Spirits as ‘ready to hand’

• Published in: Anthropological Theory
• Main Author: Willerslev, Rane
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2004
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous); Anthropology; Kolyma; Yukaghir; Siberia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463499604047918; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1463499604047918

The Upper Kolyma Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters in north-eastern Siberia, rarely give names to spirits and have no neatly ordered system of classification. I develop an argument that relates this to the nature of Yukaghir experience, going beyond the academically widespread view of knowledge as a matter of linguistic representations or cognition and focusing instead on the way things occur in the flux of people’s everyday activities. Moreover, drawing on recent findings within cognitive science, which show that concepts can and do exist independently of language, and that dreaming shares basic cognitive structures and processes with waking life, I suggest that it is possible that children, before they learn to talk, could develop prototypical concepts of spirits through dream experiences. In this case, language would not be essential for conceptual thought about spiritual beings.