A (0:00)

Good evening everyone. Thanks to all of you for coming. It's my great pleasure to welcome tonight Rane Willislev. Now, Rane is thought of as a person to watch, and this is true on either side of the North Sea. Most recently, British anthropologists and students will know him for his recent participation in a debate in the Group for Debates and Anthropological Theory series run at the University of Manchester, where he spoke for the Motion. The anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no place for love and he and his co debater Jeanette Edwards won by 10 votes. So he's obviously a very convincing speaker. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Cambridge in 2003 and he's also been associate professor at the Granada center for Visual Anthropology and Department for Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. But he's also famous in Denmark. He's the director of the Ethnographic Collections, as you can see at the Museum of. I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it, but Musk. Gord, Right, Denmark. And also associate professor at the Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics at the University of Aarhus. He tells me he's not been having to teach much recently and this has given him a lot of freedom to write, but I'm sure the students are the poorer for it. But our own students were very lucky to have him give a talk to them today because some of them have been studying his work. He's also the editor of Acta Boreala, the Nordic Journal of Circumpolar societies. And in 2006 he was awarded the Young Elite Researchers Award by the Independent Research Councils of Denmark. So to the more important topic, and that is his research. He's been interested in hunting and spiritual knowledge among Siberia's indigenous people. And in 2007 his monograph Soul Hunting, Animism and Personhood among the Siberian Yuga was published by University of California Press, Berkeley. This is the book that was part of our undergraduate syllabus this year. Again, very much enjoyed by the students. He tells me that students back in Denmark haven't read the book, so I guess this is the right place for him to be. He also published a more popular book, which translates as on the Run in Siberia in 2009. So he's going to be talking to us today about Fraser Strikes Back from the Armchair, A New Search for Origins. Thanks very much for coming.

B (2:39)

Let me say how very honored I am by your invitation to deliver the Malinowski Memorial Lecture. Can you hear me? Honored, but also a little anxious. I'm the first Danish anthropologist to give this prominent talk and I suddenly fear that your response will be critical, not just for me, but also for how you will think of Danish anthropology in the near future. I'm also anxious, and even more so because I've been foolish enough to use this opportunity to question the ethnographic tradition of Malinowski, in whose honor this lecture is organized and whose intellectual legacy continues to define our discipline. Indeed, the problem I want to consider here is one of key importance to Malinowski. It has to do with the relation between abstract human reason and imagination and so called ethnographic fact. The crux of my argument will be to show that we will get nowhere if we confine ourselves to a trust in ethnographic facts. Every manifestation of actual social life is more or less and adequately expressive of an imaginary totality or all inclusive force which operates on a purely spiritual plane and which cannot therefore be object of empirical observation or experience. True anthropological insight begins then, not from what we conventionally regard as the solidity of actual empirical observation, but on the contrary, from the scholar's speculative imagination which provides the only vehicle for insight into this imaginary fabric of social life. The path that leads us to the real starting point of social life sets out, therefore, not in the field, but in the scholars speculative imagination. In proposing this rather reverse take on anthropology, which we conventionally think of as an empiricist social science, I do not mean to deny the achievements of Malinowski's ethnographic methods, which are very considerable at the time of its implementation. It clearly answered a felt need for purging anthropology of its old office bound relics to develop the ethnographic potential of first hand observation. In addition, it brought and continues to bring forth a very rich harvest of ethnographic data of actual living societies and of such unprecedented detail and scale that Malinowski may indeed have been right to denote his ethnographic method of revolution in anthropology. Moreover, in recent decades there has been a growing acknowledgement of the virtues of the ethnographic method outside social anthropology, in fields such as education, organization and design studies, and many more. In all these ways, Malinowski's methodology provided what was called for. And it seems quite obvious that the days are long gone when the anthropological researcher can be engaged in an armchair exercise, drawing social laws from the sidelines. Now he or she has to be an empirical investigator in the field, collecting data firsthand, hence providing firm ethnographic evidence for any attempt at theoretical generalizations. This is all good, we tell to students and even to ourselves, for social anthropologists are confident that Malinowski's ethnographic revolution signifies progress, the rejection of armchair fantasies, of which James Fraser was such a superlative example, in favor of direct observation through fieldwork, of which Malinowski became the champion. Modern British anthropology knows itself as not just non frasian but quite positively antifrasian, and this image, which Malinowski also was extremely eager to cement, has become enshrined in the very creation myth of modern anthropology itself. The anthropologist must get out of his comfortable position in the long chair and live it. Only by living a way of life can he get a sober and considerate account of it without falsification. Indeed, this view on the honorable task of fieldwork has become so ingrained within our discipline that it now appears common sense. Yet