Animism in Southeast Asia

Kaj Århem is Emeritus Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His previously published books include: Makuna: Portrait of an Amazonian People (1998); Ethnographic Puzzles (2000) and The Katu Village (2010). Guido Sprenger is Professor at the Institute of Anthropology, Heidelberg University, Germany. He has previously published on ritual, exchange, human-environment relations, kinship and social morphology, cultural identity, and sexuality.

• Part One: Introductory 1. Southeast Asian Animism in Context 2. Dimensions of Animism in Southeast Asia Part Two: Case Studies – Mainland and The Philippines 3. Seeing and Knowing: Metamorphosis and the Fragility of Species in Chewong Animistic Ideology 4. Graded Personhood: Human and Non-human Actors in the Southeast Asian Uplands 5. Animism and the Hunter’s Dilemma: Hunting, Sacrifice and Asymmetric Exchange Among the Katu of Vietnam 6. Wrestling With Spirits, Escaping the State: Animist Ecology and Settlement Policy in the Annamite Cordillera 7. Actualizing Spirits: Ifugao Animism as Onto-praxis Part Three: Case Studies – Insular Southeast Asia 8. Relatedness and Alterity in Bentian Human-spirit Relations 9. The Dynamics of the Cosmic Conversation: Beliefs bout Spirits among the Kelabit and Penan of the Upper Baram River, Sarawak 10. Animism and Anxiety: Religious Conversion among the Kelabit of Sarawak 11. Boundaries of Humanity: Non-human Others and Animist Ontology in Eastern Indonesia 12. Gods and Spirits in the Wetu Telu Religion of Lombok 13. Impaling Spirit: Three Categories of Ontological Domain in Eastern Indonesia Part Four: Concluding 14. Southeast-Asian Animism: A Dialogue with Amerindian Perspectivism 15. End Comment: To Conclude in the Spirit of Rebirth, or, a Note on Animic Anthropo-ontogenesis

Selected for the Outstanding Academic Title (OAT) Award 2017 by CHOICE magazine."These papers are a tremendous addition to comparative studies, Southeast Asian studies theory and methods, and ethnographic work. Defining and revitalizing animism, the editors bring together original fieldwork from 11 anthropologists. They define animism as the "ontologies or worldviews which assign agency and personhood to human and non-human beings alike." The German and Swedish editors keep the traditional theories in play while adding significantly to the body of methodological knowledge. The fieldwork is exceptional and wide-ranging; each essay serves as a springboard to further examination. This rare volume, both strong in content and groundbreaking in theory and methods, is a publication of the work on a panel organized at the sixth Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Studies in Gothenburg, Sweden, in August 2010. An exciting addition to the already powerful Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia series. Summing Up: Essential." -- L. L. Lam-Easton, California State University, Northridge in CHOICE."... this book includes a number of ethnographically detailed and analytically well-articulated essays which should prove valuable to anyone interested in comparative cosmology and forms of symbolic or spiritual knowledge, not just in Southeast Asia but more generally."Gregory Forth, University of Alberta, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute