Is the Aboriginal Landscape Sentient? Animism,the New Animism and the Warlpiri

ABSTRACT It is now commonplace for some anthropologists, and others, to say that for Aboriginal Australians in the remote regions, the landscape is ‘sentient’, however, what that means is not always clear. Are the anthropologists using this term metaphorically or do they understand Aboriginal people to be animists? The ‘new animists' have no doubt that the anthropologists are describing what they call the ‘new animism’. Much of this literature refers to the Warlpiri or their near neighbours. Here I examine the evidence for whether Warlpiri speakers are animists.     

Lulik: Taboo,Animism, or Transgressive Sacred? An Exploration of Identity,Morality, and Power in Timor‐Leste

This article explores the continued significance of lulik for people living in the central highlands of Timor‐Leste today, lulik being a term frequently translated as ‘sacred’. In contrast to the straightforward definition of lulik as the sacred property of religious places or objects set apart from everyday life, it shows that lulik is understood as a potency that animates the environment and that is concentrated in specific sites in the landscape, in ancestral objects and houses. As a vital energy that sustains life, yet that is connected to prohibitions, danger, and restrictions, lulik shares an affinity with similar phenomena found in Melanesia, Polynesia, and Southeast Asia (such as mana, tapu, or semangat). Engaging with recently reinvigorated approaches to animism and Durkheim's notion of the sacred, this article examines how lulik that emerges when distinctions between human and non‐human entities are collapsed. The analysis of how Funar residents maintain a distance from this transgressive force leads to an exploration of how lulik is connected to the constitution of the self, and how lulik is mobilized as a source of power and morality.     

‘Living’ in Nage,or the Meaning of ‘Life’ in an Eastern Indonesian Society

Originating in 19th century cultural evolutionary theory, a revised concept of ‘animism’ has in recent years found new life in anthropology in the writings of ontological relativists. Continuity is found in the reputed attribution of life by members of small‐scale non‐western societies to inanimate objects as well as to organisms. This new animism is typically contrasted with western or modern scientific thought, either exclusively or primarily. Concerning the Nage of the Indonesian island of Flores, this paper analyzes results of research into what things people regard as being alive (muzi). While the majority of Nage deem only animals, plants, and humans to be living, differences appear among informants distinguished by age and gender. As well as the overall finding, this variation and cultural usages contextually depicting certain inanimate objects as being alive raise questions about animism as a unitary way of knowing the world characteristic of single societies.     

The Social Context of Settlement in Norway in the First Millennium AD

The Viking Age was an important watershed in European history, characterized by the centralization of authority, the adoption of Christian ideology, the growth of market trade, the intensification of production and the development of urbanism. Together, these phenomena mark the beginning of Scandinavian state formation. However, the dates at which each occurred - and the unequal rates at which different state attributes were adopted in 'cores' and 'peripheries' - remain to be fully explored and explained. These issues can be illuminated by world-systems theory and brought into focus by studying the date at which key aspects of the Viking Age were adopted in a Scandinavian periphery - the Norse Earldom of Orkney and Caithness, northern Scotland. The present study questions not only why peripheries change, but why they do not change, or change more slowly than neighbouring cores.     

Into the Great Beyond: Ontology and the Non-Human

In the following essay I review three recent additions to the burgeoning ontology literature: Philippe Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture, Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think, and Istvan Praet's Animism and the Question of Life. United by their shared goal of making anthropological inquiry less ethnocentric by avoiding the imposition of Western ontologies on non-Western societies, these works simultaneously exhibit considerable variation in theory and method, ranging from traditional structuralism to ethnographically-informed Peircean semiotics. I emerged from my engagement with these ambitious books unclear about how anthropologists should conduct ethnographic research that goes “beyond the human” and convinced that units of analysis that might seem anachronistic to certain people (such as language, culture, and collectives) remain key constituents of the foundation of anthropological inquiry.