Animism, Ancestors and Adjusted Styles of Communication - Talk in London

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lecture series presents:

Animism, Ancestors and Adjusted Styles of Communication:
Hidden Art in Irish Passage Tombs

Dr. Robert Wallis

Tuesday, 28th July, 2009

October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL

(Tel: 44 (0)20 7831 1618). – email: rentals@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
RSVP so that we can anticipate numbers – Please book in advance by
credit card to guarantee a place or pay on the door.

Entry £7 /£5 Concessions, Arrive 6pm for a 6:30pm Start - Wine
available

Studies of prehistoric art tend to objectify this ‘material’ evidence
in a process of disenchantment which has limited interpretative scope.
This talk will draw on the theorising of ‘new animism’ in anthropology
and religious studies which moves beyond the problematic attribution
of spirit to matter and anthropomorphism in the work of Tylor and in
other Victorian imaginations of religion, to consider animist
ontologies as those which conceive of a world which is filled with
persons, only some of whom are human. I argue that this relational
approach enables new, re-enchanting insights into Neolithic art in the
passage tombs of the Boyne Valley in Ireland, the study of which has
tended towards an anthropocentric concept of ‘the social’ and
neurotheological analysis of altered states of consciousness. Animist
ontologies effectively disrupt the subject/object dichotomy of Western
thought, challenge reductionist neurotheology, and offer an extended
understanding of agency and personhood. I focus particularly on
‘hidden art’ to demonstrate how a variety of animist ontologies (from
animist-totemist to totemist-animist) may have operated at the
Neolithic/Bronze Age transition.

Dr Robert J. Wallis is Associate Professor of Visual Culture and
Director of the MA in Art History at Richmond University, London, and
a Research Fellow in Archaeology at the University of Southampton. His
research interests consider indigenous and prehistoric art in
shamanistic/animic communities, and the re-presentation of the past in
the present by contemporary pagans and neo-shamans. He is author of
Shamans / neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and
Contemporary Pagans, and co-author of the Historical Dictionary of
Shamanism and co-editor of Permeability of Boundaries: New Approaches
to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore and, most recently,
Antiquaries and Archaists: The Past in the Past, the Past in the
Present. He is currently working on a monograph on art and shamanism.

.

Relevant Pages
Loading