane dichotomy is non-existent here. The Maya regard some structures within their built environment as associated with nonhuman relative kin-persons. The tethering of nonhuman persons to objects, however, is incorrectly called “ensoulment” as if the Maya were fixing-activating and unfixing-terminating “souls” (e.g. Freidel and Schele 1989; Vogt 1969:235, 369–371; Vogt 1993 [1976]:17–20). Per Sanders, comprehending what others understand as person requires attentiveness to “the pre-intentional stances and attitudes that people adopt to each other” (1990:62; also see Turner 2009:39). Understanding personhood difference requires Ingold’s “relational thinking” where beings are not discrete entities but particular loci of “development within continuous fields of relationships” (2004:219). Ingold sees this relational field as unfolding in the continuum of life “that is enfolded in specific morphologies, powers, and capacities of response” (2002:56). Animals and plants are not “things”. As Ingold elaborates, we should not refer

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to “‘living things’ as though life were a qualifying attribute of objects. Every organism – like every person – is the embodiment of a particular way of being. Life is the creative potential of a field of relationships in which beings take the forms that they do in relation to others” (2004:219; similar in 2002:57, 1990:215).

Epistemology and ontology Much confusion in Indigenous American Studies stems from vagueness regarding religion and ideology (Arnold 1999:xv–xvii) and epistemology, worldview and ontology (Alberti and Marshall 2009:346). For the Maya, personhood is intersubjectively categorically surpassed since vital essences, usually glossed as “soul”, can be tethered to both animate and inanimate “things”. Mesoamerican ontologies are critical to comprehending Maya worldviews since glossing Indigenous terms into Judeo-Christian-Muslim concepts distort and mislead (Astor-Aguilera 2010:21). The term “Indigenous” here refers to a colonized/previously colonized native community and their ancestral lineage relationship to their ancient homeland topography (Merlan 2009:304). Trying to understand Indigenous Americans seriously, Hallowell developed a manner in which to comprehend “another society in terms of their culturally constituted perspective of self” (1967 [1955]:79). Epistemology, as theory of knowledge and its methods distinguishing opinion from belief, differs from ontology concerning the qualities of being. Most personhood studies rest on either addressing epistemological questions or trying to take ontological alterity seriously (Alberti and Marshall 2009:350). Relational embodiment is not about theological belief (Clammer 2004:87; Glaskin 2012:298; Harvey 2005b:14–15) per Myers’ (1986:105) conclusion. Relational embodiment concerns experiential relations constituting “sense-of-being” indicating how the world functions (Ashforth 2011:135, 143; Detwiler 1992:239), including the presence of, per Hallowell, “other-than-human entities” or “other-than-human persons” (1967 [1955]:172–182, 1976 [1960]:357–390). Belief is faith based, whereas relational perspectives experience knowing the world through sensory awareness (Bird-David 1999:74–75; Block 2005:112; Detwiler 1992:238; Harvey 2005a:122–127). Encountering nonhumans within relational perspectives opens engagement potential with said beings and the environmental particulars with which they associate (Clammer 2004:102; Ingold 2000:90–100; Ingold 2006:16). Relational ontologies, then, are an ecological type of cosmic-sense (Clammer 2004:97). Nonhuman entities within relational perspectives are co-constituents of the world rather than residing in supernatural planes of existence (Pálsson 1996). Within relational ontologies it is not problematic accepting “person-things” in a world where natural/supernatural divisions are not made (Henry 2008; Herva 2009:393; Ingold 2000).

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Hallowell (1976 [1960]:passim) understood our natural/supernatural division was inapplicable to the Ojibwa but tripped in saying their worldviews were belief based. Hallowell (ibid: 372–375) seemingly meant Ojibwa ontology was culturally adaptive. Fluid ontologies indicate malleable convergence and though, per Alberti and Marshall, analysing people as having “multiple ontologies can seem oxymoronic and trivializing those we study” (2009:344), sense-of-being within the Indigenous Americas was not codified (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim). Noting diverse epistemologies does not grasp ontological difference. Analysing ontologies is not just about noting cross-cultural differences but neither is it about proclaiming the superiority of “animism” as Scott (2013:860, 864) and Wilkinson (2017:293–297) accuse. People having relational ontologies should not be romantically idealized (Astor-Aguilera 2016). Indigenous people are practical. They do not worship nature (Clammer 2004:102) and take their practices less seriously than we think they do (Astor-Aguilera 2010:xiii; Willerslev 2013:51–54). Humans live in the same biological world as is evident by antibiotic application; however, the perception of why and how Western medications work differs cross-culturally and even within particular cultures (Harris and Robb 2012:669). Ignoring that humans engage their world through various ontological perspectives forces them into one category. Embodiment and ontological difference are best analysed within on-the-ground social context (ibid). Per Harris and Robb (2012:672), it is easy for people to live within differential modes of being since applying one criterion to all contexts creates tension. Ontological uniformity is mostly exhibited in the European mediaeval to modern eras while less so in time periods not so affected by domineering theologies as espoused by Christian theocracies and/or the emergence of science. Fluid ontologies explain why communication is possible cross-culturally since social change exhibits dialectic on the part of colonized people that is only possible by having polyontologies (Harris and Robb 2012:668–672).

Persons, extended relatives and shape-shifters Descola (2013:207–220, 299–301) claims “analogical ontology” dominates Mesoamerica; however, the Indigenous Americas seem polyontological since elements of his “naturalistic ontology” and “animistic ontology” classifications are also present – hence my plural use of “relational ontologies”. Mesoamerican hybridity did not begin with European contact as Indigenous Americans had extensive trading networks where heavy interaction spread influential ideas (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim). Morphable ontologicalbeing is present throughout much of Indigenous North and South America (Detwiler 1992:238; Foster 1944; Gossen 1994; Houston and Stuart 1998; Houston and Stuart 2001 [1989]:449–450; La Farge 1947:153–154; Monaghan 1998:141–144; Newsome 1998; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1972:59; Saler 1964; Stratmeyer and Stratmeyer 1977:133; Villa-Rojas 1947:583–586;

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Wright 1990:55). Maya women, for example, are said to sometimes give birth to shape-shifters (Astor-Aguilera 2010:60) who can transform into half-animal/half-humans (Calvin 1997; Grube and Nahm 1994; Houston and Stuart 2001 [1989]; Musgrave-Portilla 1982; Redfield and Villa-Rojas 1934:178–179; Taube 2003:476–479). Shape-shifters are assumed by Westerners to be supernatural, and therefore originally assumed by Coe (1973:22, 1978:11–14) to be gods and deities, but, as everything else in the Indigenous American world, they are anything but (Laugrand and Oosten 2007:xxxiii–xxxix). Shape-shifters can be immediate or extended relatives and/or neighbours. Humans sharing essences with animals allow cross-species communication that, unpredictably and ambivalently, also includes plants and objects (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim; Hallowell 1967 [1955]:98–99, 176–180; Hallowell 1976 [1960]:376– 381; Ingold 2000:423; Viveiros de Castro 1998:471; Viveiros de Castro 2004:464; Wright 1990:58; Zedeño 2008; Zedeño 2009:409). According to Gell, social objects require configuration with humans (1998:20); however, humans are not necessarily required in the Indigenous American cosmic mix (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim; Descola 2013:passim; Turner 2009:34). Invisible nonhumans can make themselves smellable, audible, felt and/or visible (Morrison 2000). Invisible entities can manifest as human, animal, plant, rock, fire, lightning, cloud and object (Radin 1914:352–353). The Maya, like the Mexica (Meshica), “Aztec”, see plants as not separate from human and nonhuman animals, moving air, moving shadows, etc., (McKeeverFurst 1995:182). Indigenous people grant that other-than-human entities can potentiality communicate with humans; however, the occurrence is not common (Bray 2009:363; Hallowell 1976 [1960]:362, 377; Harris and Robb 2012:670; Ingold 2000:106; Willerslev 2013:50). When nonhuman being communication occurs here, it is deemed highly potent rather than sacred (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim). Personhood analyses require cross-cultural translating of ontologies adequately (Strathern 1988:136, 271, 354) since embodiment studies entail social bodies and the worlds they inhabit (Turner 2009:30–32). Harris and Robb emphasize invariable human bodily functions in that sleeping, sex, drink and eating are pleasurable; violence is painful; bodies decay; and impregnation requires sexual intercourse; however, within “different ontologies women can become pregnant without sex” and we academics, therefore, have “to engage the world in a different way to understand” (2012:672). Only humans are persons within Modernist perspectives: animals can be individuals but they are not typically seen as thinking persons (Harvey 2006). Personhood from Western perspectives requires a divine soul and its related consciousness and rational intellect (Gergen 2009:135; Gilson 1940:201–203; Teichman 1974:56). Strathern noted the great divide caused by imposing Western categories and the ensuing difficulty of translating Indigenous thought (1988:12, 29, 371; also see Cousineau 2006:185). The European Enlightenment of the

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late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries precipitated Western learning based on disciplined empirical knowledge acquisition (Latour 1993:12–36, 61–70, 135–144). We find it difficult escaping Cartesian categories since we are inherently involved in intellectual philosophizing as indoctrinated through an academia of the West (Ingold 2000:6); “Western” and “West” referring to “our very activity, in thinking and writing, underpinned by disciplined rational inquiry” (ibid) with most academic studies abiding by the natural and social “laws” delineated during the Enlightenment (Hornborg 2006:21; Viveiros de Castro 2004:464–468). The West, for example, separates Earth into animal world, plant world, soil, skies, oceans, weather, etc., and the unknown gets categorized into the supernatural. Differentiating between Indigenous and West has issues; however, most of its problematizing stems from Western analysis since, despite thought variability within industrial populations – where social science is immersed – this “disputation is precisely what ‘the West’ is about. There is, therefore, nothing more ‘Western’ than debating these topics” (Ingold 2000:6–7). Various academic issues stem from reified academic constructions of cultures (Harris and Robb 2012:669–670) and religions (Scott 2013:860). Indigenous ontologies, for example, are typically force-fit into Judeo-Christian-Muslim concepts (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim). Viveiros de Castro’s (1998:471– 474, 2004:3, 6) perspectivist theory on Indigenous American “transpecific personhood”, for example, is commendable but relies on universal soul ideas. Cieza de León (1553:85, 1864 [1553]:53–60, 88, 117), exemplifies this problem when reporting that Peruvians did not have a conception of the soul; however, he nevertheless imposed the term since Andeans, he said, conceived of something that did not die and transformed at death.

Breath, spirit and soul We labour grasping Mexica vital essences since “terms Mesoamericans used for aspects of what we call the soul were thickets of homophony” (Knab 2004:23). Animo in Spanish means driven determination, whereas anima means soul and, as both imply “force”, applying a Western Judeo-ChristianMuslim soul concept to non-Westerners requires justification. Per Willerslev, Viveiros de Castro’s (1998:471–474) “Amerindian perspectivism” rests on the “spiritual-soul”/“material appearance” dichotomy (2011a:514; also see Alberti and Marshall 2009:347). Replacing soul with ontological-being here would lessen the theological baggage apparently causing Viveiros de Castro to state that the internal “soul-spirit of animals is identical to human consciousness” (2004:465). As Willerslev elaborates, Viveiros de Castro (2001:33) assumes that the “soul is a ‘given’ for all beings yet in ethnographic details of the body-soul interface among various Indigenous groups, ambiguities crop up. Looking through ethnographies on ‘soul’ conceptions, it is difficult to find an immaterial soul” (2011:515; also see Turner 2009:17–22, 25–29). According to

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Turner, Viveiros de Castro’s (2001:33, 2004:465) “Western Modernist ideas misunderstand Indigenous conceptions” (2009:22; also see Latour 2009:2). Our European-derived soul concept is, despite being frequently force-fit, difficult to apply within Mesoamerican ontologies. Elaborated by the Greeks, Aristotle (1993 [350 B.C.E]:412a27; Hamlyn 1974:11–44) thought the soul had three hierarchical functions: first, a power that kept organic matter alive (see Wijsenbeek-Wijler 1978:70–71); second, an enlivening energy present in animals, including humans, but not most plants (ibid: 72–83); and third, reason and conviction found only in humans (ibid: 84–96). Plato thought souls were composed of spiritual fire (ibid: 50), whereas other Greeks thought spirits were simply disembodied souls (see Steel 1978). Our soul ideas are Germanic-Dutch derived in referring to a human’s immaterial spirit as distinct from its physical body (Oxford English Dictionary 1989). Though linked, Classic Greek ideas concerning the soul are not identical to those of Christian theologians (McKeever-Furst 1995:6). Augustine (1886 [419 C.E.]), for example, formulated the soul as indivisible, immaterial, rational and divine matter related to God’s substance. In 1513, the Roman Catholic Fifth Lateran Council declared each soul to be uniquely created as an immortal entity individually assigned by God to a specific human at their conception (McKeever-Furst 1995:7). Later, Aquinas’s (1997 [1270]) Question 75, Articles 1–7, conceived the human soul as not requiring a physical body since it by itself equated being (Echevarría 1941; Gilson 1940:172–188, 198–202; Pegis 1934; Teichman 1974:3–9). The soul, as self, influenced European colonizers, early social scientists, and continues to be influential within academia (Astor-Aguilera 2010:103, 151, 173, 207–210; Carrithers 1985:236; McKeever-Furst 1995:1) despite the fact that Judeo-Christian-Muslim theologians do not concur on the nature of the soul even within their own traditions (McKeever-Furst 1995:14–16). Applying our soul notions within Indigenous America is difficult (Knab 2004:14; López-Austin 1980:221–318). Seventeenth-century Jesuits, for example, found it complicated translating soul to the Native American Huron (Pomedli 1991; Tooker 1964). The closest notion the Huron had, “oki”, referenced potent power found throughout the world. While oki did not correspond to soul, the Jesuits nevertheless glossed it as such (Harris and Robb 2012:672–673). Sixteenth-century friars thus applied their theology, however distorted, to Indigenous Americans (McKeever-Furst 1995:8). For the Mexica, Read applies the term “animistic entities” since “vital essences are not comparable to the Christian soul and they do not divide the material body and the nonmaterial spirit which is logically impossible in their system” (1998:111–112, 265 note 5). What colonial Europeans recorded were not Indigenous soul beliefs but notions concerning multiple vital ontological essences (McKeever-Furst 1995:9). As Willerslev admits, “I have uncritically followed Tylor (1903 [1871]); Frazer (1922 [1911–1915]); and Viveiros de Castro (2011a) and used ‘soul’ for Indigenous concepts. Soul in our Judeo-Christian discourse, however, is an ontological opposition

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of spirit and matter” (2011a:516). Colonial friars misinterpreted Indigenous American ideas of “‘shadow’, ‘breath’, and ‘name’ among” others (Hall 1997:44, 55) like “heat”. Different as these terms are in English, shadow and breath sometimes respectively reference spirit as one’s shade or one’s visible breathing during cold weather. The term “spirit” stems from the Latin spiritus (breath) and spirare (breathe) (Oxford English Dictionary 1989) and, though it has commonalities with Indigenous ideas, spirit is usually conflated with soul and is therefore uncertain in its applied meaning (Harvey 2006:12; Valeri 2000:23–26).

Transformative breath For the Native American Hopi, transformation marks an experiential “transition from one state-of-being to another and on death a person’s breath, hikwsi, leaves the body not to a place separated from the living but different in that it is unseen” (Glowacka 1999:137). Hikwsi is like the Chinese dao in indexing “that which underlies the state of things, and their changes, since it is the ever-shifting transformations present in qi – ‘breath’ and ‘vapor’. Qi [chi] runs counter to Western ideas and pervades everything in different combinations rather than a binary between spirit and matter” (Robson 2015:55). The Maya associate vital ontological essences with air entering/leaving bodies (Astor-Aguilera 2010:209), noting that when asleep their peers sometimes breathe and flatulate conspicuously. Breath is powerful and transformative, and linked to wandering co-essences during sleep. Tylor cited cross-cultural breath notions as spirit, noting that “spirit-breath are throughout the world widely united” (1866:75); for example, Central American Nicaraguans told Francisco de Bobadilla (in Oviedo 1855 [1557]:311–327) that “‘when men die comes forth from their mouth something resembling a person: it is their breath’”. Marett (1936:111) linked anima to breath though, in Latin-derived Spanish, “anima”, “animo”, and “alma” differ. Per Sillar for Indigenous Bolivians, while only “people have a soul, ‘alma’, people and other entities (e.g. alpacas, maize, objects) can have ‘animo’, vitalizing energy. It is animo which people, animals, and some things possess providing perception and communication” (2009:369). In Mayan, ool is “animo-determination” per a botanical sprout’s emergence from hard soil, a sunflower’s movement following the sun across the sky, and vines strategically climbing over structures in seeking stronger sunlight. Earth “breathes” through its ch’a’ iik’ yetel muus iik’, “inhaling and exhaling”, of breezes and gusts. As noted by Benedict (1989 [1946]:99) for Asia, Indigenous terms do not translate well into English because their notions are strikingly different. Rather than belief, relational experience is paramount in Indigenous contexts (McKeever-Furst 1995:2–3) and forcefitting their non-polar thought into dichotomies distorts their complimentary dualities (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim). Kuiper stresses “not defining

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‘personhood’ in terms of concepts embedded in the language of particular cultures but rather ‘to find personhood’” within our studies (1990:42); however, how can one find a society’s ontological view of personhood without being embedded within that particular culture and language? Per Sanders, our analyses require cultural context since “the more specific the research, the more relevant information (linguistic, psychological, sociological, historical) about the behaviour of people becomes” (1990:52). Academics typically reductively simplify complexity, in categorizing and controlling our subject, while Indigenous people do not. Per Lakoff and Johnson, “our concepts of objects are interactional with dimensions emerging from our experience. Objectivism, however, is inadequate to account in another way”. Objectively, classifications are “characterized by a set of inherent properties within each category. Everything is either inside or outside the category. Things in the category have the requisite properties. Anything not having the requisite properties falls outside the category” (2003 [1980]:122). Academics tend to apply this process whether or not it accords with how other people classify things and/or their experiences.

