Animism beyond the Soul

Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge

Katherine Swancutt, Mireille Mazard, Katherine Swancutt, Mireille Mazard

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781785338663, 9781785338656
• eBook ISBN: 9781785338670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Metafísica filosófica

How might we envision animism through the lens of the 'anthropology of anthropology'? The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors. They explore how native epistemologies, which inform anthropological notions during fieldwork, underpin the dialogues between researchers and their participants. In doing so, the contributors reveal ways in which indigenous thinkers might be influenced by anthropological concepts of the soul and, equally, how they might subtly or dramatically then transform those same concepts within anthropological theory.

Chapter 1

THE ALGEBRA OF SOULS

Ontological Multiplicity and the Transformation of Animism in Southwest China

Mireille Mazard

In a large, almost empty conference room inside the rundown Liuku Hotel, Lañi, an elderly Nusu man, slowly climbs steps up to the theatrical stage at the front of the room.¹ He is wearing a handmade woven jacket with narrow blue-and-white stripes, a self-consciously ‘ethnic’ garment (Ch. minzu fuzhuang). A machete hangs at his waist. Lañi seizes the machete, still in its holster, and strikes it nine times on the stage floor. He is miming the way a Nusu shaman would open the ground of the burial plot to open the path for the deceased into the ‘shadow realm’, or mhade.²

In the ritual unfolding of a Nusu funeral, the yãn-hla (soul or doppelgänger) emerges from latency into full personhood, supplanting the corporeal existence of the deceased. Through transformations enacted in death and fire, the deceased and his or her belongings become ontologically other. This process of metamorphosis entails a geographical movement as well, as they set off for the land of the dead (mhade). Lañi, onstage, is demonstrating the beginning of this journey for a group of researchers who traveled from Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan in Southwest China, to the province’s remote northwestern frontier to study endangered traditions of ethnic minority music and dance. In his home village of Khrada, however, Lañi ceased his ritual activities decades ago when he converted to Christianity.

The cleavage between the living and the dead, mapped out in separate geographies and enacted in the ritualized transformation of the person, reflects the poly-ontological character of Nusu animism, which I explore in this chapter. For Lañi and other Nusu participants in the research encounter, it is echoed in a further ontological divide, between themselves and the researchers documenting their cultural artifacts. More than a matter of linguistic or social differences, for Nusu, different ethnicities, like different states of being, are essentially and irreducibly different, but interactions can occur across ontological divides. The key to this is metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis and Animism

This chapter takes metamorphosis as a starting point to explore poly-ontological animism among the Nusu in Southwest China. The transformation of persons and ideas enables productive exchanges across boundaries in a fundamentally plural socio-cosmic order. In looking at animism, my focus is on how Nusu understand the invisible dimensions of personhood. Dualistic paradigms—viewing the body as ‘clothing’ for the soul, for instance (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 471)—are inadequate to describe Nusu ways of thinking about the self, whose ‘soul attributes’ possess corporeal as well as spiritual qualities.

The anthropology of animism has long enjoyed a mutual rapport with Euro-American philosophy. Exchanges between these disciplines have infused new energy and ideas into theoretical models on both sides. Consider Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) exploration of non-dualism, for instance, or Viveiros de Castro’s (1998) description of Amazonian perspectivism. Yet in the heady meeting of anthropological and philosophical minds, there is a risk of making flesh-and-soul animists into pure thought exercises (Starn 2011: 193). Michael Scott argues that our theoretical models require careful calibration as they “are not context-free universal decoders” (see Venkatesan et al. 2013: 306). By situating Nusu animism in the ethnographic encounter, I hope to depict the subtlety of their soul theories, showing that animists engage in philosophical explorations that reflect back on anthropological beliefs.

