Animism in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian animism in context / Kaj Århem -- Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia / Guido Sprenger -- Seeing and knowing : metamorphosis and the fragility of species in Chewong animistic ideology / Signe Howell -- Graded personhood : human and non-human actors in the Southeast Asian uplands / Guido Sprenger -- Animism and the hunter's dilemma : hunting, sacrifice and asymmetric exchange among the Katu of Vietnam / Kaj Århem -- Wrestling with spirits, escaping the state : animist ecology and settlement policy in the Annamite Cordillera / Nikolas Århem -- Actualizing spirits : Ifugao animism as onto-praxis / Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme -- Relatedness and alterity in Bentian human-spirit relations / Kenneth Sillander -- The dynamics of the cosmic conversation : beliefs about spirits among the Kelabit and Penan of the Upper Baram River, Sarawak / Monica Janowski -- Animism and anxiety : religious conversion among the Kelabit of Sarawak / Matthew H. Amster -- Boundaries of humanity : non-human others and animist ontology in eastern Indonesia / Timo Kaartinen -- Gods and spirits in the Wetu Telu religion of Lombok / Sven Cederroth -- Impaling spirit : three categories of ontological domain in eastern Indonesia / David Hicks -- Southeast-Asian animism : a dialogue with Amerindian perspectivism / Kaj Århem -- End comment : to conclude in the spirit of rebirth, or, A note on animic anthropo-ontogenesis / Tim Ingold. "Animism refers to ontologies or worldviews which assign agency and personhood to human and non-human beings alike. Recent years have seen a revival of this concept in anthropology, where it is now discussed as an alternative to modern-Western naturalistic notions of human-environment relations. Based on original fieldwork, this book presents a number of case studies of animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon - its diversity and underlying commonalities and its resilience in the face of powerful forces of change. Critically engaging with the current standard notion of animism, based on hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies in other regions, it examines the roles of life forces, souls and spirits in local cosmologies and indigenous religion. It proposes an expansion of the concept to societies featuring mixed farming, sacrifice and hierarchy and explores the question of how non-human agents are created through acts of attention and communication, touching upon the relationship between animist ontologies, world religion, and the state"--