it is exactly here we begin to glimpse the problem that motivates the writing of this lecture. For one may ask if the key which once opened the door of a new age in anthropology, its confidence in what can be directly and accurately observed by the field worker, is inserting him or herself into the routine context of a society, has gotten out of hand. In other words, is the determining role given to empirical observation really the way forward with regard to our interpretive efforts? The argument advanced here is that while some social aspects can be grasped aside, others are beyond empirical experience, for they form the virtual fabric of the social world's actual living manifestations. For the sake of clarity and economy, I have adopted the two terms, the virtual and the actual, from Deleuze, and I will make occasional reference to them. That something is actual basically means that it exists in the conventional sense of being empirically present, that it can be experienced, observed, measured. The virtual, by contrast, does not share any of these characteristics. Its qualities are not empirical in the normal sense, not perceptible, material, measurable, and so on. The virtual is rather like a phantom ideal which does not exist in the conventional sense of being physically given or presented, but can only be imagined as a kind of unthinkable abstraction or paradox working on a purely spiritual plane. This, however, does not make the virtual unreal, the recent evolution of the word's general meaning in phrases like virtual reality, or unhealthily associated with the artificial or merely superficial, but the words older, now archaic meaning related to the possession of inherent virtues or powers. It is this older meaning that I want to bring across to reveal how the force of the virtual, in an important sense is more real than its actual manifestations. What we do, how we live our lives, despite its seemingly solidity and determination, is in fact the product of a virtual producing that originates in what Deleuze, following the image of Bergson, refers to as the dawn of our human experience. The virtual, in other words, constitutes the primordial groundwork of the observable world's actual living manifestation, that is their real starting point or origin. Below I will exemplify this point by discussing one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first, namely the soul that Tyler pointed out sits at the heart of animism, the primitive tendency to impute a soul to that which empirically does not have one. I will show how the animist concept of soul is impregnated with virtual force, which finds expression in a certain excess, impossibility, or paradox, and which effectively situates it outside the zone of empirical investigation. As such it can only be thought or rather imagined, in a highly abstracted and idealized view. Understanding it therefore begins not in the field but in the scholar's speculative imagination. This preoccupation with the primordial, along with my attempt to conventionalize ethnographic information in an idealized direction, finds an echo in Fraser, the last survivor of the old armchair school. Frazer's bookish style of doing anthropology was marked by bold speculative interrogations of ethnography, a process whereby uncertain leaps of his own vivid imagination gave force and meaning to the ethnographic observations at his disposal. This speculative methodology can clearly be detected in his masterpiece the Golden Bough, which I will now turn to discuss in some detail. Because nowadays, whatever anthropologists do, they seldom read Frazer, Fraser's name and work have often provided sufficient to drive usually calm anthropologists to a frenzy of vituperation, and I therefore suspect that my aim of awakening his legacy as a source of inspiration will provoke frightening and perhaps even spiteful associations of an extremely old fashioned anthropology full of undisguised contempt for primitive peoples. To obviate any misunderstandings, let me at once point out that my reflections on Frazer do not imply that I take his imperial evolutionism to be right and its critics to be wrong. Such attempt at restoring Frazer's evolutionist legacy has already been pursued and recently renewed by Jarvi in his call for back to Fraser movement, and I think with little conviction. In my view it would be absurd to deny that the shifts in our discipline, the most important being that of Malinowski's ethnographic revolution, means that Frazer's evolutionism is not merely dated but stone dead. Frazer's questions as to how societies pass through the same stages of development, with the added assumption that this development is necessary in the direction of intellectual and moral progress are not simply flawed, but frankly absurd when judged by modern standards of knowledge. Thus, if Fraser's intellectual legacy is to be appreciated at all, in his, evolutionism cannot be part of what is recovered. This becomes even more mandatory when we realize that phrases anthropology is a science of human origins which relies on history. Functionalism, as promoted by Malinowski, rejected all attempts at conjecturing human origins where there is no information based on reliable historical records. In this way, the entire approach of Frazer, who, who relied on an authentic knowledge of a period of human history to which we have no access, was rejected. However, one may ask if the question of origins really is a historical one in the same way as, for instance, the fall of Rome or Constantinople. I don't think so. History is by its very nature a recording of actualization, the effectuation of real events that took place in lived time and space. But actuality is, as already pointed out, unfolded from a virtual beginning. This virtual force is of itself always prior to history and cannot be accounted for by any strict causality or chronological sequence, nor is it connected to any specific body or place. Strictly speaking, then, origins have no history. Thus we are forced to renounce Fraser's old dream of grasping the origins of religion and other human inventions, which with the aid of historical tools. What we need instead is a theory of origins as the virtual power of