Nature, Supernature, Anthropology

Having spent time among shamans and magicians in Nepal and Indonesia, David Abram ( The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World ) concluded that magicians are marginal figures, but in a different sense than is usually understood.  Rather than standing at the boundary between nature and the supernatural, they typically mediate “between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance.  This larger community includes, along with the humans, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and myriad animals – birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects – that inhabit or migrate through the region, the to the particular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms – forests, rivers, caves, mountains – that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth.”  A magician is “an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field.”

Why have anthropologists missed this?  Abram thinks that anthropology has imposed a Western, Christian model on indigenous peoples: “European missionaries, steeped in the dogma of institutionalized Christianity, assumed a belief in supernatural, otherworldly powers among those tribal persons whom they saw awestruck and entranced by nonhuman (but nevertheless natural) forces.”  When this Christian nature/supernature scheme is set aside, it becomes clear that “that which is regarded with the greatest awe and wonder by indigenous, oral cultures is . . . nothing other than what we view as nature itself.”

What would a non-Cajetanian, de Lubackian anthropology look like?