Search results

AbstractOne of the characteristic aspects ofViveiros de Castro's perspectivismis the relative rather than absolute character of subject/object positions. In the Altaian context, animals are not attributed with subjectivity in the way found in Amazonian cosmologies. Still, the subject position is not particular to humans: the landscape is populated by masters of a both human and nonhuman kind. The terminological division of animals into wild (a?dar-kushtar) and domesticated (mal) in Altaian language is analogical to the human/animal division in Amazonia. Wildness and domesticity thus become relative categories defined with reference to the idiom of the master. What is wild for a human master is domesticated for a nonhumanmaster. Here, the common denominator is a sort of 'livestock-morphism':what for the human hunters looks like a deer is a cowfrom the point of view of the forest masters. If conducted improperly, hunting is thus analogous to livestock theft – morality transcends perspectivism in Altai. Exploring this 'pastoralist perspectivism' leads to questions about subjectivity and agency, ethics and ownership. The discussion is finally placed 'into perspective' by showing thatAltaians do not operate with a single idea of the animal and human–animal relationship.

Suicide and Agency offers an original and timely challenge to existing ways of understanding suicide. Through the use of rich and detailed case studies, the authors assembled in this volume explore how interplay of self-harm, suicide, personhood and agency varies markedly across site (Greenland, Siberia, India, Palestine and Mexico) and setting (self-run leprosy colony, suicide bomb attack, cash-crop farming, middle-class mothering). Rather than starting from a set definition of suicide, they empirically engage suicide fields-the wider domains of practices and of sense making, out of which realized, imaginary, or disputed suicides emerge. By drawing on ethnographic methods and approaches, a new comparative angle to understanding suicide beyond mainstream Western bio-medical and classical sociological conceptions of the act as an individual or social pathology is opened up. The book explores a number of ontological assumptions about the role of free will, power, good and evil, personhood, and intentionality in both popular and expert explanations of suicide. Suicide and Agency offers a substantial and ground-breaking contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of suicide. It will appeal to a range of scholars and students, including those in anthropology, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies, suicidology, and social studies of death and dying.