K Swancutt
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 16301 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | K Swancutt |
| NOMBRES | K |
| APELLIDO | Swancutt |
| FIRMA | SWANCUTT K |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9838-2849 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 19 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 89 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 19 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2006 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking
What does it mean to envision or dream a world into existence? Dreams and visions are often deeply personal and private experiences, but they also open up social spaces for worldmaking. From Australian Aboriginal "Dreamtime" to the ethnographic dreams of anthropologists and their research partners, many dreams and visions are entangled with the historical and analytical trajectories of anthropology. I set out in this article to stretch further th…
Moved to distraction
What does it mean to be ‘moved to distraction’ by ritual theatre? Each year the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, may be moved by their Fire Festival competitions, pageantries, and ‘extravaganzas’, but not necessarily by the Chinese nationalist elements within them. Simulating the pageants of Chinese megacities, Fire Festival extravaganzas meld Nuosu myth-history, animistic imagery, and ‘minority culture’ with the Chinese Dream of …
Of Cosmological Visions and Creativity
How do cosmological visions unsettle animistic and scientific ways of approaching the world? Whereas 'cosmovisions' have the narrow meaning of 'worldviews', people unleash new 'cosmological visions' through the creative act of relating to-and simultaneously dismantling-their constructs of the world at large. Drawing on my ethnography of the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, I show how an ethnohistorian and a priest set out, at the …
Manifesting the invisible. Writing, piercing, shaping, and taming potency in Southwest China
Potency is an often invisible form of power that becomes manifest when written deeply into bodies and things. Among the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, “writing” or “manifesting” (bbur ꁱ) is a vast polysemic concept rooted in the scriptures of priests, which, however, exceeds its own bounds. Nuosu manifest potency by writing it into religious scriptures and handwrought effigies, piercing it into embroidered clothing and tattooed …
The Chicken and the Egg
Which comes first, divine agency or the calculations of diviners? Both are integral to divination, other predictive methods, and the ‘hatching out’ of new creation stories among the Nuosu of Southwest China. In this article, I present ethnography on divination in which eggs evoke the person’s position in the world while the bodies or bones of chickens are indices of health or prosperity. When cracking open raw eggs, peeling open slaughtered chick…
It's scientific!' Play, parody, and the para-ethnographic in Southwest China
Play and games encourage persons to hold the world at a distance, while occasionally challenging its norms through parody, mimicry, and clowning, too. In this article, I offer new ethnography on drinking games among the Nuosu of Southwest China, who distribute penalty shots by injecting them directly into glasses with a syringe. While this revelry may evoke the recent Nuosu history of heroin (ab)use and HIV/AIDS, syringes are used in drinking gam…
Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood
Animal Release and the Sacrificial Ethos in Inner Asia
Animal release is often understood as the practice of freeing an animal from human consumption or the burden of labour. Typically associated with various Buddhist or Daoist cosmologies in which liberating an animal is a merit-making act, animal release tends to be conceptualised in altruistic terms. Yet the diverse forms that sacrifice and animal release take across Inner Asia suggest that the focus of analysis sometimes shifts from a concern wit…
Animism
Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits, the environment, or even items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Through ethnographic examples drawn from animistic societies worldwide, this entry examines key themes in the study of animism, from principles of animation to attributing sentie…
Animism Beyond the Soul
How might we envision animism through the lens of the ‘anthropology of anthropology’? The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors. They explore how native epistemologies, which inform anthropological notions during fieldwork, underpin the dialogues between r…
The Return to Slavery?
