All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual
In All My Relatives David C. Posthumus offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas' religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the "ontological turn," particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, that includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood.

Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles. All My Relatives offers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion.
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All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual
In All My Relatives David C. Posthumus offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas' religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the "ontological turn," particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, that includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood.

Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles. All My Relatives offers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion.
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All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual

All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual

by David Posthumus
All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual

All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual

by David Posthumus

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Overview

In All My Relatives David C. Posthumus offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas' religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the "ontological turn," particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, that includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood.

Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles. All My Relatives offers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781496230393
Publisher: Nebraska
Publication date: 05/01/2022
Series: New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies
Pages: 296
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

David C. Posthumus is an associate professor of anthropology and Native American studies at the University of South Dakota.

Table of Contents


List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Hallowell, Descola, Ontology, and Phenomenology
2. Situated Animism and Lakota Relational Ontology
3. The Living Rock, Grandfather of All Things
4. Persons and Transformation
5. Spirits and Ghosts
6. Nonhuman Persons in Lakota Mythology
7. Nonhuman Persons in Lakota Dreams and Visions
8. Nonhuman Persons in Lakota Ritual
9. The Dynamics of Life Movement
Glossary of Lakota Terms and Phrases
Notes
References
Index
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