ABSTRACT
This chapter contests the alleged impossibility to get rid of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism in our efforts of depicting animals, by identifying the pitfalls into which Charles Foster has fallen when criticising the “literary shamanism” of J.A. Baker in his classic work The Peregrine, the tale of how the author obsessively pursues some falcons until he suggests he has become one. Foster, in his study Being a Beast , which is the account of his own efforts to become five different animals, attempts to identify with certain species of animals by concretely adopting their life-styles and habitats. To his mind, such attempts are doomed to failure from the outset. However, this chapter argues that Foster’s rejection of “literary shamanism” rests upon a misconception of Uexküll’s animal worlds, of becoming, of shamanism, and, finally, of the practice of writing. By combining Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections on becoming-animal with Viveiros de Castro and Descola’s (2005) insights into the philosophical implications of shamanism, this chapter purports to show that shamanism, understood properly and despite Foster’s claims to the contrary, might well provide us with the conceptual tools by which to assess the singular experiences of those who attempt to cross the species divide in order to adopt other-than-human perspectives.
