Rane Willerslev
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 92957 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Rane Willerslev |
| NOMBRES | Rane |
| APELLIDO | Willerslev |
| FIRMA | WILLERSLEV R |
| AFILIACIONES | Aarhus University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 55 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 667 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 7 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
Disparate Ontologies
Disparate Ontologies? Takes a critical look at Philippe Descola’s four-field anthropological model for ontologies among hunter-gatherer societies. Descola’s model juxtaposes animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism as reflecting different expressions of interiority and physicality and queries those four ontological concepts as comparative units of analysis. While Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture (2013) was a ground-breaking exploration of …
Ideas with Histories
Anthropologists have long been fascinated by the strikingly similar adaptations of circumpolar cultures as well as their puzzling differences. These patterns of diversity have been mapped, studied, and interpreted from many perspectives and often at different social and spatiotemporal scales. While this work has generated vast archives of legacy data, it has also left behind a fragmented understanding of what underpins Arctic cultural diversity a…
Mirrors of Passing
Without exception, all people are faced with the inevitability of death, a stark fact that has immeasurably shaped societies and individual consciousness for the whole of human history. Mirrors of Passing offers a powerful window into this oldest of human preoccupations by investigating the interrelationships of death, materiality, and temporality across far-flung times and places. Stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece and moving thr…
Transcultural Montage
The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors—anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators—explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing,…
Berdamai dengan Keterbatasan Epistemologis
Following the proliferation of digital media usage, the world has seen an increasing amount of digitally-mediated lives in everyday contexts. While anthropological scholarship has started to address this ever-growing subject, anthropologists are mainly preoccupied with human engagements in virtual worlds that have their own tangible and embodied sense of spatiality (e.g., online role-playing and gaming communities). In so doing, anthropologists h…
Chapter 1 ‘To have the world at a distance’
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Who’s Afraid of the S-word? Deviants’ Burials and Human Sacrifice
Over the last couple of decades, archaeologists interested in studies of ritualized violence have continued to debate the possibility, extent, and possible evidence for human sacrifice in much of t
Human sacrifice and value
Mirrors of Passing
How is death, time, and materiality interconnected? How to approach an understanding of the world of the dead? In this introduction, we seek to understand how the experience of material decay, of the death of those around us, makes us aware of the passing of time. Through the literary lens of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, we explore how the world of the dead and the world of the living can intersect; how time and materiality shifts and change…
Montage
Montage refers to the production of new amalgamated wholes by joining different elements in a variety of combinations, repetitions, and overlaps. It is often associated with film editing but the basic principles of montage are also found in a broad range of artistic, cultural, and academic practices. In anthropology, montage has been used as a disruptive principle of analysis and representation in experiments with ethnographic writing, film, phot…
Mirrors of Passing
Without exception, all people are faced with the inevitability of death, a stark fact that has immeasurably shaped societies and individual consciousness for the whole of human history. Mirrors of Passing offers a powerful window into this oldest of human preoccupations by investigating the interrelationships of death, materiality, and temporality across far-flung times and places. Stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece and moving thr…
Faith in anthropologyResponse to rejoinders to Willerslev, Rane, and Christian Suhr. 2018 “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau
Response to rejoinders to Willerslev, Rane , and Christian Suhr . 2018 “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 65–78
Special Section Introduction
Arctic Disequilibrium
This special issue of Cross-Cultural Research presents four papers each of which in their own way addresses the question of how Arctic populations tackle the high levels of unpredictability and risk associated with their environment. It takes as a starting point the evidence for and against aspects of disequilibrium between humans, animals, and their environment. The authors consider both contemporary and historical Indigenous Arctic populations …