Potent ontological forces Similar to Mesoamerica, Chinese vital essences are linked within live bodies but separate at death. Asian notions about essences are also not codified, having no consensus on how many reside per person (Oldstone-Moore 2015:152). In Central Mexico, per Sandstrom (1991:258), Nahuatl speakers conceive of various essences: one, the yolotl, referring to the “force” of an organism, object or invisible entity; and two, the tonali, referring to heat associated with animo, that is, vigour and drive. Tonali is divided into up to seven synchronized components within humans and up to 14 within animals. More components equal more power. Powerful tonali wander out of bodies and interact with tonali belonging to other bodies. Tonali leave and return to human bodies through the fontanel and associate with human-like animals encountered in dreams (McKeever-Furst 1998:215). Mesoamerican vital essences do not match the Western soul (ibid: 213). Tonali are similar to other ontological force ideas in the Indigenous Americas (González-Torres 1976) concerning essences found in and around bodies (Hall 1997:31). Tonali, as heat and breath, is shared on and within Earth as well as the sky, and humans and animals can learn to manipulate these tonali (Knab 2004:32). Mesoamerican essences phenomena remain unclear (Knab 2004:24–25) since the questions we pose, and how we ask them, often say more about us than those we study (Harris and Robb 2012:670). Our categorizing of Central Mexican essences, rather than clarifying, typically adds confusion similar to that for China (see Oldstone-Moore 2015:152). Tonali, for example, is classified as the second essence after yolotl, yet tonali is split into 14 parts. Further, there is a third essence called ihiyotl (hijillo) residing in the liver and blood (López-Austin 1980:257–258) and linked

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to strained bad-smelling breath and luminous flatulent air associated with shape-shifting (Knab 2004:28). All three ontological essences differ (LópezAustin 1980; González-Torres 1976; Signorini and Lupo 1989) but are not discrete since all are present in air/breath sometimes seen as glowing methane on marshy lakes (McKeever-Furst 1995:180). Volition is potentially exhibited by everything here since ontological essences need not be human linked (Sanders 1990:54).

Agency, causality and volition Relational ontologies are not about metaphorical personification. Indigenous Americans are interpreted to metaphorically personify objects and thus indicate reluctance on our part to take their ontologies seriously (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980]:33–34; Wilkinson 2017). Per Alberti and Marshall, studying Indigenous concepts “seriously means not neutralizing them through universal concepts” (2009:347). Viveiros de Castro (2011b:145) suggests that taking Indigenous people seriously requires us to decolonize our analyses. What other researchers mean by taking relational ontologies “seriously”, however, is not clear (Willerslev 2013:41–42). Seriously, for me, means we need not accept relational ontologies as true for most Westerners but accept that they are true for most non-Westerners. Per Halbmayer, taking relational ontologies seriously helps decentre Western universalistic notions (2012:9). Personification involves imagining/projecting personhood (Morrison 2000:28), and thus speaking of it in metaphor, rather than experiencing it as real. It is erroneous, for example, to say that the Ojibwa personify as this implies that object-things for them are a priori perceived as inanimate (Hallowell 1976 [1960]:367). Personifications cannot act; however, things that have personal identity for people living within relational ontologies are perceived to carry out action. Relations with things are not personifications projecting personhood onto something previously thought otherwise (Sahlins 2014:286). Imposing universal metaphor meta-theory allows academics to approximate “a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities including interpreting seeing something nonhuman as human” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980]:34); however, personification is not universal (ibid: 33). Exploring ontological difference allows us to produce fewer Cartesianinfluenced worldviews of non-Western people (Friedson 1996:4–5). As Lakoff and Johnson admit, physical experience is not just “a matter of having a body; rather, every experience takes place within cultural presuppositions. All experience is cultural. We experience our ‘world’ in a way that our culture is present in every experience” (2003 [1980]:57). Causation here is an experiential whole in how one functions within one’s everyday environment (Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980]:69–70) and causality, including intent stemming from beings Westerners categorize as supernatural, is

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not impersonal. Maya ontologies may be fluid but they are not concerned with the supernatural, sacredness or divinity (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim). Per Harvey, Indigenous people are not concerned with deities or divinity; their concern is “the many and varied relationships between things. It is an engagement with everyday life” (1997:176; also see Laugrand and Oosten 2007:xxxiii–xxxix). The Maya world is composed of a reality Modernists typically deem unreal. Westerners may grant that rocks exhibit agency when rolling (as actions producing effects) but not volition (having the faculty of intention) because the rock intended to roll. Rivers, per science, create canyons by carving their trajectory, but water does not plan its route. Agency is behaviour-like in that materials such as acids and salts behave, that is, “react”, in particular chemical manners (Teichman 1974:58). Agency-behaviourism relates to action but does not require intent. For Indigenous Americans, most things are just that: a stream, rock, spring, mountain, cave, artefact, etc., though the potential exists for them to acquire volition (Astor-Aguilera 2010:115; Zedeño 2009:409). In Central Mexico (Knab 2004:157–159) and the Andes (Bray 2009:363), for example, only certain stones communicate. Hallowell (1967 [1955], 1976 [1960]) coined “other-than-human-person” per his interest in Canadian Anishinabek (Ojibwa) perception of causality. Hallowell (ibid) emphasized that to understand Indigenous meaning we need to listen to Indigenous people and this includes their ties to invisible kin-like beings they maintain relations with as relatives (Bird-David this volume; Detwiler 1992; Hallowell 1992 [1962]:52). Per Sahlins, those who are considered relatives here “is not so much structure as it is argument: kinsmen are made as well as born” (1985:20–21, 28).

Self, individual and person Recognizing the personhood of things does not negate the idea of humans as different from other beings; however, Maya conceptions of what we consider material or immaterial collide with Western notions of the self. Individual, self and person differ for Western moderns in that self refers to a unique personality; individual to a distinct biological unit composed of socially discreet mind and body; and person to a state of being composed of social relational roles (La Fontaine 1985:124–126). For non-Western people, for example in Africa, the tendency is to conflate all three of our distinctions into person (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001:279 note 6). Western social conditioning stressing individualism (MacFarlane 1978) conflates the three categories into individual and is therefore inapplicable to Indigenous cultures (Oosten 1990:26). We need, then, investigate differential cultural conceptions of personhood (Spiro 1993:117) rather than “diminish the importance of experiential perspectives” of others (Glaskin 2012:301). For the Maya, person is intersubjectively linked to vital forces called pixan’o’ob (“essence sheaths”). Nonhumans tether themselves, or are tethered

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by Maya ritualists, to various things, including structures, which to the outside observer seem like the very object is deemed to be “alive” (AstorAguilera 2010:207; e.g. Stross 1998; Vogt 1998). Essences are not anchored or fixed but k’aax na’ats’, “tethered”, like casually wrapping a horse’s bridle rein loosely round a bar rail where the horse can move and even unleash itself if so desired. For the Maya, how a person functions depends on the body to which a being is tethered (Astor-Aguilera 2010:234). Understanding Indigenous actions requires non-Western thinking. Per Holbraad, our analyses require trying to “overcome the contradictions in which our descriptions of personhood are mired” (2009:434). Holbraad elaborates that not taking relational ontologies seriously steers academics toward “analytical blunders of immense proportion” by, at best, interpreting their target populations’ views as metaphorical. Therefore, “attempts at describing these phenomena come up with blatant contradictions. The only way to understand what these phenomena are is to break out of the circle of our conceptual repertoire. If the concepts we use to describe personhood produce contradictions, then we need to use alternative concepts that do not” (2009:433). Such conceptualizing should be based on actual Indigenous thought of the targeted population. Everything for the Maya, visible or not, is related (Astor-Aguilera 2010:207) and, within relational ontologies, some nonhumans are paid homage and given reciprocal offerings (see Harvey 2005a:xi, xvii). The sun, moon, wind, clouds, lightning, etc., are experienced as, rather than believed to be, sentient. The implications of Maya ontology took me a decade conducting immersed ethnography. The first step, following Evans-Pritchard (1976 [1937]:151, 249), was recognizing that equating our Judeo-Christian-Muslim soul-spirit belief within non-Western peoples’ ways of knowing their world was a non-starter. Being human does not automatically equate with being considered jlu’um kaabil, “an emplaced person”, for the Maya (Astor-Aguilera 2010:207). Personhood, relational being, is acquired and maintained through social relations (Gergen 2009:149). Persons in a relational ontological context are not equivalent to “people” as misunderstood by Wilkinson (2017). The Maya treating some rocks as persons does not mean they see these particular rocks as people. The Maya do not see human bodies differently from how non-Maya see them; however, that does not make each human a person since personhood, whether human or not, unfolds within societal relations and is not a given. Scientists look to cellular deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) ontogenetic development in producing a specific organism as a phenotype. Personal character, however, is not DNA replicated but evolves within societal development (Ingold 2004:215). People are born but persons are made. Per Ingold, “humans are not independent of the historical and environmental circumstances in which they become – grow and live – without ontogenies there would be no ontologies to compare” (2004:215; personal communication, 2015). If personhood is variable, individual entities, whether human

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or nonhuman, can be composed of variable persons. In relational ontologies, beings are composed of more than one character-essence that personwise make up what we call their personality. The sharing of essences within relational ontologies, from human to animal to plant to object, is expected (Hallowell 1976 [1960]:376–377).

The Chilen Balams Maya people speak of shape-shifters as associated with their behavioural environment. “Uay” in Mayan means “sleep” and indexes their co-essences roaming the world and entering nonhuman bodies with which a particular human has social relations during dreams. Mesoamerican persons potentially interlock with everything that exists. Exhibiting this phenomenon are the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mayan-Spanish hybrid Chilam Balam books descended from the Pre-Columbian Postclassic to early colonial period (900–1546 C.E.) (Roys 1967 [1933]:3–4). Chilen Balam, “the jaguar lies down”, is usually translated as “Chilam Balam”, referencing a legendary person supposedly named Chilam (first name) and Jaguar (surname) (Thompson 1967 [1933]:vi). Chilen, “to lie down”, gives context to the Balam, “jaguar”, lying down because it indexes a ritual specialist in a prognosticating dream-like state (Roys 1967 [1933]:182; Stuart 2011:24). Mesoamerican languages, as any others, contain idioms which are difficult for non-natives to engage with (Roys 1967 [1933]:9) so the social conditioning of researchers influences how they interpret, reject or accept Indigenous information, and decide which meaning they apply during translation (Astor-Aguilera 2010:20; Houston, Chinchilla, and Stuart 2001:3, 7; López-Austin 1980:50–51; Schele 2002:21). Translating the Balam books is notoriously complicated since it is difficult to escape Western assumptions about their religious nature (Roys 1967 [1933]:xi, 8; Stuart 2011:24). Translating Mesoamerican concepts causes confusion since much translation of Indigenous American speech and texts linguistically polishes abstract ideas into universal concepts. The Chilen Balams, for example, are often labelled shamanic; however, shamans possess spirits while performing dramatic feats in front of a participating audience (Astor-Aguilera 2010:10, 2014:7). If not Mesoamerica immersed, native ideas appear esoteric to mystical to theological to abstruse, and arduous to comprehend (Arnold 1999:xv– xvi; Van Stone 2010:3, 21, 89, 106–107, 123). The Maya seek knowledge not readily available to them through healing prognosticators, which enable acquiring “medicine” to heal a particular person and/or situation.

Relational ontogeny, transpecific personhood and perspectivism Mesoamericans consider all humans to share co-essences with animals, plants, objects and/or meteorological phenomena, etc. (Monaghan 2000:142). Most Maya do not know what their co-essences are and/or do not know

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how to control them. Mesoamerican ontologies are little studied so coessences are usually described within Western constructions of religion (e.g. Coe 1973:22, 1978:11–14). Indigenous “religions” are relational ontologies in that personalism resembles animism (Astor-Aguilera 2010:231; Halbmayer 2012:12; Harvey 2006:13) and the “anthropology of ontology”, in this chapter then, contrasts with religion as “mutually exclusive theological categories” (Scott 2013:867–868, note 7). Relational sense experience is paramount within Maya ontologies. To the Maya, for example, red spongy blobs along forest paths do not indicate the cage fungus Clathrus ruber (Stijve 1997) (Figure 8.1) but fly-attracting shapeshifter excretions. How Westerners categorize botanical matter differs from the Maya. The word “plant” to us refers to “an other-than-animal organism as exemplified by trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, ferns and mosses growing on permanent sites and absorbing water and inorganic substances through their roots. Plants have cell walls and grow to suit their surroundings but have no voluntary movement” (Oxford English Dictionary 1989). Scientifically, plants lack intent despite the visible movement of, for example, morning glories (Turbina corymbosa), sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula), and the exemplary Maya forest plant called

Figure 8.1 Clathrus ruber (photograph by Miguel Astor-Aguilera)

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xmuts (“closing-shrinking”), Mimosa pudica (Trewavas 2009:606–608), that when touched immediately rapidly recedes as if shying away. Per their plant behaviour observations, Maya villagers do not believe in shape-shifting: they perceive shape-shifters because their experiential cultural logic lets them sense them. A duck not behaving like a duck is not a duck. This is the same with a human “baby” looking like an other-thanhuman being. Ethnographic details clarify shape-shifting (Villa-Rojas 1947:583–586) since, for the Maya, shape-shifters exist because when a woman miscarries a reptilian-looking embryonic foetus it does not look human (Figure 8.2). Reptilian-like babies are considered fathered by nonhuman entities entering a woman’s vagina as essence (Astor-Aguilera 2010:60). Cross-culturally, Lindow states that North Germans apply “kiel kropf for ‘changeling’, ‘aborted foetus’”, and shape-shifting earth-children (1978:92–93; also see Gundarsson 2007:98). Ingold’s (2004) ontogenesis, per an organism’s anatomical and behavioural development, fits the human embryo example but neither Ingold (ibid: 215–218) nor I refer to ontogeny in terms of biological science. How the Maya environment behaves is partly similar to Viveiros de Castro’s (1998, 2004:3, 6) “perspectivism” as a “transpecific personhood” where human and nonhuman persons share ontogenesis within the same world. Rather than force-fitting Mesoamericans into Western logics – regardless of archaeology, history and ethnography demonstrating a different Indigenous environmental engagement – the Mesoamerican world is not managed by and for humans but is a cosmos where humans are only part of a relational

Figure 8.2 Human embryonic foetus (public domain)

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stage where a multitude of beings, seen and unseen, socially interact (LópezAustin 1997:36, 197). According to Willerslev (personal communication, 2015), “what we call the ‘Shamanic Complex’ and ‘Animistic Complex’ vary so we need better data to know what we are dealing with”. That the ancient Maya depicted a monkey with personal attributes does not mean that they worshipped a monkey god. Imaginative conclusions require evidence. Per Holbraad, we “commit blunders of immense proportions in our attempts describing personhood” (2009:433). We need to deemphasize our entrenched Judeo-Christian-Muslim ideas of belief, supernatural, sacredness, divinity and worship in dealing with relational ontologies. Religious belief is thinking something exists supernaturally rather than sensorially perceived, experienced and engaged with within our immanent world (Bird-David 1999:74–75; Block 2005:112; Harvey 2005a:122–127). Some scholars understand that Indigenous Americans do not conceive of a supernatural-natural division; however, they still impose its related sacred-profane religious dichotomy (e.g. Detwiler 1992:235–236, 244) by projecting “their own Cartesian . . . version of wonder onto others” (Scott 2013:869, notes 12 and 16, citing Descartes 1989 [1649]:52). Worship requires evidence exhibiting this action since venerating and paying homage to a particular tree does not equate to worshipping that tree. The relational cosmos is organized through relationships established regardless of a constituent’s organic, non-organic, material or immaterial make-up (Pálsson 1996). What we commonly refer to as deities and gods are not that for Indigenous people but simply invisible sentient-world constituents depicted and spoken toward as elder relatives in a venerating, that is, highly respectful, type of behaviour (Detwiler 1992; Hallowell 1992 [1962]:52; Ingold 2000:90–100, 2006:16; Laugrand and Oosten 2007:xxxiii–xxxix).

Discussion This chapter has brought intersubjective personhood into focus by analysing how the Maya relate to nonhumans. Non-Western people make no distinction between supernatural/natural (Durkheim 1965 [1912]:39–43; Henry 2008; Herva 2009:393; Ingold 2000; Sharer 1994:513–514), sacred/ profane, and divine/secular (Astor-Aguilera 2010:passim; Droogan 2013:42, 110, 117–130; Guthrie 1996; Read 1998:35). Prior to applying critical theory, researchers dismissed Indigenous notions as primitiveness (Harris and Robb 2012:668). Allowing Maya ontological differences permits exploring alternative thinking modes by granting affordances to everything surrounding Mesoamericans not because most Westerners see objects as subjects but because most non-Western people relate to the world as such. We can no longer pretend to separate what we know of the world from how we know the world and how our subjects understand their being-in-the-world. As Vogt admitted, he used “the term ‘soul’ advisedly in indicating our European concepts of ‘souls’ and ‘spirits’ are inadequate for Maya studies” (1969:369).

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Relational ontologies emphasize knowing the world through sensory experience. How a people perceive the world is inherent in their linguistic concepts and terms (Hinzen 2012; Hinzen and Uriagereka 2006; Sapir 1958 [1929]:69; Whorf 1940:213–214; Wittgenstein 2001 [1921]:67–68). Per Sanders (1990:53), “personhood and things to which it refers vary cross-culturally and their practices, languages, and the conceptual schemes embedded in them”. Caution, then, should be exercised applying Indigenous American relational ontologies elsewhere as even between them there is difference (Halbmayer 2012:19; Turner 2009:39). Personhood meta-theory may falsely create a one-size-fits-all in which every human within every nonWestern society supposedly responds the same way and in the same manner for the same reason (Astor-Aguilera 2010:201). Relational ontologies, per our academic dialogue, are not found out there per se but here with us as a heuristic analytical tool (Scott 2013:869, note 10). Exploring ontologically different affective qualities then demands that we produce not so Cartesian interpretations. Many religious conceptual troubles stem from researchers’ non-clarity. How religious terms apply, or not, is usually not forthcoming and causes confusion. Knowledge requires refinement and, in doing so, Glaskin (2012:297) characterizes personhood as “embodied relatedness”. Agreed. Maya ontological status, entity-personhood, concerns experiential relations within the behavioural environment, and concerns with what is outside of it, per our Western scientific distinction as a transcendent supernatural world, are non-existent.