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Religion through the Looking Glass
This article is an exploration into how a distinct fascination with the study of religion traverses the biographies of researchers who, through fieldwork, episodically enter into the life-worlds of the peoples they study. In it, I offer up ethnographic and auto-ethnographic reflections on the experiential crossroads and personal biographies that are perhaps as constitutive of religion as they are of the persons who study it. Through a discussion …
The Art of Capture
Anthropology has, among its many accomplishments, become a 'hyper-reflexive' discipline that is mastered by anthropologists and their fieldwork friends. Today's China offers an especially revealing lens onto anthropological reflexivity as it reintroduces animism among ethnic minorities and mobilizes a cosmological-cum-ecological ethos, replete with soul-searching and planet-saving behaviors. This article presents ethnography on the Nuosu of South…
Anthropological Knowledge Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the Soul
In this introduction, we propose a new approach to anthropological knowledge making that would observe the ‘hyper-reflexive’ quality of ethnographic exchanges. We show that anthropological ideas infiltrate themselves into the discourse of native thinkers, even as native ideas regenerate anthropological theory. Our starting point is ‘animism’, a key concept of anthropological theory. We suggest that anthropologists and their interlocutors jointly …
Fame, Fate-Fortune, and Tokens of Value among the nuosu of Southwest China
Landmark anthropological works on fame have shown that gift-giving is often the vehicle for producing relations of 'positive value' and recognition. When viewing fame against the related notion of fortune, however, the focal point of study shifts to how people produce reputations that are 'beyond value' or 'priceless'. This article proposes that the Nuosu of Southwest China enter into an ongoing 'economy of ordeals' in order to accumulate pricele…
The captive guest
An unstable mode of hospitality underpins an important ethnographic finding among the Nuosu of Southwest China: namely the notion that each person 'hosts' his or her own soul, which takes the form of a 'soul-spider' residing on the outer surface of the human body. Famous for their slaveholding practices, which were disbanded by the Chinese in 1956-7, the Nuosu nowadays take 'captive guests', to underscore lineage rankings within their spidery cos…
The undead genealogy
This article gives the sequel to a case study on magical innovation introduced earlier in theJRAI, and shows that Buryat Mongol shamans regularly deflect hostile forces by adopting spirit perspectives. Presenting new ethnography on Buryat vampiric imps and an episode of intra-familial vampirism, the article argues that, in Buryat sociality, anyone - including omnipresent spirits - may cross the virtuous-unvirtuous divide. In northeast Mongolia, B…
The Ontological Spiral
Bodily affects, in Viveiros de Castro's sense of the term, are not just physical characteristics, such as the comportment, mannerisms or tastes consistently ascribed to a given subject. They are also 'forces', 'energies' or 'talents' which are taught, acquired and refined over time. This article argues that virtuosity and fortune are bodily affects which Mongols hold to varying degrees. Through the Mongolian game called 'The Stag', the article sh…
Representational vs conjectural divination
Divination is often regarded as a practice undertaken to obtain a standardized, best possible result. This characterization is made at the cost of analysing how people obtain desired innovations through divinatory procedures. To show how divination actually forces people to adopt strategies that lead to innovation, this article classifies all forms of divination into 'representational' or 'conjectural' categories. Drawing on Mongolian ethnography…
The captive guest
An unstable mode of hospitality underpins an important ethnographic finding among the Nuosu of Southwest China: namely the notion that each person 'hosts' his or her own soul, which takes the form of a 'soul-spider' residing on the outer surface of the human body. Famous for their slaveholding practices, which were disbanded by the Chinese in 1956-7, the Nuosu nowadays take 'captive guests', to underscore lineage rankings within their spidery cos…
Animism
Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits, the environment, or even items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Through ethnographic examples drawn from animistic societies worldwide, this entry examines key themes in the study of animism, from principles of animation to attributing sentie…
Representational vs conjectural divination
Divination is often regarded as a practice undertaken to obtain a standardized, best possible result. This characterization is made at the cost of analysing how people obtain desired innovations through divinatory procedures. To show how divination actually forces people to adopt strategies that lead to innovation, this article classifies all forms of divination into 'representational' or 'conjectural' categories. Drawing on Mongolian ethnography…
Anthropological Knowledge Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the Soul
In this introduction, we propose a new approach to anthropological knowledge making that would observe the ‘hyper-reflexive’ quality of ethnographic exchanges. We show that anthropological ideas infiltrate themselves into the discourse of native thinkers, even as native ideas regenerate anthropological theory. Our starting point is ‘animism’, a key concept of anthropological theory. We suggest that anthropologists and their interlocutors jointly …
The undead genealogy
This article gives the sequel to a case study on magical innovation introduced earlier in theJRAI, and shows that Buryat Mongol shamans regularly deflect hostile forces by adopting spirit perspectives. Presenting new ethnography on Buryat vampiric imps and an episode of intra-familial vampirism, the article argues that, in Buryat sociality, anyone - including omnipresent spirits - may cross the virtuous-unvirtuous divide. In northeast Mongolia, B…
The Art of Capture
Anthropology has, among its many accomplishments, become a 'hyper-reflexive' discipline that is mastered by anthropologists and their fieldwork friends. Today's China offers an especially revealing lens onto anthropological reflexivity as it reintroduces animism among ethnic minorities and mobilizes a cosmological-cum-ecological ethos, replete with soul-searching and planet-saving behaviors. This article presents ethnography on the Nuosu of South…
The Ontological Spiral
Bodily affects, in Viveiros de Castro's sense of the term, are not just physical characteristics, such as the comportment, mannerisms or tastes consistently ascribed to a given subject. They are also 'forces', 'energies' or 'talents' which are taught, acquired and refined over time. This article argues that virtuosity and fortune are bodily affects which Mongols hold to varying degrees. Through the Mongolian game called 'The Stag', the article sh…
