Part III - DWELLING IN LARGER-THAN-HUMAN COMMUNITIES

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Part III continues pondering what facts “nature” and “culture” reveal, but does so by attending to relations between human- and other-than-human persons. These relations, however they are theorized, are starkly tested by the need to eat. While not all ani-mists are hunters, hunting and other kinds of life-taking are vital arenas for reflection on animism. In the 1920s, Aua, an Iglulik Inuit shaman, told Knud Rasmussen, a Danish explorer and ethnographer, that “The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls” (Rasmussen 1929: 55–6). More recently, Old Tim Yilngayarri, an Aboriginal Australian culture-teacher, taught Deborah Bird Rose, an ecological humanities scholar, about the effects of Australia's ecocidal war against dingoes on his totemic relationships (D. Rose 2011). Animist notions of the liveliness of the world require a focus on specific relationships as well as on more universal moral claims.

“Totemism” has appeared in previous chapters (especially in relation to Descola's work). In the classic anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, “totemism” was summed up in the phrase “animals are good to think with” (1963: 89): they represent or symbolize kinship structures. Debbie Rose's chapter develops her definition of totemism as positing the “connectedness, mutual interdependence, and the non-negotiable significance of the lives of non-human species” (1998: 8). Animals, in this context, are close relatives. Citing Aboriginal informants and colleagues, she examines various engagements with animals, especially those involving death, dying, bereavement, loss and grief.