creation, where it is a question not of history or evolutionary stages, but of subtracting the very source of creation from the mediation of the created, that is to uncover the dependence on the actual upon the virtual. If we are to take Frazer as our guide in this challenge, the first thing to do is to find within his work a far more radical potential than his single evolutionary scheme. We may detect this potential if we cease focusing on what Frazer did and instead look into the somewhat odd way he did it. There are, I venture to suggest, key aspects to Frazer's methodology which ought to be influential in the creation of anthropologist modern or post modern spirit. First, there is still a seam of gold in his emphasis on the human mind being the same throughout the world, irrespective of the stage of social development. This aspect, this appeal. Sorry, this appeal to general human reason and imagination. Fraser used not only to enlist the so called savages among the heartbeat and eager rationalists, making their apparently absurd religious beliefs the outcome of essentially consistent and logical thinking. It also formed the basis of his own intellectualist commitment to what could be denoted the speculative imagination. It is well known that Frazer's access to the native point of view was not born out of field studies, but involved his own speculative projection of meaning onto the ethnographic data provided to him by missionaries and imperial officials. This speculative dimension to Frazer's work is strongly present in the Golden Bough. Throughout the volumes, and there are 13 of them, there's a plentiful of daring, essentially poetic speculations as to the origins of whatever primitive, archaic and contemporary rituals, beliefs and religious institutions. All of them he eventually interprets as the variations of the antique theme of the sacred priesthood of Nemi. I think there should be. Oh, there it is. Yeah, it's Turner's picture of Nemi that he starts out with. Just a sec of Nemi and with it the legend of the Golden Bough, which must be broken before the combat for the succession of the priesthood can take place. Malinowski used exactly this phantasm of the priesthood's archaic and universal presence to dismiss Frazer. Metaphysical considerations of cabinet thinkers, he disdainfully declared. Radcliffe Brown, in conversation with Klugmann, nicknamed Fraser's mode of reasoning if I Were a Horse. And Evans Pritchard famously compared it to myth, making a just so story like how the Leopard Got Its Spots. I would not deny that the lack of any positive evidence for pointing to the remote and long forgotten origins of religiosity suggests a major problem for Frazer. It is interesting to note, however, that his way of coping with this drawback is to develop a mythological picture of a prehistoric past, which seems to suggest that empirical or fact driven accounts of human religiosity can cannot stand alone. We need stories too. Boone has also noticed this lack of a clear cut distinction between poetic mythology and science and phrases writing style. He says the Golden Bough internalizes the contrast between itself and its subject matter. Its prose paradoxically describes unbelievable rights believably. Frazer's achievement as a writer has often been praised by literary critics. However, in anthropology, his fine prose has been much more criticized for being too literary. As Strathearn writes in her Fraser lecture published in 1987, and I quote her making out a piece of writing as literary is like making out a person as having personality. Difficulties arise when the apparent facts of a case are altered or distorted for the sake of a particular effect. Fraser is certainly guilty of this charge. He did not strive for a plain account. Thus he has been accused not simply of creating an atmosphere of romantic savagery, but of tampering with his source material too. End of quote. The question is, why did Frazer not strive for plain account, among other means, by treating events, behavior, dogma, rights out of context. Strathearn points out that we have too easily overlooked the fact that the context of a phenomenon does not exist out there for us to grasp, but is itself the result of the relationship between writer, reader, and subject matter. For Fraser, global culture, differentiated only through the stages of savagery and civilization, was the relevant context, and he worked, as Rafin writes, to explicate a discourse already known to his audience. Ideas about the evolution from savagery to civilization has been thoroughly aired had already been thoroughly aired. But isn't his take on Frazer's colorful prose a little too pat? Let us take a closer look. We have seen that Frazer, instead of simply restricting himself to a firmly earthbound description of ethnographic facts, was playing with speculations about the origins of religiosity through the use of a poetic mythological prose. Indeed, this makes him less a pseudo scientist and more of a thoughtful relativist, since I suppose it implies that he was suggesting how his origin stories were virtually true. That is, true in the sense a myth is true in spite of being empirically and historically unacceptable. It also draws attention to our collective cultural representations by illustrating that civilized man has within him the same myth making tendencies as primitive man, which is by all means synchronic and not an evolutionary posture. Yet these aspects are not the most important to my argument. What is important is that the literary grace of Frazier's prosecution suggest an alternative view on anthropology, a view in which its task is not to mimic or accurately reflect ethnographic reality, but rather to overcome it. Fraser, this most literary of figures, was effectively pointing to the curious paradox inherent in any anthropological account. The more faithful it becomes to ethnographic reality, the more it loses its high function of imagery, namely that of synthesizing and interpreting what it represents, and thereby it loses interest to anthropology as a theoretical enterprise. For Frazer, therefore, ethnographic realism is not our discipline's duty. Rather, for him, anthology begins where direct and close empirical description