It's scientific!' Play, parody, and the para-ethnographic in Southwest China
Play and games encourage persons to hold the world at a distance, while occasionally challenging its norms through parody, mimicry, and clowning, too. In this article, I offer new ethnography on drinking games among the Nuosu of Southwest China, who distribute penalty shots by injecting them directly into glasses with a syringe. While this revelry may evoke the recent Nuosu history of heroin (ab)use and HIV/AIDS, syringes are used in drinking gam…
Religion through the Looking Glass
This article is an exploration into how a distinct fascination with the study of religion traverses the biographies of researchers who, through fieldwork, episodically enter into the life-worlds of the peoples they study. In it, I offer up ethnographic and auto-ethnographic reflections on the experiential crossroads and personal biographies that are perhaps as constitutive of religion as they are of the persons who study it. Through a discussion …
Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking
What does it mean to envision or dream a world into existence? Dreams and visions are often deeply personal and private experiences, but they also open up social spaces for worldmaking. From Australian Aboriginal "Dreamtime" to the ethnographic dreams of anthropologists and their research partners, many dreams and visions are entangled with the historical and analytical trajectories of anthropology. I set out in this article to stretch further th…
Moved to distraction
What does it mean to be ‘moved to distraction’ by ritual theatre? Each year the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, may be moved by their Fire Festival competitions, pageantries, and ‘extravaganzas’, but not necessarily by the Chinese nationalist elements within them. Simulating the pageants of Chinese megacities, Fire Festival extravaganzas meld Nuosu myth-history, animistic imagery, and ‘minority culture’ with the Chinese Dream of …
Of Cosmological Visions and Creativity
How do cosmological visions unsettle animistic and scientific ways of approaching the world? Whereas 'cosmovisions' have the narrow meaning of 'worldviews', people unleash new 'cosmological visions' through the creative act of relating to-and simultaneously dismantling-their constructs of the world at large. Drawing on my ethnography of the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, I show how an ethnohistorian and a priest set out, at the …
Animal Release and the Sacrificial Ethos in Inner Asia
Animal release is often understood as the practice of freeing an animal from human consumption or the burden of labour. Typically associated with various Buddhist or Daoist cosmologies in which liberating an animal is a merit-making act, animal release tends to be conceptualised in altruistic terms. Yet the diverse forms that sacrifice and animal release take across Inner Asia suggest that the focus of analysis sometimes shifts from a concern wit…
Representational vs conjectural divination
Divination is often regarded as a practice undertaken to obtain a standardized, best possible result. This characterization is made at the cost of analysing how people obtain desired innovations through divinatory procedures. To show how divination actually forces people to adopt strategies that lead to innovation, this article classifies all forms of divination into 'representational' or 'conjectural' categories. Drawing on Mongolian ethnography…
The Ontological Spiral
Bodily affects, in Viveiros de Castro's sense of the term, are not just physical characteristics, such as the comportment, mannerisms or tastes consistently ascribed to a given subject. They are also 'forces', 'energies' or 'talents' which are taught, acquired and refined over time. This article argues that virtuosity and fortune are bodily affects which Mongols hold to varying degrees. Through the Mongolian game called 'The Stag', the article sh…
The undead genealogy
This article gives the sequel to a case study on magical innovation introduced earlier in theJRAI, and shows that Buryat Mongol shamans regularly deflect hostile forces by adopting spirit perspectives. Presenting new ethnography on Buryat vampiric imps and an episode of intra-familial vampirism, the article argues that, in Buryat sociality, anyone - including omnipresent spirits - may cross the virtuous-unvirtuous divide. In northeast Mongolia, B…
Fame, Fate-Fortune, and Tokens of Value among the nuosu of Southwest China
Landmark anthropological works on fame have shown that gift-giving is often the vehicle for producing relations of 'positive value' and recognition. When viewing fame against the related notion of fortune, however, the focal point of study shifts to how people produce reputations that are 'beyond value' or 'priceless'. This article proposes that the Nuosu of Southwest China enter into an ongoing 'economy of ordeals' in order to accumulate pricele…
The captive guest
An unstable mode of hospitality underpins an important ethnographic finding among the Nuosu of Southwest China: namely the notion that each person 'hosts' his or her own soul, which takes the form of a 'soul-spider' residing on the outer surface of the human body. Famous for their slaveholding practices, which were disbanded by the Chinese in 1956-7, the Nuosu nowadays take 'captive guests', to underscore lineage rankings within their spidery cos…
Religion through the Looking Glass
This article is an exploration into how a distinct fascination with the study of religion traverses the biographies of researchers who, through fieldwork, episodically enter into the life-worlds of the peoples they study. In it, I offer up ethnographic and auto-ethnographic reflections on the experiential crossroads and personal biographies that are perhaps as constitutive of religion as they are of the persons who study it. Through a discussion …
The Art of Capture
Anthropology has, among its many accomplishments, become a 'hyper-reflexive' discipline that is mastered by anthropologists and their fieldwork friends. Today's China offers an especially revealing lens onto anthropological reflexivity as it reintroduces animism among ethnic minorities and mobilizes a cosmological-cum-ecological ethos, replete with soul-searching and planet-saving behaviors. This article presents ethnography on the Nuosu of South…
Anthropological Knowledge Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the Soul
In this introduction, we propose a new approach to anthropological knowledge making that would observe the ‘hyper-reflexive’ quality of ethnographic exchanges. We show that anthropological ideas infiltrate themselves into the discourse of native thinkers, even as native ideas regenerate anthropological theory. Our starting point is ‘animism’, a key concept of anthropological theory. We suggest that anthropologists and their interlocutors jointly …
Animism Beyond the Soul
How might we envision animism through the lens of the ‘anthropology of anthropology’? The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors. They explore how native epistemologies, which inform anthropological notions during fieldwork, underpin the dialogues between r…
The Return to Slavery?
