Title: Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world
Abstract: Abstract Abstract Animistic or 'relational' ontologies encountered in non-Western (i.e. premodern) settings pose a challenge to Western (i.e. modern) knowledge production, as they violate fundamentalassumptions of Cartesian science. Naturalscientists who have tried seriously to incorporate subject-subject relations into their intellectual practice (e.g. Uexküll, Bateson) have inexorably been relegated to the margins. Surrounded by philosophers and sociologists of science (e.g. Latour) announcing the end of Cartesian objectivism, however,late modern or 'post-modern' anthropologists discussing animistic understandings of nature will be excused for taking them more seriously than their predecessors. It is incumbent on them to analytically sort out what epistemological options there are, and to ask why pre-modern, modern, and post-modern people will tend to deal with culture/nature or subject/object hybridity in such different ways. Animism, fetishism, and objectivism can be understood as alternative responses to universal semiotic anxieties about where or how to draw boundaries between persons and things. Keywords: Animismfetishismobjectivismmodernityepistemologysemiotics Acknowledgment This article is a revised version of a paper presented in the symposium 'Animism and the Meaning of Life' in honour of Tim Ingold, winner of the Anders Retzius Gold Medal, Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geogra?, Vegadagen, Stockholm 23 April, 2004. I would like to thank the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation for supporting the project 'Native American Ecocosmologies and Environmental Ethics: Animism, Modernity, and the Cultural Phenomenology of Human-Environmental Relations.' Notes 1. Compare, e.g., Fig. 3.1 in Ingold (2000 Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 42) with Fig. 4.2 in Latour (1993 Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]:99).
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 109
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