The ethnonym ‘Nusu’ refers to roughly 8,000 people who speak a Tibeto-Burman language and live primarily in Nujiang, a steep mountainous prefecture bordering Myanmar in the west and the Tibetan Autonomous Region in the north. Due to its geographical proximity to these two politically sensitive regions, Nujiang was militarized and subject to intense ideological scrutiny from the Chinese Communist Party during the Mao era. I conducted 12 months of fieldwork in Nujiang in 2006 and 2008 and additional fieldwork among Nusu living in Kunming during the same period. I spent most of my time in the villages of Khrada and Uvri, which cling to the sides of the Nu mountain range. This location is regarded as a remote and exotic frontier, attracting visitors in search of untouched natural wonderland, but in fact it saw radical transformations during and after the Mao era. The tree line has shifted, new roads criss-cross the river gorge, and a massive, controversial dam project is underway (Litzinger 2007). The greatest shift is perhaps in the area’s ideological points of reference.

Historically, Nusu ritual life centered on shamanic practitioners called yüigu or yüigusu, meaning ‘a person who makes sacrifices to the yüi’, the miscellaneous term for spectral beings such as spirits of the forest and human ghosts (see He Shutao 2000: 845–847). In their rituals, shamans divined the spectral causes of illnesses and offered animals as sacrifices across ontological boundaries. From the 1940s to the mid-1950s, Nusu came into contact with evangelists from the neighboring Lisu ethnic group and began converting to Christianity in large numbers (Mazard 2014). This coincided with the beginnings of Chinese ethnographic research in Yunnan, which defined animism in terms of yuanshi zongjiao (primitive religion) (Yunnansheng Bianji Weiyuanhu 1981: 113). People in Southwest China came to understand their ritual practices as ‘backward’ (luohou) and insufficient (see Swancutt, this volume). From 1958 onward, episodes of political turmoil interfered with shamanic and Christian practices, as well as with ethnological projects. The intense politicization of discourse during the Mao era—and the violence surrounding it—made Nusu people intensely aware of the ideological implications of discourse and ritual life (Mazard 2011).

This brings us to the concept of hyper-reflexivity developed in this book, which is essential to understanding the transfers of people, objects, and ideas between ‘natives’ and ‘anthropologists’, to employ a well-worn dualism. Reflexivity has infiltrated animism and anthropology alike as Nusu thinkers engage with outsiders whom they consider ontologically other. The encounter between animism and two powerful ideologies in Southwest China, that is, socialism and Christianity, has opened up unstable philosophical ground for Nusu people, who are now questioning and redefining their beliefs. Metamorphosis—in this case, the metamorphosis of animism itself—allows exchanges to occur across ontological boundaries, and anthropology is implicated in the transformation.

The ‘Algebra of Souls’

Nusu assume that their social interactions take place in a context of plurality, in which ordinary people experience only one facet of a poly-ontological social order. I draw the idea of poly-ontology from Michael Scott’s (2007) work on the Arosi of the Solomon Islands. Scott deploys this concept to resolve the contradictions between Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) relational, anti-essentialist model of Melanesian sociality and the forms of essentialism that Scott (2007) discerns among the Arosi. Arosi differences are grounded in a “cosmos in which the parts precede the whole” (ibid.: 10), and their cosmogenesis stories point to an “original plurality” (ibid.). Moving on from the anecdote above about a staged ritual in the Liuku Hotel, I argue that Lañi and other Nusu participants view their transactions with the researchers through the lens of poly-ontology, as participants in two separate realms that can communicate only through a carefully managed transformation of words and ideas.

For Nusu, multiple forms of being comprise the inhabitants of multiple, communicating ontological realms. These include multiple ‘types’ that a mono-ontological outsider, such as a non-Nusu anthropologist, might identify as ethnicities, souls, soul attributes, ‘gods’ or ‘ghosts’, each associated with its own geographies and capacities. This conceptual framework has implications for our theory of personhood. Rather than being a monadic individual, or even a relational dividual (Strathern 1988), a person can, under certain conditions, evince different aspects of the self, with multiple ontological identities. Seen from another perspective, ontologically different persons can converge into one identity.

