Animism as Folkcommunication: A Conceptual Alternative to Folkpsychology

• In Event: 3-185 - New Approaches to Animism across Cultures and Development

Integrative Statement

This paper presents a series of experiments highlighting concepts of nonhuman agency afforded on one Indigenous animist framework, that of the Ngöbe of Panama. Through comparative studies with Ngöbe adults and US college students, we show that the Ngöbe conceptual framework for agency diverges from the US framework in ways that carry all the signature features of an intuitive conceptual domain. The Ngöbe framework recruits distinct principles for inferring agency; identifies a distinct set of human and nonhuman agents as belonging to the agency domain; and guides unique (and productive) inferences about nonhuman agents' behavior. These converging results point to an ecocentric conceptual framework where agency is inferred on the basis of interactions and relationships (folkcommunication). This represents an alternative to the widely-assumed universal framework of anthropocentric folkpsychology where agency is inferred on the basis of mental states. The Ngöbe perspective, and perhaps other forms of Indigenous animism, is best understood in terms of an ecologically grounded framework that embeds a distinctive conceptual organization of the social and ecological domains relative to the Western domains of folkpsychology and folkbiology. This account refines current understandings of animism and raises important new questions about its role in conceptual development across cultures, which are discussed in light of recent studies conducted among Ngöbe children.

Author

• bethany ojalehto, Cornell University
  Presenting Author