Art and Influence, Presence and Navigation in Southern African Forager Landscapes
Religions December 13, 2021 Sam Challis, Andrew S. Skinner 14 citations
The New Animisms and the ontological turn, active since the mid-2000s, offer valuable insights for interpreting rock art by showing that in animist societies, distinctions between nature and culture, religious belief and practicality, and the sacred and profane are minimal. A key problem is that the perspectives of such societies diverge more fundamentally from Western views than often acknowledged. Archaeologists of religion must become anthropologists of the wider world to recognize animistic and shamanistic ontologies and to question where Cartesian separations of nature/culture, religious/mundane, and human/animal obscure other ways of being. This work locates southern African shamanic rock art within broader animist shamanisms.