ABSTRACT
The shift from a purely theoretical to a concrete way of exploring a full-blown alternative to the dominant anthropocentric one is carried out in this chapter, guided by the thesis that animism is panpsychism in practice. To enact the shift, three of the most important anthropologists writing today are discussed: Philippe Descola, Tim Ingold, and Eduardo Kohn. Whereas philosophers like Nagel struggle with the relationship between mind and matter, and posthumanists like Barad with that between knowers and known (dissolving the separation), these anthropologists pursue a more promising approach: their ethnographic studies of nonmodern peoples show what it means for a cosmology to be something utterly concrete as opposed to purely ideational, informing such a daily practice as hunting. The upshot is that the modern Western way of understanding culture and nature – as ontologically separate domains, exhibiting mutually exclusive properties – is shown to be a historical aberration, precisely not the rule among cosmologies but the exception. This has profound consequences for the question about agency and the forms it takes within the natural world, in so many (and so different) other-than-human agents.