A Soul by Any Other Name
Name-soul beliefs maintain that, through a process of reincarnation, spirits of the deceased return into the bodies of newborn members of the same society. When this is recognized, the newborn or very young child is then named for the previously known ancestor or close kin relation believed to be returning (e.g., a grandfather, or an aunt). Name-soul spiritual beliefs among traditional indigenous societies residing in circumpolar regions are perv…
Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer's divine revelation
Anthropological insights are not produced or constructed through reasoned discourse alone. Often they appear to be given in "leaps of faith" as the anthropologist's conceptual grasp upon the world is lost. To understand these peculiar moments, we adopt the Kierkegaardian concept of religious faith, not as certitude in some transcendental principle, but as a deeply paradoxical mode of knowing, whose paths bend and twist through glimpses of underst…
Obstruction and Intervention as Creative Methods in Anthropological Research
Could it be that creativity thrives under the methodological asceticism of imposed limitations? Drawing on von Trier's and Leth's film experiment The Five Obstructions, this introduction outlines the creative potentialities of rethinking anthropological methodology through interventions and obstructions into the works of one's peers
Understanding Hunger with Ik Elders and Turnbull'sThe Mountain People
Drawing upon the method of peer obstruction, this article revolves around understanding experiences of hunger among the Ik of northern Uganda by reflecting upon Colin Turnbull's book The Mountain People together with community elders. The article debates the ethical dilemmas of discussing potentially unpopular ethnographic accounts locally, and the anthropological hesitation of using ethnic categories such as the 'Ik'. The article contributes to …
Cement, Graves, and Pillars in Land Disputes in Northern Uganda
Cement pillars and graves play significant roles as land markers in disputes over land in postconflict northern Uganda. Contemporary land cases from Acholi and Ikland display different histories of land use and conflict. In Acholi, cemented graves constitute concrete indices of belonging in wrangles. In Ikland, national nature authorities have brought cement pillars into the landscape. We explore how cemented graves and cement pillars are used fo…
Taming Time, Timing Death
Regenerating Life in the Face of Predation
This article describes in detail a mortuary ritual among the Chukchi of Northern Kamchatka and points to its remarkable affinity with an ideal-typical reindeer sacrifice. We argue that this connection between human cremation and sacrifice plays a key role in the people’s attempt to maintain and ensure continuation of their particular kind of life in a cosmos that is replete with numerous other, mostly hostile, life forms. The article describes al…
Materialities of Passing
Taming Time, Timing Death
The Anthropology of Ontology Meets the Writing Culture Debate
Not Animal, Notnot-animal
Among the Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters in northeastern Siberia, it is commonly held that humans and animals can turn into each other by temporarily taking on one another's bodies. However, this is dangerous for a hunter, because he may thus lose sight of his original species identity and undergo an irreversible metamorphosis. He therefore assumes the viewpoint of his prey, but not in any absolute sense, which would mean literall…
The Dark Side of Empathy
This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially 'good'-with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality-ignores what we propose to call the 'dark side of empathy': that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by…
An anthropological concept of the concept
This article attempts to sketch a new anthropological epistemology. It does so by revisiting the work that concepts do in economic models, and by suggesting an alternative 'anthropological concept of the concept' for the economy. The article looks to how concepts create their own limits of meaning and uses the very idea of limit to rethink how conceptual thought out-grows and transforms itself. We develop our epistemology by looking at the socio-…
Frazer strikes back from the armchair
The question which runs throughout this talk can be stated in stark form: is it a mistake to take our interest in an ethnographic phenomenon in the direction of empirical investigation when what is really needed with respect to its clarity is an imaginative contemplation of it? It is my overall argument that the Malinowskian recourse to ethnographical evidence is misguided. As an example, I take the animist conception of 'soul'. I will show how i…
Taking Animism Seriously, but Perhaps Not Too Seriously
How do we take indigenous animism seriously in the sense proposed by Viveiros de Castro? In this article, I pose this challenge to all the major theories of animism, stretching from Tylor and Durkheim, over Lévi-Strauss to Ingold. I then go on to draw a comparison between Žižek's depiction of the cynical milieu of advanced capitalism in which ideology as "false consciousness" has lost force and the Siberian Yukaghirs for whom ridiculing the spiri…
