Dr Robert J. Wallis lecture at the University of Lisbon
01/09/2010
Dr Robert J. Wallis Professor of Visual Culture and Director of the MA in Art History gave a paper at the ‘Things and Spirits: New Approaches to Materiality and Immateriality’ at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, 15-17 September 2010. His paper examined the way in which scholars have used the notions of ‘spirits’ and ‘shamans’ in studies on rock art.
http://www.aaics.pt/?p=85
Exorcising ‘Spirits’: Approaching ‘Shamans’ and Rock Art Animically.
‘Spirits’ and ‘shamans’, are discursively linked categories that are often used unproblematically, notably in the ‘shamanistic interpretation’ of rock art: the painted animals in European cave art have been termed ‘spirits’, Southern African rock art may depict ‘shamans’ and their ‘spirit-helpers’, and Irish passage tomb imagery may derive from entoptic phenomena perceived as ‘spirits’ in the ‘visions’ of ‘shamans’. But with ‘spirit’ goes ‘matter’, producing a Eurocentric dualism through which to view ‘Others’; and when ‘shamans’ are cited in addition, further problems emerge, of ‘control’ – over ‘spirits’ and ‘altered states of consciousness’ (ASCs), with shamans’ engagements with these often positioned as definitive of their practices. The constructs ‘spirits’ and ‘shamans’, as currently conveived, are limiting our thinking on rock art; while I am not the first to state this, my reasoning is quite different from other critics. My aim is not to demolish the shamanistic interpretation of rock art but to contribute constructively to it. Recent thinking on ‘agency’, ‘materiality’ and ‘things’, particularly the theorizing of ‘new animism’ in anthropology and the study of religion, disrupts the spirit-matter dichotomy, with implications for how certain rock art traditions might be interpreted. Animists approach ‘humans’ and ‘objects’ as potentially equally ‘things’ and ‘persons’ – things-as-persons and persons-as-things – with diverse agentive qualities, situated within wider communities which are filled with ‘persons’, only some of whom are human. Humans engage with non-human agents on a daily basis and must maintain proper social comportment so as to maintain harmony between persons. I locate shamans as key mediators who use adjusted styles of communication (a reconfiguring of ASC’s), including the production and consumption of rock art, to repair imbalance between humans and non-humans. This approach draws attention away from Western dualisms of spirit/matter, culture/nature, mind/body, to consider other forms of relating more attuned to indigenous lifeways. As such, I aim to reinvigorate the shamanistic interpretation of rock by thinking through animism, theoretically exorcising ‘spirits’ and relocating shamans within animist ontologies and epistemologies (beyond ‘shamanistic worldviews’); examples will be drawn from the British Isles and Namibia.
Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/1088.aspx