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Stratmeyer, Dennis and Jean Stratmeyer. 1977. “Jacaltec Nawal.” Cognitive Studies of Southern Mesoamerica. Editors: Helen Neunswander and Dean Arnold. 126–159. Dallas, Sil. Stross, Brian. 1998. “Mesoamerican Ensoulment.” Sowing and Dawning. Editor: Shirley Mock. 31–39. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press. Stuart, David. 2011. Order of Days: The Maya World. New York, Harmony. Taube, Karl. 2003. “Field and Forest Maya Conceptions.” The Lowland Maya Area: Human-Wildland Interface. Editors: Arturo Gómez-Pompa, Michael Allen, Scott Fedick, and Juan Jiménez-Osornio. 461–492. New York, Haworth. Teichman, Jenny. 1974. Mind and Soul. London, Routledge. Thompson, Eric. 1967 [1933]. “Ralph Roys.” Chilam Balam of Chumayel. v–ix. Norman, University of Oklahoma. Tooker, Elisabeth. 1964. Huron Indians. Washington, Smithsonian. Trewavas, Anthony. 2009. “Plant Behaviour?” Plant, Cell, & Environment, 32:606–616. Turner, Terence. 2009. “Perspectivism and Animism.” Tipití, 7(1):3–42. Tylor, Edward. 1866. “Savage Religion.” Fortnightly Review, 6:71–86. ———. 1903 [1871]. Primitive Culture, 1–. London, Murray. Valeri, Valerio. 2000. Forest of Taboos. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Van Stone, Mark. 2010. Prophecy of the Ancient Maya. San Diego, Tlacaél. Villa-Rojas, Alfonso. 1947. “Kinship and Nagualism.” American Anthropologist, 49(4):578–587. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3):469–488. ———. 2001. “Potential Affinity and Construction of Sociality.” Beyond the Visible and Material. Editors: Laura Rival and Neil Whitehead. 19–43. Oxford, Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. “Exchanging Perspectives: Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies.” Common Knowledge, 10:463–485. ———. 2011a. Inconstancy of the Indian Soul. Chicago, Prickly Paradigm. ———. 2011b. “Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes.” Common Knowledge, 17(1):128–145. Vogt, Evon. 1969. Zinacantán. Cambridge, Belknap. ———. 1993 [1976]. Zinancanteco Rituals. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 1998. “Dedication and Termination Rituals.” Sowing and Dawning. Editor: Shirley Mock. 21–30. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press. Wagner, Roy. 2001. The Subject: Holographic Worldview. Berkeley, University of California Press. Whorf, Benjamin. 1940. “Science and Linguistics.” Technology Review, 42(6): 229–231. Wijsenbeek-Wijler, Henriette. 1978. Aristotle’s Concept of the Soul. Amsterdam, Hakkert. Wilkinson, Darryl. 2017. “Is There Such a Thing as Animism?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 85(2):289–311. Willerslev, Rane. 2011. “New Search for the Animist Soul.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17:504–526. ———. 2013. “Taking Animism Seriously, But Not Too Seriously?” Religion and Society, 4:41–57. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001 [1921]. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London, Routledge. Wright, Pablo. 1990. “Toba Mythical Animals.” Human Meaning in the Natural World. Editor: Roy Willis. 55–62. London, Hyman.

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Zeddies. Timothy. 2000. “Relational Unconscious.” Psychoanalytic Psychology, 17:467–487. Zedeño, María. 2008. “Traditional Knowledge, Ritual Behavior, Contemporary Interpretation.” Belief in the Past. Editors: Kelley Hayes-Gilpin and David Whitley. 259–274. Walnut Creek, Left Coast. ———. 2009. “Animating by Association: Index Objects and Relational Taxonomies.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 19(3):407–417.

9

Environment, ontology, and visual perception A saltwater case Katie Glaskin

Skilled vision, pattern recognition, and seeing the country Soon after I moved to the Kimberley to begin working as an anthropologist, I took part in a bush trip in which I drove a car full of mainly elderly Aboriginal women, at their direction, to a favored fishing spot in their country. After some time of driving through the bush the women directed me to stop at a certain spot. They knew exactly where we were and what we would find in that place. They took some branches and swept the ground. They dug a shallow hole to light a fire and prepared a damper (a kind of bread), and made themselves at home. When the fire burned down they buried the damper beneath the hot coals, and then, while some women kept watch over the campfire, others went down to the beach with handlines to go fishing. The sun was bright and hot, and the blue water of the Indian Ocean was covered in sparkles of light. It was difficult to see beyond the glare. This did not prevent the women from detecting movement in the water some distance away, which, they told me, was a pair of manta rays. The women indicated where the rays were, but, to their incredulity, I could not detect them. It was only when the rays came in closer to the shore, and then began to mate (creating a fair bit of surface disturbance) that I finally saw them. Or rather, I saw something I understood to be them. This was the first of many times I had the experience of being with saltwater Aboriginal people who pointed out things in the ocean I simply could not see. Dugongs and turtles were the primary suspects but various kinds of sharks, stingrays, and distant whales are amongst the many marine creatures I have had pointed out to me but have been unable to visually locate. This is not to say I was unable to see all of them, but a fair number of the creatures my hosts spotted in the water remained largely invisible to me. In the bright Kimberley sun, I wore dark Polaroid sunglasses whenever I was out in daylight, and these reduced the glare coming off the sea. While some of the people pointing these things out to me wore sunglasses some of the time, many of them did not. Glare was not the issue. I simply had not learned how to see. As I discuss later, the kind of seeing I am talking about is not simply a matter of gaze, but “a way of looking at the world”

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(Grasseni 2004:41). It is a kind of perception that reflects cosmology and, in the context I discuss here, a specific ontology and associated identity that Kimberley and other Australian Aboriginal people succinctly encapsulate under the term “saltwater people.” This appellation differentiates them from other Aboriginal people whose experiences are shaped in profoundly different ecological contexts: desert mobs or river people, for example. As I spent more time with saltwater Aboriginal people, I came to learn that there were many things I could not see, and these ranged from marine creatures to tracks to birds to shifting shorelines to spirit beings. My focus in this paper on visual perception is inspired by these experiences and by conversations with other anthropologists working in Australia who have also recounted not being able to effectively “see” those things being pointed out to them. It is also inspired by an interest in how material and metaphysical domains coalesce in Aboriginal Australian cosmologies, in which “landscape [is] imbued with social identities and relations, all grounded in the presence of ancestral traces” (Keen 2006:525). For Bardi people I worked with, the world is understood to have both material and immaterial dimensions; the existence of one dimension implies the existence of the other, and hence the activities of various beings may be inferred from topographic features (as I elaborate subsequently). Thus I use the term “metaphysical” as a way of describing beings which, while not usually understood to be visible of themselves, are manifest in forms that can be discerned through a variety of means. For Bardi, the land and seascape (collectively, their “country”) is animated through a range of metaphysical beings. Some of these are creator beings who are responsible for the shape and form of the country and whose powerful traces remain in country and emanate from specific places within it. Some places are ngulungul (“sacred”/dangerous) as a consequence. Other spirit beings are “in” the country; some inhabit specified locations, and this may also make those places dangerous. Other spirit beings are more benign, and some may transform themselves into different kinds of beings (for further consideration of these types of beings and human relationships with them see Glaskin 2018). Ancestral, creator beings are detectable through their traces, their tracks, their marks, their footprints, and their names, all of which are extensions of them. They may be simultaneously present in a number of locations, including in terrestrial, marine, and celestial forms created through their actions. In this cosmology, the Western distinction between nature and culture collapses. Country is sentient and inhabited; its forms are not accidental or “natural” but have their genesis in specific actions that can be retold in story and song. For this reason, Bardi aesthetics, like the aesthetics of other Australian Aboriginal peoples (e.g. Anderson & Dussart 1988:111–116; Morphy 1991:193–196; Young 2011; Sutton & Snow 2015:128–142), simultaneously reference physical and metaphysical worlds. I return to the significance of this for my argument about the ontological bases of vision, but, at this stage, it is perhaps sufficient to point out that

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the act of seeing is always relational, and, whether we are aware of it or not, part of the relationship involved in seeing is with the things that are not-seen. And this point, which is true of vision more generally as a form of perception, gains particular ground in the context of a cosmology in which country is animated by a range of metaphysical beings.

Physical environment and visual perception Situated at the northern tip of the Dampierland Peninsula, the mainland portion of Bardi country is a roughly triangular-shaped piece of land with the tip of the triangle at its apex. The interior of the peninsula does not contain permanent water sources and is considered nimidiman, “shared” country. The coastal region is entirely covered with estates (buru) containing one or more water sources, and these extend into the sea. Relationships to these are primarily inherited through patrifiliation, although people also inherit rights in maternal estates and acquire rights in their spouse’s estate through marriage. Bardi people may also have relationships of consubstantiality with specific features within their estates, such as a rock, a tree, a site containing a resource (such as white pipe clay or red ochre), a current, a freshwater site, and so on. Should damage occur to any of these features with which they are identified, a person’s body is impacted. This relationship between a person and specific sites within their coastal estates, or indeed with particular species of animal (terrestrial or marine), is one that Bardi refer to as barnman, or in English, as their “totem.” Relationships with sites within one’s estate are inherited while those with particular species of animals are the consequence of conception totemism (see Glaskin 2012). There is evidence that these kinds of relationships are not as common as they once were, reflective of a broader social change (Glaskin 2018). The King Sound region lies to the east of the peninsula and was formed about 8000 years ago when sea levels rose, and contains numerous small islands. Bardi country includes a number of such small islands off the coast and, like Jawi country (comprised wholly of islands to its east) it also includes islets, reefs, sandbanks, whirlpools, and other marine features, all of which have indigenous names. Some of these features are both physically and metaphysically dangerous, as is the case with a very large whirlpool, Jindirrabalgun, in the Sunday Strait, which, as people have said, makes a sound “like a 747 taking off.” There are a number of accounts about pearling luggers being “drowned” in Jindirrabalgun, including with loss of life. This region has one of the highest tidal variations in the world of between 5.5 and 8 meters, and contains an array of currents traveling at speed (12–14 knots) in different directions. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the area, Bardi and Jawi traveled between the mainland and the islands on mangrove wood rafts, using the currents like “roads” in the sea. Canoe technology spread into the region around the 1930s (Glaskin 2017:126), and today, Bardi and Jawi people rely on motorized boats to traverse these areas. To do

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so safely, they still rely on their knowledge of numurr (sea routes), because small dinghies and boats are not sufficiently powerful to counter the force of the tidal currents in the region. Effective colonialism began in the peninsula in the 1880s when the first pearlers arrived and set up shore bases to support their maritime activities. Their presence, and the presence of large seasonal pearling crews, led to concern about the impacts on local Aboriginal people and to the establishment of two missions in Bardi and Jawi country: a Pallottine mission at Lombadina in 1910, and a non-denominational Protestant mission at Sunday Island, in Jawi country, in 1899, to which many Bardi people were drawn. From the earliest days of Sunday Island mission (1899–1962), people were engaged in pearl and trochus shelling and collecting bêche-de-mer. Trochus shell collection continues as a viable economic activity today. Both unengraved and engraved pearl shell (guwarn and riji, respectively) are used in ritual, and some Bardi and Jawi today engrave pearl shell for sale (see Glaskin 2011). The saltwater orientation shared by Bardi and Jawi people is evident in a diet that was and remains significantly reliant on marine foods such as fish and shellfish. Turtles and dugongs are highly valued foods. These are butchered in prescribed ways and their parts shared amongst various kin. Although people now purchase shop-bought processed foods, fishing continues to be an important economic and social activity, one that is intrinsically related to their identities as saltwater people. Thus people constantly pay attention to the tide. As might be expected in a region with such extraordinary tidal variation, people identify different tides and tidal phases, including between incoming and outgoing tides, spring tides, neap tides, small incoming tides around dawn, slow tides, incoming and outgoing tides in the late afternoon, turbulent outgoing tides in the late afternoon, slow incoming tides in the morning, outgoing tides in the morning, a changing tide, and many more. People perceive these tidal changes visually and in combination with other senses such as hearing (the sound of a rising tide) or through smell (as one Bardi man stated, “We know the smell of the tide coming in”). Skilled hunters also say they can detect the smell of exposed rocks when night fishing or hunting. In the context of turtle hunting, Rouja (1998:139) says that “experienced Bardi hunters can usually tell from the sound and length of the breathing its [the turtle’s] size and general state of health. If downwind, one can actually smell their breath and apparently judge their fatness or meat quality.” This statement indicates something of the intimate familiarity that many Bardi and Jawi people have with the marine environment and marine species that inhabit it. Such familiarity is further indicated by fine environmental distinctions and differentiations expressed in Bardi language. For example, my fieldnotes (and see Bagshaw & Glaskin 2000) contain entries for such things as the reflection of light on a turtle’s shell at night, “that flash” (jungumi); sea-glare (ngam inalij garanim); glassy saltwater, when distant lands appear close (garnduwara-garnduwara); flat, oily patches of saltwater produced by sub-surface turbulence (buwuybuwuy); dead calm

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saltwater (injalgij); linear stretches of “greasy,” rippling water close to reef [indicative of an incoming tide]: (jimil), and many more terms that reflect precise observations of maritime conditions.

Learning to see: Ecological relationships in the physical environment As with the Anangu context Young (2011:358) discusses, Bardi learn how to do things through “looking and copying,” rather than through reliance on “verbal exegesis.” Technology may be altering how this occurs somewhat; I have, for example, seen a 3-year-old Bardi boy imitating the video-recorded public dances (ilma) of an older generation played through the television, dancing in time with the dancers recorded on the video, and perfecting his practice through doing so. Despite the technological innovation, imitation remains key. Similarly, knowledge of the marine environment is learned experientially (and hence incrementally) rather than didactically, and to be a knowledgable hunter or fisherperson means to be an experienced one. Male children as young as 4 or 5 attend turtle-hunting expeditions with male relatives, and young children with their first turtle catch are proudly photographed. Part of what young hunters begin to learn is about the habits of the marine species they are attempting to catch. Because dugongs “feed against the tide unless in calm water,” they leave long, highly visible trails in the seagrass beds where they have been grazing (Rouja 1998:128). Rouja (1998:128) describes how “Bardi hunters can tell from the direction and the extent of the grazing how many dugong have been feeding in a given area and on what phase of tide, denoting both the likelihood and timing of their possible return.” The significance of ecological knowledge in these calculations, in combination with visual skill, is evident. Even more impressive is an observation Rouja (1998:129) makes which highlights combining fixing on an invisible focal point and a speedy apprehension of its location within the broader environmental domain. Discussing how feeding dugong have particular cycles – in which they return across the area they have just grazed to the starting point of that grazing trail to breathe – Rouja (1998:129) describes how: A skilled hunter will time these cycles and accurately plot the breathing site by lining up two points on land behind it. This is especially important as the hunter, at the mercy of the tides and the currents, could quickly be shifted from his position and lose all perspective on the location of the breathing site. The subtlety and nuances of this kind of internal mapping are very hard to describe but the older men can maintain a fix on a patch of water while travelling almost 180 degrees around it, a feat that is almost impossible to conceptualise for anyone who knows the sea. (my emphasis)

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This “internal mapping” is highly reliant on visual skills although it is likely that there are other skills and senses associated with this as well (judging how far the tide or current has taken you through a variety of means). A skill of this kind has, I think, much in common with what Ellis (2011) describes in terms of an acuity of visual perception amongst UK naturalists. While the situation Ellis discusses (UK naturalists engaged in biological recording) is very different to the one I discuss here, her description of jizz – “a predominantly visual skill that most if not all naturalists aspire to attaining” (2011:770) – provides a useful comparative perspective to draw on. Importantly for this discussion, Ellis describes jizz as: A form of gestalt perception, a “visual perception of synthesis,” which reveals the identity of a species through an apprehension of a coalescence of its attributes, and as part of a broader set of ecological relationships, rather than through the arduous study and memorizing of an organism’s distinct diagnostic characteristics, such as leaf or seed capsule shape and size. (2011:770, my emphasis) Rouja’s (1998) description of how an experienced dugong hunter “can maintain a fix” on a patch of water resonates with Ellis’s description of jizz as a “visual perception of synthesis.” Part of that synthesis is to do with the kinds of skilled ecological knowledge I have only begun to sketch out here. Being able to make such kinds of fine observations and distinctions about the marine environment and marine species were and are necessary for survival. For example, one Jawi man I knew was in a dinghy with a couple of others on his way to Sunday Island. The dinghy was caught in an exceptionally rough patch where several currents meet and was capsized (or “drowned,” as Bardi and Jawi people tend to say). Two of the three occupants managed to swim to nearby islands, but the man I knew got caught in the current and taken a long way out to sea. When recounting the story to me after his successful return, he confessed that he was frightened about the possibility of being taken by a shark or a crocodile. Notwithstanding this, he knew that if he survived these hazards and stayed afloat that in about 12 hours’ time, the tide would turn and bring him back to the area where his boat had capsized, allowing him to find refuge at a nearby island. This is indeed what happened (but not before the alarm had gone out because, while the other two survivors had been found, he was missing). Along with narratives of those who have successfully navigated the many hazards of the marine environment, my fieldnotes contain stories about those who were less successful, who drowned or were taken by saltwater crocodiles, and these in particular highlight the importance of ecological knowledge for survival. Such “knowledge” is underscored by perception, an active, responsive apprehension of the environment, of which vision – as evidenced in Bardi descriptions of how they use numurr, the marine

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routes which, at certain times, allowed them to travel to their intended destination – is just one example.