"Introduction
The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an ant…
Sacrifice as the ideal hunt
The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer herders. What may this tell us about the transformation from hunting to pastoralism? This article argues for a structural identity between hunting and sacrifice, and for the domestication of the reindeer as the result of hunters' efforts to use sacrifice to control the accidental variables of the hunt. Hunters can practise their ethos of 'trust' with p…
The optimal sacrifice
In the Siberian North, "voluntary death," that is, a person, who-often because of illness and old age-requests to die at the hands of close relatives, has traditionally been explained as a form of suicide resulting from the region's harsh living conditions. In this article, I suggest an alternative interpretation. Drawing on ethnographic data collected among the Chukchi of northern Kamchatka, I argue that voluntary death is effectively a ritual b…
Transcendental Perspectivism
This article explores the concept of "transcendental perspectivism," drawing on ethnographic research among the Yukaghir hunters of Siberia. It argues that Yukaghir cosmology, rather than simply attributing human-like perspectives to animals, posits a radical de-centering of perspective, where the "human" is but one viewpoint among many, and where the very notion of a fixed subject position is challenged. This transcendental perspectivism allows …
Can Film Show the Invisible
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions - a position often associated with observational cinema - but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its …
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer's divine revelation
Anthropological insights are not produced or constructed through reasoned discourse alone. Often they appear to be given in "leaps of faith" as the anthropologist's conceptual grasp upon the world is lost. To understand these peculiar moments, we adopt the Kierkegaardian concept of religious faith, not as certitude in some transcendental principle, but as a deeply paradoxical mode of knowing, whose paths bend and twist through glimpses of underst…
Spirits as 'ready to hand
The Upper Kolyma Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters in north-eastern Siberia, rarely give names to spirits and have no neatly ordered system of classification. I develop an argument that relates this to the nature of Yukaghir experience, going beyond the academically widespread view of knowledge as a matter of linguistic representations or cognition and focusing instead on the way things occur in the flux of people's everyday activiti…
The anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love
Prologue
This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions…
The Soul of the Soul Is the Body
As part of a Common Knowledge symposium on the "consequence of blur," this article reassesses the anthropologist E. B. Tylor's famous but vague concept of the animist soul as an optimal reflection of the soul's fuzzy ontological status among animist peoples. Unlike the Platonic body/soul dichotomy, with its fixed appearance/essence distinction, indigenous conceptions of the soul among North Asian peoples, such as the Chukchi of Siberia and the Da…
God on trial
What would the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac look like through the value magnitude of Chukchi sacrifice, and vice versa? Drawing on the Dumontian idea that a dominant value contains its contrary within, I show that what counts as the dominant value in each of the two sacrificial traditions is so deeply co-implicated that trickery (Chukchi) becomes the shadow of faith (Abraham), and vice versa. At certain moments, one dominant value o…
Cement, Graves, and Pillars in Land Disputes in Northern Uganda
Cement pillars and graves play significant roles as land markers in disputes over land in postconflict northern Uganda. Contemporary land cases from Acholi and Ikland display different histories of land use and conflict. In Acholi, cemented graves constitute concrete indices of belonging in wrangles. In Ikland, national nature authorities have brought cement pillars into the landscape. We explore how cemented graves and cement pillars are used fo…
Understanding Hunger with Ik Elders and Turnbull'sThe Mountain People
Drawing upon the method of peer obstruction, this article revolves around understanding experiences of hunger among the Ik of northern Uganda by reflecting upon Colin Turnbull's book The Mountain People together with community elders. The article debates the ethical dilemmas of discussing potentially unpopular ethnographic accounts locally, and the anthropological hesitation of using ethnic categories such as the 'Ik'. The article contributes to …
Regenerating Life in the Face of Predation
