Animism in Southeast Asia - 9780415713795

Animism is the religious worldview that natural physical entities possess a spiritual essence. This book presents a number of case studies of animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon – its diversity and underlying commonalities and its resilience in the face of powerful forces of change.

Based on original fieldwork, the chapters address a variety of topics central to the understanding of animistic worldviews: notions of human-nature relatedness and human-spirit relations, bodily metamorphosis and the constitution of personhood and trans-human sociality. The book looks at the extent to which the new understanding of animism makes sense of or provides new angles on Southeast Asian religious ethnography, and the ways in which Southeast Asian ethnography sheds light on, or contributes to, the theoretical rethinking of animism. It goes on to present particularly poignant ethnography relating to animism in both the inclusive, classical sense (the belief in nature spirits) and the contemporary, more precise sense (as a particular, non-modern type of ontology/epistemology). The book is a significant contribution to anthropological theory and the revitalization of the concept of animism in the humanities and social sciences.