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Animism
Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits, the environment, or even items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Through ethnographic examples drawn from animistic societies worldwide, this entry examines key themes in the study of animism, from principles of animation to attributing sentie…
Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood
Animal Release and the Sacrificial Ethos in Inner Asia
Animal release is often understood as the practice of freeing an animal from human consumption or the burden of labour. Typically associated with various Buddhist or Daoist cosmologies in which liberating an animal is a merit-making act, animal release tends to be conceptualised in altruistic terms. Yet the diverse forms that sacrifice and animal release take across Inner Asia suggest that the focus of analysis sometimes shifts from a concern wit…
The Chicken and the Egg
Which comes first, divine agency or the calculations of diviners? Both are integral to divination, other predictive methods, and the ‘hatching out’ of new creation stories among the Nuosu of Southwest China. In this article, I present ethnography on divination in which eggs evoke the person’s position in the world while the bodies or bones of chickens are indices of health or prosperity. When cracking open raw eggs, peeling open slaughtered chick…
It's scientific!' Play, parody, and the para-ethnographic in Southwest China
Play and games encourage persons to hold the world at a distance, while occasionally challenging its norms through parody, mimicry, and clowning, too. In this article, I offer new ethnography on drinking games among the Nuosu of Southwest China, who distribute penalty shots by injecting them directly into glasses with a syringe. While this revelry may evoke the recent Nuosu history of heroin (ab)use and HIV/AIDS, syringes are used in drinking gam…
Manifesting the invisible. Writing, piercing, shaping, and taming potency in Southwest China
Potency is an often invisible form of power that becomes manifest when written deeply into bodies and things. Among the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, “writing” or “manifesting” (bbur ꁱ) is a vast polysemic concept rooted in the scriptures of priests, which, however, exceeds its own bounds. Nuosu manifest potency by writing it into religious scriptures and handwrought effigies, piercing it into embroidered clothing and tattooed …
Moved to distraction
What does it mean to be ‘moved to distraction’ by ritual theatre? Each year the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, may be moved by their Fire Festival competitions, pageantries, and ‘extravaganzas’, but not necessarily by the Chinese nationalist elements within them. Simulating the pageants of Chinese megacities, Fire Festival extravaganzas meld Nuosu myth-history, animistic imagery, and ‘minority culture’ with the Chinese Dream of …
Of Cosmological Visions and Creativity
How do cosmological visions unsettle animistic and scientific ways of approaching the world? Whereas 'cosmovisions' have the narrow meaning of 'worldviews', people unleash new 'cosmological visions' through the creative act of relating to-and simultaneously dismantling-their constructs of the world at large. Drawing on my ethnography of the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, I show how an ethnohistorian and a priest set out, at the …
Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking
What does it mean to envision or dream a world into existence? Dreams and visions are often deeply personal and private experiences, but they also open up social spaces for worldmaking. From Australian Aboriginal "Dreamtime" to the ethnographic dreams of anthropologists and their research partners, many dreams and visions are entangled with the historical and analytical trajectories of anthropology. I set out in this article to stretch further th…
Sociology (15 obras) · Anthropology (11 obras) · Philosophy (10 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 obras) · Art (9 obras) · Aesthetics (8 obras) · China (8 obras) · Ethnography (8 obras) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (8 obras) · History (7 obras)