Seeing the invisible Writing about aesthetics, Indigenous Australian artist Gordon Bennett points out the term does not have a simple, universally accepted definition, but notes it is clearly concerned with perception (2006:513). On the basis of a dictionary definition from the Greek, he suggests that because aesthetics means “perceptible by the senses,” it “embodies the notion of perception; to thoroughly grasp or comprehend; to recognise a thing through the senses, especially the sense of sight” (2006:513, my emphasis). Bennett follows this statement with a question highly pertinent to my discussion here, namely, “How do we recognise what we perceive?” (ibid). In general terms, part of seeing is that it always includes invisible dimensions of what is being observed, even when consideration of these invisible dimensions occurs at an unconscious, implicit level of understanding, rather than a conscious and explicit one. What we see is always seen in a relational context, although much of what it is in relation to may not be apparent to us as part of the act of seeing. Crowther says that: Picturing involves specifying kinds of visual things, the relations between their parts, and their inter-relations with other visual things. Vision has the power to comprehend a complex of such factors simultaneously. It also involves a highly developed capacity for reading the presence of hidden visual aspects as a kind of inference from those which are immediately given. (2009:67) One way of thinking about this capacity to “read” or infer unseen visual aspects from those that are seen is through considering cognitive schemas, “mental patterns or abstract representations of environmental regularities” (Mandler 1984:55–56, cited in d’Andrade 1995:122). Where specific associations are learned and shared and these associations are reinforced relationally between people within particular social and cultural settings, they may also come to shape what is perceived or, indeed, seen. For example, Morphy and Perkins (2006:18) describe how the complex motifs painted on the bodies of young Yolngu boys prior to initiation are “semantically dense objects” which, nevertheless, are “only glimpsed at a distance by most participants in the ceremony.” They note that the “semantic and cognitive significance” of such a body painting: Is not located in the moment or instance of its physical expression, but in its existence within a mental archive of possible images, connected through the Yolngu system of knowledge to other instances of Yolngu

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ancestral power in the forms of songs, landscape, designs belonging to different places and associated with different ancestral beings. (Morphy & Perkins 2006:18, my emphasis) Morphy and Perkins (2006) thus point to a network of learned associations (“a mental archive of possible images”) that connect country, people, and cosmology and which achieve their effect precisely because these associations are integrally incorporated into Yolngu understandings of the world, embodied in cognitive schemas. Morphy and Perkins’ (2006:18) observations of how these ritual designs are, for the most part, “only glimpsed at a distance,” and yet are able to be recognized, demonstrates the kind of visual skill (like jizz) that rapidly apprehends something in the environment, including the unseen elements making up that which is being recognized. Bardi, I have argued, have a cosmology (broadly subsumed and understood by non-Indigenous people under the rubric of “the Dreaming”) that provides the grounds for ontologies of embodied relatedness, in which people, places, species, and other-than-human persons are all implicated (Glaskin 2012). In this cosmology, persons have a non-corporeal presence that precedes and proceeds their human instantiation. Persons exist as spirit entities (raya) before birth and continue to exist in various spirit forms after their death (see Glaskin 2018 for a more comprehensive explanation of this). They also have barnman, a consubstantial identification with sites or species that I have previously described, and they have nimanggar, which people say is both a “shadow” (and the term is used to refer to actual shadows) and “a soul sort of a thing.” This concept resonates with Willerslev’s (2007:34) description of a Yukaghir concept, ayibii, which is similarly “an ambiguous combination of spirit and substance . . . on the threshold of the visible, yet without being such an actual ‘thing’ or ‘object.’” Jarlngungurr, those people who possess special powers to heal, ensorcel, and communicate with ancestral entities in dreams, are able to identify when a person is close to death, because they “see” their nimanggar begin to leave their body. Country is inhabited by a variety of spirit beings: raya (preexisting human beings), the spirits of the old people who have passed away, ancestral beings who shaped and formed the country, and a variety of beings (collectively referred to as ngaarri, a term that can also refer to the unstable spirit of the recently deceased, and which indicates that they are dangerous or malevolent), inhabiting specified ecological zones. Bardi describe these spirit beings as, for the most part, invisible, although there are tantalizing physical descriptions of some of them: some are “hairy,” others “white” and “ghostly,” some are short and others “long.” While most people do not claim to have seen these beings, one woman told me that one of her kinsmen had told her he had seen Layurd, a dangerous spirit that lives in mudflats and mangroves, and told her that it appeared as “a long white thing standing, ghostly.” He

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was sufficiently frightened to say he would not return to the place again. Europeans were often referred to by the same terms given to some of these entities, and this may explain why there are “physical” descriptions of some of them. Increasingly, such beings are becoming less differentiated (Glaskin 2018). Some spirit entities appear in animal form. A raya (a preexisting spirit) may appear in the form of turtle, dugong, ocean mullet, or other marine creature, that a man spears or catches while hunting or fishing. In these instances, it is the appearance of lanbirr (birthmarks) on a child of his that is subsequently born that provides the basis for a deduction that this child’s raya is that of a specific marine creature previously encountered. An unusually persistent bird presence is likely to be interpreted as a message from a spirit entity, and similarly is decoded retrospectively; something occurs, and then people remember the bird that sat outside their house. In the Australian ethnography, birds are often associated with spirit beings (see Glaskin 2018). A snake crossing one’s path is unlikely to be considered random. Unusual events such as these are meaningful and reflect on the unseen metaphysical domain. One of the anthropomorphic creator beings in Bardi cosmology is Lululu, a giant shark who was formerly a man. Lululu, who some people have identified as a whale shark, is considered to be “boss” of the sea: the story of Lululu and his relationship to other marine species is encapsulated in works published by Bardi authors (Paddy & Paddy 1988; Wiggan 1990). Some Bardi people have said they have seen Lululu. My fieldnotes have two records of people who have said they have seen Lululu, along with other accounts of “old people” (who had passed away who saw Lululu in their lifetime and passed their stories down to them). A senior Bardi man told me that: One time, we were at Brue Reef when [I was] young. Big south-east wind come up, really rough. South-east wind generally go few days, or a week. We were going in the barge to Cafarelli Island, baling it out [as we went]. Then we saw Lululu, and the south east wind dropped. Lululu made that wind go down. (Uju, 11/7/97) In all of these instances, a perceptual openness and skilled vision coalesce to uncover the visible traces of metaphysical presence. Ancestral presence is also present or may be detected in topographic features, or in tracks and traces in the land and seascape, and in specific substances, color transformations, unusual atmospheric and meteorological effects, and more. Some terrestrial and marine topographical features are understood as the material embodiment of ancestral beings. A rock may be understood to be a particular being that transformed into that rock after performing certain deeds leading to this transformation. For those people who know the narratives

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associated with them, these topographic features call forth the invisible and the unseen, the ancestral being who existed in other forms before this one, and who, indeed, is likely to be present in additional forms and in other places as well. A sedimented footprint or “track,” whether human or animal, can indicate the presence and prior activity of an ancestral being. Galalung, an important ancestral figure for both Bardi and Jawi people, left a sedimented impression at Julum (Middle Island) where he kneeled down. Ancestral (“creator”) beings are also manifest through qualities associated with particular substances. Morphy’s (1991:194) description of how Yolngu people from north-east Arnhem Land understand ancestral power to be revealed in substances and things that shimmer is one that many anthropologists working with Aboriginal peoples in different parts of Australia have also noted, and such substances and things may include rainbows, waterholes, water, pearl shell, quartz crystal, and spider webs (Radcliffe-Brown 1926; Young 2011; Sutton & Snow 2015:128). Because of its iridescent qualities, pearl shell is a substance identified with ancestral power, and Bardi and Jawi use pearl shells (in engraved and unengraved forms) in both public and restricted ritual settings. Ancestral power is detected in shiny substances (such as blood and fat) and iridescent materials (which, along with pearl shell, include other kinds of shells and feathers). In her discussion of color amongst Anangu people of Central Australia, Young (2011:369) notes that “the colours of the sky at sunset, the sudden illumination of a hill, evinces the creation Ancestors as present in that moment, an exhibition of presence by the generally invisible beings.” Other anthropologists have noted the important relationship between color transformations and ancestral presence and given this, I suspect that when some of the coastal topographic features in Bardi country light up in extraordinary ways in the early morning or late afternoon sunlight, such transformational effects are also considered ancestral manifestations. An additional example of how light and color are associated with ancestral beings is evident in this description of a creator being who a senior Bardi woman described as follows (I have removed the name of the being as it may now be subject to certain restrictions, although it was not then): [X] is just a being, you don’t see him, he or she or whatever, a power that is not seen, comes in thunder, lightning, wind, the seas that come and go . . . [X] could make the stars collide. One time at Lombadina, a large blue light, beautiful light, a bright different light, a bluey thing, stayed for a while, not a long way, people put it down to [X]. People ran down from the hills, people were scared. You could see it all the way down to the mangroves; this was early in the night, maybe about 7pm. (Nilili, personal communication, 12/3/97)

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Based on the age of the woman who told me this, and because she told me she was in the mission dormitory at the time this occurred, this event would have occurred in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Although she describes this being as “unseen,” she also described the many elements through which the being’s presence could be detected, including visible elements of light and color. In Indigenous Australian contexts, ancestral power is aesthetically evoked through the creation of ritual objects and designs that produce a shiny or shimmering effect, effectively reproducing those visual effects associated with ancestral power. In relation to the Arnhem Land region of northern Australia, Howard Morphy describes how Donald Thomson’s fieldnotes refer to an aesthetic effect called “bir’yun,” which, with respect to paintings, refers to “the flash of light – the sensation of light that one gets and carries away in one’s mind’s eye, from a glance at the likanbuy miny’tji [clan paintings]” (Thomson cited in Morphy 1991:194). In Arnhem Land this effect is created through cross-hatching, while in Central Australia, the creation of a similar effect of “brilliance” is created through the use of dots (Sutton & Snow 2015:136). Bardi also use flashing light to evoke ancestral presence, even in their genre of public (non-gender restricted) performances known as ilma (a term comprising song, dance, and material object, as well as referring to each). The shape of each ilma (object) is created through the threading of string around nails hammered into wood in different patterns (see Glaskin 2011). Tufts of white cotton wool adorn the outer edges of the threaded material emblem carried during the dance (also called ilma). Carefully juxtaposed different-colored cottons create an optical mixing effect through the threading itself, effectively heightening the visual perception of the apparent hue and intensity of the colors. These effects (the color juxtapositions and the cotton wool–dotted “framing” of the whole), along with how these objects are displayed during the dance (they are concealed through abruptly turning them away from the audience, then revealed by directing them sharply back towards the audience, then concealed, then revealed, and so on, in time with the accompanying rhythmic boomerang percussion throughout), all combine to create an effect of shimmering, of flashing light, an aesthetic quality that calls forth an unseen, invisible ancestral presence. This concealing/revealing motion also creates a kind of visual “pattern.”

Distance, vision, and being seen As Grasseni (2004:41) discusses, anthropological work concerned with the senses that has prioritized vision has been critiqued for being “visualist,” representing rationalist, ethnocentric, ideological, and “ocularcentric” or “perspectivalist” biases that foreground vision above other senses (Fabian 1983:105–123; Bhabha 1994:48–51). My concern in this paper, though, has not been with vision as being in some measure the most significant of human senses. Rather, it is with how what Grasseni (2004) calls “skilled vision”

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relates to the ontological bases of perception more broadly. As she argues, skilled vision is not necessarily “visualist”; vision and “detached observation” are not always the same, and “vision, like the other senses, needs educating and training in a relationship of apprenticeship and within an ecology of practice” (Grasseni 2004:41). Vision is something we may rarely pause to consider in terms of how it is shaped by our cultural experience, but as Causey (2017:27) explains: All our visual behavior is engaged, situated, context-bound, and interpreted, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. Even “looking,” which . . . is a kind of passive perception, uses the brain’s cognitive processes that are translating and de-coding the present-seen in comparison with the past-seen. In other words, we do not all see things the same way; what we see, and how we see, is related to our previous experiences of seeing, and we learn to focus our attention on particular things. Crowther (2009:74) puts it this way: “Nothing is, in perceptual terms, simply there. We recognize a visible item or state of affairs on the basis of its position within a complex of bodily competences and visual relations.” Of interest for this discussion is one of the differences between visual and other forms of sensory perception, namely, that “vision and visual imagery . . . facilitate the perception of things and states of affairs as totalities, from a distance” (Crowther 2009:66, original emphasis). In a discussion of the significance of considering vision in social anthropology, Willerslev (2007:29) also stresses the factors of distance and separation inherent in vision, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1964:166) statement that “to see is to have at a distance.” As Willerslev explains, something that is too proximate cannot be seen: “Everything turns into a mass of undifferentiated experience in which inside and outside, self and other, collapse into one, thereby making seeing impossible” (2007:38). Thus visual perception differs from the more proximal senses of “smell, taste and touch,” as these are diminished through distance (Willerslev 2007:29). Hearing, Willerslev (2007:29) suggests, differs in a different way: “the distance of hearing . . . streams towards [the listener] and into him,” whereas: The seeing of a phenomenon requires a distance, a space between the “here” of the seer and the “there” of the phenomenon, and – this is a key point – this distance allows the subject not only to be aware of the visible world but also to be in a fundamental way aware of his own visibility, his own activity of seeing. (2007:30) This question of “distance” is one that becomes particularly interesting when we consider it in relation to the nocturnal experience of dreaming

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which involves, in large part, a sense that what has been experienced has been “seen.” For Bardi, the events that a person experiences in a dream are considered real events. Not all dreams reference the metaphysical – some are considered ordinary – but dreams are one of the primary ways through which the spirits of deceased persons, or indeed other metaphysical entities, may communicate directly with humans (e.g. see Glaskin 2005, 2011). In dreams, whatever we “see” we do not see with our eyes, although we experience events in dreaming life as though we are seeing them using our eyes. As Kerr and Domhoff (2004:230) say, there is a distinction between “actual seeing through the visual system and imagery that preserves spatial and metric properties without specific reliance on the visual system,” as in dreams. The distinction that they seek to make is both technical and semantic: They argue that “the term visual imagery should be reserved for imagery that is phenomenologically similar to objects seen with one’s eyes, the only sensory receptors capable of receiving and encoding the information conveyed exclusively in light waves” (Kerr & Domhoff 2004:233, original emphasis). Notwithstanding this, the fact remains that we cognitively perceive the things we “see” in dreams at the time we experience them in the same way as things we “see” in waking life – as part of experiences which “define a point of view on us that renders us visible to ourselves,” in which “we understand that we are visible, precisely because we are seeing” (Willerslev 2007:31). Indeed, I would argue that one of the reasons dreams as they are experienced (in contrast to how we might subsequently reflect on them once we wake) present such a compelling sense of reality is precisely because how we “see” in dreams has the same quality of “depth reflexivity . . . rooted in the fact that all seeing is doubled with being seen” (Willerslev 2007:31, original emphasis) as our waking vision.

Learning to see the invisible Significant to both Bardi cosmology and, it would seem, other Indigenous Australian cosmologies more generally, is that they are generative of an approach to the world that could be described as a perceptual openness – an orientation that is “particularly open to making associations and connections between ‘new’ and known elements.” (Glaskin 2015:665). This is something all humans do: It is how we make sense of things in the world, drawing new experience into relationship with existing cognitive schemas, conceptual structures which, D’Andrade (1992:28) says, “make possible the identification of objects and events . . . a procedure by which objects or events can be identified on the basis of simplified pattern recognition.” Although all humans make such associations, I suggest that some aspects of how we do this may be culturally distinctive. Nisbett and Miyamoto’s (2005) work on cultural difference in perception contrasts social structures that emphasize interdependence with those that place more emphasis on independence. The former promote

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“context-dependent and holistic perceptual processes,” which pay attention to the relationship between an object and its context, while the latter social structures, they argue, lead to more “context-independent and analytical” perceptual processes (Nisbett & Miyamoto 2005:467). They consider the former to be more evident among those from Asian cultures and the latter to be more evident among those from Western cultures. Indigenous Australian societies are clearly different from Asian societies but their social structures of kinship, in which everyone in the known universe is classed as a kind of relative, similarly emphasize interdependence and relationality, and Nisbett and Miyamoto’s (2005) observations about perceptual processes which more clearly pay attention to relationships between an object and its context appear apposite to the Australian context. There are many examples of this in Australian ethnography which illustrate the kind of perceptual openness to which I refer. Myers (1986:66), for example, describes an incident in which Pintupi men encountered an unusual geological formation and sought to explain it with reference to its material features, its location, and its proximity to other Dreamings, using what he called a “deductive process” to draw it into a myth to which it then became associated. Merlan (1997:8) has described how some Aboriginal people near Katherine had their imaginations “fueled” through their encounter with an odd-shaped stone that had been exposed by a grader, going through a similarly deductive process that attended to the relationships among geology, geography, and cosmology brought to bear on the context through the people present. The extract from my fieldnotes that follow also illustrates something of this perceptual openness. Speaking about a beach on Hancock Island (which Bardi and Jawi call “Gaygin”), a senior Bardi man spoke about how a stone had appeared on a beach, a large stone, that he suspected had come from a cave. He said: All this cave in Gaygin on the beach, and stone from cave outside [the stone from the cave was laying outside on the beach]. Something with muscle carry that stone. Some spirit there. Rat or snake don’t carry that stone. Sand from inside [the cave] outside too. It must be ngaarri [a term used to encompass a variety of malevolent spirit beings] business, spirit business. (Uju, 11/7/97) His account highlights attentiveness to the environment underscored by a perceptual openness reliant on vision, underscored by a cosmology and ontology that understands what is seen to have unseen, other-than-human dimensions. This kind of perceptual openness, I argue, is fostered through a cosmology that requires this kind of attentiveness to the world; a cosmology in which the powers of ancestors are ever immanent, and in which country is redolent with the traces of ancestral and other spirit activity. This is a cosmology that allows people to infer the unseen and invisible

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from that which is seen; a cosmology that fosters perceptual openness and attentiveness in precisely these terms. Grasseni (2004:53) says that skilled vision “implies an active search for information from the environment,” and this is entirely congruent with the perceptual openness I have described here, in which something that is out of place, as in the example recorded in my fieldnotes, needs to be considered because it “might be something.” I suggest then that for Bardi people, the “apprenticeship” and “education of attention” through which, as Grasseni (2004:53) says, skilled vision is obtained, provides the critical grounding for seeing those qualities Merleau-Ponty (1964:166) described as “not altogether real objects,” but which, in Aboriginal cosmologies, are imbued with power and significance: Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, colour, all the objects of his [the painter’s] quest are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only virtual existence. In fact, they exist only at the threshold of profane vision: they are not seen by everyone. Merleau-Ponty’s words are, I think, prescient for this discussion. In effect, he identifies here the very qualities to which Aboriginal cosmologies pay particular attention, as reflected in their aesthetics, and also, via the shadow at least, in concepts of the person. This thought should be sufficient to cause us to re-consider the relationship between vision and materialism and how we learn to see the world.

