Author: Marc Brightman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454684
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
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, this volume 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 processes of 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.
Author: Marc Brightman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
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, this volume 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 processes of 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.
Author: Marc Brightman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786613968067
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
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, this volume 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.
Author: Katherine Swancutt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785338676
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
How might we envision animism through the lens of the ‘anthropology of anthropology’? The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors. They explore how native epistemologies, which inform anthropological notions during fieldwork, underpin the dialogues between researchers and their participants. In doing so, the contributors reveal ways in which indigenous thinkers might be influenced by anthropological concepts of the soul and, equally, how they might subtly or dramatically then transform those same concepts within anthropological theory.
Author: Istvan Praet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134500661
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
The central purpose of this book is to help change the terms of the debate on animism, a classic theme in anthropology. It combines some of the finest ethnographic material currently available (including firsthand research on the Chachi of Ecuador) with an unusually broad geographic scope (the Americas, Asia, and Africa). Edward B. Tylor originally defined animism as the first phase in the development of religion. The heyday of cultural evolutionism may be over, but his basic conception is commonly assumed to remain valid in at least one respect: there is still a broad consensus that everything is alive within animism, or at least that more things are alive than a modern scientific observer would allow for (e.g., clouds, rivers, mountains) It is considered self-evident that animism is based on a kind of exaggeration: its adherents are presumed to impute life to this, that and the other in a remarkably generous manner. Against the prevailing consensus, this book argues that if animism has one outstanding feature, it is its peculiar restrictiveness. Animistic notions of life are astonishingly uniform across the globe, insofar as they are restricted rather than exaggerated. In the modern Western cosmology, life overlaps with the animate. Within animism, however, life is always conditional, and therefore tends to be limited to one’s kin, one’s pets and perhaps the plants in one’s garden. Thus it emerges that "our" modern biological concept of life is stranger than generally thought.
Author: Hans Van Eyghen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100086829X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
This book assesses whether belief in spirits is epistemically justified. It presents two arguments in support of the existence of spirits and arguments that experiences of various sorts (perceptions, mediumship, possession and animistic experiences) can lend justification to spirit-beliefs. Most work in philosophy of religion exclusively deals with the existence of God or the epistemic status of belief in God. Spirit beliefs are often regarded as aberrations, and the falsity of such beliefs is often assumed. This book argues that various beliefs concerning spirits can be regarded as justified when they are rooted in experiences that are not defeated. It argues that spirit-beliefs are not defeated by recent theories put forth by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists or evolutionary biologists. Additional arguments are made that traditional theistic belief is epistemically linked to spirit beliefs and that unusual events can be explained in terms of spirit-activity. The book draws on theistic arguments, phenomenal conservatism and defenses of religious experiences to argue for the justification of spirit-beliefs. The arguments draw on examples from various religious traditions ranging from Christianity and Islam to Haitian Vodou and Tibetan Bon. The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of religion, religious epistemology, ethnography and cognitive neuroscience.
Author: Melissa R. Baltus
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498555365
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
In Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, Melissa R. Baltus and Sarah E. Baires critically examine the current understanding of relationality in the Americas, covering a diverse range of topics from Indigenous cosmologies to the life-world of the Inuit dog. The contributors to this wide-ranging edited collection interrogate and discuss the multiple natures of relational ontologies, touching on the ever-changing, fluid, and varied ways that people, both alive and dead, relate and related to their surrounding world. While the case studies presented in this collection all stem from the New World, the Indigenous histories and archaeological interpretations vary widely and the boundaries of relational theory challenge current preconceptions about earlier ways of life in the Indigenous Americas.
Author: Benjamin Grant Purzycki
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350265713
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
Why are humans obsessed with divine minds? What do gods know and what do they care about? What happens to us and our relationships when gods are involved? Drawing from neuroscience, evolutionary, cultural, and applied anthropology, social psychology, religious studies, philosophy, technology, and cognitive and political sciences, The Minds of Gods probes these questions from a multitude of naturalistic perspectives. Each chapter offers brief intellectual histories of their topics, summarizes current cutting-edge questions in the field, and points to areas in need of attention from future researchers. Through an innovative theoretical framework that combines evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion, this book brings together otherwise disparate literatures to focus on a topic that has comprised a lasting, central obsession of our species.
Author: David Jenkins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000636267
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
This book questions how bureaucracies conceive of, and consequently interact with, nature, and suggests that our managed public landscapes are neither entirely managed nor entirely wild, and offers several warnings about bureaucracies and bureaucratic mentality. One prominent challenge facing scientists, policymakers, environmental activists, and environmentally concerned citizens, is to recognize that human influence in the natural world is pervasive and has a long history. How we act, or choose not to act, today will continue to determine the future of the natural world. Western-style management of nature, mediated by economic rationality and state bureaucracies, may not be the best strategy to maintain environmental integrity. The question is, what kinds of human influence, conceived of in the widest possible sense, will produce ideal environments for future generations? The related question is, who gets to choose? The author approaches the problem of analyzing the mutual influence of human and natural systems from two perspectives: as an objective scholar investigating bureaucracies and natural systems from the outside, and over the last decade as an inside practitioner working in various roles in federal land management agencies developing policies and regulations involved in the control of natural systems. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of natural resource management, policy and politics, and professionals working in environmental management roles as well as policymakers involved in public policy and administration.
Author: Selcen Küçüküstel
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800730632
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. It focuses on the role of the spirited landscape which embraces all living creatures and acts as a unifying concept at the center of the human and non-human relations.
