ABSTRACT
This chapter troubles the tradition started by Irving Hallowell that places personhood at the centre of studying animistic worlds. It suggests that instead of “the person”, we perhaps should think about “the relative” as a productive concept for approaching hunter-gatherers’ animistic cosmos. This proposal partly builds on and partly revises the author’s early work which proposed that various kinship relations are salient in foragers’ cosmos. Following Hallowell, it also turned to “the person” as analytical currency in the study of animism, arguing that the animistic person, transcending human/nonhuman distinctions, is relational and situational. Studies of kinship, personhood and animism have since been newly aligned and therefore require the troubling of these earlier proposals. This chapter, therefore, rethinks animism through kinship; in particular, suggesting that “relatives” (in the plural) is a more productive concept than “the person” for exploring hunter-gatherers’ animistic cosmos.
