ABSTRACT
This chapter turns diversity into an asset by approaching Southeast Asian sociality as being based on the dynamic production of alterities. It refrains to set up a comparative model of animism in Southeast Asia by defining large contrastive categories or subregions of societies. Instead, the chapter argues that three major factors may help to analyse the varieties of animistic relationships in Southeast Asia in any specific case. All three factors contribute to the creation and dissolution of human and non-human beings in Southeast Asia, which shift in and out of personhood. The chapter takes the term 'animism' as shorthand for animist relationships, which contingently crystallize into more-or-less stable cosmologies. It proposes to analyze such ways of reproducing and relating alterities by three dimensions, which help to grasp their local variations: exchange, accessibility to the senses, and hierarchy. The asymmetry of exchange is a major means to establish communication and define alterities, both social and cosmological.
