The Altai Mountains Have No Spirits – Posthumanist Inspirations.

Over the past twenty years, both the concept of animism and ethnographies of communities described as animistic have been discussed many times. The concept of perspectivism, understood as one form of animistic engagement with the world in which life is organized by interactions with a multitude of living entities, has been one of the most important impulses for discussions about non-anthropocentric approaches in social anthropology. Despite this, ethnographic descriptions of such forms of action and thinking in the world still most often rely on categories such as “spirit” and “matter,” which are rooted in European and Christian philosophical and theological thought. But is it possible to propose another way of describing it that would better reflect local ways of perceiving and acting? In my presentation, I re-examine the results of research that I conducted in the Altai Republic between 1994 and 2008. Even then, I was bothered by the notion of the “mountain spirit” or “spirit of place,” which are very common in the ethnographies of Siberia and Inner Asia. The way in which the human inhabitants of Altai build relationships with other entities can definitely be interpreted animistically. Altai as a whole is a living entity, and important partners in the lives of its human inhabitants are rivers, mountains, passes, trees, individual places, animals, and also some objects made by man. On the one hand, assuming that all these objects have something additional in them – a spirit or soul – that allows us to enter into relationships with them seems like a good solution. But how does Altai differ from its spirit? On many levels, referring to a dualistic approach, in which there is a material mountain and a spiritual being belonging to it, animating matter, does not reflect the experience of my Altai interlocutors. It is Altai that is alive as a whole, not its spirit. It is therefore worth considering whether this problem can be solved by referring to concepts often used in anthropology today: assemblage, agency and relationality? In my presentation, I will ask myself whether posthumanist and new materialist inspirations can help construct a new description of Altai relations with the mountains.

Agnieszka Halemba is a social anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of religion. She works at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she leads the Team of Undisciplined Anthropology. She also teaches at the University of Potsdam, is the chair of the Asian Studies Commission of the Committee of Ethnological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the editor-in-chief of the journal Ethnologia Polona. In the years 1994-2008, she conducted research in southern Siberia, the results of which were presented in a series of articles, a doctoral dissertation defended in 2001 at the University of Cambridge and a monograph The Telengits of Southern Siberia. Landscape, Religion and Knowledge in Motion (Routledge 2006). She has also conducted ethnographic research in the Ukrainian Transcarpathia (monograph Negotiating Marian Apparitions The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine (CEU Press 2015)) and in East Germany.