Abstract

Amazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged ‘western’ understandings of man’s place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also ‘things’ such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, this volume offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas. The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processes of their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity.

Vanessa Elisa Grotti is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University.

Marc Brightman is Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva and Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

“This thoughtful volume is extraordinarily rich and will prompt all of us interested in these questions to think about them from fresh perspectives.” • Anthropological Forum

“This is an extremely interesting collection of papers which takes our understanding of animism forward considerably. Pre-scientific ideas abound in religion. The Bible's focus on sacrifice has roots here, and what is 'idolatry' but nature religion giving human characteristics to divinities and even trees, the Asherah.” • Journal of Beliefs and Values

“This exciting book…offers an excellent introduction to the main theoretical problem that the book addresses—“the anthropology of nature.”… there is a lot of rich material here on how Siberian and Amazonian peoples create lives and communities out of inter-species relations and inter-species communicative practices that involve rural, frontier landscapes…I highly recommend this book for its rich ethnography and theory, and for its fruitful comparative perspective.” • Sibirica

Olga Ulturgasheva is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the Scott Polar Research Institute and Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.