Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the evocation of primordial beings - essentially asocial and prehuman entities - during one of the key ceremonial rituals of the Torres Islands (N Vanuatu). In this context, they simultaneously stand apart from the local social world at the same time as they appear to be incorporated into a theoretically incestuous relation. I suggest that the explanation lies both in the multiple nature of reality (local ontologies) as well as recent historical transformations to Torres kinship and morality.

Paper long abstract:

During one of the most important ceremonies of transformation in the Torres Islands (North Vanuatu), a kind of primordial, and therefore prehuman and presocial, entity briefly materialises and seems to take on a role that does not easily fit into the highly controlled system of social relations: it is neither living nor dead, which is the primary condition for all participants within the local relational horizon. I take this as a point of departure for an exploration into the multiple nature of local spirit and human worlds, and suggest that there is a form of multiplicity at play in the manner that people relate to the various entitites that populate their cosmos. This multiplicity accounts for apparent ambiguities, seemingly part of a long-lived set of principles, but I argue that it has to be approached through the backdrop of the historically changing nature of kinship, morality and ritual power in the Islands. The overall intention is to produce an outline for understanding existential principles (local ontologies) as contingent phenomena, both in historical as well as immediate senses, that allow for the coming together of different entities from multiple realities at specific junctures.

Paper short abstract:

Witch-hunts are current in the contemporary world, in contexts of changing relations of production, new forms of Christianity and reformulations of the nation-state. I propose that witch-killing is an act that reaches into a space of uncertainty. The paper is based on recent material from Vanuatu in Central Melanesia.

Paper long abstract:

I understand the existence of the witch in Vanuatu to be on a different plane of reality than the everyday activities that people engage in. Witches do not have a stable existence in the realm of the living, but they rather emerge and take personalized shape when called into being by feelings of jealousy and anger in close relations. In this way the witch cannot be pinned down to being defined and recognized as an individual agent, but holds an intermediary position, by wedging into relationships that have gone wrong.

Underlying my argument is the idea that witches are in certain societies of crucial importance due to their transformative function and character. These are societies that operate with relations between life and death, man and animal, subject and object as more or less continuous states. Categories of the human world are broken down, shifted around or changing place. We can maybe simplify this into a pattern; and say that whereas witchcraft in these societies is about bursting out, invading, merging and overtaking categories of social life, the witch-hunt is about violently putting them back into place. In this essay I am particularly interested in these ontologies of openness and uncertainty - that also operate a crucial control towards the realm from which life arises and which also harbours death. The crucial point is to tear the analysis loose from explanations that delegate the witch hunt to a realm of politics and interpersonal conflict.

Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnographic examination of the uncertainties the Arosi of Makira (Solomon Islands) articulate today about their island, I argue for the importance of recognizing essentialist ontologies that resist analysis in terms of an open-ended and multidirectional relational matrix.

Paper long abstract:

Among the Arosi of Makira (Solomon Islands) many people express perplexity when discussing stories about their island. These stories include frequently iterated accounts of huge snakes swimming ashore and disappearing into caves, reports of mini-submarines disguised as marine mammals patrolling close to shore, recollections of a British royal visit, anecdotes about unidentified aircraft said to make regular passes over the island, and speculations about the presence of a mysterious subterranean military base inside Makira. Even those Arosi who are said to have visited this underground world or who tell of bemusing encounters with its supposed inhabitants acknowledge, in the words of one elderly man, 'That's what we're confused about.... That's something we don't understand.' In this paper I focus specifically on this man's puzzlement over his shaman-like visit to a mysterious realm he himself struggles to locate. Although many Arosi who hear his stories identify this realm — more confidently than he does — as the subterranean Makiran world, uncertainty remains. What is it and why is it there? By puzzling over this elderly man's claim that during his visit to this confusing realm he 'saw the future world that we're moving towards', I examine how his stories and perplexity reveal historically shifting ontologies and the resulting tensions among multiple co-existing existential principles and subjectivities in Arosi. I argue furthermore for the importance of keeping an analytical space open for recognizing essentialist ontologies that resist assimilation to an open-ended and multidirectional relational matrix.

Paper short abstract:

The coexistence of contradictory or mutually incompatible relations in all Huichol rituals obliges defining their ontology as complex, non-unitary and syncopated. Here we explore the implications of this situation for understanding the complexity of figuration in Huichol contemporary art.

Paper long abstract:

In order to understand the materials, style and figuration employed in the contemporary artistic expressions of the Huichol Indians (Wixaritari) of western Mexico, and to determine whether such emergent art forms are related to "traditional" ritual art, I consider the complexity of ritual relations. The problematic articulation of such contradictory relations precludes any attempt to hypothesize models of socio-cosmic wholes. Extending the notion of dividuality, we should instead consider the existence of "syncopated" worlds (following Roy Wagner). Aesthetically, Huichol yarn painting expresses just this, and therefore can be seen as a reflection on traditional knowledge-practice and initiation.

