Animism and the Question of Life

Istvan Praet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134500666
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The central purpose of this book is to help change the terms of the debate on animism, a classic theme in anthropology. It combines some of the finest ethnographic material currently available (including firsthand research on the Chachi of Ecuador) with an unusually broad geographic scope (the Americas, Asia, and Africa). Edward B. Tylor originally defined animism as the first phase in the development of religion. The heyday of cultural evolutionism may be over, but his basic conception is commonly assumed to remain valid in at least one respect: there is still a broad consensus that everything is alive within animism, or at least that more things are alive than a modern scientific observer would allow for (e.g., clouds, rivers, mountains) It is considered self-evident that animism is based on a kind of exaggeration: its adherents are presumed to impute life to this, that and the other in a remarkably generous manner. Against the prevailing consensus, this book argues that if animism has one outstanding feature, it is its peculiar restrictiveness. Animistic notions of life are astonishingly uniform across the globe, insofar as they are restricted rather than exaggerated. In the modern Western cosmology, life overlaps with the animate. Within animism, however, life is always conditional, and therefore tends to be limited to one's kin, one's pets and perhaps the plants in one's garden. Thus it emerges that "our" modern biological concept of life is stranger than generally thought.

Part I

Restricted Life

1 Humans

Us, the Human Beings, the Living Ones

I propose […] to study the animism of the world so far as it constitutes, as unquestionably it does constitute, an ancient and world-wide philosophy.

—Edward B. Tylor (2010a [1871]: 386)

In this chapter ‘indigenous’ notions of humanity and life are documented and contrasted with approaches based on modern science. What emerges is that the former are surprisingly uniform all over the world. It also transpires that contemporary anthropologists pose the question of humanity in a very peculiar way, just as biologists pose the question of life in a very peculiar way.

Humans are the core business of anthropology. The very name of the discipline indicates this: it derives from the Greek anthropos, human being, and logos, reason. But who qualifies as a ‘human being’, exactly? In modern anthropology, the question is deemed superfluous—whether somebody does or does not pertain to humanity is assumed to be obvious. And anthropologists tend to suppose that this self-evidence is recognized universally, by people all over the world. To be sure, there is no shortage of ethnographic evidence that—apparently—supports this conviction. Consider the following example. One evening, the Chachi school-inspector Adalberto Añapa Cimarron looked up from his newspaper and told me:

‘Can you imagine, according to this report there are now six billion Chachi in the world!’

We were sitting in his house in el tercer piso, one of the poorer neighbourhoods of Esmeraldas, a small town on the Pacific coast of Ecuador. What struck me in this phrase was not so much the estimation of some demographer cited in the newspaper, as Adalberto’s curious use of the term ‘Chachi’. Until then, I had only heard it used with regard to the specific Amerindian group of approximately nine thousand people among whom I had been doing ethnographic research. I had always assumed that ‘Chachi’ was simply the name of a particular kind of ‘indigenous people’. Noticing my confusion, Adalberto explained that it can be used in a wider sense as well. All the people in the world, he insisted, could be considered ‘Chachi’: ‘Tsachila, Epera, Blacks, Quichua, Hispanics, Gringos … all are Chachi. It is not just the Chachi in our own community that can be designated as such’.

At first sight, Adalberto’s remarks confirm the universality of the concept of an incontrovertible, unified humanity. Indeed, what people such as the Chachi say seems to establish the ‘obviousness’ of the anthropological notion of a singular human species rather firmly. With regards to humanity, Westerners and those traditionally portrayed as non-Westerners—i.e. anthropologists and so-called indigenous people—appear to march in perfect unison. But can one take for granted that this has always been the case?

Adalberto, for one, was quick to add that this specific usage of ‘Chachi’ was fairly recent. In his view, it coincided with the emergence of the bilingual education system during the 1970s. In Cha’palaa, the vernacular language, there is no original term for ‘the human species’ as it is conceived of in modern anthropology. The notion only emerged when people began to learn Spanish. Adalberto, himself a pioneering bilingual teacher, then explained how ‘Chachi’ was used in the past:

Formerly, ‘Chachi’ had a very narrow meaning; it uniquely referred to those who shared our language and lived like us. Quichua Indians from the highlands, Blacks from the coast, and city-dwelling Hispanics were not considered Chachi. In fact, the latter were not considered proper humans. ‘Chachi’ literally means ‘humans’ [gente in local Spanish] or ‘true humans’ [gente verdadero]. Therefore, when we said that somebody was not Chachi, this amounted to saying that he or she was not really human. Moreover, you should not think that this specific usage is merely something of the past: along the river Cayapas and elsewhere in the countryside it is still quite widespread, even among those who regularly visit cities.

