Dimensions of Animism in Southeast Asia

Upland pioneers: an introduction

“…Potency is often associated with 'potent places' that constitute concentrations of cosmic energy in particular locations within the environment (Guillou 2017: 392;cf. Allerton 2013) at harnessing this energy (Sprenger 2016). Such spiritual centres may be infrastructurally remote from a centrist lowland perspective and call for different 'mappings' and ambivalent explorations of overlapping topographies of potency -cosmological alongside techno-political ones.…”

The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste

“…While this regional literature has demonstrated ethnographically the embeddedness of human relations and exchanges with other material forms (such as inanimate objects, plants and animals; see, e.g., Traube, 1986), there has been a focus in the more recent independence period literature on the links between these kin‐based relations and broader spirit ecologies, including the circulation of more‐than‐human ‘bodies’ and things across time and space (Trindade, 2011; Bovensiepen, 2015; Palmer, 2015; Palmer & McWilliam 2019). Similarly, building on the literature from the so‐called ontological turn in anthropology, a wider regional literature has placed increasing ethnographic emphasis on the inseparability and interconnectedness of human and other life forms (see Tsintjilonis, 2004; Allerton, 2013; Arnhem, 2016; Sprenger, 2016).…”

“…Viveiros de Castro (1998) has argued influentially that from an Amerindian perspective all beings (human, animal, plant) share a single view on different worlds, creating ‘multinaturalist’ worlds divided up not by cultures but by the differences between the natures or bodies which have mastery in them. In contrast, in Southeast Asian cosmologies, others have argued that relational alterity is foregrounded less by focusing on the body (immanence and multinaturalism) and more by differences based on spirit and hierarchy (transcendence) (Arnhem, 2016, p. 299; Sprenger, 2016).…”

“…The vitalist ‘immanence of life’ (Fox, 1987) flowing through all things has been shown to come together most potently in ‘bodily’ exchanges between more‐than‐human kin. In ‘assembling their relations with non‐human types’ (Sprenger, 2016, p. 44), the key activator of wellbeing in these cosmologies is not the preservation of difference but ensuring relational flows between variously configured more‐than‐human collectivities.…”

De um peixe a um homem: animismos e dádivas (uma discussão teórica)

“…Se o foco levi-straussiano dava-se sobretudo nos aspectos contratuais da dádiva, outras abordagens têm enfatizado a incerteza (Caillé, 2002;Keane, 1997, p. 82). Esse caráter em aberto, que leva em conta o risco, dá conta dos elementos não recíprocos da partilha, permitindo incluí-los na noção de troca (Sprenger, 2016).…”