References Anderson, Christopher & Francoise Dussart 1988. Dreamings in acrylic: Western desert art. In Dreamings: The art of Aboriginal Australia (ed.) P. Sutton. Ringwood, VIC: Viking. Pp. 89–142. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Bagshaw, Geoffrey & Katie Glaskin 2000. Anthropologists’ supplementary report: Aspects of Bardi and Jawi marine tenure and resource usage. Filed in the Federal Court of Australia, Western Australia District Registry, General Division, in Paul Sampi & Ors vs The Premier and State of Western Australia & The Commonwealth of Australia, WAG 49/1998, 30 October, 2000. Bennett, Gordon 2006. Aesthetics and iconography: An artist’s approach. In The anthropology of art: A reader (eds.) H. Morphy & M. Perkins. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pp. 513–519. Causey, Andrew 2017. Drawn to see: Drawing as ethnographic method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Crowther, Paul 2009. Phenomenology of the visual arts (even the frame). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. d’Andrade, Roy 1992. Schemas and motivation. In Human motives and cultural models (eds.) Roy G. D’Andrade & Claudia Strauss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 23–44.

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d’Andrade, Roy 1995. The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, Rebecca 2011. Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition: Virtuosity, discipline and the agency of insight in UK naturalists’ arts of seeing. Social Studies of Science 41(6):769–790. Fabian, Johannes 1983. Time and the other: How anthropology makes it object. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Glaskin, Katie 2005. Innovation and ancestral revelation: The case of dreams. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(2):297–314. Glaskin, Katie 2011. Dreaming in thread: From ritual to art and the property(s) between. In Ownership and Appropriation (eds.) V. Strang & M. Busse. Oxford: Berg. Pp. 87–104. Glaskin, Katie 2012. Anatomies of relatedness: Considerations of personhood in Aboriginal Australia. American Anthropologist 114(2):297–308. Glaskin, Katie 2015. Dreams, perception and creative realization. Exploring Cognitive Diversity: Anthropological Perspectives on Cognition, Special Issue of TopiCS (Topics in Cognitive Science) 7(4):664–676. Glaskin, Katie 2017. Crosscurrents: Law and society in a native title claim to land and sea. Crawley: UWA Publishing. Glaskin, Katie 2018. Other-than humans and the re-making of the social. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24(2):313–329. Grasseni, Cristina 2004. Skilled vision: An apprenticeship in breeding aesthetics. Social Anthropology 12:41–55. Keen, Ian 2006. Ancestors, magic and exchange in Yolngu doctrines: Extension of the person in time and space. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 12:515–530. Kerr, Nancy H. & G. William Domhoff 2004. Do the blind literally ‘see’ in their dreams? A critique of a recent claim that they do. Dreaming 14:230–233. Mandler, George 1984. Mind and body: The psychology of emotion and stress. New York, NY: Norton. Merlan, Francesca 1997. Fighting over country: Four commonplaces. In Fighting over country: Anthropological perspectives, CAEPR Research Monograph No. 12 (eds.) D.E. Smith & J. Finlayson. Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal and Economic Research, Australian National University. Pp. 1–14. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1964. The primacy of perception: And other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics (ed.) James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Pp. 159–190. Morphy, Howard 1991. Ancestral connections: Art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Morphy, Howard & Morgan Perkins 2006. The anthropology of art: A reflection on its history and contemporary practice. In The anthropology of art: A reader (eds.) H. Morphy & M. Perkins. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pp. 1–32. Myers, Fred 1986. Pintupi country, Pintupi self: Sentiment, place, and politics among Western desert Aborigines. Washington, DC: Smithsonian. Nisbett, Richard E. & Yuri Miyamoto 2005. The influence of culture: Holistic versus analytic perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9(10):467–473. Paddy, Sandy & Esther Paddy (with Moya Smith) 1988. Gadiman jawal: The Gadiman story. Perth: Western Australian Museum. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 1926. The rainbow serpent myth of Australia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 56:19–25.

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Rouja, Philippe 1998. Fishing for culture: Toward an Aboriginal theory of marine resource use among the Bardi Aborigines of One Arm Point, Western Australia. PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham. Sutton, Peter & Michael Snow 2015. Iridescence: The play of colours. Melbourne: Thames & Hudson. Wiggan, David 1990. Loolooloo and Margaliyn. One Arm Point: One Arm Point School. Willerslev, Rane 2007. ‘To have the world at a distance’: Reconsidering the significance of vision for social anthropology. In Skilled vision: Between apprenticeship and standards (ed.) Cristina Grasseni. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pp. 23–46. Young, Diana 2011. Mutable things: Colour as material practice in the northwest of South Australia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17:356–376.

10 “Are all stones alive?” Anthropological and Anishinaabe approaches to personhood1 Maureen Matthews and Roger Roulette

Since stones are grammatically animate, I once asked an old man: Are all the stones we see about us here alive? He reflected a long while and then replied, “No! But some are”. (Hallowell 1960:24)

Irving Hallowell was a subtle and perceptive anthropologist. He conducted his fieldwork among the Anishinaabe (whom he called the Ojibwa or Saulteaux)2 of the Upper Berens River from 1930 to 1940 and continued to write eloquently about their worldview throughout his career. Hallowell posed this question to Alec Keeper, Kiiwiich, a medicine man at Little Grand Rapids, Manitoba. He would have had in mind stones like those pictured in Figure 10.1, “grandfather stones” surrounded by offerings from Ojibwe travelers in the belief that they have the power to help an individual in some important way. As he later wrote, “This qualified answer made a lasting impression on me”. It was the ambivalence of the answer that charmed Hallowell. While he agreed that it was quite impossible, within a rigid scientific frame of reference, to imagine stones who might be alive, he argued that it was the interpretive and relational task of anthropologists to try. “We are confronted with the philosophical implications of their thought”, he wrote, “the nature of the world of being as they conceive it” (Hallowell 1960:20). He understood that the practice of anthropology is facilitated by a bracketing of personal experience, by a willingness to suspend disbelief, at least temporarily, and by an acute willingness to attend to the explanations of others (cf. Jackson 1996:10; Gell 1998:10). Hallowell’s sensitivity to the ontological understandings of his Ojibwe acquaintances had a very Boasian anthropological history, and there is an implicit relativist stance in his writing. But the clarity of his field observations, the soundness of his overall perspective, his scope and his ability to convey the flux and nuance of Anishinaabe perception make his work wonderfully useful in a contemporary Anishinaabe anthropological practice (Stocking 2004:203). This is especially true of the project at hand, having to

Figure 10.1 William Berens at a portage on the Berens River with a group of “grandfather” stones, 1932 (photograph: Hallowell Collection, American Philosophical Society Library)

“Are all stones alive?” 175 do with Anishinaabe people from the communities he studied and ceremonial objects he described and photographed which are, for the most part, members of this intriguing class of grammatically animate objects. In addressing the question of grammatical animacy and its implications, Hallowell was wrestling with one of the seminal problems of anthropology. The attribution of “life” and social roles to apparently inert objects has vexed anthropologists since the inception of the discipline (Gell 1998:9). Linguistic reports of animate/inanimate gender among the Anishinaabe and their fellow Algonquian speakers became primary evidence for early anthropological theorists (Long 1791 [1992]). E.B. Tylor chose the term “animism” (from the Latin anima [life, soul]) to refer to this “primitive philosophy”. He considered “animism” to be a primal way of thinking and a prerequisite for religions which are characterized by a belief in the concept of a soul (Tylor 1892. cited in Stringer 1999:547). Grammatical animacy became a diagnostic for this “animist” class of cultures but, although Hallowell uses the term “animacy”, he is careful about its application. He writes of the Anishinaabe: “Neither animism in its classical formulation nor animatism is the unequivocal foundation of Saulteaux belief” (Hallowell 1942:7). On another occasion he was even more direct: “Despite the fact that the general trend of their thought is so emphatically animistic, it would caricature the beliefs of these people to assert that a spirit lurks in every rock, or that they believe that every stone has a soul. They are not given to sweeping generalizations of this sort” (Hallowell 2010:44). Hallowell’s caution about generalizing with respect to Anishinaabe concepts was based on his conviction that Western anthropological categories have the power to confound cross-cultural understanding. His misgivings are revealed at the outset of his article, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour and World-view”, where he writes that “a thoroughgoing ‘objective’ approach to the study of cultures cannot be achieved solely by projecting upon those cultures categorical abstractions derived from Western thought. For, in a broad sense, the latter are a reflection of our cultural subjectivity” (Hallowell 1960:21). This caution, he argued, applied to animacy which has a very long European intellectual history. The first known use of the attribution of animacy for literary effect was in the Aeneid where the ghastliness of war is summed up in a phrase about stones being brought to tears, “lacrimae rerum”, Virgil writes, “the tears of things” which “touch the mind” (translation Hardie, April 2005). To Hallowell, understanding the Anishinaabe attribution of animacy meant turning away from longstanding European anthropological and literary metaphorical conventions. “If we wish to understand the cognitive orientation of the Ojibwa”, he wrote, “there is an ethno-linguistic problem to be considered: What is the meaning of animate in Ojibwa thinking? Are such generic properties of objects such as responsiveness to outer stimulation – sentience, mobility, self-movement, or even reproduction – primary characteristics attributed to all objects of the animate class irrespective of their

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categories as physical objects in our thinking? Is there evidence to substantiate such properties of objects independent of their formal linguistic classification?” (Hallowell 1960:23). At the time of his research, Hallowell believed that “no Ojibwa is consciously aware of, or can abstractly articulate the animate-inanimate category of his speech. Consequently, the grammatical distinction as such does not emerge as a subject for reflective thought or bear the kind of relation to individual thinking that would be present if there were some formulated dogma about the generic properties of these two classes of objects” (Hallowell 1960:23). This is not the case anymore. It is my privilege to consult with native Anishinaabemowin (also referred to by linguists as Ojibwe) speakers who are university-trained linguists, particularly Roger Roulette, and to use his expert transcripts, translations and interpretations of complex Ojibwe texts in thoughtful attempts to explain animacy from an Anishinaabe point of view. Hallowell’s second point, however, is still relevant to the discussion of museum objects because in attempting to incorporate Indigenous perspectives, museum personnel have wrestled with the meaning of objects which may have life and social relations and have mistakenly tried to use grammatical animacy as a key to identifying the sacred.

Animate objects and repatriation In the past 30 years, the repatriation of indigenous ceremonial artefacts to their Canadian source communities has partially reset the balance of power between Indigenous people and museums. Twenty years ago, with a landmark task force report, Canadian First Nations leaders and the Canadian Museums Association charted a new and more respectful course with respect to indigenous artefacts (Task Force 1992) and museums and museum professionals are now strongly motivated by respect for the sensibilities of contemporary indigenous peoples. Simultaneously, a renewed anthropological interest in the role of objects in social processes has led to a theoretical approach that incorporates objects as actors in explanations of social events (Gell 1998; Latour 1993, 2000; Strathern 1999, 2004). In this mode, objects are seen to be doing things socially and thus become the natural subject of anthropological inquiry. This paper focuses on such an object, an Ojibwe medicine man’s water drum, or mitigwakik, caught up in a mistaken repatriation. Mitigwakik is an Anishinaabemowin word which requires an animate verb form, an idea to which I return, and when the drum is referred to in this way, it is grammatically identical to an old man, a respected elder. Hallowell talked about such apparently socially active objects as other-thanhuman persons, and one could hardly find a more emotionally charged event than the repatriation of an other-than-human person, a claim which reverberates in the multiple communities to which the drum is connected. Individuals and communities initiate the process of repatriation to reclaim ceremonially essential artefacts and to restore cultural losses, while dealing

“Are all stones alive?” 177 with often-overwhelming feelings of personal grief and cultural destruction. For museums, repatriation claims seem to strike at the heart of their ethos of preserving objects for the edification of all, for the greater good, their ultimate raison d’être. This paper presents an even more fraught situation, a mistaken repatriation. In 1998, more than 80 Ojibwe ceremonial artefacts from a small anthropology museum at the University of Winnipeg were secretly given to a politically adept, well-intentioned Ojibwe cultural revitalization group unrelated to the source community, in spite of clear provenance and significant interest in the collection having been expressed by the source community. It is a situation where the conjunction of politicized museum artefacts and honestly held views about cultural rights and the desires of objects led to a gross injustice. Understanding this mistaken repatriation is facilitated by taking a dual perspective, adding the Ojibwe philosophical and social environment of the drum (Hallowell 1940) to an anthropological understanding of the theoretical personhood of objects (Strathern 1999, 2004; Latour 1993; Gell 1998; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007). This is apt because our “epitomizing object” (Fogelson 1985:84), a mitigwakik, or water drum, is (often) grammatically and metaphorically animate to Ojibwe speakers. Similarly, recent anthropological theory situates objects as actors in everyday life, with a social significance far beyond our conventional awareness (Latour 2000). In both views, indigenous and anthropological, Naamiwan’s water drum is credited with social agency, that is, the power to act in the world. The purpose of this paper is to draw inferences from this set of events by taking seriously the human inclination to ascribe animacy and attribute social agency to objects. Doing so is a contemporary and very human practice, not an attribute of primitivism or magical thinking on the part of Indigenous peoples. Daniel Dennett argues that all humans approach natural objects, living objects and made objects using three basic strategies: They interrogate natural objects in terms of their physical properties, question the design purpose of made objects or living things and, finally, take an intentional stance toward a made and living thing by treating it as “a rational agent, attributing ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ and ‘rationality’ to the thing, and predicting that it will act rationally”, in effect asking what it “wants” to do (Dennet 2017:37). This is evident in the museum world. If, as a Western society, we did not believe that objects have the capacity to “speak” to us across time and culture, we would not have museums (Mack 2003). From an Ojibwe perspective, if a powerful drum, isolated in a museum and feeling forgotten, had the will to become famous, it could not have initiated a set of events better calculated to bring it back to the centre of everyone’s attention than this mistaken repatriation.

