Learning from Ancestral Cosmologists
by Feng Qu
Abstract
Through his experience in an archaeological site in the wild, the author began to question the theoretical dualism of inside body and outside world. During his Ph.D research, the author drew away from the traditional dichotomy and built his hypothesis based on animism ontology theory. Relying on ethnological analogy while dealing with prehistoric Eskimo ivory artifacts with mask-like images, the author proposes a shamanic body metaphor which was likely used by the ancient shamans or hunters to call spiritual power to realize hunting success. According to this research result, the author further emphasizes the importance of “second body” method in modern spiritual practices for healing the body and the earth.
1. Gerstle River Site
Modern anthropological theory has long been built on a belief that there is a boundary between the human body and the outside world. Inside the body it is the mind, or consciousness, which perceives the exterior universe. However, the question always remains: where is the edge of the body and where is the boundary located?
In the summer of 2010, I was working as a Teaching Assistant of the Archaeological Field School, University of Alaska Fairbanks on the Gerstle River site in the Alaskan Interior. My anthropological knowledge told me that the foraging culture is the most ancient lifestyle, predating the emergence of agriculture and animal domestication in human history on many lands of the world. Interior Alaskan foragers represent an exceptional case. They sustained such a survival style for 10,000 years until 300 years ago when White people arrived. During my study of Alaskan archaeology, more questions emerged in my mind: did hunting groups hunt animals and gather plants only for their substance, or were there other meaningful purposes? Were they only materialists, or were they spiritualists as well?
The site was the home of a small-sized community. We do not know the exact number of the people. It might have been composed of 10-20 or possibly 20-40 members. We also do not know how many years this group had inhabited the site. It could have been anywhere between 100 and 1,000 years. What we do know is that the site was their seasonal settlement in summer, where they cooked, ate, made tools, and slept, and perhaps where they also danced, sang, and conducted rituals. The remains we found include animal bone pieces, which might be discarded after eating, unfinished lithic tools, and broken lithic weaponry.
The site sits on a slope directly facing the famous Alaskan Mountains. White snow covers the tops of the mountains during all seasons. When Alaska summer sun sets at midnight, the clouds and the snow always shine with different colors: dark red, pink, or orange-red. Every evening after dinner, I liked to sit on the site to admire the splendor of the scenery. My whole body and mind were often immersed in the natural views, and I found that my consciousness was completely fused with the wildness and my body actually became one with the universe. There was no boundary; there was no division. Perhaps my sensual experience was similar to that of hunters who lived many thousands of years ago in this beautiful region, close to nature. In hunting societies, there is evidence that the body embraced nature and was embraced by nature. Foragers hunted not only to obtain food to eat, but to absorb the universe’s energy. A hunting society never separated from nature because it was part of nature. The ancient hunters were not materialists, or pure spiritualists; they were actually cosmologists.
At a moment on the Girstle River site, when my mind was infused with the wilderness again, I felt privy to Christopher McCandless’ hidden secret. In the spring of 1992, Christopher McCandless, a young man from Georgia, now famous for Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) and a movie with the same title, walked into the Alaska wilderness and lived in the forest alone for four months before his death by food poisoning. It is hard for many people to understand why he left his family and modern life to challenge himself with deadly hardship. However, I seemed to read his mind at this moment. He came to Alaska not to practice his survival skills, but rather, to pursue his spiritual purpose. As Krakauer wrote, “McCandless went into wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large, but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul……An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward” (1996: 183).
My personal experience on the Gerstle River site inspired me to think that, in a prehistoric hunting-gathering society, human mind and natural environment were possibly an integral whole. They were actually inseparable. However, for centuries, anthropologists have always clearly divided culture from nature, mind from material, and inside from outside. It is likely that they have an ontological misunderstanding of ancient cosmology.
2. New Animism
The dichotomy of nature/culture and body/mind in modern philosophy was initiated by the work of Rene Descartes. Within the Cartesian scheme of things, the world is divided into two opposite domains: the external (nature or body) and the internal (culture or mind) (Synnott 1993). Archaeology has long been articulated in this dualism. However, since the 1990s, more and more archaeologists are inclined to eliminate the demarcation between the oppositions of internal and external, or inside and outside, because these binary relations are believed to mislead archaeologists when they deal with excavated materials. The British archaeologist Julain Thomas is one of these critical archaeologists. In his point of view, it is a mistake for us to clearly distinguish culture from nature, because the body and the world are interwoven and inseparable. Cultural practices demonstrate that ancient people did not simply move things from the natural world into the cultural world, but instead, “it is a means of entering into the network of relationships which obtains between bodies and materials, and into the creation of meaning” (Thomas 1996: 19).
