Birds, Liminality, and Human Transformation: An Animist Perspective on New Animism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.v14i1.108Keywords:
animism, green spirituality, Dreamwork, Neoshamanism, EcopsychologyAbstract
In many pre-modern, non-Western, and indigenous cultures, birds mediate between humans and a divine realm. In mythology and lore they are widely associated with the survival of death. Edward Tylor’s definition of animism identified a belief in spirits that survive death as a key conceptual error to be rectified by the advance of scientific rationality. Recent reconfigurations of animism as an ecological and relational worldview treat the notion of discarnate spirits as a projection of Western assumptions that locate mystery and divinity beyond the natural world. This essay responds by arguing for a degree of continuity between new animism and the spiritualist traditions denounced by Tylor. An autobiographical account of a sequence of encounters with the Common Kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) and other birds appears to confirm their reputation as psychopomps.References
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Mynott, J. Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Pollard, John. Birds in Greek Life and Myth. London: Thames and Hudson,1977.
Roper, Mark. “Halcyon: A Kingfisher in Gortrush Wood.” New Hibernia Review/ Iris Éireannach Nua 12, no. 4 (2008): 9-14.
Rowland, Beryl. Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,1978.
Rozwadowski, Andrzej. “Centering Historical-Archaeological Discourses: The Prehistory of Central Asian/South Siberian Shamanism.” In Belief in the Past: Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion, edited by Davis S. Whitley and Kelley Hays-Gilpin, 105–118. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008.
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Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift, Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520064232.001.0001
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Taylor, John H., ed. Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Journey through the Afterlife. London: British Museum, 2010.
Tillman, Caroline M. The Flesh Made Word: Luce Irigaray’s Rendering of the Sensible Transcendental. Janus Head 11, no. 1 (2009): 39-45. www.janushead.org/11-1/Tilghman.pdf .
Thompson, D’Arcy. A Glossary of Greek Birds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930.
Trubshaw, Bob. Souls, Spirits, and Deities. Avebury: Heart of Albion Press, 2012.
Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture, 2 Vols. London: John Murray, 1913 [1871].
Van Lommel, Pin. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of Near-Death Experience. New York: Harper Collins, 2010.
Wallis, Robert. Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans. London: Routledge, 2003.
Wilkes, Barbara. “Reveal or Conceal?”In Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, edited by Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller, 53–84. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Woodward, Wendy. “Who is to Say that the Hen did not Speak? Bird Subjectivities in some Southern African Narratives.” Alternation 16, no. 2 (2009): 241–61.
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous., New York: Vintage, 1996.
Allen, Richard Hinkley. Star Names, Their Lore and Meaning. New York, Dover, 1963 [1899].
Armstrong, Edward. The Folklore of Birds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1958.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Sociology and the Postmodern. In The Bauman Reader, edited by Peter Beilharz, 173-199. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 [1991].
Bird-Davis, Nurit. “’Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 Supplement ( 1999): S67–S91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/200061
Blain, Jenny. “Now Many of those Things are Shown to Me which I was Denied Before”: Seidr, Shamanism, and Journeying, Past and Present.” Studies in Religion 34, no. 1 (2005): 81–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000842980503400105
Boss, Medard. The Analysis of Dreams. London: Rider 1957.
Bracken, Patrick, and Thomas, Philip. Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, Harmondsworth, Penguin,1972/1966.
Cocker, Mark, and Mabey, Richard. Birds Britannica. London: Chatto and Windus, 2005.
Crumley, Jim. Waters of the Wild Swan. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992.
Curry, Patrick, ed. Divination, Perspectives for a New Millennium. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Eliade, Mircea. Myths Dreams and Mysteries. London: Fontana, 1968 [1957].
Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 [1958].
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. London: Arkana 1989 [1964].
Ezzy, Douglas. “Religious Ethnography: Practising the Witches’ Craft.” Researching Paganisms, edited by in Jenny Blain, Douglas Ezzy, and GrahamHarvey, 112–28. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira, 2004.
Flaceliere, Robert. Greek Oracles. London: Elek Books 1965. George, Andrew, trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London:Penguin Classics, 2003.
Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths I. London: Penguin, 1960.
Greenbaum, Doris Gieseler. “Rising to the Occasion: Appearance, Emergence, Light, and Divination in Hellenistic Astrology.”In The Imaginal Cosmos: Astrology, Divination, and the Sacred, edited by Angela Voss and Jean Hinson Lall, 9–24. Canterbury: University of Kent, 2007.