Naamiwan’s water drum, mitigwakik To simplify a complex repatriation narrative, this paper follows one of the 80 artefacts caught up in the mistaken repatriation, a 200-year-old water drum, or mitigwakik. Although perhaps not the most valuable artefact nor the

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most beautiful, it may be the artefact with the broadest range of social connections and therefore the deepest personhood. Early in the twentieth century, it was owned by the renowned Anishinaabe medicine man, Naamiwan, who lived in the northern Manitoba community of Pauingassi. Naamiwan was born nearby in 1850 and died in Pauingassi in 1943 at the age of 93. Figure 10.2 is of Naamiwan (John Owen) and his wife, Koowin, taken at Pauingassi in 1933 by American anthropologist, A. Irving Hallowell, and shows an indomitable 83-year-old man and his frail wife in front of a large, finely crafted Waabano pavilion. Naamiwan is surrounded by the ceremonial objects of his practice, a combination of medicinal and murderous power available to very few. On the post to his right, guarding the eastern door of the Waabano pavilion stands a bineshishikaan, “like a bird”, the carved image of his aadizookaan, his spirit-helper, a Thunderbird. He has a rattle in one hand and a drum-stick in the other, and at his feet sits his mitigwakik, the subject of this paper; his personal water drum; his ritual brother, or wiikaan, his ally in war, his agent in healing and his envoy into the future. Naamiwan used his water drum in both the Waabano ceremony and the Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Society, the pre-eminent Anishinaabe ceremonial practice. The presence of the carved Thunderbird comes as no surprise as drums and the rights to use them are considered the province of

Figure 10.2 Naamiwan (with water drum); his wife, Koowin; son Angus; and grandson Omishoosh (Charlie George Owen – farther back in the Waabano lodge), Pauingassi 1933 (Photograph F59, Hallowell Collection, American Philosophical Society)

“Are all stones alive?” 179 Thunderbird spirits (Matthews 2016:128). This drum, built for Naamiwan’s grandfather sometime around 1800, predates the family’s move from Lac Seul in Ontario to Pauingassi, Manitoba (Harms 2012). It is made out of a single round of a poplar tree too large to have come from the Pauingassi area, hollowed out by carving and burning the interior. It was subsequently used by both Naamiwan and his eldest son Angus, behind Naamiwan in Hallowell’s photograph, and inherited by his grandson, the respected elder, Omishoosh (Charlie George Owen), farther back inside the Waabano pavilion in the photograph. Naamiwan’s drum is still remembered in Pauingassi where people speak of it as if it were an old man, sitting among them, using the animate verb “he/ she sits”, abij/abid. Omishoosh says that the drum’s strength and capabilities originated with its maker, Naamiwan’s grandfather. When Naamiwan played the drum, it was with his grandfather’s strength. When Naamiwan dared his strong, young grandson to stop his arm while he drummed, Omishoosh couldn’t do it (Matthews and Roulette 2003). After the death of Angus Owen, the drum was retired and placed in respectful solitude on an island north of the community. In the winter of 1969–70, this remarkable drum, along with 234 other artefacts from Pauingassi, was purchased by an anthropology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Jack Steinbring intervened when he heard that an outfitter was buying ceremonial artefacts and selling them to tourists. He promised the people of Pauingassi that the objects would be kept safe at the University of Winnipeg and that community members could visit whenever they wished. There was only one visit from Pauingassi; in 1995, Omishoosh came at the invitation of Dr. Jennifer Brown and spent a day in the Anthropology Museum looking at the collection, naming things and talking about the memories they evoked. He admired the pristine storage conditions provided for the artefacts, using the complex verb “gii-ganawaabanjigaadegin”, to indicate that their aesthetic well-being had been addressed. He said that seeing the artefacts so comfortable in their retirement made him happy; he could feel the positive presence and approval of his ancestors who had used these objects to such great effect years ago (Matthews 2016:40). When Omishoosh first saw the water drum in the museum, he was particularly delighted, acknowledging the old man’s “kettle/pail, akik(oog)” with an affectionate grammatically animate euphemism. As we have seen with stones, in the Anishinaabe language a distinction between animate and inanimate is required. In the context of museum repatriations it is often said that Anishinaabe people think all ceremonial objects are alive but while it is true that speakers often use animate agreement when referring to drums as a general idea, there are many significant exceptions both with drums and with other objects which are definitely ceremonial but only become consistently grammatically animate in very specific situations. Working from an Anishinaabemowin transcript of Omishoosh’s visit to the museum reinforces Hallowell’s point that grammatical animacy does not

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imply an Anishinaabe “formulated dogma about the generic properties of these two classes [animate and inanimate] of objects” (Hallowell 1960:23). So on a November morning in 1995 when Omishoosh, a unilingual Ojibwe speaker with a sophisticated, expert vocabulary, began talking about his grandfather’s water drum as he looked at “him”, it was no surprise that he slipped deftly back and forth between animate and inanimate grammatical forms, sometimes using them both in the same paragraph. Omishoosh’s first reference to the drum as a kettle is etymologically related to mitigwakik, the usual name for a water drum in Anishnaabemowin – literally “wooden pail” which is animate. In his conversation about the drum at the museum, Omishoosh also used the words mitigwakik(wag), water drum, and ‘dewe’igan(ag), drum’, both of which are animate. However, about half the time that Omishoosh was talking specifically about a water drum which had saved his life, he used the inanimate form madwe’igan(an), a noun which means “any thing to strike or beat upon”. One explanation for this metaphysical downgrading of a drum, like the initial joking reference to the “old man’s pail”, is that it is a very typical Anishinaabe form of linguistic discretion that Mary Black Rogers calls “respectful talk” (Black Rogers 1986). Respectful talk is a prominent characteristic of Anishinaabe speakers who use euphemisms and unexpected animacy to obliquely hide or highlight valued objects or important persons. And sometimes there is more implied in a particular grammatical form. On an occasion when he was talking privately to Roger Roulette, Omishoosh used a very unusual derivative of the animate verb madwe’o, “to beat upon something alive”, “madwe’akokwe”. This form is used only on ceremonial occasions or when speaking in confidence to other Midewiwin initiates because it reveals that the speaker is or has been actively involved in ceremonial practice, a fact that is very personal and not readily admitted. The fact that not all significant Anishinaabe ceremonial objects are grammatically treated as animate further complicates the question. Omishoosh consistently referred to rattles, zhiishiigwan(ag); animal hide pouches, gashibidaagan(ag); and even objects as prosaic as spoons, emikwaan(ag), and snowshoes, aagim(ag), in their animate form, while the words he uses for drumsticks, dewe’iganaatig(oon) and obaganaagan(an), are consistently inanimate (Matthews 2016:60). His embroidered bandolier, gijipizon(an), which Omishoosh wore in ceremonies to indicate his role as an honourary Bear clan member, is grammatically inanimate but he occasionally referred to it by a euphemism, the name for the tinklers on it, zhinawishin(oog), “these beings that jingle” which is animate. At certain moments, drums can also experience a transformation in terms of relational possibilities. Naamiwan’s dream drum is said to have become “alive” when the heart of the drum, a beautiful bone tinkler or bell, was put in place in 1915 (Matthews and Roulette 2003:280). Naamiwan’s water drum, like others of its type, is said to have become “alive” when the hide covering is in place, as it is in Figure 10.2. For this reason, contemporary

“Are all stones alive?” 181 ceremonies often start with reassembling the water drum which is stored and transported separately from its cover. Like drums, pipes, opwaagan(ag), which are consistently grammatically animate (Roulette 2005), become “really alive” at the moment when the pipe bowl and pipe stem are joined. As a result of this insight, pipes are stored in museums with bowl and stem separated. The transcript which details Omishoosh’s subtle use of animate and inanimate references to the drum presents an interpretive problem. It means that a universal key to the spiritual significance of objects, a classificatory category of great interest to museum curators, can NOT be divined solely from Ojibwe grammar (cf. Goddard 2002). Nevertheless, the attribution of animacy provides a conceptual prelude to the social agency of drums, allowing Ojibwe speakers to readily incorporate meaningful artefacts in explanations of events. It registers the possibility that erstwhile objects may transcend the boundaries of their materiality and take on the social roles of persons, a mode Hallowell calls “other-than-human persons” (Hallowell 1960:45). The Anishinaabe, he said, have a “personalistic theory of causation”. “Who did it, who is responsible, is always the crucial question to be answered” (Hallowell 1960:45). And the answer may very well be a drum. For objects to be credited with this degree of social agency, it is helpful that they are primed by the grammatical presumption of personhood.

Personhood and drums Alfred Gell developed a parallel interest in the personhood of objects, in particular in the social agency of works of art. In Art and Agency (1998), Gell proposed a theoretical model which situated art objects not as signifiers of culture, but as actors in social networks. He, like Hallowell, cast them as other-than-human persons with both agency – the capacity to act – and a degree of intentionality – the will to act (Gell 1998:16–17). Gell relied on the lead provided by Marilyn Strathern, who worked out the many ways that both “people and things assume the social form of persons” (Strathern 1988:145), when he argued that “art objects are the equivalents of persons, or more precisely social agents” (1998:7). Museum objects have the same potential to assume the social form of persons, but to Strathern, a whole person is a theoretical impossibility. In her view, only the relationships of persons can be whole and each fleeting relationship engages only a small facet of our “partible” personhood – hence her term “dividual”. Museum artefacts, like their human curators, are equally “dividual”; their personhood is the sum of a facetted array of relationships, many of which are unknown to the parties in a given relationship. Strathern argues that maximal personhood, a mode in which person/ objects are at their most person-like, is achieved when multiple relationships are acknowledged by acquaintances, when one’s social network is contextually rich, when the person/object has real choices in life and enough agency

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to make those choices without interference (Strathern 1999:14). At the other end of the relational spectrum, person/objects are at their most objectlike when they are trapped by the inescapable obligations of one overarching relationship. For example: Ownership claims, relational claims made by persons (who have choices and agency) in respect of objects (who do not), impose non-optional obligations (e.g. as property or as a slave). As wholly owned possessions (property) of museums, artefacts are at the object-like end of this relational spectrum, their prestige deployed to burnish the reputation of the institution. Their museum personhood may eventually be augmented by relationships with the institution, curators, conservators, visitors, with the collection and with their classificatory relations on the shelves of the museum, but the social fact of ownership is inescapable. If museums engage with source communities, the extended personhood of artefacts may re-emerge through the addition of an array of revitalized family, community and ceremonial relationships. Repatriation, the return of person-like things to their families and home communities, sometimes flows from these relational changes, but repatriation is not complete until the dominant museum ownership relationship has been ruptured. In the case of Naamiwan’s water drum, its Ojibwe personhood is similarly relational, shifting meaning from person to object within the dictates of its social connections. While the University of Winnipeg Anthropology Museum might have been a source of social vitality generated by interactions with curators, students, visitors and classificatory co-residents, the museum’s taxonomic storage system and crucially the separation of the Pauingassi artefacts into “sacred” and “secular” classificatory fields divided them from one another. The “sacred” artefacts, the drum among them, were placed in restricted access storage, isolated from human contact and the relational possibilities of the museum. The drum’s latent Pauingassi personhood first emerged in a story told by Omishoosh’s cousin, St. John Owen, in which the drum commits a longdistance murder. In this story, the drum’s maximal Ojibwe personhood emerges and all grammatical ambivalence vanishes. Every verb is animate: The drum took his victims inside itself, ogii-biindiganaa; trapped them, naazikaazowan; and then killed them, nichigaazonid. “That old man did terrifying things!” “Aapijigii-gagwaanisagichigea’aakiwenzi!” said St. John when he finished the story (Matthews 2016:198–203). The drum is an ally with extraordinary power who hunts and kills at the behest of Naamiwan. On the afternoon of his visit to the museum, Omishoosh told another story about the drum and how the water drum enabled his grandfather to bring him back from the dead (ibid: 45–47). Naamiwan and his drum are described in these instances as “wiikaanag, ritual brothers” and it is their collaboration that makes this deed possible. As wiikaanag the drum is always grammatically animate, always acting in the world as Naamiwan’s helper. One of Gell’s distinctive and controversial theoretical contributions was to put a name to “distributed personhood” – the role of objects as “embodiments

“Are all stones alive?” 183 of the power or capacity to will their use” (Gell 1998:23) (using the horrifying example of land mines) and to identify in works of art, evidence of a form of “secondary” agency which is “socially and cognitively practicable” and acknowledged by others (Gell 1998:16). Ojibwe speakers also make a precise and nuanced distinction between primary and secondary agency. Animate entities, including people and objects, are simply bemaadiziwaad – “those who have life”. There is no presumption of volition or agency, but they certainly can be said to embody the “capacity to will their use” (Gell 1998:23). They are simply playing the roles intended for them and following their preordained fate. Powerful medicine men, Midewigimaa(g), and their spirit helpers, aadizookaanag, are bemaaji’iwemagak, “those who bring life into something” (and naturally they can also take life out of someone, onisaan) and would be considered to have primary agency aplenty. Thunderbirds, the most powerful of the aadizookaanag, are at the apex of this Anishinaabe cascade of power and agency. Medicine men like Naamiwan who can count on the help of aadizookaanag, particularly those who have help from Thunderbirds, are also considered to be bemaaji’iwemagak, and are accorded enviable access to near primary agency although it would be conditional on actually exhibiting powers consistently over time. The water drum, Naamiwan’s ally, is bemaadizid; it simply has life. The drum has dangerous capabilities, but from an Ojibwe point of view, it has secondary agency, the sort mere mortals possess. All forms of social agency, whether exercised by a person or a ceremonial artefact, is something that is judged retrospectively. Rather than being seen as an inherent quality or attribute of a person or object, agency emerges from an evolving process of assessment. Evidence is tested and assumptions proved – or not – by events as they transpire and, in the meantime, as Mary Black Rogers observes, Ojibwe speakers live comfortably with unfinished judgements in a state of long-term “percept ambiguity” (Black Rogers 1977).

The repatriation After his 1995 visit, Omishoosh asked that the drum and other artefacts be photographed so that he could use the pictures for teaching in the Pauingassi School. He emphasized that they were retired and should not be used ceremonially. Four years later, after repeated requests, I was finally granted permission to photograph the objects and undertake a project to reconnect them with the stories from Pauingassi. And then came a stunning revelation. A letter from the university informed us that 41 of the 235 artefacts from Pauingassi, about half of a total of more than 80 objects from the Anthropology Museum at the University of Winnipeg, had been quietly given away to a U.S.-based Ojibwe cultural revitalization group with no connections whatsoever to Pauingassi or its people. This cultural “reclamation” was described as the rightful repatriation of sacred objects to “the traditional

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spiritual community”. The letter specifically mentioned Naamiwan’s drum, “(catalogue #E5211) purchased by Jack Steinbring in 1970 that was noted in our records as purchased from Nanpaykun, made by Namuin, [Naamiwan] 50 years old” (Brown Correspondence, 1. Sept 29, 1999). Rationale for the “reclamation” was provided in a memo circulated in the Anthropology Department. The artefacts reclaimed were those that had previously been designated as “sacred” or “sensitive”, as “things which no one can access or see” (Brown Correspondence, 3. Sept 23, 1999). This “sacred” status, an imposition of a classificatory system, a restrictive relationship enforced by the museum as owner rather than a reflection of Pauingassi sensibilities, defined the vulnerable artefacts. Those artefacts thought to be secular were not removed. This attribution of sacredness was paired with an invocation of animacy. Omishoosh’s point of view was written off in the memo: “The objects .  .  . were considered “dead” by their principal informant” (Brown Correspondence, 2. Sept 23, 1999). The memo distinguished between Omishoosh, “our principal informant”, and those “Indigenous people” who adhere to a “Traditional value system” and whose suitability as new owners of the Pauingassi artefacts was related to the authenticity of their contemporary “Traditional practice”. The missing objects had “reentered the Traditional community through such events as the convening of the Grand Medicine Lodge (Three Fires Society) in Bad River, Wisconsin (summer 1998)” (ibid, original brackets). The “reclamation” was a wellkept secret for a year and a half. No one in Pauingassi or in the university administration had been informed, and there was no documentation of the transaction. Omishoosh’s initial reaction was concern for the people who now had the drum. Although it was retired, the drum was by no means incapable. One needed the authority of Thunderbirds to handle it and, importantly, Naamiwan’s ghost was still about. (Whereas when most people die, they will be “so-and-so-iban”, the “ban” suffix indicating “the late” and implying that they have gone to the Land of the Summer Birds permanently, this suffix is never used for Naamiwan, nor for Omishoosh). Those with primary agency, the power to make things happen, “bemaaji’iwemagak”, are apparently not bound by normal constraints and appear in the lives of others long after they have passed away. Thus Naamiwan’s drum not only embodies dangerous capabilities but can also still be moved to act by Naamiwan in his ambient form. In February 2000, Omishoosh sent a letter to the president of the university in syllabics asking that the artefacts be returned for the good of all (Brown Correspondence, 4. Feb 20, 2000). After that, things just fell silent. We have no knowledge of what went on at the university, but for the next two years the museum staff stayed in place, no move was made to recover the objects, no invitation to photograph the objects ever materialized and no attempt was made to get in touch with Omishoosh. By the fall of 2001, Omishoosh was upset and, in response to a question about the removal of the objects, he called it “theft,

“Are all stones alive?” 185 gimoodi” (Matthews 2016:98–99). Omishoosh passed away just after Christmas 2002. There had been no move by the university to rectify the situation. Omishoosh’s letter wasn’t answered by the university until 2008. There hadn’t been the slightest apology to him or his family. His grandfather’s drum was in Wisconsin in the possession of the spiritual leader and Chief Executive Officer of the Three Fires Midewiwin Society, Eddie Benton-Banai, who had no previous connection to the drum, the family or the community. Eddie Benton-Banai is an American political activist who started Three Fires in the early 1970s. The Three Fires Society’s goals are to relearn ceremonies and revive the Midewiwin Lodge; promote the well-being of the Anishinaabe people; achieve freedom from alcohol, drugs and family violence; and provide educational opportunities for children and youth (Three Fires website). Benton-Banai is also a co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Both Three Fires Midewiwin Society and AIM have been active in Manitoba for at least 20 years. AIM members have contributed to creating the political environment in which repatriation has become accepted museum practice in the United States and Canada and were among the first to articulate repatriation claims (Graef 2008). They have also helped to create the rhetoric of repatriation, a discourse which posits indigenous artefacts in museums as imprisoned and alienated victims of colonialism, waiting to be liberated. Eddie Benton-Banai calls Naamiwan’s water drum “Grandfather, Mishoomis”. He says he had no part in bringing the drum to the United States but admits he kept the drum at his home for a number of years. He says he first saw the drum at the Bad River Three Fires Midewiwin Ceremonies in June 1986 and agreed to look after it as a duty. Another member said how honoured they felt to be its keepers and emphasized the happiness the drum must have felt to be part of ceremonies again (Matthews 2016:144). BentonBanai knew little about Pauingassi or its people, believing them to be “white Christians” (Matthews 2016:147). In an interview he said, “I think that very likely that community has been pounced upon by white racist preachers, who are doing everything they can to destroy us, to destroy our covenant with the spirit” (ibid). When asked about Pauingassi objections to the repatriation, he said that he wouldn’t give the drum back until the people were capable of performing traditional ceremonies to his satisfaction: The day that Pauingassi does the traditional ceremonial things that are required and if they convince me that they will never again fall into white hands, I’ll see to it that they get returned, the items that belong to Pauingassi. That’s it. (Matthews 2016:148) In practice, repatriation and other cultural property rights claims are ownership claims, claims made by persons in respect of things (Strathern 1999:6). One of the reasons contemporary repatriation literature is so unsatisfying is