leaves off. As Downey points out, Frazer deliberately added vivid details to his ethnographic observer's bold accounts, making dry leaves alive. In an important sense. Fraser thus foreshadowed the post structuralist point that words function completely different from mirrors. Whether or not this was something he was considered consciously aware of, it certainly appears as an effect of his poetic writing style. As such, he revealed that anthropological thinking is a creative endeavor which should not be confused with an imitation or accurate acrylic of the textures of authentic social life, akin to Malinowski's situated description of being there, a faithful correspondence of fidelity between representation and actuality is not only impossible but also unwanted. Anthropology can express social reality only by making it alive again, that is, by in some way distorting it through the high function of the scholar's speculative imagination, and to impart that distortion with explanatory force. Thus, the tampering with his source material that Frazer has been so vigorously accused of was integral to his anthropological project. As such, I do not intend to propose Frazer as some early predecessor of some postmodern mood. The attitude of witches to make deliberate play with context. Biographers like Eckerman and Downey, along with critics like Wittgenstein, are clearly quite right in enlisting Frazer among the conventions. Convinced and passionate empiricists, Frazer certainly paid careful attention to ethnographic details, and the Golden Bow is famous for piling example upon example of myth, rights, and religious practices from all over the world. Even so, it is important to recognize that Frazer interrogated ethnography only in order to invent suitable, targeted means of escaping it by injecting into the text his own imaginative speculations as to the origins of Nami and other religious phenomenon. As such, Fraser's approach can best be described as an exercise in creative, in discernment, an effort to subtract the very source of creation from the mediation of the created. With these considerations in mind, I will take Fraser as my guide. Oh. Oh, there. And turn towards a remote corner of the Russian Empire, namely the tundra of northern Kamchatka in eastern Siberia, which is the home of the Chukchi, an indigenous group of hunters and reindeer herders. My aim is to launch an investigation into the origin of the animist concept of soul. Unlike Fraser, I have actually lived among the Chukchi for a considerable period of time. Yet, like a genuine armchair anthropologist, my investigation will not be restricted to the provincial study of a single people. Instead, I will follow Fraser's style of comparison what Evans Pritchard caricatured as a scissor and paste method, and make undisciplined rates on ethiopic descriptions from all parts of the world, without respect to their internal integrity or context. In this way, I hope to synthesize a set of ethnographic phenomenon of which my Chukchi material is only one variant, and from which I aim to subtract the primordial source of the animus content concept of soul. The Chukchi live in a world full of vision, full of eyes, Every being is said to have a viewpoint of its own that stares back. However, vision is not restricted to things with eyes. All things, from humans, animals and trees to inanimate objects and spirits, are said to see or have a perspective of their own. In indeed, this has serious ramifications, for here all beings participate in a field of social interaction defined in terms of predation. From the viewpoint of any class of beings, all others are the predators or prey. The human hunter sees the wild reindeer or seal as prey in much the same way as he himself is seen as animal prey by the spirits of these animals. Hunting, therefore, is not just a one sided event, but fundamentally reciprocal. People are both hunters and hunted, just as they are both seeing and seen. Indeed, much of what goes on in the world of the Chukchi is concerned with this fearsome symmetry of being both subject and object of vision, both predator and prey. As Valdemar Bokoras, the classical ethnographer of the Chukchi, describes it with regard to the much feared evil spirits, the Caliph, and here I quote, progress, the object of their hunts is exclusively man, whom they usually call a little seal. After catching a soul, they chop it into pieces, cook it in a kettle, and feed the children with it. However, the Khalid are not exempt from the attacks of shamans who can deal with them in the same way as they deal with men. The calid on their part call shamans calid, end of quote. Horrifying as this predatorial and violent world may seem, it fits neatly into what Viviers de Castro denotes perspectivism. It is an ontology according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human or non human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view. Yet these are not alternative points of view of the same world, but rather result from a carrying over of the same point of view into alternative realities. Thus the Caillid see the world in similar or identical ways to human beings and behave just like them from their own subjective perspective. This, according to Virius de Castro, is because both human and non humans possess the same kind of intentional substance or soul. And as he writes, and here I quote him, the ability to adopt a point of view is undoubtedly a power of the soul. And since the soul is formally identical in all species, it can only see the same things everywhere, end of quote. The difference between viewpoints lies therefore not in the soul, but in the specificities of bodies with their distinctive dispositions for action and perception. Accordingly, while the kale go hunting for prey in the same way as the Chukchi go hunting for prey. What each class of being see as prey differs and depends on the distinctive kind of bodies. Likewise, from the viewpoint of the Chukchi, the Caele have monstrous and terrifying features. Yet according to the Caele themselves, they are the ones who are humans, that is people pursuing a full social life and endowed with a human appearance. Now this cosmological idea that humanity is extendable to