Greenoak, Francesca. British Birds, Their Folklore, Names, and Literature. London: Christopher Helm, 1997.
Greenwood, Susan. The Anthropology of Magic. Oxford: Berg, 2009.
Gurney, O.R. “The Babylonians and Hittites.”In Divination and Oracles,edited by Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacke, 142–73. London: George Allen and Unwin 1981.
Hallowell, Irving. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour, and World View.” Readings in Indigenous Religion, edited by Graham Harvey, 17¬–49. London: Continuum, 2002.
Hamilton-James, Charlie. Kingfisher: Tales from the Halcyon River. Rickmandsworth: Evans Mitchell, 2009.
Harvey, Graham. “Animism Rather than Shamanism: New Approaches to what Shamans ‘Do.’ “ In Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Bettina Schmidt and LucyHuskinson, L 14–34. London: Continuum, 2010:14-34
Harvey, Graham. Animism, Respecting the Living World, London, Hurst, 2005.
Harvey, Graham, ed. Shamanism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.
Hodder, Ian, and Meskell, Lynn. “The Symbolism of Çatalohöyük in its Regional Context.” In Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalohöyük as a Case Study edited by Ian Hodder, 32–72. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511761416
Ingold, Tim. “A Circumpolar Night’s Dream.” In The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill by Tim Ingold, 89–110. London: Routledge 2000.
Irigaray, Luce. “Animal Compassion.” In Animal Philosophy; Essential Readings in Continental Thought edited by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atherton, 193–202. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Irigaray, Luce. “Practical Teachings: Love—Between Passion and Civility.”In I Love to You; Sketch for a Felicity Within History. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Irigaray, Luce. Prières Quotidienne, Everyday Prayers. Translated by Luce Irigaray and Timothy Matthews. Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 2004.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by Aniela Jaffe. London: Fontana, 1995 [1963].
Krell, David Farrell. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. London, Routledge 1993 [1978].
Lockwood, W.B. The Oxford Dictionary of British Bird Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Mannermaa, Kristiina. “Birds and Burials at Ajvide (Gotland, Sweden ) and Zvejnieki ( Latvia ) about 8,000–3,900 BP.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27 (2008): 201–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2008.01.001
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Richard McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Miller, Frank Justus, trans. Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book XI. London: Heinemann, 1933. Morgan, Robert, and Glue, David. “Breeding, Mortality and Movements of Kingfishers.” Bird Stud 4 (1977):15¬–24.
Mynott, J. Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Pollard, John. Birds in Greek Life and Myth. London: Thames and Hudson,1977.
Roper, Mark. “Halcyon: A Kingfisher in Gortrush Wood.” New Hibernia Review/ Iris Éireannach Nua 12, no. 4 (2008): 9-14.
Rowland, Beryl. Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,1978.
Rozwadowski, Andrzej. “Centering Historical-Archaeological Discourses: The Prehistory of Central Asian/South Siberian Shamanism.” In Belief in the Past: Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion, edited by Davis S. Whitley and Kelley Hays-Gilpin, 105–118. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008.
Ry?gi, ?k?cho. “Nietzsche’s Conception of Nature from an East-Asian Point of View.” In Nietzsche and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes, 200–13. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Serjeantson, Dale. Birds. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift, Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520064232.001.0001
Taylor, Brian. Responding to Men in Crisis: Masculinities, Distress, and the Postmodern Political Landscape. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.
Taylor, John H., ed. Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Journey through the Afterlife. London: British Museum, 2010.
Tillman, Caroline M. The Flesh Made Word: Luce Irigaray’s Rendering of the Sensible Transcendental. Janus Head 11, no. 1 (2009): 39-45. www.janushead.org/11-1/Tilghman.pdf .
Thompson, D’Arcy. A Glossary of Greek Birds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930.
Trubshaw, Bob. Souls, Spirits, and Deities. Avebury: Heart of Albion Press, 2012.
Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture, 2 Vols. London: John Murray, 1913 [1871].
Van Lommel, Pin. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of Near-Death Experience. New York: Harper Collins, 2010.
Wallis, Robert. Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans. London: Routledge, 2003.
Wilkes, Barbara. “Reveal or Conceal?”In Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, edited by Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller, 53–84. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Woodward, Wendy. “Who is to Say that the Hen did not Speak? Bird Subjectivities in some Southern African Narratives.” Alternation 16, no. 2 (2009): 241–61.
Published
2013-07-18
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Taylor, B. A. (2013). Birds, Liminality, and Human Transformation: An Animist Perspective on New Animism. Pomegranate, 14(1), 108-127. https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.v14i1.108