This particular conception of humanity is by no means unique to the Chachi—in what follows I will develop the argument that it is a cornerstone of animism in general. Amerindians and other so-called indigenous people fairly consistently refer to themselves in terms that are often translated as ‘the people’, ‘the real people’, ‘true persons’, or ‘us, the human beings’, implying that those unlike ‘us’ are not truly human. In Race et histoire, Claude Lévi-Strauss did already describe this phenomenon; in the anthropological literature it is often referred to as the ‘ethnocentric attitude’ of small-scale societies.¹ More recently, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has suggested that expressions such as ‘the human beings’ operate pragmatically (and possibly also syntactically) as pronouns that mark the position of the enunciator rather than as substantives.² According to him, this would explain why indigenous categories of collective identity so often have a great contextual variability, which is also characteristic of pronouns. Their contemporary fixation as ‘ethnonyms’ is in this view an artefact of the interaction with colonizers, travellers, missionaries, and ethnographers.

Here I will develop this line of reasoning in a somewhat different direction. It is true that terms such as ‘Chachi’ may designate something that many Chachi people nowadays understand as ‘a society’, ‘a culture’, ‘an ethnic community’, or ‘an indigenous tribe’. Yet, this kind of understanding is of relatively recent coinage; it is in most cases a colonial legacy. Terms such as ‘Chachi’ originally did not refer to some people or to a specific group of people but to all people. That is, they used to designate humanity as a whole. Or—to use an alternative formulation that will be fully explained further on—they did not refer to some living beings or to a specific group of living beings but to life as a whole. Of course, this humanity and this life do not exactly overlap with the anthropological notion of humanity and the biological notion of life promoted by the practitioners of modern science. Insofar as only members of one’s own group are deemed human, we are dealing with what one could call a restricted humanity. Insofar as only members of one’s own group are deemed alive, we are dealing with a restricted life. Strictly speaking, ‘Chachi’ is not (or at least did not use to be) an ethnonym; it must rather be grasped as something like ‘us, the human beings’ or ‘us, the living ones’. But my argument does not just concern the Chachi.

In fact, I tentatively suggest that a restricted humanity and a restricted life are (or at least used to be) common among so-called indigenous people all over the world. The argument I develop throughout the book is that this restrictedness is a central if not the foremost feature of animism. Although this kind of statement may sound inordinately sweeping to the ears of social anthropologists, I stand by my claim: far from being limited to one ethnographic area in South America, the notions of restricted humanity and restricted life are much more widespread than usually realized. What is more, their basic characteristics are surprisingly stable. As I hope to show in what follows, they recur in a great variety of cultural and historical contexts with astonishing regularity.

But first it is necessary to introduce a few formalities. To mark the difference between the animistic notion of humanity and the modern anthropological idea of humanity I will consistently capitalize the restricted humanity described by Adalberto in the last quote: from now onwards, this becomes ‘Humanity’. The anthropological notion of humanity, in contrast, will be kept in lower case. Whereas the latter always denotes a relatively stable ontological category, Humanity does not, as we shall see in great depth further onwards: I will refer to it as a shape. Similarly, I will systematically use capital letters when I speak of restricted life: from now onwards, this becomes ‘Life’. The modern biological notion of life, in contrast, will be kept in lower case. Unlike the latter, the animistic Life is not a fixed ontological category. Just like Humanity, I will refer to Life as a shape. For our purposes here, the key difference between a category and a shape is that whereas the former is given, the latter must always be maintained continuously.

These ad hoc conventions will make apparent that the way in which contemporary anthropologists formulate the question of humanity is strikingly similar to the way in which contemporary biologists formulate the question of life. As far as I know, the present study is the first one that explores this intriguing similarity in some detail. These conventions will also enable me to demonstrate that this manner of formulating those respective questions is far from self-evident but, rather, peculiar to a distinctly Western (and hence ultimately parochial) cosmology. In this chapter, I will mainly concentrate on the notion of Humanity. The parallel notion of Life will be developed more gradually over the next few chapters.

