Animism beyond the Soul

Katherine Swancutt is a Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London. She is the author of Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (Berghahn Books, 2012). She has conducted fieldwork on shamanic and animistic religions across Inner Asia for two decades, with a particular focus on Southwest China and Mongolia. Her newest work is on the anthropology of dreams.

• Foreword: The Anthropology of Ontology Meets the Writing Culture Debate—Is Reconciliation Possible?Rane WillerslevIntroduction: Anthropological Knowledge Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the SoulKatherine Swancutt and Mireille MazardChapter 1. The Algebra of Souls: Ontological Multiplicity and the Transformation of Animism in Southwest ChinaMireille MazardChapter 2. Recursivity and the Self-Reflexive Cosmos: Tricksters in Cuban and Brazilian Spirit Mediumship PracticesDiana Espírito SantoChapter 3. Spirit of the Future: Movement, Kinetic Distribution, and Personhood among Siberian EvenyOlga UlturgashevaChapter 4. The Art of Capture: Hidden Jokes and the Reinvention of Animistic Ontologies in Southwest ChinaKatherine SwancuttChapter 5. Narratives of the Invisible: Autobiography, Kinship, and Alterity in Native AmazoniaVanessa Elisa Grotti and Marc BrightmanChapter 6. Technological Animism: The Uncanny Personhood of Humanoid MachinesKathleen RichardsonPostscript: Anthropologists and Healers—Radical EmpiricistsEdith Turner

“The authors in this collection have cooperated in making a bold and meaningful attempt to provide in-depth research on animism through their honest awareness of the significance of reflexivity. They have met the goal they have set themselves of illustrating the different understandings of the spiritual and invisible aspects of personhood they describe.” • JASO“In a very short space (138 pages of text) with only six essays, Animism Beyond the Soul makes an outsized contribution to our understanding of animism and to the more general issue of the construction of ethnographic knowledge. Stressing the danger of imposing one religion’s language on other cultures, as well as the inevitable multiple reflexivities of cultural encounter, the contributors open our eyes to a much wider vista of soul and person concepts and point to a rich literature that challenges our narrow assumptions about exotic and familiar religions and ontologies.” • Reading Religion