I employ the term ‘algebra of souls’ to describe the Nusu understanding of personhood because it suggests the complexity and transformability of this poly-ontological order and of other forms of animism as well. In mathematics, algebra offers a language for resolving the co-existence of known and unknown elements. An algebraic equation, static on the page, illustrates the movement and transformation of terms. Nusu personhood is reckoned complexly, as in algebra. Some of its attributes remain unknown or possibly in flux, while ontological shifts may bring unresolved elements to the fore. Nusu think of soul attributes in terms of fractions (fragmentary selves), doubles, and latent possibilities. Unforeseen events, shocks such as death or major illness, and vivid emotional states can unbalance the equation of self and shift the number and state of one’s soul attributes. In algebra, equivalent values may take different forms on two sides of an equation, and something similar is at work in Nusu ways of understanding persons, whose multiple attributes, some of them spectral, may co-exist on two sides of an ontological divide. To illustrate this, let us first examine the work of Nusu funerals.

Crossing Ontological Divides

Nusu mortuary rituals involve the management of people and objects transitioning from the realm of the living into the afterlife. For non-Christians, this afterlife is mhade, the shadow realm, where the dead go about their business much as they did when alive, pursuing the same occupations and daily chores. In mhade, as in the realm of the living, people cultivate crops to feed themselves. The dead, like the living, can be wealthy or poor. Items belonging to the dead are sent to mhade to ensure their comfort and to prevent the yãn-hla (soul or doppelgänger) from being drawn back to the family home to use favored items, unable to see the difference between the living world and the shadow realm, unaware that he or she is dead.

During the days following a burial, the deceased still return to their former homes to partake in meals with the living in spectral form. Their presence is often sensed in disembodied perceptions, such as through the sound of chopsticks scraping against a bowl. Funerals end with the yãn-hla lõng, the ‘soul-awaiting day’, when the deceased’s presence should be felt for the last time. This occurs on the seventh day for women and on the ninth day for men, counting either from death or burial, depending on the family and village. Mueggler (2014a: 200) has also documented the custom of holding seven- and nine-day vigils elsewhere in northwest Yunnan. Wellens (2010: 251n14) notes that “[t]he symbolic association of the number seven with female and nine with male is widespread” among speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages. In Nusu communities, one explanation for the seven- and nine-day vigils is that women and men possess so many souls, a point I return to below.

Managing the belongings of the deceased is a way to maintain souls in their proper place after death. They are detached from the household and their former social relations, as these items form a link that may bring them into dangerous proximity with the living. There are several ways to achieve the transition from the realm of the living into the shadow realm. Items can be buried directly with the deceased or placed on or adjacent to the tomb. It is common to see porcelain bowls and liquor bottles holding the remnants of rice and a strong grain alcohol (Ch. baijiu) placed on the lip of a tomb. Some families also place food next to the deceased during the wake, to sustain them in their transition to the afterlife, as I saw done for a young Christian woman from Uvri village who died at the age of 27 after a sudden illness.³ In addition, fire acts as a means of transport between this world and mhade. Mourners may burn common-use items that are too bulky to fit inside the tomb, such as bedclothes and mattresses. A former shaman also told me that the practice of tomb burial replaced the earlier custom of cremation, which has historically been practiced among ethnic minority groups in Yunnan (Mueggler 2014b: 20–22). Perhaps the deceased themselves once reached the afterlife through means of fire.

Fire can transform objects into a form that the dead can receive. Charcoal or charred wood is money in the shadow realm, and it may be placed in the tomb with food and other important items. When I first asked my Nusu friend Ayima about the significance of charcoal, I employed the term ‘symbolize’ (Ch. xiangzheng). “Does charcoal symbolize money?” I asked. Ayima corrected me: “Charcoal does not symbolize money. It is money for the deceased.” Some families prefer to buy Chinese paper money at the lowland market and burn it after burial. In each case, fire acts as a transformative element. More broadly, in Nusu social life, fire is an agent of destruction and transformation. Yet it also enables social relations of a certain kind. In swidden agriculture, fire destroys vegetation in order to fertilize crops. It enacts creative destruction, initiating cycles of productivity and reproduction: fields lie fallow when their fertility decreases before new vegetation is burned off to make them fertile again. In the household, the fire is at the center of comings and goings in the social space surrounding the hearth. Visiting friends and relatives are told to mi hla, draw close to the fire, where people share gossip and tall tales, drink liquor and eat amödjioguei (maize porridge), pop corn and roast tidbits of meat in the burning embers.