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that it fails to grapple with the conflict between rights claims as ownership claims and indigenous understandings of the animacy and personhood of the artefacts caught up in repatriation. Strathern argues that personhood is particularly relevant in instances in which relations are impinged upon by conceptions of human rights, as they are in repatriation (e.g. Riding In 2000). Claiming cultural property rights, asserting ownership rights over artefacts as things, as Strathern points out, means that indigenous cultural understandings related to the nature of animate person-like entities and their agency, their possibilities for acting in the world, are suppressed. Setting repatriation literature in the context of cultural human rights as many authors do (Cowan, Dembour and Wilson 2001; Bell and Napoleon 2008; Bell and Paterson 2009) and pressing for legal remediation based on EuroAmerican property law, as is the case in the United States with NAGPRA (Trope and Echo Hawk 2000), has also problematized the concept of “culture”. As Strathern points out, rights claims require that “we live in a ‘post-cultural’ world . . . which posits individuals as ontologically prior to the cultural milieu which they create” (Rapport 1998:386) and one in which: “Culture” becomes “an optional resource”, one to be employed by individual actors on a global stage who are free to create identities for themselves (1998:387, 388). It is a modernist position of course to imagine that one can choose. Much of the rhetorical justification for Culture is in fact cast in terms of allowing people (the “right”) to practice their customs as they always have done. (Strathern 1999:17–18) Strathern (1999) and Wagner (1981 [1975]) both argue that it is a logical impossibility for persons to exist without or before their culture; that it is not possible to lose your culture any more than it is to get it back. However, this presumption that culture is both alienable and retrievable is essential to the legal environment of cultural human rights and to neo-traditionalist movements such as Three Fires. The idea of culture as a “right” poses another serious problem for those who are imagined to have this right. People advance cultural rights claims because they are without power. If they had power, they’d do what they want. If they must petition for rights which derive from their cultural identity, they are obliged to present a culturally authentic image of themselves, both objectifying and partial, to what Colin Samson calls “the rights conferring political machinery” (Samson 2001:228). In the case of repatriation, culture (performed by persons who claim cultural things) is something they must have, the authentic expression of which has been defined in advance by the museums (the rights conferring political machinery) that will decide on the validity of their claim. This cultural performance is part of what Crane calls “museal discourse” (Crane 2000). All parties in this discourse accept, as a basis of interaction,

“Are all stones alive?” 187 the intellectual conventions of museums; that the objects embody culture, can teach and possibly even sustain culture, and that their possession confers cultural prestige. They believe that interpretive agency and social power can be acquired through the appropriation of cultural objects. Authentic repatriation claimants are expected to be engaged in “traditional” cultural practices, and in the case of Three Fires, this was their explicit argument – they were the authentic Traditional Ojibwe Midewiwin Society. Within the context of “museal discourse”, “traditional” claims present a problem because they are impossible to interrogate (Phillips and Berlo 1995:16–17). Without the excellent provenance of the Pauingassi collection, judging simply on the rhetorical conviction of “traditional” claims made on behalf of Three Fires, few would have found fault with this repatriation. But the connection to Pauingassi was known, and, in spite of this, the objects were transferred to Three Fires. In their activist mode and in conjunction with museums, Three Fires members had a hand in creating the authenticating Ojibwe cultural performance that is now expected from those who wish to elicit cultural property rights. Omishoosh’s informal and sometimes joking relationship with the artefacts, his failure to demand a smudge with sweet grass (never used ceremonially in Pauingassi) and his disinclination to acknowledge the “sacred” and “secular” distinction so important to the museum, undermined his credibility at the university. For these reasons, he had no moral purchase whatsoever with those who operated the museal “rights conferring machinery” to which Samson alludes (Samson 2001:228). Pauingassi elders, perceived as de-cultured Ojibwe, “white Christians” according to Eddie Benton-Banai, and their artefacts, perceived as imprisoned and “sacred”, were both confined to their most thing-like modes. Their lack of agency paralleled their depersonalization. It did not matter that, in Pauingassi, there could be no history of dealing “traditionally” with museums; the people were entirely unaware of museums and their dark colonial history. In spite of immediate personal and ceremonial histories, Pauingassi claims were dismissed when Omishoosh failed to perform “culture” to their satisfaction. A contemporary political and emotional context generated by the cultural rights imperatives of repatriation gave the artefacts an urgent role in an altogether different scenario. They were seen to have been abandoned by people who had stopped practicing their “culture” in favour of “white Christianity”. The needs, values and agency of a contemporary Traditional Ojibwe spiritual revival group trumped Pauingassi relationships and negated Pauingassi Anishinaabe agency.

The return of the drum Eddie Benton-Banai met Nelson Owen, the grandson of Omishoosh Owen, in May 2002. Nelson and his wife, Elaine, had taken the lead in pushing to get the artefacts back. At this meeting, Benton-Banai realized that the people of

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Pauingassi were not as he had imagined and quickly offered to give the drum back. Five days after the meeting, Nelson Owen got a phone call about arranging the return of Naamiwan’s drum. He was assured it was to be a quiet, private and dignified affair. No media were to be involved; the Owens had to promise not to tell anyone. Having followed these instructions, the Owens arrived at the appointed time and place to find a TV camera crew and a room full of reporters. Nelson and Elaine Owens, wanting only to accept the drums and go home, endured a lengthy ceremony, singing and praying, and a press conference (Matthews 2016:192–193). In a newspaper report of the ceremony, Terrance Nelson, one of the participants, wrote that the drums had been granted their wish to “go home”, adding that Benton-Banai, “a deeply spiritual man . . . says the spirits of the waterdrums asked to go home. He had to comply despite being forced to enter into a swirl of controversy” (Nelson, June 2002). From a Pauingassi point of view, one might say that the regrettable “swirl of controversy” he refers to (Nelson June 2002) is an eruption of the agency of a firmly recalcitrant object (Latour 2000:116); that Naamiwan’s drum, unwillingly appropriated to enhance Three Fires’ reputation, was reasserting its Pauingassi family and community relationships. Gosden and Knowles warn against too freely attributing agency, warning that agency is a relational process. “[T]hings are not agents in their own right, and the material world is only given force and significance through human activity. . . . Any use of the active voice when describing objects must be suspect” (Gosden and Knowles 2001:23). This caution is properly engaged when the attribution of animacy is overly convenient. To say as Eddie Benton-Banai has done, that the “spirits” directed the drums to Wisconsin gives to divine entities the responsibility for their transit across the border in contravention of the Canadian Cultural Property Export Act. This is understandably something that a human actor might not want to claim. There was the matter of a looming Provincial Auditor General’s report and an RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) investigation. All these events may have concentrated minds, but they also generated a certain amount of self-serving talk about animacy. And it is not the only instance in this repatriation where claims of rather literal animacy on behalf of ceremonial objects have been advanced as a convenient explanation. As artefacts trickled back to the museum and nearby lab, both before and after the Auditor General’s forensic audit, the university was content to explain their reappearance as an example of the artefacts “walking back” (McKinley 2007). From a relational perspective, ownership claims – and repatriation claims are ownership claims – are both a fact and an illusion (Strathern 1999: 14–15); they may temporarily constrain a person/object, but they don’t necessarily cut off other outcomes and prevent other scenarios. When the museum decided to repatriate the drum to Three Fires, it submerged a set of relationships with the Owen family that re-emerged when Eddie Benton-Banai talked to Nelson Owen. At that point, Benton-Banai appears to have experienced a radical shift in his feelings about the drums and their rightful ownership.

“Are all stones alive?” 189 As Strathern points out, when action becomes necessary, agency (or lack of agency) becomes evident. “Agency is evinced in the ability of persons to (actively) orient themselves or to align themselves with particular relationships” (Strathern 1999:14–15). From this perspective, the return of the drum came about because of a new and expanded perception of the complex relational field of the drum and a desire to reconcile the “nature of obligations and how people meet the debts they perceive”. As Strathern explains: “The claims which bear in on the actors as immediate reasons for their actions are based on the fact of their relationships with one another” (Strathern 1999:15). In the case of Naamiwan’s drum, while it had been welcomed into the Three Fires community, it carried an undercurrent of Pauingassi relational history with it. “An object may make present powers or forces that affect a person’s life” (Strathern 1999:15), as Eddie BentonBanai learned when he met Nelson Owen. If agency is the smoke to personhood’s fire, then it is a signal worth watching, and in the case of Pauingassi, there has been a gradual shift in the agency of the Owen family and their community. The family have recently succeeded in repatriating the entire Pauingassi Collection, taking a guardianship responsibility for the artefacts which now mean so much to them. And in a recent successful application for a World Heritage cultural landscape site that brings Pauingassi First Nation together with three other First Nations to protect their traditional territories, Pauingassi is seen as the keystone community, the cultural heart of the region, with a gift for articulating ecological understandings in complex and evocative Ojibwe language. What they have repatriated, in addition to the drum, is the social agency to represent themselves in the world.

Notes 1 We are grateful to the University of Toronto Press for permission to present revised material from Maureen Matthews’ Naamiwan’s Drum (2016). 2 I use the terms “Ojibwe” and “Anishinaabeg” interchangeably to refer to those who call themselves Anishinaabeg. These people are often referred to as Ojibwa, and their language is written Ojibwe. I follow Roger Roulette and Pat Ningewance in choosing to spell both Ojibwe. See Nichols and Nyholm (1995:xxiii–xxvii). Hallowell refers to the people of Pauingassi as Northern Ojibwa or Saulteaux, a name which dates back to the French traders who encountered these peoples’ ancestors in the area near what is now Sault St. Marie, Ontario (see Peers 1994:xv–xviii).

References Bell, Catherine, and Val Napoleon (eds.). 2008. First Nations Cultural Heritage and the Law: Case Studies, Voices and Perspectives, ed. W. Wesley Pue Law and Society Series. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Bell, Catherine, and Robert K. Paterson (eds.). 2009. Protection of First Nations Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Reform: Law and Society Series, ed. W. Wesley Pue Law and Society Series. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Black Rogers, Mary B. 1977. ‘Ojibwa Taxonomy and Percept Ambiguity,’ Ethos 5(1): 90–118.

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Black Rogers, Mary B. 1986. ‘Ojibwa Power Interactions: Creating Contexts for Respectful Talk,’ in Regna Darnell (ed.), Proceedings of Conference on Native North American Interaction Patterns. Ottawa: National Museums. Brown, Jennifer S.H. Correspondence. Jennifer S.H. Brown Fonds 1945–2010. Repository: University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collection, Elizabeth Dafoe Library. MSS336 A. 10–111. The letters are from the A.11–17 accession. The 1999 correspondence is in box 3 fd.8. The 2000 correspondence is in box 3 fd.9. 1) 2) 3) 4)

Memo: September 29, 1999 from Dr. Persis Clarkson, head of the Department of Anthropology, to Dr. Jennifer S.H. Brown. Handwritten note: September 29, 1999, attached to Memoabove, entitled “Policy on Sensative [sic]/Sacred Material”. Memo: September 23, 1999 to P. Clarkson, G. Fulford, G. Granstberg and C. Meikeljohn, re: Anthropology Museum Repatriations. Letter: February 20, 2000. From Charlie George (Omishoosh) Owen to Dr. Constance Rooke, President of the University of Winnipeg.

Cowan, Jane K., Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard Wilson. 2001. Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crane, Susan. 2000. Museums and Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dennet, Daniel. 2017. Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Fogelson, Raymond. 1985. ‘Night Thoughts on Native American Social History,’ in The Impact of Indian History on the Teaching of United States History, Occasional Papers in Curriculum, No 3. Washington: D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goddard, Ives. 2002. ‘Grammatical Gender in Algonquian,’ in H. Christopher Wolfart (ed.), Papers of the 23rd Algonquian Conference. Winnipeg: University of Winnipeg: 195–231. Gosden, Chris and Chantal Knowles. 2001. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change. Oxford: Berg. Graef, Chris. 2008, July 8. ‘Dr. Richard St. Germaine, “Our Elders Warned Us”,’ in Paul Demaine (ed.), News from Indian Country. http://indiancountrynews.net. Accessed July 13, 2008. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1940. “The Spirits of the Dead in Saulteaux Life and Thought.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 70(1): 29–51. Hallowell A. Irving. 1942. The Role of Conjuring in Saulteaux Society. Publications of the Philadelphia Anthropological Society 2. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Anthropological Society. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1960. ‘Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour and World View,’ in S. Diamond (ed.), Culture in History: Essays in Honour of Paul Radin. New York: Columbia University Press. Hallowell, A. Irving. 2010. Contributions to Ojibwe Studies: Essays, 1934–1972, in Jennifer S. H. Brown and Susan Elaine Gray (eds.). Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology, Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray (eds.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

“Are all stones alive?” 191 Harms, Patricia. 2012. “The Political Economy of the Modern Fur Trade.” Conference Paper. Rupertsland Research Colloquium, Winnipeg, 2010. Henare, Amira, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.). 2007. Thinking through Things: Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Jackson, Michael (ed.). 1996. Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993 [1991]. We Have Never Been Modern. Harlow: Longman. Latour, Bruno. 2000. ‘When Things Strike Back: A Possible Contribution of “Science Studies” to Social Sciences,’ British Journal of Sociology 51(1): 107–123. Long, John. 1922 (1791). ‘John Long’s Voyages and Travels in the Years 1768–1788,’ in Milo Milton Quaife (ed.). Lakeside Classics. Chicago: Lakeside Press, R.R. Donnelley and Sons Company. Mack, John. 2003. The Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures. London: British Museum Press. Matthews, Maureen. 2016. Naamiwan’s Drum: The Story of Contested Anishinaabe Repatriation of Anishinaabe Artefacts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Matthews, Maureen, and Roger Roulette. 2003. ‘Fair Wind’s Dream: Naamiwan Obawaajigewin,’ in Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert (eds.), Reading beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, 2nd edition. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press: 263–292. McKinley, Valerie. 2007, July. ‘Object Information,’ University of Winnipeg Anthropology Museum documentation, University of Winnipeg Archives. 13 pages. Nichols, John D., and Earl Nyholm. 1995. A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peers, Laura L. 1994. The Ojibwa of Western Canada: 1740 to 1870. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Phillips, Ruth B. and Janet Catherine Berlo. 1995. ‘Our (Museum) World Turned Upside Down: Re-presenting Native American Arts,’ Art Bulletin 77(1):6–24. Rapport, Nigel. 1998. “The Potential for Human Rights in a Post Colonial World.” Social Anthropology 6(3):381–388. Riding In, James. 2000. ‘Repatriation: A Pawnee’s Perspective,’ in Devon A. Mihesuah (ed.), Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Roulette, Roger. 2005. References are to conversations, taped interviews, or editing suggestions, dated where possible. I simply could not have done this work without Roger’s enthusiastic assistance. Samson, Colin. 2001. ‘Rights as the Reward for Simulated Cultural Sameness: The Innu of the Canadian Colonial Context,’ in Jane Cowan, Marie-Benedicte Dembour, and Richard Wilson (eds.), Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 226–248. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Studies in Melanesian Anthropology, 6. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. ‘Losing (Out on) Intellectual Resources,’ in Martha Mundy and Alain Pottage (eds.), Fabrications: The Techniques of Ownership. London: London School of Economics Modern Law Review. Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. ‘The Whole Person and Its Artifacts,’ Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 1–19.

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Index

Aboriginal Australians 8, 15, 17–18, 25, 45, 59, 83, 156–170 Abram, David 4 activism 46, 122–123, 129, 185, 187 Actor-Network Theory 45, 46, 96, 108, 176 adjusted styles of communication 7, 35–49 aesthetics 81, 99, 157, 162, 166, 170, 179 agency 9, 20, 40, 55, 57, 94, 101–102, 142–143, 177, 181–184, 186, 187, 188, 189 Alberti, Benjamin 57–58, 61, 135, 136, 138, 142 Allen, Chadwick 10 Allen, Michael J. 62, 64, 65, 70 Allison, Anne 94 altered states of consciousness 7, 37, 48 alterity, othering 1, 3, 5, 18, 19, 23, 27, 28, 29, 33, 35, 37, 41, 59, 61, 76, 77, 78, 83, 85, 89–90, 92, 97, 99, 104, 106, 108, 119, 121, 127, 133, 135, 157, 173 Amazonia 15, 17–19, 28, 58, 76, 77 American Indian Movement 185 amulets 89 analogism 6, 15–16, 19, 20, 22, 44, 59, 136 Anangu 160, 165 ancestors 4, 15–16, 17, 19, 22, 36, 39–40, 47, 48, 61, 65–66, 69, 70, 122, 133, 157, 164, 165, 169, 179, 189n1 animals xiv, 5, 6, 8, 15–23, 28, 31–32, 35, 36–39, 45–47, 48, 66–68, 76, 78, 94, 95, 96, 102, 107, 119, 122–123, 125, 134, 137, 138, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146, 156, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 180

animation continuum 8, 97–107 Anishinaabeg 2, 5, 8–9, 36, 43–45, 46–47, 49, 78, 83, 117–118, 119, 124, 125, 142, 173–189 Anthropocene 5–6 anthropocentric 3, 38, 43 anthropomorphism see projection apprenticeship 167, 170 Aranda 17–18, 19 Araweté 19, 41 archaeology 3, 7, 9, 55–71, 86, 119, 121, 147 Arnold, Kyle 133 Arnold, Philip 135, 145 Asquith, Pamela J. 96 Astor-Aguilera, Miguel 4, 8, 58, 133–149 Bainbridge, William S. 85 Barad, Karen 4, 59, 60 Bardi 8, 156–170 Bell, Catherine 186 Bennett, Gordon 162 Bennett, Jane 59, 60, 61 Benton-Banai, Eddie 185–189 Berens, William 174 Berlo, Janet C. 187 Bessire, Lucas 120–121 Bhabha, Homi K. 166 bimaadiziwin (good life) 118 Bird-David, Nurit 6, 7, 25–34, 40, 44, 49, 97–98, 135, 143, 148 birds 21, 36, 125, 157, 164, 178, 183, 184 Blackfeet 8, 115–130 Black Rogers, Mary 180, 183 Blok, Anders 96, 97 Blood, Narcisse 123–124 Boas, Franz U. 173 Boivin, Nicole 78

