Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part I DIFFERENT ANIMISMS
- Part II DWELLING IN NATURE/CULTURE
- 6 Beyond nature and culture
- 7 The materiality of life: revisiting the anthropology of nature in Amazonia
- 8 Metamorphosis and identity: Chewong animistic ontology
- 9 The ancestral sensorium and the city: reflections on religion, environmentalism and citizenship in the Philippines
- 10 The invisible: toward a phenomenology of the spirits
- Part III DWELLING IN LARGER-THAN-HUMAN COMMUNITIES
- Part IV DWELLING WITH(OUT) THINGS
- Part V DEALING WITH SPIRITS
- Part VI CONSCIOUSNESS AND WAYS OF KNOWING
- Part VII ANIMISM IN PERFORMANCE
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The materiality of life: revisiting the anthropology of nature in Amazonia
from Part II - DWELLING IN NATURE/CULTURE
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part I DIFFERENT ANIMISMS
- Part II DWELLING IN NATURE/CULTURE
- 6 Beyond nature and culture
- 7 The materiality of life: revisiting the anthropology of nature in Amazonia
- 8 Metamorphosis and identity: Chewong animistic ontology
- 9 The ancestral sensorium and the city: reflections on religion, environmentalism and citizenship in the Philippines
- 10 The invisible: toward a phenomenology of the spirits
- Part III DWELLING IN LARGER-THAN-HUMAN COMMUNITIES
- Part IV DWELLING WITH(OUT) THINGS
- Part V DEALING WITH SPIRITS
- Part VI CONSCIOUSNESS AND WAYS OF KNOWING
- Part VII ANIMISM IN PERFORMANCE
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Animism, whatever this term means after almost twenty years of renewed debate, offers an excellent standpoint from which to measure or evaluate how far we have moved towards theorizing nature as locally produced in Amazonian settings. With the benefit of temporal depth, we are now in a better position to appreciate how the academic understanding of animism has evolved over time, and, with it, the use of a number of other key concepts, such as agency, humanity and intentionality (Rival 2012). I am struck by the extent to which analyses of ethnographic materials have, in less than one generation, converged towards a peculiar form of theoretical consensus regarding the discursive production of nature as “after nature”. Thinking in terms of “after nature” or “post-humanism” has often led to a more or less happy marriage between the metaphysics of being and the primacy of direct experience, as well as to the avoidance of scientific and objective attempts to understand the world on the ground that such “naturalist” analyses necessarily distort or subvert indigenous ways of knowing (Bird-David 1999; Descola 2005). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004: 468) puts it bluntly: whereas for Amerindian shamans to know is to personify, moderns need to objectify – or de-subjectify – in order to know. Animist worlds, where there are no “things”, for “something” is always also “someone”, cannot be understood with analytical tools designed to differentiate “knowledge” from “belief”.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Handbook of Contemporary Animism , pp. 92 - 100Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013