Indigenous children's understandings of life and intentionality: an anthropological case from the Amazonian rainforest

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

Integrative Statement

Anthropologists have long reported that local indigenous people in different parts of the world understand animals, plants and inanimate entities as subjects with intentions (Hallowell 1960; Ingold 2000; Willerslev 2007). This kind of relationship with nonhumans is frequently referred to in anthropology and psychology as 'animism' (Piaget 1929; Tylor 1871) and has been more aptly reformulated as "relational epistemology" in recent years (Bird-David 1999; Harvey 2006). The question of how children learn to adopt such relational epistemology has however rarely been addressed in the anthropological literature (Mead 1932). Drawing on recent research in the cognitive sciences on children's understandings of the natural world (Medin et al. 2010; Unsworth 2012; Taverna et al. 2016), this presentation explores the ways in which children in an indigenous community learn to recognize nonhumans -including plants, animals and certain features of the landscape - as subjects with intentions. I will present new data from anthropological fieldwork among Runa people of the Ecuadorian Amazon on preschool children's understandings of life and intentionality, and compare such data with that of adults from the same Indigenous community. I will then explore how Runa children learn in their everyday life to perceive a variety of nonhumans as intentional subjects. Based on ethnographic observation of toddlers and older children in rural villages, I will argue that there are two important means through which children learn to adopt a relational epistemology. First, I will describe how, in child-adult interactions, caretakers encourage children to adopt different forms of perspective-taking (e.g. vocalization for the animal/plant, deployment of sound symbols, gestures to mimic nonhuman actions, etc.). The significance of this perspective-taking will be discussed in relation to recent research (Bang et al. forthcoming; Washinawatok et al. 2017) on Native American children's ecological knowledge. Second, I will show how Runa children's understandings of nonhuman behavior are based upon direct observation and engagement with a wide variety of nonhuman subjects, during daily activities such as fishing and hunting trips, garden and forest walks. The presentation will conclude by arguing that animism, rather than being a quality that is outgrown by adults, seems rather to be a form of perceptual awareness that is gradually learned in specific cultural and natural environments.

Author

• Francesca Mezzenzana, University of Kent
  Presenting Author