ABSTRACT
This chapter develops themes of this book with a view to substantiate what the author takes to be the prototype of Southeast Asian animism. It considers Amerindian perspectivism and the current standard notion of animism as varieties of immanent animism. In perspectivism, the human-animal relationship is fundamentally conceptualized in terms of predation, the relationship between hunter and prey. Ontological predation as a form of ritualized violence was also an intrinsic feature of Southeast Asian animism, but here in form of headhunting, an institution widespread in the region until the late nineteenth century. Headhunting and warfare cannibalism were distinct but analogous ways of maintaining and reproducing the animist cosmos. The chapter proposes here that shamanism in Southeast Asia, as described in the regional literature, should be considered a specific variety of spirit possession, an active or agentive form of possession subsumed under what the author tentatively refers to as the possession complex.
