Abstract
The chapter lays out the analytical modus operandi for dealing with the central issue of this book: how people experience ontological mutability—a key theme of their cosmology—and how they deal with its profound phenomenological and existential implications mentally and viscerally. The matter is dealt with in general terms in Chap. 1, which lays out three avenues followed in this phenomenological consideration of transformation: a general receptiveness to ontological ambiguity; the experiential impact, on the mind and senses, of transformation; an intersection of the myth and spirit world with reality. They are the topics for the subsequent three chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
Especially so in his posthumously published Carnets, in which he moderated the degree of dichotomization of his earlier formulation and conceptualization of the two mentalities, holding them to be complementary as well as present among both pre-industrial and industrial society, with “mystical mentality more marked and more easily observed among primitives than in our own society, but present everywhere in the human mind” (cited in Bunzel 1966: xvii).
- 2.
As well as elsewhere and more tangentially, such post-Victorians as Eliade, Lévy-Bruhl and Hallowell (Guenther 2017: 12).
- 3.
Which, as noted in the introduction and argued elsewhere (Guenther 1999: 226–47), underlies a tolerance also for conceptual ambiguity in San society and values, religion and beliefs.
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Guenther, M. (2020). Being Other-than-Human: Ontological Mutability and Experience. In: Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume II. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21186-8_2
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