various types of beings, along with this symmetrical inversion of predator and prey so characteristic of perspectivism, is by no means confined to indigenous Amazonia, but is recorded worldwide worldwide among a great number of so called animists societies. In northern Siberia, not only the Chukchi, but also the Koyak, the Yukagir and the Evening give equal emphasis to the theme of animals and spirits seeing themselves as humans see themselves. The same is true of North American native peoples such as the Obiva, the Cree and the Inuit. Also among indigenous groups of Southeast Asia, such as the Chiwang of Malaysia and the Huaulu of eastern Indonesia, we find what is essentially perspectival cosmology. In Africa, perspectivism is less clearly documented, but it may be detected at least in fragments among the foraging Haddad of West Africa and the Kum of South Africa. In Central Asia and Mongolia, as Morton Peterson, Rebecca Empson and Caroline Humphrey have clearly shown, we also find perspectivism, but with a twist, in that it is primarily concerned with inter human metamorphosis in seeking to take on the perspective of past humans, that is ancestors. Be that as it may, it is quite likely that animism and perspectivism are very closely connected phenomena. Or as Peterson states, perspectivism is the strongest form of the general animist belief in human non human sociality. Its elementary premise appears to rest on a pertinent division between an inner spiritual soul concealed beneath an outward material appearance. Whereas the former is anthropomorphic and independent of its variable outward form, the latter is linked to somatic clothing which may be exchanged so that one takes on the viewpoint of another being. Indeed, when reading through the various ethnographic studies listed above, we find numerous examples of shamans, hunters, warriors, covering themselves in outfits resembling an animal's or ancestor's outward form so as to take on the corporal powers and perspectives. Hence, at first view, Viverius de Castro's assumption that the animist concept of soul is a given dimension of the body in the sense that it is identical for all beings and not the product of transformation, or at least not in the Way the body is appears to be supported by much ethnographic evidence. Yet when confronting ethnographic details of the body soul interface among the various indigenous groups, ambiguities crop up which obscure or at least complicate the logical consistency of Vivier's de Caster theory. Above all, one cannot fail to take notice of the widespread tendency to conceive the soul as something quartic, physical rather than spiritual. Indeed, when taking a hasty glance through the enormous ethnographic literature on soul conceptions among indigenous groups, it is hard to find any examples whatsoever of an altogether immaterial soul. The Chukchi are case in point. That term uv? Rit, which is usually translated as sold by Russian anthropologists, belongs to the linguistic root uvik, meaning literally body. In fact, there's an important sense in which Chukchi souls are form of bodies. This is best illustrated by describing the workings of a small wooden amulet in the shape of a human figure that is regularly fed with tallow or bone marrow. The amulet is called kamaklu, meaning wooden face, and is fastened in the armpit of a person's outer clothing or to his belt. It is said to provide its owner with the body of a caliph, whereby his own body becomes protected against predation from these cannibal spirits, who will see him as a fellow human being as opposed to animal prey, and leave him alone. The principal idea is that the person attaching the amulet to his body turns himself inside out, so to speak, in that his own body becomes the soul of the Kamaklu. Hence, what comprises the inner soul and the outer body is a matter of perspective. From the viewpoint of the Kamaklu, the person's body is the soul, whereas from the viewpoint, from the human view viewpoint, the kamak blue is the soul. Body and soul are, so to speak, reversibles. This leaves us with the problem of accounting for the coexistence of two seemingly contradictory set of animist beliefs about the nature of the soul. On the one hand, the soul is seen as a common spiritual essence distinct from the body, which is conceived as a form of clothing, and for which alterity is apprehended as such. On the other hand, no clear division exists between body and soul, appearance and essence, all outer and inner, and each pair can be mutually reversed. Can these two apparently opposed conceptions of the soul be integral, graded in a logical, coherent way? Vilasa's study of how the soul is connected to the body among the vari of lowland Amazonia constitute an apt entry point in this attempt. Among the vari she writes, the reality of the soul lies in the eyes of others, which is therefore not a subjective experience but constituted within relations. A given person, soul, human or non human, is visible to other persons but in the form of a body. However, if those others, perceiving the soul, belong to another kind of people, such as animals or spirits, they will see it as radically different from the way in which the human subject sees his or her own body. Thus, the soul represents the capacity of the person to adopt a multiplicity of bodily forms as seen from the external perspective of others. However, Villasa is at some pains to point out that in Amazonian perspectivism the different perspectives never add up to a whole. Thus any totalization of the body is impossible, she says. I will return to discuss this latter point in detail. For now I will point out that it follows quite logically from Villas's account that duplicity is the law of every being and every event. A Chukchi person's soul will display one reality for his fellow human beings and another reality for the Caelid to humans. His soul is in fact identical with his human body, or rather it is his body, whereas it is the body of a reindeer or a seal in the eyes of the Canaan. The soul becomes in this way the person's double body, which makes sense when we consider that worldwide the most common indigenous word for soul is shadow. This implies that the soul is actualized as a body