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Amazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged "western" understandings of man's place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also "things" such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, Animism in Rainforest and Tundra offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas.
The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processesof their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Stephen Hugh-Jones
Maps
Introduction: Animism and Invisible Worlds: The Place of Non-humans in Indigenous Ontologies
Marc Brightman, Vanessa Elisa Grotti and Olga Ulturgasheva
Chapter 1. Too Many Owners: Mastery and Ownership in Amazonia
Carlos Fausto
Chapter 2. Revisiting the Animism versus Totemism Debate: Fabricating Persons among the Eveny and Chukchi of North-eastern Siberia
Rane Willerslev and Olga Ulturgasheva
Chapter 3. Animism and the Meanings of Life: Reflections from Amazonia
Laura Rival
Chapter 4. Stories about Evenki People and their Dogs: Communication through Sharing Contexts
Tatiana Safonova and István Sántha
Chapter 5. Making Animals into Food among the Kanamari of Western Amazonia
Luiz Costa
Chapter 6. 'Spirit-charged' Animals in Siberia
Alexandra Lavrillier
Chapter 7. Shamans, Animals and Enemies: Human and Non-Human Agency in an Amazonian Cosmos of Alterity
Casey High
Chapter 8. Expressions and Experiences of Personhood: Spatiality and Objects in the Nenets Tundra Home
Vera Skvirskaja
Chapter 9. Humanity, Personhood and Transformability in Northern Amazonia
Vanessa Elissa Grotti and Marc Brightman
Chapter 10. Masked Predation, Hierarchy and the Scaling of Extractive Relations in Inner Asia and Beyond
Katherine Swancutt
Afterword
Piers Vitebsky
Notes on Contributors
Index
Marc Brightman is Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. His research, based on fieldwork among the Trio, Wayana, and Akuriyo of southern Suriname and French Guiana, covers subjects including indigenous leadership, native Amazonian forms of ownership, and the politics of conservation.
Vanessa Elisa Grotti is currently British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at ISCA (Oxford). She has also been Research Fellow at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (EHESS-College de France, Paris) and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Olga Ulturgasheva is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology and Polar Studies at Clare Hall and Research Associate of Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. Her ethnographic monograph is currently titled "Ideas of the Future among Young Eveny in Northeastern Siberia" (Berghahn Books, in preparation).
"This is an extremely interesting collection of papers which takes our understanding of animism forward considerably. Pre-scientific ideas abound in religion. The Bible's focus on sacrifice has roots here, and what is 'idolatry' but nature religion giving human characteristics to divinities and even trees, the Asherah."
- Journal of Beliefs and Values
"This exciting book [...] offers an excellent introduction to the main theoretical problem that the book addresses – "the anthropology of nature." [...] there is a lot of rich material here on how Siberian and Amazonian peoples create lives and communities out of inter-species relations and inter-species communicative practices that involve rural, frontier landscapes [...] I highly recommend this book for its rich ethnography and theory, and for its fruitful comparative perspective."
- Sibirica
"[This volume] brings a comparative framework to the anthropological investigation of what humanity, personhood, and nature each mean in the twenty-first century [...] This thoughtful volume is extraordinarily rich and will prompt all of us interested in these questions to think about them from fresh perspectives."
- Anthropological Forum: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology
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