Paper short abstract:

The Ewe term "aklama" designates a person's soul, a bush spirit, and the idea of contingency. The paper aims to show, via an analysis of hunting rites, that the core of the concept consists in a relation to the Other characterized both by existential antagonism and mutual identification.

Paper long abstract:

The Ewe and Akan notion of the "soul" (kra, kla, aklama) is intimately connected to the idea of "chance" and "luck" in a context of danger. The paradigmatic example of such a context is hunting. However, far from reducing itself to the concept of a guardian spirit protecting the hunter, "aklama" is also conceived of as a bush spirit acting as the protector of animals and thus as the hunter's deadly enemy. What might appear as a paradox is actually at the core of the notion of the self. The familiar representation of the soul as a "double" here takes the particular form of a relation to the Other characterized both by existential antagonism and mutual identification. This relation is mobilized and modified through ritual action, in what appears as a transformation of funerary rites for the evil dead. The paper aims to clarify this relationship, drawing both on historical ethnographic accounts and recent fieldwork data from South-east Togo.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore the creative dividends of what appears to be two simultaneous levels of cosmology operative among practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian religion of Umbanda in the city of Rio de Janeiro, one static and historical, and the other unknowable.

Paper long abstract:

For practitioners of Umbanda, an umbrella term designating a set of modern largely urbanized Afro-Brazilian spirit mediumship practices, their complex, even bureaucratic, cosmos of 'spirit-entities' is a situated, historical manifestation of what is considered an infinite, millenarian divine (Zambi). Each entity-spirit with whom a medium engages is at once an earthly crystallization of this ancient 'vibration' and its multiple refractions (based on the number seven), and a nameless, formless being who temporarily assumes an archetypical spirit 'skin' in order to better effect its mission among the living. These identity 'skins' - as complications of a Brazilian national historical imaginary - become the cultural language by which an acultural 'truth' (Umbanda) is paradoxically revealed, and by which mostly 'human' moral messages (humility, joy, etc) are engendered. A permanent, creative disjuncture of ontological structures is thus somehow inevitably present. On the one hand, cosmology is rarely fixed, and perhaps even illusory: what appears to be a static quasi-military hierarchy of spirit forms betrays in fact a fluid, transformational magma of agencies whose mobility and shape-shifting is what generates cosmic flow. On the other, the pragmatics of collapsing this flow become all-important: mediums must embrace certain artificial structures (posture, songs, signatures and importantly, names) - the meta-cosmology given by the entities themselves - in order to produce 'Umbanda'. It is unsurprising that the processes involved in the identification of entities are frought with ambiguity. This paper will explore these tense spaces of naming and materializing as turning-points of ontological insight.

Paper short abstract:

The treatment of illness in an Andean district accommodates aetiological uncertainty with multiple healing practices (biomedicine, herbalism, shamanism). The experience of illness and healing is grounded in cultural presuppositions that do not always correspond to people's stated or conscious belief

Paper long abstract:

Healing in Cañaris (northern Peruvian Andes) is sought from a variety of local and non-local specialists who represent distinct traditions (biomedicine, herbalism, shamanism). This system of healing assumes that an illness is curable only by methods specific to that illness, since this method responds to a distinct cause (inanimate factors, non-personified and personified agents). However, it is not simply a matter of some conditions being treatable by ritual healers and others by biomedicine, because at the outset it is unknown to both observers and the afflicted person what has "really" caused the illness; this can only be known when the illness has been cured. The local healing system accommodates this uncertainty, and in practice various curative approaches will be tried until one is found to be effective.

Nevertheless, there are certain illnesses that are specific to each method of treatment. The most intractable, serious, and life-threatening conditions which respond to neither herbalism nor biomedicine can only be cured by shamanic specialists called maestro curanderos. Most people will deny for various reasons believing in this form of healing (curanderismo), yet many later admit that it cured a condition that did not respond to other forms of treatment. Their reported experience has a corporeal affect that is not necessarily tied to their stated belief. To experience curanderismo as healing implicates the existence and efficacy of the place-based powers to which both the cause and cure of illness are ultimately attributed - and by extension a world in which certain places and things can have agency, subjectivity, knowledge, and affect. I address this shifting ontological ground in the two-fold relation between multiple healing practices that respond to distinct aetiologies, and the coexistence of and tension between contradictory existential principles implicated in these causal factors and methods of healing.

