A. Irving Hallowell (1892 to 1974) was an American anthropologist who worked through the 1930s with Ojibwe people around the Berens River in Manitoba, Canada. He coined the phrase “other-than-human persons” to convey what his Ojibwe hosts taught him, that the category of person is wider than the category of human, so that some rocks, animals and other beings are persons too. The phrase, set out in his 1960 essay “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View”, became the starting point for what is now called the ‘new animism’.
Who was A. Irving Hallowell? #
He was born in Philadelphia in 1892 and died there in 1974. He first trained at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as a social worker in Philadelphia whilst studying sociology and anthropology, and learnt his early ethnography from Frank Speck and Franz Boas.1
He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1923, became a full professor there in 1939, spent three years at Northwestern University from 1944, and returned to Pennsylvania until he retired in 1963. He was president of the American Anthropological Association in 1949. Much of his later work belongs to the field known as ‘culture and personality’, which looked at how a culture shapes the people raised in it; he drew on Freudian and Gestalt psychology and gathered Rorschach (inkblot) records from Ojibwe communities. His collected essays Culture and Experience appeared in 1955.2
Who were the Ojibwe that Hallowell worked with? #
They were Ojibwe, also called Saulteaux or Anishinaabe, living in the Lake Winnipeg region, and above all around the Berens River. When Hallowell knew them they were hunter-gatherers in transition. The memoir of his life describes them as one of the few remaining hunting-and-gathering cultures in North America, and also records the reservation conditions, the pressures of outside culture and the decline of their own ceremonies that he studied alongside.3 His closest collaborator was William Berens, a man of the community. Hallowell’s own studies of the time covered such things as the size of family hunting territories and the passing of the Midewiwin, the Ojibwe medicine society.3
Where does the phrase “other-than-human persons” come from? #
From Hallowell’s essay “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View”, published in 1960 in Culture in History, a volume edited by Stanley Diamond, and drawn from his fieldwork of the 1930s.4 He was trying to put into English something his hosts took for granted. For these Ojibwe, as the religious studies scholar Graham Harvey sums up Hallowell’s account, the world is full of people, only some of whom are human. Person is the wider category, and under it sit ‘human persons’, ‘rock persons’, ‘bear persons’ and others. This is not a matter of projecting human likeness onto things; rather, humans are one kind of person among many.5
Kinship words show it. Among the Ojibwe Hallowell described, ‘grandfathers’ is a term of respect for older persons who teach, give names and bestow blessings, and not all of these grandfathers are human. The human and the other-than-human grandfathers do the same work in a person’s life, and so share the same word.5
Harvey adds a point about the phrase itself. From a tree’s point of view there might be ‘tree persons’ and ‘other-than-tree persons’; Hallowell was a human writing for humans, so ‘other-than-human’ remains the useful form.6
What did the Ojibwe elder say about the stones? #
In Ojibwe, as in other Algonquian languages, the word for rock is grammatically animate, the class of words used for living beings. So Hallowell asked an old man, “Are all the stones we see about us here alive?” The man thought for a long while and then said, “No! But some are.”7
Some stones had been seen to move, or to show other signs of life, and these could be spoken of and spoken to as persons. Other things made of stone were simply ‘it’. The old man’s hesitation is, for Harvey, a sign that this animism is “not a dogmatic belief system” but a way of attending to particular beings in particular encounters.7
Why did the phrase become so important? #
Because later writers built on it. Graham Harvey says that any account of the new animism has to begin with what Hallowell learnt from his Ojibwe hosts, and the anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, writing about the Nayaka of South India, among whom she has worked since 1978 and who were then forest hunter-gatherers, since drawn into wage work and trade, took Hallowell’s argument further in her account of knowing as a way of relating.8 See Who is Graham Harvey, and what is the new animism?
Not everyone was content with the phrase. Bird-David suggested ‘superpersons’ instead, so as not to imply that being human is what defines a person. Harvey, discussing her suggestion, keeps Hallowell’s term, because ‘superpersons’ still needs a picture of what an ordinary person is, whereas ‘other-than-human persons’ rests on what all persons share and treats no one kind of person as the standard.8
How does Hallowell’s phrase connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely in its language, although the books do not name him. Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of the Animal People, the Plant People and the Stone People, all kin to us, the Human People, and of reconnecting with the other-than-human Peoples as healing in itself.9 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
The emphasis, as in Hallowell’s account, falls on personhood and relationship, not only on everything being alive. If everything were simply alive, that would be closer to pantheism; animism is about the river and the mountain each being someone, a grandfather river or a grandmother mountain to be in relationship with.
There is also an echo of the Ojibwe grandfathers in Therapeutic Shamanism’s account of the elders among the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer. Hunter-gatherers held the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer to be the oldest and wisest of all, then the Plant People, then the Animal People, with humans the youngest. That is not a hierarchy but a family, in which humans are the children with most to learn.10
Where do Hallowell’s account and Therapeutic Shamanism differ? #
Over the stones. The old man’s answer was “some are”, a judgement made stone by stone, in encounter, and Harvey notes that not all animists agree that everything that exists is alive or a person.11
Therapeutic Shamanism teaches that everything is made of Spirit, and that Spirit is alive and conscious, so everything is conscious. Where people fail to recognise this, it is because things very different from us are conscious in a way that is different to us.12
The two can be read side by side. Both turn the question away from a list of what counts as alive and towards how a person meets the beings around them, and both treat that meeting as something learnt through experience rather than taken on as a belief. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