194

Index

Bond, David 120–121 bones xiv, 19, 62, 65, 66, 85–88, 100, 180 Borges, Jorge L. 18 Bowker, John 42 Boyer, Pascal 101 Braidotti, Rosi 59, 60–61 breath xiv, 133–149, 159, 160 Brown, Jennifer 118, 179, 184 Bruce, Albert 4 Buddhists 94–96, 97, 100–101, 105, 107 Canadian Cultural Property Export Act 188 capacities 60, 67–68, 69, 134 capitalism xv, 9, 40, 94 cathexis 97–101, 104, 105 causation 142–143, 181 Causey, Andrew 167 Cavanaugh, William 42 ceremony / ritual 16, 19, 20, 21, 42, 44, 45, 49, 62, 77, 81, 83, 85, 97, 99–100, 101, 106, 115–116, 124, 125–126, 127–128, 144, 145, 159, 162–163, 165–166, 176, 178, 188 chalk 62, 69, 70 Champagne, Duane 120 chants 30–32, 48 Charbonnier, Pierre 4 Chewong 30–32 China 18, 22, 23n3, 95, 99, 140, 141 Christians xiii, xiv, 4, 42, 75–92, 135, 136, 139–140, 144, 148, 159, 185, 187 Cipolla, Craig 56, 61 clans 15, 17, 19–20, 22, 44–47, 83, 166, 180 Cleal, Rosamund 61, 67 Comaroff, Jean and John 133, 143 commodities 94, 103, 126 communication 7, 22, 35–49, 84, 104, 106, 117, 118, 136, 137, 140, 143, 163, 168, 177 companion animals 5 cosmograms 96 cosmology 4, 8, 20, 25, 28, 30, 33, 39, 40, 43, 46, 47, 58, 85, 96, 128, 133–149, 157–158, 163–164, 168–171, 173, 175, 184 Cowan, Jane K. 186 Crane, Susan 186–187 Crellin, Rachel J. 7, 55–71 Croissant, Doris 100

Crowther, Paul 162, 167 Cuba 57, 87 dancing 39, 48, 99, 103, 107, 160, 166 d’Andrade, Roy 162, 168 Darvill, Timothy 61, 64, 65 Darwin, Charles 35, 49 decolonization 128–129, 142 DeLanda, Manuel 59, 60 Deleuze, Gilles 59–61, 71 Dembour, Marie-Bénédicte 186 Dennett, Daniel 177 Descartes, René 148 Descola, Philippe 6, 15–24, 28, 44, 46, 59, 61, 70, 136 Detwiler, Fritz 134, 135, 136, 143, 148 devotion 7, 21, 75–92 difference 3, 5–6, 7, 8, 18, 19, 21, 31–32, 36, 41, 45, 47, 58–59, 60–61, 78, 84–86, 90, 91, 99, 101, 108, 129, 133–136, 142, 148, 149, 167, 168 Dinka 20, 23n2 disenchantment 94 distributed personhood 182–183 dividuals 2, 4, 27–28, 44, 49, 181 divination 22, 57 docility 99–99, 101–103, 105 Doctrine of Christian Discovery xiv–xv Dolphijn, Rick 59 Domhoff, G. William 168 Douglas, Mary 39, 41 Dreaming(s), The 15, 17, 163, 169 dreams 16, 141, 145, 163, 167–168, 180 Droogan, Julian 148 drums 9, 44, 48, 176–189 Durkheim, Emile 18, 40, 83–84, 87, 148 economics xv, 49, 58, 97, 159 elders 8, 36, 43–44, 125, 126, 128, 130, 134, 148, 156, 176, 179, 187 Ellis, Rebecca 161 embodied relatedness 149, 163 embodiment 22, 41, 83, 99, 104, 109n4, 125, 133, 135, 136, 137, 149, 162–163, 164, 182–183 enchantment 89, 94 environmental rights 122–123 Evans-Pritchard, Edward 144 ex votos 71, 81, 83, 90 Fabian, Johannes 166 Faure, Bernard 100 fear of matter 87

Index fetish(ism) 7, 75–92 Fienup-Riordan, Ann 118 Fogelson, Raymond 177 forests xiv, 4, 25, 26, 28, 30–32, 37, 39, 40, 47, 120, 134, 146 Fowles, Severin 58 Frazer, James G. 85, 139 Frow, John 99–100 fungi 36, 39–40, 146–147 Gardner, Peter 31 Geertz, Armin 121–122 Geertz, Clifford 117 Gell, Alfred 1, 2, 83, 100, 101, 137, 173, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182–183 Geraci, Robert M. 96–97 Gergen, Kenneth 137, 144 gifts, giving xiv, 40, 44, 47, 48, 49, 79, 80–81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 90, 91, 124, 125–126, 144, 173 Gillings, Joshua 69 Giraldo Herrera, César E. 4 Glaskin, Katie 8, 133, 143, 149, 156–170 Glowacka, Maria 140 Goddard, Ives 181 González-Torres, Yolotl 141–142 good life 118, 125 Gosden, Chris 188 Graeber, David 89, 90 Graef, Chris 185 Grasseni, Cristina 156–157, 166–167, 170 Grimes, Ronald 49 Gross, Lawrence 118 Grosz, Elizabeth 59, 60 Guattari, Félix 59–61 Guth, Christine M. E. 99 Guthrie, Stewart 149 Gygi, Fabio R. 8, 94–109 Halbmayer, Ernst 142, 146, 149 Hallowell, A. Irving 2, 5, 8, 25, 28, 36, 40, 43–44, 49, 78, 117–119, 124, 134, 135–136, 137, 142, 143, 145, 148, 173–180, 181, 189n1 Hamilakis, Yannis 68 Hanson, Robin 37 Harman, Graham 57 Harris, La Donna 120 Harris, Oliver J.T. 7, 55–71, 136–138, 141, 148 Harrison, Simon J. 19–20 Harrod, James 38 Hartney, Chris 42–43

195

Harvey, Graham 7, 15, 35–49, 78, 82, 90, 97, 108, 119, 122, 129, 135, 137, 140, 143, 144, 146 Haudenosaunee xiii–xvi healing 81, 94, 105–107, 145, 178 Heavy Head, Ryan 124 Heidegger, Martin 101 Henare, Amira 1, 177 Herbert, Zbigniew 99 Hicks, Dan 86 Hills, Ben 97 Hirata, Oriza 105 Holbraad, Martin 1, 57–58, 144, 148, 177 Hopi 140 Hornborg, Alf 138 Howell, Nancy 38 Howell, Signe 30–32 human likeness 35, 36, 37–41, 46, 104, 106–107, 108, 119 human rights 186 Huron 139 iconoclasm 76–77 indigenizing 10 Indigenous Research (Methods) 115–130 individuals 1, 4, 9, 15, 17, 27–28, 33, 42–43, 46, 48, 49, 85, 102, 105, 125, 126, 133, 134, 143–145, 186 Ingold, Tim 59, 60, 76, 78, 87, 91, 134–135, 137, 138, 144–145, 147, 148 interiority 4, 7, 15, 20, 42, 46, 48, 100, 107 intersubjectivity 6, 8, 43, 47, 82, 90, 133, 134, 135, 143–144, 148 Ishiguro, Hiroshi 103–105 istawa’pii (success) 125 Jackson, Michael 173 Jahnke, Robert 10 Japan 8, 94–109 Jawi 8, 158–159, 161, 165, 169, 170 Jensen, Casper B. 96–97 Johnson, Mark 141, 142 Johnson, Paul C. 10, 89–90 Jones, Andrew M. 78, 134 Kanaka Maoli 15–16, 20–22 Katsuno, Hirofumi 104, 105–106, 108 Kattunayaka 26, 27 Kawada, Junzō 99 Keen, Ian 133, 157

196

Index

Keeper, Alec (Kiiwiich) 173 Kerr, Nancy H. 168 King, Thomas 46 kinship 2, 4, 6–7, 17, 20, 22, 25–34, 35, 48, 133, 143, 169 Kita, Shinichi 101 Knab, Timothy 138, 139, 141–142, 143 Knowles, Chantal 188 Kohn, Eduardo 4, 120 Kopenawa, Davi 4 Kubo, Akinori 102–103 Kuroda, Toshio 95 Lakoff, George 141, 142 Lakota 48–49, 126–127, 128 LaPier, Rosalyn 123–124 Latour, Bruno 1–2, 5, 17, 25–26, 35, 40, 41, 45, 46, 57, 58, 67, 76, 84, 88–89, 96, 108, 138, 139, 176, 177, 188 Law, John 85–86 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 18, 29 licensed insanity 42 Lienhardt, Godfrey 20 Linnaeus, Carl 37 listening 5, 66, 143, 167 Little Bear, Leroy 123 living things xiii–xiv, 135, 177 Lokensgard, Kenneth H. 8, 115–130 Long, John 45, 175 Mack, John 177 Malafouris, Lambros 98–99 Malagasy 69 Manambu 19–20 Mandler, George 162 Māori 47–48, 122 Marett, Robert 140 Marriott, McKim 2 Marshall, Yvonne 57–58, 135, 136, 138, 143 Matthews, Maureen 8–9, 44, 173–189 Mauss, Marcel 27 Maya 2–3, 8, 133–149 McGrew, William C. 38–39 McKinley, Valerie 188 medicine bundles 58, 125–126, 128 Melanesia 2, 19–20 Merlan, Francesca 139, 170 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 167, 170 Mesoamerica 2–3, 8, 133–149 Metzger, Deena 108 Mexica (Aztec) 137, 138, 139 microbes 4 Midewiwin 178, 180, 185, 187

Miyamoto, Yuri 168–169 Moderns 1–2, 7, 9–10, 26, 28, 29, 35, 41–42, 46–47, 48, 49, 57, 84, 143 Mol, Annemarie 99 Monaghan, John 136, 145 morphogenesis 60 Morphy, Howard 157, 162–163, 165, 166 Morrison, Kenneth M. 2, 35, 43, 47, 134, 137, 142 museums 9, 44, 60, 81, 86, 89, 176–189 mutuality 1, 7, 8, 17, 25, 28, 35, 47, 49, 82, 109, 125, 133 Myers, Fred 135, 169 mythology xiii, 16, 17, 30, 30–33, 42, 91, 122, 169 Naamiwan (John Owen) 177–189 NAGPRA 186 Napoleon, Val 186 Native Hawaiians 15–16, 20–22 naturalism 6, 15–16, 22, 44, 59, 61, 136 nature/culture 36, 75, 121 Naveh, Daniel 30–33 Nayaka 26–33, 49 new fetishism 91 new materialism 7, 35, 56, 59–61, 66, 70–71 Nietzsche, Friedrich 133–134 Niitsitapiiksi 8, 115–130 Nisbett, Richard E. 168–169 Object Orientated Ontology 57 Offering see gifts, giving Ojibwa / Ojibwe see Anishinaabeg Olsen, Bjørnar 57, 101 Omishoosh (Charlie George Owen) 178–187 opacity 97–101, 103 Orsi, Robert A. 42 Owen, Nelson and Elaine 187–188 Paddy, Sandy and Esther 164 Paliyans 31 Palmer, Edwina 95–96 Pálsson, Gisli 135, 148 Pard, Allan 126, 128, 130 Parker Pearson, Mike 61–66, 68, 69 parliament of things 2, 108 Paterson, Robert K. 186 Pauketat, Timothy 58 Pels, Peter 86, 87, 89, 90, 91 Pepion, Don 123 Perkins, Morgan 162–163

Index personification see projection perspectivism 16, 18, 19, 23n2, 28, 41, 57–58, 61, 133–134, 138, 145–148 Peruvians 138 Phillips, Ruth B. 187 Pietz, William 88 Pintupi 169 plants 6, 8, 17, 19, 20–21, 22, 32, 47, 66, 67–68, 134, 137, 138, 139, 145, 146–147 Plato 37, 139 Plumwood, Val 46, 48 Pollard, Mark 64, 69 pots 57–58, 62, 64 power 20, 22, 40–41, 48, 51, 57, 66, 70, 75, 77, 82, 88–92, 95, 96, 100, 124, 134, 139, 140, 141, 157, 163, 165–166, 169–170, 173, 177, 178, 182, 183, 186–187, 189 primitivism xii, 43, 77–78, 86, 91, 122, 148, 175, 177 Prohl, Inken 95–96 projection and anthropomorphism 6, 15–17, 20–21, 22–23, 35, 40–41, 42, 46, 57, 81, 83, 90–91, 95–109, 118–119, 134, 142–143, 148, 175–176, 177, 181, 184, 188 Pueblos 58 purity 5, 9, 17, 38–39, 41–42, 90, 99–100, 107, 109 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 133, 165 Rambelli, Fabio 97, 100, 109n1 Ramilisonina 65, 68 Rapport, Nigel 186 recalcitrance 98, 101–103, 105, 188 reciprocity 80–81, 91, 100, 120, 122, 123–126, 126–130, 144 Redfield, Robert 133, 137 re-enchantment 89, 94 relational accountability 119, 127, 129 religion, defining xii–xiv, 38–39, 41, 42–43, 58, 66, 77–78, 83, 85, 128, 135, 138, 146, 175 Renfrew, Colin 64–65, 99 repatriation 9, 176–177, 179, 182, 183–189 representation 18, 42, 55, 57, 79, 83–84, 87, 92, 96, 100, 162 respect xiii–xiv, 8, 30, 44, 46, 47–48, 49, 77, 109, 120, 125, 127, 130, 134, 148, 176, 179, 180 Ricoeur, Paul 117, 130 Riding In, James 186

197

rights 45, 47, 55, 108, 122, 158, 177, 178, 185–187 ritual see ceremony ritual studies 86 Robb, John 136–138, 141, 148 Robb, John 137–142 Robertson, Jennifer 94–95, 96, 103, 108 robotics 8, 94–109 romanticism 43, 46, 120–123, 129, 136 Rose, Deborah B. 45–46 Rouja, Philippe 159–161 Roulette, Roger 8–9, 173–189 sacred xiii–xv, 7, 10, 87, 97, 134, 137, 143, 148, 157, 176, 182, 184, 187 Sahlins, Marshall 2, 6–7, 15–24, 25, 27, 29, 40–41, 48, 59, 133, 142, 143 Salmon, Gildas 1, 4 Saltwater people 8, 156–170 Sanders, Andy 134, 141, 142, 149 Saulteaux see Anishinaabeg Scheduled Tribes 26–33 Scott, Michael 136, 138, 146, 148 seen/unseen 8, 100, 136, 144, 157, 162–166 separatism 7, 9, 35–49 Sepik peoples 19–20 Serres, Michel 67 shamans, shamanism 7, 16, 36–37, 48–49, 145, 148 shape-shifters 136–138, 145, 147 Shibata, Masayoshi 103 Shimazono, Susumu 95 Shinto 8, 94–97, 109 Sillar, Bill 140 Simonden, Gilbert 60 singing 21, 39, 46, 48, 81, 157, 163, 166, 188 Skafish, Peter 4 Slotkin, Jason 122 Smith, Eric A. 27 Smith, Jonathan Z. 128 Smith, Linda T. 128–130 Smithsonian Institution 99 Snyder, Gary 49 Sommer, Volker 38–39 souls 4, 22, 77, 133–149, 163, 175 species-societies 28, 30 speculative futurism 121 spirits xiv, 3, 15, 40, 45, 75, 77, 91, 94, 95, 108, 133, 138–140, 144, 145, 148, 157, 163–164, 168, 169–170, 175, 178–179, 183, 185, 188 Spyer, Patricia 75

198

Index

Stark, Rodney 85 statues 7, 10, 42, 75–92, 98, 100, 101, 109n1 Stocking, George W. 173 Stonehenge 7, 55–71 stones 8, 23n3, 28, 40, 43–44, 55–71, 78, 85–88, 134, 143, 169, 173–189 Strathern, Marilyn 1, 2, 27, 44, 137, 176, 177, 181–182, 185–186, 189 Strehlow, Theodore G. H. 18 Stringer, Martin D. 175 structuralism 18, 60, 95 successful living 118, 125, 127, 128 suspended animation 100 suspension of disbelief 173 sustainability 3, 8, 130 symbolism 18, 23n3, 38, 42, 57, 83, 99–100 taboos 38–39, 45, 49, 77, 83 tea ceremony 99 Tezuka, Osamu 103 Thomas, Julian 56–57, 58, 62 Thomson, Donald 166 Three Fires Society 184–185, 186, 187, 188, 189 Thunder-persons 20, 22, 28, 165, 178–179, 183, 184 Toritani, Naoshi 106–107 totems / totemism 15–20, 22, 36, 44–47, 49, 59, 83–84, 88, 158 trance 30, 81 transformation 20, 46, 57–58, 60, 67, 70, 91, 101, 108, 137, 138, 140–141, 157, 164–165, 180–181 Tresch, John 96 Tsing, Anna 39–40 Turner, Terence 133–134, 137, 138–139, 149 Turner, Victor 128 Tylor, Edward B. xii, 3, 77–78, 84, 85, 86, 91, 139, 140, 175 Umehara, Takeshi 95

Valeri, Valerio 20–21, 140 van der Tuin, Iris 59 vibrancy 55, 59, 60, 70, 81 Virgin Mary 7, 75–92 visible/invisible see seen/unseen visual perception 156–170 vital essences 8, 133–149 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1, 7, 16, 25, 26, 28, 57, 61, 77, 85, 137, 138–139, 142, 147 volition, will 4, 8, 70, 101, 107, 122, 123, 133–134, 177, 181, 183, 188 Wagner, Roy 133, 186 walking back 188 Wang, Aihe 22 Wasilewski, Jacqueline 120 Wastell, Sari 1, 177 Weber, Max 94 Weibel, Peter 2, 40 West Africans 89 Weston, Kath 4 Whanganui River 36, 47–48, 122 Whitehead, Amy R. 7–8, 75–92 Whittle, Alasdair 64, 68 Wiggan, David 164 Wilkinson, Darryl 58, 97, 121, 136, 142, 144 Willerslev, Rane 6, 136, 137, 138, 139–140, 142, 148, 163, 167–168 Willis, Christie 62, 65–66 Wilson, Richard 186 Wilson, Sean 115–116, 119, 120, 128–129 Wishnie, Mark 27 Witmore, Christopher L. 57 wood 21, 55, 61–62, 66–70, 79, 83, 85–88, 91, 158, 166, 180 worldview see cosmology Yolngu 162–163, 165 Young, Diana 157, 160, 165 Yup’ik 118 Zedeño, María 133, 134, 137, 143