The web of relations

Eduardo Kohn (2013), in his ‘anthropology beyond the human’, describes the lives of the Runa people of Ávila, in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, as inhabiting an ‘ecology of selves’ in which,

to remain selves, all selves must recognize the soul-stuff of the other souled selves that inhabit the cosmos. I’ve chosen the term soul blindness to describe the various debilitating forms of soul loss that result in an inability to be aware of and relate to other soul-possessing selves in this ecology of selves. I adopt the term from Cavell (2008: 93), who uses it to imagine situations in which one might fail to see others as humans. Because in this ecology of selves all selves have souls, soul blindness is not just a human problem; it is a cosmic one.

Some notion of the motivations of others is necessary for people to get by in a world inhabited by volitional beings. Our lives depend on our abilities to believe in and act on the provisional guesses we make about the motivations of other selves. It would be impossible for people in Ávila to hunt or to relate in any other way within this ecology of selves without treating the myriad beings that inhabit the forest as the animate creatures that they are. Losing this ability would sever the Runa from this web of relations.

— Kohn 2013, 117-18

This is the actual situation of all selves in any cosmos.

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