If Not all Stones Are Alive…
Radical Relationality in Animism Studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.31066Keywords:
animism, personhood, relations, ontologyAbstract
Irving Hallowell’s conversation with an Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) elder in the early twentieth century has gained increasing attention in recent decades. It has been cited by many involved in the multi-disciplinary “turns” to ontology, materiality and relationality. In particular, it has inspired many researchers involved in the “new (approach to) animism”. This article considers efforts to rethink what “person” or “relation” might mean – in the light of Indigenous ontologies and of the ferment of reflection and analysis offered by many colleagues. It proposes that we have not yet sufficiently understood what the elder intended by telling Hallowell that only some stones are animate. A more radically relational understanding of personhood has implications for the ways in which we approach and engage with/in nature, culture, science and religion.
References
Altieri, Pia. 2000. ‘Knowledge, Negotiation and NAGPRA: Reconceptualizing Repatriation Discourse(s)’, in Peter Edge and Graham Harvey (eds.), Law and Religion in Contemporary Society: Communities, Individualism and the State (Aldershot: Ashgate): 129-49.
Bird-David, Nurit. 1999, ‘“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology’, Current Anthropology 40 (Supplement): S67-S91. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/200061.
Bird-David, Nurit. 2015. ‘Animism: Scales of Practice and Imagination’, paper presented at ‘The Familiar and the Strange of Personhood’ session at the American Anthropological Association meeting, Denver.
Brant, Beth. 1990. ‘Recovery and Transformation: The Blue Heron’, in Rose Brewer and Lisa Albrecht (eds.), Bridges of Power (Gabiola: New Society Publishing): 118-21.
Buchli, Victor (ed.). 2002. The Material Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg).
Descola, Philippe. 1992. ‘Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society’, in Adam Kuper (ed.), Conceptualizing Society (London: Routledge):107-26.
Descola, Philippe. 1996. ‘Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice’, in P. Descola and G. Pálsson (eds.), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge): 82-102. Doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203451069_chapter_5.
Descola, Philippe. 2013. ‘Beyond Nature and Culture’, in Harvey 2013a: 77-91.
Fulbright, John. 1992. ‘Hopi and Zuni Prayer-Sticks: Magic, Symbolic Texts, Barter or Self-Sacri?ce?’, Religion 22: 221-34. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0048-721X(92)90018-Y.
Graeber, David. 2005. ‘Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes are Gods in the Process of Construction’, Anthropological Theory 5.4: 407-38. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499605059230.
Guthrie, S. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Halbmayer, Ernst (ed.). 2012. ‘Debating Animism, Perspectivism and the Construction of Ontologies’, Special Journal Issue: Indiana 29: 9-23.
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): 19-52.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge): 149-81.
Haraway, Donna. 2000. ‘Birth of the Kennel: A Lecture by Donna Haraway. August 2000’, European Graduate School. Online: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/birth-of-the-kennel/.
Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signi?cant Otherness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Haraway, Donna. 2015. ‘Preface’, in Kaori Nagai, Karen Jones, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Caroline Rooney, and Charlotte Sleigh (eds.), Cosmopolitan Animals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan): vii-xiv.
Harvey, Graham (ed.). 2003. Shamanism: A Reader (London: Routledge).
Harvey, Graham. 2010. ‘Animism Rather Than Shamanism: New Approaches to What Shamans Do (for Other Animists)’, in Bettina Schmidt and Lucy Huskinson (eds.), New Interpretations of Spirit Possession (London: Continuum): 14-34.
Harvey, Graham. 2013a. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (New York: Routledge).
Harvey, Graham. 2013b. Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (New York: Routledge).
Henare [Salmond], Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.). 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge).
Hornborg, A. 2011. Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World (London: Routledge).
Ingold, Tim. 1996a. ‘Growing Plants and Raising Animals: An Anthropological Perspective on Domestication’, in D.H. Harris (ed.), The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia (London: UCL Press): 12-24.
Ingold, Tim. 1996b. ‘Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment’, in R.F. Ellen and K. Fukui (eds.), Rede?ning Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication (Oxford: Berg): 117-55.
Ingold, Tim. 1998, ‘Totemism, Animism, and the Depiction of Animals’, in Marketta Seppälä, Jari-Pekka Vanhala and Linda Weintraub (eds.), Animals, Anima, Animus (Pori: Pori Art Museum): 181-207.
Ingold, Tim. 2006. ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought’. Ethnos 71.1: 9-20. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840600603111.
Ingold, Tim. 2007a. ‘Materials Against Materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues 14.1: 1-16. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127.