Doubtlessly, the idea “network of relationships” means that the world is a network interwoven by various relations rather than being composed of binary structures. These relations, in Tim Ingold’s opinion, are like threads which weave various materials together. Whether a tree in the air, a cloud in the sky, or a stone in the river, they all join in the process of formation, thus all are “a certain gathering together of the threads of life” (2010: 4). In this way, materials, like humans, inhabit the world rather than occupy the world. They are active, no more stable, and flow to form a process like the life of a person. Therefore, the dualism is actually a modern assumption to misguide us to mis-understand the material world. In Ingold’s words,
“There is no inside or outside, and no boundary separating the two domains. Rather there is a trail of movement or growth. Every such trail traces a relation. But the relation is not between one thing and another – between the organism “here” and the environment “there.” It is rather a trail along which life is lived: one strand in a tissue of trails that together make up the texture of the lifeworld” (2006: 13).
This anti-dualism trend is also represented by “new animism” scholars. New animism anthropologists focus on indigenous myth, cosmology, and shamanic practices, and have proposed an animism ontology theory. According to animism ontology, animals as non-human persons are equal to humans: they have souls, specific cultures, and social systems, and they also perceive themselves as anthropomorphic beings. Both humans and non-humans are endowed with the same generic type of soul and the same set of cognitive capacities (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004).
This new animist ontology is different from animism in the western evolutionary model, which proposes that indigenous peoples see all things in the world as animated and “marks the origin of religion” (Wallis 2009: 51). Evolutionary animism sees the whole world as one nature. Humans are seen as animals when they are “primitive” and “uncultured” (Harvey 2006: 99). Such perspective is apparently built on the dualist idea, however, new animism views all things as a single culture (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). That is to say, there is no boundary between culture and nature. All things, including humans and non-humans, have subjectivity and there are no objects in the world. In evolutionary theory, humans, animals, and non-life objects are animated. In contrast, new animism argues that all these humans and non-humans have the same condition – humanity rather than animality.
Drawing from Amerindian cosmology, animist ontology reveals that while humans see themselves as humans, animals and spirits also see themselves as humans. Animals and spirits have their own houses and villages, they perceive themselves as anthropomorphic beings, they have their specific cultures, and they also organize their own social systems like humans (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 470). These animals and spirits are hence called “non-human persons” (Pedersen 2001, 2007; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004) or “other-than human persons” (Harvey 2006; Wallis 2009, 2013). All beings inhabiting the world, including human beings and non-human beings, possess the human condition, and they are thus all subjective. In this way, it is not hard to understand why the human body becomes one with nature.
Animist scholars thus view the body as the central concept in explaining the differences between humans and non-humans. Although humans and non-humans embody the same soul, they are differentiated by different body shapes. In Viveiros de Castro’s words, “Between the formal subjectivity of souls and the substantial materiality of organisms there is an intermediate plane which is occupied by the body as a bundle of affects and capacities and which is the origin of perspectives”
(Viveiros de Castro1998: 478).
Such body conception and new animist perspective enable archaeologists to consider archaeological artifacts as dynamic, transformative things inhabiting the world rather than as animated objects. Combining ethnological analyses, for example, Vanpool and Newsome (2012) provide an ontological approach on prehistoric pottery of the Casas Grandes region of the American Southwest and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Drawing away from Cartesian dualism, Vanpool and Newsome see pottery as non-human beings, which served as active agents in a cosmological and ontological structure. The pot was thus a non-human person, which was transformed from formless clay and experienced a life history of birth, existence and death.
3. Prehistoric Eskimo Ivories
After the Gerstle River excavation in the summer of 2010, I came back to my Ph.D. study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The focus of my Ph.D. research is ivory artifacts that were produced by prehistoric Eskimos of the Bering Strait region. The data were collected from the University of Alaska Museum in 2012. The early periods of prehistoric Eskimo culture on the West Alaska coast and Russian Chukchi coast were represented by Okvik culture (AD 100 – 400) and Old Bering Sea culture (OBS, AD 400 – 800).