in another world, very often conceived of as a mirror reversal of this world, exactly like that of the shadow. Such an interpretation of the body soul problem is actually in a court with Tyler, who proposed that animist ideas about the soul originated from man's experiences of his body stubble in death, disease, trances, and above all, dreams, where his phantom body was seen as engaging in action while the dreamer slept. May we then conclude with Vilasa that the animus soul is in fact the body whose actualization as a specific kind of body depends on the eyes of the person who is looking. I believe we still face a problem which begins with the acute question of translation between cultures. So far I have uncritically followed the tradition of Tylor Fraser and Vivirius de Castro, among many other anthropologists, and used the English word soul to represent indigenous concepts. However, this word is quite clearly misleading. The soul in our Judeo Christian discourse is part and partial of an ontological opposition of spirit and matter, which implies that the soul is immaterial, its substance is spirituous breath. What is most invisible, the indivisible, most immaterial Indeed. However, according to animist perspectival thinking, as we have just seen, the soul is nothing of the sort. Quite the contrary, in fact. It's a body. Even beings that are said to hunt for souls, such as the Kalid among the Chukchi, the Bas among the Chiwang, and the Abahi among Yukagyas, never actually see souls. They see meat, reindeer, seal and elk. So what they see is, as a matter of ethnographic fact, bodies. Does this then mean that the soul, as something essentially invisible, airy and ghost like, does not exist? In animist perspectival thinking, I venture to suggest that it does. In fact, I will set out to show that among various indigenous societies we find ideas about a soul which operates on a purely spiritual plane, thus escaping the embodied infra human perspective of any actual being. This is not to say that I reject villas important insight that the reality of the soul lies in the eyes of others. Rather, what I'm going to propose is a theoretical elaboration of perspectivism that I believe has remained unanticipated by Vivaris de Castro's and Villasa's theoretizations. Indeed, it is from this articulated extension of perspectivism into the realm of virtuality that I venture to subtract the very source or origin of the animist concept of soul. Let me now briefly return to the great armchair philosophers of anthropology. Tyler believed that the origin of religion developed out of simple thoughts about the existence of souls, which then, at a much later stage of culture, turned into a belief in God. Fraser proposed a similar developmental scheme, arranging magic, religion and science in an evolutionary linear sequence. However, both schemes were radically challenged by a contemporary scholar who is now largely lost to historical view. His name was Andrew Lang, a folklorist and writer who stressed that a theistic concept of a high God was was evident among the most primitive of peoples, even among the Australian aborigines, whom Frazer had deemed the rudest savages with no religion, only magic, a high God, the so called All Father, had been detected. Lang thus concluded that certain low savages, as he writes, are as monotheistic as some Christians, and that supreme gods were not necessarily developed out of spirits. It is worth mentioning that about the same time similar beliefs in a supreme being were reported among Siberia's supposedly most archaic peoples, the Chukchi and the Yukagir, by the two legendary ethnographers, Jockelson and Bogoras. The Yukagirs named it Pan, meaning something, whereas the Chukchi called it Vagin, which means something existing now. Tyler fiercely responded that the high Gods were not archaic pre contact deities but the result of direct or indirect influence from missionary activities, a view which has recently been revitalized by Jonathan Smith. However, I believe that the rejected ideas about high Gods among animist peoples are in need of further comments. First, it is noticeable that with regard to Siberia, which I know, the best ideas about a Supreme Being are not restricted to the Yukaghis and the Chukchi, but are shared among all the so called Paleo Siberians, the Koyak, the Italmim and the Aleut. In addition, we may certainly say that the Yukagirs do not regard Pon as equivalent to the Christian God, and this is clearly shown in the distinction between Pon and Hoyle. The latter used to be the name of the dead clan shaman skull, the most sacred of the ancient Yukagi idols, but is now the name of the Christian God. Finally, while it can be said that Christianity has had an impact on virtually all the indigenous peoples of Siberia, Bogograss is certainly right in arguing that the Chukchi are an exception. During the 18th century, when the Russian Orthodox mission was most active, the Chukchi were at constant war with Russia, a war which they in fact won, with the result that their lands were annexed by the Russian Empire only after the 1917 revolution when all missionary activity had been banned. Many Chukchi therefore have been totally out of reach of Christian missionaries and are not even baptized. This, however, is not to say that I accept Lang's theory of archaic High Gods as parallel to the Christian God. From the information at my disposal it is quite clear that both Pon and Wacin do not count as gods but are rather like the creative spirit of the newer, who Evans Pritchard described as beyond contact and comprehension, yet the giver and sustainer of all life. Thus Joggins and writes about the pawn that he is of a most vague and indefinite character. The Yukagirs do not address him with prayers and do not present offerings to him, and their mythology contains no reference to the pawn. As regards the Chukchi conception of Vagin, Bogueras is even more indefinite. He is unclear if the name refers to an individual deity or is rather an appellative term for entire class of spirits. However, Vakin does not belong to those sacrificed to and place no active role in mythology. This notion of the supreme beings as elusive and indefinable, having no personal or