Ingold, Tim. 2007b. ‘Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 13 (Supplement): S19-S38. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00401.x.
Ingold, Tim. 2013. ‘Being Alive to a World without Objects’, in Harvey 2013a: 213-25.
Jenness, Diamond. 1935. The Ojibwa Indians of Parry Island, Their Social and Religious Life, Canada Department of Mines (National Museum of Canada Bulletin, 78; Anthropological Series, 17; Ottawa: J.O. Patenaude).
King, Thomas. 2003. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf).
Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press).
Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel (eds.). 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Miller, Daniel. 2005. Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386711.
Morrison, Kenneth. 1992. ‘Beyond the Supernatural: Language and Religious Action’, Religion 22.3: 201-205. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0048-721X(92)90016-W.
Morrison, Kenneth. 2000. ‘The Cosmos as Intersubjective: Native American and Other-than-Human Persons’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions: A Companion (London: Cassell): 23-36.
Morrison, Kenneth. 2002. The Solidarity of Kin (Albany: SUNY Press).
Morrison, Kenneth. 2013. ‘Animism and a Proposal for a Post-Cartesian Anthropology’, in Harvey 2013a: 38-52.
Neurath, Johannes. 2015. ‘Shifting Ontologies in Huichol Ritual and Art’, Anthropology and Humanism 40.1: 58-71. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12068.
Pedersen, M.A. 2001. ‘Totemism, Animism and North Asian Indigenous Ontologies’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7.3: 411-27. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00070.
Plumwood, Val. 2000. ‘Surviving a Crocodile Attack’, Utne Reader. Online: http://www.utne.com/arts/being-prey.aspx.
Rose, D. 1998. ‘Totemism, Regions, and Co-management in Aboriginal Australia’, paper presented at ‘Crossing Boundaries’, the 7th annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 10-14 June. Online: http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/1187/rose.pdf.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2014. ‘On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture’, Hau 4.1: 281-90. Doi: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.013.
Salmond, Amiria J.M. 2014. ‘Transforming Translations (part 2): Addressing Ontological Alterity’, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4.1: 155-87. Doi: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.006.
Scott, Michael. 2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands (Durham: Carolina Academic Press).
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520064232.001.0001.
Tawhai, Te Pakaka. 2002 [1988]. ‘Maori Religion’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Readings in Indigenous Religions (London: Continuum): 238-49.
Tsing, Anna L. 2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Tsing, Anna L. 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): 47-66. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444324426.ch4.
Tylor, Edward B. 1958 [1871]. Primitive Culture. Vol. 1, Religion in Primitive Culture (New York: Harper & Row).
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3: 469-88. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157.
Whitehead, A.R. 2013. Religious Objects and Performance: Testing the Role of Materiality (London: Bloomsbury).
Bird-David, Nurit. 1999, ‘“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology’, Current Anthropology 40 (Supplement): S67-S91. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/200061.
Bird-David, Nurit. 2015. ‘Animism: Scales of Practice and Imagination’, paper presented at ‘The Familiar and the Strange of Personhood’ session at the American Anthropological Association meeting, Denver.
Brant, Beth. 1990. ‘Recovery and Transformation: The Blue Heron’, in Rose Brewer and Lisa Albrecht (eds.), Bridges of Power (Gabiola: New Society Publishing): 118-21.
Buchli, Victor (ed.). 2002. The Material Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg).
Descola, Philippe. 1992. ‘Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society’, in Adam Kuper (ed.), Conceptualizing Society (London: Routledge):107-26.
Descola, Philippe. 1996. ‘Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice’, in P. Descola and G. Pálsson (eds.), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge): 82-102. Doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203451069_chapter_5.
Descola, Philippe. 2013. ‘Beyond Nature and Culture’, in Harvey 2013a: 77-91.
Fulbright, John. 1992. ‘Hopi and Zuni Prayer-Sticks: Magic, Symbolic Texts, Barter or Self-Sacri?ce?’, Religion 22: 221-34. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0048-721X(92)90018-Y.
Graeber, David. 2005. ‘Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes are Gods in the Process of Construction’, Anthropological Theory 5.4: 407-38. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499605059230.
Guthrie, S. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Halbmayer, Ernst (ed.). 2012. ‘Debating Animism, Perspectivism and the Construction of Ontologies’, Special Journal Issue: Indiana 29: 9-23.
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): 19-52.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge): 149-81.
Haraway, Donna. 2000. ‘Birth of the Kennel: A Lecture by Donna Haraway. August 2000’, European Graduate School. Online: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/birth-of-the-kennel/.
Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signi?cant Otherness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Haraway, Donna. 2015. ‘Preface’, in Kaori Nagai, Karen Jones, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Caroline Rooney, and Charlotte Sleigh (eds.), Cosmopolitan Animals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan): vii-xiv.
Harvey, Graham (ed.). 2003. Shamanism: A Reader (London: Routledge).
Harvey, Graham. 2010. ‘Animism Rather Than Shamanism: New Approaches to What Shamans Do (for Other Animists)’, in Bettina Schmidt and Lucy Huskinson (eds.), New Interpretations of Spirit Possession (London: Continuum): 14-34.
Harvey, Graham. 2013a. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (New York: Routledge).
Harvey, Graham. 2013b. Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (New York: Routledge).
Henare [Salmond], Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.). 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge).
Hornborg, A. 2011. Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World (London: Routledge).
Ingold, Tim. 1996a. ‘Growing Plants and Raising Animals: An Anthropological Perspective on Domestication’, in D.H. Harris (ed.), The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia (London: UCL Press): 12-24.
Ingold, Tim. 1996b. ‘Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment’, in R.F. Ellen and K. Fukui (eds.), Rede?ning Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication (Oxford: Berg): 117-55.
Ingold, Tim. 1998, ‘Totemism, Animism, and the Depiction of Animals’, in Marketta Seppälä, Jari-Pekka Vanhala and Linda Weintraub (eds.), Animals, Anima, Animus (Pori: Pori Art Museum): 181-207.
Ingold, Tim. 2006. ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought’. Ethnos 71.1: 9-20. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840600603111.
Ingold, Tim. 2007a. ‘Materials Against Materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues 14.1: 1-16. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127.
Ingold, Tim. 2007b. ‘Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 13 (Supplement): S19-S38. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00401.x.
Ingold, Tim. 2013. ‘Being Alive to a World without Objects’, in Harvey 2013a: 213-25.
Jenness, Diamond. 1935. The Ojibwa Indians of Parry Island, Their Social and Religious Life, Canada Department of Mines (National Museum of Canada Bulletin, 78; Anthropological Series, 17; Ottawa: J.O. Patenaude).
King, Thomas. 2003. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf).
Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press).
Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel (eds.). 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Miller, Daniel. 2005. Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386711.
Morrison, Kenneth. 1992. ‘Beyond the Supernatural: Language and Religious Action’, Religion 22.3: 201-205. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0048-721X(92)90016-W.
Morrison, Kenneth. 2000. ‘The Cosmos as Intersubjective: Native American and Other-than-Human Persons’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions: A Companion (London: Cassell): 23-36.
Morrison, Kenneth. 2002. The Solidarity of Kin (Albany: SUNY Press).
Morrison, Kenneth. 2013. ‘Animism and a Proposal for a Post-Cartesian Anthropology’, in Harvey 2013a: 38-52.
Neurath, Johannes. 2015. ‘Shifting Ontologies in Huichol Ritual and Art’, Anthropology and Humanism 40.1: 58-71. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12068.
Pedersen, M.A. 2001. ‘Totemism, Animism and North Asian Indigenous Ontologies’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7.3: 411-27. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00070.
Plumwood, Val. 2000. ‘Surviving a Crocodile Attack’, Utne Reader. Online: http://www.utne.com/arts/being-prey.aspx.
Rose, D. 1998. ‘Totemism, Regions, and Co-management in Aboriginal Australia’, paper presented at ‘Crossing Boundaries’, the 7th annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 10-14 June. Online: http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/1187/rose.pdf.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2014. ‘On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture’, Hau 4.1: 281-90. Doi: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.013.
Salmond, Amiria J.M. 2014. ‘Transforming Translations (part 2): Addressing Ontological Alterity’, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4.1: 155-87. Doi: https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.006.
Scott, Michael. 2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands (Durham: Carolina Academic Press).
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520064232.001.0001.
Tawhai, Te Pakaka. 2002 [1988]. ‘Maori Religion’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Readings in Indigenous Religions (London: Continuum): 238-49.
Tsing, Anna L. 2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Tsing, Anna L. 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): 47-66. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444324426.ch4.
Tylor, Edward B. 1958 [1871]. Primitive Culture. Vol. 1, Religion in Primitive Culture (New York: Harper & Row).
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3: 469-88. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157.
Whitehead, A.R. 2013. Religious Objects and Performance: Testing the Role of Materiality (London: Bloomsbury).
Published
2018-02-26
Issue
Section
CLOSED - Special Issue: Religion, Science, and the Future
How to Cite
Harvey, G. (2018). If Not all Stones Are Alive…: Radical Relationality in Animism Studies. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 11(4), 481-497. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.31066
