3-185 - New Approaches to Animism across Cultures and Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Animism-the attribution of life, consciousness, or agency to nonhuman entities-has long been thought to provide a unique window into the conceptual structure of the mind. This symposium brings together interdisciplinary scholars who advance diverse accounts of animism based on research in three cultural contexts: majority-culture US, Indigenous Ngöbe (Panama), and Indigenous Runa (Ecuador). The classic view of animism holds that it reflects an overextension of agency beyond the proper domain of animates (e.g., Piaget, 1929). Paper 1 invokes this venerable tradition to analyze the conceptual mechanisms of animism among US children and elderly adults. The authors argue that animism results from the failure to inhibit prepotent responses driven by a core agency theory, leading to over-attributions of life to inanimate objects. Intriguingly, however, a growing number of scholars have begun to offer alternative views of the conceptual commitments at stake in animism. Paper 2 reexamines the conceptual foundations of animism among Ngöbe individuals to argue that animism reflects fundamental cultural variability in concepts of life and agency. Paper 3 analyzes how Runa children learn to recognize nonhumans as subjects with intentions. Based on experimental data and ethnographic observations, the author argues that animism represents a specific form of perceptual awareness of the nonhuman world. These latter approaches challenge the classic view of animism as a misguided overextension of agency. A leading scholar of cognitive development will conclude by discussing how these papers offer insights into the cognitive principles underlying animism, speaking to core questions of development and diversity.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• bethany ojalehto, Cornell University

Discussant

• Susan Gelman, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Agency and Vitalism: conflicting theories in a single mind - Presenting Author: Deborah Zaitchik, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Carey, Harvard University

• Animism as Folkcommunication: A Conceptual Alternative to Folkpsychology - Presenting Author: bethany ojalehto, Cornell University

• Indigenous children's understandings of life and intentionality: an anthropological case from the Amazonian rainforest - Presenting Author: Francesca Mezzenzana, University of Kent