concrete features or any cult attached to them was fully confirmed during my own spells of fieldwork. In fact, both Pan and Vakin are almost completely unknown to the majority of present day Yucatan. In Chukchi, whenever I asked, they would shrug their shoulders in dismissal and say, who knows or never heard of it. Only one Chukchi elder, a type of shaman, came up with a somewhat more elaborate answer. And here I quote him. He says, wagging exceeds our ability to comprehend, and although we have given him a name, he eludes our naming with his many faces. You look around and everything you see the reindeer, the snow, the sky, the sun are all wagging. His eyes rest on everything, and he sees through everything that exists. This is why we simply call him barking, meaning something existing. We pick up here the thread of the question I raised about the insufficiencies of the type of knowledge derived from empirical fieldwork. Ethnographically speaking, Pan and Waggan hardly exist. There are no sacrifices, no prayers directed towards them, no myth explaining their whereabouts and deeds, and the people themselves hardly know of them. In fact, they exist outside just about the entire ethnographic domain of observation and discourse. And yet I believe them to be of paramount importance to the issue that interests us here, namely the animist concept of soul and its origin. To argue this, however, we need to move outside the zone of ethnographic fact and its place appeal to our speculative reason and imagination so as to render plausible by thought experiment why ideas about a supreme being are and must be integral to the animist concept of soul. This, however, will require a slight detour into the philosophy of Maurice Melo Ponty, whose theory of perception proposes a radical break with our intuitive common sense understanding of vision as located where our eyes are. And here I quote Meleau Ponty When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can see. The back of my lamp is nothing other than the face which it shows to the chimney. I can therefore see an object insofar as objects form a system or world, and insofar as each of them treats the objects around it like spectators of its hidden aspects and a guarantee of its permanence. End of quote. Let me explain this somewhat cryptic passage which pushes vision into the animist realm, where every object grows eyes and stares back. Given that our perception of an object always takes place from one perspectival viewpoint or another, we can never see the object in its totality, but only partly. There will always be A hidden side which remains absent from our direct view. Nevertheless, we immediately presume that there is more to the object than what is exhibited to our naked eye. If this were not so, we would experience the object as a two dimensional facade and not as a fully fledged three dimensional reality. So there's a sense in which we see the object as having sides that are hidden from view. Merleau Ponty explains this by arguing that it is because our perspective is entangled in in a vast sprawling web of viewpoints which surrounds the focal thing and provides the supporting context for the side of the object which is in view at any one time, that we experience it to be deep and solid rather than just flat. Without this matrix of other viewpoints weaving the object through to its core, the direct given aspect of the thing would simply lose its sense of depth and volume. That is, it would would lose its three dimensionality. It is, so to speak, because vision is everywhere, that we as perspectival beings are able to see things from somewhere, that is from one particular viewpoint or another. In other words, we do not simply see by our own power or force, but are dependent on an anonymous or general vision which is already in place, waiting to assign us a place within it. Melau Ponty calls this primordial anonymous totality of vision the view from everywhere, whereas Martin Holbright and I have called it the transcendental perspective. This latter term does not imply a leap into an otherworldly beyond. Not at all. The view from everywhere is embedded in matter, in things, objects and bodies, and as such it does not exist in some higher plane. Transcendental here simply implies that this all inclusive perspective is impossible to adopt while we can understand it imaginatively. We can never actually see things in their totality simply because seeing in its nature is embodied and therefore perspectival. Even so, the view from everywhere is a viewpoint that we cannot do without. It underlines every perspective as the invisible background that allows things to stand out in the visibility. As Meleau Ponty expresses it, the proper essence of the visible is to have a lining of invisibility which it makes present by a certain absence. In other words, while the view from everywhere implies the world seen in totally clear and unambiguous ambiguous visibility, that is the world as laid bare in absolute transparency. It is a view that must hide itself in order for the visible world to appear before our eyes. As such, the view from everywhere is a view that cannot be an object of our perspectival seeing, except negatively, that is by its absence. Now this anonymous primordial totality of vision, which is situated here, there and everywhere, all at once, is parallel to what Deleuze calls the virtual, understood as the primordial visual form that exists beyond the organic limitations of actual seeing beings and which is most adequately expressed in pure thought. However, I also venture to suggest that it finds its creative equivalent in the Yukagya and Chukchik notions of pan and Waggin and in the so called supreme beings of other animist societies. These essentially elusive and impalpable creative forces represent a pre aspectival vision, marked, as it were, by an anonymous or general seeing which underlines every bodily perspective as its vital and animating principle. Indeed, this explains why Pon and Waking go under such unidentified names as something and something existing because they are nothing but the unlimited one, all the virtual primordial totality that sees without limits and distances in a single movement of spirit. Likewise, it