A READYMADE HUMANITY VERSUS HUMANITY AS A SPECIFIC EFFORT

Within the Western cosmology humanity is considered a given. No exam must be passed to count as human, no forms have to be filled out, and no trial period is required. According to modern anthropology there are no terms and conditions whatsoever: all one needs to do is to be born as a human being. Indeed, this anthropological humanity can poignantly be characterized as effortless—it always comes readymade. In a similar vein, life is considered a given in all contemporary scientific approaches. The status of ‘living being’ is attributed to this, that, and the other without any specific conditions. All one needs to do is ‘to be alive’. Life, in its modern biological conception, can be described as readymade too. Many of us (and I include myself) are so inculcated by the tenets of this Western cosmology that we can hardly imagine that somebody would not readily accept these anthropological and biological axioms as self-evident. And yet, a small but not unimportant minority has never taken them very seriously. Who are these sceptics?

Well, they are to be found among those who have always constituted anthropology’s favourite subject of enquiry, namely ‘indigenous people’. More precisely, they are to be found among those who have traditionally been subsumed under the heading of animism. Even though the latter is a very loaded term, I will co-opt it to refer to a certain attitude of recalcitrance vis-à-vis the Western cosmology. Of course I am aware that this recalcitrant attitude is by no means omnipresent among contemporary indigenous people, many of whom wholeheartedly embrace the possibilities of modern science (by getting a university degree in medicine, for example, as one of my Chachi friends did). In fact, animism may not even be particularly prevalent in the present day and age. Yet I do not apologize for focussing on it almost exclusively. My portrayal of so-called indigenous people as defiant nonconformists may be somewhat idiosyncratic but then again I never pretend to deliver a perfectly truthful ethnography or a fully realistic account of indigenous group X or Y, whatever that may be. I begin my inquiry with the Chachi of Esmeraldas, who I have already introduced to you. For reasons that will become clear, I first take a closer look at their courtship practices:

Finding a girlfriend was not easy in the old days. Boys and girls were not supposed to talk to each other and even looking at the opposite sex was forbidden. Adolescent girls were rigorously guarded at all times. Their fathers kept a close eye on them, never allowing them to be on their own outside the house. If a girl went to the river or forest, she was always accompanied by at least one relative. ‘When I was an adolescent,’ one elderly man recalled, ‘morality was very strict and monogamy was the rule. If you were caught speaking to or even just smiling at a girl, you were immediately obliged to marry her.’ Casual meetings were nearly impossible, as people did not live in villages at the time. Villages only appeared with the introduction of bilingual education, that is, in the past 25 years. The Chachi used to live apart, in separate houses located at certain intervals along the river. Approaching the girl you fancied required patience and cunning. Usually, the lover had to wait until it was dark and everybody in her house was asleep. Meticulous preparation was essential. He had to know exactly on which mat she slept and where her mosquito net was located. Without light, he had to tiptoe towards her, carefully avoiding any noise. Once inside the net he had to wake the girl gently, so that she would not be frightened. Then, the lovers could whisper in each other’s ear and get to know each other better. Clearly, such undertakings were quite risky. If somebody slept in a different spot than usual, the intruder could stumble over that person and the whole house would be alarmed. The father of the girl often had a machete close at hand and would not hesitate to go after the uninvited guest. One constantly had to remain vigilant, ready to flee when necessary. Elders know plenty of anecdotes about such amorous adventures gone wrong. Thus, there is the hilarious story of a young man who sneaked into the mosquito net of his girlfriend, but found himself in the arms of her father, who had grown suspicious and swapped places with his daughter … [personal fieldnotes]

Before anything else, I remark that such elderly men’s stories no doubt downplay the active role of the female lovers; girls surely did more than simply lie and wait for their boyfriends. Even so, the account clearly illustrates that Chachi people deemed flirting before marriage unacceptable. Much has changed today, especially for male adolescents who are mostly bilingual and can travel to the town of Esmeraldas and other cities pretty easily, something that was not possible two generations ago when today’s elders were young and there was no public transport system. Nevertheless, a very strong general sense that the Chachi are somehow more virtuous than neighbouring populations continues to exist. Chachi courtship remains a strikingly secretive affair, especially in comparison to what happens among Hispanics, where machismo reigns and boasting about one’s sexual prowess tends to be the norm, at least among young men.

Above all, marriage is taken very seriously. Its great importance is reflected in the fact that Chachi people spare no effort to organize sumptuous wedding festivals.³ A key aspect is that husband and wife are supposed to remain absolutely faithful until death separates them. Up until today this emphasis on strict monogamy is no laughing matter. Divorce, adultery, and polygamy are considered among the vilest mistakes thinkable. They are what Chachi call ujcha, a word ethnographers imperfectly translate as ‘sins’. Besides strict monogamy, marriage e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Anthropology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• World Map
• Introduction
• PART I Restricted Life
• PART II Life as Discontinuity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index