Fire anchors the gra, the cooking tripod and embodied presence of founding ancestors within the house, the link between the living and the dead. The three legs of the gra represent generations of ancestors: aya, abaw, and api (grandmother, grandfather, and great-grandparents). The gra is fed bits of food—lumps of maize and rice that are placed at the top of each of its three legs. Nusu do not practice ‘ancestor worship’ in the sense that anthropologists have employed the term among Han Chinese. Yet ancestors are, in a sense, present in the gra that encompasses the fire. Among the Premi, who also speak a Tibeto-Burman language, Wellens (2010: 120) finds that “the hearth and fireplace with its iron tripod … make up the locus of worshipping the ‘ancestors’ (bap’u) and divine beings of the mountains, water, wind, heaven, and earth.” For the Nusu, the ancestors persist through the hearth, not as known and named persons, but as generic and unnamed elders in a de-individuating remembrance that doubles as an act of forgetting (Carsten 1995; Vitebsky 2008: 245). Elsewhere in northwest Yunnan, effigies take the place of the dead and are gradually moved away from the living, eventually to be discarded (see Mueggler 2001: 71–72).

Acts of giving to the dead, which maintain their relations with the living, also simultaneously contribute to dissolving their social relations. The deceased belong to their own ontological plane, whose geography communicates with that of the living, but whose essence remains fundamentally incompatible—the living cannot live off scraps or swap charcoal money for goods at the market. The yãn-hla is continuous in life and in death, yet living and dead persons are essentially different categories of being, not just different in outer appearance, in spite of shared attributes of personhood. This essential difference is echoed in the ontological divisions between human and non-human persons, the living and the shadow realm, Nusu and non-Nusu.

Plural Selves

Nusu refer to souls of the living and the dead indiscriminately as yãn-hla. However, the yãn-hla may become separated from the living self even in life, and in death it entirely supplants it. The yãn-hla is only one of several alternative, fragmentary selves that partake in the identity of their owner, while sometimes exhibiting their own agency. I suggest that we think of Nusu yãn-hla and other kinds of doppelgängers (Hultkrantz 1953; Willerslev 2007) and fragmentary selves as soul attributes, latent and malleable components of the person that, in becoming manifest, may acquire their own agency, acting without their owners’ knowledge. An important corollary to this is that a Nusu person may be perceived as a different ontological type, endowed with different capacities, when certain of her or his soul attributes are present or absent.

One good example of how a Nusu person may become a different ontological type can be found in the difference between women and men, who possess different numbers of souls. Women, who have only seven, can never become yüigu (shamans), although they can acquire the skill to perform certain rituals. The two additional souls possessed by men endow them with the full potential to become yüigu. Meanwhile, men and women endowed with second sight, that is, seers or mia-vr-su (people who see through), possess a predatory soul attribute, the kösu, which can attack and consume human victims. Fear, envy, bereavement, and other affective crisis states can furthermore trigger the inception or appearance of an otherwise latent soul attribute. If one should suffer an emotional disturbance, such as the death of a loved one, the yãn-hla can separate from the body-self and wander away: its owner overcome with grief, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword: The Anthropology of Ontology Meets the Writing Culture Debate—Is Reconciliation Possible?
• Introduction: Anthropological Knowledge Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the Soul
• Chapter 1: The Algebra of Souls: Ontological Multiplicity and the Transformation of Animism in Southwest China
• Chapter 2: Recursivity and the Self-Reflexive Cosmos: Tricksters in Cuban and Brazilian Spirit Mediumship Practices
• Chapter 3: Spirit of the Future: Movement, Kinetic Distribution, and Personhood among Siberian Eveny
• Chapter 4: The Art of Capture: Hidden Jokes and the Reinvention of Animistic Ontologies in Southwest China
• Chapter 5: Narratives of the Invisible: Autobiography, Kinship, and Alterity in Native Amazonia
• Chapter 6: Technological Animism: The Uncanny Personhood of Humanoid Machines
• Postscript: Anthropologists and Healers—Radical Empiricists
• Index