comes as no surprise that no myth refers to them, and no offerings or prayers are made in their honor, because this would entail reducing them to some kind of corporal creature with specific and therefore limited visual capacities. But if Pon and Wacken are the pure viewpoint that intuit the whole of reality, then what do they in fact see? In the terminology of perspectival theory, they can only perceive the full spiritualization or dimmat materialization of life, which is the soul of things, as the anonymous and unlimited expanse of vision. The Supreme Being thus defines or makes visible the soul, which is the body seen in its totality or absolute visibility, leaving nothing hidden, that is, the body seen from all sides in all relationships, all at once. The soul, in other words, is nothing but the body grasped in a single totalizing view. Vilasa, therefore, is quite right ethnographically when she holds that within perspectival cosmology, any totalization of the body is impossible. However, anthropologically, she's not right enough. It is the anonymous primordial totality of vision ascribed to supreme beings like Pon and Waging which allows for a perspectival concept of soul to arise in the first place. This is the germ of truth in Lang's now rejected doctrine of high gods in animist societies. For without the awareness of some kind of all seeing being, even if only vaguely recognized, there could be no concept of soul as such. The real starting point or origin of the animist soul is therefore the virtual primordial totality of vision, which is in fact a phantom ideal and not an actual thing to be seen the reason why no creature within the perspectival cosmology ever sees souls. Now what concrete ethnographic evidence can be mastered in support for my claim of the animist perspectival dependence on a supreme being who perceives with an intensity that no actual perspective can endure, and whose vast sprawling web of viewpoints hollows out the domain of the body in favor of a purely spiritual or virtual soul? Not much, I'm afraid. As already stated, the virtual by its nature cannot be practically given, presented or represented. Virtual and unpresentable are synonymous terms, and insight into the virtual, therefore, is never a matter of empirical evidence. That said, human creativity can certainly be the vehicle for insight into the virtual dimension of reality, if properly oriented precisely away from the social world's actual manifestations towards the virtual. Producing this creativity is as old as the dawn of human experience. And this is a claim that can in fact be illustrated. Consider, for example, the Paleolithic artwork in the caves of southern France, which are said to be to date approximately 13,000 BC. In a cave known as Sanctuary we find the depiction of an anemic figure that has been nicknamed the Dancing Sorcerer. It shows a male hybrid creature seen sideways but gazing straight out at the viewer. Every part of his autonomy belongs to some animal an antlered head, wolf's ears, eyes of a bird, a cat's face, a long beard of reindeer or elk, horns of a bear, and the tail of a wild horse. His overall shape, however, is profoundly human. Obviously the figures meaning is unknown, but it is thought by archaeologists to be the key to an understanding of the other drawings in the cave, which show various depictions of animal prey stretching out in every direction. Bruhl interpreted the Dancing Sorcerer to be a shaman in ceremonial dress or in the moment of shape shifting. Others have suggested the figure to be a spirit master of animals who embodies the essence of all animal species. Let me add another interpretation to the list, though one which can only be treated here in bald strokes. Since the other creatures depicted are prey as seen from the viewpoint of human hunters, that is they are represented as actual animal bodies to be hunted and killed, then the Dancing Sorcerer is likely to signify the same meaning, or rather the general idea of prey. This is a person, human or non human, seen from all predatory viewpoints at once, which is nothing but the virtual expanse of the view from everywhere. For this reason we can detect underneath the figure's composite body a slight lining, an aerial ghost like substance, which I imagine to be the Paleolithic hunter's attempt at exposing the dematerialized or spiritual soul which is beyond depiction, but which they thought to make present by a certain absence. By way of conclusion, one could ask why this nostalgia for the primordial? Why this quest for human origins, the theory just presented is no more plausible than, let's say, Tyler's old theory of the origin of the soul. Both explanations are largely inaccessible to observation and verification and as such both qualifies to belonging to the if I were a horse variety sure enough. But the empirically orientated anthropologies should not overlook the that fact that although human experiences of soul, spirits and the like are always contextually constituted, this does not explain the very existence of these experiences. As anthropologists we know that we can approach so called religious experiences only through their actual living manifestations. But to situate such an experience within the context of internal social integrity or a cultural system of meaning does not give us the answer to the key question that human beings also ask themselves. What is the starting point or ultimate ground of such a religious experience? This question calls for speculative investigation into human origins, which by its nature is beyond empirical observation and evidence. Dream trances and visions offer one plausible explanation for the origin of the animist concept of soul, the virtual primordial totality of vision and other. The key point for both explanations is that it is impossible to study the non empirical questions of human origins without first moving into mythic discourse. Frazer understood this, which is why he used fine mythical prose to speculate about the origins of religiosity. Perhaps he also knew that all we can ask of an origin story is that it makes good horse sense, that it has its own imaginative logic and self contained rationality. And as does any myth, thanks.