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(2016) Critical anthropological engagements in human alterity and difference, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Drawing on ethnographic material from Chewong, a hunter-gathering group of people in the Malaysian rain forest, I discuss how Chewong ontology and cosmology conflate with a comprehensive understanding of causal processes in "nature" in which every object is a potential subject. Identity is a question of the particular physicality–interiority relationship in each case. Chewong do not divide the world into human versus the rest of nature, but make a distinction between species with and without consciousness. My discussion is linked to a trend in contemporary anthropology that dissolves the division between humanity and nature; a trend that leads one to ask if the anthropos in anthropology is destined to become an anachronism. Despite the fact that Chewong subjectivity cuts across species, this does mean that they are not Chewong (human)-centric. Therefore, I argue against the current post-humanist vogue and for human exceptionalism and suggest that to anthropomorphize is a human universal.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_2
Full citation:
Howell, S. (2016)., The relationality of species in chewong animistic ontology, in B. Enge bertelsen & S. Bendixsen (eds.), Critical anthropological engagements in human alterity and difference, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 43-63.
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