This article describes in detail a mortuary ritual among the Chukchi of Northern Kamchatka and points to its remarkable affinity with an ideal-typical reindeer sacrifice. We argue that this connection between human cremation and sacrifice plays a key role in the people’s attempt to maintain and ensure continuation of their particular kind of life in a cosmos that is replete with numerous other, mostly hostile, life forms. The article describes al…
The Anthropology of Ontology Meets the Writing Culture Debate
"Half-Trust" and Enmity in Ikland, Northern Uganda
This article questions whether enmity is always bad and trust always good. In the borderlands between Ikland in northern Uganda and Turkanaland in Kenya, sometimes violent enmity combines with friendly barter relations between the Ik, a subsistence agricultural people that also hunts, and their goat-and-cattle herding neighbors, the Turkana and Dodoth peoples. "Half-trust," as some of the Ik call it, works to prevent the escalation of conflict. W…
Urbanites without a City
Female roles as promoted among the Siberian Yukaghirs today, favouring ideals of beauty, autonomy and above all a modern urban lifestyle, are not as clear-cut as they may seem at first glance. Superficially, it appears that there has been a complete reversal of what went before: the Soviet ideal of the strong working-class woman has been thrown out and replaced with Western models of femininity. Dip a little deeper below the surface, however, and…
Who’s Afraid of the S-word? Deviants’ Burials and Human Sacrifice
Over the last couple of decades, archaeologists interested in studies of ritualized violence have continued to debate the possibility, extent, and possible evidence for human sacrifice in much of t
Obstruction and Intervention as Creative Methods in Anthropological Research
Could it be that creativity thrives under the methodological asceticism of imposed limitations? Drawing on von Trier's and Leth's film experiment The Five Obstructions, this introduction outlines the creative potentialities of rethinking anthropological methodology through interventions and obstructions into the works of one's peers
Spirits as 'ready to hand
The Upper Kolyma Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters in north-eastern Siberia, rarely give names to spirits and have no neatly ordered system of classification. I develop an argument that relates this to the nature of Yukaghir experience, going beyond the academically widespread view of knowledge as a matter of linguistic representations or cognition and focusing instead on the way things occur in the flux of people's everyday activiti…
Not Animal, Notnot-animal
Among the Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters in northeastern Siberia, it is commonly held that humans and animals can turn into each other by temporarily taking on one another's bodies. However, this is dangerous for a hunter, because he may thus lose sight of his original species identity and undergo an irreversible metamorphosis. He therefore assumes the viewpoint of his prey, but not in any absolute sense, which would mean literall…
Drømme, Ånder Og Kognition
As a child of the Western intellectual tradition, anthropology has tended not to take its informants' stories about the existence of spiritual beings seriously. Instead, these stories tend to be accounted for by using a terminology drawn from the theories of representation, which take as their premise that we do not have any direct perceptual access to the world, but need to construct it in our minds by means of our language. This article aims at…
Soul HuntersHunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs
This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yukaghirs, a little-known group of indigenous people in the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia. Basing this study on firsthand experience with Yukaghir hunters, the text focuses on the practical implications of living in a “hall-of-mirrors” world—one inhabited by humans, animals, and spirits, all of whom are understood to be endless mimetic doub…
Soul Hunters
This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yukaghirs, a little-known group of indigenous people in the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia. Basing his study on firsthand experience with Yukaghir hunters, Rane Willerslev focuses on the practical implications of living in a "hall-of-mirrors" world—one inhabited by humans, animals, and spirits, all of whom are understood to be endless mimeti…
Skilled Visions
Transcendental Perspectivism
This article explores the concept of "transcendental perspectivism," drawing on ethnographic research among the Yukaghir hunters of Siberia. It argues that Yukaghir cosmology, rather than simply attributing human-like perspectives to animals, posits a radical de-centering of perspective, where the "human" is but one viewpoint among many, and where the very notion of a fixed subject position is challenged. This transcendental perspectivism allows …
An anthropological concept of the concept
This article attempts to sketch a new anthropological epistemology. It does so by revisiting the work that concepts do in economic models, and by suggesting an alternative 'anthropological concept of the concept' for the economy. The article looks to how concepts create their own limits of meaning and uses the very idea of limit to rethink how conceptual thought out-grows and transforms itself. We develop our epistemology by looking at the socio-…
