Puhuu tiikerin kanssa. Näkökohtia ihmisen ja eläimen maailmassa-asumiseen Venäjän Kaukoidässä

Authors

• Teuvo Laitila

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30666/elore.79046

Abstract

Since E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), the term animism has been used to indicate the anthropomorphisation of animals, plants and natural events. Later studies, from ca A. I. Hallowell’s ”Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View” (1960) onwards, have expanded the term denoting human–other-than-human relations as interactions not predominated by any particular actor. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and others have called this perspectivism.
The article discusses the Hallowell–Viveiros de Castro sort of view in the light of stories on human–tiger relations from the Russian Far East. Instead of perspectivism, the author has used the term ‘dwelling-in-the-world’, because he thinks that it covers all aspects (acting, emotions, thinking, etc.) better than perspectivism, which he finds to confine too much to seeing or perceiving. This term has been modified from that of Heidegger’s pace Tim Ingold.
The article focuses on human–tiger division of space, conflicts related to it, and the ways of handling or negotiating them. The author concludes that these issues are managed, often successfully, by supposing that all partners know how they should behave when encountering another person in space, or how to act upon the personhood ’required’ in that situation. This knowledge is called, among other things, the law of taiga, and implicates that partners acknowledge both each other’s personhood and the fact that they live and act in worlds which overlap and affect each other. In other words, persons are interdependent. Therefore, the acting of a particular personhood also has an ethical aspect, which, however, is not given but discloses itself through interaction.