During my observations of Okvik and OBS collections at the University of Alaska Museum, I found that many of the ivory hunting tools were engraved with a beastly face, characterized by large, round eyes and toothy mouth (Figure 1). The artifacts decorated with such face designs include ivory harpoon heads, socket pieces, counterweights, blubber scrapers, and other ivory or bone objects. My subsequent ethnographic analogy showed that these prehistoric mask-like images resemble those beast motifs engraved on the wooden masks collected by European and American ethnographers at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century among the Yup’ik Eskimo cultures (Figure 2).
Figure 1. OBS culture ivory artifacts. 1.1, Harpoon head. University of Alaska Museum of the North collection UA64-021-0718, provenance unknown, 12.4 cm length.
1.2, Blubber Scraper, from Okvik site. University of Alaska Museum of the North collection 1-1931-0993, 7.2 cm length.
Figure 2. Yup’ik mask. National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) collection E33118-0, 93 cm width. After Fitzhugh 2009a: 177, Fig. 18.
The painted face masks are the most striking Eskimo ceremonial objects in Alaska. They were used for both secular and religious purposes (Fienup-Riordan 1996; Lantis 1947; Ray 1967). The secular masks, whether with animal face or human face, were carved by anyone and worn by laymen. Usually, they were worn in the social dances for public amusement. In contrast, the religious masks were carved by the shaman or carved by laymen but under the shaman’s direction. They were worn by the shamans and laymen during dancing in various ceremonies. Mostly, they were used in dances of the Bladder Festival, Messenger Festival, and other hunting festivals. The images on masks were from the shaman’s spiritual visions or from traditional forms, and represented Eskimo cosmology. These mask images included mythological beings (such as raven and eagle), deities (such as sun and moon), human beings, spirits of animals, guardian spirits, and the shaman’s helping spirits. The images of half human and half animal usually represented the inua of the animal (Ray 1967).
The wooden masks with such images used in ritual dances were usually derived from the shamans’ spiritual visions (Fienup-Riordan 1996; Fitzhugh 2009; Nelson 1900; Ray 1967). Among central Yup’ik, the shamans traveled to other worlds for warding off evil spirits, changing weather, or requesting the yua of animals to give hunters hunting success. The masks carved by the shaman, or directed by the shaman but carved by others, were powerful. The dancers were believed to receive supernatural visions during the performance. The common helping spirits of the Yup’ik shamans often have a large, open toothy mouth (Fienup-Riordan 1996: 59-100).
The resemblance between the beastly faces on prehistoric ivories and on historic masks suggests that the Okvok/OBS mask-like images most likely served shamanic hunting rituals like proper religious masks. But why were the therianthropic designs engraved on ivories in Okvik and OBS cultures whereas they were carved on masks during historical period? How did the prehistoric mask-like images function and what meanings were carried by ivory artifacts?
Ethnographic data show that animism ontology was highly developed among the Alaska Eskimo peoples during the historical period. In the Yup’ik worldview, there were no clear-cut cosmic differentiations and boundaries between the human and non-human. The Yup’ik belief equates animals and inanimate objects with humans, and sees all of them as persons (Fienup-Riordan 1994, 1996). For many Alaska Eskimo groups, things, including animals and even lifeless things, possess a soul which can take a human form. This soul abiding in things was called inua by the Inupiaq and yua by the Yup’ik. Inua or yua and simply means “man” or “person,” respectively in Inupiaq or Yup’ik language (e.g. Fienup-Riordan 1996; Fitzhugh & Kaplan 1982; Merhur 1985; Ray 1967; Weyer 1932).
Masked dances played a vital role in shamanic rituals among the Yup’ik peoples. The purpose of the masks was not to conceal the human entities but to manifest the animals’ spiritual entities and to activate their supernatural powers (Fienup-Riordan 1996). That is to say, when the shaman or a dancer was masked in dancing, the human body was actually animalized. This metamorphosis is neither the change of the spirit nor the bodily transformation as traditional anthropology holds, but rather a rebuilding of affects and capacities of the body. In his article, Pederson refers to such a rebuilt body as the shaman’s second body (Pedersen 2007). This second body is shamanized and spiritualized; it sheds the limitations of the human physical body and connects human consciousness with the greater world. It thus helps shamans to perceive the world more effectively and to transverse ontological divisions of the cosmos. In the second body, human and non-human subjectivity interweave and generate a spiritual entity. In the process, things flow from the subjective to the subjective rather than from the subjective to the objective or from the objective to the subjective. Dualism in traditional anthropology holds that artwork is always objective representations of subjective thoughts. From second body concept, the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity does not actually exist.