The optimal sacrifice
In the Siberian North, "voluntary death," that is, a person, who-often because of illness and old age-requests to die at the hands of close relatives, has traditionally been explained as a form of suicide resulting from the region's harsh living conditions. In this article, I suggest an alternative interpretation. Drawing on ethnographic data collected among the Chukchi of northern Kamchatka, I argue that voluntary death is effectively a ritual b…
Robert Paine
Urbanites without a City
Female roles as promoted among the Siberian Yukaghirs today, favouring ideals of beauty, autonomy and above all a modern urban lifestyle, are not as clear-cut as they may seem at first glance. Superficially, it appears that there has been a complete reversal of what went before: the Soviet ideal of the strong working-class woman has been thrown out and replaced with Western models of femininity. Dip a little deeper below the surface, however, and…
Species-specific responses of Late Quaternary megafauna to climate and humans
Tiltrædelsesforelæsninger
Nils Bubandt. Demokrato som selvfølge: Hvad kan antropologi sige om globaliseringen af folkestyret? Andreas Roepstorff. Eksperimentel AntropologiRane Willerslev. Det guddommelige blik: En analyse af 'Den Dansende Troldmand
The anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love
A Matter of Life and Death
Frazer strikes back from the armchair
The question which runs throughout this talk can be stated in stark form: is it a mistake to take our interest in an ethnographic phenomenon in the direction of empirical investigation when what is really needed with respect to its clarity is an imaginative contemplation of it? It is my overall argument that the Malinowskian recourse to ethnographical evidence is misguided. As an example, I take the animist conception of 'soul'. I will show how i…
When Good Luck Is Bad Fortune
Two indigenous Siberian groups-the Yukaghirs and the Telengits-share rather similar ideas about success in hunting as an elusive and highly precarious tension between too little and too much luck. In the catalogue of semiotics, it corresponds to the homonym whereby one sound/spelling is the manifestation of two words with different meanings. The result, as we shall show, is that any lucky hunter always inhabits the alternative possibility of his …
The Soul of the Soul Is the Body
As part of a Common Knowledge symposium on the "consequence of blur," this article reassesses the anthropologist E. B. Tylor's famous but vague concept of the animist soul as an optimal reflection of the soul's fuzzy ontological status among animist peoples. Unlike the Platonic body/soul dichotomy, with its fixed appearance/essence distinction, indigenous conceptions of the soul among North Asian peoples, such as the Chukchi of Siberia and the Da…
Percepções da presa
Para os Yukaghirs da Sibéria, a presa é vista como uma amante que precisa se 'entregar' ao caçador, demonstrando desejo sexual por ele. Consequentemente, o caçador busca seduzir a presa transformando seu corpo na imagem dela. Contudo, esse empreendimento é arriscado e pode resultar na perda de sua aderência à espécie original. Por essa razão, dentro do acampamento humano, o processo de caçar é oposto por um contraprocesso, implicando o esforço do…
Can Film Show the Invisible
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions - a position often associated with observational cinema - but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its …
Transcultural Montage
The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors—anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators—explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing,…
Taking Animism Seriously, but Perhaps Not Too Seriously
How do we take indigenous animism seriously in the sense proposed by Viveiros de Castro? In this article, I pose this challenge to all the major theories of animism, stretching from Tylor and Durkheim, over Lévi-Strauss to Ingold. I then go on to draw a comparison between Žižek's depiction of the cynical milieu of advanced capitalism in which ideology as "false consciousness" has lost force and the Siberian Yukaghirs for whom ridiculing the spiri…
Prologue
This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions…
God on trial
What would the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac look like through the value magnitude of Chukchi sacrifice, and vice versa? Drawing on the Dumontian idea that a dominant value contains its contrary within, I show that what counts as the dominant value in each of the two sacrificial traditions is so deeply co-implicated that trickery (Chukchi) becomes the shadow of faith (Abraham), and vice versa. At certain moments, one dominant value o…
"Introduction
The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an ant…
Sociology (31 obras) · Philosophy (30 obras) · Epistemology (24 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (23 obras) · Philosophy (21 obras) · Anthropology (19 obras) · History (15 obras) · Computer Science (14 obras) · Art (11 obras) · Aesthetics (10 obras)