Paper short abstract:

Amerindian ethnology has focused on sociocultural transformations that have ocurred among indigenous peoples. For example, "becoming White" has been an important theme for anthropologists working with Amerindians. Although, what happens when Amerindian gods meet the Whitemen?

Paper long abstract:

When the first long-time fieldwork ethnographies appeared - during the 70s - Amerindian ethnology turned the acculturation theme upside down and Indian-White relations started to be thought of as indigenous processes of (re)signification. "Becoming white", then, became a way of talking about contextual forms of transformation instead of historical processes of acculturation. Recently, works such as Viveiros de Castro (1992)'s on Tupinambá inconstancy on accepting Christianity have helped comprehend those trasnformations. For now, these works have focused on human cultural transformations. What happens, though, when Amerindian gods meet the Whitemen?

After fieldwork among the Araweté, in eastern Amazonia, we aim to delineate an answer to the question above. Describing Araweté shamanic rites, we intend to take Indian-White relations to a place that we could call an inter-ontological encounter. Canoes and motors were not a part of Araweté cosmology before they met the Whitemen and, with that in mind, we can ask: how does this process come about? What kind of shift has Araweté cosmology undergone in the past thirty years?

Singing songs brought by the deceased, Araweté shamans tell the living about the divine landscape: canoes, motors and, right by God's town, a White city. Conversely, the living have to send a bunch of material goods acquired from the Whitemen in the Brazilian town of Altamira, Pará to the heavens. Sacrifying goods, Araweté help their gods in this process of encountering the Whitemen

Paper short abstract:

In a crisis over mining, ontological actors and boundaries shift as Huichols open their relationship with the ancestors who control climate and landscape. They display ritual practices and share indigeneity in return for more of the territorial governance and economic agency they had relinquished.

Paper long abstract:

I discuss the scandal over agribusiness and planned gold and silver extraction in and around the Huichol (Wixarika) pilgrimage region of Wirikuta in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where for centuries these indigenous people have left offerings and gathered peyote. In a newly mass-mediated ontological politics, the divine ancestors in the paramount sacred peak of Paritekïa (the birthplace of the sun) would be so devastated by mining that underground water flows, rain patterns and the whole planetary climate would suffer. Despite these cosmopolitical and environmentalist discourses, Wixarika journeys to Wirikuta coincided with the 18th-19th century mining economy surrounding Paritekïa: part of a wider symbiosis with capitalism. Wixarika sacred histories claimed silver as an ancestral patrimonial substance like peyote yet ceded control over it and other economic relations in return for recognition of an exclusive and indispensable eco-ceremonial role. But now that the official ethnic assimilation policy of mestizaje has crumbled and globalized capitalism grows more unpopular, Huichols build widespread support by critiquing it and instead proposing an alternative regional development model of ecotourism in Wirikuta and an identity politics that opens the door to the global public's desire to indianize itself through ceremonial participation. Therefore, in a historical crisis ontological agents and boundaries shift as Huichols open up their exclusive relationship with the ancestors who control the climate and landscape: instead, they display previously guarded ritual practices and share their indigeneity in return for more of the economic agency and territorial governance that their sacred narratives had seemingly relinquished.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the disarticulation of brand ontology in Tamil youth fashion. While youth display brands as 'style' they're indifferent to brand authenticity. Not as brand, but instances of brandedness, such acts bracket that which they cite, a fact implied by the brand's own citationality.

Paper long abstract:

Much recent anthropology has reformulated the question of difference vis-à-vis the question of ontology. This paper looks at the brand as one such ontology. Rather than focusing on the brand as such, however, I show how (putative) brand displays among non-elite youth in South India instantiate an alternate ontology that holds in abeyance—i.e., negates and reinscribes—the brand ontology which governs the global circulation of brand forms in South India in the first place. While brand commodities are popular among youth for their "style" (their ability to playfully transgress adult respectability), such youth are willfully indifferent to the brand identities and provenances such commodities otherwise instantiate. Rather, youth reckon brand commodities by their brandedness, the quality of being like a brand even if not a brand. This active ignoring/simulation of brand ontology registers the anxieties that one's displays may be seen as ostentatious, as inscribing class inequality in peer groups marked by their egalitarian ethos. These double-voiced creative acts (and the desires, anxieties and self-doubts that they diagram) navigate the contradictory existential mandates to be style but not too much style, to transgress adult normativity without transgressing youth sociality. And by citing the brand through instances of brandedness, such youth bring into being novel ontological configurations through the very ontologies they bracket, a fact materialized in the wide range of brand-esque designs which proliferate in local markets. I conclude by arguing that such citationality is engendered by gaps in the brand ontology's double fetish of commodity/brand-personality (and materiality/immateriality, presence/absence).