The world is composed of multiple bodies, and these ontological bodies all possess the capacity to have a perspective and invisible intentionality. A new shaman’s initiation can also be seen as the construction of his new body. A Swiss anthropologist, Zeljko Jokic, spent over a year observing the shamans among the Yanomami in Venezuela from 1999 to 2000. His exploration of the shaman’s initiation shows that the neophyte’s body was embodied with various spirits during the initiation. In the end, the new body finally overcame the human condition and became a cosmic body. There was no boundary between human ego and the world, and they fused “into a one-world continuum of consciousness, which is the cosmic body” (Jokic 2008: 51).
Based on new animism theory and my ethnological analysis, I hypothesize that those Okvik and OBS ivory hunting tools engraved with the mask-like images most likely represented the shaman’s or the hunter’s second body: the rebuilt body. Like the masks which covered humans, the mask-style images covered artifacts and possibly engaged the shaman or a hunter within nonhuman bodies in order to achieve hunting success. The artifacts thus resembled the shaman’s ability to travel between the human world and the spiritual world. Artifacts were thus intentional agents and represented interconnected relations embracing a variety of human and non-human people. They not only enabled hunters to gain the appearance of non-human entities, but were also imbued with the capacity of the human body’s transformation (Qu 2013).
4. Second Body
Today’s neo-shamanism or core shamanism practitioners have attempted to revive the old trance techniques in order to help deal with illness and many other problems of our modern life. Through educational and training opportunities provided by shamanism organizations (such as the Foundation for Shamanic Studies), many common people have learned the wisdom and consciousness of shamanism in order to seek personal empowerment and self-healing (Harner 2005). Sandra Ingerman has listed some key methods for how a person learns spiritual techniques to connect with the power of the universe to create harmony, balance, and healing in our lives. These methods include creating sacred space, imagination, embodying the divine, dismemberment, and transfiguration (Ingerman: 2000). From my research experience, I realize the importance of the “second body” method in our spiritual practice of connecting with divine power and transfiguring our bodies. In my point of view, the second body practice can be conducted in many ways, such as masked dancing performance and visual arts, both of which were favored by our ancestors in many cultures around the world to call divine forces.
One of the best examples of healing through the “second body” is from Gilah Hirsch, who defined herself an artist-as-shaman. She experienced serious injury, but was finally healed through spiritual means. In the fall 2013, I met her in the ISSR (the International Society for Shamanistic Research) conference in Guiyang, China. She told me her personal story of how she called spiritual power through paintings to rebuild her terribly-injured body, her broken skeleton and smashed organs. In 1999, a car accident broke her vertebrae, ribs, and scapula, and severely damaged her head and heart. Nevertheless, she decided not to ask the hospital for surgery. She immobilized herself at her home in California and practiced imagery visualization instead of medication. When she could walk, she began to paint the inside pictures of her body in order to reconstruct her body through artwork. When her imagery about her skeleton, organs, and cells was gradually born on the canvas layer by layer (Figure 3), she felt that her body greatly changed until completely recovered after three months (also see Hirsch 2010, 2012). She wrote with great joy:
As creator and reflector of divinity, our capacities are only beginning to be known. Divinity in humanity implies spirituality in behavior. With this focus directing mind and heart, we have an optimal opportunity to consciously link the eternal with the temporal, and the spiritual with the physical, providing an arena in which the human and the universal can embrace. (Hirsch 2012: 21)
Figure 3. Hirsch’s painting “Refuge (Chassiah).” 2000, oil on wood, 27” by 27”. In this painting, Hirsch parted the ribs and painted protection for the heart and spinal cord. After Hirsch 2010.
Hirsch’s words recall my experience in the Girstle River site. When I was sitting on the slope, it was not only my consciousness that was humanist: all things in the nature around me possessed subjectivity like humans. All these subjective threads were woven together and there was no way to demarcate my consciousness from nature’s consciousness. Perhaps my body became my second body at that moment. I was a man in the universe, as defined by Ingold (2010) – like the tree in the air, the cloud in the sky, and the rock in the river.
Biography
Feng Qu, Chinese, Ph.D. (anthropology), University of Alaska Fairbanks. His academic interests lie in shamanism, ritual, symbolism, cognitive archaeology, and structural archaeology. Geographically, his research focuses on the North Pacific rim, including North China, Northeast Siberia, and Alaska.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ben Potter for his offering me the opportunity to attend the excavation on the Gerstle River site in the summer of 2012. Thanks are also given to William Fitzhugh, Gilah Hirsch, Josh Reuther, and Scott Shirar for their permissions to use their museum and gallery resources.
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